Remembering the Freedom Riders

In 1961 Mother’s Day in the United States fell on May 14th. Two groups of civil rights campaigners were half way through the second week of their bus journeys south from Washington, designed to test a Supreme Court decision of the previous year that declared the segregation of inter-state transportation unconstitutional.

With the black and white passengers deliberately sitting together, and ignoring the signs that directed them to different facilities at rest stops, they expected to face suspicion and hostility, but apart from an ugly incident in Rock Hill, South Carolina, they had not run into any serious trouble. But in Alabama, things suddenly turned nasty.

As it left Anniston, the Greyhound bus was pursued by a convoy of angry whites who, when it pulled over for a flat tyre, attacked the vehicle, set it ablaze, and assaulted passengers as they emerged from the smoke. The Trailways bus, carrying the second group, arrived later and, after on-board segregation was forcibly established, were allowed to continue to Birmingham, where many of the passengers were brutally set upon by members of a large crowd which was waiting for them.

Shaken and injured the campaigners were nevertheless determined to continue to Montgomery the next day. But when the Alabama authorities refused to guarantee their safety, the riders reluctantly agreed to complete their journey to New Orleans by plane. Thus ended the first Freedom Ride.

When I wrote a piece recently on two writers – John Lewis and Gary Younge – who had revisited the sites of some of the most momentous scenes of that first ride, in what I argued were politicized variants of the popular ‘footsteps’ genre of travel writing, I looked for an appropriate image to illustrate it, and found this:

Historic marker at 4th Avenue N and 19th St N, Birmingham, Alabama: photo by kschlot1

The marker was erected in 1995, close to the site of the old Trailways bus terminal (now occupied, somewhat inevitably, by a bank). The site of the bus burning in Anniston was memorialized in 2007, although both were privately funded: evidence perhaps of Alabama’s official reluctance to come to terms with parts of its past it would prefer to forget.

But what I didn’t immediately notice about the plaque is how inaccurate and misleading it is. That it refers to the Greyhound, rather than Trailways, terminal is perhaps of no great consequence, although it must surely puzzle those passers-by who know that the Greyhound terminal is several blocks north and must wonder why the marker is placed here and not there.

The use of the word ‘youth’, though, demands a little more attention. Not only is it simply misleading to imply that the riders were all young people – five of the fifteen riders who arrived in Birmingham that day were over 40 (indeed three of them were over 50) – it’s a very curious choice when applying it to a very specific group of individuals, for it is neither a plural nor a collective noun. It is as if in the struggle to find a wording that everyone would find acceptable, no one knew what to call them.

The ‘klansmen’ who attacked them have a certain familiarity, as do the ‘police’ who stood by and watched, and yet – perhaps to compensate for this reckless admission of official collusion – the riders themselves become a strangely disembodied, abstract entity, the personification of one of the stages of life. It makes it easier for us to feel the kind of sympathy that is born of condescension rather than solidarity; it marks them as immature, easily swayed by manipulative others (the acronym CORE – surely opaque to many who read the notice – serving perfectly in this respect).

Above all, it codes them as feminine in contrast to those hyper-masculine thugs who participated in their humiliation. Or it would, if it weren’t for that final clause that suddenly and unexpectedly has them ‘standing their ground’ – a phrase that has circulated with particular speed these last few weeks, but which for a century or more has conjured up the image of an armed white patriarch defending his private property against intruders. Here, in a brilliant twist, it is being used to honour non-violent protesters (black, white, male, female) seeking to assert their right to occupy public spaces together.

Evidently, there is more than one way to stand your ground.

Jamaica Kincaid: A Small Place

Who is speaking in this book? There are several voices here and while their utterances may readily be described as heartfelt or brutally honest, they also feel slightly contrived. It is as if A Small Place is an exercise in invective rather than an expression of it.

I was prompted to re-read A Small Place after being introduced to Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. These letters from defiant young revolutionaries addressed to North American readers were actually written by a US sociologist. C Wright Mills begins and ends the book with reflections of his own, but the narrator in the main body of the text is a composite persona he created on the basis of extensive interviews during his visit to the island in 1960.

Kincaid grew up in Antigua so she is not an outsider like Mills. But she left the island at an early age and by the time she came to write A Small Place she had lived in the United States for nearly thirty years, and so to begin her essay as a native (who gives no indication of ever having been abroad) addressing the reader as a hypothetical tourist arriving in her country is to adopt an identity almost as fictional as Mills’.

And the point of view is equally heterogeneous. If the first part offers a sarcastic assault on the ignorance of the tourist (the most striking, most enjoyable part of the book, the one that most readers remember), the second turns on the white settler elite of colonial Antigua (flavoured with childhood reminiscences), and the target of the third is the corrupt alliance of big business and government that replaced it following independence. Gradually the voice shifts from that of a local who can do nothing but pour scorn on the wealthy visitor to that of an educated outsider who despairs that ordinary Antiguans seem to acquiesce in this new state of affairs, and are unwilling to take responsibility for themselves. By the end the narrator has shed all traces of solidarity with her fellow-islanders, referring to them in the third person: ‘Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.’

There is a hint of an alternative future for the Caribbean, one that builds on the dream of democracy represented by the founding of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union in 1939 and Maurice Bishop’s revolution in Grenada. But characteristically it is Bishop’s fate – ‘at the hands of the Americans’ – that closes off these reflections rather than the uprising against the Duvalier dictatorship two years before the book was published (at the end of the essay Baby Doc still seems to be in power). And so A Small Place ends, calling for Antiguans to develop ‘a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship, a relationship in which they are not victims’, but giving little sign that this is likely to happen.

The passion of the book is superficial, for this cynicism empties its passion of any force. ‘And so look at this prolonged visit to the bile duct that I am making, look at how bitter, how dyspeptic just to sit and think about these things makes me,’ she writes. Is there not something unreliable about a narrator who is so archly self-conscious about her own moves? Kincaid declines and conjugates rage in a way that leaves me rather cold.

C Wright Mills: Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba

Reporting on his 1960 visit to Cuba, C Wright Mills did not write a conventional travelogue or journalistic account. He chose to have his book narrated by a composite Cuban revolutionary, and it consists of a series of letters addressed to his North American readers. ‘Most of the words are mine,’ Mills writes in his introduction, ‘– although not all of them; the arguments, the tone, the interpretations, the tang and feel – they are in the main directly Cuban. I have merely organized them – in the most direct and immediate fashion of which I am capable.’

The result is a powerful defence of the revolution, which calls upon its readers in the US to challenge the ‘Yankee imperialism’ that is being pursued in their name and to support this brave experiment that seeks to pursue a middle way between Capitalism (which ‘sacrifices man’) and Communism (which ‘sacrifices the rights of man’) .

The book caused quite a stir at the time and sold close to half a million copies. But it is hardly known today. Listen, Yankee is out of print and has not attracted anything like the critical attention paid to Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, an equally passionate challenge from the Caribbean that accusingly fingers a similar audience, and with which it might be usefully compared.

Elizabeth Burns: Held

The vocabulary used in this collection is perhaps best characterised by what it excludes. There is very little non-standard or ‘new’ English here, very little dialect, vernacular, slang, other languages. The use of proper names is tightly controlled – a few places and people here and there; certainly almost no trace of current affairs, brands, popular culture. It goes without saying that no one talks like this – no one could get far in everyday life with such a restricted stock of words – but it is unusual to find even poetry like this today.

This is one reason why Burns’ poems seem so fragile and precious. It seems almost unbelieveable that they can hold off the teeming heteroglossia that surrounds them. It is certainly noticeable when a slightly low word like ‘shove’ appears (‘An eighteenth-century experiment’) or a slightly specialized one like ‘felucca’ (‘A homecoming’), while the rare specificity of ‘Silloth’, ‘Carstairs’, ‘Cold War’, and ‘Nazis’ draw you into geography and history. And for me these moments give an extra pleasure, not least because they gently remind you that the collection’s persistent themes (bereavement, creativity) always emerge from the evocation of a particular place and time even if the reader couldn’t pin them them on a map or a calendar.

But the most characteristic feature of Held – its signature, even – is its astounding ability to span centuries and continents in a few lines, as the observation of something so humble as a stone coffin, an excavated trench , a river approaching the sea, gives way to a glimpse of its distant past or possible future.

In ‘Transport’, for example, an image of barges laden with gunpowder pulled by horses takes us back to the crofters gathering the kelp ash used in its production and forwards to the sea voyage and explosions on the other side of the ocean. ‘History’ combines in one view – and a sublimely condensed apprehension of human and geological time-scales – the ruins of an abbey and a nuclear power station, ‘whose indestructible / waste is in the seabed where layers of sediment / became the quarried sandstone, heaved over salt marsh // to be turned into an abbey.’

The front cover of the book features a white porcelain moon jar in the British Museum (and the subject of one of the poems), but the material objects in these poems are not trapped in a display case; they are invested with labour, love, power and suffering. As the title suggests, it’s what’s inside them, the secret biographies they harbour, that counts.

Sometimes, it is true, the poems themselves seem a little too laboured and unconvincing. The metaphor of portrait and sitter in ‘Diptych’ feels overextended so that its point becomes unclear. The historical sweep of ‘Holy Water’ from mediaeval monks to nuclear subs packs in more descriptive and explanatory clauses than it needs, I think. And the collection closes with ‘This life’ – whose title I imagine unwittingly duplicates that of the cult TV series: it is the only time we find ourselves in an urban environment, and I wonder if it isn’t just its protagonist (a characteristic ‘you’) but the writer herself who feels uncomfortable there, as she slips into a series of glib, short, generalizing nouns before resting more sure-footedly on the sensuous particular: ‘… but this life with its city streets, // its fizz and mix and mess, its rush of sweet-pea scent, / the lightness of their petals, their brief and lovely bloom.’

Rodney Saint-Éloi: Haïti, kenbe la!

book cover

Rodney Saint-Éloi

Haïti kenbe la!

Paris: Éditions Michel Lafon, 2010

 

 

 

 

Like Dany Laferrière’s Tout Bouge Autour De Moi, this is a first-hand account of Haiti’s earthquake by a Haitian-Canadian author who was in Port-au-Prince for the Etonnants Voyageurs book festival in January 2010.

Neither has yet been translated into English, but they should be. For many years now it has been customary to tag Haiti as ‘the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere’ in foreign news reports, and coverage of the earthquake often reinforced the tendency to treat the country and its people as victims who can do little to help themselves. Neither the sour commentaries of those who blame Haiti’s misfortunes on an endemic fatalism so often attributed to ‘voodoo’ nor the well-meaning efforts of the thousands of NGOs who provide aid ‘from above’ contribute much to the vital task of extending and strengthening democratic participation in a society dominated by a tiny rich elite; indeed, they have been accused of deliberately thwarting it.

Saint-Eloi does not confront this situation head-on. He is a poet and publisher (he runs Mémoire d’encrier in Montréal) not a grassroots activist, and although he returns frequently, he has not lived in Haiti for more than a decade. Accordingly, his perspective is that of a visitor. The narrative begins in media res as he drifts in and out of sleep on the tennis court of the Hotel Karibe where he and the other guests spend the night after being forced to evacuate when catastrophe struck the previous afternoon. In the course of the book, we meet a large cast of characters, including fellow writers (many of them, like his friend Dany, put up at the hotel by the festival) and members of his family, as he moves about the city observing scenes of devastation and the efforts to rescue the living and bury the dead.

Despite the sloganistic title (a popular Kreyòl expression meaning ‘Never Give Up!’), Haïti, kenbe la! is an episodic collection of low-key personal impressions and recollections. Children amuse themselves with water pistols; a woman’s naked body is found the arms of her illicit lover and her husband buries them together; a radio announcer reads out the names of survivors; a policeman who avoids injury because he is late for work; ways of concealing the smell of death; the sound of hymns, prayers; thieves ransacking a displacement camp; journalists taking photos of corpses. The city takes shape through the accumulation of telling details. And indeed Saint-Eloi compares his method of composition to the way his mother in New York synthesizes information from many different sources in order to construct the compelling story of the earthquake she tells him over the phone.

After a couple of nights, he moves out of the hotel and stays with friends in a house overlooking a makeshift camp. They ration their food, but allow themselves a bottle of wine now and again. Before the week is out, Saint-Eloi is offered a seat on a military aircraft flying to Montreal, alongside other Haitian-Canadians – but only those with a Canadian passport are permitted to leave.

He allows many voices to speak – often without comment, giving us a Haiti in which different faiths vie for attention, and a strongly patriotic sense of history coexists alongside a cynical dismissal of current leaders, where the overseas aid represents relief for some and suffering for others, and the possibilities offered by emigration forms the horizon of so many lives. Through the story-teller Grann Tida, Saint-Eloi suggests Haiti has long represented to outsiders either the appealing primitive or the threatening savage, but it has also answered back. ‘Touris pa pran pòtrè ‘m’ (‘Tourist, don’t take my picture’) she says, quoting Felix Morisseau-Leroy’s famous poem, while conceding that it is not likely to have much effect.

Yet if the tourist would read this book, perhaps another Haiti could come into focus, one that is not designed to answer the outsider’s hopes or fears. ‘Resilient’, perhaps, although Saint-Eloi bristles at such an abstract concept. This Haiti is essentially one in which people just get on with things. A Haiti that lives for the present. If you fall, you get up – an attitude illustrated by the new neighbours in the ‘village’ that sprung up near his temporary home in Delmas: Zaka and his friends, playing dominoes, slamming down the tiles, their everyday chat – music, carnival, women, the price of rice and corn – punctuated with bursts of laughter.

But the hero of the book is undoubtedly Franketienne (who in Rapjazz: Journal d’un paria has recently written his own, rather more poetic, tribute to the city). We first meet the writer and artist hard at work rebuilding his house in Port-au-Prince. Later, Saint-Eloi takes a call from him in Montreal. He jokes about the Nobel Prize everyone expects him to win and reads a passage from his new play which is soon to be produced in Paris.

Since his return, he has struggled to resume his old life, haunted by the fury of the goudougoudou. But he emerges from the conversation with renewed vigour. ‘Franketienne had just reminded me that hope is not a utopia,’ he writes. ‘Franketienne had just reminded me that hope was Haitian.’

Some other first-hand accounts of the earthquake are included in Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture And The Earthquake Of 2010, edited by Martin Munro.

José María Arguedas: The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below

book coverJosé María Arguedas

The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below

translated by Frances Horning Barraclough ; edited by Julio Ortega

Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000

 

I love this novel. Even on a first reading – when it is obvious that you’re going to miss so much – it is a hugely rewarding experience.

The author‘s death tends to overshadow the interpretation of the book – as a kind of extended suicide note – but I enjoyed it above all as a brilliant and complex contribution to the literature of place. There is a large cast of memorable characters here, but the main character is surely Chimbote itself. Their criss-crossing journeys across the city offer the reader the opportunity to view it from many different angles, and the result is a remarkably sophisticated exercise in social, economic and political geography. The uneven distribution of power and wealth is quite visible in the layout of the conurbation and its lines of communication. Trawler, brothel, factory, market, cemetery: these are not simply settings in the novel but locations whose capacity to shape the action that takes place there is of crucial significance.

On some level the novel, with its passing derogatory remarks about Cortazar, Carpentier, Fuentes and Garcia Marquez, is also a provocative challenge to the mainstream Latin American novel, which certainly looks hopelessly gentrified after reading this unsparing immersion in the lives characters that include an itinerant preacher, a popsicle vendor, a prostitute expecting a baby, a crooked businessman, an unscrupulous factory manager, a corrupt labour leader, a pig-raiser, a trawler captain, a Yankee priest and a former peace corps volunteer who has gone native. Only the editorial apparatus can indicate how Arguedas combined Spanish and Quechua in his text, often creating new words from both languages, but the translation gives a good impression of the range of sociolects as it switches expertly between standard and vernacular Englishes.

If the book takes its title from a Quechua myth and while the narrative duplicates its themes of ‘above’ and ‘below’ in its fascination with the complex encounter of the mountain-dwelling Indians who are drawn to work in the rapidly industrializing port on the coast, the relation between the two stories is not merely analogical. One of the foxes appears in the novel as a somewhat enigmatic character, and it may be that Foxes is a critical rewriting of the myth, answering it back, out-doing it perhaps. Whether a second reading will make this any clearer I don’t know, but it will certainly be just as compelling.

Pop Videos of the Future

warsaw airport

What if field recordings became popular?  You know, like pop songs?

In a piece on a field recording posted in tribute to Ahmed Basiony, killed in the Cairo uprisings in January this year, Marc Weidenbaum asks a similar question.  The recording, made by John Kannenberg, is one of a series of museum recordings, all lasting exactly 4 minutes 33 seconds – a duration in tribute, of course, to John Cage.

Weidenbaum continues:

It’s no doubt something of a pipe dream among those of us who enjoy field recordings, but should the act of recording the sound of a place ever become nearly as popular and common as is taking photographs of places, it’s imaginable that 4’33” would become a if not the standard length of such an audio document, the same way that there are standardized dimensions for photos.

This may be true. And indeed I have made some 4’33” recordings of libraries, other places of relative silence, that might appeal to our inner Cage.

But if 4’33” is one standard (equivalent perhaps to an album), then one minute is another (the seven-inch single of the field recording world, we might say).  Think of the Quiet American’s One-Minute Vacations or Sound and Music’s Minute of Listening project (to which I have offered some contributions). Sixty seconds is also the (approximate) length of the sonic postcards that are emerging from the City Rings venture.

Whatever. But if these became hits, one thing they would need is a video.  What would a field recording pop video look like?

Well one thing they wouldn’t look like are those videos on YouTube that document people making field recordings (usually to create sound effects) or offer tutorials in using field recording equpment.

More promising is a Vimeo group that goes by the name of, um, Field Recording.  John Kannenberg himself has a A Sound Map of the Egyptian Museum here, which displays a floor plan and indicates where in the building the different recordings were made as they play.  South Bank Skate consist of a sequence of still images taken of a skate park, while the soundtrack appears to be a continuous recording of people skateboarding there.

There are some films of musical performances which, while they make full use of the acoustic space (and one, Notturno, recorded in a working steel foundry, is actually dominated by the ambient sound) still offend the purist in me, who doesn’t want to call these field recordings.

But probably the most common approach found here is to present long takes from a static camera, positioned close to where the recordings were made.  Among my favourites is this clip of Zurich airport at night by Made for Full Screen:

I like this sequence too, animate structures #4 by John  Grzinich, exploring the aeolian effects of strong winds on the landscape and the built environment in the hills just north of San Francisco:

Also interesting is Transplant – 06/07/2010 by Keir Docherty, a close-up of foliage, with the movement of motor traffic on a busy road beyond, which dominates the soundtrack, part of a ‘series of short videos which capture simple moments of everyday life from a very particular perspective.’  The point being to demonstrate that while trees and plants are often introduced to conceal roads from the eye, they are much more effective at masking the visual rather than the aural, even though they do dampen the sound.

These are all fairly close to what I imagine a field recording pop video would look like. The long takes, the static camera, the relative absence of movement within the frame, all help to draw attention to the soundtrack, and yet allow a certain tension between sound and image, given that there will always be a mismatch between what you hear and what you can see (like noises originating off-screen, but also events on-screen that, perhaps unpredictably, cannot be heard). And it is a tension that doesn’t tend to exist with photographs which do not carry the same (if any) sonic expectations.

The makers of such films have sometimes found it useful to work to a set of rules. Made for Full Screen drew up guidelines for a Vimeo group called The Pictures Don’t Move:

1. No camera movement (zoom, pan, …)
2. No editing (cut, time manipulation, …)
3. No performance (acting, dancing, …)
4. Original sound (no music, …)
5. At least 30sec long!

Two years later with over 400 videos, the principles have clearly struck a chord. Despite frequent flagrant (and sometimes spammy) disregard for these rules, there are some great films here.  But after watching a few, my growing feeling was that they were visually too busy.  Or at least that their creators were more interested in what you see rather than what you hear.  Perhaps at some level they were trying too hard not to be boring.

That’s never been a problem for me. Long fascinated by constrained writing, I have been experimenting with a set of rules of my own. Unaware of The Pictures Don’t Move until a few weeks ago, mine are similar, but in effect add more conditions, namely (1) the films must be exactly one minute long, and (2) the source of most of the sounds must be off-camera (to insist on all would be one step too far, I think).

  1. One minute because, as I suggested, it is becoming one of the standard formats for field recordings, but also because producing a series of works of this length (which could be joined together to make a longer film made up of identically-sized segments) help to sharpen your awareness of this – often merely rhetorical (‘just give me a minute’) – unit of time that we take for granted. I suppose my gamble is that this rule can help produce something that makes a minute seem much more precious and longer-lasting than we often allow.
  2. I think a key to this stretching of time is to encourage the viewers to listen as intently as they watch, and to point the camera away from the source of the sound is one of the best ways of doing this. And there is no better way of slowing you down than imposing a rule that breaks the ingrained habits of almost everyone who makes and watches videos.

One video in the Field Recordings group that obeys this acousmatic principle is Geijitsu Mura Koen by Brown (also an active member of The Pictures Don’t Move group).  It is grotesquely long – almost two minutes – but repays repeated … I was going to say listening, but what we need is a word that combines listening and viewing (with more of the former than the latter).  Listiewing perhaps.  (You need to join the field recordings group to play it.)

My own efforts have been focused on a project that is bound by even more limitations: Scottish Minutes. The plan is to produce sixty one-minute videos in accordance with these rules, but with the additional objective of covering a wide variety of locations in Scotland (rural, urban, maritime, etc) at different times of year and times of day. In the last eighteen months I’ve made five.  It may take some time.

It almost goes without saying that these rules favour those with fairly unsophisticated equipment.  They could be made quite easily using a smartphone. I tend to make things more complicated for myself. Used to making sound recordings, I normally use binaural microphones with a minidisc recorder for the audio, and a cheap point-and-shoot digital camera. Back home I transfer the recording onto computer, choose the segment I want and attach it to the matching segment of film (replacing the original audio taken by the camera).  Of course, since much of the sound is off camera, precise matching of sound and image is not usually required.

Here’s an example of a non-Scottish minute. A Short Film About Flying, made at Warsaw’s Chopin Airport.  You will notice that not only are these videos done on the cheap, I don’t even bother to clean the camera lens properly.  How rock’n’roll is that?

 

Sean Borodale: Notes for an Atlas

book cover imageSean Borodale
Notes for an Atlas
Np: Isinglass, 2003

370p
ISBN : 978-0-9533273-2-4

 

 

 

This book describes itself on the back cover by means of a quotation from Robert Macfarlane, recommending it in the Guardian: ‘An extraordinary 370-page poem written whilst walking through London.’

I think ‘poem’ is the right word, though it is not written in verse. The text is left-justified, the carriage returns determined automatically by the margin rather than chosen for effect, and so must count as prose. And very dense prose at that.  Divided into twenty-five numbered sections, Notes for an Atlas is otherwise unrelieved by paragraph breaks.

And if this is not enough to daunt the reader, it invites you to step into a very strange world indeed.  Here are the opening 100 words or so:

A man walks and he speaks, and every word warps in the wind in the street. See brambles, a blackberry still as a boulder suspended among thorns. Leaves broken as sawdust, curled and torn. A man wearing black clothes walks to a car, see lips clamped  See clouds reflected on car doors. See brown eyes and clouds banked, knotted and ripped. Wind ticking a maple, scratching the leg of a twig. See cracks in grey tar. Hear a tattered blue and white flag, the shrug and the quiet crack of its cloth in a turn of the air (p7).

This is not a quirky beginning to a narrative that eventually begins to normalize. The whole poem takes the form of a transcription of  things seen, heard (and read), usually announced by subject-less verbs. Nothing makes sense, not even in retrospect. And by this I mean, the connections between the different objects and events are entirely random, juxtapositions of the close up and far away, and separated by unspecified intervals of time, distances travelled, angles turned. It is impossible for the reader to create from these fragments a space in which one can imaginatively inhabit or orient oneself.

But this is one of the most compelling books I have ever read. It is travel writing pared down to its most basic ingredients. Notes for an Atlas makes even the sketchiest fieldnotes seem over-polished and prematurely analytical even while it depends on far more considerable artifice, for it aims to recreate a degree of fragmentation that we never spontaneously experience, so accustomed we are to converting our impressions into portraits, landscapes and stories even before they take place.

The author’s own website has little to say about the technique of composition. It is just possible that Notes for an Atlas is a work entirely of the imagination, devised with only the most indirect relation to walks actually taken in London. But I find it hard to believe that any imagination wouldn’t crumble in the face of having to recreate such inexhaustible banality. The most likely scenario would be that Borodale undertook several long walks in the capital – perhaps twenty five of them – while recording his immediate impressions as he want along, possibly speaking into a microphone (that opening sentence may be a self-portrait), maybe even using a concealed camcorder.  The poem would be a – probably much worked-on and revised – transcription of these impressions.

If so, it seems likely that the original sequence of these impressions survives in the written work.  From the fragments it is often possible to deduce something about where and when they are occurring, for instance  the density of the built environment, whether the location is busy or quiet, whether it is night or day.  Deprived of proper names (which only appear in the text if the poet overhears them or sees them written down – and then only rarely), the reader struggles to identify locations and occasions, though it would appear that the poem documents a solemn public event (perhaps Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph or a state funeral) (section VI), a visit to the zoo (presumably in Regent’s Park) (section VIII), a walk through an art gallery (section XV), and an encounter with an anti-war demonstration (section XXII).  Names of businesses, streets, buildings occasionally offer clues.  ‘A giant wheel in the sky with thin spokes’ (p220) suggests the London Eye. But it would be impossible to reconstruct the itineraries followed here.

The text forces us to break the habit of reading prose that finds causality or explanation implied in the transition from one clause or sentence to the next. In fact one can not even be sure of proximity, since the focus and direction seem to be always changing. And these changes are quite unpredictable because there is no ‘I’ to lend them coherence. The poet adopts the persona of an invisible man (who never seems to see reflections of himself or hear his own footsteps, and gives no indication that he is perceived by others) who betrays no feelings or inclinations of his own. He is almost, in fact, a machine. Or an alien. And this impression is reinforced by the deliberately restricted vocabulary of the poem, which (when not transcribing the words of others) often resorts to descriptive phrases rather than specific nouns, as if to emphasize the radical innocence of his perception, referring for example to a man ‘moving on wheeled shoes’ (p241) as if roller-skates was a term he had not learned or would betray too much speculation regarding something not directly seen.

So what is the best way to read Notes for an Atlas? When I first obtained a copy of the book I did read it from beginning to end, though slowly, probably no more than ten pages a day. Perhaps there was a story here, or a mystery that would be unveiled, or some recurrent motif that I would miss if I didn’t painstakingly turn every page in order. If you take pleasure from the discipline of an exercise regime – doing just enough each day to make a difference, but not too much it becomes a chore – this approach has its benefits. But since there is no suspense, no climax, no dramatic change of key or tempo, what makes reading it possible at all is the texture of its language, which you can appreciate by dipping in and out at any point.

It’s best enjoyed by speaking it aloud, I think. Try those opening lines again, listening to the way the repeated words (‘and’, ‘see’) and word-endings (‘-ing’, ‘-ed’) give it flow, while the sentences build, getting longer, before getting shorter again. The rhythms are uneven – there is no time signature here – but there is an ebb and flow, a rising and falling, like the tide or the wind, that suits such an epic (and attracts the praise of a ‘nature writer’ like Robert Macfarlane).

But what really transforms this poem from an intriguing, dare-devil stunt of largely academic curiosity is its imagery, particularly the way the poem is fuelled by an apparently inexhaustible stream of metaphors and similes: ‘blackberry still as a boulder’, ‘leaves broken as sawdust’, ‘clouds banked, knotted and ripped’ – the first half-page sets the tone immediately. Some of them are routine, but many may make you smile at their freshness and pertinence, and often I would be forced to pause and admire their humour or sheer audacity.  Here the labour of transcription – the work that recreates the walk on the printed page – is abundantly on display.

These are some of my favourites:

The mouth of a woman at a phone and it moves like the eye of a man trying not to sleep (p293)

And see five thin men standing against a long wall of shade in a row like guns in a rack (p300)

See a snail-sized mound of red-brown on pavement, the closed palace of a dog’s excrement (p281)

Sometimes they come thick and fast you can hardly keep up with them:

… and a chocolate wrapper lies curled on its side like a sleeping man. See the grain of stone flecked with shapes like grains of wheat blackened with fungus and cast iron railings rise planted in stone like the edge of a wheatfield.  A man’s head swivels its neck, see the eyes are sharp like a hawk’s. Pass black window glass like obsidian sheets. Glimpse a dark garden, dark green and black leaves like carved jade and slate, lacquer of rainwater … (p252).

At such moments there is almost a doubling – even eclipsing – of the immediate everyday world apprehended by the senses, with another world populated by anonymized memories, dreams and ghosts. Into a mundane London street arrives a sleeping man, a wheatfield, a hawk, carved jade, obsidian sheets from the cultures and histories filtered by the poet’s imagination. Somehow, in the midst of what seems to be a hyper-naturalist transcription of strenuously un-interpreted sense impressions, emerges a magical realism of considerable beauty.

The books ends with a farewell, the parting dialogue between a man and a woman.

And a man with a woman smiles and she smiles and they both stand quiet in smiles as many walk in different directions. Air thick with fumes in a grey. Hear, ‘God no.’ A dark hand lands like a clamp on a wrist with a shake. hear ‘Wonderful to see you, is she all right?’ Hear, ‘Great, absolutely.’ Hear, ‘Well I think we have actually, it’s nerve-wracking … oh.’ Hear, ‘God, well I hope so … bye bye.’ Hear, ‘Bye bye Murph’ (p372).

I wonder if there isn’t a hint of mischief here.  As if this is also an imagined exchange between author and patient reader, who, having read thus far, might admit to finding the experience ‘actually … nervewracking’.  And the author, of course, would be bound to reply: ‘God, well I hope so.’  And thus they part, on the best of terms.

Malcolm X as Photographer

One of the surprises for me reading Manning Marable’s recent biography of Malcolm X is the number of references to him as a photographer.

In the summer of 1963, for instance, to a civil rights demonstration in New York, he ‘brought along a 35-millimeter camera and busied himself taking photographs. “If there were no captions for these pictures, you’d think this was Mississippi or Nazi Germany,” he informed one New York Times reporter’ (p253).

This is not the first mention of Malcolm filming demonstrations. It seems he made a habit of it, possibly because the mainstream media could not be relied on to report objectively, but also, perhaps, to help the Nation of Islam identity (or at least provoke) FBI observers and infiltrators.

On holiday in Miami with his wife, children, and Cassius Clay in January 1964, he kept a notebook in which

he drafted several paragraphs about his family’s visit to Clay’s training camp that were designed to be the basis for a feature news story, ‘Malcolm X, the Family Man.’ Most of his notes were captions designed to accompany photographs he had taken (p280).

During his second trip to Africa and the Middle East, he toured Algiers ‘by taxi, leaning out of the car window to take photographs’, apparently catching the attention of the police who detained him on departure at the airport, believing the photos to be a security risk (p319).

An evening program at the Audubon Ballroom organized by the Organization for Afro-American Unity in January 1965 ‘featured color films taken by Malcolm during his travels’ (p404).

This suggests his interest in photography extended to cinematography too, and indeed, several images of Malcolm show him holding an 8mm movie camera, like this one published in Life magazine, taken at London Airport in July 1964.

Here’s another picture of Malcolm holding a camera. And there is actually a similar shot (possibly taken on the same occasion) on the home page of the Malcolm X Project, a collection of resources compiled in association with Marable’s biography.

But most intriguing of all is the claim that de Laurot’s remarkable film Black Liberation (1967) features Malcolm X not only on screen but ‘behind the camera’. You can – if you’re lucky to get a good connection – stream a video here, but it is impossible to guess which bits of footage he may have been responsible for.

Surely there is enough here to merit further investigation. Malcolm was not the first political leader to try to control his photographic image. But a leader who wields a camera in public is certainly unusual and cannot be attributed solely to a concern over how he was represented. After all, most of the film he shot would have been of people and places he encountered, not of himself.

Perhaps it is time to return to the vast on- and off-line Malcolm X archive and ask it questions about photography that it may not have been asked before. How skilled a photographer was he? Do his photographs and movie footage evince a particular sensibility, even the hints of a radical aesthetic practice, or are they indistinguishable from conventional holiday snaps? At any rate, the special interest in photography on the part of someone who was almost exclusively identified with a – very distinctive – verbal (largely oral) delivery might cause us to wonder about the co-existence of these very different rhetorical forms in his repertoire.

There are five boxes of photographs in the Malcolm X Collection at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The collection description record is fairly general, but does indicate that it includes ‘portraits of African-American expatriates and visitors, and views of crowds, possibly photographed by Malcolm X during his visits to various African countries, particularly Nigeria and Ghana (ca. 1964).’

Looks like a good place to start.

Jackie and Bob

It seems incredible that I could have lived more than fifty years and not have heard ‘Oboe’ by Jackie Mittoo.

But, as I was compelled to stop doing the dishes and turn up the volume when this beguiling instrumental came on the radio this evening, it would appear to be indeed the case.

Something about it sounded familiar, though. That five-note motif (first heard at 0’25”) nagged me.  Where had I heard this before? Who had sampled it?

I scrubbed at a pan and put the kettle on. My son could tell from my manner that I was preoccupied.  He asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t explain. I told him it was nearly bedtime and went through to run his bath, scared that the song would end and I’d miss the announcement that would tell me what it was and the riff would simply evaporate.  For you can’t (yet) sing to Shazam.

And then it came to me. Wasn’t it used in ‘A Touch of Jazz’ by DJ Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince?

Actually, no. While he was splashing and singing the Octonauts theme at full belt in the bathroom, I played the 12″ and realized what I was thinking of was the better known ‘Westchester Lady’ by Bob James:

The motif (first heard at 0’09”) is similar but – played straight after the Jackie Mittoo – is much more distinct. And, of course, more samplable. You can see why it caught the attention of Jazzy Jeff (and several others).

Bob’s tune came out in 1973, Jackie’s three years later. I assume the quotation is deliberate. Roaming online just now I came across one comment that suggested that ‘Oboe’ is a cover of ‘Westchester Lady’, which is pushing it, and only true in the sense that John Coltrane’s ‘My Favourite Things’ is a cover of that song from The Sound of Music.

Let’s face it, Bob James is pretty cheesy. This song, with its cringeworthy title, is a lifetime’s supply of Dairylea. That five-note series is the only thing going for it, unless jazz funk arrangements polished to a dazzling shine thrill you per se.

But embedded in the loose ensemble sound you hear on ‘Oboe’, Jackie Mittoo shows that riff has legs. Its meandering, improvisatory quality, together with those never-quite expected splashes and swells of keyboard and cuts in the rhythm, make it far too interesting to listen to in a lift or hotel lobby.

Its nine and a half minutes deserve your full attention.