My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 57

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In thinking of captivity and freedom
here, I cannot help but think of
the speaker’s activity and inactivity.
The speaker brings the girl’s cry “down
from the hills” but cannot, or does
not, stop her burning. Too, the girl is
both the captive of fire, but also “free”
in the sense that she is everywhere —
her body, or the speaker’s memory
of her body, is superimposed onto the
landscape. She transcends her own
body and is found in the body of the
environment — yet, she is onl y found
in the burning of other things. Which
is to say, she transcends her body but
not her burning.

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Perhaps part of the work of this poem
is also an impossible attempt to
reconcile violence with the beauty of a
landscape (geographic and linguistic).
Recall the poet’s years in Vietnam
and the poet’s years in Bogalusa.
The similarity of the two geographies.
Their beauties and violences.
Remembering his childhood, he says,
“My sense of poetry has a lot to do with
Louisiana where I grew up, my rituals.
I was very tuned into the beauty and
violence in the people and the landscape.
It’s a great, scary irony that the kkk
call themselves the “Knights of White
Camellia” — as if language is used to
pervert nature, to tinge the camellia
with blood.” In a way, “You and I Are
Disappearing” tinges the landscape and
every orange thing with the burning
girl. Experience haunts the landscape.
Memory floods the speaker.

“You are a tilt of the head
& vantage point, neither this
nor that, clearly prehistoric
& futuristic, & then you are gone.”
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How might these readings be useful
to us as seers and thinkers and writers?
In order to think about this more
usefully, I have to consider an old Fon
story of Legba. In the story, Mawu, the
female high-god of the Fon cosmology,
tells the other gods that whoever can
simultaneously play several percussion
and wind instruments for her, while
dancing to the music they make, will
be named chief of the gods. All of
the other gods try their hands at this
feat, but fail. Legba, however, succeeds.
He plays gong, bell, drum, flute
simultaneously, while dancing. (Are you,
too, remembering Rahsaan Roland
Kirk?) Robert Pelton suggests that this
tale illuminates some of the value of
polyvocality and rhythmic structures in
Fon and other West African musics.
This story also helps me to consider the
value, or power, in simultaneity. That
it takes great, improbable skill to play
the several musics at once, but also to
hear each of their languages, to dance
inside that simultaneity. As scholar Erik
Davis writes of Eshu, Legba’s Yoruban
counterpart, “[Eshu] knows that the
power of ambiguity and the multiplicity
of perspectives can change the fixed
into the free.”

This might translate into a poetics of
attention, play, risk — patterns and
ruptures of patterns. A poetics that
depends on a deep care for freedom
in our thinking and seeing, a constant
movement toward. A poetics of process
vs. a poetics of destination. A poetics
of opening, of doors. (We remember
the famous father of Haitian liberation
who took a new last name, one he
is famous for: Touissaint Louverture.)
At the risk of belaboring a point, and
in the spirit of reaching, trying to
name, I’d like to propose that with the
Komunyakaa, one of the things we
might be witnessing and learning as his
readers is how valuable an understanding
of plurality (an ability to straddle
worlds!) is in the pursuit of freedom or
becoming free. Not arrival at freedom,
for isn’t the process of becoming free,
or more free, always relative?