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8 R e p o r t s / C a p i l d e o not a ‘home’, however temporary, can be developed or inhabited, there was no gesture towards how this resembles the ‘colonial uncanny’ (or, dare I say it, the ‘white supremacy uncanny’) in which much of world has been living for generations. When Mundler aptly stated that ‘The Covid-19 virus, like radiation, is invisible and intangible, but wreaks terrible and often long-term damage; it is a cause of anxiety and an inability to live comfortably in the world’, my mind antiphonally, rebelliously sang back ‘magical realism is realism’. The magic realist texture of my current everyday is not only to do with diversity of spiritualities, créolités and habitats; but overarchingly and foundationally with this uncanny. Here is an example of the ‘crisis ordinariness’ of our unacknowledged, shared context. A friend and I were sitting in the cinema in Port of Spain (during the Before Coronavirus years). Almost everyone on screen, in the trailers for films that would be shown in that theatre, was white. Almost everyone in the audience was non-white. I am not talking about the box-office-friendly casting of protagonists. The normed milky sameness extended to characters in the background of peopled scenes, where you would have expected a mixed crowd in real life. ‘Post-genocidal fantasy’, we joked incorrectly, in between awareness of the genocides perpetrated in our Americas, and what looked like wish-fulfilment elimination, or at least segregation, in our world to come. It is no surprise, therefore, that after Megen De Bruin-Molé (Panel 2) delivered a magnificent paper on ‘Living with the Crisis: ‘Mindful’ Consumption and the Rehabilitation of the Zombie in Twenty-First-Century Popular Culture’, I went to look up ‘real’ zombies. De Bruin-Molé was merciless and funny about the political symbolism of the ‘zombie’ in popular film and TV depictions. The latemid twentieth century zombie arrives in hordes to threaten individuals and individuality. (Hmmm…) The zombie of the 1980s is an oddball, a monster not unlike our misunderstood selves. Nowadays, the mindful, neoliberal zombie may work against organised, bad zombies…without escaping from consumerism, of course. But zombies are local, and the tongueless whispering in the land told me I already knew more and needed to know yet more… The friend who had been with me in the cinema referred me to Mike Mariani’s article for The Atlantic (2015).2 In this piece, Mariani restores the heritage of the ‘horror-movie trope’: Haitian slavery. Haiti is a country of great culture, not too far away from Trinidad. I wish I could visit. There is a continuous strand of incredulity in my awareness about how this nation has been forced to service generations of debt, first exacted by France then administered by America, as punishment for winning a black liberation war of independence not long after the French Revolution. Mariani sees the initial ‘zombie archetype’ as a mirror of the inhumanity of slavery. Speaking of the 1625-1800 period of Hispaniola/Haiti, Mariani asserts that while those trapped in subjugated bodies ‘believed that dying would release them back to lan guinée, literally Guinea, or Africa in general, a kind of afterlife where they could be free’, suicide was not a permissible pathway. The spiritual penalty for taking one’s own life was to remain on the plantation as ‘an undead slave’, a zombie. The trajectory Mariani proceeds to narrate goes a little way to healing our knowing, even if nothing can be made whole. I laid it alongside De Bruin-Molé’s narration of the trajectory of fictional bodies, strongly desiring a similar juxtaposition to happen as a matter of course, in reality, at the next such public conversation. To summarise Mariani: what he terms ‘the post-colonialism zombie’ refers to the post-Haitian Revolution period (1804 onwards). This was different from the trapped undead suicide. A reanimated corpse, made to work without reward or carry out dubious tasks, the post-colonialism zombie embodied ‘a more fractured representation of the anxieties of slavery’. Excision is how Mariani figures the zombie myth’s disconnexion, in popular culture, from the memory of millions of African dead. The bodies and minds that do not fit marketable hero tales are cut out. His choice of word is telling. Amputation would have indicated the loss of a limb, i.e. something that was part of a body. Excision suggests the extraction of an alien growth. This chimes with the BACLS papers looking at how the language and logic of contagion have been used, long before the 2020 pandemic, to justify social exclusion. Mariani’s attentiveness to the metaphorisation of language also is of a register with the day of discussion of crisis with which this essay primarily is concerned. What Mariani shows is that with this excision, we have lost any ‘clear metaphor’. What remains? ‘Entertainment’ and ‘escapism’ – not even true apocalypse, in Mariani’s sceptical reading of the fictions featuring ‘zombies’. End-of-the-world fantasies engage us in a refusal to confront real fears. Mariani concludes, ‘Hence a bitter irony between the Haitian zombie and its American counterpart. The monster once represented the real-life horrors of dehumanisation; now it’s used as a way to fantasise about human beings whose every decision is exalted.’ For the stripped-down, brownand-green landscapes of the zombie apocalypse give excessive power to the few remaining characters, feeding individualist desires for ‘us’ to make a difference – so long as ‘we’ can be significant, and saviours. I agree, and conclude slightly otherwise. Before going out again on this heat-risen, rain-wet evening in Port of Spain to walk among the ghostly and perspiring inhabitants of Queen’s Park Savannah and its neighbouring mansions, I find myself thinking of British ‘nature writing’ and ‘psychogeography’. Ah, these increasingly well-funded, modish and respectable outsider genres. Never dare apply a political lens to the writing of the ‘good guys’, who elegise and/or empty their landscapes, forever writing loss, loving through lament and at best a kind of pained tolerance of change. Are these homegrown genres of excision? What tongueless whispering is accumulating in, and off the shores of, my adoptive land? May there be a crisis of transformation. Notes 1 www.bacls.org/conferences/bacls-virtual-conference- june-2020/schedule-draft/ 2 www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/ 10/how-america-erased-the-tragic-history-of-thezombie/412264/
page 11
Some trees and some further trees john clegg It’s impossible to judge definitively from Google Earth, but I think that the white blotches visible in satellite view at 51°59’02.1”N 2°23’43.9”W are tree stumps; in which case they are all that remains of the trees written about by Robert Frost, in his poem ‘The Sound of Trees’ (from Mountain Interval, 1916). They were a clump of elms called the Seven Sisters, in Lascelles Abercrombie’s back garden, at ‘The Gallows’, Ryton, Dymock (near Ledbury). Catherine Abercrombie had a ‘permanent tent’ there, and cooked duck and green peas in a cauldron under an open fire. A great number of Georgian poets came to visit, some camping out, others in spare rooms, others occupying the property when the Abercrombies were away: Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, W.H. Davies, Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater who camped out but had to come back indoors because in the middle of the night he was ‘blown on by a horse’. Presumably all the trees were brought down by Dutch elm disease. A hundred metres east of the Seven Sisters is the edge of Ryton Coppice, a tiny stretch of woodland (a kilometre north to south, 500m east to west at its widest point), which has tangential connections with two famous twentieth century poems. Frost began to draft ‘The Road Not Taken’ at The Gallows in late autumn 1914; Steve Nicholls, in Flowers of the Field: Meadow, Moor and Woodland (Head of Zeus, 2019) has pointed out that Rydon Coppice is a particularly yellow wood (‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’) because its edges and clearings have for a long time been famous for their wild daffodils. (Children used to bunk off school to pick them, for market gardeners to sell in London.) The speaker of ‘The Road Not Taken’ has for a long time been identified as the vacillating Edward Thomas, and this is certainly a path which Frost and Thomas would have walked together in spring. If this identification is correct, incidentally, it’s easy to identify from Google Earth the point at which the road diverges. Nicholls may be pushing it a bit: the ‘yellow wood’ is surely also a close relation of the ‘yellow leaves’ in Shakespeare’s sonnet 73, and the colour brings in the same thematic parallels (too late to change now etc.) – although I’ve never personally walked through woodland in autumn where the leaves felt yellow, quite. The twelfth line of the poem certainly doesn’t seem to fit with daffodils: both paths lay under ‘leaves no step had trodden black’. (That said, the grassiness of the path in the second stanza doesn’t suggest November to me.) But the possibility is open, I think, that Frost had the springtime wood in his mind’s eye when he began, which turned autumnal as the poem’s theme developed. There is a reasonable possibility that the wood Frost had in mind when he began writing his most famous poem was Ryton Coppice. Ryton Coppice is also in the background of Thomas’s most famous poem. Around 1910, Lascelles Abercrombie wrote the long poem ‘Ryton Firs’, which he enthusiastically performed on many occasions at both the Poetry Bookshop in London and The Gallows. (He went on to add a post-war prelude, describing how the firs were cut down to be used as pit props for the Welsh coal mines. His Selected and Collected poems both print the poem with this prelude and revisions.) The final section of the original ‘Ryton Firs’, ‘The Dance’, takes as a repeating burden the line ‘In Herefordshire and Glostershire’; I think there’s a very good chance that this suggested to Thomas the final line of ‘Adlestrop’. Further, more speculatively: I think Thomas heard Abercrombie read the poem, hamming it up, and realised how well the line would work if it was more subdued. Abercrombie rhymed ‘Glostershire’ with ‘fire’; Thomas, ‘Gloucestershire’ with ‘mistier’. Anyway, this all unnerves me slightly, because all three poems, ‘Adlestrop’ and ‘The Sound of Trees’ and ‘The Road Not Taken’, are much too close for comfort. ‘The Road not Taken’ and ‘The Sound of Trees’ are the first and last poems, respectively, in Mountain Interval, announcing and tying up the book’s concerns. 9 R e p o r t s / C l e g g They are that that talks of going But never gets away, writes Frost about the trees, but Thomas might have equally written it about the train; both poems have humanized and vulnerable cloud-formations; both poems address the irresolvable demands between movement and stasis, and how each is enacted in language (the fixed ‘name’ in ‘Adlestrop’, the false ‘talk’ in ‘The Sound of Trees’). When Thomas idled in Adlestrop, he was heading towards Ryton to meet Frost. When Frost ‘set forth for somewhere’ (via London), he would have passed through Adlestrop himself.

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8

R e p o r t s /

C a p i l d e o not a ‘home’, however temporary, can be developed or inhabited, there was no gesture towards how this resembles the ‘colonial uncanny’ (or, dare I say it, the ‘white supremacy uncanny’) in which much of world has been living for generations. When Mundler aptly stated that ‘The Covid-19 virus, like radiation, is invisible and intangible, but wreaks terrible and often long-term damage; it is a cause of anxiety and an inability to live comfortably in the world’, my mind antiphonally, rebelliously sang back ‘magical realism is realism’. The magic realist texture of my current everyday is not only to do with diversity of spiritualities, créolités and habitats; but overarchingly and foundationally with this uncanny.

Here is an example of the ‘crisis ordinariness’ of our unacknowledged, shared context. A friend and I were sitting in the cinema in Port of Spain (during the Before Coronavirus years). Almost everyone on screen, in the trailers for films that would be shown in that theatre, was white. Almost everyone in the audience was non-white. I am not talking about the box-office-friendly casting of protagonists. The normed milky sameness extended to characters in the background of peopled scenes, where you would have expected a mixed crowd in real life. ‘Post-genocidal fantasy’, we joked incorrectly, in between awareness of the genocides perpetrated in our Americas, and what looked like wish-fulfilment elimination, or at least segregation, in our world to come.

It is no surprise, therefore, that after Megen De Bruin-Molé (Panel 2) delivered a magnificent paper on ‘Living with the Crisis: ‘Mindful’ Consumption and the Rehabilitation of the Zombie in Twenty-First-Century Popular Culture’, I went to look up ‘real’ zombies. De Bruin-Molé was merciless and funny about the political symbolism of the ‘zombie’ in popular film and TV depictions. The latemid twentieth century zombie arrives in hordes to threaten individuals and individuality. (Hmmm…) The zombie of the 1980s is an oddball, a monster not unlike our misunderstood selves. Nowadays, the mindful, neoliberal zombie may work against organised, bad zombies…without escaping from consumerism, of course. But zombies are local, and the tongueless whispering in the land told me I already knew more and needed to know yet more…

The friend who had been with me in the cinema referred me to Mike Mariani’s article for The Atlantic (2015).2 In this piece, Mariani restores the heritage of the ‘horror-movie trope’: Haitian slavery. Haiti is a country of great culture, not too far away from Trinidad. I wish I could visit. There is a continuous strand of incredulity in my awareness about how this nation has been forced to service generations of debt, first exacted by France then administered by America, as punishment for winning a black liberation war of independence not long after the French Revolution. Mariani sees the initial ‘zombie archetype’ as a mirror of the inhumanity of slavery. Speaking of the 1625-1800 period of Hispaniola/Haiti, Mariani asserts that while those trapped in subjugated bodies ‘believed that dying would release them back to lan guinée, literally Guinea, or Africa in general, a kind of afterlife where they could be free’, suicide was not a permissible pathway. The spiritual penalty for taking one’s own life was to remain on the plantation as ‘an undead slave’, a zombie.

The trajectory Mariani proceeds to narrate goes a little way to healing our knowing, even if nothing can be made whole. I laid it alongside De Bruin-Molé’s narration of the trajectory of fictional bodies, strongly desiring a similar juxtaposition to happen as a matter of course, in reality, at the next such public conversation. To summarise Mariani: what he terms ‘the post-colonialism zombie’ refers to the post-Haitian Revolution period (1804 onwards). This was different from the trapped undead suicide. A reanimated corpse, made to work without reward or carry out dubious tasks, the post-colonialism zombie embodied ‘a more fractured representation of the anxieties of slavery’.

Excision is how Mariani figures the zombie myth’s disconnexion, in popular culture, from the memory of millions of African dead. The bodies and minds that do not fit marketable hero tales are cut out. His choice of word is telling. Amputation would have indicated the loss of a limb, i.e. something that was part of a body. Excision suggests the extraction of an alien growth. This chimes with the BACLS papers looking at how the language and logic of contagion have been used, long before the 2020 pandemic, to justify social exclusion. Mariani’s attentiveness to the metaphorisation of language also is of a register with the day of discussion of crisis with which this essay primarily is concerned. What Mariani shows is that with this excision, we have lost any ‘clear metaphor’.

What remains? ‘Entertainment’ and ‘escapism’ – not even true apocalypse, in Mariani’s sceptical reading of the fictions featuring ‘zombies’. End-of-the-world fantasies engage us in a refusal to confront real fears. Mariani concludes, ‘Hence a bitter irony between the Haitian zombie and its American counterpart. The monster once represented the real-life horrors of dehumanisation; now it’s used as a way to fantasise about human beings whose every decision is exalted.’ For the stripped-down, brownand-green landscapes of the zombie apocalypse give excessive power to the few remaining characters, feeding individualist desires for ‘us’ to make a difference – so long as ‘we’ can be significant, and saviours.

I agree, and conclude slightly otherwise. Before going out again on this heat-risen, rain-wet evening in Port of Spain to walk among the ghostly and perspiring inhabitants of Queen’s Park Savannah and its neighbouring mansions, I find myself thinking of British ‘nature writing’ and ‘psychogeography’. Ah, these increasingly well-funded, modish and respectable outsider genres. Never dare apply a political lens to the writing of the ‘good guys’, who elegise and/or empty their landscapes, forever writing loss, loving through lament and at best a kind of pained tolerance of change. Are these homegrown genres of excision? What tongueless whispering is accumulating in, and off the shores of, my adoptive land? May there be a crisis of transformation.

Notes 1 www.bacls.org/conferences/bacls-virtual-conference-

june-2020/schedule-draft/ 2 www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/

10/how-america-erased-the-tragic-history-of-thezombie/412264/

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