By Nick Moss
In John Berger’s essay Uses of Photography (which collects Berger’s responses to Susan Sontag’s book On Photography), Berger sets out Sontag’s argument that “Cameras define reality in two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers.)”
He then considers “whether photography might serve a different function. Is there an alternative photographic practice?” Berger concludes provisionally that “The task of an alternative photography is to incorporate photography into social and political memory instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory.”
Berger then sets out a possible method by means of which this might be achieved. “A radial system has to be constructed around the photograph so that it may be seen in terms which are simultaneously personal, political, economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.”
A similar issue arises if we want to consider how best to construct a poetic response to the times in which we now find ourselves – where Capital sheds its democratic camouflage, profits from genocide, offers peace as a protection racket, and we slump into a digitised alienation. In this situation, any poetry which might seek to avoid response reduces itself to the level of versifying doggerel, however skilled it may be, because it is empty of any content which would give meaning to form. What would be the poetic equivalent of Berger’s radial system, which would put the poem/photograph “back into the context of experience, social experience, social memory”?
The “social poetics” championed by the US poet and activist Mark Novak presents one option. Novak’s practice is based around establishing poetry workshops “in the community, in prisons, in schools, and in worker centres and trade union halls” to produce a collective working-class literature and poetry as a space of political/cultural/aesthetic struggle. A key text arising from this movement is Novak’s Coal Mountain Elementary (Coffee House Press 2009) which weaves together the voices of miners from West Virginia and China, newspaper accounts of mining disasters and American Coal Foundation teaching material into an epic poem of working-class struggle and survival.
Another way forward is illustrated in Nick Makoha’s extraordinary series of poems, The New Carthaginians. The book explores how Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “exploded collage” can be used as a poetic device. As Makoha sets out:
The exploded collage allows for multiple codices of information and insight to be displayed all at once, free of social hierarchies. To these Basquiat adds a sampling of experience, the way a DJ samples music….The seemingly nonsensical use of language, symbols, numbers and images are in fact a code for those willing to engage.”
This is a text that requires active engagement – the poems cannot simply be consumed, they have to be worked at; they take the reader out of their comfort zone, they disorientate, they shift. You think you know where you are with them, and then they blindside you.
Makoha ‘s poetic voice here is based around three narrators who are also one – the narrator/poet; Basquiat, and a Black Icarus. The scene both is, and is not, Entebbe International Airport, at the time of the 1976 hijacking. Makoha’s voice (s) are allusive. They are “A bird on fire looking for an edge.” They are “Icarus/Iverson’s 48-point game/the taste of sorrel on a beach.”
Makoha , a Ugandan poet and playwright, now London-based, tells us that “If this is what we know, then their year is 1976 and the air is thick with everything coming.” But “coming” not just for Makoha, but for Icarus, for Basquiat and for Uganda and the writer’s father. For all of us. “I don’t know where to begin so I may jump around in search of a source code, in search of a known life, in search of fire and something to displace us.”
The voices interchange within the text. in one of the Codex of Birds poems, the narrator tells us “There was a time when I thought that to release myself from my self and its boiling rage I had to become the sort of animal that swallowed expensive wine from mason jars.” Is it the poet here refusing to become a hipster bourgeois, or is it Basquiat, or both? Later in the same poem, the narrator tells us he “began to master the speech of birds in the same way that a pilot draws darkness down.” Icarus emerges from the flux of voices.
This proceeds throughout – the voices overlap, debate, compete, sometimes they chorus, sometimes they heckle. In Pegasus, the poem works as 2 texts, the body of the poem and the poem’s footnotes. At various points the footnotes comment on the main text, and at others they become a surrealist subtext operating as a shadow of the main text. Makoha is a bracing, challenging, agile poet – his writing is reminiscent of Aime Cesaire, in its powerful symbolism, but touched with the surreal edge of Nathaniel Mackey, the exhilarating shooting-for-the stars invention of Will Alexander.
All of this comes together, for instance, in the stunning Riddle Me This, Batman, which again has a dialogue between the poem and its footnotes, such that “it is in fact never possible to be sure that a dream has been completely interpreted.”
“I dreamt that my father was the River Nile and I walked across him towards the trees.” Footnote text: “(I would like to fly out of my head the way Joyce Bryant used to sing out of her head after a doctor sprayed her throat with cocaine.)” (and is there in the text something of Joyce Bryant ‘s hitting head-on the walls of contradiction that contained her and constrained her? The refusal of a gangster -dominated music business; the embrace of Seventh Day Adventism; and then the breaking with the spiritual when the church refused to engage in the civil right struggle.
As the poem puts it “As a rule many are cautious of life. What I mean is I have been cautious with life, and I command you not to fear the way life moves through space. Why fear the hawk when it is the wind that carries him?” In the space opened up by Makoha’s imagination, what if Basquiat doesn’t die of a smack overdose at 27; what if Icarus doesn’t crash and burn – or what if in falling he finds himself? (“in fact, all falling is an act of flight”.) Makoha creates space for imagination and interpretation throughout, and in doing so he opens up the possibility of the disruption of the continuity of history – for something else to be imagined into being.
The hijacking by the of the Air France passenger plane at Athens by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and its re-routing to Entebbe gave Ugandan President Idi Amin some cover to adopt an anti-imperialist posture, in welcoming the hijackers. The aim of the hijack was to force the release of Palestinian militants from Israeli jails. Instead, a raid by 100 IDF special forces led to the killing of the hijackers and 45 Ugandan soldiers. Uganda’s territorial integrity was entirely disregarded and Amin’s attempt at anti-imperialism led to Uganda being turned into a killzone for Israel’s troops. The collusion of Kenya in the Entebbe raid led Amin to issue orders for the Ugandan army to kill all Kenyans living in Uganda. What is striking is how in The New Carthaginians, these specifics are referenced only allusively,
Except that “If you calculate your power the small can stand up to the large.” (Icarus at the Fun Gallery in the East Village of New York.) Except that “Paradise and violence are the same road; one cannot exist without the other, both gladly accept loss.” (The Long Duration of a Split Second.) Except that “The war reporters were selling democracy and asking for copyright to a Ugandan stageset in which we had minor parts (third villager, English-speaking native, and if they can make it to the third act, soon-to-be refugee”. (Basquiat asks the Poet to Paint Him the Truth) Except that “Would you call a body hanging from a tree an imitation of Christ on the cross?” (The New Carthaginian) Everything here both is and is not about “the Palestine situation, the price of oil, the American embassy’s concerns about the disruption of international trade by hijackers” but always with the fact that “this country was ours to begin with” dismissed as irrelevant to all the state actors who concern themselves with the “plane on the tarmac.”
Basquiat’s Suite Of 14 Drawings, text pieces which group together phrases that are randomly banal and profane and profound (and all this and more depending on when you encounter them and in what order) is related to what Makoha attempts here. Similarly in Basquiat’s Jawbone of An Ass he paints a list that passes from Alexandria, the Punic Wars, via Hannibal to the Emancipation Proclamation and Transcendentalism. Alongside, two robots fight, and cartoon serpents loom. This is what Makoha means by “exploded collage”. It is at the heart of Basquiat’s works, and it works to dynamic effect when deployed in the poems here.
In A Season In Hell Arthur Rimbaud writes that “I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic…”
Nick Makoha, in The New Carthaginians, writes “like Icarus above the sea where the sky in all versions of itself is blue even when it wasn’t”, with such power and lightness that you will dream of revolutions and magic again. Or, as Basquiat once put it, “Fuck the Sistine Chapel, we’ve done the third rail.”
