e krii?

Another quick announcement (although, since this blog venue seems not to offer the equivalent to the charms of Solibo's tamarind tree and Sucette's ka-drum, it's hard to know how many of you will gather here to read it): in any event, I have put some brief comments on your multigenre preludes, and I will be able to put them in my mailbox (in LA 133) by Friday at 11:00 in the event you want to stop by and pick them up. Do consider, as well, posting a teaser of your multigenre project here on the blog: this would not only allow everyone to get a glimpse of each other's projects, but it could also produce some cross-fertilization and maybe become a way for getting some ideas from your colleagues as to how you might use the course texts in support of your inquiry. It all depends, though, on whether there are any potential "e kraas" out there at this point! Anyway, just a thought!

I'm repeating myself in this instance, of course, but I always get jazzed by the way disparate texts end up speaking to one another in a class like this: thus my repeated reference to the fact that one intertext (from early in the semester) that sheds some useful comparative light on the situation and dilemma of the character of Chamoiseau, the "word-scratcher," is Blake's "Introduction" to the Songs of Innocence. As you recall, the piper in that poem is commanded first to pipe, then to sing, and then to write, and with each step in the sequence there seems to be a kind of diminishment that occurs (until finally the child vanishes when he sits down to write, and then he subsequently "stain'd the water clear"). Solibo warns Chamoiseau of a similar peril in moving from an oral to a written mode of expression, and the latter finally laments the situation: "In rereading my first notes from the time I followed him around the market, I understood that to write down the word was nothing but betrayal, you lost the intonations, the parody, the storyteller's gestures, and all of this was made even more unthinkable for I knew Solibo was hostile to it. But I called myself a "word scratcher," a pathetic gatherer of elusive things, like the draft through the wind's cathedrals" (158). Of course, without the efforts of the word scratcher we wouldn't have the novel, and Chamoiseau must be commended for making such a sonorous, musical, and rhythmic text, and for honoring the oral tradition in the process.

If you read through the novel again in light of my attempt to link it with Bakhtin and the carnivalesque, you'll undoubtedly find a good many passages that become newly relevant to you. The events of the novel take place during Carnival, of course, and the nature of those events, and the manner of the transactions between the witnesses/mourners and the police emerge from Bakhtin's characterizations: e.g., "The whole place soon began to resemble a market during the sale of red pepper. Screaming. Astonishment. Sympathies offered to the line of witnesses. Curses of mysterious origin in the direction of the policemen" (68). There are also the various references to laughter, including the "thick and greasy laughs" when "all were displaying molars" (62), laughter which often serves to undermine institutional power. And there's still so much more we could say about wakes and quiverings in the context of this novel, too. Given that this is a novel about the processual, fluid, and multiple nature of identity, how appropriate that it's focused on the transition between life and death; we're reminded that death induces us to look at life as a process of change, and brings with it a kind of poetics of liminality in which there are no easy answers or categorizations (which creates rich overlap, potentially, with Kay's Trumpet). These poetics call upon the performance of storytellers, too, and somehow I find myself thinking of the various itinerant bards we've encountered in this course: Mr. Tambourine Man, perhaps; the squeezebox singer in the Martin Sexton song we listened to; Mikey Smith (whose "Me Cyann Believe It" we'll listen to on Monday); Robert Johnson and then the crossroads bluesman in the O Brother film clip; Solibo; Medouze in the Black Shack Alley film clip; et al.

Finally, there are a good many wonderfully evocative and poignant moments of writing in this novel, which are worth contemplating in isolation. An example: "That scene lasted forever -- and could have gone on and on: a tafia-soused audience, sitting in a circle at the crack of dawn, does not inscribe itself in the ephemeral. But then, after eons (exactly three hours, thirty-eight minutes, and twenty-two seconds, says the coroner), a basaltic old man left the assembly and made toward Solibo. His name was Congo and he seemed to owe Death four centuries" (16). Or this one, on memory and grieving, and on storytelling's solace: "Sidonise, who had seemed for a few moments to be drowning in another world, starts to murmur an inaudible story. A strange smile transfigures her pain, her eyes follow the flight of internal visions. There is a prowling memory there, of those that death, in its tide, drains from our heads, our hearts, our dreams. Oh life plays hide-and-seek, never giving all of herself at once, but leaving to death's seasons the essence of her stems, her flowers' subtle perfume. There, through the small sherbet vendor, Solibo confronts our distress, dissipates it, as certain churches do the sadness of the devoted. Charlo' forgets his cheek and raises his inundated eyes" (78-9). Perhaps you have other examples that you would add to the list ...

Hope you enjoy Bel Canto this week & weekend ...