08 September 2014

Poem of the Week 2014/37

The Country of the Dead

The country of the dead
I speak
no answer
I weep
no pity
I watch
no colour
I listen
no sound
the country of the dead

I shout, the echo strikes
the dead rock
I kick, my toe mutilates
on dry stump
I weep, no pity
the country of the dead

I've searched the exit
but heard no owls
no parrots, the waves beat afar
on wrecks of ships
the sand stares with me
the country of the dead.

Jared Angira

This is an evocative, chant-like poem, summoning up a state that I think we can all recognize, even if we can't quite place or limit its uneasiness. Right after the title tells us we are in the country of the dead, the speaker emphasizes that statement with repetition at the very beginning of the poem, and then again at the end of each stanza, like the tolling of a bell. In the unpunctuated first stanza, in between the repetition of the country of the dead, we have a series of two-word lines, divided into couplets the second line of which is a response balanced against the first. You could almost see this as an example of stichomythia, the technique (dating back to ancient Greek tragedy) in which single lines (or half-lines) are rapidly exchanged between two different characters, usually ones who are disputing something. There is a call-and-response here; each couplet starts with the speaker making a statement about himself: I speak, I weep, I watch, I listen. And then the speaker perceives a response, or more precisely a lack of response, from the country of the dead: no answer, no pity, no color, no sound. Each two-word statement begins with I and is balanced by one beginning with no: a negation of the self. In between the first and last lines of the stanza, which are the repetition of the country of the dead, the speaker has established what this country is: each action of the speaker, each emotional or sense-based assertion, is immediately nullified by an oppositional blankness.

In the second stanza, the speaker moves from I speak to I shout, but his increased volume and intensity are met only with echo against dead rock. He lashes out physically, kicking, and his toe mutilates / on dry stump: mutilates on is an odd usage. Usually it would be is mutilated by [or on] a dry stump or mutilates a dry stump. Perhaps the phrasing here is an attempt to suggest both ideas: he hurts himself on the dry stump, and while doing so he damages the dry stump. In either case, the only result is damage. In another example of repetition, the first stanza's I weep / no pity recurs, this time as one line: I weep, no pity. There is an added immediacy and intensity by pulling no pity up from the second line, as if the reaction is even faster than after his first tears (the longer line also fits the longer lines used in the second stanza).

In the third stanza the speaker looks for a way out (I've searched the exit) but he hears no owls (meditative birds of night) or parrots (noisy and colorful birds of day) – nothing is going to escape by taking flight, by night or by day. Though this third stanza opens out, we are still very much in the country of the dead: he looks for other living creatures, but they aren't there. There is an ocean, but its waves beat against wrecked ships (the ships are the only evidence of the existence of other people, and they are wrecked). There is sand, but it is so blank and harsh it seems to be staring (nonetheless, the vast blank sand, by staring with instead of at him, becomes the only element not in opposition to him). The poem ends with another repetition of the country of the dead, followed by the finality of the only period, the only end-stop that appears in the poem.

I wonder if some of The Waste Land, particularly the section titled What the Thunder Said, lurks behind some of this poem, with its dry stump, its blankness and silence except for an ominous natural noise (here, the far-off waves beating on wrecked ships), its sand, its dead rock (rock of course is by its nature dead; the use of dead here is emphatic, as in the usage dead silence – this rock is the essence of the not-living). There is also in both poems the deep awareness of the dead – a feeling that we live in a world that is really theirs. So what is the country of the dead? The answer is open, and as in The Waste Land, the possible interpretations include both the personal and the social and the historical. The speaker could be describing a state of spiritual despair, of hopelessness; or it might be a sense of personal isolation and alienation in a world that mystifies him.  He might himself be dead, and the poem a description of a bleak afterlife, from which he finds no exit. He might be describing his awareness of mortality, and of those who have gone before into what we see as blankness and silence, into Hamlet's "undiscover'd country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns."

Jared Angira is a contemporary Kenyan poet. I took this poem from The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier.

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