Broken Lyrics: Forms of Survival and the Survival of Form in Darwish, Mackey, and Rankine

The word lyric has taken on a dicey quality for me in recent years, amid the resurgence of “lyric theory.” The word lyric has almost become a word to avoid so as not to risk what Virginia Jackson has called “lyricization”— flattening historical microgenres with an appropriative generic stamp. But, thinking (with Jahan Ramazani) of poetry and poetic genres as quite porous and flexible entities, I am glad we are still thinking about, writing about, and otherwise contemplating the lyric. Glad, too, that the lyric survives—not only in scholarly discourse but in the persistence of poems that sing, even in the least hospitable conditions, and despite the pressures placed on the term in critical discourse and, formally, by various anti-lyrical conceptual movements. I contend that this is in part because of a relationship between survival and song. In the meditations that follow, I explore what that relationship might be. Specifically, how poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Nathaniel Mackey, and Claudia Rankine can be seen as “acts of lyric survival.”

Emerging into an Arabic literary scene where experimentation and a modernist break with historical forms had already been introduced, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was in many respects less experimental than his modernist influences and contemporaries. His early work stayed close to the forms and meters of classical verse. Later in his career, his style became more flexible, fragmentary, and dreamlike—a shift accompanied by a parallel move from more overtly political, declarative poems to more abstract, inward themes of memory, exile, and love. Yet formal lyrical elements such as rhythm and rhyme remained essential to his work. Poetry, for Darwish, was above all a form of ughnia (song). He thus rejected shi‘r hurr (free verse) in favor of the flexible formal constraint of taf ‘ila poetry (based on the repetition of a single metrical “foot”). Just as rhythm was essential to poetry’s roots in music, tradition rooted modernism in its histories. As he wrote in an interview, “Any modernity that does not emerge from a historical context will remain a false and fabricated modernity.” These fusions—of inheritance with invention, form with fragment—enable the translation of, for example, the ancient lyrical trope of mourning at ruins (atlal) into an act of present survival.

Darwish’s poem, “Who am I, Without Exile,” from his 1998 collection, Sareer al-ghariba (The Stranger’s Bed), presents a lyric poised between desire and grief: two kinds of lack. The poem opens in an address to an absent beloved:

A stranger on the riverbank, like the river... water
binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway
to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing
makes me enter the gospels. No-
thing... nothing sparkles from the shore of ebb
and flow between the Euphrates and the Nile. No-
thing makes me descend from the pharaoh’s boats. No-
thing carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing
and not promise. What will I do? What
will I do without exile, and a long night
that stares at the water?”

The speaker, a “stranger on the riverbank,” stands “bound” to the name of the beloved, the place, by water. And yet, in the course of this passage, both “you” and “I” dissolve into a series of open questions that center on absence—the absence of the self, the absence of possible return.

Absence—the no/thing—breaks at each line, so that the poem traces a hem-like void at its edge. Language seems to be holding on, barely, at the brink of the poem itself. The poem is at once lament, love-song, and smoke signal. The speaking stranger is a no-man in no-man’s-land, addressing a bodiless name, to which he is nonetheless bound. There is no path that might bring the stranger home “back from my faraway / to my palm tree.” The series of breakages and negations move as a river: a presence whose being is at every moment moving away. And yet the negations also bring to mind what is absent, creating a space for what he called the “presence of absence.”

For Darwish, exile was both literal and existential: exile from Palestine, exile in the terrain of poetic language. Poetry—especially lyrical poetry, as a gathering of voices and a bridge to the past—was a mode of surviving and creating a foothold for the present and for the presence of absence. The act of the poem emerges from the homelessness of survivors: to stand, “staring at the water,” and give voice. The act of lyric survival extends a double imperative: Stop, Sing.

In an interview with Charles Bernstein, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey described contemporary America as undergoing a “state of emergency that occurs when ‘business as usual’ breaks down, and ... ‘business as usual’ has broken down.” He positions his poetry as a response to this broken state, and to the longer histories of violence and slavery that enabled and shored up a broken “business as usual.” Mackey’s 2002 collection Splay Anthem, a volume of entwined song- cycles, suggests the need for song and dance, even and perhaps especially in this state of emergency.

Writing on Kamau Brathwaite’s collection Mother Poem, Mackey observes an insistence on breakages: “not only ‘cracked note,’ ... ‘cracked ground,’ and ‘broken tongue’ but also ‘history...stripped and torn.’” He describes this as “writing which amounts to a fractured wordscape.” The “fractured wordscape” of Splay Anthem is marked by emptiness, brokenness, and a quality Mackey refers to repeatedly as “ground gone under.” This “ground” is embodied for Mackey in the Andoumboulou, who in Dogon mythology were an earlier, failed pre-human race forced to dwell in holes in the earth. The condition of the Andoumboulou— living underground, in cramped darkness and dispersion—resonates, for Mackey, with historical and contemporary conditions of diaspora: fragmentation and isolation. And yet the Andoumboulou communicate by singing, bridging their separate holes with song. Mackey writes: “The song of the Andoumboulou is one of striving, strain, abrasion, an all but asthmatic song of aspiration. Lost ground... lost union and other losses variably inflect that aspiration, a wish, among others, to be we... that of some larger collectivity an anthem would celebrate.” If the Andoumboulou songs strive toward connection and collectivity, their fugitivity bears witness to a condition of collective loss and instability. Quote: “The poems’ we... knows nothing if not locality’s discontent... the consolation they seek in song, accents and further aggravates movement. The songs are increasingly songs of transit.”

Gaps, hollows, rifts and openings abound in Mackey’s Anthem. “Song of the Andoumboulou 40,” for example, begins in tightly woven lines, then grows increasingly marked by ellipses and in-line gaps. The gaps that proliferate within the lines create temporal suspensions, attenuations, and syncopations within the text. At times the in-line gaps connect across multiple lines. The gaps resonate with bodily sense orifices: “eyes, / ears / nostrils, mouths [ ] holes in / our heads.” Farther down, the hollows belong to bones, bodies lightened by lack. The subjects of “Song 40” are “boatlike.” Their bodies recall the hollow hulls of slave ships, the hundreds of bound bodies packed into the boat’s belly, the abyss below. In the first chapter of The Poetics of Relation, titled “The Open Boat,” Edouard Glissant (to whom Mackey pays tribute in an epigraph to Splay Anthem) writes of these ships: “This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under the sentence of death.”

In his essay, “Wringing the Word,” Mackey writes of the urge “to squeeze the last drop of sound and sense from the world and from words”—that is, to wring sound and sense from each word through temporal and sensory attenuation. As Mackey puts it, “Attenuation extends the voice; it stretches it, strings it out... This too is a kind of movement, a kind of mobility, an aspect of ground gone under, loss or lack of assurance.” This maneuvering in time with attenuation and mobility suggests an interest in modes of bending, circumventing, hinging.

Mackey describes the hinge as “[a] form of connection that allows for a bend, that allows for a flexing and movement.” Formally and rhythmically, the poems of Splay Anthem enact this movement: hinge- lines and in-line gaps, elongated or stretched rhythms followed by short lines and quick steps, produce the effects of syncopation, rhythms of West African music, jazz, and blues. If the gap represents a missing or unstable step (a limp), the rhythmic or temporal hinge recovers and restores the flow of the line to the next, making it dance. In his essay, “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol,” Mackey describes the figure of Legba, the Fon-Yoruba deity of crossroads, thresholds, borderlands, and language, who guards the passage between humanity and the loa, giving or refusing permission to speak with the spirits. Quote: “Legba walks with a limp because his legs are of unequal lengths, one of them anchored in the world of humans and the other in that of the gods.” Mackey sees Legba’s dance-limp as a “‘defective’ capacity,” “an emblem of heterogeneous wholeness”, “Impairment taken to higher ground, remediated, translates damage and disarray into a dance.” The limp of Legba embodies the limp-dance of lyric survival— in Mackey’s terms, a “willingness to reside within a rift... and, in doing so, possibly bridge what has been sundered, or at least straddle it.”

The lyric impulse rises from the sensing body and the attending mind, embedded in a historical moment and sociopolitical pressures: pressures exerted by the words, actions, and gazes of others. In this sense, like survival itself, it is thus inevitably a historical and political act—an act of citizens. Claudia Rankine’s booklength poem Citizen combines lyrical narrative, essay, and photographs to address the ongoing and systemic racial violence and “well-meaning” micro-aggressions that plague contemporary America.

While Citizen is concerned with humans as co-relating sociopolitical subjects, it is also concerned with the human as creature—with the fact of the body. It speaks to the position of the human as breathing, feeling animal in the world, among others. The creatureliness of the voice emerges in the “moan” and “sigh” that cuts through the text’s critical register. Rankine writes: “To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about. // The sigh is the pathway to breath; it allows breathing. That’s just self-preservation. No one fabricates that. You sit down, you sigh. You stand up, you sigh. The sighing is a worrying exhale of an ache. You wouldn’t call it an illness; still it is not the iteration of a free being. What else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind?” At the same time, even sighs are public acts. As soon as a sound is voiced it positions its subject among others, in a body marked out by sex, by color, and by class. The formal, material density of poetic language calls out this fact of the body. It “bodies forth.” For Rankine, this bodily presence is the site of both poetry’s resistant potential and language’s capacity to harm, to dehumanize: “you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present.” Her response is to use the bodily presence of her poetry to stand and call out, make visible, be visible.

If Rankine didn’t include the subtitle “An American Lyric,” would we know right away that we’re looking at a lyric? Looking for the lyric “I,” we find “you.” Looking for line-breaks, or a rhyme scheme, we find paragraphs of sometimes scholarly sometimes conversational speech. Looking for text, we find image. And yet at some point in reading Citizen, the lyricism creeps in around the edges of our awareness —we become aware suddenly that the text is not only conveying information or relating experience; it is singing and moaning, exerting a physical presence and pressure upon us.

Reading Citizen for the first time I experienced a kind of hush —the kind of hush that I associate with sacred spaces and sacred words, even though I’m not a religious person. The hush, I think, comes from being addressed, being singled out as a you, but also as a she. Because, in everyday life I am more often the “she” of Citizen: the white friend, the privilege-blind, unaware, liberal white person. But I think the hush also comes from the ways in which Rankine weaves lyricism into her text at the micro-level, countering and calling out micro-aggression with the only kind of lyricism that can reach it—at the almost, but not quite, imperceptible level at which it takes place, a kind of micro-lyricism. The images in Citizen work a more sudden halt, causing me to stop, and simply look. They interrupt my reading flow. They interject. That act of stopping brings me back to the act of stopping at ruins with which I began in Darwish—that there’s something fundamentally important about the act of stopping for the notion of the lyric. Stopping before ruins, before a beloved—or, in Citizen, before a violence both pervasive and well camouflaged, designed to keep things moving along without disrupting anyone’s day. It takes an act of profound courage and attentiveness to stop the flow of what Mackey called “business as usual” with one’s own body and voice. To say, I am here. Look. This is happening.

As physical, embodied form inhabiting and moving within space, and time, the lyric locates language most pressingly in the senses, grounding the movement of the mind in the sensing body, and thus in physical presence. This presence is at once spatial, sensorial, and temporal. Giving form to voice means entering into history with one’s body and breath. In his “Meridian” speech upon receiving the Büchner Prize in 1960, Paul Celan spoke of poetry as signifying “an Atemwende, a Breathturn.” The movement, or turning of the breath in the poem was, for Celan, the site of survival and, perhaps, an opening for relation between living others. Celan’s “perhaps,” his emphasis on potentiality, is important for an understanding of lyric survival because it is not guaranteed. The survival of human song must be fought for, guarded, cultivated. The precariousness of lyric’s survival is central to its continual invention and re-invention. As song or even as the trace of song, the lyric is carved out at the edge of silence from the mortal medium of embodied language itself. Perhaps one “value” of a lyric act in this particular historical moment might be the standing of the poem as itself a body—of which breath and pulse (line and rhythm) are the signs of life.