As caught up as so many of us are in the quotidian, a historical novel seems hardly relevant.
Yet, NPR All Things Considered book critic Alan Cheuse has managed to write an epic that is exquisitely appropos; in his newly released Song of Slaves in the Desert- A Novel of Slavery and The Southern Wild – Source Books 2011, he gives us the issues of ethnicity, race and freedom in a new, eloquent light.
Song of Slaves in the Desert begins with the searing account of a sheik warning his slave of his impending sale, that slave’s attempt to escape with his family, and capture.
Meanwhile, in mid-nineteenth century New York Nathan Pereira is a young Jew sent by his father to Charleston to monitor family interests. So it is that histories collide and the colorful protagonist, delivered to the reader in a remarkable first person assemblage of detail, begins to confront how it is and why it is that Jews, themselves the indisputable victims of history, came to possess African slaves in the antebellum South.
Cheuse is a canny narrator, writing in rich prose: “’Not long now, massa,’ Isaac said, another week or so later, holding up a handful of the rich and plumped kernels from the stalks at our feet, stalks that held their heads high, strong, in spite of the weight of the burgeoning kernels.”
“…Mute at dinner—retiring early to my room—reading (Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe!) dreaming into the dark—that was my round after returning from the fields. I felt as much slave to my condition as the dark people who went home to their cabins and took some feeble pleasures before sleep and the next day’s round of hard labor.”
The heart of The Song of Slaves in the Desert is “The Passage,” a grueling journey, a tale oft told but seldom with Alan Cheuse’s exquisite poetry, delineating the unbearable brutality in which the children of the slaves were thrown into the sea: “Her heart pounded, the wind pounded the sails, the ship pounded its way into the rolling sea. Where did they take those children? Lyaa asked in a voice raspy with thirst and emotion, hearing nothing but moans and hoarse shouting, the roar of wind and rush of water against cloth and wood.”
Histories intertwine when Pereira encounters the beautiful Liza, descendant of the desert slaves, crossing an heretofore unbreachable boundary.
It is a daunting task to explore the twists and turns of history, to sift through to find narrative threads and weave them together. Writing such a book is tantamount to archaeology: you have the bones, then the flesh and then the emergent story with its revelations. Cheuse paints a world that draws the reader in to come face to face with great disparities and conundrums, his characters justly fallible and ignoble and yet who are redeemed, as we hope we all are, by their efforts to overcome and come to terms.
New Poem for “Friday Feast”– Chalice
To participate in the Friday Feast meme click here. Questions? jenneandrews2010@gmail.com. I’m also featured in Leslie Moon’s beautiful artist and writer series at One Stop Poetry today.
Chalice
for C.A.
All I know is, when her soul
seemed to fail her, I had no choice.
In the lifting up I became another
venturing, could shake far cries in realms
unguessed. Nor could I return
without the shade of her
who carried me into her need, beyond
mere mercies.
.
from The Violence of Unseen Forms,
the collection Dear Ghosts
Tess Gallagher
.
Weary of the saga
our obsession with the saga,
I blot out the light.
.
But I dream of spots on a car’s upholstery,
chlorophyll, chloroform, duct tape–
skull bones taped to jaws
prodigious prosecutors opining
defense lawyers like runners
on the rim of time
the sonnets of their testimonials.
.
We cannot escape collective obsession
the will fails and we pitch into it
where we sink in beyond mere mercies
like wet tar
witness to the witnesses
mouthing indictments
forgetting who looks out
from our dry, rebuking eyes.
.
First: the mother– she binds herself to the mast
like Jocasta
the mother, her moony madness
her tan and frosted hair.
.
Then I watch your face, the mad
daughter’s face. Ophelia then Persephone.
A Magdelene, a mime. Soon it is a face
I see in the mirror instead of my own.
the dark hair, the lashed blue eyes,
the resolved rouged mouth.
.
I see the bones laid out,
the small skull
and I think of the child
with cornflower eyes
I had torn from me.
I see the grandmother with the child
stepping into a dream of water
.
And I remember my own drowning
in the seas of the world
setting a course
only to end up hooked
at the edge of the waterfall
.
So that someone in a helicopter
had to come and haul me up
into his khaki-sheathed arms.
.
We all want to be saved.
But if you held her underwater
were you not drowning yourself.
If you drugged her
.
Kissing her with an eyedropper of chloroform
like a mother bird
even as you sped away
into the night
its profaning neon havens
have you not
undone yourself
for all time.
.
Ii
.
We want evidence to tell us the truth
but it bears the circumspection of chaff.
I want to know what my father
did to me to make me give myself
so freely to men who remind me
of him.
.
He cannot tell me;
his is the stillness
of the earth around dwarfed pine trees
.
I want my mother to rise from the dead
to forgive my dispossession of her
but I weep in the dusk
while someone says I must forgive myself.
.
Truth is the acetylene–
it sears away the infected flesh
of the most gilded, all-deluding lie.
Weary girl
in your living tomb
.
Tell the truth. tell it to the world.
I will stand with you
fellow murderer, fellow thief,
fellow liar.
.
iii
.
Shame runs a course like a river of fire.
Unaware of this, the old dusty men
of the courts, lairs redolent
with formaldehyde
lay their hands on our white marble bodies.
They cut our hearts out of our chest
they open our legs
and crawl back in to the womb
like brown worms screwing themselves
into the loam.
.
Even so we think that the lies we tell
to save ourselves
are acceptable
to our souls. I remember
terrorizing a small and vulnerable thing
until it hated and feared me
.
And I denied that I had brought torment
into the world
.
And then I hated and feared myself.
until I begged that one’s forgiveness
and my shame pried my mouth open
there, the black pearls of truth
next to the chalice of my own blood.
.
Beautiful damned girl, say it. Rise up.
Open your veins: bleed
into the cup.
.
copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews 2011
Feel free to share but attribute to me. I’m at jenneandrews2010@gmail.com, and on Facebook.
2 comments | tags: Friday Feast poetry meme, jenne andrews poetry, poem inspired by Anthony trial, post-confessional poetry | posted in About Inner Child, Poetry, Politics and Commentary, Tour d'Force Posts, Trauma Survival