OF NATURE, NATION, AND
THE ETHNIC BODY
To echo a famous twentieth-century statement, the mind should prompt the mouth to say A
BODY IS A BODY IS A BODY, aware that the voiced words refer to and locate an
indivisible subject and object.. Or
perhaps the utterance dislocates the invisible to bring into view, into
perspective, a something in the world that the world is determined to impale
with the idea that the something is ethnic and different and to talked
about. If the something that is so
embodied speaks, especially in terms of accepting its ethnicity, the something
that is a human being may be contemplating its relationship to nature and to
its properties and privileges as a constituent of a nation. Leave all of that in the conditional. Or
export it to POEM, to POETRY. It is poetry and the poem that can facilitate
contemplating the mysteries of nature that always outpace human understanding.
These mysteries are akin to those which invite consideration of the nature of nations ---- the birth, maturation, and death
of nations. The will behind the impulse to beget social contracts that are the
invisible skeletons of nations. Are all these nations in one sense or another
ETHNIC by virtue of being combinations of people identified as “ethnic”? Poem, the use of the potential magic of
language in its splendid arbitrary nature ---ah, the endless shapes that sound
assumes. Poem, the vehicle for
maximizing our discourses regarding nature and nation and the unstable temporal
and spatial identities of bodies assumed and
reported to be ethnic. The poem can name the contradictions, the
discord of a) having common national or cultural connections and b) having
origins by virtue of birth or heritage which may or may not correspondence with
the origins of a specified nation. In this sense, bodies account for their
ethnicities. They move into or out of
ethnicity by accident or choice, forever bearing the traces and onus of being
or existing. Of all our existing and future genres, it is the poem to which we
turn to make sense (and occasionally nonsense) of ethnic motions and notions.
The indeterminate status of poem as poem is truly the force that through the
green fuse drive the flower.
Here I offer as catalysts for discussion three of my own
poems which do not overtly identify my ethnicity because they are, by their
nature, beyond both nationality and
ethnicity, until (and this is the crucial turn) I as the voice of a body
interpret them into the imagined spaces marked national and ethnic. The first
is “Poem 70,” written to annotate my success in arriving at the age of seventy:
Poem 70
Small, common, not tired
Nor weary nor worn,
Powerful I am
I am an infinite eye/
Voice
Reviving, deriving
midnight
From a trinity of
signifying parrots---
Passing hep to hopping
The jarring jam they
Dream words
Syntax wax
Grammarians
She and he
Who prismed
light---grandeur
Parents razing towers
From/form a sentence
---me/I
Apple
Stone immune to polish,
To ignorant charms
Clashing by day,
Superlative subparticles
endure----
Invited to logic wild
Crazy quilting
Wet bones on a mountain,
Fear no evil we/I
Zillion paragraphs
Am defiant dance of
chapters,
Have bibled seventy
gospels
Shadowed through
The middle between
Of hardships and the rock
of ages,
Have published sleep----
A miracle of invisibility
I am
A purpose to remember.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
July 31, 2013
It is the job
of a reader to make intelligent guesses about whether the voice in the poem,
the speaking “I”, is a citizen of the
United States of American and an African American or a Chinese person who is by
heritage a citizen of Cuba. The reader
does not know she is supposed to make such guesses until the poet who as author
is no longer related to the poem once it flows freely in the world proposes
that these guesses rather than a different set of speculations ought to be
undertaken. Much depends are where the
clues are coming from.
The second
poem, “Poem 65,” may have incorporated more clues, especially in the choice of
using a line from Walt Whitman as an epigraph. Nevertheless, these clues may
depend on the extent of a reader’s cultural literacy.
Poem 65
“Old age
superbly rising! Ineffable grace of dying days!”
---Walt
Whitman, Leaves of Grass
That year
love lassoed us
Nailed us to
a burning tree.
A trillion
stars assumed our minds
Fed us honey
and pungent gasoline
In a
myth-drenched season.
And want of
reason turned us a trope.
In those
days a mosquito sang a fatal song
So wrong we
cracked bones on a killing floor.
Now in the
light of night
Red
magnolias blow and children laugh outright
We embrace
sanguine memories
Against the
fears watered by our fears
Old age and
scuppernong have learned us
Charity for
the resurrecting past
Tolerance
for the blue holes of blessings
Grown
ineffable in our eyes and ears.
For some but not all readers who acknowledge their membership
within the boundaries of a certain ethnicity the clues may be the words killing floor and blue holes, words that in African American speech communities
possess special connotations. These words may allude to certain blues lyrics
and establish a semantic relationship with blues lyrics. If that is the case, it is appropriate to
identify the “we” in the poem with black Americans. Nevertheless, black Americans do not have a
monopoly on how words revolve around the concept of ethnicity. The language of the poem has the option of
not being ethnic, unless we are willing to identify the concept of ethnicity as
a universal item that manifests itself in multiple forms.
The third poem, “Winter Solitude,” speaks of time, a
particular season that marks a cycle in Nature, and actions that require no
linking to nation or country. It
exercises its option to defy ethnicity, to be beyond ethnicity, unless the
words the second line, segregates, peace be still and jazz are limited to reductive orbits
in culture-bound locations. Second line does refer to a culture-bound ritual
associate with funerals and parade celebrations in New Orleans, Louisiana; the
phrase “peace be still” is exported directly from a refrain in an African
American gospel song. In this way the ethnic referents can wear the mask of
being associated with Paul Laurence Dunbar’s famous poem “We Wear the Mask.”
Winter Solitude
Funeral follows funeral---
the second line between ---
resentment segregates the tombs.
The universe is wrinkled
with the whims and the winds.
Saints cut of silk, frantic like the turf,
wanting terror to touch down,
explode lucid leaves of grass
evermore
for the asking
is nevermore.
The universe is wrinkled
with the whims of mothball hours.
Time. An old man
erect,
folding the canals of his bones.
An old woman, pious,
rigid in her rapture on an urn,
grinning toothless passion.
The universe is wrinkled
with the whims of worried days.
Words copulate not
none the less but more.
Salvation burns
where peace be still
is still to be.
The universe is wrinkled
with the whims of stinging seconds
Sounds, jazz iced down,
signal the ending
always beginning
time. Sufferings in
ascetic hymns
wash. Absolute soap
for the soul.
Primate wings renounce a name.
Yes, seed clichés. .Pungent
despair
in the fragrant dust.
Flowers rust.
Gravity marks wasting time.
December
21, 2011
Poems, I would argue, do reveal and conceal what is ethnic in
talk about nature and nation, and the ethnic pleasure is in the always
unfinished revolutions of interpretation.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
November 3, 2014
Wuhan, China
