Shane McCrae, Blood, Mesilla Park, NM: Noemi Press, 2013
Shane McCrae’s Blood—The
Unstoppable Epic
“Probably the real story of race in the United States, […] an
epic that spans three centuries,” reads Kathleen Ossip’s blurb on the back
cover of Shane McCrae’s latest collection.
Terrance Hayes concurs with an accolade that sounds like an intersection
of his own language and the author’s: “His disconcerting language tracks the
estrangement and strangeness, the severance and severity of a Self seized by
history.”
McCrae professes a poetics of capitalization and line
breaks, where enjambments are not so much meant to amplify aesthetic quality
and meaning-related complexity, but convey subversive messages and ensure
survival while telling histories of massacre, abuse, and misfortune.
Some niggers isn’t and they is
Never gonna be and them I known
And I remember best
is niggers I seen dead /
Remember even
the breaths they was
always breathing
(“Heads”—“2. Captured and Returned
to His Master”)
The “niggers” both exist and do not
exist, as they (sort of apophatically) are beyond the ‘grammar’ of the establishment
and they endure in ways that elude the masters’ control. The enjambment transforms an auxiliary verb
into a main one asserting existence (and they is/ Never gonna be) and then
further assertion is hidden behind the capitalized “Never.” Bad grammar and typography thus renders
unexpected value to the language distorted and translated by rebellion and by the
gasping breath of the chased slave—ontology (“they is”), knowledge (“I known”)
and cultural heritage (“I remember best”) are thus established and fiercely
defended under the nose of “the Master” with the latter’s tools.
Slashes
also play a shrewd role throughout the book.
In the quote above for instance the slash is placed ‘unnaturally’ far
from the line break it feigns to accommodate, and acts like a hideout for the
capitalized “Remember,” and for the way in which the slaves get “even” by never
forgetting those who “was the breaths” of their culture.
In fact, McCrae accomplishes a lot
with very few devices. There is barely
any description in the book yet the images (and the sounds) are
unforgettable. Complexity is reached by
ellipsis, by clashing scenes, narratives, and voices, by speech that seems to
be drowned out by other speeches, memories, and fears, but then resurfaces even
stronger than before. The poetry flux is
a wave encountering particles of matter (of matter that matters, the one of
life and death) and thus seems to be obnubilated, but actually nothing blocks
it; in fact, it is exactly such brief (and horrific) episodes that render it
perceptible.
Ranting, raging, rambling syncopated
voices that seem to sound the same, cover in fact an impressive number of forms
and styles—satire (“the silver [money] rattled as I ran it sounded like/ a chained
dog jumping”), black (or rather cynic-horror) comedy (“he was barefoot in/ Shit
when the white men found him
/[author’s slash] He stank so bad/ They couldn’t hang him didn’t want
those feet/ over their heads// That’s why they burned him”), prophecy (“Our
Savior comes disguised /[author’s
slash] Like a thief in the night/ […] down from the cross/ And he must set the
cross on fire”), ballad/blues/farce (in “The Ballad of Cathay Williams William
Cathay”), elegy (“Brother it keep us like a pond keep leaves/ from trees on the
pond they/ Rotting in the thing they lived on/ […]/ Brother our father me and
him / [author’s slash] That’s how it love/ keep us together”), etc, etc.
The
fragmentary epic seems to go full circle when in the last poem, the speaker
sardonically acknowledges that “I thought// Who do I got to kill/ to get all
the way free/ And it was more people
than it was/ alive in the world,” thus echoing as if from the other end of the
world (and history) the oppressive image at the beginning of the book, with its
ominous enjambment-puns: “The death in us was bigger than the life in us/
except for some of us it seems like now/ And them the niggers got
their heads cut off…” The massacred rebels
are still around (here and) “now,” moreover, they are the (atemporal?) here and
now, they have become the matter history is made of (they are beheaded now and…
them). But if the victim, the enslaved,
the exterminated want to be free (not to survive…), they’ll have to imagine a
holocaust the world is not big enough for.
McCrae goes beyond the victim/victimizer overlap and reaches the
negative (capability and) sublime of a poetry that, in order to be true, will
have not only to account for but also reenact the endless horrors of his
people’s history.
The characters’ confessions are
truncated, contorted, distorted, stressed, compressed, pressed for time and
space. If it is an epic it is one of
deeply subjective and incoherent voices that have no time or reverence neither
for the ample Homeric meter and its circuitous rhetoric—the “niggers’ song” is
not meant for ceremony or leisure—nor for the gluttonous Whitmanesque enumerations—since
although they crave and recognize democracy (“The Yankees were/ Shaking hands”
and calling the slaves by their names) they haven’t really enjoyed any justice
or democracy yet. The vision is not
huge, but relentlessly ramified, not gigantic, but unstoppable. That’s why—it gotta be continued…
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