7TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 ::DAY 23:: BRENDA IIJIMA on ROBERTO HARRISON
Welcome to the OS’s 7th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 Series! This year, contributors far and wide were gathered by four incredible curators, who are also our 2018 Chapbook Poets — you can read more about their curatorial intentions, their work, and a little more about the mission of the series here. You can navigate to the series archive, of nearly 200 entries, here!
This week’s curator is Jared Schickling, author of Needles of Itching Feathers, who writes that:
When I was contacted about curating a week’s lineup for The Operating System’s 30/30/30 series, I was intrigued with the call’s multicultural and internationalist stance. Consequently, I sought out poets who I thought would offer in their contributions a plurality of cultural reference points. They didn’t let me down: Crane Giamo writes on Swiss artist Dieter Roth; Brad Vogler on French poet Eugène Guillevic; Brenda Iijima on Panamanian American poet Roberto Harrison; moi on Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert and Russian poet Dmitry Golynko; Marc Pietrzykowski on Japanese poet Ozaki Hōsai; Michael Farrell on indigenous Australian poet Lionel Fogarty; Michael Boughn on Canadian poet Garry Thomas Morse; and Noah Falck on American poet Graham Foust. I hope the reader enjoys their contributions as much as I do.
Yaviza, Roberto Harrison’s latest book, released by Atelos in December of 2017, comes on the heels of two other very recent full-length collections: Bridge of the World and Culebra, discussed with great lucidy here by Edgar Garcia and Jose-Luis Moctezuma:
I read all three books with great anticipation — and have followed Roberto’s sustained creative cosmology developed over the years through his other titles, Os, Counter Daemons and Bicycle. They each represent a significant aspect of Roberto’s revelatory mythopoetic oeuvre, impossible to summarize.
Yaviza reminds me, psychically in ways, of Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris’ Jonestown. Both texts are kaleidoscopic vision quests within aftermaths and continuations of violent colonial histories depicted in flashes of coruscating language, the post-traumatic stress of which is a hallucinatory trigger. With both these books disequilibrium shifts the surface tension of meaning at every turn. In Yaviza sentence clauses fuse with splintered fragments of a phrase. Subjects don’t necessarily relate to objects as sound-images buckle along a fault line below the surface of sense. The past weighs in as a presence with brutal evocation. Time is pulverized. We are in a continuous present proliferated with now, then and a foreboding expectancy that arrives as it dissipates.
An ethereal simultaneity suspended in the omnipresent involves the transformations of life and death as the coming into being and the forsaking into afterlives where residual pain fractured into innumerable pressure points create an empyrean map. A creation myth and a destruction myth woven into one another become heaven’s expanse. Opposites (and oppositions) are involved in what Harris calls “archetypal intercourse”.[1] Francisco Bone, the fictional narrator and lone survivor of Jonestown muses about time, “The Maya were torn by the notion of eternity’s closure of time and another shape to time, blending pasts and futures to unlock closure or pact or plot.” Bone continues, “The weight of charismatic eternity and a capacity to unlock closure became real and profoundly pertinent to me and to my age…I drifted into what seemed an abnormal lucidity upon chasms of time.”[2] Both Jonestown and Yaviza share an ontological latticework that draws on pre-capitalist notions of time and a utopian vision of post-imperial-capitalist time. I use the term empyrean instead of cosmos or heaven, because throughout Yaviza, numerology is significant. The number 7 is conjured frequently. The empyrean is the highest of seven heavens. There are 7 corresponding underworlds as well. This concept is at the core of many religious understandings. Yaviza, centered in a Panamanian symbolic universe is permeated by a diversity of ritual meanings and cultural signifiers. The ouroboros modulates death and life with its powers of eternal recurrence forever digesting itself in order to renew life. The ouroboros, when cannibalizing itself, is zero, null and void — out of time, yet filled with potential and completion. When the ouroboros stretches itself, it becomes a snake, curvaceous, flowing, like a river or like the shape of Panama itself. 7 resembles a snake. 7 resembles the isthmus that is Panama. The name of the nation state has been imposed on a geological location and of people whose name for their home has been obscured. 7 plus that which can’t be counted could be considered a hologramatic 8, and 8 resembles an ouroboros flexed over the void as a mesh.
The numbering and patterning of Yaviza are a chanted rhythmic undertone, “the exile of concatenations”[3] and “the violation of mathematics”[4] as meanings stress implications in humming continuity, one after another out of sequence. Pulsations of intention; meanings, as if flung, cling to adjacent energies that compel or resist attraction in each unique iteration. Wholeness is achieved through dispersal. Predicates fly away from subjects. Subjects claw their way toward endless horizons. Here I’m reinstating how the map of the empyrean map is drawn with Roberto’s imagination in a dizzying array of sequencing. “Each of us through counting,”[5] every phrase contains a number of breaths. The modulation of a phrase is a meditative practice. Time can be handled by articulations of sound, and time pings off the body. There is correspondence between counting and sense-making and worlding, a cosmic governing agency that mutates beyond recognition as it presences and ghosts origins and futurity. Maximal iteration as a form of “tentacular interconnectedness”[6] acts as a chant, a spell, and a rhythm. Michael Taussig, in his book The Corn Wolf, has this to say about incantation: “…incantation (by which I mean magical speech as with spells and prayers), can in itself be an engagement with the material life of things, uniting, so to speak, the human body with other bodies and the body of the world through the bodily unconscious.”[7] Numbers count out myriad poetic associations so that we feel the proliferation of fecund potential:
into the knots of the earth, we want that the count be neutral, and that two
sees itself in the seven, boiled to the East side of four, piledon top of zero, we were not pliant like a winter plume or do not
attend to the words as they circle us, phasingthrough your torsos [8]
Numbers and words are what Carolyn Merchant calls “dividable and rearrangeable”, thinking of her mechanical model of thinking about knowledge and information in terms of “natural order”. [9] Numbers are ontological framework — the bulwark that fortifies systems of logic. Diane M. Nelson’s book, Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide gives us ways to understand numbers as they… “retain their potential referrents across the registers, to words, things, bodily kinetic and spiritual powers.”[10] Yaviza engages numbers as computer programmed units and as culturally significant symbolic systems and arrangements. Numbers and their algorithmic applications become personal, move within mythic and transformative valences of sense. In Roberto’s trajectory I don’t sense a randomized serialization of imagery and numbers; rather, a pattern is worked out that discloses the complexity of an oracle. Conjugating electrons through a Salomic yogic practice to “solve the calculus of presence, we embrace each fabric of the monstrous”:[11]
A Sufi holds the water for the Sea. they try the four directions pushed into the color
woven tendrils in the creature made from visits to the origin of doubles, the home
of the reversals made to wander in the psychic fields amassed with ghosts.[12]
And Wilson Harris’ Francisco Bone who, hovering between Jonestown, the historical site of the event of a mass suicide, and the conceptualization of his Dream-book that takes him back to childhood, always his imaginative preoccupation within a memory-scape that reveals the pre + post-traumatic trajectories of human cruelty meted out in innumerable ways, figured as a Death Ship that carried historical traumas:
A rhythm of equations linked the ship to the Phallic tree to the leaf. Breath I dreamt I possessed — in which a leaf or feather from long-extinct Atlantean forests and species circulated — but as the Storm subsided I was unable to translate the Oracle of Chaos and its equations. Perhaps the Oracle took pity on me.[13]
These passages are near reflections of each other as images in a pool of water or semblances in a transglobal mirror transmitting versions and duplicates of appearance, portent, hallucinatory revelation. Reflection also is about what is hidden beneath the screen of projection. Here is a passage from Aime Cesaire’s “Commonplace” that shares too in a symbiotic, synesthetic connection:
admirable wound I lose my blood I lose my breath I lose my head and find it
again at the outfall of the digestion of great boa constrictors dear head I dress
you with the innumerable pinnules that allow me to break the violence of the
rain dear head I lose you again I lose my memory I don’t recover it don’t give
a damn since right where my mutilations are other limbs grow back.[14]
The perpetration and victimhood are not explicitly clear or are mingled beyond recognition within Yaviza. Legacies of violence interlace to form a dense understory of pain and abuse, but because specificities are fractured or constantly regroup kaleidoscopically, history’s contingencies are not grounded in an evidentiary timeline. Polarity is changeable. A fluctuating state of ambiguity allows for unforseen openings. Roberto’s scope includes the originary and the endless without summation. Taussig, again in The Corn Wolf, writes that, “Walter Benjamin speaks of ‘chips of Messianic time’, referring to what can happen when something from the traumatic past is suddenly brought into the present such that another world seems possible.”[15]
Conquistadors, beginning with Rodrigo de Bastidas in 1501, invaded Panama, then Columbus, followed by waves of Spanish colonists, Scottish colonists, then “absorption” by Columbia and its Viceroyalty (“absorption is my word for a confusing set of terms set into motion by Simón Bolívar who created a union among several South American nations”), and continually ruled by remnants of colonial aristocracy (I read that something like ten aristocratic families have pretty much ruled Panama up until the 19th century and onward), French financiering, followed by numerous economic and military invasions by the United States. The United States, as imperialist alpha, seems to be constantly involved at some level in Panamanian affairs, having invaded Panama twenty times since 1856 and conducted a decades-long program of secret weapons testing,[16] and can be intuited, but the text is not a condemnation — rather, I feel like at the heart of Roberto’s project is the hope of reworlding within catastrophe and a methodology of healing that is as much personal as it is an extension to everyone through time. A bridge, a deep inhalation of the awareness of suffering and an exhalation of peacefulness. This briefest of sequential historical ‘overviews’ I’ve documented doesn’t contain the complexity of the voices of the dead, the “ghost ontology based on day and night mounds and the archaic animals”[17] that carries far back in time, before the colonial name Panama was used to organize governmental control over diverse groups of indigenous people, former slaves, indentured workers and migrant populations. This is the work that Yaviza does, evoking the silences, occlusions and overrides that historical accounts by the empowered fail to account. Such a concentration demands a different listening capacity that doesn’t focus on facts or logics. What is at stake are the affective lineages through time of knowledge and presence.
Yaviza is a rush of cultural influences and time frames that reflect the complicated “mobius paths” and trajectories within Roberto’s lived history and the communal histories he participates in, from “the center of the egg of the world” and “archaic wandering” that traverse time and space. Meanings are internalized, held in the body, pushed through valves of identification, initiating revisionary focus and momentum. “Mabila was a town and the location of the (?) first major conflict between inhabitants here in North America and Europeans,”[18] and Yaviza, situated approximately 60 miles from its border with Columbia, is a small town located at the the northern half of the Pan-American Highway at the Darién Gap. At this point the roadway is impassable except for all-terrain vehicles, as a swath of mountainous rainforest encroaches on the Panamanian side and swampland surrounds the Columbian side. Developers are no doubt contemplating ways to defoliate the flora, earthmove the mountains and drain the swamps, so that the road can press through to South America in an unbroken line, so capital can move what it wants when it wants across distances, across power brokered borders unrestrictedly.
Unraveling like red thread, blood, black lines of tar, black birds in flight formation, gifs in cyberspace, and yellow strands of sunlight, the reflective sheen of a snake’s skin glistening in the jungle. Using red, black and yellow inks, Roberto’s line drawings that are scattered throughout Yaviza map psychic integration drawn by a phantom limb and/or embodied multiplicities. The drawings appear as clusters of lines balled up like interstellar clouds changing composition into what we can only fathom. Perhaps the frenetic trail a beetle makes, a repetitive circling around an attraction, in pursuit of a scent. Roberto’s bicycle paths of/through the corpus, the reverse applique of a Mola stitch resembling script, a generative living line bundling the sacred and profane into cognitive threadwork — Molas depict earthly and cosmic reality in manifold detail. Stitched to blouses, people adorn themselves with cosmological insight, channeling sentience in all forms. Roberto makes the drawings spontaneously on index cards. The lines never, as far as I know, touch the edges of the cards. The lines hover in the center of the white expanse. Sometimes the image seems to be splitting into two — cell division.
There’s an extensive essay-like section titled “tecumseh republic” that relates the psychogeographic movement in the book: “The Tecumseh Republic is borderless and permeates all worlds on some level. Tecs are boundary-less and inviolable. A Tec contains at least one and often many ghost souls. Tec lives are ritualized around the migration paths of inner animals. Their blood systems circulate together so they are never apart, and yet they dream constantly in solitude.”[19] Yaviza responds to Harris’ embedded question, “How does one build new architectures out of the rubble of traditions and out of diasporas across millennia”:[20]
as they move beyond the pattering rain
and fold their dogs and their offerings
as someone plants through each levelof glass aches, so that the writing will not
sever the others
to will without a netand suffer. give them everything
as they lose reception
and undo their armsfor the Sun[21]
[1] Wilson Harris, Jonestown, Faber and Faber, 1996. P. 119.
[2] Ibid. P. 5.
[3] Roberto Harrison, Yaviza, Atelos, 2017. P. 135.
[4] Ibid, P. 135.
[5] Ibid, P. 60.
[6] Donna Haraway: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/
[7] Michael Taussig, The Corn Wolf, The University of Chicago Press, 2015. P. 49.
[8] Yaviza, P. 96
[9] Carolyn Merchant, 1992. Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. New York: Routledge.
[10] Diane M. Nelson, Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide, Duke University Press, 2015. P. 22.
[11] Yaviza, P. 139. Saloma: “A male song style with yodeling and falsetto.”
[12] Yaviza, P. 119.
[13] Jonestown, P. 138.
[14] Aimé Césaire, Solar Throat Slashed, Wesleyan University Press, 2011.p. 139.
[15] The Corn Wolf, P. 54.
[16] John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the American Encounters/ Global Interactions, Duke University Press, 2003.
[17] Yaviza, P. 161.
[18] Yaviza. P. 104.
[19] Yaviza. P. 157–170.
[20] Jonestown. P. 84.
[21] Yaviza. p.75.
Brenda Iijima’s involvements occur at the intersections and mutations of poetry, research movement, animal studies, ecological sociology and submerged histories. She is the author of seven full-length collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks and artist’s books. Her most recent book, Remembering Animals was published by Nightboat Books in 2016. She is also the editor of the eco language reader (Nightboat Books and PP@YYL). She is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, located in Brooklyn, NY (http://yoyolabs.com/).
