Dionne Brand’s volume of poetry, Ossuaries, is my 22nd book of 2013 & the 3rd book of my February reading list to mark Black History Month. In light of recent reports that the remains of Richard III have been discovered beneath a Leicester car park, a reading of Ossuaries seems timely. I don’t know much about Dionne Brand other than that she was appointed Toronto’s third poet laureate back in the days before Rob Ford threw the city into its current pot of political insanity. It was a kinder subtler time in Toronto’s civic life but, let’s be honest: her Brand of social criticism could have found more meat to sink its teeth into if she had continued her service through to the end of Rob Ford’s term as mayor.
Ossuary: a depository for the bones of the dead. That’s the formal definition. It calls to mind two kinds of images. The obvious are those relating to death: tomb, grave, rot, decay, endings. The word “depository” suggests other kinds of images: containers, confinement, imprisonment. Both kinds of images pass through all the pages of Ossuaries. While the volume is a single extended poem of free-form tercets, it is divided into fifteen chapters which are themselves called Ossuaries. Each of these containers leans towards a particular species of “bones”.
And while it would be a stretch to call the volume a narrative poem, if we dig like poetic archaeologists, we will uncover enough fragments to construct a narrative. There is a woman named Yasmin, perhaps in flight, through Algiers (with a crossing to Spain suggestive of Laila Lalamai’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits), Cuba, and upstate New York on her way to the Niagara region. She has fallen in with a group of radicals. Maybe students. People who read Engels and talk about revolution and speak political slogans: power to the people. They hold up a bank. It seems odd to pierce this thick poetry and discover there’s a bank heist going on. I thought only Michael Ondaatje did that sort of thing. Yet it works. And then, naturally, there comes a flight from the law in a rusted old car.
So what are the ossuaries? What are the bones?
Prisons: We begin with images of incarceration: prisons, concrete walls, restraining metal, zoos, chain-link fences, ligatures, ropes, handcuffs. But our bones are confining too. Our rib cages look like the bars of a prison. And our skulls are containers; they hold the very seat of our being.
Although containment can be inflicted in the physical world with jails and bodies, perhaps we suffer more from the limitations of “invisible architecture”.
Science imposes the limits of precise measurement and definitive explanations: “whole diameters, circumferences, locutions,/an orgy of measurements, a festival of inches”.
Photographs/Painting: Brand speaks of “the photographs’/crude economy” and “eye murder”. Paintings hang on walls in museums. Life loses its kinetic essence when it’s represented on a canvas and nailed in place for exhibit.
Life/Love: Life and love exist in a precarious relationship, mostly mutually exclusive. When life is reduced to mere survival, as it is for Yasmin, there is no possibility for love “since to live is to be rapacious as claws, to have/the most efficient knives and broken beer bottles”. The corollary is that love is somehow related to death. I don’t think this is inevitable, but our ossuaries, our “invisible architecture”, the ideological structures we have created for ourselves, make it seem inevitable that those who love must die.
Miles Davis/Charlie Parker: “here’s the difference, she told him,/between Miles and Bird,/Miles kept living, till life was rancid, Bird flew off”. Brand seems to be using the Miles/Bird comparison to continue the observations about life and love. Miles Davis lost his “gift” and spent half his life trying (unsuccessfully) to get it back, whereas Charlie Parker died a young man, and didn’t give life enough time to let his addictions turn him into a burnt-out has-been. The men may also point to another ossuary: addiction.
Gravity:
gravity must give up its hold on us
surely, gravity the jail guard, the commandante
of surfaces, might relent someday, unpin us
Language: Brand writes about “a lover’s clasp of/violent syntax and the beginning syllabi of verblessness”, a phrase I don’t rightly understand but love all the same. In the second ossuary, we have the image of a cut larynx. It begins with: “to undo, to undo and undo and undo this infinitive/of arrears”. Brand has something against infinitives in particular. An infinitive is action in the abstract. Only when a verb is properly conjugated does the action have a context, a particularity, a purpose. It matters that action have context and purpose.
Our language is a futile play for fixity. We hear this in Brand’s lament:
how to say I wish for permanence,
then I cast it off as dullness, stupidity,
then wish again for certainty, to bein life, sitting at a bar,
cigars hanging from my fingers, I’d tip
the waitress half the cost of everythingto inhabit whole,
which is to exist simply
The volume of poetry is a play for fixity. But it, too, is an ossuary. Or at least the hope for permanence that sometimes motivates the written word. It’s a dead end.
War: Last month, in a post about Brian Fawcett’s Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow, I noted a question at the core of his writing: In a world where there is Cambodia (or any other genocide), how is it possible to make art? In her final ossuary, Brand asks much the same thing: “who could have lived each day knowing/some massacre was underway, some repression”.
We are grown-ups, which means we have eaten the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Or, to put it in the context of the 21st century, our twitter feeds give us instantaneous news about acts of oppression on the far side of the globe. The only way we can not know about the nature of our world is to be willfully ignorant. Art that aspires to be art for its own sake, that aspires to be purchased and mounted on a wall, or discussed at soirées, or read at black-tie affairs … such art is an ossuary. As grown-ups, the only art it is possible to make is art connected to the real world. We breathe life into our dry bones by investing our art with a moral orientation in a hurting world. Everything else is an ossuary.
We are grown-ups, which means we have eaten the bitter fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Or, to put it in the context of the 21st century, our twitter feeds give us instantaneous news about acts of oppression on the far side of the globe. The only way we can not know about the nature of our world is to be willfully ignorant. Art that aspires to be art for its own sake, that aspires to be purchased and mounted on a wall, or discussed at soirées, or read at black-tie affairs … such art is an ossuary. As grown-ups, the only art it is possible to make is art connected to the real world. We breathe life into our dry bones by investing our art with a moral orientation in a hurting world. Everything else is an ossuary.