Trickster Poetics: Multiculturalism and Collectivity in Nathaniel Mackey's Song of the Andoumboulou

Over the course of his twenty-five-year publishing career, Nathaniel Mackey has authored five poetry chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry, including Eroding Witness (selected for the National Poetry Series by Michael Harper, 1985), School of Udhra (1993), and Whatsaid Serif(1998). His work of serial fiction, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, has appeared in two installments to date: Bedouin Hornbook (1986) and Djbot Baghostus 'S Run (1993). In addition to his creative pursuits, Mackey has established his reputation as a scholar with his book, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993), and numerous periodical articles in which he examines the writing he finds most compelling: that of contemporary Caribbean and African American experimental writers such as Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, and Clarence Major as well as the Black Mountain poets Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley. With Art Lange, Mackey edited the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (1993). Born in Miami in 1947, Mackey has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz since 1979 and continues to edit the journal Hambone. Mackey works at the intersection of the African American vernacular and Euro-American "open form" poetics, a rich intersection, but one not often recognized as such, and in which we can locate the projects of few other African American poets. Amiri Baraka comes to mind, representing the generation before Mackey, as do a few of the young innovators whose work is often contextualized with that of the "language writers," such as Will Alexander, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen. Although the much-needed critical vocabulary for talking about postmodern African American writing has begun to be developed by scholars such as Aldon Lynn Nielsen in his book Black Chant, contemporary American poetry scholarship and publishing have yet to adequately account for linguistically innovative African American poetry. Thus, placing Mackey's writing in any one literary tradition or context is difficult since his poetry itself is "difficult." But significant critical engagements with Mackey's work have appeared, most notably in a recent special issue of Callaloo (2000) and in Paul Naylor's Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History. Mackey's ongoing sequence poem, Song of the Andoumboulou, is published to date in more than forty numbered sections, the first seven appearing in 1985 in Eroding Witness. Other installments appear in School of Udhra, and Whatsaid Serif is comprised wholly of Song of the Andoumboulou, sections 16-35, many of which had previously been published in literary journals such as Sulfur, Conjunctions, and apex of the M; subsequent sections continue to appear in Callaloo and other periodical venues. In 1995 Mackey made a CD recording of sections 16-25, entitled Strick, with jazz/world music artists Royal Hartigan and Hafez Modirzadeh. The series is an improvisational work of sometimes jarring dissonance and startling connections, rife with noise and punctuated by deep silences. The title of the series, Song of the Andoumboulou, refers to a traditional funeral song of the Dogon people of West Africa that invokes what in their complex cosmology is an earlier, flawed form of human being. Mackey was initially inspired, upon hearing a sound recording of the song, not so much by the meaning of its words or to what they refer, but by the harsh and "raspy" texture of the singing itself ("Interview," O'Leary 40). Mackey emulates this rasp in his poetic sequence by means of various formal and stylistic gestures, including radical word play, sonic devices, ragged left and right margins, irregular spacing within and between lines, frequent use of ellipses, repetition, and enigmatic fragments of narrative stitched to one another with what seem to be the sinewy innards of language itself. Song of the Andoumboulou begins with an epigraph from Marcel Griaule's Conversations with Ogotemmeli, an anthropologist's account of Dogon cosmology and culture garnered through interviews with a single tribal elder, and the first few sections of the series stay close to this particular source in terms of theme and specific references. …