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BRICK 114 The kaachi I heard growing up was neither a bell nor a voice but an electric horn that blared from Tropicana Sugar Estate’s factory. The sound travelled miles. The sound reached into the barracks of Jane Ash Corner, Duckenfield, Cheswick, Hampton Court, Dalvey—all those gently falling Anglo-Saxon district names—out of which bodies rose up at the break of dawn, at midday, at dusk, at bedtime, and at midnight and filed off down the marl-and-ash road to sweat in the satanic vats. Time was shaped by the kaachi’s eternal shift change. What I heard was the sound of a tragic pastoral, the sound of a place blunted into routines of and for survival, routines intimately tied to the sugar-cane crop, the original sin of suffering. Sugar cane. Saccharum officinarum. The sound is a terrifying pathos. But you cannot hear the shrill hiss of that incessant harpy, the kaachi. It is a sound I would not want you to hear. I want you to hear another sound, one that even as it issues—even as it is uttered—from the pain of the sugar cane, out of the despair of history, manages to bear an elemental cry that imagines itself beyond pain, beyond despair, beyond cane, and beyond history. Here is that sound: Half my friends are dead. I will make you new ones, said earth. No, give me them back, as they were, instead, with faults and all, I cried. Tonight I can snatch their talk from the faint surf ’s drone through the canes, but I cannot walk on the moonlit leaves of ocean down that white road alone, or float with the dreaming motion of owls leaving earth’s load. O earth, the number of friends you keep exceeds those left to be loved. The sea canes by the cliff flash green and silver; they were the seraph lances of my faith, but out of what is lost grows something stronger that has the rational radiance of stone, enduring moonlight, further than despair, strong as the wind, that through dividing canes brings those we love before us, as they were, with faults and all, not nobler, just there. This poem is called “Sea Canes,” and it appears in Derek Walcott’s 1976 volume, Sea Grapes. Five tercet stanzas set between a quatrain and a couplet, alternating full and half rhymes, “Sea Canes” has the skewed formality of a cultivated sugar-cane plot, lost in a dense forest of classical oaks and beech trees. This cultivated structure falls away where the rhythm of the poem commingles into an Antillean melody, and you hear, with pictorial clarity, a landscape that is asymmetrical, self-creating, and involved in the speaker’s lament. A reminder of the dead and the radical site of consolation. How does the poem become such a site? A fair amount of classicism drives the matter. There’s the ecologic convention; there’s the apostrophe to earth, earth which is allegorized into
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ISHION HUTCHINSON 115 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

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BRICK

114

The kaachi I heard growing up was neither a bell nor a voice but an electric horn that blared from Tropicana Sugar Estate’s factory. The sound travelled miles. The sound reached into the barracks of Jane Ash Corner, Duckenfield, Cheswick, Hampton Court, Dalvey—all those gently falling Anglo-Saxon district names—out of which bodies rose up at the break of dawn, at midday, at dusk, at bedtime, and at midnight and filed off down the marl-and-ash road to sweat in the satanic vats. Time was shaped by the kaachi’s eternal shift change. What I heard was the sound of a tragic pastoral, the sound of a place blunted into routines of and for survival, routines intimately tied to the sugar-cane crop, the original sin of suffering. Sugar cane. Saccharum officinarum. The sound is a terrifying pathos.

But you cannot hear the shrill hiss of that incessant harpy, the kaachi. It is a sound I would not want you to hear. I want you to hear another sound, one that even as it issues—even as it is uttered—from the pain of the sugar cane, out of the despair of history, manages to bear an elemental cry that imagines itself beyond pain, beyond despair, beyond cane, and beyond history.

Here is that sound:

Half my friends are dead. I will make you new ones, said earth. No, give me them back, as they were, instead, with faults and all, I cried.

Tonight I can snatch their talk from the faint surf ’s drone through the canes, but I cannot walk on the moonlit leaves of ocean down that white road alone, or float with the dreaming motion of owls leaving earth’s load. O earth, the number of friends you keep exceeds those left to be loved.

The sea canes by the cliff flash green and silver; they were the seraph lances of my faith, but out of what is lost grows something stronger that has the rational radiance of stone, enduring moonlight, further than despair, strong as the wind, that through dividing canes brings those we love before us, as they were, with faults and all, not nobler, just there.

This poem is called “Sea Canes,” and it appears in Derek Walcott’s 1976 volume, Sea Grapes. Five tercet stanzas set between a quatrain and a couplet, alternating full and half rhymes, “Sea Canes” has the skewed formality of a cultivated sugar-cane plot, lost in a dense forest of classical oaks and beech trees. This cultivated structure falls away where the rhythm of the poem commingles into an Antillean melody, and you hear, with pictorial clarity, a landscape that is asymmetrical, self-creating, and involved in the speaker’s lament. A reminder of the dead and the radical site of consolation. How does the poem become such a site? A fair amount of classicism drives the matter.

There’s the ecologic convention; there’s the apostrophe to earth, earth which is allegorized into

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