Broken English. Heather McHugh

whom we must kneel to worship,” and “a little bush becomes a court case.” From infancy to old age, the Yoruba sensibility is tickled with the carnal comedies.

      I'm not a scholar of Yoruba language or culture. I can't judge the fidelity of the translations used here (all taken from Ulli Beier's remarkable collection of Yoruba poems, divinations, chants and proverbs), nor offer social or political elaboration on the context. I refer interested readers to Beier's work, and in particular to his descriptions of the pitches and rhythms of “talking” drums. My intention is simply to appreciate a few of the poetic texts Beier has given us, taking the texts as artifacts provocative in (and to) English. What these pieces did to me was strike at the heart of my sense of the poetic; they worked like an antidote to overdose. (I mean the overdose of polite nostalgias and predictable discretions in contemporary American poetry.) These brief Yoruba pieces make an extraordinary contrast to our poetry-magazine-multitudes because of their directness, their practical relation to the material world, their freedom from self-absorption or perennial regret. In them, one senses the force of an efficacious act, and not an art in the process of its own elegizing. They proceed by a kind of structural logic and natural analogy. Human beings seem to be treated as only one form of being among others; there's plenty to learn from plants and animals, as well as from gods, who are (in the Yoruba cosmology) no more fickle than weather (and no less). Poetry itself takes on the patterns of such creaturehood; it mimics, honors, and affects nature. For the Yoruba, far more fundamentally than for contemporary Americans, poetry has daily force as a human form of nature.

      Death

      I cannot carry it,

      I cannot carry it.

      If I could carry it,

      I would carry it.

      When the elephant dies in the bush

      something is carried into the house.

      When the buffalo dies in the forest,

      something is carried into the house.

      But when the mouse dies in the house

      something is thrown into the bush.

      Note here first of all, in the best sense, the beating-around-the-bush. The bush is a literal location, and the poem doesn't metaphorize away a difficult question. It is stunning, immediately, for the directness of its address to the sorrow at hand. Apart from the natural analogical relation that arises between title and body of poem, there is in the poem no direct identification of the repeated “it” as the burden of death itself. Indeed, the virtue of the poem lies entirely in its refusal to abstract its object: the physical weight of the death, and not its philosophical constitution, seems at issue, and the repetition “I cannot carry” builds up great power, as if in plain linguistic illustration of a Dickinsonian numbness-in-the-face-of-death. In concentrating less on the idea than on the body of death, this poem distinguishes itself clearly from most American elegies or meditations on the subject: there is a kind of death math here, an effort physically to “grasp” or “bear” its dimensions.

      The mental move from animal to human deaths—inevitable in hundreds of American road-kill poems—is left, blessedly, implicit in this Yoruba death-chant; and a kind of humor (almost unthinkable in this connection in America, where the unbearability of death is itself unmentionable) obtains in the sudden disposability of the domestic corpse, the brief heft and trajectory of mouse.

      The trail of analogies is also a trail of changes. Parallels highlight a pattern of repetition and variation. The animals become progressively lighter, but also progressively closer to home. Not only how big they are but how near us they live becomes important. What death means to us, in ranges unenclosed, is what we can carry off: from the death of the elephant and buffalo much can be made, much can be redeemed. But from the deaths closest to us, what salvage? Deaths inside the human house are removed into the outer world; deaths in the outer are (at least in part) brought in.

      Paradoxically enough, the most portable deaths are of the biggest, farthest animals. The verb “carried” is insistent, occurring in six of the poem's ten lines; and in the last line of the poem suddenly it is replaced by “thrown”—this accounts for at least part of the shock of levity at the end. Of these large and far-off deaths, something (quantities of something, tusk or meat) can be taken in. (We live on—live off—the deaths of things outside; we are their grave.) But of the deaths “in the house” something is thrown out. We don't eat the mouse, or use the hide of the dead domestic cat; deaths in the psychological interior have to be pushed out of mind, so we can live. The poem suggests how big a little thing can be, close-up (the closest deaths are the least bearable, is a fair paraphrase in English). The line thus drawn between the domestic (even the domestic “wild” animal like the mouse) and the outside world (even its most amicable animals) is a clear and inviolable line, physical, psychological, and spiritual.

      The four its and the three somethings seem brilliandy, intently nonspecific. They are not vague, as so many somethings are in contemporary poetry (wanting to evoke the bodiless unnameable, wanting, in short, to get a big feeling out of a small abdication). Here the somethings are bodily parts, more or less simply. But a principle, an equation, even, is being worked out, and it is the pattern of carryings, not the content or mystification of them, that is most important to the Yoruba poem. Indeed these words insist on looking not at private but at a sum of public gestures, and rather than evading the difficulty of naming, by slipping from the letter toward the spirit, they do an exacter, weirder work: a kind of framing, very physical. In contemporary American poetry, “something” crops up as poetic phrasing around powerful mysteries: something told me she was dead; something moved in the shadows; there was something red about the night, etc. It partakes of our mistake about the great mysteries, if we assume that they inhere in the spirit and not in the letter of things. In short, in our poetry, a “something” is seldom so meant: it is more like a nothing, its drift is atmospheric, its vicinity the failed ideal. One feels American poets have deeply lost their faith in the physical power of words. Culturally that power seems most directly to obtain in the arenas of advertising and public relations, the very arenas from which most American poets are by nature and by economic association most deeply alienated—and the realm popularly accorded poetry, that of sentiment, is represented in America by the million-fold small-surprise industry of the greeting card. We don't, as a rule, make even our own prayers, or value freshness or invention in them. If we believe in God, we don't believe in a God that would change his mind. The much mentioned “personality” of American life—your “personal” banker, your “personal” God—seems deeply, perhaps pathologically, impersonal. And our prudishness with regard to sex—its unmentionability intimate with the industry of pornography, making much of private parts and making of property the most sacred place—resembles nothing so much as our way of dealing with death. A fundamental loneliness comes of the displacements of sex and death into dark back rooms, into solitudes, into chambers where tissues and towels are dispensed for secret blottings out, and from which the yearner or mourner returns to sunlit—loveless, deathless—streets, wiped clean of carnal attachment and animal relation.

      Compare that world, its models of animal life, and the world of the poem that follows:

      Quarrel

      Nobody will quarrel with the woodcock,

      because of his blue coat.

      Nobody will quarrel with the parrot

      because of his red tail.

      You old people of this world,

      don't be my enemies.

      Would you kill a dog because he barks?

      Would you kill a ram because he butts?

      Would you kill the goat because he fucks his mother?

      Forgive me, don't fight,

      and let me taste the world

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