School of Udhra

African American Review, Summer, 1996 by Mark Scroggins

That wind is no doubt the "bedouin wind" to which the subtitle of one poem alludes, for the other keynote of these poems, besides that of longing, is of migration, a "bedouin wish / to be elsewhere, / every- / where at once." This movement is away from origins which, even as they recede, become mythicized, at once familiar and alien, the "mu" Mackey celebrates in an ongoing serial poem of that title - "Irredentist / myth, 'mu' meaning lost ground, / 'else' / the earlier where we were / after" (81) - and toward some ultimate personal or cultural goal, whether the beloved (who appears once memorably as "maitresse erzulie," the voudoun loa) or the Utopian (meaning, of course, "no-place") city of Zar, which, as Mackey quotes Larry Neal, "is just this side of far" (55).

These poems are not uniformly easy of access: They studiously avoid a consistent authorial or lyric voice, steering instead among a myriad of fragmented and disjointed voices and textual styles. Such disjunction, while rare in the works of contemporary African American poets - or at least those most often anthologized and lionized by the literary establishment - seems on one level to enact quite seriously the "death of the author" theorized by European poststructuralism. Happily, Mackey is a critic, explicator, and theorist of experimental texts, as well as an innovator in his own right. The publication of his volume of critical essays Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing has very nearly coincided with that of School of Udhra, and there are a number of moments in these essays that not only provide us signposts for approaching Mackey's own poetry but help us to situate his poetry within the spectrum of contemporary African American writing practices. One is a quotation from the "Language" poet Ron Silliman, who addresses the question of why so much poetry written by African American (and by "woman, ... sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the 'marginal'") appears "conventional" in comparison to his own experimentation and the experiments of his white colleagues. Since the "narrative of history has led not to their self-realization, but to their exclusion and domination," Silliman writes, such writers "have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to whom [sic] is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience." Mackey replies straightforwardly, if not scornfully: For Silliman to characterize African American literary production as "conventional" provides an index, not of that writing, but of Silliman's own limited experience thereof. To fail or refuse to "acknowledge complexity among writers from socially marginalized groups," Mackey writes, is nothing but condescension: "Experimental writing, the aesthetic margin, is not the domain solely of those from socially unmarginalized groups."

And Mackey's own writing is surely one of the best cases in point. Professor of Literature at UC-Santa Cruz and editor of the stunningly eclectic journal Hambone, Mackey is also among the foremost of a group of innovative African American poets among whom one can number Clarence Major, Erica Hunt, C. S. Giscombe, and Harryette Mullen. Mackey's poems are influenced by the early avant-garde poetics of Amiri Baraka, by the cross-culturality and pan-Africanism of Henry Dumas, and by such white experimentalists as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, leading lights of the "Black Mountain" school of poetry. Such a literary lineage is almost unique, though Mackey has much in common with the young Baraka, whose own work was modeled as much on the "new thing" of post-bop jazz as it was on the work of the avant-garde New York poets with whom then-LeRoi Jones associated in the Fifties and early Sixties, before his conversion to a militant Black Nationalism led him to a more easily accessible, hortatory poetics.

Mackey addresses this very shift in his essay "The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka," in which he valorizes the "obliquity or angularity" of Baraka's early work, qualities that are everywhere evident in the poems of School of Udhra. These poems, that is, do not tell singular, coherent stories, or even proceed out of clear, separably singular voices. They are complex and initially bewildering works, for they proceed on an assumed cultural and personal basis of complex contemporaneity and heterogenous, perhaps indeterminate origins. There is a dense web of intertextual references running throughout the poems, references to other texts, musical compositions, cultural traditions, and to Mackey's own previous writings. Such intertextuality is reinforced by the presence within School of Udhra of poems from Mackey's two ongoing series, "Song of the Andoumboulou" and "mu." In many ways similar in structure to Robert Duncan's series Passages and Structure of Rime, each of which included poems from several of Duncan's books of poetry, Mackey's series are both continued from his earlier collection, Eroding Witness (1985). Their titles evince the cross-cultural range of his poetics: "Song of the Andoumboulou" derives from the French anthropologist Marcel Griaule's research among the Dogon peoples of Mali, and while "mu" takes its name from jazz trumpeter Don Cherry's album titles, it derives additional resonance from Jane Harrison's Themis: "A myth is not merely a word spoken; it is a re-utterance or pre-utterance, it is a focus of emotion Possibly the first muthos was simply the interjectional utterance mu" (21).