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The Black ScholarJournal of Black Studies and Research

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An Ars Poetica from the Blue Clerk

Dionne Brand

To cite this article: Dionne Brand (2017) An Ars Poetica from the Blue Clerk, The Black Scholar,47:1, 58-77, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2017.1264860

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2017.1264860

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An Ars Poetica from the BlueClerk1

DIONNE BRAND

Verso 1.12

There are bales of paper on a wharf some-where, at a port, somewhere. There is a

clerk inspecting and inspecting them. She isthe blue clerk. She is dressed in a blue inkcoat, her right hand is dry her left hand is drip-ping; she is expecting a ship, she is preparingfor one. Though she is afraid that by the timethe ship arrives the stowage would have over-taken the wharf.

The sea off the port is roiling some days,calm some days.

Up and down the wharf she examines thebales, shifts old left-handed pages to theback, making room for the swift voluminousincoming freight.

The clerk looks out sometimes over theroiling sea or over the calm sea, finding thehorizon, seeking the transfiguration of theship.

The bales have been piling up for years yetthey look brightly scored, crisp and sharp.They have abilities the clerk is forever curtail-ing andmartialing. They are stacked deep andhigh and the clerk, in her inky garment,weaves in and out of them checking and re-checking that they do not find their way intothe right-hand page. She scrutinises the mani-fest hourly, the contents and sequence ofloading. She keeps account of cubic metresof senses, perceptions and, resistant facts.No one need be aware of these, no one islikely to understand, some of these are quite

dangerous and some of them are too delicateand beautiful for the present world.

There are green unclassified aphids, forexample, living with these papers.

The sky over the wharf is a sometimish sky,it changes with the moods and anxieties of theclerk, it is ink blue as her coat or grey as thesea or pink as the evening clouds.

The sun is like a red wasp that flies in andout of the clerk’s ear. It escapes the clerk’sflapping arms.

The clerk would like a cool moon but allthe weather depends on the left-hand pages.All the acridity in the salt air, all the waft ofalmonds and seaweed, all the sharp poiso-nous odour of time.

The left-hand pages swell like dunes someyears. It is all the clerk can do to mount themwith her theodolite, to survey their divergentlines of intention. These dunes wouldenvelop her as well as the world if she werenot the ink-drenched clerk.

Some years the aridity of the left-handpages makes the air dusty, parches the handof the clerk. The dock is then a desert, thebales turned to sand and then the clerk mustarrange each grain in the correct order,humidify them with her breath and wait forthe season to pass.

And some years the pages absorb all thewater in the air becoming like four-hundred-year-old wood and the dock weeps andcreaks and the clerk’s garment sweepssodden through the bales and the clerkweeps and wonders why she is here andwhen will the ship ever arrive.

I am the clerk, overwhelmed by the left-hand page. Each blooming quire contains athought selected out of many reams ofthoughts and vetted by the clerk, then

© Dionne Brand 2017. All rights reserved.The Black Scholar 2017

Vol. 47, No. 1, 58–77, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2017.1264860

presented to the author. The clerk replaces thefile, which has grown to a size, unimaginable.

I am the author in charge of the ink-stainedclerk pacing the dock. I record the right-handpage. I do nothing really because what I do isclean. I forget the bales of paper fastened tothe dock and the weather doesn’t bother me.I choose the presentable things, the beautifulthings. And I enjoy them sometimes, if notfor the clerk.

The clerk has the worry and the dampthoughts, and the arid thoughts. The clerkgoes balancing the newly withheld pagesacross the ink slippery dock. She throwsan eye on the still sea; the weather is con-crete today, her garment is stiff like marltoday.

Stipule3

Over the course of my writing I have tried toarticulate what it is I think that poetry canaccomplish. In my practice in Poetry I havetried to produce a grammar in which Blackexistence might be the thought and not theunthought; might be. What I offer here is abrief consideration of Poetry’s diacritic possi-bilities for Black existence, for being in thediaspora: an ars poetica, a discourse on theart and practice of poetry, that performs theacts of reading and writing I am hoping to illu-minate. It is but a partial look at Poetry’scapacities for overwriting of the narratives ofnon/being in the diaspora. I am trying tothink my own way through to thesepossibilities.

Much in the way that diacritical marks sup-plement certain alphabets changing thesound, tone, or meaning of certain words,Poetry, in my formulation, changes what I

see as the racist alphabets of narratives—theprevalent modes of speech and key impedi-ments to Black being. I am proposing aradical indictment of Narrative. I think thatfor Black people, Narrative, as it is constitutednow, is incapable of transmitting or soundinga tomorrow, beyond brutalisation. It is incap-able of transmitting or sounding a present, atoday, since our lived today is cluttered in fre-quencies of oppression and responses tooppression. In the presence of our bodies allnarrative utterances are full of attention toracism, bracketed by racism, animated byracism; our language is noded, mined,secretly and publicly by racism. Self-refer-ence, self-description, are circumscribed bythe mined terrain of narrative.

Poetry, perhaps, with its capacities todeposit and unearth plural meanings, with itsrefusals of a particular interrogative gazemight cut out a space toward a description ofbeing in the diaspora. If we think about thereading practices that attend these twoshapes, Poetry and Narrative, I suggest thatthe reader interrogates Narrative but Poetryinterrogates the reader. And here is poetry’spower. The reader’s response is tangential topoetry, whereas it is crucial to narrative.Poetry requires a deciphering of meaningwhereas narrative enjoins, hails the knownworld. So I want to offer Poetry as a diacriticalto Narrative. A diacritical, that is to say, anoverwriting, a meaning displacement of whatChristina Sharpe has called the “dysgraphia”produced by the (resonating) historicaltragedy of the slavery of Black people in theAmericas. The ongoing “dysgraphia of disas-ter” Sharpe writes continues to be dissemi-nated “by way of rapid, deliberate, repetitive,and wide circulation on television, in social

Dionne Brand 59

media (and newspapers—the whole pro-duction of representation) of Black social,material and psychic death.”4 We know thisdysgraphia as also produced historically andin the contemporary through an abundanceof literary narrative, disquisition anddissertation.

I suggest that unwillingly and inadver-tently, narrative attempts at response to andrebuttal of the dysgraphia by those of uswho write against and in opposition to itnecessarily imports, albeit in order to refute,the language of the dysgraphia. Narrative is,to my mind, almost always implicated in thecolonial/imperialist/racist project—with bestefforts one writes back to, or against, first theexistence and then the persistence of thedominant narratives of coloniality, racismand imperialism. Character in narrative, inthis sense, and landscape for that matter, areweighted with whiteness as a fundamental/originary category. The Black body in narra-tive is always spectacular, always spectacu-larised, marked. The dysgraphia, ofdominant and of dominating narratives,unwrites, and makes incoherent, Black pres-ence as presence.

Our bodies are always active, alwaysenacting in the register of this narrative, or inthe register of what I call in Land to LightOn, “the hard gossip of race that inhabitsthis road.”5 So predicated this narrativelanguage compels us to answer in the samelanguage, struck through, enlivened by theaction of our bodies in race. We are fluentin that language, we often respond in it,taking apart the attacks of raced language byemploying the very dysgraphia. Interred innarratives of racism, we try to detonate themwith counter-narratives.We wait for narrative

to do what war should or might do. Thiscurious sentence. Yes. In a material war, hadwe summoned the equivalent of the literaryammunitions we have launched at racismour sovereignty would already have beenwon.We live instead in a language of conven-ience, of instrumentation, of stipulating thedysgraphia. We précis our lives and submitthe text to the dominant culture for inclusion.We are people without a translator. Thelanguage we use already contains ourdemise and any response contains thatdemise as each response emboldens andstrengthens the language it hopes to under-mine. It is always as if we will live tomorrow,live if, live only, and live when. The appre-hension of neverness, presentlessness, weexperience; of presentness in another world.This chasm between ourselves and ourselves.In effect, we narrate non-being. It is ourfluency in the raced vocabulary of narrativethat makes us so alarmed when our ripostesare neither heeded nor understood, and,when they do not result in the desired life; aliving. Narratives end in a rudimentary rep-resentation; continuous rudimentary rep-resentations of what Cornelius Eady soeloquently called the “Brutal Imagination”: acontinuous recycling of character, alreadyknown, already read, already, already in thezoo, in themuseum. If the premise of narrativeis our location in the dysgraphia, the work ofpoetry might dislodge us from these accountsof non-being.

I offer poetry’s diacritical as a critique ofand a remedy/cure for the fragmented Blackbody of narrative—whose modes of writing,modes of reading and modes of speaking,apply race language to Black presence, andin which, being in the diaspora, being in

TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 201760

history, is represented as impossible, andunviable

Since writing A Map to the Door of NoReturn, I have thought that the radicalmove would be to cease working in narra-tive altogether—to be silent; to see silenceas the radical project—unresponsive togossip, unmoved by violence, uninvolvedin exchanging death for less death, whichis the bargain of narrative. I had tried todescribe a location of being in Ruttier forthe Marooned in the Diaspora. This locationI imagined as the ground from which agrammar might spring. I saw/see theRuttier, then, as the ground of and thepreface to the diacritical.

Ruttier for the Marooned in theDiaspora

Marooned, tenantless, deserted. Desolationcastaway, abandoned in the world. Theywas, is, wandered, wanders as spirits whodead cut, banished, seclude, refuse, shut thedoor, derelict, relinquished, apart. Morewords she has left them. Cast behind. Fromtime to time they sit on someone’s bed orspeak to someone in the ear and that is whysomeone steps out of rhythm; that is whysomeone drinks liquor or trips or shuts oropens a door out of nowhere. All unavailableto themselves, open to the world, cut in air.They disinherit answers. They owe, ownnothing. They whisper every so often andhear their ownmusic in churches, restaurants,hallways, all paths, between fingers and lips,between cars and precipices, and the weightof themselves in doorways, on the legs oftrue hipsters, guitars and bones for soup,veins.

And it doesn’t matter where in the world,this spirit is no citizen, no national, no onewho is christened, no sex, this spirit iswashed of all this lading, bag and baggage,jhaji bundle, georgie bindle, lock stock, knap-sack, and barrel, and only holds its ownweight which is nothing, which is memorylessand tough with remembrances, heavy withlightness, aching with grins. They wander asif they have no century, as if they can boundtime, as if they can sit in a café in Bruggejust as soon as smoke grass in Tucson,Arizona, and chew coca in the high Andesfor coldness.

Pays for everything this one, hitchhikes,dies in car accidents, dresses in Hugo Bossand sings ballads in Catholic churches, under-water rum shops. This is a high-wire spiritladen with anchors coming in to land, devo-luting heirlooms, parcels, movable of nips,cuts, open secrets of foundlings, babes, igni-tions, strips of water, cupfuls of land, realestates of ocean floors and steaming asphaltstreets, meat of trees and lemons, bites ofCommunion bread and chunks of sky, subdi-visions of stories.

These spirits are tenants of nothing jointly,temporary inheritors of pages 276 and 277 ofan old paleology. They sometimes hold a lifelike a meeting in a detention camp, like asettlement without a stone or stick, like dirtyshelves, like a gag in the mouth. Their drygoods are all eaten up already and theirhunger is tenacious. This spirit doubling andquadrupling, resuming, skipping stairs andbreathing elevators is possessed with uncom-municated undone plots; consignments ofcompasses whose directions tilt, skid offknown maps, details skitter off like crabs.This spirit abandoned by all mothers, fathers,

Dionne Brand 61

all known progenitors, rents rooms that disap-pear in its slate stone wise faces. These peopleun-people, de-people until they jump over-board, hijack buildings and planes. They dis-inhabit unvisited walls. They unfriend friendsin rye and beer and homemade wine andforties.

She undwells solitudes, liquors’ wilder-nesses. This drunk says anything, cast awayin his foot ship, retired from the world. Thiswhisperer, sprawler, mincer, deaconess,soldier is marooning, is hungering, is unknow-ing. This one in the suit is a litigant in anotherhearing gone in the world. This spirit inhalingcigarettes is a chain along a thousand glisten-ing moss harbours and spends nights brood-ing and days brooding and afternoonswatching the sea even at places with no har-bours and no sea. This one is gone, cast offand wandering wilfully. This is intention aswell as throwaway. This is deliberate andleft. Slipstream and sailing. Deluge. Thesewander anywhere, clipping shirt-tails andhems and buying shoes and vomiting. Theseshake with dispossession and bargain, thenchange their minds. They get trapped inhouses one minute, just as anybody can,and the next they break doorways and sit incompany mixing up the talk with crudehonesty and lies. Whatever is offered orceded is not the thing, not enough, cannotgrant their easement, passports to unknowingeverything.

This spirit’s only conveyance is eachmorning, breath, departures of any kind,tapers, sheets of anything, paper, cloth, rain,ice, spittle, glass. It likes blue and fireflies. Itsface is limpid. It has the shakes, which ishow it rests and rests cutting oval shells ofborders with jagged smooth turns. It is an

oyster leaving pearl. These spirits have livedin any given year following the disaster, inany given place. They have visited shuttersand doors and thermal glass windowslooking for themselves. They are a prism ofendless shimmering colour. If you sit withthem they burn and blister. They are bonywith hope, muscular with grief possession.

Marooned on salted highways, in highgrass, on lumpy beds, in squares with lights,in knowledge plantations and cunningbridges grasping two cities at the same time.Marooned in the mouth where things escapebefore they are said, are useless before theyare given or echo. Marooned in realms ofdrift, massacres of doubt, implications. Mar-ooned where the body burns with longingfor everything and nothing, where it circlesunable to escape a single century; tenementsand restagings of alien, new landings. Mar-ooned in outcropping, up-crops of citiesalready abandoned for outposts in suburbs.Deserted in the fragility of concrete rooms,the chalked clammy dust of dry walls, therot of sewer pipes and the blanket of citygrates.

Marooned in music, dark nightclubs ofweeping, in never-sufficient verses, uncom-municated sentences, strict tears, in copperthroats. Where days are prisons this spirit isa tenant.

She moves along incognito on foot, retreat-ing into unknowing, retreating into alwaysorphanages, dew light, paradise, eclipses,bruised skies, atomic stars, an undeviatingever.

So if now and then they slump on beds inexhaustion it is hallowed pain. If they sink inthe ear it is subversions that change theirminds even before they are deployed,

TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 201762

unexpected architectures of ambivalentlonging, cargoes of wilderness. It is their soli-tudes’ wet desolations. If they finger a stringacross a piece of wood and a tremoloattacks a room, toccata erupt, coloratura satu-rate the walls, it is their lost and found derelic-tion. If virtuosity eludes them, relinquishesthem, cast away to themselves only, gapinglimbs and topographies, it is just as much spir-itoso, madrigal, mute chirping, ululating twi-light unvisiting.

It is now and she, they whisper in Walk-mans, in cities’ streets with two millionpeople gazing at advertisements. It is nowand he, they run his fingers over a moustacheflicking frost away, breathingmist like a horse.Cities and public squares and public placescorral their gifts of imagined suns and ima-gined families, where they would have beenand who they might have been and when.Cities make them pause and wonder at whatthey might have thought had it been ever,and had it been dew light and had it beensome other shore, and had it been time intheir own time when now they are out ofstep with themselves as spirits are. Electriclights and neon and cars’ metal hummingconvince them of cultivated gateways andgenerations of water, of necessities theycannot put back together. Their coherence isincoherence, provocations of scars andknives and paradise, of tumbling woodenrivers and liquid hills.6

Stipule

Within the life that the Ruttier describes arethe shifting grounds of provisional living,and half living. The being that comes intoview in the Ruttier is a being who might be

unavailable to the rules of character, who isuninterested in the fixed raced definitions ofmodernity and who refuses the efforts to reno-vate narratives of coloniality and imperialism.This being owes no exposition for their pres-ence, or actions, most certainly not to thatspectatorship. The clerk of my forthcomingwork emerges from the Ruttier making up anew inventory of the world ruptured by thedoor. The diacritical will write a true inven-tory beginning with small object and effects,with nouns and adjectives.

Verso 55

When I finally arrived at the door of no return,there was an official there, a guide who waseither a man in his ordinary life or an idiot ora dissembler. But even if he was a man in hisordinary life or an idiot or a dissembler, hewas authoritative. Exhausted violet, the clerkinterjects. Yes he was says the author, violetsnares. For some strange reason he wanted tocontrol the story. Violet files. Violet chemistry.Violet unction. It was December, we hadbrought a bottle of rum, some ancient ritualwe remembered from nowhere and no one.We stepped one behind the other as usual.The castle was huge, opulent. We went likepilgrims. Youwere pilgrims.Wewere pilgrims.This is the holiest we ever were. Our gods werein the holding cells. We awakened our godsand we left them there, because we neverneeded gods again. We did not have wickedgods so they understood. They lay in theircorners, on their disintegrated floors, they layon their walls of skin dust. They stood whenwe entered, happy to see us. Our guide said,this was the prison cell for the men, this wasthe prison cell for the women. I wanted to

Dionne Brand 63

strangle the guide as if he were the originalguide. It took all my will. Yet in the roomsthe guide was irrelevant, the gods woke upand we felt pity for them, and affection andlove; they felt happy for us, we were stillalive. Yes, we are still alive, we said. And wehad returned to thank them. You are stillalive, they said. Yes we are still alive. Theylooked at us like violet; like violet teas theydrank us. We said here we are. They said,you are still alive. We said, yes, yes we arestill alive. How lemon, they said, how bluelike fortune. We took the bottle of rum fromour veins, we washed their faces, we sewedtheir thin skins. We were pilgrims, they weregods. They said with wonder and admiration,you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen.

We all stood there for some infinite time.We did weep but that is nothing incomparison.

Stipule

And after that what do we need language todo? What might language be capable of ifwe think in and with it differently? What is

and might be the grammar of our being?Poetry’s diacritic force (like Coltrane’sVenus, or Charlie Parker’s Ornithology)allows, breaks open, explodes the languageof race power, registering the sounds of ourliving in the diaspora, the sounds of thealways possible world-space one lives.Poetry’s densities of multiple and newmeaning trouble the dysgraphia. The poemis concerned formally with the qualities oftime, materiality, and meaning and has noobligation or need, like the citizen of theRuttier, to attend to linearity or the representa-tive as is often the burden of narrative. There’sno compulsion to construct a world withinwhich character is loaded with the preemi-nent, presumptive, preemptive, preconditionof narrative. Story cannot account for exist-ence in our case. At least not story in thepresent dysgraphia. The citizen of the Ruttieris inattentive to the gaze of the reader. Otherquestions arise from poetry: when-ness,how-ness, what-ness. What poetry allows isthe removal of parts of speech so that a lifemay make sense to itself. In verblessness forinstance…

TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 201764

… from Ossuary 17

after consideration you will discover, as I,

that verbs are a tragedy, a bleeding cliffside, explosions,

I’m better off without, with vermillion, candles

this bedding, this mercy,

this stretcher, this solitary perfectable strangeness,

and edge, such cloth this compass

of mine, of earth, of mourners of these

reasons, of which fairgrounds, of which theories

of plurals, of specimens of least and most, and most

of expeditions,

then travels and wonders then journeys,

then photographs and photographs of course

the multiplications of which, the enormity of this,

and the drill-bits and hammers and again hand cuffs,

and again rope, coarse business but there

some investigations, then again the calculations,

such hours, such expansions, the mind dizzy

with leaps, such handles, of wood, of thought

and then science, all science, all murder,

melancholic skulls, such fingertips,

these chromatic scales, these calipers the needle

in the tongue the eyes’ eye, so

whole diameters, circumferences, locutions,

an orgy of measurements, a festival of inches

Dionne Brand 65

gardens and paraphernalia of measurements,

unificatory data, curious data,

beautiful and sensuous data, oh yes beautiful

now, of attractions and spectacles of other sheer forces,

and types in the universe, the necessary

exotic measurements, rarest, rarest measuring tapes

a sudden unificatory nakedness, bificatory nakedness,

of numbers, of violent fantasms

at exhibitions again, of walks, of promenades

at fairs with products, new widgets, human widgets,

with music, oh wonders,

the implications

then early in this life, like mountains,

already pictures and pictures, before pictures,

after pictures and cameras

their sickness, eye sickness, eye murder,

murder sickness, hunger sickness,

this serendipity of calculators, of footprints

with fossils, their wingspan of all time,

at crepuscules’ rare peace time, if only,

like water, in daytime, no solace, so, so different

from solitude, all solitude, all madness,

so furious, so numerous, the head, the markets,

the soles of the feet, so burnt, so thin

and the taste, so meagre, so lightheaded,

the cloud flashes, the lightning geometry,

the core of reflectivity so vastly, vastly vast

TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 201766

the wait now, lumens of aches, such aches,

the horizontal and the vertical aches of lightning,

its acoustics, loud pianos, percussive yet

strings and quartets, multicellular runnels yet and yet,

the altitude of the passageway, its precipitation

and grand arithmetic, the segments

the latitudes of where, where and here,

its contours, its eccentric curvatures,

so presently, angular and nautical, all presently

just fine my lungs, just fine,

hypothesis absolutely, but just fine,

why lungs, strange theory

oh yes and the magnitude of jaundice, trenches,

like war, continuous areas and registers, logarithms

so unexplainable, rapid scales, high notes

besides, anyway so thermal, atmospheric,

wondrous aggressions, approximately here,

elaborate like radiation and seismic, yes all over

the bodies’ symptoms of algebraic floods,

weariness actually,

weary with magnetic embryos

petals, yes petals of sick balm please, now yes,

for my esophagus, analgesics of indigo,

of wires, of electric shocks, why eucalyptus leaves

of course lemon grass, labernum, please, lion’s claw,

remedies of cloves, bitter bark,

still birdless though, worldless

Dionne Brand 67

asthma with blueness, then music,

gardens truthfully, truthfully nauseous gardens with

tonsured numbers, volumes of fibres, embroidery

and hair nets of violence, blue,

like machine guns, of course knives, extensions

of blueness, then wherever

same radiations, lines in the forehead,

tapers, electrodes, invisible to the eyes,

official hammers and corkscrews, official grass

official cities now for appearances after all this,

all these appearances, generous, for certain

scraggly, wan and robust appearances

assignments and hidden schedules of attendance,

a promise of blindness, a lover’s clasp of

violent syntax and the beginning syllabi of verblessness

TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 201768

Stipule

This is the space of poetry, the space that cutsthrough coloniality. What is the language thatdescribes this space; that language that doesnot take the address to modernity’s dominantcanon as its motivation; by that I mean it neednot underwrite its legitimacy through thevarious ways one (the author) strives for thislegitimacy by constantly making reference toeighteenth- or nineteenth-century English lit-erature and by inserting the enlightenment’smarking of the Black body in an attempt toreceive/procure a judgment of human onthat body. The assignment of the poet is mul-tiple—to bring that Black body into focus initself and for itself in a language for recordingthe space/time of that body. While the dysgra-phia speaks of the body’s fragmentation,poetry has the capacity to speak of its present-ness, its integrity.

Verso 1.1.1

When Borges says he remembers his father’slibrary in Buenos Aires, the gaslight, theshelves and the voice of his father recitingKeats’ Ode to a Nightingale; when my eyeslit on Borges’ dissertation on poetry, Ithought, I had no Library. And I thought itwith my usual melancholy and next myusual pride in being without.

And the first image that came to me afterthat was my grandfather’s face with hisspectacles and his weeping left eye and hiswhite shirt and his dark trousers and hisnewspaper and his moustache and his clipsaround his shirt arms and his note books andhis log books; and at the same moment thatthe melancholy came, it was quickly

brushed aside by the thought that he was mylibrary.

In his notebooks my grandfather loggedhundredweight of copra, pounds of chickfeed and manure; the health of horses, thenails for their iron shoes; the acreages of heli-conia and yams; the depth of two rivers; thelength of a rainy season.

My grandfather with his logs and notebookslived in a town by the sea. That sea was like aliquid page to the left of the office where mygrandfather kept his logs and his notebookswith their accounts. Apart from the depth ofthe two rivers, namely the Iguana and thePilot, he also noted the tides and the times oftheir rising and falling. And, the rain, thenumber of inches and its absence. Heneeded to know about the rain for plantingand for sunning and drying the copra. Andtoo, he kept a log of the sun, where it wouldbe and at what hour, and its angle to theearth in what season. And come to think of ithe must have logged the clouds moving in.He said that the rain always came in from thesea. The clouds moving in were a constantworry. I remember the rain sweeping in,pelting down like stones. That is how it usedto be said, the rain is pelting down likestones. He filled many log books with rainand its types: showers, sprinkles, deluges,slanted, boulders, sheets, needles, slivers,peppers. Cumulonimbus clouds. Or, Nimbos-tratus clouds. Convection rain and relief rain.Relief rain he wrote in his log book in hissmall office; and the rain came in from thesea like pepper, then pebbles then boulders.It drove into his window and disturbed hislogs with its winds, and it wet his desk. Andhe or someone else would say, “But look atrain!” And someone else would say, “See

Dionne Brand 69

what the rain do?” As if the rain were human.Or they would say, “Don’t let that rain comein here.” As if the rain were a creature.

Anyway my grandfather had a full andthorough record of clouds and their seasonsand their violence.

From under the sea a liquid hand wouldturn a liquid page each second. This pagewould make its way to the shore and makeits way back. Sometimes pens would washup onto the beach, long stem-like organicstyli. We called them pens; what tree orplant or reef they came from we did notknow. But some days the beach at Guayawould be full of these styli just as somenights the beach would be full of blue crabs.Which reminds me now of Garcia Marquez’sold man with wings but didn’t then as I did notknow Garcia Marquez then and our bluecrabs had nothing to do with him; it is onlynow that the crabs in his story have over-whelmed my memory. It is only now thatmy blue night crabs have overwhelmed hisstory. Anyway, we would take these pensand sign our names, and the names of thosewe loved, along the length of the beach. Ofcourse these names rubbed out quickly andas fast as we could write them the surf con-sumed them.

What does this have to do with Borges.Nothing at all. That is not what you meant tosay, the clerk says finally. I walked into thelibrary and it was raining rain and mygrandfather’s logs were there, and thewooden window was open. As soon as Iopened the door, down the white steps camethe deluge. If I could not read I would havedrowned. Now you are sounding like me, theclerk says. I am you, the author says.

Verso 14

Coltrane’s Venus and the Ossuaries’tercets

In Venus there are two basic elements theauthor says, the horn and the drums. Theyare working with doubleness all the time.There is one statement at the top. And thenthey begin to deconstruct the statement. Thedrum serves as pacing for the horn, but ithas its own investment in the statement. Soit holds underneath, but its own project is toalso find deconstructions. The drums, playedby Rasheed Ali structure the horn and is inturn structured by the horn. Coltrane workson the first declarative syntactical unit. It isnot declarative, the clerk interject, it is provi-sional, speculative, let us at least try to be asprecise as we can since… Fine says theauthor he works on deconstructing thatspeculative, provisional statement, structu-rally, and breaks it down technically. Whatis done becomes undone. Then he alsodeconstructs its emotion. If you listen to it, itis romantic but mournful, sophisticated andworldly; it is elegant. And he pulls thesenotions apart also, he tears the elegance toits limits, he mocks the mournfulness as notmournful enough and he drives the otherworldliness to its outer-worldliness. To myway of seeing says the clerk it is moreelegant when it is, as you say, torn apart. Soboth emotionally and structurally, the authorcontinues, ignoring the clerk’s interruption,hearing it only as a faint sound from theclerk, he pulls the statement apart. There’s apoint in the middle, four or five minutes of itwhere the project takes hold of him, wherethe music is fully realised as separate and

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sentient on its own. There is an uncontroll-ability to it, and you can hear it wobblingout, out, out, into distances and into a kindof unspeakable. At least in your language,the clerk objects. The former statement triesto return, to recover itself, to recover thatline, and it can’t—so much structural andemotional change has already been accom-plished. Happened you mean, says theclerk, so much has happened, says theauthor that the statement itself is now inde-scribable without its fragmentations. Itrejects its former self, as well as it acceptsthat somehow that self like a shadow isembedded in it, in him, at that moment ofcomplete disintegration. Venus is an exper-iment, like two travellers going out to anunknown, not the unknown, says the clerk,they are both moving toward another, muchmore open statement at the end.

To me, this is like our poemOssuaries. Thetercets are like Rashid Ali’s drums, consistent,sheltering, pushing; the three lines are com-pletely steady. They perform a range of actsof pacing. The tercet is conducting the ideas—the horn, the Ossuaries. You knownothing about musical structure, the clerksays. But I can hear the author says. I hear itas a liberatory rhetoric. Then should I be stillhere on the dock, says the clerk rhetorically,shouldn’t the ship have arrived, shouldn’tthis shoreline disappear?

The author ignores her again. The bitter-edged-ness, the global violence, one’s own vio-lence, the tercet anchors (anchors, anchors,anchors. The tercet anchors). What disruptsthe tercet is the meaning. It is not regulated byrhyme or equal metric length of line but bythe sense of infinity or possibility, in-between-ness. It is indivisible by anything other that

itself and one. The tercet is light, light as wellas heavy. It can hold weight, and surprise.

But if I haven’t said this already… Youhave said it, ad infinitum, mumbles theclerk… tripping along giddily, like a tercet.The tercet has guile. Like the body of asnake. Or on the other hand a triangle, or,less ambitious, the clerk joins, but morecunning, a bit of elastic. I could use a bit ofelastic. The next time you come by. I woulddye it blue like this paper. Only a small bitof elastic the clerk says. But the author is drift-ing off.

You don’t knowwhen it begins, and it endsyes as you say, but it doesn’t conclude.

Verso 16.3

Museums and corpses

The poet’s position, is only to point that out,not to say how we should go forward with it,but just to point out that all these laws so faronly ever address one arm, or one foot, overthe long term; they address one leg, onemouth; where one can sit, where one can eatwhere one can travel and so on. They leaveus, perhaps, just one-legged and one-footed,one-armed, sewing our vaginas, clawing ourfaces, cursing the presence of our bare heads.

I do know that the bodies that we inhabitnow are corpses of the humanist narrative.Awful corpses. And when we appear on thestreet, that is what we are appearing as. So, Ican only give you this view of it. We inhabitthese bags of muscle and fat and bones thatare utilised in the humanist narrative todemonstrate the incremental ethical develop-ment of a certain subject whom is not we. Weleave the psychiatrist’s office like the figure inRemedios Varo’s painting,Mujer saliendo del

Dionne Brand 71

Psicoanalista, with a little container of our truepossible selves held out at arm’s length in aplastic bag.

My job is to notice. Even as you are a livingobject of dead bones, you can notice it. Youcan’t sustain that double seeing for very long,otherwise, the body would truly collapse.The nineteenth-century human zoos; the cat-egorization of human bodies—that is when Ileft you, the clerk says, that is when I createdyou, the author says, that is when I createdyou, the clerk says, that is when you left methe author says. It is a short step away, fromhow we perform these bodies in the present.You are exaggerating and these exaggerationsonly pile up. The author says. I am exaggerat-ing? Look at the sky, the clerk beckons. Youare living your life, don’t be naturalistic, theclerk says. Where is the great arctic, theendless dark days the endless day-lit nights?However, if you were to stop for a minuteand observe yourself, you are merely the con-tainer for a set of cultural knowledges andpractices which go on without you, butwhich you are never without. They are like abag of… a heavy bag on you. How do I getout of this zoo?

Verso 19

Poema, poein, related to the Sanskrit cinoti,cayati, to assemble to heap up, to construct

You’ve left out a whole lot. Brathwaite,Carter, Carpentier, Spoiler, Kitchener. Andwhere you been last night Caroline.8 I can’tdo everything. That is what someoneassured me. She said, You can’t be respon-sible for remembering everything. But thoseare strange things to forget. Like heliconiaand ginger lily? No, like your fingers. Well

of course one forgets one’s fingers. Theysimply do what they do. I suspect othermotives, the clerk stabs.

Well, I think that poetry can expose the het-erogeneous qualities of a life, or of life, in anage when all efforts seem to, both corporateand State, seem to make homogenous. So, Ithink that poetry has the capacity to blowoxygen on a stiff existence, right? I mean,I’m saying that, but if you think of all themechanisms of communication and all theavailability of information, you’re thinking,well, that’s not particularly homogenous orthat’s not particularly stiff, or needing of atype of oxygenation. But, not true. I think itis stiff, because it is a repetition of the samething, over and over and over again. All theinformation about what a life might be, whata life might look like, how a life ought to belived, what one must want and desire, allthose roads are quite flattened out intocertain needs and certain tastes and certainwants. And that person, that human, hasnow become fairly describable, as someonewho is striving not to think too deeply aboutvery much, because everything is availableto them. All information is available, allhistory is available, all thought is available.Consuming is the obvious answer to life.This availability exists, but it really exists inthe brain; it doesn’t exist in the mind, andone is not actually living. One is rushingover it, or one has a landscape, but it isn’t alived landscape, all the details aren’t lived.I’m not sure where that was going… .

No, because I think that poetry does anumber of things on a number of levels.Like, a line of poetry does about five things,whereas a line of prose can do five things,but it has a full stop. You seem obsessed by

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the full stop, the clerk has beckoned with herdry hand, why not just leave it out of thenovel. I think the imperative, in a certainsense, for prose to satisfy chronologicallyand story-wise, makes prose unavailable tothe generative possibilities that a poem has;that obtains in poetry. You have never beenable to articulate this well or convincingly,each time you attempt it, I end up with thisincoherence and this uncertainty. The clerkbeckons to a thousand files, they groan witha sweep of her hand. I can think of hundredsof novels that contradict you. A baby wasborn next door, the clerk continues, as if weare talking about the same subject. I’m think-ing about making him my assistant. It is notthat prose can’t do it… I am being carefulhere, because as you say there are many,many works… I have written prose, and Iknow that it is possible to perform these gen-erative moves, these imaginative… all thosemoves in it, but essentially, you still owesomething to the reader, you know, under-standing, in ways that in poetry, you don’towe them that at all. It generates and gener-ates and generates and generates. It is a nego-tiation between what is said, what is writtenandwhat is withheld. And you are always bal-ancing this; so, if prose is on the continuumbetween what is written and what is withheld,it would be, perhaps, somewhere in themiddle, and poetry would be three-quartersof the way along that line in terms of the pos-sibilities of its withholding, and the possibili-ties of its revealing. What was the questionagain? I can’t remember.

Poetry has that ability to reconstitutelanguage in different associations: metaphor,trope, it uses that space. So, it can make yousee the then and the after, or the now and

the after, in interesting ways. It has no obli-gation to the present.

Verso 9

To furrow, a row, a file, a line. Inventory

The clerk is at the end of thewharf, the weatheris as aggressive as a metaphor. The metaphor,she’s talking to herself clearly, the metaphoris an aggressive attempt at clarity not secrecy.The poem addresses the reader, it asks thefirst question, it is not interested in thereader’s comfort nor a narrative solution. It isnot interested in your emotional expectations,or chronologies. It is flooded with the world.The great interrogation room is the stanza,you are standing at its door.

The clerk is at the end of the wharf, and theend… the weather is as aggressive as astrophe. The strophe is a turning and a turningand a resolute turning. After, after, after theworld is different. And after still, and after.

“Tell them I’m living in the world,” theclerk shouts at the author. “I’m talking aboutit next,” the author insists.

Verso 10.1

The idea of an Inventory9 of this overwhelm-ing came to me since an inventory would becapacious enough to carry what the poetknew or could know. An inventory is agape.One need only open a new logbook, theitems may be the same or disparate, one’sonly job is to list. That seemed the least Icould do given what I saw.

The grim list of the clerk begins, “Webelieved in nothing/ the black-and whiteamerican movies/buried themselves in ourchests,/glacial, liquid, acidic as love.”10

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Stipule

Without the violence of Narrative, she mightunmoor meaning in this terrain, she mightmake Black life legible, make Black life live.Incandescent smoke of a luminous flame.Let us begin here.

Verso 13

Blue tremors, blue position, blue suppuration.The clerk is considering blue havoc, bluethousands, blue shoulder, where these arrivefrom, blue expenses… the clerk hearshumming in her ears, blue handling sheanswers, any blue she asks the author, anyblue nails today? Did you send me as Iasked blue ants? The author asks, bluedrafts? Perhaps blue virus, blue traffic wouldmake a sense says the clerk, blue hinges,blue climbing, these would go togetherunder normal circumstances. The authoractually doesn’t hear a thing the blue clerksays under these circumstances when theblue clerk sits in the blue clerk’s placemaking the blue clerk’s language. Systolicblue, any day it will be blue now, reloadingblue, blue disciplines. The blue clerk wouldlike a blue language or a lemon language ora violet language.

Blue arrivals. Oh yes.

Verso 18.4.2

Lemon the clerk has collected: watch lemon,bay lemon, rare lemon, lemon distance,lemon steps, given lemon, lemon knot,lemon reach, lemon fast, lemon documents,lemon ethic, lemon funerals, lemon hold,

taken lemon, lemon elegies, lemonsummary, lemon pulley, lemon factors,lemon archives, what lemon, lemon acts,lemon nails, lemon steps, lemon crevasses,written lemon, lemon vanishing, lemondeposit, missing lemon, lemon contents,lemon debris, lemon gains, unassailedlemon, lemon sinew, uncertain lemon

Stipule

The poem is concerned formally with thequalities of time, materiality and meaningand has no obligation to the linear or therepresentative as is often the burden of prosenarrative. There’s no preeminent or presump-tive compulsion to construct or transport yourreader, only, simply to address them. Storycannot account for existence. Other questionsarise from a poem: when-ness, how-ness,what-ness. The clerk recites this from theauthor’s memoirs. When was I that naïve?asks the author.

Stipule

To calibrate sound, sense, discipline, passion,line, syntax, meaning, metaphor, rhythm,tone, diction, pressure, speed, tension,weight. Everything, everything, everything,the whole thing, in one line, in one moment,the clerk’s recitation continues. I depend onsomething so thin, says the author, so thin.

Verso 18.4.2

Violet the clerk has collected: violet hand,violet notes, violet coolness, violet edging,violet halls, violet finger, violet region, violet

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fuel, violet metre, violet breath, violet written,violet hatreds, violet hammer, violet bed,violet wires, violet arms, violet apples, violetdigits, violet washes, violet thyme, violet dialy-sis, violet records, violet scissors, violet palms,violet onion, violet speed, violet construction,violet fog, violet lane, violet yield, dry violet,half ton violet, cord violet, violet management,violet sleep, written violet, hung violet, violetsuspension, violet carburettor, violet labour,violet genocide, violet mud, violet lizards,violet chemical fences, violet chill, violetintended, violet taken, violet ambulances,violet incarceration, violent shoving, violetFebruary, violet field, violet episode, violetrails, violet reply, violet brassiness, violetblind, violet brick, violet cancels, violetspite, violet profession, violet shame, violetlimb, violet smoke, violet chest, violet rains,violet jars, violet pays, violet haunch, violetsticks, violet coast violet vein, violet teeth,violet gorse, violet escarpment, violet hoar-frost, violet museum, violet rues, violetrecovery, violet creek, violet carpool, violetrequirement, violet plans, violet openings,violet empties, violet asylum, violet criminal,violet angers, violet manuscripts, violet intro-duction, violet terminals, violet mainten-ance, violet fame, violet probations, violethours, violet snares, violet whimper, violetofficials, ample violet, violet chained, betterviolet, same violet, violet x-ray, violetbecomes, hidden violet, violet blunder,violet early, missed violet, violet itself,violet prescription, scabrous violet, violetthumbs, violet belief, violet riot, neverviolet, violet spur, intended violet, pinnedviolet, violet respiration, violet staples, dayviolet, exhausted violet, greyed violet,opening violet, violet gravity, violet help

Verso 18.4.2

Lemon the clerk has collected: watch lemon,bay lemon, rare lemon, lemon distance,lemon steps, given lemon, lemon knot, lemonreach, lemon fast, lemon documents, lemonethic, lemon funerals, lemon hold, takenlemon, lemon elegies, lemon summary, lemonpulley, lemon factors, lemon archives, whatlemon, lemon acts, lemon nails, lemon steps,lemon crevasses, written lemon, lemon vanish-ing, lemon deposit, missing lemon, lemon con-tents, lemon debris, lemon gains, unassailedlemon, lemon sinew, uncertain lemon

Verso 13.1

The clerk goes on. Black arrivals, oh yes,Black valves of Black engines, Blackcharges, Black spins, Black numbers, Blackoptions, Black equilibriums. Condensedsmoke of a luminous flame.

Verso 48

Violet. This is what the clerk thinks. Violethand, violet notes, violet metre, violethammer, violet bed, violet scissors, violet man-agement, violet speed, yes with violet speed,violet washers, violet sleep, violet percent,taken violet yesterday, violet incarceration,violet ambulances, immediate violet, violetlabour, intended violet, violet transcripts, sus-pended violet for now, violet cancels, blindviolet, violet schemes, reply violet

Verso 8

Two enigmatic bales of pages arrivedone day. The clerk was adding up the

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countervailing duty as she usually did onMondays. Mondays, because Sundays are abad time for the author. Just the sound ofBillie Holiday alone accounts for this. So thissurprising Monday when the clerk hadexpected the usual empty Monday ofadditions, two bales, one violet and oneblue arrived. The blue was not like the blueof the clerk’s garment rather it was a bluelike the blue off Holdfast Bay on the IndianOcean. The violet was indescribable. Howcan you describe violet? It melts. There wereno consignee marks, except blue and violet.

Verso 8.1

Violet rails, violet cancels, violet manage-ment, violet maintenance, the violet balebegan. Blue search, blue proceedings, bluediastole, blue traffic, the blue bale began.

Lighter than usual, the blue clerk tried tofigure out what to make of these.

Verso 19.1

Adjectiveless, the clerk thinks, balance, daily,no qualification, ink perhaps, sincerely. Dear.File 65. Attempt 197. The clerk needs aspanner, a vehicle, a bowl of nails, a wire, acup, a lamp. A lamp? Bring file 267. Attempt501. Handles.

Verso 0.2

Have you seen these, said the clerk. Someyears ago you collected them. They are richwith something. I don’t know what. Ofcourse I am being coy. You, as you say, livein place, but I, I live in time. The heapedand waiting life.

Verso 47

Why do you talk like that? Where did you getthat voice? It is evening on thewharf. Crepuscu-lar, as in Thelonious Monk’s Crepuscule forNellie. I collected it, said the author. Gatheredit. From everything, from the walks to andfrom schools, past funeral homes, past dump-sters, past canefields, past ladies selling flour,from gazing, from listening, kicking surf, beingtumbled in sand, being cut with nails andbroken shells, from running barefoot on hotasphalt, from quarrels, in noisy bars, in suicidalquiet, past gloom, with sugar, past trees withrangy leaves, pierced ears, with sour cherriesin the throat, wasps, ants, scraping ice on awindscreen, past water, cutlasses, sewers, afterWednesday, after spoons, when sleeping I col-lected the end of breathing, then salt, thenoranges, light switches, farine, from funeral par-lours, from cemeteries, from little streets, pastlong grass, razor grass, fever grass, brilliantmuscles oiled in sweat, from water, fromhearing, donkeys, bananaquits mostly, fromthe loneliest most poisonous smell of Cestrumnocturnum, from the sound of shaved ice withred syrup, bottles, broken bottles, greenbroken bottles, cane chairs, peppers. Stop.Why? You and your endless lists, why? I don’tfully know why. Must I? Why don’t we take iton the faceof it? Lists exist and theymaybecon-secutive or serial or alternative on the otherhand they may be important as exquisiteobjects on their own or as an alternate spellingof everything. As you say. I thought you wouldlike the idea of lists. To continue then why doyou speak that way? Because of water, the reefout there, the Fregata magnificens, look at theboiling turquoise, the sea’s albumen, becausethe throat fills with thick reeds, drowned fine

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pebbles, because of stairs’ gradient, the waycorn is disappearing, steep terraces. Graphemeteeth, on the cold walls and the stringy aortas, athousandmusics. It ismorning on thewharf, theauthor has gone on this way well into the nightand now it is morning. The author and the clerkspoke in their sleep.At timesnounswerehuntedby prepositions followed by an adjective. Theysat up suddenly like the dead, then lay downwith the anxiety of the thought that they werealive after all. The dock creaked, the papersbloomed blue letters. Their sleep was thejittery sleep of birds. They had long arms.Long, long arms. If only. Alphabets were usedup and used up and lay flat and slumped, anddisheveled of their normal shapes. It’s uselessto speak any other way, the author says in amorning voice. Useless, says the clerk. Thenight passed in more nouns.

Notes

1. This Ars Poetica is taken in part from thelonger forthcoming work, The Blue Clerk: An Ars

Poetica (Forthcoming 2017). The work is a conver-sation, a discursive poetic, between the Author andthe Clerk about that which is withheld and thatwhich is written. All Versos included are part ofthe work cited here.

2. A left-hand page of an open book; thereverse of something; the underside of a leaf.

3. A small leaflike appendage to a leaf, at thebase of the leaf stalk; the condition, the proviso ofthis ars poetica.

4. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Black-ness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2016).

5. Dionne Brand, Land to Light On (Toronto,ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1996).

6. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of NoReturn: Notes to Belonging (Toronto, ON: Double-day Canada, 2001).

7. Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (Toronto, ON:McClelland & Stewart, 2010).

8. Roaring Lion, Where You Been Last Night,Caroline.

9. Dionne Brand, Inventory (Toronto, ON:McClelland & Stewart, 2006).

10. Ibid.

Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist. Her poetry has won the Governor General’sLiterary Award, the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Pat Lowther Award for poetry, and the GriffinPoetry Prize. Her 10 volumes of poetry include: Land to Light On, No Language Is Neutral, Inventory,thirsty, and Ossuaries. Brand was poet laureate of the city of Toronto from 2009-12. Brand is also theauthor of five works of fiction. Her critically acclaimed novels include:What We All Long For (winnerof the Toronto Book Award), Love Enough, In Another Place, Not Here, and At the Full and Change ofthe Moon. Brand’s non-fiction works include Bread Out Of Stone and A Map to the Door of NoReturn. She is Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at University of Guelph,Ontario, Canada.

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