Sarah Eltantawi
Toward a Poetics of the Middle East Crisis: An Interview With Leonard Schwartz
SE: My guest today is Leonard Schwartz who is the author of numerous books of criticism on poetry. Today we're talking about his latest book, The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises which was released from the University of Arkansas press in 2016. The New Babel ‘ evokes and investigates—from a Jewish American perspective and in the forms of poetry, essays, and interviews—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, America’s involvement as both perpetrator and victim of events in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the multiple ways that poetics can respond to political imperatives’.
Also joining us today is Dr. Kathleen Eamon, who is a professor of philosophy at the Evergreen State College. Kathleen earned her PhD in philosophy from Vanderbilt in 2009. She specializes in aesthetics and philosophy of art at the juncture of social and political thought— otherwise known as specializing in Kant, Hegel, Marx and Freud. Kathleen wrote a review, published in Talisman, of Leonard Schwartz's latest book, so she joins us today to add to the conversation. Thank you Leonard and Kathleen.
Leonard Schwartz: Great to be here with you, Sarah.
Dr. Kathleen Eamon: Yeah. Thanks so much, Sarah. It’s great to be here with you, Leonard.
SE: We're also colleagues. It’s just exciting to be able to talk to you about your work. I really enjoyed your book, Leonard. It was wonderful to read. So let's begin with, can you explain your concept of the Tower of Babel in this book?
LS: Yes, and again thank you so much for having me on the program. It’s a real honor. This is a book that does address itself towards what I call ‘a poetics’ of the Mideast crisis. By poetics, I mean that the book includes poems, essays, and interviews as opposed to just poems. The New Babel addresses multiple modes of creative thought; there’s Poetic Thought vis-à-vis the poem, Conversational Thought, vis-à-vis the interview, and Propositional Thought vis-à-vis the essay. All of those pertain to the question you asked about the concept of Babel, or the Tower of Babel, in the book.
We know, of course, that it’s a biblical image, the story of the Tower of Babel. It also is what September 11th, 2001 felt like to me as a New Yorker at that time— the day that the towers fell and a vast, manipulated confusion of language followed after. So the question then becomes as someone working with language, as poet or essayist or as conversant, what kinds of things can one do to redeem [language]— to make babble into a source of energy and richness and wealth as opposed to vast manipulated confusion?
A language is a kind of babble. And in the first piece in the book, ‘The New Babel’, I try and make some kind of argument, or some kind of suggestion, for the way in which the very confusion of language, as opposed to the communicability of language, can become a source of resistance and energy.
SE: So there are a number of foundational, philosophical questions that you bring up in the book. I wanted to start at the heart of one of those questions, which is the perennial question of what is the role of aesthetic production in the context of war destruction and horror?
You channel [the German philosopher Theodor] Adorno in your discussion of the war in Afghanistan. You have a long piece about Madoo, which is a place in Afghanistan on the border region of Pakistan. You say— again channeling Adorno: ‘after Madoo, to write poetry is barbaric.’
So can we start right there? I think a lot of people can probably relate to that sentiment and concern that aesthetics in a time of war is somehow inappropriate— even obscene.
LS: Yeah, sure. Let me respond to that. I mean, Adorno is very interesting to think about here, and I think about him a lot. I know Dr. Eamon thinks about him a lot, too, in terms of his positions on the politics of the poem or political poetry/political art.
KE: Yes.
LS: Very famously, he opines that [Samuel] Beckett is more empowered politically then is [German poet, Bertolt] Brecht. Although Brecht addresses himself directly to political circumstances, Beckett creates an imaginary space on the page that gives us more leverage on political circumstance, according to Adorno. So Brecht gets tied up in reproducing the very structure he's attempting to undermine or subvert while the artist who creates an imaginative space on the page, has the possibility of liberating us from the political knots we'd otherwise be tied into.
So there's that position of Adorno's, but there's also his position that “after Auschwitz, there can be no poetry”, right? That, to aestheticize the horror, is necessarily to represent or reproduce that which cannot be represented or reproduced.
Adorno doesn't necessarily stick to that position. Then there's Paul Celan, the poet whose poetry— in its complexity— undermines that position. But as a provocation on Adorno's part— to say that we've reached the limits of what art can represent, I still think becomes an important statement. Of course, I distort it. I turn the idea to: 'after Madoo, there can be no poetry', and I need to say a little bit about that distortion, of course. Maybe it would help if I read that section from The New Babel?
The New Babel is in seven sections. It begins with section zero, perhaps inevitably. I'm going to skip section zero and section one and read from section two, which is on page eight, since that's where you direct my question. Section two begins with a quote:
Perhaps someday there will be a reckoning for this tiny village of 15 houses, all of them obliterated into splintered wood and dust by American bombs. United States military officials might explain why 55 people died here on December 1st… But more likely, Madoo will not learn whether the bombs fell by mistake or on purpose, and the matter will be forgotten amid the larger consequences of war. It is left an anonymous hamlet with anonymous people buried in anonymous graves… America’s own anti-Taliban allies were horrified, claiming the targeting had been mistaken and that hundreds of innocents had been killed. It was ‘like a crime against humanity,’ said Hajji Muhammad Zaman, a military commander in the region.
— Barry Bearak, The New York Times,
December 15th, 2001, Madoo, Afghanistan
LS: [continuing from section two of The New Babel]
Madoo’s farmers are people in pieces. They’ve become their own fertilizer… assuming the rains come, we did them a favor, suggests a cartoon version of Secretary of Defense R. (Big laugh). But there isn't any need for such a cartoon. We've already firmly established the concept of collateral damage.
He who sees with his heart, as Paz would have it, sees Madoo as himself; and who can’t see Madoo with his heart? (‘Men with fossil minds, with oily tongues’ suggests the cartoonist.)
Every face, a mask; every house a ruin of brick and wood.
Whose sisters were killed? Collateral Damage can’t ever say beforehand. (Terrorists don’t target specific sisters.) (The American attack came in four separate waves.)
After Madoo, to write poetry is barbaric (Theodor Adorno).
‘We’ve yet to find their bodies’
‘Many layers to this rubble’
‘And now we live with this’
‘Mystery’:
Sayeth the elder Mr. Gul, Madoo resident,
Though he might be speaking of Manhattan.
‘Sorrowful old man’ ‘white bread’ ‘furrowed forehead’:
‘Then Paia Gul’ ‘young man’ ‘bitter eyed’: ‘I blame’
‘The Arabs’ ‘then amended his own’ ‘statement’
‘I blame the Arabs’
‘And the Americans’
‘They are all terrible people’
‘They are all the worst in the world’
‘Most of the dead were children.’
Fragrance bird song wheat fields
Mr. Bearak reporting two weeks after Madoo’s apocalypse.
Harvesting scrap metal from bombs,
Hopes of surviving winter.
Beyond anecdote sounds a hymn we can only hum, humble in our making,
The birds scribbling like authors in a startling ephemera of air.
LS: [continuing from section two of The New Babel]
Walking in the vegetable patch
Late at night, I was startled to find
The severed head of my
Daughter lying on the ground.
Her eyes were upturned, gazing at me, ecstatic-like…
(From a distance it appeared
To be a stone, hallooed with light,
As if cast there by the Big Bang.)
What on earth are you doing, I said,
You look ridiculous.
Some boys buried me here,
She said sullenly.
—Araki Yasusada, Doubled Flowering, the foothills
surrounding Hiroshima, December 25, 1945
Craters. Tractor carcass. Dead sheep.
Urn crushed to disc;
Unendurable, ‘unintended,’ un-American
Ax Americana;
Far from Mecca, in Madoo, Tora Bora,
One undamaged room.
Anger cannot be buried.
Prayer is perfect when he who prays remembers not that he is praying.
Everything dead trembles (Kandinsky).
Note: E-Mail the reporter, ask if there were ever rows of poplars.
Moonstone sucked into the atmosphere of dwarfed arts; no Hero but also no
Nero; the half that faces us is full tonight.
As the Kaushitaki Upanishad has it, ‘the breath of life is one.’
LS: [continuing from section two of The New Babel]
The word ‘Madoo’ is a transcription of a Pashto name the reporter must have sounded out.
In English, then, ‘Madoo.’
In English the name ‘Madoo’ derives from an old Scottish word meaning
‘My dove.’
LS: So that’s section two of The New Babel. In terms of babble, I’m remarking on the process or project by which ‘Madoo’, the name of a village in Afghanistan can turn into a dove if the tongue is playing with sounds—and that at the sounds’ transfer from one semantic system to another, the ruins [of a language] ascend into a dove.
There are other levels of babble in the text, in that I'm basing my attempt to reconstruct what happened in that village in Tora Bora on the basis of a newspaper report— in certain sections of the poem that are in quotes or only the language of the newspaper report. You sift through the language of the newspaper report to try and arrive at the event.
NourbeSe Philip, in her book Zong!, is the great example of attempting to do a major project. ‘The Zong’ was a slave ship that dumped its cargo, enslaved people, into the sea, for insurance purposes so that they could be indemnified later, once the ship got into trouble.
She writes the poem on the basis of the legal documents, which are all about the insurance question, in order to try and get back to the nightmare— in order to get back to the murders— or in order to get back to the crime by sifting through the available language, which is only in the legal documents pertaining to insurance.
[In this section of The New Babel], all I have is the document from the newspaper to work with, as a writer and as a poet, to try and sift through and find some sense between the cracks of what might actually have happened.
In the process, of course, one fictionalizes. In the process, in terms of one's own positionality, unless we're completely committed to the idea that only a poetry of witness, or poetry of direct experience, is valid, one necessarily is fictionalizing. And so, when I bring in Araki Yasusada, I'm acknowledging that.
Early on in the poem, I compare what I experienced in New York during 9/11 in 2001 to Hiroshima— or a little Hiroshima— in that the civilian target has been substituted for a military target. And there's no greater event than Hiroshima in terms of obliterating that distinction between the civilian and military target.
In any event, when I bring in Araki Yasusada as a Hiroshima poet, that of course is a fictional poet. It's a poet that was invented by an American poet, who wrote a whole poetry from that perspective. So I'm suggesting that there's a necessity to— as a writer and as a poet— also create new spaces on the page as opposed to imagine one's ability to report reality in some direct way. It’s problematic, though— as I understand.
SE: Yes. Okay. Interesting. Let's talk about that.
Kathleen— what do you think? Your essay is incredibly dense on precisely that point, actually.
KE: Yes, that’s right. Now I'm thinking between my essay and everything that Leonard just shared with us. Going back Adorno and the question of ‘poetry after Auschwitz’ and ‘poetry after Madoo’, and trying to figure out exactly where with all of that, I want to start— and I think I'll start with a phrase that Leonard used early on, right before you framed section two of your book for us.
Talking about Adorno, and the fact that poetry can liberate us, to a certain degree, from ‘the knots’ that violence ties us in. We become bound to the real in a way that it seems inescapable— how could you write poetry, right?
When you were talking about that, I was thinking about a lecture that I heard recently from Judith Butler. She was talking about a recent publication, Poems from Guantanamo (University Of Iowa Press, 2007)— do you know it?
LS: No, I don’t.
SE: No.
KE: I don't know if [the book is made up of] the only poems that made it past the US Department of Defense’s censorship, but I do know that—according to her—25,000 lines of poetry from one detainee alone were either destroyed or entirely censored.
KE: A couple of people, [including editor Marc Falkoff] put together a series poems that made it past the censors. And in talking about their work, the Department of Defense said that poetry presents 'a special risk' to national security because of its content and its format.
Butler was talking about the fact that almost all of the poems include lines where the poets are marveling at their writing a poem—like, what am I doing? I'm in Guantanamo, but what am I doing? There is something so useless about poetry in the face of incredible violence and especially incarceration, right?
LS: Yeah.
KE: At the same time, I'm thinking also about that uselessness as part of what it can point up to us about ourselves, and our kind of finitude—the finitude with which we have to respond to everything.
Now I'm thinking about Hegel, and this idea that something like absolute knowing, or the highest form of knowing, is being able to live with and even create hospitality around the finitude of our response, in spite of the fact that we recognize the infinity of the demands coming at us. Now, those ‘infinities’ might be demands ‘to know’— as science is like the whole world demanding to be known, right?
LS: Within that myth of Babel in the Biblical context, there's a kind of indictment of language—the idea that ‘it could have been better’. It’s the idea that there was one language and now there's the confusion of tongues that follows. The counter argument of The New Babel is the confusion of tongues by which a ruined Madoo can turn into 'my dove', or by which we're now faced with questions of translation.
What did those Guantanamo poets write? How were those texts translated? Presumably they weren't writing in English or Spanish. They were writing in Arabic, they were writing in Pashto, they were writing in Uyghur—you know? So then you've got these Department of Defense people trying to translate that—and if they're translating it, then are they making it more about the dangers they see at play in those poems? I can have all kinds of questions about the way language turns against us— or is uncontainable—as seemed to be suggested by that example.
It's that ‘uncontainability’ of language— its propensity to do exactly what you didn't expect it to do— that is an argument for aesthetic maximalism when it comes to language. I know I'm going to anger a certain number of readers if I compare Madoo to Auschwitz— they are two very different events and things— but sometimes the provocation is necessary.
SE: Now, that’s actually what I wanted to ask you about. One of the many threads in the book is you comparing Madoo to Auschwitz. You then have an interview at the end of the book with Aharon Shabtai, a leading Israeli poet and activist, who is very critical of the occupation. You also have your own positionality as an American Jewish person. I'm hesitating to ask you this question because I'm sensing that you don't want to bring yourself in as a direct narrator of these events and yet I'm going to ask you anyway— how does this all tie together? Where are you in this?
KE: Can I add to your question, please? I’m just wondering if your own phrase, ‘transcendental mobility’, might be the right phrase to use to talk about all of these turns you're making? Could you help us understand what ‘transcendental mobility’ might mean and how to make ‘turns’? Angering people in all directions is my guess— the comparison of Auschwitz to Madoo is making people mad all over the place, if they know about it— right?
LS: Right.
SE: You have a whole section of the book on this concept [of transcendental mobility] and really, it's the idea that the transcendental is historicized and particular. So yes, thank you for bringing that up.
LS: There is positionality in the book. I do take a position— a political position—and that political position is largely in reference to the writing of Martin Buber. Now Martin Buber is known for his I and Thou (1923), the direct address between the ‘I’ and ‘thou’— that address between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ which is reciprocal and in which both are ends— and the kind of elevation of dialogue to nearly the status of the divine.
His political writing is also very interesting because Martin Buber applied that notion of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ or ‘I’ and ‘You’ to Jews and Palestinians. In his political writing, he speaks about the necessity of creating a space. [Buber] is a Zionist, and he speaks about the necessity of creating a space as creating a Jewish homeland. Then he also talks about the necessity of preserving a space for the ‘you’ which are the Palestinians. So very early on in the 30s, and by even as late as 1947, he's writing about a single, binational state solution— a one state solution that will have an Arab majority— and this is from a Zionist thinker.
SE: That doesn’t sound like what we would consider Zionists today.
LS: Exactly, this is my point— another form of Zionism won out. But if you look at the history of Zionism, and you look at Buber’s position, he's making an argument that more or less equates to a particular Palestinian position now, or a particular progressive Jewish position now. [The position being that] you need a one-state solution. We're just going to have to give up on the notion of a Jewish majority in that state in order to maintain its democratic nature.
Buber’s not calling for a two-state solution; he's calling for a one-state solution in a way that is anathema to most current Zionist thinkers. This is a reminder that even within the Zionist tradition, there was a position that held out that the only solution was a one state solution.
SE: [American philosopher and political theorist, Hannah] Arendt was also there, right?
LS: Yeah. Now, Arendt has a critical attitude towards Buber—they're two different thinkers and Arendt is... well that's another issue, the argument between Arendt and Buber. But I do take a kind of theoretical position in the way that a number of the essays [in The New Babel] refer back to Buber and make the claim that this is a kind of a contribution poetics can make— by comparing the poetry of Darwish to Celan, as I do in one essay in the book, or thinking through the notion of dialogue that Buber is working with in my own radio work, and the interviews in the book with Aharon Shabtai, as you cite, as well as with the political philosopher Michael Hart and with the African American poet Amiri Baraka. So that's part of I think what was in ‘the choir’.
[As far as] whether I'm there in the book, I'm there propositionally as a thinker— or taking a position. As a poet, of course you have to be open to all kinds of material that's passing through you. As a poet, your job is to evacuate your personality as much as possible. It's never possible to do that entirely, but to evacuate your personality as much as possible so the voice of Rumi— or the voice of Dante, or the voice of the guy sitting on the bus next to you— can pass through you— filtered, of course, by one's own sensibility— but nonetheless it’s an act of language. It's the voice of the poem, not the voice of the poet, that is really a significant, I think— at least in the kind of poetry I would aspire to write or in the kind of poetry I'd want to read.
Then conversationally, as someone interviewing the people who've spoken, I think I'm there [in the book] as a person asking questions, which is all I really can do, not knowing anything.
Does that respond in some way? I want to come back to the [question of the] transcendental in a moment, but to respond to [the question of] the way in which the ‘flesh and blood’ Leonard Schwartz is present in the book, at least by taking a political position, the notion of the transcendental, as one could gloss it in Kant or Hegel or Husserl , is some sense of leverage on the personal ego, or on the personal self.
Traditionally, it means: a universal set of preconditions on the basis of which perception might be possible. When I talk about transcendental mobility, I'm trying to get away from a universality, certainly, but still maintain some sense of a way in which language allows us to move from personal experience towards a certain impersonality— a certain impersonality on the basis of which you can hear those other voices, or have access to forms of perception that you wouldn't personally— as a body, or a particular being— have access to otherwise.
So I think the necessity of the Palestinian Israeli situation, is that— the capacity to see, with deep empathy, from the eyes of ‘the other’. That's not a given.
To see with empathy from the eyes of ‘the other’] requires an act of imagination— an act of transcendental imagination. That's also what's necessary to poetic thinking— the capacity to, as [French poet, Arthur] Rimbaud put it in the Lettres du Voyant in the 19th century, ‘I is someone else’. It's wrong to say ‘I’ is ‘being’, it's wrong to say ‘I think’, rather ‘I’ is [what’s] being thought.
[As Rimbaud] has it, ‘don't blame the wood if it wakes up a violin’, I update that to say ‘don’t blame the plastic if it wakes up a cell phone’— it’s the idea that there is something of the self as a material. But if you tune that material to proper resonance, it's going to pick up on the voices of others.
KE: So can ask about this idea of the transcendental self? I'm imagining that ‘don't blame the plastic that wakes up’ as this particular thing, right? Don't blame ‘the self’, which is less than nothing, maybe before it becomes something.
I'm thinking about, for example, what all of the three interviews in [The New Babel] have in common, which is— I think it's in the interview with Michael Hart that you push him to talk about the idea— of a sort of ‘mixture at the center’— that we are multiple before we're one. I'm trying to think about that in relationship to this question of a sort of ‘flesh and blood’. You, with a Jewish American identity, taking a position with respect to also something that's clearly a question for anyone.
In America, I guess it's especially a question for Jewish Americans. But it's also in some funny way, not quite our question because it's also somewhere else, right? There's just something about the multiplicity involved there, and the sort of ‘mixture’ that proceeds your arriving to the question at all.
KE: To include, for example, the history of American violence, which comes up in the book as sort of a place of metonymic slippage between the history of slavery, for example, with the bombing in New York, or with John Brown's body at Harper's ferry. There’s all of these sort of ‘metonymic nodes’ that you can move through in order to access something that is not causal argument from one end to the other.
LS: I think it's a series of suggestions. There is the one section of [the book]— the ‘Apple Anyone’ sonnets— where I set myself the task of writing a series of poems using only English words that were derived from Arabic. There, the suggestion is: yes, there's no question we have different positionalities, different subjectivities. One person may be from Kansas and other person may be from Peshawar, but the fact is, if we're speaking English, we're also speaking Arabic. That is to say that there are all these borrowed words that pass from Arabic into English— and they're such that you can barely name a piece of fruit. [This is to say that] we are dependent in all these expressivities on the borrowings from the Arabic words. So rather than making some kind of shrill set of pronouncements there, I wanted to demonstrate that the clash of civilizations is a sort of 'bogus' notion—that the two languages, and therefore the two cultures, are intertwined and mutually dependent in terms of ordinary speech.
One of the words that was most exciting for me, in terms of doing the research on that, was the word 'tabby', as in a tabby cat, which I use in the poem [‘Transcendental Tabby’ from The New Babel]. According to the etymologies I was reading, there's a neighborhood in Baghdad--al-‘Attābiyya—where they've been weaving tapestries and making carpets for hundreds of years that have a particular pattern that we recognize now in the tabby cat.
So now, every time a tabby cat walks into a room, I think of Baghdad and I think of al-‘Attābiyya. That is a sense of mobility and flexibility in the language. Identity politics will always lead us to a kind of fixed, fast, and frozen set of positionalities whereas 'babble'—or language— is fluid and in process. Then, all of a sudden there's a relationship between my pet cat and a neighborhood in Baghdad that maybe just got bombed the day before. I'm related to that neighborhood once I see that my cat is actually related to it by way of word.
That's the argument, at least for poetry— the argument of poetry.
SE: This is a conversation we had a lot recently, which I've really appreciated. The era that we're in now has caused me to revisit my usual distrust of identity politics, so I actually wanted to open up that question a little bit.
SE: Kathleen writes in her essay, speaking of your work, of course:
In his opening essay, Schwartz positions the work vis-à-vis the friendship and then rupture between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, a friendship that breaks down over the question of poetry’s relation to the Vietnam War. As far, it seems, as poetry is concerned, Schwartz sides with Duncan, that the task of the poet is ‘to imagine evil, not to oppose it’, claiming that Duncan was ‘responsible for the fall of the friendship’ but also ‘right about the larger point.’
So you do take a position, there— quite clearly.
LS: That’s true.
SE: I respect that position. I want to think about it in terms of the very unique moment that we are in now, and also think about it in the context of your interview with Amiri Baraka if there are ways that he nuances the identity politics question. Briefly, if I may state the counter argument— it seems to me that in an age in which you have forces in power that are explicitly enacting policies against groups of people based on their identities, I can understand the poet wanting to circumvent that speech act, in the way that you described the tabby cat. I also fret about the consequences of ignoring the form of the assault that is happening. I could say more, but I will let you respond to that.
LS: Kathleen, did you want to respond? You did write about this in a really powerful way, I thought. In your piece, there’s the question of the notion that consciousness is non-self-identical, and that it's only if we recognize the way in which consciousness is non-self-identical— it's never the same as itself— that we can refrain from turning consciousness into an object. It's the objectification and the locatability of 'those Mexicans' or 'those Muslims—or 'those Jews' for that matter—that turns fellow citizens into targets, right?
The notion of the non-self-identical—so powerful in Adorno and I think there in Hegel as well— in terms of any thesis, is going to break apart into its dialectical components pretty quickly. Non-self-identical; never the same as itself. It's how we distinguish between human beings and objects, or human beings and things, right? So the danger of identity politics—or rather, the danger with the Trump administration - is the targeting of specific beings on the basis of specific characteristics that become absolutely synonymous with their identity.
Now the question is: is the response to that a kind of reification of the very criticism that's being made? Is it an accidental reproduction of the very criticism that's being made? It seems to me, if I were being targeted, camouflage might be a more suitable response. If I'm really being targeted as 'x', do I run out into the street and say, ‘I am x’, or do I create some kind of camouflage? And doesn't poetry—doesn't language—doesn't the wealth of consciousness— provide all kinds of costume that is at that point, very powerful and very necessary to survival?
If I'm a targeted person from Guatemala who's [in the United States] without proper documentation, my response is not going to be 'I'm Guatemalan without documentation'. I'm going to have to play some sort of game in order to survive, or in order to not be deported by the Trump administration, right? So I think that there's a kind of privilege built into certain notions of identity politics. Do I make that announcement at a moment in which I'm an existential threat? No. I make that announcement when I'm engaged within the university, with a certain kind of politics about positions and lines, and so on. All I'm saying is that there's an existential level to this that I think the identity politics might miss.
SE: So I think the counter argument would be that those of us in the university with that privilege, have the responsibility to name that identity. Following Audre Lorde, 'your silence will not protect you— you wear your difference on your skin. The counter argument would be that it's up to those of us with privilege to name these identities, and therefore have them as political categories in the system that we're living under in which you do need a political category to attain rights, to attain identification, or to attain even identity, right? To exist, you need to be politicized.
KE: I'm interested in the possibility that actually there's a third option. Maybe both of those things have to be happening at once. I'm thinking about, Leonard, in your interview with Amiri Baraka, you identify a certain aesthetic predicament that you ascribe to the avant garde, which is that the avant garde speaks the new and the new gets quickly incorporated and commodified and you have to keep going. You identify, maybe a little quickly, with existential predicaments, right? But aesthetic predicaments and existential predicaments actually might be different orders of magnitude and they may need different responses.
I don't know for sure, but I can say that if you think about the work of the cultural worker as holding open space for a kind of non reified way of thinking and acting as a kind of long game— 'game' is maybe the wrong way to talk about it, but when it's the aesthetic predicament, it feels a little more appropriate to talk about gaming and costuming—then where does that predicament become existential and does that require some other response when that response is available? It would be in a position of privilege, in a place where I can assert my identity, right?
LS: In the interview with Baraka, he's talking about music, specifically drumming during slave days. He's talking about the plantation owner taking the drumming as 'jungle music'. He's then saying that, actually, it's also code—it's also, 'we're breaking out of here at 3:00 AM, we've got a canoe and if you've got an extra paddle, meet us down by the river', et cetera. Then the plantation owner, who's impervious to all of that, just takes it as this 'primitive' drumbeat when, actually, it's a complex communicative system. So it seems to me that there are circumstances in which you don't want to announce your positionality—what you're doing and what you're saying. A 'hermetic poetics', if I can call it that—’code’, maybe, is the better term— has its place.
We're, of course, not in slave days right now, is what you're saying, though, and with that there is a necessity to announce. And if you have the privilege to announce, there's the necessity to fight back by naming the identity. Nonetheless, I think within poetry itself, we don’t want to rule out the situation in which, if you're a tiny minority or if you're ‘outflanked’, within language there’s the possibility of creating this camouflaged, coded way of expressing resistance without it becoming as big, as bold, and as caricature-like as, for example, Secretary of Defense 'R' Rumsfeld in the passage [from section two of The New Babel] that I read previously. That's there, but it's only one kind of possibility. It's easy to caricature one's enemies. That's the bold assertion of identity which produces, arguably, a backlash in response to it. Not to mention the ease with which the language of social justice can be appropriated or commodified.
Now, the Duncan and Levertov argument is interesting. Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov,in the 60s, were very good friends. It’s the Vietnam War that ultimately breaks up their friendship because Denise Levertov believes that, as a poet, she needs to respond directly to the war and write a very explicit anti-war poetry that denounces its evil. Robert Duncan as you’ve cited, argues that the poet’s task is to ‘imagine evil, not to oppose it’. I think implicit in that idea is the suggestion that, if you imagine evil fully, you’re going to oppose it more fully.
But there was a split between an anti-war poetry that Levertov espoused and an imaginatively rich—potentially quite ‘evil’—poetry that Duncan espoused. He was a teacher of mine, so I’m biased, but I also think that Duncan’s poetry is still very powerful, whereas much of Levertov’s poetry from that period reads now like propaganda, whereas her writings from before [the Vietnam War], and her writings from after, are quite rich.
With Sam Hamill's Poets Against War (2003), released during the Iraq War, there was a moment in which [his writing] began to feel like a war against poetry rather than poets against war because there’s a simplification that occurs at the level of the language. That very simplification is what is required to go to war in the first place.
So this would be my counter argument: that it’s complexity, as opposed to populism, that is going to produce certain forms of resistance and subversive language that maybe we can't do without.
KE: Right. This is also Adorno's position, where the work of art is always supposed to be complicit. In order to ‘mime’, you have to admit a certain complicity. This also makes me think of Arendt, around the idea that in order to stand with other people at all, in a plurality, is to admit some complicity.
LS: Right.
KE: Yeah. There's the idea, that in fact, both 'the criminal' and 'the saint' find themselves in the same position. There's the one who is just calling out—there's no call-and-response—the saint. Then there’s the criminal, who has exempted herself entirely, in the other direction. And with that, in order to do something, you have to start from a position of complicity, or ‘mixture’. That's a level at which I think sometimes what happens—say, around a kind of 'campus' identity politics—actually feels like an impossible moment. It’s like there's a gap across which we don't know how to talk to each other because we're not admitting a kind of complicity with one another.
SE: Now, what do you mean by ‘complicity’?
KE: Well, I'm just thinking—what does it do when we position ourselves like that with one another? I'm also thinking about the multiplicity of voices, for example, that when, Leonard, you say you sort of ‘empty yourself out of yourself’ as much as possible in order to have other voices speak through you. But then, you have to claim them as you are speaking—so [those voices are] speaking through you, but by way of your permission, right? So I'm thinking about the way in which there is a kind of multiplicity here—like, the bombs are falling over there and I'm also here with you. There's always a ‘falling short’, and I continue my daily life in these ways.
These poems [from The New Babel], in particular, evoke moments of the humorous, or the daily, or the sexual—or all of these things that maybe you're not supposed to be thinking about if bombs are falling anywhere, wherever. But in fact, we're all living in all of those levels.
LS: Simultaneously, yeah.
KE: So, it’s both the sort of problem found in a ‘moral high ground’ position, but it's also the fact that our capacity to turn to each other, at all, involves that multiplicity. We're always moving between all of those things. I think when I say complicity, I don't mean anything particularly heinous. [I use ‘complicity to refer to] this sort of ‘muddle’ and multiplicity that we all are.
SE: Okay, and you're saying that the absence of the recognition of that leads to conditions in which we can't talk to each other?
KE: I do think that, yeah.
LS: There’s a passage in what I read earlier with an Octavio Paz aside—'he who sees with his heart'. I happen to know, Dr. Eltantawi, that you did your undergraduate thesis on Octavio Paz. So you'll instruct me, but my sense there is that you have a poet who's interested in the transcendental sources of imaginations, such that he's able to go back into deep sources of pre-Colombian sensibility as a Mexican poet.
LS: [Octavio Paz] is able to draw from language and through a certain way of enheartening the world in his image from foundational sources in a particular psychogeography he happens to live in. So it's that sense of being able to move from language towards assertion on the basis of some energy in language itself that one is, as a writer, attempting to attune oneself to— as opposed to on the basis of a fixed, fast, and frozen identity that might preclude me, [as a poet], from discovering certain words.
SE: So, I’ll raise two points here. So one assumption that's made in what you've just said is what you write in the first page of the introduction: 'language is the source of our humanity'. The other—and I'm playing devil's advocate, because who wouldn't want to gesture toward these kind of deeper, more subterranean, universal, transcending senses of shared common humanity? Who wouldn't want to recognize that in art and bring that out in art? But what worries me, is that if we think that that's the entire nature of reality, then I worry that I'm not being attentive enough to voices that are experiencing structural discrimination. There are actual real material disparities that certain people are experiencing; I'm, speaking for myself as a moral agent, worried that if I don't tune into that, I will miss it and possibly hue to my bias toward universality and shared solutions, on the basis of something like the heart. Does that make sense?
LS: It makes sense, sure. Certainly you’re right— one would not want to end up in some sort of bourgeois humanism, right? That would not be an attractive place to end up. To come back to the notion of the non-self-identical: as soon as I make a statement of identity, it's going to have to contradict itself. The nature of ‘babble’, or the nature of language conceived of as babble, is that it's going to contradict itself. The statement is always going to be misinterpreted. The comment is always going to come to mean the opposite of what it was intended to. In what way? I don’t know— that’s unpredictable.
To say something about language as being the source of our humanity is to say something about our humanity as being muddled, confused, babbled, or contradictory, as opposed to universal. At that point, language is a pleasurable confusion. That's the argument of the book— it's not a work of philosophy where you're defining a term and then limiting it to that meaning, because ‘al-‘Attābiyya’ comes to mean ‘tabby,’ right? Words are always overflowing their definitions and that overflow is seen as desirable here
Now, we could talk about the idea of Orientalism. We could talk about Edward Said. You know, it is interesting—Martin Buber is a major figure in this book in terms of language. It is the idea of dialogue, or of conversation as being words addressed and received, that are also at work in the idea of language. Ibrahim Muhawi, the Palestinian translator, tells a fascinating story—that when Martin Buber moved into Jerusalem, he moved into the very house that Edward Said and his parents were being expelled from. There was even some kind of exchange between Said's father and Buber, to which he remained entirely impervious.
[Buber] may have been blind, to the specificity, the particularity, the distress of the concrete individual. That is, I think, what you were describing a moment ago—that there's a way in which a certain kind of thinking, in a certain kind of poetry, can also blind you to particularities.
When Ibrahim Muhawi, who I've had interesting exchanges with and who's said nice things about this book, and I were talking about Buber a few years back, he pointed that out. We don't want them to get heroic about any particular thinker or figure. I've never researched his story, but Ibrahim has a very interesting account of Buber and Said—Said as a young as child and Said's family losing their home directly to Martin Buber.
I had an exchange with him recently. He had translated one of Mohammed Darwish's books, and there was a quote from Martin Buber in the book that he, Muhawi, had not been able to find any source for. It was a quote that was about ‘the Arabs’ having ‘no claim to the land’ whatsoever.
I wrote to Muhawi: I don't think that's accurate, I don't think that's true. That quote is antithetical to Buber's actual position. I'm not a Buber scholar per se, so I contacted the world's greatest Martin Buber scholar, Paul Mendes-Flohr, who teaches at the University of Chicago and Hebrew University. He also indicated to us that there is no such quote in Buber. There's a false Buber quote floating around in Arabic that Darwish picked up on. That's babble at work, in the way in which the language can become confused purposely, or otherwise mistranslated. I don’t think Muhawi’s footnote on this in his translation of Darwish’s Journal Of An Ordinary Grief did justice to Buber on this point, by the way.
In the course of that exchange with Ibrahim Muhawi, the story about Buber and Said came up. So of course— you're right. You have to be attentive to concrete potentiality and concrete individuals. The question is: does poetry do that as well?
SE: Not so much individuals, but groups. I'm worried about groups- like 'the Arabs' or 'the undocumented'.
LS: Right.
SE: Are you worried about ‘groups’?
LS: I am worried about 'groups', but I don't think poetry is up to that particular task. Poetry is a marginal art. Poetry is at the margins of American culture. I wouldn't want to rely on poetry alone to defend a 'group'. There are other forms of language, there are other forms of rhetoric, other forms of protests, other forms of media that are probably— I think— better equipped. I’m sure it is possible that when I speak about the hermetic it may only apply to myself or my situation: I don’t speak for a group.
KE: I was going to say, this is where your poetry isn't like the drumming of slaves, right? I mean, [poetry] actually has been moved into a kind of useless, outer sphere, which I think is opposed to then be, according to Adorno, the thing that now reinvigorates it and makes it possibly useful again, but in a way that you can't be aiming at.
But anyway, that's a complicated argument. Poetry once was, if you think about Homer, the way we told and held history— it was the way we told and held our stories about one another. It isn't that in the same way now, and we can either mourn or we can celebrate it.
SE: In the Arabic tradition it is, though.
KE: Yeah— and I was going to say, it probably depends partly on your positionality. You mentioned Audre Lorde, talking about how poetry isn't a luxury for women, in that essay, and for black people, right?
SE: There's something of a question of having access to poetry, or access to the world of poetry. I don't necessarily want to get into that, but it's a question.
LS: Sure, sure. Poetry is at least very cheap, right?
SE: Yes, that’s true.
LS: All you need is a notebook and a pen. For example, I was in Russia in ‘97 and ‘99 on a grant that allowed a bunch of American poets to go to Russia because it was a great period in Russian poetry. Why? Because the economy was so awful! I mean, the Russians greatly value poetry, right? It's a prestigious art. The only reason you wouldn't write poetry is because you couldn't make a living. But since you couldn't make a living anyhow, you might as well write poetry. All you need is a notebook and a pen.
So I met a nuclear physicist who hadn't been paid for six months. He was working, therefore, as a teacher but that hadn't paid, either. So he was working as a night watchman at a hotel I was at, since that paid. But he was also writing poetry since his research had been defunded. So it's at that moment of extreme poverty that the poem, because its physical accoutrement is so light, becomes, then, an open possibility. That’s why, sometimes, smaller eastern European countries produced these extraordinary poets— because of the deprivation.
In American culture, we have TV, we have the web— we have these endless forms of screens and lights to which we're attracted like moths. We have all kinds of forms of entertainment, and so poetry is a marginal activity. But then, within that margin, you have a great deal of freedom about what you can do and about what kind of voices you can hear. I don't want to say though, that it's only that.
I want to offer another example as well. A poet I'm very interested in is Raúl Zurita, who was a Chilean poet that I think about a lot and admire quite a bit. Zurita is a poet who survived the Pinochet regime, ‘the Era of The Disappeared’, and he'll write, like in the book INRI (2003), a poetry that at first sounds very much like it's nature poetry. It's a poetry of the landscape of Chile: the mountains and the volcanoes and the Atacama desert and the ocean. At a certain point, as he's invoking that landscape, you suddenly realize he's also invoking the people who are dropped into the volcanoes and into the desert and into the mountains and into the ocean.
Unlike the Nazis, the Chileans didn't document much— the disappeared are truly disappeared. There's no historical work a documentarian can do. No— it's going to have to be the poet, in some truly orphic sense, who's going to invoke the voices of the dead from those places.
Furthermore, Zurita, who was tortured during that period, has Parkinson's disease— perhaps brought on by what was done to his nervous system. So when he reads [his poetry], he has very little control over his body, which is twitching— but the voice is absolutely present. [His reading of his poetry] creates this illusion that it is, in fact, the voices of the dead that are speaking through him. Now, from a strictly empirical sense of positionality, he shouldn't be able to do that because the dead are the dead and he's alive. But the function of the poet, going back to Orpheus, is to go into the underworld and speak for the dead when you come back up. Zurita does that in an utterly persuasive way, for the entire Chilean Left, people who were dropped into volcanoes and oceans and deserts.
If we close down the space in which it's possible for the imaginative act of the poem to do that kind of work, there's a terrible loss, right? I've always thought the problem with the formulation that 'we should stop reading dead white males', is that it's only in an ideologically-directed, Western progressive tradition that saying someone is ‘dead’ is pejorative. When actually—in Chinese traditions of ancestor worship, and Haitian voodoo and… I could go on and on—the dead are very present. Zurita is a poet who was able to invoke that sense of the ‘classical’ function of the poet. Even if just three people hear that poem, that creates the presence of these people who Pinochet thought were disappeared, and now they're still present. [In that sense], there's a political efficacy to the Orphic.
KE: If I hear you right, you're making a sort of larger claim. That's a very specific scenario, and there's a larger claim to be made about language as a place where our dead gather, right? Who did we inherit language from? Who made language? How were we born into it? And in some ways, all of the passed are disappeared, in that we have had generation upon generation. Of course, [The New Babel] raises the question--disappeared by what? There's the claim of violence as the far extreme of communication that makes people disappear.
LS: Right.
SE: So, believe it or not, we've actually been speaking now for over an hour. Can I ask you an ending question?
LS: Of course.
SE: Okay, so since this show is called 'Contemporary Islam Considered', I'm wondering if you can link [The New Babel] to contemporary Islam? Because I see many links! I'll let the audience 'link' for themselves, but if you have ending thoughts...?
LS: Sure! Much of the work in this book was written during the Bush Administration. Now, we find ourselves under the Trump administration back in a position, again, where very visibly in American culture, there's rampant Islamophobia, right? And then the question becomes, as a writer or as a citizen, about what kinds of things one does to counter that? With this talk of a 'Muslim registry', myself and others said, 'well, we'll register as Muslims if such a thing comes to pass’, right? What kinds of linguistic structures, or books, or ideas can one discuss and promulgate that are going to produce the greatest possible flexibility such that, if such a thing comes to pass, we'd have the maximum number of people willing to register as Muslims, even though they're Protestants or even though they're Jews.
Is that kind of resistance going to be best promulgated through a certain kind of identity politics, as I think you were arguing, Sarah? Or is it going to be through a certain kind of 'flexibility of form' on the basis of which, experiences I didn't think I had access to, suddenly I do have access to through some structure of language that makes the imagination of an experience possible? So, in terms of contemporary Islam, as we are in the age of Trump— wondering what's coming next, I think about it immediately it in those terms.
SE: Okay. Thank you. Kathleen—?
KE: I think all I can really add, at this point, is that I'm interested in all of those possibilities. I'm still wondering if there are situations in which the defensive gesture is to claim the identity? Your suggestion was that we might all claim the identity, which is something that I'm certainly interested in, and yet also you don't want to lose the specificity of [knowing] who stands under greatest threat. How do we make people who stand under the greatest threat visible, right? I think that's your question, Sarah. I think, there's cultural work and then there's political work and there's work at the barricades... and I don't know if the same people can do all the kinds of work.
I've often said—I think I'd be Adorno; I wouldn't have joined the students at the barricade. I'm slow. I'm a reader. I'm a slow reader. All of those things are true, and yet the fact is, whenever I'm protesting, I'm weeping—which is just not helpful to anybody. Masses of people make me terribly upset in general. Even at basketball games, if there's a surprise applause that makes its way through the crowd, I'm instinctively terrified. It's interesting.
LS: It's contextual, too. The Egyptian poet Mohamed Metwalli is someone I've always been interested in. He's someone who purposefully writes a kind of flat prose poetry on the grounds tha,t he says, there's a hyperbolic quality to Quranic Arabic that translates into a hyperbolic quality to the lyric poetry he sees being written that he wants to undermine. So there is a necessarily flat kind of writing—not fiery, not hyper-expressive, not flame throwing, but flat and anti-declarative—that he felt was necessary in his cultural circumstance in Mubarak era Egypt.
When we talk about contemporary Islam, that's obviously a huge set of cultural circumstances. I was responding with a particular identity of an American poet, an American writer, thinking about Islamophobia. So, with Islam and American culture, I'm thinking about what kinds of things one does with language without pretending to someone else's identity and without shirking the imaginative work of Islam's presence as part of a linguistic and cultural landscape that shapes who one is, as a writer and a poet.
SE: Thank you, this has been really fun— and thanks to your book, Leonard.
LS: Oh, thank you so much for having me on and talking about the book with me.
SE: It was really my pleasure. And thank you, Kathleen.
KE: Yeah, thanks to both of you. This was great.
—transcribed by Rowan Waters
Also joining us today is Dr. Kathleen Eamon, who is a professor of philosophy at the Evergreen State College. Kathleen earned her PhD in philosophy from Vanderbilt in 2009. She specializes in aesthetics and philosophy of art at the juncture of social and political thought— otherwise known as specializing in Kant, Hegel, Marx and Freud. Kathleen wrote a review, published in Talisman, of Leonard Schwartz's latest book, so she joins us today to add to the conversation. Thank you Leonard and Kathleen.
Leonard Schwartz: Great to be here with you, Sarah.
Dr. Kathleen Eamon: Yeah. Thanks so much, Sarah. It’s great to be here with you, Leonard.
SE: We're also colleagues. It’s just exciting to be able to talk to you about your work. I really enjoyed your book, Leonard. It was wonderful to read. So let's begin with, can you explain your concept of the Tower of Babel in this book?
LS: Yes, and again thank you so much for having me on the program. It’s a real honor. This is a book that does address itself towards what I call ‘a poetics’ of the Mideast crisis. By poetics, I mean that the book includes poems, essays, and interviews as opposed to just poems. The New Babel addresses multiple modes of creative thought; there’s Poetic Thought vis-à-vis the poem, Conversational Thought, vis-à-vis the interview, and Propositional Thought vis-à-vis the essay. All of those pertain to the question you asked about the concept of Babel, or the Tower of Babel, in the book.
We know, of course, that it’s a biblical image, the story of the Tower of Babel. It also is what September 11th, 2001 felt like to me as a New Yorker at that time— the day that the towers fell and a vast, manipulated confusion of language followed after. So the question then becomes as someone working with language, as poet or essayist or as conversant, what kinds of things can one do to redeem [language]— to make babble into a source of energy and richness and wealth as opposed to vast manipulated confusion?
A language is a kind of babble. And in the first piece in the book, ‘The New Babel’, I try and make some kind of argument, or some kind of suggestion, for the way in which the very confusion of language, as opposed to the communicability of language, can become a source of resistance and energy.
SE: So there are a number of foundational, philosophical questions that you bring up in the book. I wanted to start at the heart of one of those questions, which is the perennial question of what is the role of aesthetic production in the context of war destruction and horror?
You channel [the German philosopher Theodor] Adorno in your discussion of the war in Afghanistan. You have a long piece about Madoo, which is a place in Afghanistan on the border region of Pakistan. You say— again channeling Adorno: ‘after Madoo, to write poetry is barbaric.’
So can we start right there? I think a lot of people can probably relate to that sentiment and concern that aesthetics in a time of war is somehow inappropriate— even obscene.
LS: Yeah, sure. Let me respond to that. I mean, Adorno is very interesting to think about here, and I think about him a lot. I know Dr. Eamon thinks about him a lot, too, in terms of his positions on the politics of the poem or political poetry/political art.
KE: Yes.
LS: Very famously, he opines that [Samuel] Beckett is more empowered politically then is [German poet, Bertolt] Brecht. Although Brecht addresses himself directly to political circumstances, Beckett creates an imaginary space on the page that gives us more leverage on political circumstance, according to Adorno. So Brecht gets tied up in reproducing the very structure he's attempting to undermine or subvert while the artist who creates an imaginative space on the page, has the possibility of liberating us from the political knots we'd otherwise be tied into.
So there's that position of Adorno's, but there's also his position that “after Auschwitz, there can be no poetry”, right? That, to aestheticize the horror, is necessarily to represent or reproduce that which cannot be represented or reproduced.
Adorno doesn't necessarily stick to that position. Then there's Paul Celan, the poet whose poetry— in its complexity— undermines that position. But as a provocation on Adorno's part— to say that we've reached the limits of what art can represent, I still think becomes an important statement. Of course, I distort it. I turn the idea to: 'after Madoo, there can be no poetry', and I need to say a little bit about that distortion, of course. Maybe it would help if I read that section from The New Babel?
The New Babel is in seven sections. It begins with section zero, perhaps inevitably. I'm going to skip section zero and section one and read from section two, which is on page eight, since that's where you direct my question. Section two begins with a quote:
Perhaps someday there will be a reckoning for this tiny village of 15 houses, all of them obliterated into splintered wood and dust by American bombs. United States military officials might explain why 55 people died here on December 1st… But more likely, Madoo will not learn whether the bombs fell by mistake or on purpose, and the matter will be forgotten amid the larger consequences of war. It is left an anonymous hamlet with anonymous people buried in anonymous graves… America’s own anti-Taliban allies were horrified, claiming the targeting had been mistaken and that hundreds of innocents had been killed. It was ‘like a crime against humanity,’ said Hajji Muhammad Zaman, a military commander in the region.
— Barry Bearak, The New York Times,
December 15th, 2001, Madoo, Afghanistan
LS: [continuing from section two of The New Babel]
Madoo’s farmers are people in pieces. They’ve become their own fertilizer… assuming the rains come, we did them a favor, suggests a cartoon version of Secretary of Defense R. (Big laugh). But there isn't any need for such a cartoon. We've already firmly established the concept of collateral damage.
He who sees with his heart, as Paz would have it, sees Madoo as himself; and who can’t see Madoo with his heart? (‘Men with fossil minds, with oily tongues’ suggests the cartoonist.)
Every face, a mask; every house a ruin of brick and wood.
Whose sisters were killed? Collateral Damage can’t ever say beforehand. (Terrorists don’t target specific sisters.) (The American attack came in four separate waves.)
After Madoo, to write poetry is barbaric (Theodor Adorno).
‘We’ve yet to find their bodies’
‘Many layers to this rubble’
‘And now we live with this’
‘Mystery’:
Sayeth the elder Mr. Gul, Madoo resident,
Though he might be speaking of Manhattan.
‘Sorrowful old man’ ‘white bread’ ‘furrowed forehead’:
‘Then Paia Gul’ ‘young man’ ‘bitter eyed’: ‘I blame’
‘The Arabs’ ‘then amended his own’ ‘statement’
‘I blame the Arabs’
‘And the Americans’
‘They are all terrible people’
‘They are all the worst in the world’
‘Most of the dead were children.’
Fragrance bird song wheat fields
Mr. Bearak reporting two weeks after Madoo’s apocalypse.
Harvesting scrap metal from bombs,
Hopes of surviving winter.
Beyond anecdote sounds a hymn we can only hum, humble in our making,
The birds scribbling like authors in a startling ephemera of air.
LS: [continuing from section two of The New Babel]
Walking in the vegetable patch
Late at night, I was startled to find
The severed head of my
Daughter lying on the ground.
Her eyes were upturned, gazing at me, ecstatic-like…
(From a distance it appeared
To be a stone, hallooed with light,
As if cast there by the Big Bang.)
What on earth are you doing, I said,
You look ridiculous.
Some boys buried me here,
She said sullenly.
—Araki Yasusada, Doubled Flowering, the foothills
surrounding Hiroshima, December 25, 1945
Craters. Tractor carcass. Dead sheep.
Urn crushed to disc;
Unendurable, ‘unintended,’ un-American
Ax Americana;
Far from Mecca, in Madoo, Tora Bora,
One undamaged room.
Anger cannot be buried.
Prayer is perfect when he who prays remembers not that he is praying.
Everything dead trembles (Kandinsky).
Note: E-Mail the reporter, ask if there were ever rows of poplars.
Moonstone sucked into the atmosphere of dwarfed arts; no Hero but also no
Nero; the half that faces us is full tonight.
As the Kaushitaki Upanishad has it, ‘the breath of life is one.’
LS: [continuing from section two of The New Babel]
The word ‘Madoo’ is a transcription of a Pashto name the reporter must have sounded out.
In English, then, ‘Madoo.’
In English the name ‘Madoo’ derives from an old Scottish word meaning
‘My dove.’
LS: So that’s section two of The New Babel. In terms of babble, I’m remarking on the process or project by which ‘Madoo’, the name of a village in Afghanistan can turn into a dove if the tongue is playing with sounds—and that at the sounds’ transfer from one semantic system to another, the ruins [of a language] ascend into a dove.
There are other levels of babble in the text, in that I'm basing my attempt to reconstruct what happened in that village in Tora Bora on the basis of a newspaper report— in certain sections of the poem that are in quotes or only the language of the newspaper report. You sift through the language of the newspaper report to try and arrive at the event.
NourbeSe Philip, in her book Zong!, is the great example of attempting to do a major project. ‘The Zong’ was a slave ship that dumped its cargo, enslaved people, into the sea, for insurance purposes so that they could be indemnified later, once the ship got into trouble.
She writes the poem on the basis of the legal documents, which are all about the insurance question, in order to try and get back to the nightmare— in order to get back to the murders— or in order to get back to the crime by sifting through the available language, which is only in the legal documents pertaining to insurance.
[In this section of The New Babel], all I have is the document from the newspaper to work with, as a writer and as a poet, to try and sift through and find some sense between the cracks of what might actually have happened.
In the process, of course, one fictionalizes. In the process, in terms of one's own positionality, unless we're completely committed to the idea that only a poetry of witness, or poetry of direct experience, is valid, one necessarily is fictionalizing. And so, when I bring in Araki Yasusada, I'm acknowledging that.
Early on in the poem, I compare what I experienced in New York during 9/11 in 2001 to Hiroshima— or a little Hiroshima— in that the civilian target has been substituted for a military target. And there's no greater event than Hiroshima in terms of obliterating that distinction between the civilian and military target.
In any event, when I bring in Araki Yasusada as a Hiroshima poet, that of course is a fictional poet. It's a poet that was invented by an American poet, who wrote a whole poetry from that perspective. So I'm suggesting that there's a necessity to— as a writer and as a poet— also create new spaces on the page as opposed to imagine one's ability to report reality in some direct way. It’s problematic, though— as I understand.
SE: Yes. Okay. Interesting. Let's talk about that.
Kathleen— what do you think? Your essay is incredibly dense on precisely that point, actually.
KE: Yes, that’s right. Now I'm thinking between my essay and everything that Leonard just shared with us. Going back Adorno and the question of ‘poetry after Auschwitz’ and ‘poetry after Madoo’, and trying to figure out exactly where with all of that, I want to start— and I think I'll start with a phrase that Leonard used early on, right before you framed section two of your book for us.
Talking about Adorno, and the fact that poetry can liberate us, to a certain degree, from ‘the knots’ that violence ties us in. We become bound to the real in a way that it seems inescapable— how could you write poetry, right?
When you were talking about that, I was thinking about a lecture that I heard recently from Judith Butler. She was talking about a recent publication, Poems from Guantanamo (University Of Iowa Press, 2007)— do you know it?
LS: No, I don’t.
SE: No.
KE: I don't know if [the book is made up of] the only poems that made it past the US Department of Defense’s censorship, but I do know that—according to her—25,000 lines of poetry from one detainee alone were either destroyed or entirely censored.
KE: A couple of people, [including editor Marc Falkoff] put together a series poems that made it past the censors. And in talking about their work, the Department of Defense said that poetry presents 'a special risk' to national security because of its content and its format.
Butler was talking about the fact that almost all of the poems include lines where the poets are marveling at their writing a poem—like, what am I doing? I'm in Guantanamo, but what am I doing? There is something so useless about poetry in the face of incredible violence and especially incarceration, right?
LS: Yeah.
KE: At the same time, I'm thinking also about that uselessness as part of what it can point up to us about ourselves, and our kind of finitude—the finitude with which we have to respond to everything.
Now I'm thinking about Hegel, and this idea that something like absolute knowing, or the highest form of knowing, is being able to live with and even create hospitality around the finitude of our response, in spite of the fact that we recognize the infinity of the demands coming at us. Now, those ‘infinities’ might be demands ‘to know’— as science is like the whole world demanding to be known, right?
LS: Within that myth of Babel in the Biblical context, there's a kind of indictment of language—the idea that ‘it could have been better’. It’s the idea that there was one language and now there's the confusion of tongues that follows. The counter argument of The New Babel is the confusion of tongues by which a ruined Madoo can turn into 'my dove', or by which we're now faced with questions of translation.
What did those Guantanamo poets write? How were those texts translated? Presumably they weren't writing in English or Spanish. They were writing in Arabic, they were writing in Pashto, they were writing in Uyghur—you know? So then you've got these Department of Defense people trying to translate that—and if they're translating it, then are they making it more about the dangers they see at play in those poems? I can have all kinds of questions about the way language turns against us— or is uncontainable—as seemed to be suggested by that example.
It's that ‘uncontainability’ of language— its propensity to do exactly what you didn't expect it to do— that is an argument for aesthetic maximalism when it comes to language. I know I'm going to anger a certain number of readers if I compare Madoo to Auschwitz— they are two very different events and things— but sometimes the provocation is necessary.
SE: Now, that’s actually what I wanted to ask you about. One of the many threads in the book is you comparing Madoo to Auschwitz. You then have an interview at the end of the book with Aharon Shabtai, a leading Israeli poet and activist, who is very critical of the occupation. You also have your own positionality as an American Jewish person. I'm hesitating to ask you this question because I'm sensing that you don't want to bring yourself in as a direct narrator of these events and yet I'm going to ask you anyway— how does this all tie together? Where are you in this?
KE: Can I add to your question, please? I’m just wondering if your own phrase, ‘transcendental mobility’, might be the right phrase to use to talk about all of these turns you're making? Could you help us understand what ‘transcendental mobility’ might mean and how to make ‘turns’? Angering people in all directions is my guess— the comparison of Auschwitz to Madoo is making people mad all over the place, if they know about it— right?
LS: Right.
SE: You have a whole section of the book on this concept [of transcendental mobility] and really, it's the idea that the transcendental is historicized and particular. So yes, thank you for bringing that up.
LS: There is positionality in the book. I do take a position— a political position—and that political position is largely in reference to the writing of Martin Buber. Now Martin Buber is known for his I and Thou (1923), the direct address between the ‘I’ and ‘thou’— that address between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ which is reciprocal and in which both are ends— and the kind of elevation of dialogue to nearly the status of the divine.
His political writing is also very interesting because Martin Buber applied that notion of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ or ‘I’ and ‘You’ to Jews and Palestinians. In his political writing, he speaks about the necessity of creating a space. [Buber] is a Zionist, and he speaks about the necessity of creating a space as creating a Jewish homeland. Then he also talks about the necessity of preserving a space for the ‘you’ which are the Palestinians. So very early on in the 30s, and by even as late as 1947, he's writing about a single, binational state solution— a one state solution that will have an Arab majority— and this is from a Zionist thinker.
SE: That doesn’t sound like what we would consider Zionists today.
LS: Exactly, this is my point— another form of Zionism won out. But if you look at the history of Zionism, and you look at Buber’s position, he's making an argument that more or less equates to a particular Palestinian position now, or a particular progressive Jewish position now. [The position being that] you need a one-state solution. We're just going to have to give up on the notion of a Jewish majority in that state in order to maintain its democratic nature.
Buber’s not calling for a two-state solution; he's calling for a one-state solution in a way that is anathema to most current Zionist thinkers. This is a reminder that even within the Zionist tradition, there was a position that held out that the only solution was a one state solution.
SE: [American philosopher and political theorist, Hannah] Arendt was also there, right?
LS: Yeah. Now, Arendt has a critical attitude towards Buber—they're two different thinkers and Arendt is... well that's another issue, the argument between Arendt and Buber. But I do take a kind of theoretical position in the way that a number of the essays [in The New Babel] refer back to Buber and make the claim that this is a kind of a contribution poetics can make— by comparing the poetry of Darwish to Celan, as I do in one essay in the book, or thinking through the notion of dialogue that Buber is working with in my own radio work, and the interviews in the book with Aharon Shabtai, as you cite, as well as with the political philosopher Michael Hart and with the African American poet Amiri Baraka. So that's part of I think what was in ‘the choir’.
[As far as] whether I'm there in the book, I'm there propositionally as a thinker— or taking a position. As a poet, of course you have to be open to all kinds of material that's passing through you. As a poet, your job is to evacuate your personality as much as possible. It's never possible to do that entirely, but to evacuate your personality as much as possible so the voice of Rumi— or the voice of Dante, or the voice of the guy sitting on the bus next to you— can pass through you— filtered, of course, by one's own sensibility— but nonetheless it’s an act of language. It's the voice of the poem, not the voice of the poet, that is really a significant, I think— at least in the kind of poetry I would aspire to write or in the kind of poetry I'd want to read.
Then conversationally, as someone interviewing the people who've spoken, I think I'm there [in the book] as a person asking questions, which is all I really can do, not knowing anything.
Does that respond in some way? I want to come back to the [question of the] transcendental in a moment, but to respond to [the question of] the way in which the ‘flesh and blood’ Leonard Schwartz is present in the book, at least by taking a political position, the notion of the transcendental, as one could gloss it in Kant or Hegel or Husserl , is some sense of leverage on the personal ego, or on the personal self.
Traditionally, it means: a universal set of preconditions on the basis of which perception might be possible. When I talk about transcendental mobility, I'm trying to get away from a universality, certainly, but still maintain some sense of a way in which language allows us to move from personal experience towards a certain impersonality— a certain impersonality on the basis of which you can hear those other voices, or have access to forms of perception that you wouldn't personally— as a body, or a particular being— have access to otherwise.
So I think the necessity of the Palestinian Israeli situation, is that— the capacity to see, with deep empathy, from the eyes of ‘the other’. That's not a given.
To see with empathy from the eyes of ‘the other’] requires an act of imagination— an act of transcendental imagination. That's also what's necessary to poetic thinking— the capacity to, as [French poet, Arthur] Rimbaud put it in the Lettres du Voyant in the 19th century, ‘I is someone else’. It's wrong to say ‘I’ is ‘being’, it's wrong to say ‘I think’, rather ‘I’ is [what’s] being thought.
[As Rimbaud] has it, ‘don't blame the wood if it wakes up a violin’, I update that to say ‘don’t blame the plastic if it wakes up a cell phone’— it’s the idea that there is something of the self as a material. But if you tune that material to proper resonance, it's going to pick up on the voices of others.
KE: So can ask about this idea of the transcendental self? I'm imagining that ‘don't blame the plastic that wakes up’ as this particular thing, right? Don't blame ‘the self’, which is less than nothing, maybe before it becomes something.
I'm thinking about, for example, what all of the three interviews in [The New Babel] have in common, which is— I think it's in the interview with Michael Hart that you push him to talk about the idea— of a sort of ‘mixture at the center’— that we are multiple before we're one. I'm trying to think about that in relationship to this question of a sort of ‘flesh and blood’. You, with a Jewish American identity, taking a position with respect to also something that's clearly a question for anyone.
In America, I guess it's especially a question for Jewish Americans. But it's also in some funny way, not quite our question because it's also somewhere else, right? There's just something about the multiplicity involved there, and the sort of ‘mixture’ that proceeds your arriving to the question at all.
KE: To include, for example, the history of American violence, which comes up in the book as sort of a place of metonymic slippage between the history of slavery, for example, with the bombing in New York, or with John Brown's body at Harper's ferry. There’s all of these sort of ‘metonymic nodes’ that you can move through in order to access something that is not causal argument from one end to the other.
LS: I think it's a series of suggestions. There is the one section of [the book]— the ‘Apple Anyone’ sonnets— where I set myself the task of writing a series of poems using only English words that were derived from Arabic. There, the suggestion is: yes, there's no question we have different positionalities, different subjectivities. One person may be from Kansas and other person may be from Peshawar, but the fact is, if we're speaking English, we're also speaking Arabic. That is to say that there are all these borrowed words that pass from Arabic into English— and they're such that you can barely name a piece of fruit. [This is to say that] we are dependent in all these expressivities on the borrowings from the Arabic words. So rather than making some kind of shrill set of pronouncements there, I wanted to demonstrate that the clash of civilizations is a sort of 'bogus' notion—that the two languages, and therefore the two cultures, are intertwined and mutually dependent in terms of ordinary speech.
One of the words that was most exciting for me, in terms of doing the research on that, was the word 'tabby', as in a tabby cat, which I use in the poem [‘Transcendental Tabby’ from The New Babel]. According to the etymologies I was reading, there's a neighborhood in Baghdad--al-‘Attābiyya—where they've been weaving tapestries and making carpets for hundreds of years that have a particular pattern that we recognize now in the tabby cat.
So now, every time a tabby cat walks into a room, I think of Baghdad and I think of al-‘Attābiyya. That is a sense of mobility and flexibility in the language. Identity politics will always lead us to a kind of fixed, fast, and frozen set of positionalities whereas 'babble'—or language— is fluid and in process. Then, all of a sudden there's a relationship between my pet cat and a neighborhood in Baghdad that maybe just got bombed the day before. I'm related to that neighborhood once I see that my cat is actually related to it by way of word.
That's the argument, at least for poetry— the argument of poetry.
SE: This is a conversation we had a lot recently, which I've really appreciated. The era that we're in now has caused me to revisit my usual distrust of identity politics, so I actually wanted to open up that question a little bit.
SE: Kathleen writes in her essay, speaking of your work, of course:
In his opening essay, Schwartz positions the work vis-à-vis the friendship and then rupture between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, a friendship that breaks down over the question of poetry’s relation to the Vietnam War. As far, it seems, as poetry is concerned, Schwartz sides with Duncan, that the task of the poet is ‘to imagine evil, not to oppose it’, claiming that Duncan was ‘responsible for the fall of the friendship’ but also ‘right about the larger point.’
So you do take a position, there— quite clearly.
LS: That’s true.
SE: I respect that position. I want to think about it in terms of the very unique moment that we are in now, and also think about it in the context of your interview with Amiri Baraka if there are ways that he nuances the identity politics question. Briefly, if I may state the counter argument— it seems to me that in an age in which you have forces in power that are explicitly enacting policies against groups of people based on their identities, I can understand the poet wanting to circumvent that speech act, in the way that you described the tabby cat. I also fret about the consequences of ignoring the form of the assault that is happening. I could say more, but I will let you respond to that.
LS: Kathleen, did you want to respond? You did write about this in a really powerful way, I thought. In your piece, there’s the question of the notion that consciousness is non-self-identical, and that it's only if we recognize the way in which consciousness is non-self-identical— it's never the same as itself— that we can refrain from turning consciousness into an object. It's the objectification and the locatability of 'those Mexicans' or 'those Muslims—or 'those Jews' for that matter—that turns fellow citizens into targets, right?
The notion of the non-self-identical—so powerful in Adorno and I think there in Hegel as well— in terms of any thesis, is going to break apart into its dialectical components pretty quickly. Non-self-identical; never the same as itself. It's how we distinguish between human beings and objects, or human beings and things, right? So the danger of identity politics—or rather, the danger with the Trump administration - is the targeting of specific beings on the basis of specific characteristics that become absolutely synonymous with their identity.
Now the question is: is the response to that a kind of reification of the very criticism that's being made? Is it an accidental reproduction of the very criticism that's being made? It seems to me, if I were being targeted, camouflage might be a more suitable response. If I'm really being targeted as 'x', do I run out into the street and say, ‘I am x’, or do I create some kind of camouflage? And doesn't poetry—doesn't language—doesn't the wealth of consciousness— provide all kinds of costume that is at that point, very powerful and very necessary to survival?
If I'm a targeted person from Guatemala who's [in the United States] without proper documentation, my response is not going to be 'I'm Guatemalan without documentation'. I'm going to have to play some sort of game in order to survive, or in order to not be deported by the Trump administration, right? So I think that there's a kind of privilege built into certain notions of identity politics. Do I make that announcement at a moment in which I'm an existential threat? No. I make that announcement when I'm engaged within the university, with a certain kind of politics about positions and lines, and so on. All I'm saying is that there's an existential level to this that I think the identity politics might miss.
SE: So I think the counter argument would be that those of us in the university with that privilege, have the responsibility to name that identity. Following Audre Lorde, 'your silence will not protect you— you wear your difference on your skin. The counter argument would be that it's up to those of us with privilege to name these identities, and therefore have them as political categories in the system that we're living under in which you do need a political category to attain rights, to attain identification, or to attain even identity, right? To exist, you need to be politicized.
KE: I'm interested in the possibility that actually there's a third option. Maybe both of those things have to be happening at once. I'm thinking about, Leonard, in your interview with Amiri Baraka, you identify a certain aesthetic predicament that you ascribe to the avant garde, which is that the avant garde speaks the new and the new gets quickly incorporated and commodified and you have to keep going. You identify, maybe a little quickly, with existential predicaments, right? But aesthetic predicaments and existential predicaments actually might be different orders of magnitude and they may need different responses.
I don't know for sure, but I can say that if you think about the work of the cultural worker as holding open space for a kind of non reified way of thinking and acting as a kind of long game— 'game' is maybe the wrong way to talk about it, but when it's the aesthetic predicament, it feels a little more appropriate to talk about gaming and costuming—then where does that predicament become existential and does that require some other response when that response is available? It would be in a position of privilege, in a place where I can assert my identity, right?
LS: In the interview with Baraka, he's talking about music, specifically drumming during slave days. He's talking about the plantation owner taking the drumming as 'jungle music'. He's then saying that, actually, it's also code—it's also, 'we're breaking out of here at 3:00 AM, we've got a canoe and if you've got an extra paddle, meet us down by the river', et cetera. Then the plantation owner, who's impervious to all of that, just takes it as this 'primitive' drumbeat when, actually, it's a complex communicative system. So it seems to me that there are circumstances in which you don't want to announce your positionality—what you're doing and what you're saying. A 'hermetic poetics', if I can call it that—’code’, maybe, is the better term— has its place.
We're, of course, not in slave days right now, is what you're saying, though, and with that there is a necessity to announce. And if you have the privilege to announce, there's the necessity to fight back by naming the identity. Nonetheless, I think within poetry itself, we don’t want to rule out the situation in which, if you're a tiny minority or if you're ‘outflanked’, within language there’s the possibility of creating this camouflaged, coded way of expressing resistance without it becoming as big, as bold, and as caricature-like as, for example, Secretary of Defense 'R' Rumsfeld in the passage [from section two of The New Babel] that I read previously. That's there, but it's only one kind of possibility. It's easy to caricature one's enemies. That's the bold assertion of identity which produces, arguably, a backlash in response to it. Not to mention the ease with which the language of social justice can be appropriated or commodified.
Now, the Duncan and Levertov argument is interesting. Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov,in the 60s, were very good friends. It’s the Vietnam War that ultimately breaks up their friendship because Denise Levertov believes that, as a poet, she needs to respond directly to the war and write a very explicit anti-war poetry that denounces its evil. Robert Duncan as you’ve cited, argues that the poet’s task is to ‘imagine evil, not to oppose it’. I think implicit in that idea is the suggestion that, if you imagine evil fully, you’re going to oppose it more fully.
But there was a split between an anti-war poetry that Levertov espoused and an imaginatively rich—potentially quite ‘evil’—poetry that Duncan espoused. He was a teacher of mine, so I’m biased, but I also think that Duncan’s poetry is still very powerful, whereas much of Levertov’s poetry from that period reads now like propaganda, whereas her writings from before [the Vietnam War], and her writings from after, are quite rich.
With Sam Hamill's Poets Against War (2003), released during the Iraq War, there was a moment in which [his writing] began to feel like a war against poetry rather than poets against war because there’s a simplification that occurs at the level of the language. That very simplification is what is required to go to war in the first place.
So this would be my counter argument: that it’s complexity, as opposed to populism, that is going to produce certain forms of resistance and subversive language that maybe we can't do without.
KE: Right. This is also Adorno's position, where the work of art is always supposed to be complicit. In order to ‘mime’, you have to admit a certain complicity. This also makes me think of Arendt, around the idea that in order to stand with other people at all, in a plurality, is to admit some complicity.
LS: Right.
KE: Yeah. There's the idea, that in fact, both 'the criminal' and 'the saint' find themselves in the same position. There's the one who is just calling out—there's no call-and-response—the saint. Then there’s the criminal, who has exempted herself entirely, in the other direction. And with that, in order to do something, you have to start from a position of complicity, or ‘mixture’. That's a level at which I think sometimes what happens—say, around a kind of 'campus' identity politics—actually feels like an impossible moment. It’s like there's a gap across which we don't know how to talk to each other because we're not admitting a kind of complicity with one another.
SE: Now, what do you mean by ‘complicity’?
KE: Well, I'm just thinking—what does it do when we position ourselves like that with one another? I'm also thinking about the multiplicity of voices, for example, that when, Leonard, you say you sort of ‘empty yourself out of yourself’ as much as possible in order to have other voices speak through you. But then, you have to claim them as you are speaking—so [those voices are] speaking through you, but by way of your permission, right? So I'm thinking about the way in which there is a kind of multiplicity here—like, the bombs are falling over there and I'm also here with you. There's always a ‘falling short’, and I continue my daily life in these ways.
These poems [from The New Babel], in particular, evoke moments of the humorous, or the daily, or the sexual—or all of these things that maybe you're not supposed to be thinking about if bombs are falling anywhere, wherever. But in fact, we're all living in all of those levels.
LS: Simultaneously, yeah.
KE: So, it’s both the sort of problem found in a ‘moral high ground’ position, but it's also the fact that our capacity to turn to each other, at all, involves that multiplicity. We're always moving between all of those things. I think when I say complicity, I don't mean anything particularly heinous. [I use ‘complicity to refer to] this sort of ‘muddle’ and multiplicity that we all are.
SE: Okay, and you're saying that the absence of the recognition of that leads to conditions in which we can't talk to each other?
KE: I do think that, yeah.
LS: There’s a passage in what I read earlier with an Octavio Paz aside—'he who sees with his heart'. I happen to know, Dr. Eltantawi, that you did your undergraduate thesis on Octavio Paz. So you'll instruct me, but my sense there is that you have a poet who's interested in the transcendental sources of imaginations, such that he's able to go back into deep sources of pre-Colombian sensibility as a Mexican poet.
LS: [Octavio Paz] is able to draw from language and through a certain way of enheartening the world in his image from foundational sources in a particular psychogeography he happens to live in. So it's that sense of being able to move from language towards assertion on the basis of some energy in language itself that one is, as a writer, attempting to attune oneself to— as opposed to on the basis of a fixed, fast, and frozen identity that might preclude me, [as a poet], from discovering certain words.
SE: So, I’ll raise two points here. So one assumption that's made in what you've just said is what you write in the first page of the introduction: 'language is the source of our humanity'. The other—and I'm playing devil's advocate, because who wouldn't want to gesture toward these kind of deeper, more subterranean, universal, transcending senses of shared common humanity? Who wouldn't want to recognize that in art and bring that out in art? But what worries me, is that if we think that that's the entire nature of reality, then I worry that I'm not being attentive enough to voices that are experiencing structural discrimination. There are actual real material disparities that certain people are experiencing; I'm, speaking for myself as a moral agent, worried that if I don't tune into that, I will miss it and possibly hue to my bias toward universality and shared solutions, on the basis of something like the heart. Does that make sense?
LS: It makes sense, sure. Certainly you’re right— one would not want to end up in some sort of bourgeois humanism, right? That would not be an attractive place to end up. To come back to the notion of the non-self-identical: as soon as I make a statement of identity, it's going to have to contradict itself. The nature of ‘babble’, or the nature of language conceived of as babble, is that it's going to contradict itself. The statement is always going to be misinterpreted. The comment is always going to come to mean the opposite of what it was intended to. In what way? I don’t know— that’s unpredictable.
To say something about language as being the source of our humanity is to say something about our humanity as being muddled, confused, babbled, or contradictory, as opposed to universal. At that point, language is a pleasurable confusion. That's the argument of the book— it's not a work of philosophy where you're defining a term and then limiting it to that meaning, because ‘al-‘Attābiyya’ comes to mean ‘tabby,’ right? Words are always overflowing their definitions and that overflow is seen as desirable here
Now, we could talk about the idea of Orientalism. We could talk about Edward Said. You know, it is interesting—Martin Buber is a major figure in this book in terms of language. It is the idea of dialogue, or of conversation as being words addressed and received, that are also at work in the idea of language. Ibrahim Muhawi, the Palestinian translator, tells a fascinating story—that when Martin Buber moved into Jerusalem, he moved into the very house that Edward Said and his parents were being expelled from. There was even some kind of exchange between Said's father and Buber, to which he remained entirely impervious.
[Buber] may have been blind, to the specificity, the particularity, the distress of the concrete individual. That is, I think, what you were describing a moment ago—that there's a way in which a certain kind of thinking, in a certain kind of poetry, can also blind you to particularities.
When Ibrahim Muhawi, who I've had interesting exchanges with and who's said nice things about this book, and I were talking about Buber a few years back, he pointed that out. We don't want them to get heroic about any particular thinker or figure. I've never researched his story, but Ibrahim has a very interesting account of Buber and Said—Said as a young as child and Said's family losing their home directly to Martin Buber.
I had an exchange with him recently. He had translated one of Mohammed Darwish's books, and there was a quote from Martin Buber in the book that he, Muhawi, had not been able to find any source for. It was a quote that was about ‘the Arabs’ having ‘no claim to the land’ whatsoever.
I wrote to Muhawi: I don't think that's accurate, I don't think that's true. That quote is antithetical to Buber's actual position. I'm not a Buber scholar per se, so I contacted the world's greatest Martin Buber scholar, Paul Mendes-Flohr, who teaches at the University of Chicago and Hebrew University. He also indicated to us that there is no such quote in Buber. There's a false Buber quote floating around in Arabic that Darwish picked up on. That's babble at work, in the way in which the language can become confused purposely, or otherwise mistranslated. I don’t think Muhawi’s footnote on this in his translation of Darwish’s Journal Of An Ordinary Grief did justice to Buber on this point, by the way.
In the course of that exchange with Ibrahim Muhawi, the story about Buber and Said came up. So of course— you're right. You have to be attentive to concrete potentiality and concrete individuals. The question is: does poetry do that as well?
SE: Not so much individuals, but groups. I'm worried about groups- like 'the Arabs' or 'the undocumented'.
LS: Right.
SE: Are you worried about ‘groups’?
LS: I am worried about 'groups', but I don't think poetry is up to that particular task. Poetry is a marginal art. Poetry is at the margins of American culture. I wouldn't want to rely on poetry alone to defend a 'group'. There are other forms of language, there are other forms of rhetoric, other forms of protests, other forms of media that are probably— I think— better equipped. I’m sure it is possible that when I speak about the hermetic it may only apply to myself or my situation: I don’t speak for a group.
KE: I was going to say, this is where your poetry isn't like the drumming of slaves, right? I mean, [poetry] actually has been moved into a kind of useless, outer sphere, which I think is opposed to then be, according to Adorno, the thing that now reinvigorates it and makes it possibly useful again, but in a way that you can't be aiming at.
But anyway, that's a complicated argument. Poetry once was, if you think about Homer, the way we told and held history— it was the way we told and held our stories about one another. It isn't that in the same way now, and we can either mourn or we can celebrate it.
SE: In the Arabic tradition it is, though.
KE: Yeah— and I was going to say, it probably depends partly on your positionality. You mentioned Audre Lorde, talking about how poetry isn't a luxury for women, in that essay, and for black people, right?
SE: There's something of a question of having access to poetry, or access to the world of poetry. I don't necessarily want to get into that, but it's a question.
LS: Sure, sure. Poetry is at least very cheap, right?
SE: Yes, that’s true.
LS: All you need is a notebook and a pen. For example, I was in Russia in ‘97 and ‘99 on a grant that allowed a bunch of American poets to go to Russia because it was a great period in Russian poetry. Why? Because the economy was so awful! I mean, the Russians greatly value poetry, right? It's a prestigious art. The only reason you wouldn't write poetry is because you couldn't make a living. But since you couldn't make a living anyhow, you might as well write poetry. All you need is a notebook and a pen.
So I met a nuclear physicist who hadn't been paid for six months. He was working, therefore, as a teacher but that hadn't paid, either. So he was working as a night watchman at a hotel I was at, since that paid. But he was also writing poetry since his research had been defunded. So it's at that moment of extreme poverty that the poem, because its physical accoutrement is so light, becomes, then, an open possibility. That’s why, sometimes, smaller eastern European countries produced these extraordinary poets— because of the deprivation.
In American culture, we have TV, we have the web— we have these endless forms of screens and lights to which we're attracted like moths. We have all kinds of forms of entertainment, and so poetry is a marginal activity. But then, within that margin, you have a great deal of freedom about what you can do and about what kind of voices you can hear. I don't want to say though, that it's only that.
I want to offer another example as well. A poet I'm very interested in is Raúl Zurita, who was a Chilean poet that I think about a lot and admire quite a bit. Zurita is a poet who survived the Pinochet regime, ‘the Era of The Disappeared’, and he'll write, like in the book INRI (2003), a poetry that at first sounds very much like it's nature poetry. It's a poetry of the landscape of Chile: the mountains and the volcanoes and the Atacama desert and the ocean. At a certain point, as he's invoking that landscape, you suddenly realize he's also invoking the people who are dropped into the volcanoes and into the desert and into the mountains and into the ocean.
Unlike the Nazis, the Chileans didn't document much— the disappeared are truly disappeared. There's no historical work a documentarian can do. No— it's going to have to be the poet, in some truly orphic sense, who's going to invoke the voices of the dead from those places.
Furthermore, Zurita, who was tortured during that period, has Parkinson's disease— perhaps brought on by what was done to his nervous system. So when he reads [his poetry], he has very little control over his body, which is twitching— but the voice is absolutely present. [His reading of his poetry] creates this illusion that it is, in fact, the voices of the dead that are speaking through him. Now, from a strictly empirical sense of positionality, he shouldn't be able to do that because the dead are the dead and he's alive. But the function of the poet, going back to Orpheus, is to go into the underworld and speak for the dead when you come back up. Zurita does that in an utterly persuasive way, for the entire Chilean Left, people who were dropped into volcanoes and oceans and deserts.
If we close down the space in which it's possible for the imaginative act of the poem to do that kind of work, there's a terrible loss, right? I've always thought the problem with the formulation that 'we should stop reading dead white males', is that it's only in an ideologically-directed, Western progressive tradition that saying someone is ‘dead’ is pejorative. When actually—in Chinese traditions of ancestor worship, and Haitian voodoo and… I could go on and on—the dead are very present. Zurita is a poet who was able to invoke that sense of the ‘classical’ function of the poet. Even if just three people hear that poem, that creates the presence of these people who Pinochet thought were disappeared, and now they're still present. [In that sense], there's a political efficacy to the Orphic.
KE: If I hear you right, you're making a sort of larger claim. That's a very specific scenario, and there's a larger claim to be made about language as a place where our dead gather, right? Who did we inherit language from? Who made language? How were we born into it? And in some ways, all of the passed are disappeared, in that we have had generation upon generation. Of course, [The New Babel] raises the question--disappeared by what? There's the claim of violence as the far extreme of communication that makes people disappear.
LS: Right.
SE: So, believe it or not, we've actually been speaking now for over an hour. Can I ask you an ending question?
LS: Of course.
SE: Okay, so since this show is called 'Contemporary Islam Considered', I'm wondering if you can link [The New Babel] to contemporary Islam? Because I see many links! I'll let the audience 'link' for themselves, but if you have ending thoughts...?
LS: Sure! Much of the work in this book was written during the Bush Administration. Now, we find ourselves under the Trump administration back in a position, again, where very visibly in American culture, there's rampant Islamophobia, right? And then the question becomes, as a writer or as a citizen, about what kinds of things one does to counter that? With this talk of a 'Muslim registry', myself and others said, 'well, we'll register as Muslims if such a thing comes to pass’, right? What kinds of linguistic structures, or books, or ideas can one discuss and promulgate that are going to produce the greatest possible flexibility such that, if such a thing comes to pass, we'd have the maximum number of people willing to register as Muslims, even though they're Protestants or even though they're Jews.
Is that kind of resistance going to be best promulgated through a certain kind of identity politics, as I think you were arguing, Sarah? Or is it going to be through a certain kind of 'flexibility of form' on the basis of which, experiences I didn't think I had access to, suddenly I do have access to through some structure of language that makes the imagination of an experience possible? So, in terms of contemporary Islam, as we are in the age of Trump— wondering what's coming next, I think about it immediately it in those terms.
SE: Okay. Thank you. Kathleen—?
KE: I think all I can really add, at this point, is that I'm interested in all of those possibilities. I'm still wondering if there are situations in which the defensive gesture is to claim the identity? Your suggestion was that we might all claim the identity, which is something that I'm certainly interested in, and yet also you don't want to lose the specificity of [knowing] who stands under greatest threat. How do we make people who stand under the greatest threat visible, right? I think that's your question, Sarah. I think, there's cultural work and then there's political work and there's work at the barricades... and I don't know if the same people can do all the kinds of work.
I've often said—I think I'd be Adorno; I wouldn't have joined the students at the barricade. I'm slow. I'm a reader. I'm a slow reader. All of those things are true, and yet the fact is, whenever I'm protesting, I'm weeping—which is just not helpful to anybody. Masses of people make me terribly upset in general. Even at basketball games, if there's a surprise applause that makes its way through the crowd, I'm instinctively terrified. It's interesting.
LS: It's contextual, too. The Egyptian poet Mohamed Metwalli is someone I've always been interested in. He's someone who purposefully writes a kind of flat prose poetry on the grounds tha,t he says, there's a hyperbolic quality to Quranic Arabic that translates into a hyperbolic quality to the lyric poetry he sees being written that he wants to undermine. So there is a necessarily flat kind of writing—not fiery, not hyper-expressive, not flame throwing, but flat and anti-declarative—that he felt was necessary in his cultural circumstance in Mubarak era Egypt.
When we talk about contemporary Islam, that's obviously a huge set of cultural circumstances. I was responding with a particular identity of an American poet, an American writer, thinking about Islamophobia. So, with Islam and American culture, I'm thinking about what kinds of things one does with language without pretending to someone else's identity and without shirking the imaginative work of Islam's presence as part of a linguistic and cultural landscape that shapes who one is, as a writer and a poet.
SE: Thank you, this has been really fun— and thanks to your book, Leonard.
LS: Oh, thank you so much for having me on and talking about the book with me.
SE: It was really my pleasure. And thank you, Kathleen.
KE: Yeah, thanks to both of you. This was great.
—transcribed by Rowan Waters
