“My voice on the threshold. My voice coming from afar. On the threshold of the Academy.”
So begins Miguel Angel Asturias’s 1967 Nobel Prize banquet speech. Kamau Brathwaite, with slight modification and embellishment, quotes from this speech act as the epigraph to his mkissi, “Asturias,” published in the Spring 2003 issue of Black Renaissance Noire (one of the few places, he is careful to note later in Asturias, that will publish his work in his desired 8.5×11 format). In the speech, Asturias has just begun what he considers might be a “comparison too daring. But…necessary,” by comparing Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite to the emergence of magical realism. Asturias calls the invention of dynamite a magical catastrophe, and refers to the Panama Canal as one of its magical catastrophes. It is magical because it opens from within the world a new world, bringing forth from a dream (in this case the dream of connecting the Atlantic and Pacific by water) a reality. It is catastrophic because the Panama Canal is also a new vein carved with bombs and blood into the Earth’s skin that completed the mercantilist piercing of the Americas. It literally cuts the continents apart like conjoined twins, opening them where once they joined, joining them now by a flowing flood of capital. “The use of destructive forces, the secret which Alfred Nobel extracted from nature…A magic of catastrophe which could be compared to the thrust of our novels, called upon to destroy unjust structures in order to make way for a new life. The secret mines of the people, buried under tons of misunderstandings, prejudices, and taboos, bring to light in our narrative — between fables and myths — with blows of protest, testimony, and denouncement, dikes of letters which, like sands, contain reality to let the dream flow free or, on the contrary contain the dream to let reality escape.” Here, dikes of letters (that we understand as words), are likened to infrastructure, technical matter that disposes processes toward certain outcomes. These particular dikes in this particular rhetorical figure regulate and contain the flow between dream and reality, like sands do water on the shoreline or lakeside or creek basin, or like canals and locks do water and ships. In this metaphorical matrix, bordering on the sturdiness of allegory, a matrix consisting of words, matter, letters, dikes, water, sands, the natural, the technical, meaning, its movement, flow, its processes, and the equivocation of the created and the creative, there emerges a difficult, possibly impossible, figure: a figure (dikes regulating water flows) of figuration (of how meaning is made through regulating the signifying process with letters and words) in words (spoken, recorded, written, and received) figuring the function and manifestation of words (the fluidity of language, but also sentences as locks). Asturias, of course, speaks from within one of the major hallowed halls of literary institutionalization, but, his speech suggests, he is only present at a distance: “My voice is on the threshold. My voice coming from afar. On the threshold of the Academy” […] “dikes of letters which, like sands, contain reality to let the dream flow free or, on the contrary contain the dream to let reality escape.” Brathwaite begins his citational speech act after reality’s escape, as these cataclysms give birth to a “geography of madness”:
Brathwaite’s grafted additions, mostly bracketed, specify and update the cataclysms alluded to by Asturias (“the Discovery Slavery Hiroshima the Holocausts 9/11”), and add commentary: (“a literature of cheap compromise is “or X social realism E”); surround the “Europeans” (mirrored makeshift glyphs “[ T ]” and “[ T ]” literally press against the word); they bring up into the continuing present by syntactic analepsis (was -> is) the ongoing disaster of coloniality (“It is just that what happened to us [is] shocking. Continents [and archepelagoes] submerged in the sea…”) (Bold mine, to emphasize “arche”). Brathwaite replaces “man of hope” with “[person the spirit] of hope,” de-gendering the phrase and syntactically de-naturing it by creating a stutter, a repetition (the person the spirit). In Asturias’s original, he refers to the “orderly unfolding of European conflicts, always human in their dimensions. The dimensions of our conflicts in the past centuries have been catastrophic.” Brathwaite’s additions and addendums are admittedly mild textual catastrophes that index major catastrophes. But they do, like the catastrophe of mathematics, enfold Asturias’s speech into a slightly different topological figuration, transforming its synchronic structure, while diachronically extending it. The crux between synchrony and diachrony is when and where infrastructuralist writing intervenes.
The conventional uses for brackets when quoting material are to add information without changing the meaning of a sentence (often for grammatical reasons), to point at an error that the quoter does not want to be blamed for ([sic]), and to translate from one language to another. Brathwaite’s use of brackets systematically detourns each of these conventions. He introduces non-standard grammar, deliberately changes meaning by adding description, and he misspells words, introducing “mistakes” into a rhetorical trope meant to correct them. These inverted mistakes, that is, mistakes with purpose, deliberately appropriate and detourn literary critical conventions by performing (not to say representing) a negative mimesis of established literary norms. They trouble the integrity of the quote, and might even cause us to wonder who said what and when. They are cyborgian, prosthetic supplements augmenting the cited text in its new context, while recapitulating, by emphasizing, the provocative original context of Asturias’s speech. There, Asturias critiques from within the institutional history and context that has just awarded him the highest prize in literature. It might even tacitly question, with no uncertain bravado, why Brathwaite has no Nobel himself. Tacitly, Brathwaite seems to be challenging, If we are, finally, worried about correctness over truth, then the anal crititics might point out that Brathwaite does make an actual mistake. The quote is not precisely from Asturias’s “Nobel Acceptance Speech,” but from his Nobel Prize Acceptance Banquet Speech. (from “The Critic”: Squat w/his hot / check shirt [whose] theories dic- / tate his joys. / be- /cause he hears not heavenly mel- / odies…But high-/ly refined dissonance & noise).
And yet, Brathwaite adds that the spirit of hope, nevertheless, “wanders through our own songs…[soffly unfolding].” This might reflexively refer to the pixelated cursive font KB renders Asturias’s speech into, a hallmark of Brathwaite’s SXVX, as if the text is quietly squinting or it’s a still from a poorly interlaced video, soffly unfolding, as if peeking out from a dream. And/or we might suspect this “soff” unfolding proleptically anticipates the tenor of the work to come. And yet, rather than a soft unfolding, the next paragraph, (1), (a secondary exordium, as if the story/poem can’t quite seem to begin, or has already begun, but we must become slowly immersed in it), dramatically shifts appearance into an all caps bolded graffiti-style font, rendered difficult to read by its possibly compressed kearning. Like the cenzontle, “the bird whose song has 400 tones,” that Menendez y Pelayo elevated above the nightingale, KB’s song can shift appearance like light like thought.