My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Página 55

And then there’s Komunyakaa’s move
from Bacchus to Zulu. The distinctly
Greco-Roman and the distinctly South
African. Another kind of straddling.
Zulu — meaning “heaven” or “sky.”
Zulu as in the Zulu people of South
Africa — abused as third class citizens
under apartheid and also recognized as
being descendants of the powerful
and feared Zulu Kingdom. The poem
is forged out of a dissonant, seemingly
improbable set of values.
So there is dismemberment, yes, but also
the great surprise (to me) of Zulu and
Bacchus so near. A kind of expansion of
vision. Each reference belonging to the
poet’s large seeing. Zulu touches Bacchus
touches magnolia touches raintree.
The walls of one mythological, historical
or geographic world break or bloom
into the realms of another. Which is, as
far as I’m concerned, a state of African
Americanness and, more generally,
Americanness. Whether we call this break
or bloom, rupture or expansion of vision,
the proximity of Zulu and Bacchus
(that they should both be accessible to us)
is a manifestation of an earlier violence.
It is a complicated union. And not
without Blackness and beauty.

54

Here’s where the blue note comes in.
In a 1998 bomb conversation with
Suzan Sherman and Paul Muldoon,
Komunyakaa says he’s interested in the
southern idiom and the literary
language functioning side by side,
tonally. He explains, “I realize that my
work is immersed in Southern idiom,
along with an acquired literary
language. I’m trying to make both
function tonally side by side to create
music that doesn’t have to achieve
an absolute scale of meaning, but
more or less to induce a certain feeling,
because that’s what literature is…
It’s a cumulative feeling.” He later
shares, “Rhythm extends the possibilities
within the shape of language — it’s
reaching for that surprise, the blue note.”

Can’t we say then that Legba’s register
of the betwiXt and multilingual mirrors
a jazz aesthetic!? Komunyakaa writes,
“Poetry gives itself over to language,
to what it is made of and resists, and
in this sense, the tension, the struggle
within the embrace, says everything
about why poetry exists.” The same
could be said of jazz — forged out of
the crossroads place. The wrestling
and merging of European and African
musical aesthetics. Jazz is built out
of the tension between structural
constraint and improvisation — or,
“the struggle within the embrace.”
Variations on jazz themes and/or
improvisations are engagements with
time and possibility within a constraint.
Musically, there is a tension between
predictability and unpredictability.
If we consider these states in the context
of American histories of capture,
captivity, invention, and freedom, a
meditation on possibility, predictability,
unpredictability, is full of grief and joy.
(Imagine, what “the water” brought
to and took from Benin, Cape Coast,
New Orleans, London, the ports of
Spain, San Juan and Saint Domingue.)
A poetics — or sensibility — born
out of this need to create a living space
within, toward, despite the flux, yes,
this is part of the blood of jazz, and
part of what Komunyakaa’s work
conjures. As he writes in “The Story
of a Coat,” “memories that make me
American/ as music made of harmony
& malice.”

Disclaimer. I’m not a musician. I love
music unsophisticatedly and with
an untrained ear. My love, who was
named after Rahsaan Roland Kirk,
plays, and his father is a jazz guitarist.
(Speaking of straddling worlds, Roland
Kirk often played several instruments
simultaneously, and he named himself
“Rahsaan” after hearing it in a dream.)
When I asked “my” R. to describe the
blue note in layman’s terms, he said,
Often thought of as the flatted
third, flatted fifth, flatted seventh.
In a given scale, the blue note
is the note in between two notes.
Musicians, in a blues, tend to be
sliding into a blue note or out of
it. As if you’re stretching or sliding
away — pushing the boundaries
of the note. Blues, the blue note,
is an expansion of harmonic
possibility within a given melody.
Some kind of break in the
convention. In jazz it’s often used
to convey deep, deep feeling.
The blue notes deal with heartache.
In a way, this expansion of possibility
(harmonic, linguistic, visual) is what
artists and innovators do, but, also, it
is what it means to be alive, to try
to survive. More simply, it is part of
what it means to be on the planet —
expansion as a kind of way to think
about evolution. If we think about
language, it is slowly or quickly changing
depending on the changes of the people
who “inhabit it.” The expansion of
possibility in language is a way to ensure
that language has room for our shapes and
colors and experiences. These moments
of ruptures or breaks or expansion
in language are what I’m trying to point
us to in Komunyakaa’s work.