Month: July 2016

The central image is a humanlike being whose head appears to be taken up as a single eye. The figure itself seems to be a commentary on the fact of looking or the power of images: is it saying that the figure has been taken over by images or that the figure represents a visionary capable of feats of representational power? Are the nearby images making some form of obeisance to the larger central figure, or is their position in relation to it accidental? Indeed, in this whole set of images, are we to read each image on its own, or are there threads to follow or constellations to grasp? Or may all these approaches be deployed simultaneously?

Although these images have been treated as art pieces by at least one scholar (see Vastokas and Vastokas), here I will treat them as a mode of writing. In proposing that these enunciations be seen as writing, even literature, I am recalling the early Derrida’s expansive notion of writing in Of Grammatology (107–09) while also invoking a notion of the alterity of the other. However, and as will shortly become clear, the specific form of alterity involved here is grounded materially—through the concept of mode of production—in a way that does not allow it to easily fold into the generalized discussions of identity politics that circulate widely. So before proceeding I need to backtrack.

Indigenous people, like Anishnabwe, of the mid and far north of “Canada” base their way of life off a gathering and hunting mode of production, or what Glen Coulthard has called a bush mode of production (171). Across the boundary of mode of production all certainties dissolve: time, space, and subjectivity become organized around different principles and values. Fredric Jameson early in his theoretical work positioned the concept of mode of production as the third and widest horizon of interpretation (88–102). While literary theory invokes mode of production to set a literary text in a historical context involving some seismic shift in capitalism, or more occasionally in the transition to capitalism, in anthropology mode of production remains a marker of the sharpest or most distinct social difference. There is no other that is more other than those who remain attached to the distinct way of life associated with a different mode of production. The bush mode of production (or gathering and hunting) is even more different from contemporary capitalism than the agricultural, tithe, or neolithic modes of production, including such modes that were also colonized (see Wolfe, whose broad understanding of the concept and whose studies of the peasant forms remain invaluable).

The bush mode of production involves values, ways of seeing, ways of being, laws, gender relations, decision-making processes, and forms of writing that are markedly different from those we take for granted. Hence, if this paper has a modest program, it would be to recognize what we do not know. We do not know how to “read” the Teaching Rocks, because although we may recognize them—or choose to categorize them—as a form of writing, we are illiterate in that form. The “we” here would include non-Anishnabwe who do not know the protocols of interpretation associated with these inscriptions on rock. Consider figure 2.

Multiple utterances, inscriptions, folded over each other, some faded and in palimpsest-like relation, others sharp and distinct. Human and animal; possible clan symbols; spirit journey vessels; and in their midst, carved around a crack in the rock, a curvaceous, female-gendered image. It is said that the sound of water once emanated from the fault, that the image may be a guardian or at least positioned at the entrance of another world. She is constructed around a feature (the crack) of the rock itself. The image also recalls the notion of earth as mother that has some currency among many bush people. Here certainly we have a representation where the substance of the representation (image of a woman), the material of the representation (along a crack in a rock), and the subject of the representation (the earth as mother / mother as earth) collapse into each other: the earth as woman is woman as earth.

To show that such complexity is not unique to that image, I will refer to another. In figure 3 the turtle invokes “turtle island,” an image or notion or legend that Haudenosaunee and Anishnabwe alike use to describe and understand the world: the earth is an island carried on the back of a turtle. And in this image, again, we have the substance (image of a turtle), the material (rock, or the earth itself), and the subject of the representation (turtle island) all indistinguishable from one another:

I offer this partial, inadequate reading of these images to make three interrelated points: that most of us, settler colonials, do not know how to read these writings; that nevertheless “we” can know enough to know that there is a strong representational power to these writings; and that the use of the terms simple or complex (including my own above) is generally irrelevant to interpretive gestures except as part of the apparatus of colonization (in which everything to do with the bush mode of production is “simple”). To actually make a strong interpretation of these writings we would need to talk to someone: a spiritually knowledgeable Anishnabwe teacher. But, finally, my real purpose here is to raise the issue of what has happened to the Teaching Rocks, what is happening all around us to similar places, and what therefore is happening to the people associated with these places.

For many years (as I have been told by my friends from Curve Lake First Nation), the Teaching Rocks were buried under moss. Elders would bring initiates and offer tobacco, tell stories, and show specific images, deploying them in healing ways. Then in 1924 a local, nonnative person “discovered” the Teaching Rocks. All the moss was removed, and in classic colonial nominalist practice the site became known as the Peterborough Petroglyphs and also became a favored picnic hike for local people, both nonnative and Anishnabwe. The sound of water gurgling underneath acted as accompaniment to those who visited. But, exposed to the elements and especially to acid rain, the images began to erode. Good-natured, helpful, non-Anishnabwe grew concerned about the immanent disappearance of this powerful sacred site. Meetings were held. Funds were raised. A solution emerged. A protective structure was built around one core area of the Teaching Rocks, in which all the above images are found. Now “protected,” the teaching rocks can be visited at Petroglyph Provincial Park (established in 1976), encased in the structure pictured in figure 4.

The sound of water faded and disappeared as this structure was built. There are other images around the building that are not so protected. As well as the physical structure, explanatory signs “contain” the logic of the Teaching Rocks, telling viewers that, for example, there are some number of similar images found around the Great Lakes: categorization as interpretation. In the period of political decolonization that emerged at around the same time (the 1970s) and especially under the impetus of a push to aboriginal self-government in the 1980s, the site has come to be managed by nearby Curve Lake First Nation, though it remains a provincial park. Traditional teachers and users of the site have keys and can visit and practice their spiritual activities away from the objectifying gaze of visitors or tourists. But protection itself, conservation in a museum or conservation on site, can also act as one of the most powerful destructive mechanisms of totalizing power. Safe, contained, renamed, surrounded, preserved, embalmed, sterilized: an evocative challenge to our mode of writing opening onto a substantial questioning of our mode of being is here repositioned as a cultural curiosity, the object of a settler colonial, imperial gaze.

Consider and compare another set of teaching rocks (fig. 5), images located in roughly the northwest corner of Anishnabwe territory, also known as the Manitoba Petroforms, in Whiteshell Provincial Park in my home province. Here, the images are produced not by carving into the rock but by piling stones on top of the large flat surfaces of boreal, igneous rock that serve as canvas or writing paper. It is as if these sets of images exist in some relation or tension with each other, a mirroring or reflection.

Here too we find one of several turtles, where again the tripartite elements of representation become inseparable. Scattered across an area of several acres, the distinct images pose the same problems as their eastern relatives: do we read each image as a singularity? Do we tell stories that connect multiple images or all of them? Does a single image sit in several constellations? Among snake, spirit vessel, clan figures, we find, again, the mother that is earth. Partly covered in growth, made of about twenty rocks, she lies flat, simultaneously sinking into and emerging from the earth: she is called Bannock Point Woman. She has arms, legs, head, breasts, and a rounded belly. Is this mother the earth? Is this earth the mother? Is every earth also mother? Is every mother also earth? No doubt many present and past visitors do not know of the spirit “double” that exists far to the east, and, taken together, these earth mothers gently but insistently question prevailing notions of the value of uniqueness and of the establishment of genealogical relations.

This site is in a large provincial park. It is marked by sparse signage and accessed through a trail from a parking lot off a little-used paved road. There is no structure, not even a fence, surrounding the site, though a bit of signage at the parking lot reminds visitors to respect the images, which are vulnerable to the boots of visitors. That the images remain intact is a modest testament to the respectful behavior of the province’s citizens. The province’s leadership, however, does not evidence such a positive ethical example. Among the most powerful sacred sites in northern Manitoba (Inninuwak/Cree territory), two, the Footprints (figs. 6 and 7) and Wasagejak’s Chair (fig. 8), were flooded in the profiteering interests of the export of hydroelectric power.

The story of the Footprints is a cautionary tale. The site originally had a number of footprint-shaped and
-arranged indentations going straight up a sheer wall of rock (the story associated with it tells of the trickster Wasagejak getting his head stuck in a moose skull and running to shake it off until he ran into the rock, which he then walked up). In the 1970s the site was flooded as part of a hydroelectric grand project called the Churchill River Diversion and Lake Winnipeg Regulation. Two of the Footprints were removed and set in a concrete slab, which sat at a variety of destinations until it was returned to rest on the bank of the river near its original site. Although there is evidence of traditional activity at the site, at least some local elders believe these are not the real Footprints but a copy, attesting in my view to the fact that they feel the site has lost its power.

The story of Wasagejak’s Chair is easier to tell. It was flooded as part of the same project. I have no pictures of the chair, but in figure 8 you can see a representation of the void it has left behind.

The Teaching Rocks, northeast and northwest, have been constructed by indigenous peoples, specifically by hunting people. The Footprints and Wasagejak’s Chair may have been found, constructed by people, or constructed by more-than-human, supernatural beings. Figure 8 shows rather starkly what we have left to learn from these powerful sites and moves me toward a theoretical point.

I deploy the term totalization to describe the social and cultural processes that assiduously refashion the bush mode of production. The term signifies the transformation of bush ways of embodying space, time, subjectivity, landscape, relations, ways of seeing, and modes of being into forms that are conducive to the accumulation of capital and to the expansion of the commodity form. While these two forces were well known to Karl Marx, he did not specifically theorize the state as another instrument of totalization, as a structure that sets into place the preconditions that will allow for, indeed call for, capital accumulation. A state can also, of course, be totalitarian: that is, and here I can recall Hannah Arendt, a state form that relies extensively on a police-surveillance apparatus to ensure the production of politically docile bodies (447, 457). Totalization and totalitarianism are distinct processes. When they conjoin, as they sometimes do, they make for a particular and historically specific, dangerous hegemonic form. To some extent, the regime of George W. Bush moved the United States in such a direction. Contemporary settler colonies almost always rely on some combination of both forms. In Canada, what could be more totalitarian than residential schools? In Canada, what could be more totalizing than the day schools that both predated and came after residential schools? The state-produced and monitored form of relating to time (say, clock time) has been socially naturalized and becomes a presupposition that everyone is expected to conform to: totalization. The systems of coercion used to ensure that indigenous people do not miss their appointments: totalitarianism.

Both the brutality of planned and orchestrated destruction of sacred sites, that is, totalitarianism, and the “accidental” generational “forgetting” of sacred places, that is, totalization, are busily doing their work erasing, containing, and sterilizing as many of these sites from the settler colonial landscape as they can and as quickly as possible. That many such sites remain in the mid and far north of Canada is only a signifier that work remains undone. Consider the sites in figure 9 from the western arctic, Northwest Territories, or Denendeh.

This waterfall is far up the Redstone River, which flows into the Dehcho (Mackenzie River) from the Mackenzie Mountains. A female spirit is said to reside or be embodied at this site. It is an unmarked site and not frequently visited. The waters are thought to have healing power. The “blackness” that is seen in the rock to my untrained eye indicates a possible presence of oil or natural gas in the limestone that could be extracted through fracking. It is therefore entirely possible that this site will, at some future point, be disappeared by a bulldozer or drill rig. And consider figure 10.

This sacred site sits at the foot of Red Dog Mountain on the Begadeh (Keele River), which also flows from the Mackenzie Mountains to the Dehcho. It is the subject of a powerful ancient narrative, still told by mountain Dene (Begade Shuhtagotine). Hunters traveling up the river by jet boat leave bullets or tobacco or coins at this place as they pass it.

Figure 11 is a photograph taken on the Dehcho itself but quite far upstream, between the communities of Norman Wells and Fort Good Hope: outlined along the side of a cliff is Wolverine, a powerful being in Dene narrative and philosophy. The small pointed rock outcropping is the tail, and if one follows that down the cliff a brief distance, the head and legs of Wolverine become clear. The site is known as the place where Wolverine turned to stone, in reference to an event embedded in the lengthy story cycle involving that character. As with the waterfall, as with Red Dog Mountain, there are no markers. In my many travels by boat from Norman Wells to Fort Good Hope, I passed the place where the Wolverine turned to stone without knowing of it. The fact that these sites are unmarked both protects and endangers them: they are intentionally visited by relatively few people, mostly local Dene or Métis, and therefore not disturbed. A proposed Mackenzie gas pipeline would lead to a huge construction project near this site from which it could be damaged or destroyed.

When the memory of these sites is lost, the sites are lost: they are irreparably tied to their place in memory. While some of these may be mapped by, for example, the very good ethnographers working with the Northwest Territories Heritage Museum, it is possible that my own work may be the only documentation of their existence (needless to say, this dramatizes their deeply precarious status). And of course this small sample only gestures toward the many other similar sites embedded in the landscape. Negotiating an ethical relationship to these sites must be premised on face-to-face interaction with the people who know the stories. Advertising the sites through park structures can lead to protection but also sterilization. Keeping knowledge of the sites restricted can lead to accidental destruction. The solution offered by the Footprints is not an acceptable middle ground. Each site must be placed under the stewardship of the indigenous people who read it, who themselves must decide how to balance official protection, desecration, commercial value, continued spiritual uses, and so on.

Another example, from Nunavut, land of the Inuit, in the eastern portion of the arctic, raises similar and additional issues, including the broad question of how we see as epistemology (or how we “train . . . the imagination for epistemological performance,” in Spivak’s phrasing [122]). Halfway up the “cut,” or ledge, that traverses this cliff face a cave can be seen, itself briefly obscuring the cut. The path leading up to the cave is known as the Blind Man’s Walk (fig. 12), owing to a lengthy and powerful story cycle involving a central character who, after much travail that in part left him blind, walks across the ice, up along the ledge, and through the cave, at which point he regains his sight.

Elsewhere I have commented on the desire that “we” might traverse this passage and come to see the world with newly reenchanted eyes (I note the influence of Michael Taussig’s work on this idea). A few blasts or drills to merely explore for the minerals that might be behind this rock face will be enough to erase this marker forever. The dominant social order is more likely to engage this place in the search for abstract wealth than to walk through it in an attempt to stretch the boundaries that circumvent the forms of meaning that circulate to entrench the established order. That is, do we see the possibility for capital accumulation to take place here (in which case we remain blinded by the promise of a certain restricted form of wealth as capital), or do we see the possibility of another form of wealth associated with another form of seeing?

To be clear, placing signs to mark the fact that these are signs is not what ethics demands, is not an adequate ethical response. Developing an ethical relation with indigenous communities in which asking and listening are the primary and foundational actions would allow for the stories that unfold the significance of these sites to be told. The continuing capitalist colonial conquest of the Americas carries and rests on a set of presuppositions that foreclose such asking and listening. The bottom line is to say that more lands should be under the control of more bush peoples, but this view challenges the logic of primitive accumulation that underwrites the global economic forces pressing on these peoples, these sites, this knowing, these practices, this reading, these ways of seeing.

Because the capitalist colonial conquest of the Americas is not some long-past set of events but rather a continuing and urgent politics, this analysis can finally move to its conclusion. A final few images will anchor this element.

The Keeyask (Gull) Rapids on the Kitchi Sipi (literally the “great” or “grand river” but on the maps the “Nelson River”) in northern Manitoba (fig. 13) are the last natural spawning grounds of an endangered form of sturgeon. Along the river’s banks at this site, but not found by the archaeologists who searched for it, is an ancient, sacred offering stone. Figure 14 is an image of what the future holds for this place, the Keeyask Dam, a project designed by a crown utility, Manitoba Hydro, largely to produce electrical power for export to the United States.

Although the project involved a “partnership” agreement with elected leaders of four of the nearby First Nations, the agreement is flawed in many respects and will likely produce few benefits (a similar agreement for a nearby dam and First Nations community has led to an enormous debt load there, not likely to be alleviated for decades). Along with other nongovernmental organizations, a group of locally and university-based activists, to which I belong, engaged in a struggle through public hearings to prevent this project (fig. 15).

Under the name the Concerned Fox Lake Grassroots Citizens, this group made a strong effort to articulate the view of traditional harvesters and land-based Inniniwak (bush Cree) that the project was destructive and unnecessary. We spoke, but we were not heard. The Manitoba Clean Environment Commission recommended construction of the project, the province agreed, and the construction is, as this is being written, under way.

The image of Keeyask Rapids in figure 16 would reasonably be understood or seen as a representation of what we used to call “nature.” It is not an image of nature. It is an image of history. Perhaps history in Jameson’s sweeping sense:

History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its “ruses” turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them. (102)

We refuse to be done with the issues created by restructuring the hydrology of northern Manitoba that will suit the exigencies of a regime based on capital accumulation. Too much is at stake. In the early summer of 2015 as I toured artists around hydroaffected communities, I met with the Inniniwak elder who had drawn me into this struggle, Noah Massan, and documented the devastation to his trapline, which I had visited in an untouched state the year before. Together, in tears, we vowed to fight on. Later that month we met with sixty people, academics and activists, nonaboriginal and indigenous, and planned the next phase of our struggle. The work of mourning must necessarily be brief: the work of alliance building, of dissidence and opposition, struggle and resistance, remains too urgent to allow for rest. Negotiating these sites involves the struggle to remember that there may be things in this world of a different kind of value that cannot be discussed in the terms proposed by the logic of capital accumulation and its brutal henchman colonialism. These sites, and the interpretive powers of the people who read them, open a world where the mode of valorization itself acts as a check on the avarice-laden assumptions of the dominant logic. May the bush sites and the bush stories discussed here open a window onto that world.

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper . . .

              . . . it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth. (stanza 2)

Rather than saying that poetry has no effect on the world, Auden is actually making a different and more interesting point, namely that poetry has no direct effect, no executive power, the kind of decisional authority that delivers verdicts, and delivers clear and unmistakable outcomes. Poetry is not clarity driven and outcome producing, at least not on its own. As a tissue of words, it is by nature dependent on the interpretations that readers put on it, negotiated and implemented among those who collectively decide what sort of life it would have in the world. That dependency does not make it powerless. On the contrary, simply having the ear of others makes poetry a nontrivial force, and, Auden further suggests, this force is best captured by the form of the gerund, a grammatical construct that takes the form of the noun but is, in fact, no less a verb. The gerunds here are “making” and “happening,” and each of these is in turn embedded in a larger syntactical unit—“valley of its making” and “way of happening”—at which point they can speak, like a mouth. Poetry, then, does have an outcome-producing capability, but on one condition: it would have to become part of a larger process, a larger network, that allows it to switch from noun to verb, which is to say, to function not only as scripted content but also as an unscripted and as-yet-to-be-developed intervening force, with a different kind of consequentialness in the world.

Auden’s poem to Yeats is not usually read in conjunction with Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory. Latour distinguishes between two forms of association, practiced by intermediaries and by mediators—the former, passive vehicles, rubber stamps, that transmit prior decisions without altering them; and the latter, networked agents that dynamically alter the relation between input and output in any social aggregate (37–42). In this essay, I would like to draw on this concept of networked agency to propose a way of thinking about literature as a practical force changing the fate even of those not ordinarily thought of as readers. It is the presence of networks, locally based and user generated, that multiplies the contexts for action and multiplies the chances each participant has to produce a nontrivial outcome. Participating in this way, literature becomes both input bearing and input receiving, not only being acted on but also becoming an actor itself, a mediator, intervening in situations where neither the solutions nor even the nature of the problems are self-evident, and where regular decision-making bodies, including those with punitive powers, might come up short.

The question, of course, is where to find such networks in which literature could play such a mediating role. My short answer, and I hope it is a little shocking because it is so obvious, is that the university could in fact be an experimental site for this kind of user-generated network and that teaching might turn out to be the activity with the most outreach potential. This is a surprisingly undertheorized aspect of what we all do. For this essay, I will concentrate on a small subset, namely the teaching that we do outside the traditional classroom, bringing us into contact with students we do not ordinarily encounter. I am thinking especially of the ways higher education might intersect with the criminal justice system, in the form of the teaching done under the rubric of a program called Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI).

An ATI is any form of activity other than jail time that can be required of those convicted of felonies or misdemeanors. Given the well-documented abuses of United States prisons, ATI is a high priority for the White House. Many cities have such a program. (New York City leads the way, boasting an ATI rehabilitation rate of sixty percent.) According to a study commissioned by the city, New York

has expanded the network of actors in the courtroom to encourage the use of alternative sentences. City officials have created an ATI system that includes not only programs for offenders, but also court representatives whose job is to persuade even reluctant judges, assistant DAs, and public defenders to use these programs routinely in appropriate cases. As a result, the ATI system plays a dual role in the criminal justice process, trying to shape plea bargains and sentencing decisions in court as well as administering the sentences themselves. (Porter, Lee, and Lutz 4)

Active both inside the courtroom and outside, the ATI has vastly expanded the network of actors involved in turning offenders from criminals to ordinary citizens. Restorative justice rather than punitive justice is the guiding principle here, and community groups play a crucial role in coming up with alternatives to jail time. New York City’s ATI is targeted at four groups: the general population, substance abusers, women, and youth. Programs in other cities tend to be more limited; the one in New Haven that I participated in focused only on youth. In exchange for reduced sentences, juvenile delinquents came to campus once a week for an hour to discuss literature, accompanied by Yale students and a representative from the program Community Partners in Action.

Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery was a big hit with this group, and short stories in general are probably the best assignments. Still, it might be interesting to try out some nonfictional prose, perhaps The Autobiography of Malcolm X, especially the section where he writes about all the readings that he did in the prison library: from Herodotus to W. E. B. Du Bois, from genetics to world history. And, even though it might seem counterintuitive, some poetry might work as well. I would put Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos in that category.

Pound was incarcerated, from May to November 1945, at the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center, or DTC, at Pisa, because of his pro-Fascist Radio Rome broadcasts. His Pisan Cantos were written there. He was initially kept in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage (fig. 1) but was moved indoors after three weeks and even given a homemade writing table, made out of a packing box.

The other inmates were offenders from the army, mostly African Americans. Pound writes about one of them, Louis Till, in Pisan Cantos: “And Till was hung yesterday / for murder and rape with trimmings” (qtd. in Terrell, 74.171–72). It is a casual reference, but Till’s name would come up again in a far more explosive context: in 1955 his fourteen-year-old son, Emmett, would be tortured and murdered in Mississippi after whistling at a white woman. The acquittal of the perpetrators made Emmett Till the rallying cry for an entire generation of civil rights activists. The Pisan Cantos could not have made this particular connection, but it is one that any Internet search today would make impossible not to see.

Many of the guards at the DTC were also African American. Pound mentions some of them with gratitude, especially Henry Hudson Edwards, the GI who made him the writing table:

Mr. Edwards superb green and brown

in ward No 4 a jacent benignity,

of the Baluba mask: “doan you tell no one

I made you that table.” (317–20)

This is not the first time African objects—in this case, a Baluba (i.e., Biembe) mask from the Congo—come up in the Pisan Cantos, nor the first time African civilizations are cited with admiration and longing. Earlier in canto 74, Pound mentioned “Lute of Gassir. Hooo Fasa” (93), followed by this obsessed incantation:

4 times was the city rebuilded, Hooo Fasa

      Gassir, Hooo Fasa  dell’Italia tradita

Now in the mind indestructible, Gassir, Hooo Fasa

With the four giants at the four corners

And four gates mid-wall Hooo Fasa

And a terrace the colour of stars

Pale as the dawn cloud, la luna

      Thin as Demester’s hair

Hooo Fasa, and in a dance the renewal

  With two larks in contrappunto (197–206)

“Hooo” is the Soninke word for “Hail”; “Fasa” is a tribe of heroes in North Africa. The phrase “Hooo! Fasa!” is a refrain in the Soninke epic Gassire’s Lute, which opens with these words about the mythical city of Wagadu:

Four times Wagadu stood there in all her splendor. Four times Wagadu disappeared and was lost to human sight: once through vanity, once through falsehood, once through greed and once through dissension. Four times Wagadu changed her name. First she was called Dierra, then Agada, then Ganna, then Silla. . . . [But] she endures no matter whether she be built of stone, wood and earth, or lives but as a shadow in the mind and longing of her children. . . . Hooo! Dierra, Agada, Ganna, Silla! Hooo! Fasa!” (qtd. in Terrell 370)

It is not surprising that a man held at the DTC, a “man on whom the sun has gone down” (74.178), should be obsessed with a four-time-resurrected city. Pound had come across Gassire’s Lute in Leo Frobenius’s Atlantis: Volksmärchen und Volksdichtung Afrikas (1921), which he had started reading around 1928. Frobenius’s account of West African civilizations left a deep impression on him. On 26 December 1931 Pound sent a letter to the president of the Tuskegee Institute, urging him to make the work of Frobenius a part of the curriculum. Frobenius, he said, has, with “an unflagging enthusiasm for the beauty of its different civilizations,” “done more than any other living man to give the black race its charter of intellectual liberties.” Pound had been trying to get some of this pioneering work translated into English, and it occurred to him that this “shd. be made a racial act, with whatever university or other backing you can give it.” He added:

There is no reason why a black University shd. be merely a copy of a white one. I have written elsewhere that our American universities are full of redundance. A great deal left undone and a lot done uselessly three times over. There shd. be (if there is not already) a course in Africanology in every black special school, it wd. be more interesting than another professorship of greek or latin. (qtd. in Roessel 212)

Since Pound did not personally know the president of the Tuskegee Institute and had no idea “whether he is the sort of man who will have sense enough to ACT on the suggestion,” he thought it wise to send a carbon copy to Langston Hughes, adding, “The job ought to be done. I don’t know that I can make the suggestion any stronger or clearer, but I will cooperate with any scheme you suggest for getting on with it” (211).

On 22 April 1932, Langston Hughes wrote back, apologizing for the lateness of the response (he had been on tour), but said immediately, “I was very much interested in what you had to say about Frobenius. Certainly I agree with you about the desirability of his being translated into English, and I have written to both Howard and Fisk Universities concerning what you say.” As for Tuskegee, Hughes was “afraid they have little inclinations toward anything so spiritually important as translations of Frobenius would be to the Negro race” (213–14). He was pleased, however, to be able to include affirmative responses from Howard and Fisk.¹ He also added, “I have known your work for more than ten years and many of your poems insist on remaining in my head.” And, since Pound had asked to see some of his work, Hughes said, “Some weeks ago I sent you my books in care of INDICE. I hope you have received them” (214). Pound wrote back on 8 May to say that the “INDICE has gone bust.” On 17 June Hughes replied, “My books, sent to you c/o INDICE, came back, so I re-sent them directly to you. Also a Scottsboro booklet of mine, the proceeds of which go to the defense of the boys” (218).

The boys in question were the black youths accused on 25 March 1921 of raping two white women on a freight train near Painted Rock, Alabama. The rushed trials, held in nearby Scottsboro, quickly produced death sentences for eight of the nine defendants. The presence of a lynch mob before the trial, along with the frame-up, inadequate legal counsel, and all-white juries, made the Scottsboro case a byword for racial injustice. The case went up to the United States Supreme Court twice on appeal; the first appeal resulted in the landmark decision Powell v. Alabama (1932), which ordered new trials, and the second resulted in Patterson v. Alabama (1935), the ruling that African Americans would have to be included on juries. Charges were eventually dropped for four of the defendants. Haywood Patterson, found guilty of rape, was sentenced to seventy-five years. Norris Clarence, the oldest defendant and the only one sentenced to death, jumped parole in 1946 and went into hiding up north. In 1976 he was pardoned by Governor George Wallace, who judged him not guilty, since by then the convictions had been studied from every angle and thoroughly discredited.

Hughes, active from the first, published his booklet Scottsboro Unlimited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse in 1932, beginning with a poem entitled “Justice,” a quietly furious testimony to what it looks like across the racial divide:

That Justice is a blind goddess

Is a thing to which we black are wise

Her bandage hides two festering sores

That once perhaps were eyes.

Pound probably never experienced justice like this, not even when he was held at the DTC. Still, back in 1932, and in faraway Rapallo, Italy, he had already made a point of keeping himself informed about the trials. On 18 June 1932 he wrote to Hughes, thanking him for Scottsboro Unlimited, and observed that, while the “American govt., as INTENDED, and as a system is as good a govt. as any,” it does sometimes “allow the worst men in it to govern.” “There is no doubt in my mind,” he said, “that the extreme Southern states are governed by the worst there is in them.” And he concluded, “All of which you are welcome to quote if you think it will do any good. I do not hide my opinion” (qtd. in Roessel 219).

So much and more coming out of the Pisan Cantos. Historical memory, taking the form of an ever-multiplying web, extends from a mythical African city to the living reality of lawlessness under law for African Americans. Summoning this as the mitigating ground makes all the difference to jail sentences—whether actual ones for prison-bound offenders or metaphoric ones for offending poets such as Ezra Pound, serving the equivalent of jail time under the implacable “Fascist” verdict. Networked mediation has already made things happen in the hands of those not fully persuaded by the punitive benefits of criminal justice. It remains for us to enact something similar in literary studies.

In what follows I will try to offer a literary alternative to the murderous, supersessionist versions of the story that animates the site. The textual and the physical sites that appear so recalcitrant and exclusive are actually interwoven, more elastic and artificially constructed than they appear in contemporary theological or political discourse. So if we can solve the textual conundrum, we may be able to resolve the conflict on the ground.

The site of revelation and sacrifice begins in the Hebrew Bible with the vague injunction to Abraham in Genesis 22.2 to “go forth to the land of Moriah and offer [Isaac] up as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I shall say to you.”⁵ It then moves through a number of extemporaneous altars and dramatic encounters to a movable ark accompanying a people in the wilderness and, finally, to one fixed shrine in Jerusalem. But even after King David has consolidated his dominion over Jerusalem and established its status as sacred center by bringing the Ark of the Covenant to the city, and even as his son Solomon commences building a “house” for the Lord, there remains some ambivalence about confining the divine into one physical space. It emerges that the holiest place in Judaism is not the dwelling place of the deity but the site where the human voice can call to, can name, can invoke, the deity. God repeatedly refers to “this house, which is called by my name,” not the place where God dwells (1 Kings 8.15–19; Jer. 7.11, 13–14).⁶

That is, this bold monotheistic move, by which the presence of the divine is established, is one of appellation, a human speech act—undermined periodically, however, when people attempt to reify the desire to draw near to, to possess, or to merge with the divine.⁷ The seesaw between unmediated presence and forms of mediation—calling, naming, imagining—will continue to haunt and shape Judaism from its inception in ancient Hebrew impulses to the present.⁸ After the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in the sixth century BCE, before the dust had settled on its ruins, before physical reconstruction had commenced under the new Persian regime, it was rebuilt as a vision or figment of the imagination—in the prophecies of both Ezekiel and Zachariah.⁹

But the pendulum continues to swing. The Hebrew Bible, which opened in Genesis with a vague designation of “one of the mountains [in the land of Moriah],” concludes with a reference in 2 Chronicles to Solomon’s building the “house of the Lord” on “Mount Moriah, where the Lord appeared to David his father” (3.1). And thus the mountain has been known ever since: all the shrines and hills consolidated into one spot,¹⁰ all the holiness and all the squabbling stories and stones, like the squabbling brothers, concentrated in a few dozen acres.¹¹

My argument is that the symbolic status of the city—a wandering signifier—was born at the same time as the material edifices. And that the topocentric need for what Mircea Eliade would have called an axis mundi continues to compete with more spacious, inclusive, and self-conscious linguistic and ethical flexibilities hidden in plain view in the constitutive text.

I entitled my remarks “Literary Archaeology at the Temple Mount.” Archaeologists tend to find what they are looking for, and current archaeology of the area around the Temple Mount is governed by those who discard evidence in which they are not invested. Although physical remains of the reign of David are virtually nonexistent, Elad, the right-wing Israeli group in charge of much of the reconstruction of the so-called City of David, creates what is meant to be an authentic evocation of the past through visual and textual means; these architectural “reconstructions” and “archaic” landscapes succeed in eradicating or occluding almost all traces of Islam or Arabs, past or present.¹²

Literary archaeology has the advantage of keeping your hands clean, even while you are paging through a text that is thousands of years old. It can, like later appropriations in the midrash and in other monotheistic traditions, be twisted or squeezed to yield various versions and meanings, but the text itself is always there to be rediscovered. A literal reading of the story will highlight certain structural and narrative quirks that determine the genre and contain the secret of the akeda.

Genesis 22 begins very theatrically, like the Book of Job: “And it happened after these things that God tested Abraham.” This is a wink behind Abe’s back to the audience, who is given some assurance that the old man will pass the test. In what follows we may be forgiven if we forget the stage wink as we get caught up in the unfolding tragedy. J. William Whedbee, in his study The Bible and the Comic Vision, follows Northrop Frye in calling the U-shaped plot pattern the telltale curve of the comic. According to Frye, this pattern entails “action sinking into deep and often potentially tragic complications, and then suddenly turning upward into a happy ending” (qtd. in Whedbee 7).¹³ Disaster averted at the last minute through divine intervention is the Hebrew version of deus ex machina.

The structural seemingly needs no elaboration. We all know that Genesis 22 ends with Isaac’s release, yet we repeatedly repress that knowledge so that Isaac can continue to animate our tragic imagination. From the description of Isaac’s “death” and “resurrection” in the midrash¹⁴ through nearly every modern Israeli version—and through all its appropriations in Christian iconography—the akeda is apprehended as an accomplished sacrifice. In fact, the occlusion of the happy ending in Genesis 22 is fundamental to the evolution of the genre of tragedy as sacrifice; safeguarding the place of the sacrificed son, the pharmakos—Isaac or Jesus—is tantamount to safeguarding the very “idea of the tragic,” as Terry Eagleton argues in Sweet Violence. So unearthing the comic structure in the place of ultimate sacrifice becomes a subversive act.

The other element that signals the comic in this narrative cycle is rhetorical or linguistic: the repetitions and wordplays that create literary patterns in the Bible. Genesis 17.17 is the first time the word z-h-k (“to laugh”) is introduced in the six chapters that surround the story of the akeda, when God tells Abraham that his wife, Sarah, will bear a child: “And Abraham flung himself on his face and he laughed [va-yitzhak], saying to himself, ‘To a hundred-year-old will a child be born, will ninety-year-old Sarah give birth?’” In the commentary to his translation of Genesis, Robert Alter notes that “in the subsequent chapters, the narrative will ring the changes on this Hebrew verb, the meanings of which include joyous laughter, bitter laughter, mockery, and sexual dalliance” (83). In short, all the elements of the comic genre. Actually, some version of the word z-h-k appears twenty times in these chapters. Everyone laughs—Abraham, Sarah, Ishmael, and, as a capstone, laughter is embedded in Isaac’s very name, Yitzhak, which means “he will laugh.”

In this most serious of texts the comic muscle is flexed, then, in its every permutation.¹⁵ I will illustrate with only one more passage, which replicates Abraham’s response—this time as slapstick or shtick. When Sarah, who is listening at the tent entrance, hears the annunciation given again to her husband, she repeats Abraham’s response: “So Sarah laughed inwardly, saying, ‘After being shriveled, shall I have pleasure, and my husband is old?’ Then the Lord says to Abraham, ‘Why is it that Sarah laughed [lama ze tzahakah Sara], saying, ‘Shall I give birth, old as I am?’ Is anything beyond the LORD?’. . . And Sarah dissembled, saying, ‘I did not laugh [lo tzahakti],’ for she was afraid. And He said, ‘Yes, you did laugh [lo ki tzahakt]’” (Gen. 18.12–15).

Although one can really ham this passage up, in the manner of domestic farce,¹⁶ something very consequential is transpiring here. I see this as the beginning of the Jewish version of the Divine Comedy¹⁷ as it is passed down from the biblical narrative in Genesis to Philip Roth’s story “Conversion of the Jews.” The exchange manifested hilariously in Sarah’s incredulous laughter, and God’s put-down, actually points to a disparity that will remain fundamental to the Jewish conception of the comic: despite the miracles that are regularly performed throughout the five books of Moses, especially in Genesis and Exodus, there is a healthy Jewish suspicion about any supernatural intervention that disrupts the normal processes of nature. God may be all-powerful, but parturition on the part of a ninety-year-old woman raises the same skepticism as Immaculate Conception will over a thousand years later.

Nevertheless, the laughter intensifies, darkens, and then fades as the story proceeds. After the twenty wordplays on his name, Isaac’s laughter disappears altogether, as if his near-death experience effaced whatever good humor he had.¹⁸ Posttraumatic stress disorder is, after all, a far more powerful reflex than humor.

But one can conclude from the convoluted ways in which the biblical story plays out here, and in future histories,¹⁹ that the very essence of Yitzhak’s name is manifest in the test that Abraham, and his descendants, actually failed: what was at stake was belief in a God who would desire child sacrifice, or for that matter, any human sacrifice. No, the story states simply, God—the tarrying deus ex machina—would actually prefer the comic version of human history and human-divine relations. Der Mensch tracht, und Gott lacht (man proposes, God disposes [literally, man schemes, God laughs]).

In other words, like the messianic faith in Judaism that posits the inevitability of salvation but also its endless deferral, this constitutive story authorizes the Jewish comedy.²⁰ But today in the Holy Land, where hard-won lessons have again been superseded by sacred temptations and messianic impatience, we need something more radical. The comedy I am endorsing makes more room for human intervention. Grounded in faith but driven by human agency, it has been most powerfully articulated in the bloody twentieth century in the work of Franz Kafka and the ethics of Jacques Derrida. Here is a taste of Kafka’s Abraham:

I would conceive of another Abraham for myself—he certainly would have never gotten to be a patriarch or even an old-clothes dealer—who was prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately . . . but was unable to bring it off because he could not get away, being indispensable; the household needed him, there was perpetually something or other to put in order, the house was never ready. . . . (172)²¹

Kafka’s Abraham, humbly anti-Kierkegaardian, is the ultimate comic figure, one who cannot obey the call-from-without because he is too embedded and obligated in this world.

The problem is that the “event” of the akeda, enshrined as memory, is what leads us, again and again, to the suspension of ethical obligation and the comic point of view in favor of the tragic-sacrificial mind-set. “Memory serves tragedy,” writes Carey Perloff in the October 2014 issue of PMLA, devoted to tragedy: “In the Sophoclean universe, to hold the memory of an injustice in one’s ongoing consciousness is a heroic act. In today’s world, it can be a form of psychosis” (833).²²

The “sacrifice” of Isaac moves, then, from a remembered “event” to an existential posture. Psychotic memory abolishes the wedge that distance and deferral provided. “[The] secret of the sacrifice of Isaac,” Derrida tells us, is the “space separating or associating the fire of the family hearth and the fire of the sacrificial holocaust” (88). (The “whole-burnt offering” that Abraham was to offer in the form of his son is called olah in Hebrew—holocaustum in the Latin Vulgate.) Negotiating that space, between the family hearth—the Kafka/Derrida quotidian—and the fire of the sacrifice, is, then, the forgotten secret.

In modern Israel and Palestine, that secret has undergone different iterations and subversions. In the early prestate Jewish community referred to in Zionist memory as the Yishuv, the Temple Mount had more or less the same status in Jewish imagination as it had in the diaspora—although in Jerusalem much of the tension in the 1920s between Muslims and Jews centered on the Wailing Wall, or Al Buraq, and the Temple Mount, or Haram al Sharif.²³ The folk art of the period speaks volumes. Consider, for example, a Rosh Hashanah (New Year’s) greeting from 1925 by the craftsman Moshe Mizrahi (fig. 1).²⁴

The iconography is layered and eclectic, representing a popular concatenation of visions for the future. The flag on the top of a somewhat stylized Dome of the Rock says, “mekom ha-mikdash,” or “place of the Temple.” There are a number of biblical verses, including a reference to the akeda and the priestly blessing. There are doves of peace with greetings in their beaks. But the most interesting element is the barely decipherable writing on the mosque meant, presumably, to be the place holder for the Temple. The passage is from Isaiah’s eschatological projections—when God, the speaker, “will bring them to My holy mountain and make them joyful in My house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted on My altar; for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the peoples” (Isa. 56.7). The reference is to “all the peoples” who accept God’s dominion in the end of days, but the phrase “all the peoples [or nations]” doesn’t appear in the inscription on this card. Naturally, the Hebrew reference to sacrifices and burnt offerings was not exactly pleasing to the Muslims whose Koranic inscriptions it supplants. Although in the ongoing conflict over the Temple Mount this image and others like it enraged the Muslim community—and, as Hillel Cohen shows in his recent study, this kind of supersessionist ambition actually contributed to the riots of 1929 (106–96)—one can also see such acts as at least on some level evoking an “end of days” scenario in which all competing religious visions will be reconciled.²⁵

Because this site was occluded from view and inaccessible to Israelis, because there really was space between the family hearth and the fire of the sacrifice, the Temple Mount was overshadowed by other physical shrines that constituted the “official” Israeli landscape after the establishment of the state in 1948: Yad Vashem and Mount Herzl as memorial sites, the Knesset as the site of modern Jewish sovereignty, and the Israel Museum as a shrine to ancient and modern art.²⁶ Since the Israeli victory of 1967, however, as messianic fervor has grown, all memorial and sacramental activity has converged on the Wailing Wall, with the Temple Mount as site of ultimate aspiration. Along with our loss of boundaries, that is, there has also been the loss of space between us and the sacred center—and, crucially, the loss of our sense of humor.

I suggest, then, an alternative that has always been there, that is consistent with a literal, even “fundamentalist” reading of Genesis 17–22 and of the memory site it animates: a spacious, comic negotiation between the material and the divine, with faith in, but without the hope of, final resolution.

In a speech before the United States Congress in 1994, Jordan’s King Hussein declared, “My religious faith demands that sovereignty over the holy places in Jerusalem reside with God and God alone . . .” (qtd. in Molinaro 17).²⁷ The smiles I imagine on congress members’ faces at the king’s appeal to divine intervention to pacify the squabbling sons of Abraham are the rare signs of our stubborn faith—tested regularly by events on the ground—that politics, like poetry, can be a site where memory yields to magic and comedy defeats tragedy.

The final paper I want to introduce from the Vancouver Presidential Forum is by Wai Chee Dimock, who reflects on negotiation as mediation and calls on university professors of language and literature to direct their attention to students, and potential students, in the growing population of incarcerated persons in the United States. Dimock, who asked her colleagues to think beyond the time and space of the nation-state in her study Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time, now invites readers to think about a way “higher education might intersect with the criminal justice system” through teaching “done under the rubric of a program called Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI).” That program exists in a number of United States cities, including New Haven, where Dimock teaches. She reflects on how she and other college and university educators might build pedagogical bridges between our sites of professional memory—Dimock’s key examples are passages from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos and an iconic image of the cage in Pisa, Italy, where Pound was imprisoned during the last year of World War II—and the sites of memory of students who have spent time in prison and who can discover, through ATI, a temporary reprieve from their daily routine and, potentially, an alternative site of education.

Dimock’s forum paper, like those by Kulchyski and Ezrahi, can serve not only as a memento of the 2015 convention but also as a provocation to think of our work as readers of literature and as humanities educators through the lens provided by the notion of negotiating. The verbal noun implies the willingness to take risks, to engage in acts of “communication or conference” with one another for the purpose of “mutual agreement,” “settlement,” or “compromise” (“Negotiate,” def. 1a). We know of course that negotiations can be and have been undertaken in bad faith—as tactics for delay and as distractions for an interlocutor perceived as an enemy to be defeated by any means. Such negotiations make acts of speech and writing a cover for violence rather than an alternative to it. We also know that negotiation and lying have been intimately linked in history and that tactics of negotiation have often migrated from the battlefield to arenas of diplomacy and trade—and back again. The ancient Chinese had a collection of thirty-six proverbial nuggets of wisdom for achieving military success that are now touted as valuable strategies for CEOs seeking a competitive edge: for example, “kill with a borrowed knife” (借刀杀人), translated as “attack using the strength of another person” (Barkai 8).

Despite the compromised nature of the concept of negotiation in some anglophone educational and political contexts—the 2015 MLA subconference, which highlighted contingent labor issues in academia, was, for example, a call to action entitled Non-Negotiable Sites of Struggle—I hope that the papers from my forum can reanimate a meaning implicit in the Latin term negotium: its negative particle prefix tells us that whatever negotiating is, it is not the kind of leisure (otium) typically enjoyed by the Roman upper class. As Jacques Derrida argued about the ethically difficult kind of negotiation that is required “when there are two incompatible imperatives,” “[o]ne does not negotiate between exchangeable and negotiable things. Rather, one negotiates by engaging the nonnegotiable in negotiation” (13). Such negotiation rarely has a definitive ending, and it may well seem tedious and unglamorous work. In ancient Rome, it was often performed by verbally gifted servants acting on behalf of their masters’ desires. In doing this work, the negotiators were constrained in what they could accomplish; nonetheless, they can offer a model for us because they sometimes found ways to transform intransigent desires into propositions open to change and compromise.