Ronald Firbank | Valmouth / 1919

firbank as poet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ronald Firbank Valmouth (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1919)

 

In preparation for a fiction course for the MFA Creative Writing Program at Otis College of Art this Fall, I reread Ronald Firbank's fiction Valmouth, and sought out his biography on Wikipedia, where I read the author "produced a series of novels."

 

    Since I consider myself a sort of authority of the various genres of fiction, I am no longer surprised to see that any fiction is described by most readers these days as a "novel." And, although the genre, "novel," seems to me to center on a central figure, charting his or her relationship (often in symbolic terms) with the larger culture or, at least, the world outside the central figure, I have become somewhat indifferent if people use the term "novel" indeterminately.

     The only times it truly upsets me is when readers have difficulty with a work of fiction because it does not meet the standard expectations of a "novel," such as the case of Djuna Barnes' anatomy Nightwood, a work that wasted the energies of at least one critic, Joseph Frank, in creating a new form (what he called "spatial fiction") to explain what he saw as anomalies, all perfectly a home in the anatomy genre. Others have approached the epic fictions of Heimito von Doderer and Robert Musil, works whose structures often work more like musical compositions than plot-organized novels, similarly. But when I raise these issues, I usually get blank stares or significant harrumphing.

     I might have described Firbank's Valmouth as a dialogue fiction, a work that uses conversation as its major structural device, a writing that can be traced back to Plato's Dialogues. Indeed I intend to teach this work in a course titled "Dialogue Fictions," which includes works by Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Anthony Powell, and others.

     This time my reading, however, revealed that perhaps I have been wrong in even presuming to describe Valmouth and most other Firbank works as "fictions." While it is true that many kinds of fiction contain little or no plot—and Firbank seems unable to close any event, let alone begin it—at least most fictions have a narrative. If there is one in Valmouth, it can be summarized by saying that the book is primarily about a group of elderly women, women who have survived longer that those in other English communities either because of the Valmouth air or its water. The major "event" of Valmouth consists of a grand dinner party for these women and most of the town's citizens in Hare Hall. Little of importance happens at this occurrence—indeed it is often difficult to know throughout the work what indeed might be "happening"—but it is significantly placed near the center (p. 78 of a 127 pages) of the work.

     There also appears to be no "central" character, indeed no "real" characters, Firbank preferring names (Teresa Twisleton, Rebecca Bramblebrook, Flo Flook, Simon Toole, Tircis Tree, Mrs. Hurspierpoint, etc. etc., listed sometimes for entire paragraphs) over characterization, but three quickly drawn figures do predominate, namely the black masseuse, Mrs. Yajnavalkya, her mysterious niece Niri-Esther, and Mrs. Thoroughfare's son, Dick—a sailor who is away from home for most of the fiction. If one must point to a single central figure, it would have to be Yajnavalkya, since it is clear that she is the most intelligent and exuberant figure in the book.   

     Firbank clearly loved Blacks, and writes about them in several of his "fictions." His admiration for Blacks, however, does not mean that he escapes the prejudices of his time (Valmouth was first published in 1919); the word "nigger" appears once or twice in this book, and in the title of his Prancing Nigger. The elderly women seem to be of two minds concerning Yajnavallkya, as they praise her ointments and the touch of her fingers alternating with disdain for her race.

      In fact, we don't ever truly know Yajnvalkya's ethnic background. At times she is simply from "the East," at other times she appears to have traveled from Africa or India, while at the end of the work, it appears, she is Tahitian, her niece born of Tahitian royalty. It hardly matters, since it is apparent that what Firbank most enjoys is the possibility of using his "Black" figure to create another kind of voice, in this case through a sort of strange mélange of dialect and argot. At least she is given a few full sentences ("We Eastern women love the sun...! When de thermometer rise to some two hundred or so, ah dat is de time to lie among de bees and canes.").

     The rest of the figures utter half sentences, phrases, overheard remarks. Most of this work is so utterly fragmented that—although we glean that the conversation is usually about societal behavior and love—the meaning and significance of the dialogue is impossible to detect.

     Mixed with Latinate sentences, French phrases (some of them poorly put together), and an occasional German word or two, the fragments coming from these figures' mouths is less a dialogue than a series of signs, linguistic clues to what might or might not have happened: 

 

                There uprose a jargon of voices:

                "Heroin."

                "Adorable simplicity."

                "What could anyone find to admire in such a shelving profile?"

                "We reckon a duck here of two or three and twenty not so old.

             And a spring chicken anything to fourteen."

                "My husband had no amorous energy whatsoever; which just

             suited me, of course."

                "I suppose when there's no more room for another crow's-foot,

             one attains a sort of peace?"

                "I once said to Doctor Fothergill, a clergyman of Oxford and a great

             friend of mine, 'Doctor,' I said, 'oh, if only you could see my—'"

                "Elle était jolie! Mais jolie!...C'était une si belle brune...!"

                "Cruelly lonely."

                "Leery...."

                "Vulpine."

                "Calumny."

                "People look like pearls, dear, beneath your wonderful trees."

 

This goes on for several pages, and such passages dominate the entire text.

     At several other moments we overhear the whispered conversations of servants:

 

                "Dash their wigs!" the elder man exclaimed.

                "What's the thorn, Mr. ffines?" his colleague, a lad with a face gemmed

              lightly over in spots, pertly queried.

                 "The thorn, George?"

                 "Tell us."

                 "I'd sooner go round my beads."

                 "Mrs. Hurst cut compline, for a change, to-night."

                 "...She's making a studied toilet, so I hear."

                 "Gloria! Gloria! Gloria!"

                 "Dissenter."

                 "What's wrong with Nit?"

                 The younger footman flushed.

                 "Father Mahoney sent me to his room again," he answered.

                 "What, again?"

                 "Catch me twice—"

                 "Veni cum me in erra coelabus!"

                 "S-s-s-s-s-s-sh."

                 "Et lingua...semper."

 

At least we can sense what's behind their gossip, namely the sexual attacks of the priest on the young footman; but just as often these conversations offer up no real information.

     Similarly, there are passages of fragmented readings, the one below listened to by Mrs. Hurstpierpoint between the Aves of her beads:

 

                   Music, she heard. Those sisters † a ripe and rich marquesa † strong proclivites †

                   a white starry plant † water † lanterns † little streets † Il Redentore †

                   Pasqualino † behind the Church of † Giudecca † gondola † Lido † Love †

                   lagoon † Santa Orsola † the Adriatic——

 

Again, we get the idea, the satiric mix of the sacred and the mundane, a romantic love story set against the movement of the prayer beads, but there is no other significance, and even that has been revealed to us through signs and symbols.

      Niri-Esther speaks throughout in a language of her own, using phrases such as "Chakrawakt—wa?" and "Suwhee?" A passing drunk sings an entire song in a near-nonsense language:

 

                      "Lilli burlero, bullen a-la.

                       Dar we shall have a new deputie,

                       Lilli burlero, bullen a-la.

                       Lero lero, lili burlero, lero lero, bullen a-la,

                       Lero lero, lilli burlero, lero lero, bullen a-la.

 

                       Ara! but why does he stay behind?

                       Lilli burlero, bullen a-la.

                       Ho! by my shoul 'tis a protestant wind.

                       Lilli burlero, bullen a-la.

                       Lero lero, lilli burlero, lero lero, bullen a-la,

                       Lero lero, lilli burlero, lero lero, bullen a-la

 

                       Now, now de heretics all go down,

                       Lilli burlero, bullen a-la

                       By Chrish! and Shaint Patrick, de nation's our own—

 

Similar songs appear in his other works, this little gem from Prancing Nigger:

 

                       " I am King Elephant-bag,

                         Oh de rose-pink Mountains!

                         Tatou, tatouay, tatou..."

 

     My point in mentioning these numerous fragmented passages (and I might have selected nearly any page in Valmouth for examples) is that it is clear Firbank is not at all interested in telling or even circuitously conveying a story. His pleasure is in language, not in fiction. Even when he has set up a scene, as he does at the end of the book, gathering all the work's figures together for the marriage of Niri-Esther, the Black Tahitian princess, to the fair-haired inheritor of Hare Hall, Dick, nothing comes of it, as Dick suddenly disappears from the scene and book and, while the community impatiently awaits within the church, Niri-Esther, wandering out-doors to follow a butterfly. The work ends with no attempt at conclusion or even suggestion of one. Absolutely nothing happens. It is as if Firbank were toying with any reader who might seek an interrelated narrative.

     Yet, Firbank's works, for some—for me—are highly enjoyable, delightful forays into linguistic silliness, as somehow both the old and the young of this work come together again and again to talk, to share idle gossip, gripes, complaints, and tales of illicit or imaginary love. Although we never know the full content of any of these, we can—the author requires it of the reader—fill in the blanks, turning Firbank's characters' words into our own desires and disappointments. In short, anyone coming to Firbank expecting a story, a kind of "novel"—no matter how one defines that—will be disappointed. For Firbank is closer to being a poet than a storyteller, a man interested more in the play of language than in what it means.

 

Los Angeles, July 28, 2011

Reprinted from Or, No. 7 and PIP Poetry Blog. 

Kathy Acker | Literal Madness: My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Florida / 1988

grandmother to the brat pack

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kathy Acker Literal Madness: My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Florida (New York: Grove Press, 1988)

 

After reading Literal Madness I have become convinced that there are at least two Kathy Ackers. One, the well-known punk celebrity, author of purposely styleless prose, might be described—in the context of our cultural vulturism, wherein we currently embrace the new (artists under 30) and abandon the old (artists who create for more than five years)—as a grandmother to the "brat pack," the current literary celebrities of a New York publishing scene desperate to keep the myth of bad boy/girl author alive.

     Suitably, this Acker has chosen, as her subject of the first of two novels included in this book, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Rimbaud of the 1960s generation, who was bludgeoned to death in 1975 by a young man who Pasolini may or may not have sought out for a sexual encounter. In Acker's version it hardly matters. For Pasolini is not really her focus but serves as an emblem of the position in which she would place herself: a political-sexual being who writes from a need to express those issues in action rather than the desire to create an aesthetic object.

     As for Pasolini, sex, language, and violence are Acker's themes, which through a collaging of madcap renderings of scenes from Shakespeare, an absurdly intense correspondence between the Bronte sisters, ridiculous parodies of German Expressionist theater of the 1920s and of the present-Situationist aesthetics, and personal memories and asides, Acker explores from a multitude of perspectives. Through such radical shifts Acker prods the reader, as a child might a chameleon, to re-adapt to each new backdrop, demonstrating his own colors—political and sexual—in the process.

    If this sounds like a "profound experience," Acker means it as such. With graduate seminar precision she drops statements into her humorous blending of porn and corn such as the following: "Language is more important than meaning. Don't make anything out of broken-up syntax cause you're looking to make meaning where nonsense will. Of course nonsense isn't just nonsense." An interesting concept. But for those who seek in Acker's writing a true exploration of "broken-up" syntax, her writing will be a disappointment—unless by broken syntax Acker means her insistent investigation of jargon, cliché, and stereotype with language such as "Huh" and, Romeo speaking this time, "As an upper-middle-class Jewish boy, I'm trying to do what's right by my wife."

     For the most part, Acker's language, in part because of its constant shift of context, its borrowings—the veneration of plagiarism she expresses—doesn't allow us to comprehend the values of her language, good or bad. All becomes equal in this Acker's satiric hands. We are forced through Acker's devices to comprehend how different languages affect and manipulate us. But are some languages, some ways of communicating, richer than others? Are there languages—languages of politics, sex, even of violence—which we can speak that open ourselves more fully to one another? This Acker doesn't really seek such answers; her transparent narrative collage of forms and content merely elicits such questions.

     But there is another Acker, a writer of the late 1960s and 1970s of The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, who is represented in Literal Madness by Kathy Goes to Haiti. And this Acker presents us with another kind of writing, a writing that shares some of the same methods and concerns, but speaks to us out of a delightful mock-naïveté that reminds one at times of the Dick and Jane readers rewritten as manuals for politics and sex. Here Acker presents herself less as the naughty semiotician lecturing the MLA in leather tights than as a sort of drugged-out Judy Garland, perpetually announcing, as she does in Kathy Goes to Haiti, "I just want to see Haiti." And see Haiti she does.

     Through the eyes of the various men who follow her about, each demanding of her that he become her "boyfriend," Acker explores all the political, social, and sexual ramifications of this colonial culture. When Kathy falls in love with Roger, the son of the wealthy land baron le Mystere, we are treated to a wonderfully insightful portrayal of corruption and power of the world dominated by Papa Doc. By the time she visits a voodoo doctor to free her of the spell cast over her, the young wide-eyed seeker of adventure, who throughout the novel keeps searching for an American to speak to, finds herself singing in a language she does not understand.

     In writing of the sort found in Kathy Goes to Haiti, we recognize that Acker has been able to fuse languages, to bring different languages together in a simultaneity that encourages the reader to read everything, as the voodoo doctor keeps insisting about his actions, as if it was the most important thing in life. Nonsense isn't just nonsense in this work, and Acker is able to engage the reader accordingly in a fable that is at once hilarious and terrifying, that has all the logic of a Caribbean tour and a nightmare combined.

     And this is the Acker I prefer.

 

Los Angeles, 1988

Reprinted from Los Angeles Times Book Review, Sunday, February 21, 1988.

Mohammed Dib | Omneros || Who Remembers the Night || The Savage Night || L. A. Trip: A Novel in Verse / 1978, 1985, 2001, 2003

a quiet man in the vast and chattering desert 

Mohammed Dib Omneros (containing Formulaires and Omneros), translated from the French

by Carol Lettieri and Paul Vangelisti (Los Angeles: The Red Hill Press, 1978); Omneros (without the other text) reprinted (Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 1997)

Mohammed Dib Qui se souvient de la mèr, translated from the French by Louis Tremaine as

Who Remembers the Sea (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1985)

Mohammed Dib La Nuit sauvage, translated from the French by C. Dickson as The Savage Night (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001)

Mohammed Dib L. A. Trip: A Novel in Verse, in French and English, translated from the French by Paul Vangelisti (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003)

 

I first “met” Mohammed Dib in correspondence concerning our planned Poets’ Calender in late September 1996. He responded in October, contributing three short poems, and soon after, in January 1997, sending a photograph for use in the book. I have the feeling that we communicated long before that—certainly I had been interested in his work for years before I wrote him, having read his only novel translated into English, Who Remembers the Sea. But these letters and notes are the beginning, in my files, of a fairly regular correspondence, in which I also sent him various Sun & Moon books and our translation journal, Mr. Knife, Miss Fork, and my large anthology of American poetry, From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990.

    Over the years he wrote to me, in both English and French, in a short note of January 1997, thanking me for the anthology and noting that he had met John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Bukowski. Another short note, this in French from November 1997, speaks of Guy Bennett’s upcoming re-publication of his collection of poems, Omneros (first published with Formulaires by Paul Vangelisti in a translation by Vangelisti and Carol Lettieri on Paul’s Red Hill Press in 1978). Dib also sent me books, including Le Talisman, Feu beau feu, and L’Enfant-Jazz. It was clear to Dib that I was interested in his work, and it was only a matter of finding a good translator and the right work for Sun & Moon or Green Integer to publish.

      Unfortunately, the Poets’ Calender was never published, but we did later print a short story he had sent us in 1001 Great Stories, Volume 2. And throughout the early years of the millennium, we kept regularly in touch, exchanging publications. At one point in 2000 Dib wrote me, asking if I might send him a map of Los Angeles (I sent him the indispensable, voluminous Thomas Guide of the greater Los Angeles area) and a book of photos of Los Angeles. I searched for an appropriate collection of Los Angeles photos, but was unable to send it before he notified me he’d discovered one himself.

      By 2002, I had discovered that his desire for these publications had to do with his writing L.A. Trip, a work about his Los Angeles experiences from 1974, when he lived in the city as Regents Professor in the French Department of the University of California—Los Angeles. He had also asked Paul Vangelisti to translate this new work into English, and when Paul suggested that Green Integer might publish it, I quickly agreed. We signed an agreement with Dib, and attempted to collaborate on a joint bilingual publication with his French publisher, Éditions le différence. For some reason the French decided not to publish with the English text, despite Dib’s own insistence upon a bilingual edition. Indeed, the work, in part, is about the two versions sitting side by side. So we went ahead with our publication plans, preparing to issue our dual-language version in 2003, the same year as the French only edition appeared in Paris. Dib was preparing to travel to the United States to celebrate the American publication, and Paul was excited to get the chance to greet his old friend again, and I to meet the author in person.

 

      It came as a shock to us all, accordingly, to receive the news that on May 2,  Dib had suddenly died. We knew he had long suffered from diabetes, but he had seemed a lively octogenarian, and we knew he had long been looking forward to his American voyage.

      Born in Tlemcen, Algeria, Dib attended a school where he learned French before he studied Arabic. Although raised as a Muslim Dib never attended the traditional Koranic school. His father, a carpenter, died when Dib was young.

     Already at the age of fifteen, Dib began to write poems, while working from 1939 to 1959 at various odd jobs, including teacher, accountant, weaver, interpreter, and journalist. During World War II he studied literature at the University of Algeria, and from 1950-51 wrote for the newspaper Alger républicain and Liberté, the Algerian Communist Party paper.

     Dib’s first major work was the novel La grande maison, the first book in a trilogy, published in 1952, two years before the outbreak of the Algerian War for Independence, L’Incendie (1954) and Le Métier à tisser (1957) representing the other two volumes. These years from 1954 to the war’s end had a profound impact on Dib, and several of his books throughout the period reflect his wartime experiences, particularly his novel of 1962, the year of Algerian independence, Qui se souvient de la mèr (Who Remembers the Sea), the only of his longer fictions to be published in English. The difficulty in living in Algeria while writing in the oppressors’ language of French eventually led him to leave his home, settling outside of Paris in 1959.

     Many of Dib’s fictions use more traditional narrative techniques to describe the socio-political issues of the day; but influenced as he was by Cubism, science fiction, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and Jung, Dib gradually moved away from realism, writing from mythic or dystopian visions.

     This is particularly true of his great war-time novel, Who Remembers the Sea. For those of later generations, the Algerian War of Independence may not evoke many memories. It is important to understand that it was one of the first and most important of decolonization wars, a war which was fought through guerrilla warfare, retaliation, and terrorism that would later define Arab terrorist acts.

What began on November 1, 1954 as a guerrilla battle of the National Liberation Front against military installations, police posts, warehouses, and communications facilities—a national struggle for the “restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic, and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam”—would end with over 300,000 (the Algerians place that figure at 1.5 million) people dead and over 2 million Algerians uprooted, many later dying of starvation, disease and exposure. Both sides extensively used torture, but the French were particularly effective, arguing, like the American government today, that the prisoners of this war lay outside the controls of the Geneva Convention. Mass rapes, the submerging of prisoners in freezing water or excrement and the repeated use of electric shocks were extensively used as tools of torture. After the war Paul Aussaresses, then director of the French secret service in Algiers, admitted that over 3,000 prisoners considered to have “disappeared” were, in fact, tortured and executed. These facts and their implications for French culture created divisions that exist still today throughout France and the Arab world.

      It is notable, accordingly, that Dib’s novelistic presentation of these events are not at all presented within a realist context. The narrator describing the war-torn city spends many of his hours at a regular meeting place, a café, where various friends and he discuss, often quite obliquely, the daily horrors of the war. Much of his energy is used up in simply getting to the café and returning home, during which he and others are attacked by strange bird-like creatures called (in Dib’s own vocabulary) “spyrovirs” and “iriace,” science-fiction like-beings which, like rockets and low-flying cruisers, terrorize the citizens of the city, often cornering them in cul-de-sacs and squares. At home the narrator is equally greeted with the moans, cries and gossip of the women. The peaceful and placid roar of the sea seems to have abandoned them, as they lie awake each night, counting the numerous explosions and blasts, imagining the torture and murder of their own people.

      Dib’s innocent narrator is clueless, unable to even recognize, at first, that his wife is clearly involved in terrorist acts, as she disappears for long periods of time, leaving their children with neighbors or her husband. Yet he is comforted by her, upon her returns, and able to continue as much as possible in his daily routines. It is only upon her apparent death, when she does not return, that he must seek out the secret entrance to what he has begun to perceive as an “underground city” as vast as the city above it, which represents, perhaps, either escape or death. It is only as he seeks the entrance to that invisible city that he comes to perceive the seemingly innocent café as the center of the world of terrorists and spies.

     In a Postface to this novel, Dib attempts to answer why he has treated the horror and misfortune of the Algerians in such an abstract matter, and calls up Picasso’s great painting of the Spanish Civil War Guernica as an example of how art can perhaps be more moving and representative of reality in its abstraction as opposed to a realist presentation. Putting his own suffering and that of his country in context, Dib poignantly asks a question all 20th and 21st century writers must face: “How can one speak of Algeria [or any other suffering culture] after Auschwitz, the Warsaw ghetto, and Hiroshima? What finally can one do in order that what nevertheless there is to say can still be heard and not be absorbed by what that great demonic cloud that has for so many years been floating above the world, not surround us?”

 

    In this sense, we perceive many of the voices of Dib’s fictions and poems as being quiet declarations (Dib describes poetry itself as “silent music”) against what he describes in his later book of stories The Savage Night, as “the vast and chattering desert that has spread over a large part of the planet.” If art has any nobility, he argues, it is that it helps us survive this painfully revelatory clatter of the hate, horror, and meaninglessness that overcomes even the gentle throb of the sea.

      Accordingly, many if not most of Dib’s characters, no matter how glib and experienced they see themselves to be, ultimately turn to quietude in order just to survive. There is no more apparent example of this than the modern Algiers couple of his story “The Detour,” a man and a woman, Ben and Soraya, who artfully steer their expensive Mercedes from the Algerian town they have been visiting back to their city home. A detour sign sends them inland, into the desert, where suddenly the road comes to an end, and their magnificent machine becomes stuck in the sand. Night is approaching, so the couple set out toward a distant light, meeting up with a seemingly pleasant enough native who takes them to his home and feeds them. The next morning, as they wait expectantly for help in freeing the car, the couple is taken away to a pit, where an orator declares them to have been brought to the small village by “the hand of god.” The village—arid, barren, desolate—has suffered for years, and now the natives hope to free themselves from what they perceive as an evil spell by sacrificing the couple. The story’s final revelation is as shocking to this sophisticated couple as it is the reader:

 

            This time, Ben didn’t hold himself back—he allowed his great, bellowing 

            laughter to ring out. But before he could dry his eyes, another group of 

            ruffians threw Soraya into the bottom of the pit with him. She landed nearby 

            without uttering a sound, as if she were already dead. Immediately afterwards, 

            a lid made of wooden beams lashed hastily together was pulled over the 

            mouth of the hole. Ben listened as huge boulders were rolled into place 

            over their heads.

 

     The title story of this collection, “The Savage Night,” relates the tale of a wealthy brother and sister, Nédim and Beyhana, as they travel the streets of their city via bus from their beautiful villa to a poorer section of town to release bombs in a local restaurant in an act of terrorism. Behi escapes, but Nédim is shot, and she is forced to carry him long distances through the streets while the military seeks them out until she can find a conveniently isolated spot. So intense is their love for one another and their complete belief in their cause, that even today, when we recognize the total savagery of such acts, we can only sympathize with the young couple as the brother gradually slips into death and Beyhana—still living years later in the villa she has attempted as a youth to escape—is doomed to a life of terrifying memories.

     In another of Dib’s ironic tales, “A Game of Dice,” two young radicals break into the house of an older man with the intention of killing him as they have been ordered by their superiors. But the old man, armed with a gun, shoots and kills one of the boys, betting the other his life with the roll of the dice. Despite his recognition that reason will have little effect on this young automaton—a boy whose life has been so denigrated that he has no comprehension of the value of living—the man attempts to inculcate in the youth some sense of moral values. When the boy is finally let go, he enters the streets where life is held so cheaply that he is shot at by his own cohorts.

      Perhaps one of the most humorously dark stories of this book most clearly demonstrates the silence inflicted upon anyone with something of importance to say. Sitting in a suburban Paris café, the author/narrator overhears a conversation between two men—who in the U.S. we might describe as rednecks—Gilbert and Marcel. Marcel loudly discusses the news he has just heard, that all “the dark skins,” “the wogs, the spades, those maguerrebin hustlers” have suddenly left the city en masse. Where they have gone no one knows, but it is clear to him that, while their exodus has long been sought, they have no appreciation for the cultural advantages that France has afforded them.

     Bemused but also startled by this strange information, the narrator—who like Dib does not look like the “maguerrebins”—has no choice but to remain silent in response to this absurd discussion. Ultimately the two men, glad to be rid of “those bastards,” seem to miss their former neighbors:

 

                     Shit! Why in the hell did they up and leave? What’d they have

                     against us? I just don’t get it. Our country wasn’t good enough

                     for them? They’ll have nothing but dirt to eat back where they

                     come from, I can tell you that much. The bastards! I had a few of

                     them right next door to me. I got along just fine with them. Think

                     I should’ve told them to stay?

 

“It’s gonna seem awful empty, that’s for sure,” Gilbert replies. Dib’s narrative comically reveals the frustrations of those French citizens living at the fringes of their own culture, of having a voice without a voice.

     In this respect Dib has represented one of the major writers speaking for cultures dominated by or immersed within other cultures. Like the underground city of Who Remembers the Sea, these “conquered” cultures and their spokesmen do not completely disappear, but change within their new worlds, transform themselves and the worlds around them in quiet reinterpretations of history, retelling history within what Dib describes as the “crypto-spaces,” creating a kind of shadow history (“If Tolstoy is history,” notes Dib, “Dostoevsky is the shadow”). It is clear that this kind of rereading of culture is precisely what Dib had in mind by writing the bilingual “novel in verse” L. A. Trip. Like the narrators of so many of his works, the author, in recalling his stay in Los Angeles, speaks in fragments, witnesses rather than reveals. But bit by bit we see a city, described—like Dib’s friend and translator Paul Vangelisti’s magazine of the period—as “invisible,” transformed by the images of Dib’s imagination; a small Black boy with his back turned to the author, a passing dog, a ringing bell, a dove, a beautiful woman named Jessamyn with whom the author obviously has fallen in love, the sounds and emptiness of his sleepless nights gradually build up an American landscape—Dib’s American landscape. As he notes in the very first poem/chapter, appropriately titled “Those American Things,”

 

                     Things will open

                     their eyes by themselves.

 

                     He is silently disturbed

                     by their silence. He,

                     dying of longing.

 

                     Those things at hand.

                     He who was for them no stranger,

                     who prowled around the. No.

                     Not distressed. Silent.

 

                     Then from being unknown

                     they draw closer

                     for his longing to live here.

                     He is silently disturbed.

 

By the time he “moves off in silence” at the end of the poem, he has become a kind of faux

American, a kind of Black-hipster cowboy singing the Blues. The final “chapter” appears only

in English:

 

                   You know, the man can’t help it

                   but feel bad, yes just feel bad.

                   So long, ma’am Jessamyn, so long,

                   Lord, I just couldn’t help it.

                   There ain’t no use crying, yeh Sir,

                   that’s gospel true. Let’s us git.

                   So long, ma’am Jessamyn, so long.

 

So long, Mohammed, we will miss you, miss the re-discovery of who we are in the crypto-space, in the eyes of such a sensitive and observant “stranger.”

 

 

Los Angeles, November 29, 2003

Reprinted from Or, No. 2 (April 2009).