ISHION HUTCHINSON

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a speaking subject; there’s the elegiac final couplet with a last line ghosting dactylic pentameter and standing like a funeral epigram; and above all, there’s a Grecian, and later a Roman, stoicism in light of death—which is both the acceptance and the refutation of death—which marks the poem’s consolation. Such artifice appears naturally embedded in the poem. The poem overcomes this classical artifice in one way I find crucial, and that is in the ritual journey of the first-person singular I to the first-person plural we—the private to the ceremonial. This journey encompasses “the work of mourning.” Framing the classics in this light would seem to give positive answer to my title’s projected question: “Yes, the classics can console.”

The work of mourning (Freud’s phrase) is a transmutation of the self into an other. If we begin though to consider the work of mourning within the context of the Caribbean’s colonial history—and there’s no escaping taking stock of that history— an irreconcilable difficulty presents itself. This history already maligns the Caribbean self into the position of the other. The immediate first question is: Does the work of mourning, illustrated in poetry forged out of classicism, constitute a hollowing of the other?

The question isn’t naive. There is no doubt as to the convergence of the classics, works written throughout the period of the Greco-Roman Empire, with the creation of the colonized world by, say, the British Empire of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The classics of the former empire was the cherished cultural property of the latter. It was deployed as a tool in the colonized space to reinforce and validate the “civilizing mission” of British imperialism. This raises immediately a second question: What recourse of language, then, does a person with a colonial background, one very much shaped by the classics inadvertently and directly, have when considering the work of mourning? The question put this way would seem to imply a negative answer to my title’s question: “No, the classics cannot console.”

Well, neither quite no or yes. The situation calls for a far more diffident response. A collision. Such a word exists. It resides for me outside of the English language or any other standard European language. The word I am thinking of is pallaksch, a word the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin invented during his madness while translating Sophocles’s Antigone. Pallaksch means yes and no. Pallaksch, pallaksch. Those of you who recognize the source of my essay’s title might understand immediately why Hölderlin’s self-othering word pallaksch, yes and no, such a beautiful agon of bitter ambivalence, is the just response.

Or you might be thinking something else altogether. You might be thinking the question mark is a caricature of the end-stopped original. I cannot intend anything further from that. My question mark imposes an unheard pitch of defiance ingrained in a system of power and domination, a system in which the classics play a central role. The imposition of the question mark, moreover, is an act of doubt. The question mark is an agon of pallaksch rather than a reproach to the certainty of the original end-stopped statement, “the classics can console.”

One of the powerful ways in which “Sea Canes” overcomes classical artifice is through the ritual journey from I to we, a democratization of