I'd like to to turn to Philip and introduce her, and we are really,
really delighted that she was able to come to be part of this series about how our reading impacts
our lives and and and calls to us and informs our thinking and our relationship to the world.
And this is an acclaimed poet, writer and also a lawyer who was born in Tobago and now lives in Toronto.
She writes both fiction and non-fiction and has published five books of poetry, including Thorns Nineteen eighty seven, Courage 83.
She tries her tongue as Silence Softly Breaks 1988 and Tsong 2008 and also two novels.
Harriet's Daughter also in 1988 and looking for Levingston and Odyssey of Silence.
She's also published essays and plays. She tries her tongue won the prestigious Casa de las Americas PRISE while still in manuscript form,
and she's received numerous fellowships and awards for her work,
amongst them of Guggenheim Fellowship, the MacDowell Fellowship and the Chalmers Fellowship in Poetry.
So nobody can hand over to you now and welcome you very warmly to you today.
First, thank you to all of you for being here, having me here in this beautiful city.
I spent this morning walking around looking at the what did Hardy say?
Something, The Dreaming Spires of Oxford, thanks to L.A. Marina and Matthew.
My apologies. We just met. So what I think I'll do is read a short bit.
You can signal to me when I should shut up, because I've been told since I'm the featured person, they have a little bit more time.
But as we talked before coming in, I had a few ideas as to how I should do this.
I'm going to read from the title essay in this work called A Genealogy of Resistance.
This particular world, the publishing house, is no longer in existence and this is not out of print.
I have some copies at home, but it will be in print again this year through Wesleyan in the US.
The title essay, A Genealogy of Resistance and any French speaking people forgive my accent.
It's a three epigraphs. The first one is in French.
A sailor or poet, the declination or non Tanizaki Tarus and the time has come or poet to declare your name, your birth and your race.
That's James and John Pierce from Exile, a poet whose work has meant a lot to me in my development.
The second is from Jean-Paul Sartre. The writer has a place in his age.
Each word has an echo, as does each silence.
And the third is from an African-American poet. Some of you may know her.
Audrey Lord, the late Audry Lord, the white fathers told us.
I think therefore I am the black mother within each of us.
The poet whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free.
Please come in poetry coin's the language to express and chart this revolutionary demand.
As I said from Awdry Lord. And there's an essay in here in which I actually mentioned this for the longest while and it still surfaces.
I had this sense of two people standing over my shoulder when I wrote.
One was John from Sussex and one was a Biswal.
And there was always this fight going on as to, you know,
when I wrote who should be who should be in control of this quote from Awdry that I have just read, just brought it to me.
I just read a few paragraphs from the beginning. I will begin with him, not with the word which was in the beginning.
I shall speak of him, who every evening with slow and careful hands, brought light to displace the darkness.
Mesmerised, I watch the delicate bag of white gauze fill glow bright white.
Under the slow and steady pumping, the light grows stronger and brighter until age, until its harsh glare has chased away the encroaching blackness.
Where was it kept during the day? The kerosene lantern.
What colour was it? The only memory is of that daily ritual, my father bringing light to the home,
a house perched on the seashore on the coast of a tiny island, Tobago, in an even tinier village,
a fishing village with an impressive name, Plymouth's named,
no doubt for that much larger Busia Plymouth's so many thousands of miles away, a geneology of names Plymouth, Scarbro, Lakotah lands.
For me, having everything to do with those who, in their brutal naming, obliterated others names and people.
I will begin. There was a kerosene lantern novel with him, my father bringing light because the image lingers long in my mind,
so much light from one small and fragile bag.
I begin with him not because there's any more reason to begin with him, my father, than with her my mother.
I begin with him because one needs a place to begin, a place from which to build a geneology.
And beginning with him and the lamp and the light appear so much clearer besides the images I associate with her.
But those come later in the stories and poems, how they proliferate the stories each a tiny filigreed net like the mantle of the kerosene lantern.
My father pursuing his own Spofford trail, part holp part memory in the construction of a genealogy of what belonging last
born of ten children waited with a name solid enough to balance his ambition.
He takes early retirement from a teaching profession and goes to England.
The mother country to become a lawyer does not become a lawyer.
Does research becomes obsessed with the island of his birth to be a in there, because I think he passed on that obsession to me, the island to Tobago.
And as I said to Marina last week, it's the place I write from, though not necessarily about.
In fact, I was reading in The Guardian this weekend the Irish writer who just wrote that entire novel,
one sentence talks about this little this little town he was from and how that shapes his life.
And that's the role that Tobago plays in my life. Although I only lived there for eight years, my father moved us to Trinidad.
But somehow those eight years are the most formative.
As Alex mentioned, I left home, studied, became a lawyer, practised law for seven years,
although I knew I was not going to remain forever, I think I was finishing his business.
He didn't want me. It wasn't that I felt he wanted me to become a lawyer, but I think in families that happens.
Children are very intuitive and sometimes take on burdens that are not theirs.
But it served me in good stead because I think without it I couldn't have written song, although I had to have left it to have written song.
So that's there. The Zen koan like situation I would like to read a bit from.
So I wrote two books when I was practising Law, Thornes and Samin Courage.
And then there's a break and this book comes. She tries her tongue, her silence softly breaks.
And interestingly, interestingly enough, this morning at breakfast I was talking to a young woman who is from Australia who was here,
one of the conferences, and she is has done work on Greek dramas and she was talking about IO.
And I said, oh, but, you know, she gave the title to this to this book.
So it's interesting, these synchronicities she tries her tongue, her silence off the break.
So what is interesting is that the first half of this book, the other poems, are still very much within the tradition of the lyric, the lyric form.
And I was really struggling with that. And the second half of the book represents this Break the Centre poem.
Well, I think beginning with meditations on the Declension Beauty by the girl with the flying cheekbones,
which maybe I'll read Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the girl with the flying cheekbones.
If not, if not, if not, if not in yours, in whose?
In whose language I.
If not in yours, in whose? In whose language I I am, if not in yours, in whose I if not in yours, I am yours, in whose language am I not?
Am I not? I am yours, if not in yours, if not in yours, in whose?
In whose language I go with the flying cheekbones.
She is a woman with a behind the drives men mad.
And if not in yours, where is the woman with a nose broad as her strength, if not in yours.
In whose language is the man with the full moon lips carrying the midnight of colour split by the stars.
A smile if not in yours. In whose?
In whose language I am I not I.
I am yours. Am I not. I am yours I.
I am if not in yours. In whose.
In whose language I if not in yours.
Beautiful. So that I think that's the that's the transition poem actually because the next poem is discourse and the logic of language.
But what I want to say there is you can see the struggle in that poem trying to
work with metaphors and those images that are that that are part of language,
but that speak to our non being, that speak to as I read that this poem,
I just remember there's a line there that says, woman, where's the woman with a nose broaddus her strength.
And it brings to mind something some of you may have noticed this,
that the decision that recently came down around the African-American man who was
shot by the police and the decision just found the police officer not guilty.
One of the things that he said, the police officer, was that he, the man that he observed, had had a broad nose.
And again, this was this is something that is very much a part of of how we came into this language, which I say I love.
It's my mother tongue, as you see in the following poem.
But it has always interested me that I'm sure many of you know, that Zillah, after the Second World War, questioned German as a language to write in.
It had been so contaminated by what had happened in World War Two.
And it's always interested me that that has never been much of an issue for those of us who inhabit English,
you know, like talking about the contamination of the language from these historical tragic events.
But that poem is the struggle of trying to find a language in which to consider myself, so to speak.
The next one I'll read is discourse on the logic of language.
And this, I think, is that that one was the transition. This is the watershed poem, I think.
With the various little sections. Discourse on the logic of language.
English is my mother tongue, a mother tongue is not a foreign land, land, land, language, language and a foreign language.
English is my father tongue. A father tongue is a foreign language.
Therefore, English is a foreign language, not a mother tongue.
What is my mother tongue? My mommy tongue. My mommy tongue.
My mom's tongue. My more tongue. My mother tongue.
I have no mother tongue, no mother tongue, no tongue to mother, to mother tongue me.
I must therefore be tongue dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum.
When it was born, the mother held her newborn child close, she began then to lick it all over.
The child whimpered a little bit as the mother's tongue move faster and stronger over its body.
It grew silent.
The mother turning it this way and that under her tongue until she had turned the clean of the creamy white substance covering its body edict.
One Every owner of slaves show wherever possible, ensure that his slaves belong to as many ethno linguistic groups as possible.
If they cannot speak to each other, they cannot then foment rebellion and revolution.
Those parts of the brain chiefly responsible for speech are named after the two learnt 19th century doctors,
the eponymous doctors, Veronika and Broecker, respectively. Dr. Broca believes the size of the brain determines intelligence.
He devoted much of his time to proving that white males of the Caucasian race had larger brains than and will therefore superior to women,
blacks and other peoples of colour. Understanding and recognition of the spoken word takes place in Veronika's area.
The left temporal lobe, situated next to the auditory cortex from the relevant information, passes to Broca's area,
situated in the left frontal cortex, which then forms the response and passes it on to the motor cortex.
The motor cortex controls the muscles of speech, but I have a dumb tongue, tongue and father tongue and English is my mother tongue is my father.
Tongue is a foreign land line, language, language and a foreign language is English.
Another tongue. My mother, mommy, mommy moldea me to miss their mother tongue.
Mother tongue, tongue, mother tongue, me mother tongue me mother me.
Touch me with the tongue of your lan lang lang language, language, anguish.
English is a foreign language. The mother then put her fingers into her child's mouth, gently forcing it open.
She touches her tongue to the child's tongue and holding the tiny mouth open.
She blows into it hard. She was glowing words, her words, her mother's words,
those of her mother's mother and all their mothers before into her daughter's mouth, edict to every slave caught speaking.
His native language shall be severely punished where necessary.
Removal of the tongue is recommended.
The offending organ, when removed, should be hung on high in a central place so that all see and tremble a tapering,
blunt, muscular, soft and fleshy organ describes either penis.
B the tongue. C neither of the above. D both of the above in mind.
The tongue is a the principal organ of organ of taste. B the principal organ of articulate speech.
C the principal organ of oppression and exploitation. D or of the above.
The tongue is an interwoven bundle of striated muscle running in three planes.
B is fixed to the jawbone. C has an outer covering of the mucous membranes covered with papillae.
D contains 10000 taste buds, none of which are sensitive to the taste of foreign words.
Air is forced out of the lungs, up the throat to the larynx, where it causes the vocal cords to vibrate and create sound.
The metamorphosis from sound to intelligible word requires the tongue and jaw all working together.
Be a mother tongue c the overseers with D all of the above or none.
But I have a dumb tongue tongue dumphy the tongue and English is my mother tongue is my father.
Tongue is a foreign land lang lang language language and with a foreign anguishes English another tongue.
My mother mommy mommy more dear métayer Mr. Moldea tongue mother tongue tongue mother tongue me mother
tongue me mother me touch me with the tongue of your land land land language language anguish.
English is a foreign language. I apologise for the coughing, quite unexpected,
so I just quickly sort of give an idea of where I went after this alloca mentioned looking for Livingstone as one of my novels.
I always understood this to be a poem in prose and poetry.
The publisher decided to market it as has a novel.
At the end of this work, she tries her tongue. I was confronted with the idea of silence.
And so this is a it's a narrative poem an unnamed traveller sets out to find the source of her silence.
And then she decides that Levingston embodies her silence.
And she goes to all these various villages whose names are all anagrams of silence.
So she goes to the analysts and this Kinealy and the caecilians and so on.
And I just read very quickly from that just to give a sense.
And in fact, I was amused this morning because of the one who I won't tell you that now.
I just read very quickly from this and then tell you what I was going to tell you.
I want to read something called the Museum of Silence. Just bear with me a second.
Seven, the Museum of Science, I won't read the whole thing,
seven billion years as a traveller travels for the age of the universe and then she meets Livingstone in a forest at seven billion years.
That's how long I had been travelling. I had seen many, many strange things been witness to even stranger events.
But the strangest of all was the Museum of Silence, erected to house the many and varied silences of different peoples.
This Kinealy, the Leonski, the Eternals, then this, the cleanness and the necklace and many, many others.
Their silences were all there. As I wandered throughout this museum, I recognise many of the displays.
These silences were mine as much as they had belonged to the people they had been taken from returned them.
I demanded of the proprietors, you must return these silences to their owners without this silence.
These people are less than whole. They smiled and said nothing.
It had been theft originally, I continued.
No, it was nothing but intimidation, plain and simple extortion to continue to hold the entire store of our silence ransom demand.
We pay for it and give assurances we would care for it as they had.
And just a very small lyric type poem.
How powers the punish in silence noun verb absent of grammar.
How surrender to within that without remains silence demands the break the die in release in life.
And at the end of the world, sort of Matamata text, what I say at the end here is author's note.
A record of the documents and records of the traveller, which form the basis of this world,
are bound in two volumes and on deposit at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University,
the leather bound books of burgundy coloured handson and of legal size,
eight and a half by 14 inches in Boston gold in the centre of each cover the words Diary of a Traveller, and it goes on to describe the book.
And these words are repeated on the flyleaf and around and around a strong hand in an ink which is quite faded.
Also on each cover, some two inches above the lower edge. And also in Boston, Goldar, the words volume one and volume two.
And it just describes all the maps in the books are hand drawn.
And while some appear crude, many are well executed, being fanciful and delicately covered.
The chief librarian and archivist at the body line.
We believe this to be the original manuscript of The Diary of a Traveller and the only extant copy.
However, on the last page of Volume two, in the same round hand that appears throughout the volume, appears the following statement.
This is not a facsimile of my odyssey into silence. The original diaries, including maps of these travels,
were given to the Sicilians for safekeeping, since they were the only ones who kept their silence.
The exact location of the diaries is unknown,
but I believe the Sicilians have buried them in an unmarked spot brief not on the display case containing these volumes states.
Contrary to the statement on the last page of volumes, these volumes comprise the only original copy of The Diary of a Traveller,
William DeBois, chief archivist and librarian, and Tim G.U., who wrote a wonderful book on Levingston.
He was very his work was very helpful in doing that. And so now I'll just talk very quickly about how I came to Tsong.
As I said, I practised law and after seven years gave up the practise for poetry, law and poetry.
Both share a hyper concern with language, something I only realised after, you know,
a comma, a single mark of punctuation, as happened in the States recently, a few months ago.
You're nodding. Could save you millions of dollars, can bring you awards, can mean that you should be killed.
So there's this hyper concerned with language which both disciplines share.
I have written about this unpublished about where they come together and where they actually stray from each other.
I first read about the Tsong case in a work by one of your English academics, James Walden, and it really shocked me when I read it.
I he described as being one of the strangest cases in English history around the slave trade.
And I made a note because he actually gave the legal citation for the work and I thought I should go and look that up at some point,
which I did some years after. And I was horrified when I was shocked when I got to the library.
The law library found a report in one of the usual case report books.
It was just two pages.
And I thought to myself, how is it possible that the only two pages related to an incident in which over and people were killed?
That report is the only extant document related to Zon.
And what it is, it's Lord Mansfield's judgement giving the insurers a new trial.
And I'll just back up from there. So the ship is coming across the Atlantic.
Some people fall ill and die, some of the enslaved Africans as well.
The captain decides he will throw a certain number of them overboard.
He was inexperienced. The journey also takes a lot longer than usual when the ship eventually gets back to Liverpool.
He I should say the reason he throws them overboard is because the law, as it existed then,
allowed for you to collect insurance monies if you had to reduce your losses.
So he felt he was doing his job, the owners of the ship a favour by killing these people.
And true to pattern,
when when they get back to Liverpool after stopping in Jamaica with what was left of the four hundred and seventy Africans that comprise the cargo,
the owners, the Gregson's make a claim for insurance monies.
The insurance company refuses to pay them and the insurance company then appeals that decision.
And that is the decision that is reported in which.
Mansfield gives the insurance company the right to a new trial.
My understanding is based on research, that there never was a new trial and the trail goes cold.
The event is used by many of the abolitionists here to, you know, garner support for the abolitionist movement and so on.
As some of you and many of you know, I photocopied the two pages of the decision and took it home because I understood, having studied law,
that what you spend most of your time doing is reading cases and you're reading cases often as they go through a process.
By the time it gets to the appellate level, most of the messy human part of what brought these cases to court in the first place have been erased.
And all you have usually one, two or three very precise points of law.
I should add that in that court report, Mansfield's decision murder is mentioned only once and only in the context of one of the solicitors.
One of the barristers mentions murder. But murder is not possible because this was property.
So having studied law and understanding this process,
I was convinced that all the stories of all the people on board that ship were locked in that two page document.
So the first phase was I as I said last week,
I was going to lock myself in the text in the same way the Africans were locked in the hold of the ship there, 500 plus different words.
And I'm going quickly now. The first part of zone, which is called arse bone, comprises the words as they are used in that court report.
Gregson versus Gilbert took me a couple of years.
I kept feeling this urge to, as I describe it, break and enter the text.
And because I'd set myself this rule, I was only going to use those words.
I somehow felt I was cheating to to then break that rule.
Anyway, I did do it. And as I said, it's like a grand bargain game.
The text explodes. I made these dictionaries so I would take each word, each different word from the text and find words within those words.
And what is interesting is how the poem then wrote itself in the margins of those dictionaries,
words begin to sort of come together, coalesce together, and I begin almost like skimming them off the surface of the page.
And that's how the text gets written. It's why I say that I almost abstain from authorial intent in this work.
And it has a very important result because as I mentioned last week,
a white male European voice surfaced in the text in terms of the way I was writing it, and I really had a struggle over the years.
Like I didn't want that voice in there.
And I won't you know, you can ask me in Question Time if for the reasons, but I just felt it shouldn't be there.
But because of the way the text was writing itself, it had to stay in the text.
What reveals itself to me by the end of the work was that he this whether he's a captain, a first mate or what,
realises that he has crossed a line somehow and that his own redemption depends on him joining his victims.
And so he jumps overboard after one of the enslaved Africans jumps overboard.
And I think had I, you know, taught me a lot of humility,
because had I sort of maintained a sense of what I don't want this in my text, I think I wouldn't have been given.
And I think it's a gift, a gift in the sense that I think what that act signals is the sense of what he represents,
which is a certain way of being in the world, has to end for something new to begin.
And I consider that something of a gift as a writer.
So so that was how the text wrote itself two years after it was published.
I then Fred Moten, some of you may know his work.
He was a he's an African-American academic. Someone told me about how he was reading Tsong, which was he had his class read the whole book together.
And as soon as I heard that, because I had been struggling to find a way to read the stacks, I really had a lot of difficulty.
As I had with the second half of she tries her tongue,
I remember being at a university and a student saying, Would you read Universal Grammar with me?
And I heard myself saying, if you read it with me, we can do it.
That's when I realised that that's what the work was about.
There was something about the the polyphonic nature of women's voices that was
necessary and that this text was moving towards more for choral presentation.
And so in Tsong, I had a similar struggle. I didn't understand the spaces within the words I talked about law.
There's one governing rule in the four sections or five sections of Tsong that come after us,
and that is that no word or cluster of words must come directly below another.
They are always seeking the space above it, as if the words or the clusters of words need space to breathe.
Which gets me to this idea of the poetics of breath, which I talked about last week.
For me, the three sort of revolving areas I seem to be working with, the politics of the fragment,
the politics of breath and the politics of relation, as in Galicia, because I always sensed in Tsong that there was a sense of the other.
And what what does the other mean? Who is the other?
Which gets me to my I'm going to wrap up now and repeat something I said last week.
One of the questions that confronted me, perhaps a central question in Tsong is, is being sufficient or is it contingent?
Is it contingent on class, colour, race, gender, sexuality?
And it seemed to me that those people in the Tsong were disposable as the people in Grenville's towers, you know,
that there that we are still living with this with this way of considering people disposable, certain groups, certain categories.
And so this this question and maybe when I read again at the end of read that particular poem is is is.
You know, Art, and I think that the liberal humanist tradition attempts to get around some of that,
that, you know, that you have to be Christian or Muslim or to be considered human.
But I think that also become somewhat warped in the way it develops over a period of time.
The last thing I want to say is that what has happened to me in the last few years,
ever since that understanding of reading Tsong in a group context, is that I've been performing songs sometimes as musicians.
So we do jazz improv performances. And every year this will be the sixth year I hold a collective reading of the entire book where
we begin the book at about six or seven in the evening and it is made into a not made into it.
I provide refreshments in between it's each section.
On one occasion I actually invited dance of dancers and singers to take sections and do something with it, but we read the entire text through.
We usually end somewhere two or three in the morning.
And as I said last week, one of the things that's really quite remarkable and we were talking before we came in about this,
the desk designated mourners.
What is quite remarkable is that you would expect that after reading a text like this that you would be depressed and brought down.
But it's quite the contrary. Now, what's interesting and somewhat uncanny, we usually begin, I would say, 30 or 40 people by the end of the evening,
there may be six or seven, which is an uncanny parallel of the slave journey itself, like.
So they're usually a few of us. And it's important to have drummers or musicians there because you're very tired.
The text becomes more difficult as the work goes on and you're also more tired.
So you're trying to strategize. How do I really do I read for meaning or do I just read for sound?
And sometimes you find yourself I have reading for meaning.
Sometimes it becomes too difficult. You just sort of just reading for sound.
And I mean, we've talked, I've talked with people who have done it and they have the same issues.
Sometimes you find yourself in the earlier part of the text. Again, it sometimes sounds like a cacophony, you know, and you know,
we often think of cofferati must be quite well, it sounds untidy and it must be difficult and problematic.
But in that cacophony, there's so many interesting things happen.
Sometimes you can hear a voice and you link yourself to that particular voice that helps to carry you along.
Voices take on different tonalities in the reading.
You can be silent. We've also done it in the darkness when we start off in the darkness with just little flashlights.
What is remarkable about that is that people own the text immediately compared to when they read it in the light.
I think something about the darkness offers people a maybe a protective covering.
And so there's a sense of of of owning the words.
No reading has ever been the same as another reading. And I'll end with saying that when I perform it myself.
I said this to Marina recently. I've been I think what is happening is that.
I said it at a talk I gave in the States a few months ago that I out myself when I perform zone and well, what do I mean by that?
I say out of myself, there's a sense in which something something more than the sum of its parts begins to happen.
And I have a sort of conflictual feelings about it.
It feels African and I can talk more about that.
If there are questions in the sense and I think it links to the process of colonisation that
separates us from some of those practises and that has made those practises demonise them,
made them sort of not acceptable.
I my most recent configuration of that is that the world outside me, which is which is another way of of coming at it,
I think I'll end there because I'm sure there'll be much more to talk about later on.
Thank you very much.
So next, it's my pleasure to see with my colleague Matthew Reynolds, who's professor of English and comparative criticism here at Oxford.
Sit down. He's the author of The Purpose of Translation and also translation, a very short introduction.
And his previous work on translation, an anthology Don't in English that he co-authored with Terry Griffiths.
He chairs the annual Oxford Translation Prise and is the author of two novels, Designs for Happy Home and the World Before Them.
He's also with me and this is, I think, a theme that's running through these presentations.
He's also working with some living voices with living craft on a project involving Oxford Fires School,
where which is a long way from the dreaming spires, which is a long way from the shootings in east, also down the county road on the left.
And the project, as you know,
is how creativity kind of comes out and comes out of that road between languages in this anthology of poems that students are putting together.
So so that picks up on this idea of voice and silence that they're so touched on.
So, Matthew, thanks. I've I've been asked to say something about language and translation.
I'm not going to speak with any kind of authority.
But just as a reader and admirer of Nabisco's work, which means as someone whose sense of my own use of language has been challenged,
disrupted and expanded by the encounter with the work of NASA so that the work of
using my language to talk about her language or talk it over is not straightforward.
Instead, I'll try to do something more like talking with or talking under in Harriet's daughter,
a compelling and much read young adult novel, which NASA published in 1983.
The girl is growing up speaking standard.
Canadian English meets a girl who's just arrived from Tobago and speaks a differently textured and differently sounding language.
Tobago talk. Her talk, the girl says, had all these hills and valleys, nothing like my flat, old, boring Canadian tour.
Now, if anything's flatter than standard Canadian English, it must be standard English, English spoken and received pronunciation.
And if anything's flatter than standard English, English, it must be Oxford English.
The dialect I am myself condemned to speak most of the time, and obviously I'm using now.
In Harriet's store to the Canadian speaking girl starts learning Tobago talk from her
new friend at the same time as a new friend is learning standard Canadian in school.
And it's the same kind of desire to dislodge and stretch my own discourse that the encounter with No Betsey's work creates in me.
In the rotunda at the end of Tsong, NASA writes that even when we believe we have freedom to use whatever words we wish to use,
as I as I might feel speaking here now, in fact, I don't.
But I mind much of the language we work with is already preselected and limited by fashion,
by cultural norms, by systems that shape us, such as gender and race, by what's acceptable.
And standing at this podium, I do feel a particular set of cultural norms bearing in on me.
And I'm going to deal with them by speaking mainly in the genres of personal response and indeed quotation and by being brief.
So as NASA was describing just now, much better than obviously I could,
Tsong starts from the language of the legal judgement that was handed down in the case about the massacre.
And as a way of starting the process of composition, NASA decided to lock herself into the text in the same way as men,
women and children were locked in the holes of the slave ship zone.
In the process of breaking that hold, of breaking up this language which promulgated the being of African peoples, murdering the text,
literally cutting it into pieces, she creates a poetry of disorder and mayhem through which the story, which cannot be told, can be released.
Now, this mayhem is a mixture of different languages, different tongues amongst the mayhem of song words and Yoruba,
Spanish, Latin, Shona, Portuguese, West African patois, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, French, Thawne, Dutch and Arabic.
It's a counterbalance to the language policy of the slave owners as recorded in Egypt.
One of discourse on the logic of language, which no,
just read out with its injunction that the owner of slaves will ensure that the slaves belong to different ethno
linguistic groups so that they can understand each other and so cannot then ferment rebellion and revolution in song.
The words do speak to one another and a memorial rebellion.
A monumental revolution is created.
NASA writes of the later poems in song as translating the earlier ones, and our work has a probing, continual connexion to translation.
So the title of the book she tries to tongue her silence softly breaks comes from Io's, as we heard,
and poems in the volume take epigraphs from of its metamorphosis, as translated by Mary Inês and by Dryden.
All things are altered, nothing is destroyed, writes Dryden, translating of it and thereby embodying his point,
or is it of its point in his own words, whose words which present translation as a form of metamorphosis.
Now, people tend to think of translation as something that happens between separate standard languages,
so French and English translations can be marked as right or wrong.
The more fluent they are, i.e. the more they conform to standard norms, the better.
But in fact, languages are not separate in themselves. What separates them is politics, institutions of state, education and law.
Language is a continuum which gathers into communities of practise whose borderlands are porous and which are ever shifting.
Translation, they can mix kinds of language and change them, NASA quotes Thomas Elliott from back in the 16th century,
describing the metamorphosis of Latin words into English, the augmentation of the language,
as he called it, which he, with a group of other scholars, was promoting.
I intend to augment our English tongue, whereby men should as well express more abundantly the things that they conceived in their hearts,
where for language was ordained, having words apt for the purpose.
NASA adds that the African needed to express more abundantly the thing they conceived in their hearts is undisputed,
that the English language lacked words for the purpose cannot be denied.
This expression is a matter of using the language in such a way that the historical
realities are not erased or obliterated so that English is revealed as the tainted tongue.
It truly is. And of trying to engender by some alchemical practise a metamorphosis within the language from father tongue to mother tongue.
The making of poetry begins in the body and ends in the body, no NASA quotes from Stanley Burns Shaw the word Tunt shows this in particular,
the horrifying punishment of the tongue outlined in Edik two on the photocopy.
In Harriet's daughter, we can see how Tung's bodies are continuous with language.
There's a scene in which the young girl says something important to an adult and her whole body.
Listen to what I had to say. And then the adult says something difficult to the child, reliving an old grief.
Her body had collapsed into itself.
She looked like she didn't have any bones, novice's bones, as we've just heard, our performable and performed physically.
But reading that, just holding the book and reading it also involves our bodies as well as our minds as you
have to turn your hands or your head to read discourse on the logic of language as we did,
turning the book in the way the mother turns the newborn child reading the reading,
the scattered and fragmented words of song, you become aware of the movement of your eyes and tongue.
You can scan the words like a Coast Guard looking at a satellite image of the Mediterranean waiting for meaning to leap out at you.
You can step carefully from word to word. You can find jolts and rhythms sounding from the page and find yourself mouthing them.
You can feel your shoulders, your torso beginning to weave from side to side as you follow the zigzag slippages and surges of the words.
In her essay on the Toronto Carnival Kabana, NASA put slavery in the context of a general European disposition to control movement.
Reading her poetry, you develop a disposition to move. I thought I had.
It's, again, a very great pleasure for us to see her here in the morning here today.
She is professor of English and creative writing at both college as well as Professor Professorial Research Fellow.
And so as the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, she's a very, very prolific, engaging writer of fiction and cultural history.
She's published extensively a myth and fairy tale and storytelling.
I'm sure we're all very familiar with this work from the 1976 book Alone of all her six through to 2014,
Once upon a Time, a short history fairy tale and then also the to me,
wonderful as my my favourite stranger, Magic Charms, Tales and the Arabian Nights, which which won many, many awards in fiction.
The novels include the book of shortlisted The Lost Fathers The Night Matthew.
She combines critical and cultural and historical and creative writing and a selection of her new essays on art.
Seeing Feelingly will be published in 2018.
Marina is also involved in a really fascinating project called Stories in Transit, which she's working with refugees in Sicily.
Young refugees under 18 collecting their stories, gathering their stories,
not stories about the harrowing experience of crossing the Mediterranean in boats, but stories that they enjoy.
So and it's about storytelling. You think you're going to speak now?
Thanks very much, Erika, and wonderful to hear you say thank you.
And Matthew, brilliantly brief is one of the things about literature is that it actually makes the past year archaeology.
When there is no text, it becomes extremely difficult to read.
So, for example, Stonehenge is kind of mute.
There are many, many theories, some of them very convincing. But there is no text that we have.
There are no voices that are on the page for us to learn what Stonehenge meant to the people who built it.
And that's similar very some very, very remarkable monuments in the world.
For example, the Nazca lines in southern Peru. So some of you have seen this tremendous, colossal Giglio's.
There's a huge amount of speculation, historical research attempts to understand.
But given the absence of the human memory, it is very difficult for us to understand what the past was.
So one of the things that stories are written down stories are they are testimony.
They form a kind of accurate and that archive does not necessarily mean that it is the actual record of events.
It is also the record of people's thought, people's imagination.
Now, in this we have this title at home, and that made me feel, you know, what is the relationship between stories and home?
And I think this is where the relationship most deeply lives.
It lies not so much in the record of what has actually happened, but what has been imagined and passed on.
So it lies in one of the main documents of the mother tongue, that is.
So we have songs that were carried on the voices of women very much mother tongue voices,
lullabies the world over for a very, very deep, very simple sounding words.
But nevertheless, the first place of language and that there's those little songs sometimes mean nothing or just nonsense or syllables.
Sometimes they actually tell a story. And that story is connected to the imaginary memory of the group of society.
One of the things that has happened, this is work.
One of the shows is that is that we are surrounded by silence.
The whole enormous territory of the past is largely silent.
And one of the tasks that writers have given themselves over time is to call out from that silent echo that they can catch.
And this is not just a kind of the whole digression, but the my generation were very interested in excavating women's voices.
So there was a tremendous beginning in the 70s and 80s, tremendous excavation of manuscripts,
forgotten poets and so forth, and some some very well known.
But literally when I was first an undergraduate, there was barely a woman writer on the curriculum who wasn't Jane Austen.
In English, I don't know about other languages, certainly French, which is what I studied in Italian, very, very, very rare, a woman writer.
And the other day I was in the WARTBURG researching something that I actually found a painting of a woman writing.
And I realised that I have actually never seen I've seen many paintings of women reading,
often the Madonna, but I have never seen a renaissance painting of a woman writing.
So here she is. And this is just just to just to remind you of the of the rarity of this kind of testimony.
So women's voices, black voices, the voices of slaves,
the voices of the category called Subaltern has become one of the chief echo chambers
where we are trying to trying to recall what we it's interesting that the author,
the artist, there are many, many examples of this female halflings, portraits, not all of them writing something.
Music is unknown because as he as he or she was interested in women that become submerged as well.
So, OK, so one of the tasks, apart from the historical record that people like Peter Drucker,
who wrote a marvellous book on women writers, the Middle Ages, excavated many people who had been lost.
One of the tasks has been to to, in a sense, create a body of these voices and his work.
When I first came across it,
this wonderful poems all seem to me to be this kind of symphonic cantata of these voices reverberating out of the silence, just magnificent.
And such a well-known writers was asked about his historical novels that he writes about Angola,
and he said, well, we know almost nothing about our pasts. So the interviewer then put a question to him.
Do you think a made up past can come to define someone's future, too?
And I replied, Yes, no doubt about it. By making up a past, you're able to alter your future.
So the idea that story's imaginative story is actually institute a reality while capturing what might have been a reality.
They are actually speaking to the present to constitute what Bruce Robbins was a comparatives has called community of fate.
So the stories bring people together with an imaginary memory they share through the story.
And this constitutes or can constitute a community of fate.
Well, one of the things that I think this is done so remarkably is turn the song story,
which was known possibly in academic circles and in other in other ways, too.
I mean, there are some other other responses.
But and this, of course, is one of the earliest responses, which was Turner's painting called Slavers Thrown Overboard,
the dead and Dying Typhoon Coming On,
which was exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1840 and was bought by John Ruskin and John Ruskin hung it with his bed.
So this episode, I would say, is a constitutive story of a community of fate,
which is actually changed the way changed the way at the time that people thought about slavery.
It was so disgusting that a man should claim insurance on somebody he'd murdered because he said it was good that he'd lost overboard.
This was just so repellent, so deeply repugnant to everything we consider human, that it has actually become a wonderful phrase.
You use a tombstone that speaks. And I think that's where you also brought in this analogy with Grenfell.
Grenfell is a tombstone that speaks. This is now a constitutive story of a community of fate.
The other way that NASA has very much looked at the silence of the past is actually to try and draw out entanglements,
not I mean, the Tsong massacre, though.
You say that you've heard some of the white voices that are feeling guilty to you know, you've heard that as well.
But nevertheless, the there's a way in which the underside of certain past encounters has been also brought into her work.
And this is from seven stations of the Harmattan, which is a collaborative work with Omar Berger,
was a Moroccan and Moroccan American, now lives in Brooklyn and a very fine poet and translator himself.
And he and Northwester together have written this.
And I think it's still in progress. Is that right? Yes. Harmattan is the northeasterly wind that blows in the winter in North Africa.
And so there's some kind of sense also in TSONG whether.
Metaphorical and this he was the ambassador sent by Morocco to Queen Elizabeth the first and we
have this portrait is in Birmingham and this is one of the poems which we can look at afterwards.
And I think we haven't got time now. But this is the text of the document that was written by the ruler, the king of Barbary, real person.
He sounds like a character in Shakespeare, plays a real person, and sent this ambassador to make a deal with the British against the Spanish.
And this is, of course, a kind of forgotten story. But it's an archival story, historical story.
And so that's one method. And then the other method that NBC and Omert together have adopted for their collaboration continues the work of the zone.
And this is very shocking photograph. And it shows you the border in Tangier with the people attempting to cross into, I imagine, Europe as a saviour.
Is it see what is mainland Africa, but is Europe?
It belongs to Spain. And it's a very, very old originally from the slave trade citadel on the North African shore.
And in a very good book for The Uninvited,
Jeremy Harding wrote that you could tell who had come across the border of Ceuta because their hands were scarred with the mark,
the barbed wire, the razor wire on the top of the fence.
And here you see them attempting to enter Europe into the golf course, the luxury golf course on the other side where people are playing soccer.
I mean, you're not listening to me.
So what is it? Well, there is an issue of writing and who loves to write as well as who learns to speak the language.
I think one of the ways that the community's feet are being put together now in a very hopeful way,
and that is these kinds of assembly performances and the oral project that that I'm involved in, I think you're involved in, too.
It's not only oral, but the idea is to try and get the music of language working in groups and then committed to paper later if you want to.
But the idea that the work of sort of exchanging stories of communicating when you have
been disassembled and scattered and brought together as refugees in another place,
that that work can be done better in groups rather than in the tradition of silent reading and silent writing on the page alone.
So there has been quite a strong trend, I think,
along many different social vectors towards returning to to what I call a simply a form of secular ritual in
which people attempt to touch one another again and turn themselves into some kind of common holding story.
Territory of story. Thank you. I was particularly struck from where I'm sitting by the role that silence played silence as a theme.
Silence is a presence, silence as the silence of being silence as death and as punishment,
but also as a sort of this very sort of potentially creative space of space, potential new life throughout what you were reading.
And then also in some of the responses that both Matthew and a very negative was before without without silence.
We don't have language. And in the space between the words, you know, a breath is audible, but it's also the way a silence,
it's a moment, but also the listener can come in and pause and take stock.
So I was I was just very, very struck by that. But just that's just by way of open.
I wonder to this, if you if you would like to respond to the images or the notes that Matthew Marina offered.
Well, I think what you're saying is so is so important because one of the things I have said is that.
It is the spaces in the text of song that are driving the text and the most important things that are happening,
happening in those spaces and those spaces are blank spaces.
But but I really sense as a poet that fact is where something very significant is happening.
And I had to learn. I had and I'm still in the process of learning.
There was a time when I actually I don't have it in this book, but I actually was scoring them like rest's and music,
you know, and counting out how how many beats to keep each space and so on.
So it is a continuing interaction with those spaces.
And yes, I think I think the silence can be very generative. And.
The fragment works with the silence because the fragment is a.
Is part of the larger hold, so so that's that's that's really important.
I think one of the things I just wanted to say in response to that,
I had hoped to say before when I was doing the last section of zone and do something, I think Matthew said that brought this to mind.
And I said this last week and I really felt, you know, as the tax proceeds, the text is is degrading.
It's degenerating and becoming more and more fragmented.
And it was when I was doing that last section Ferrum that I really had the sense and it came to me,
I didn't set out with this feeling that I was having my revenge on the English language in the sense that for the first time in response to that poem,
What is my mother tongue? I felt that I had found my tongue and in in typing input in what we do on computers now,
those fragments, those grunts, those moans, those pieces of words, that that was in fact my language.
And so that's that's what I mean when I say that now, when I read it,
what what I think I don't know if when people read it, to read it as a regular written text.
When I read it out loud, often I hear another language under the language as it appears on the page.
I can hear the conversations of people.
So it's as if underneath this broken, fragmented English not sits because it's more alive than just sitting there.
Is this other of these other languages continually reinventing themselves?
Yeah. Can I put crossover murder on the word mother, which are quite close,
and especially when a sequence of pronunciations and mother that we've got in that time.
And I was really struck at the end in your description of the writing process.
So when you say you're locked in, locked in a legal language, breaking out of it, and then you suddenly say,
oh, well, it's a it's a really violent day when you're describing your own process.
I wanted to murder you say, because that's so much a switching round of the you know,
that's the very sort of revenge or it's a switching of position from.
The person doing, you know, speaking on behalf of people who have violence done to them,
to being in the position someone is doing a metaphorical violent speech, wondered about that.
So strong. You know, I think it's, you know, come out.
Brathwaite, the Caribbean poet, talks about the way we speak.
We don't speak. You know how big pentameter is to me from the Caribbean. We speak speech is like a machine gun.
And I think that because. Interrupt myself this work to me.
What made it unreadable, even for myself initially, was that there is massive interruptions that are happening in different discourses.
This the only positive thing that's happening in discourse is the mother blowing words into her daughter's mouth.
And you have to make an effort, as you said, to read that story.
But the negative stuff doesn't disappear. It just becomes unreadable while you occupy that space where something generative is happening.
So you have these massive interruptions that you know, where the first nation's discourse is interrupted.
Fatale often cannot be in the African discourse, the European.
And it's like these tectonic plates of language and culture are driving against each other, which is very foul.
And it seems to me that I think you talk about murder and mother and so on, that what fascinated me as I got deeper into the text and so on,
is that how one set of letters could mean one thing in one language and something else in another
language which gets which gets your point about the translations are being so hived off.
But to come back to your question about revenge, you know,
there is this as I walk around Oxford Bolshevists, you know, it's so beautiful and it's, you know,
the history of it, you know, and at times I feel this pain in my heart because I feel, oh, there's so much that was lost and will never be replaced.
So there's always this you know, I'm always balancing this, balancing these feelings of being able to appreciate the beauty here, but.
There's so much barbarism it. Yeah, I don't see that a particular campaign at the moment,
but trying to restore some of the rest of the history books with a couple of really significant gaps, the silence,
because recently friends of ours have taken an interest in I've taken an interest in the
acquaintance and the most powerful and most wonderful book I read in the slideshow called Foose,
who was head of the Department of Education in the 60s,
and I still have this book is entitled The and it's amazing because it's been printed with batches of three or four pages.
I think that was, if you like. I know God works in mysterious ways, but I don't think it is.
I don't think I can do it just speaks really for Quakers in the sciences and museums.
And I just perhaps personally, it's not hard. I think that's very important what you're saying.
And it goes back to what I was saying. I think the silences in this text and water are the most important parts of the text.
And what is driving the text that you are interested in the kind of linguistic things to do?
Not quite so. So I'm sure you you were talking we have some wonderful lines about learning babble of groups with all these ways,
speaking without words, without words as well.
And this was one of the people who was very interested in that as well, is Beckett, who changed his language on purpose.
And he wanted to be we have less language. He said that he wanted to get away from the glory, you know, blarney, which you have Comodo into French,
which you didn't know very well in order to arrive at what he called the separation.
That is sort of grunting that allows that was the level that worked really well to grow and that your side of your gaps.
I think I'm not quite silent. I mean, the the the place where it articulates, you know, take you to see a deep feeling happens.
And this is a common language. I mean, we could probably understand, you know, people from Tierra del Fuego when they grow.
What I would say is that silence is never.
You know, like there's always there's there's always something underneath, so I entirely agree with you in terms of that.
And it's I mean, I think of the first poem. Than.
That fades away, but is still echoing in that silence, and I think that's really what it is you're trying what you're getting at in terms of.
I mean, Marconi argued I think I mentioned this in the essay, but in Water Sound, the sun never dies.
So if that is in fact the case, then all the voices of these people are actually trapped underwater.
So there is, in fact, no no silence. But the silence is really speaking of how soon do you see those who go in silence as well?
And there's a question at the back, please. Thank you.
More of us to speak to fight along these lines, as you mentioned, has been, as I mentioned earlier,
you have things like meditation and sitting in silence with the papers and you having a lot of white space on the page.
It seems like it's a need to create space in order for much more to rise up.
What you mention of these other conversations are the voices happening underneath the words that are she's going to be the.
Hunting country hunted native. This is a really important aspect to this film, which is which I was very struck and moved by the names of the tribes,
the tribes who were transported as you running along the bottom of the page all the way along as a sort of as a as a as a float, as a continuum.
Which, again, is not a science at all.
It's a search in its association below the surface, isn't it?
I was thinking what you were saying about the sea. Yes. And how often when students often do this, when when they read it, they forget those.
They forget to read those names.
They're very much what the word what song was all about, who who's forgotten, who's disposable, who are the footnotes.
And in terms of what you were saying, carefully what I what I say and in the time to which I hadn't intended to be part of the work,
I should explain that it I always keep journals when I write.
And so I was working on the ideas and I sent that to the press because they have
a very complicated way of assessing manuscripts and they wanted to keep it in.
And I was concerned that it might be somewhat prescriptive,
but because it was being used for universities, they felt very strongly that it should be in there.
But one of the things I say this is that it's a logical work. So so there is a haunting that is that is going on.
And I think it gets back to this. Who is the designated mourner who mourns for people who haven't been mourned for?
And I think that is actually very important for them to do.
And I think poets have done that traditionally other people in different communities and so on.
But perhaps in all we talked about Grenfell and who were the designated mourners for that for that place.
And so for me, coming from the new Old-World, I call it, because it was an old world, but for us it was New World.
It's where there's been so much loss and loss of loss.
It's very important to to do this work of it's almost a sort of spiritual archaeological work.
Marina, you've talked about the silence and not knowing and not having the stories and the songs and so on.
And, you know, I think that in the Caribbean in particular, where the indigenous people have been virtually erased.
So it's not even like Canada or Australia where you still have those people there with their own stories and so on.
And and this touches on this in his work, you know, in terms of is it possible to make ourselves or talk to us to that line?
But even that doesn't make sense, because to be autochthonous is to be off the land that we're not off the land.
So how does one how does one begin to belong to those places that that one did not have a choice in in in being?
And so it has many reverberations of what's happening today.
People, nomads, people who are travelling, people who are going to other lands because they have to go to other lands.
How do they make them home? Should we make them home?
Are they? Yeah, those are some of the reverberations for me in this text.
This gentleman is. Yes, I find it fascinating how you get just like used to and you know, and I said I thought I'd see life on the road before.
So I'm driven and driven of native country as all of us.
So we have to follow that language. And I always say that because I couldn't bring myself to fly.
But I love this place with this idea of Jane.
And I was wondering, well, what would that mean for the country?
What happens to be so different? And all of that is so funny.
Yeah. Thanks so much for waking up. I'd like to get the questions in a cluster.
So I saw this question back. And you say Mr.
Listen to other stories like anybody else and the new reality of your work.
I just wanted to about. To that, they may have experienced.
Journeys out of this life being consummated, something that is to through their discussions and stories.
Well, sorry, I'm just guthridge. Yes, thank you all for.
We had a collective reading of some song in Nairobi and Kenya and the context in Kenya.
He is with 44 languages, and so our experience, as we were being told,
is very much of the conversations floating up, everybody really how the words rising.
As we were reading and one of the things that I.
Fascinated by what you talk about, you briefly. It for me,
was your process around the different voices I've waiting and kind of how those voices work
through the silence and how you work with them as a writer when there are so many voices.
Let's just keep it to this test, as it always voices breaking.
Even in person, because they said they didn't make it in 2000.
Estimates that. Thank you very much.
My question is, do you have a conscious connexion between songs and melodies with NATO Summit where you have all these meetings that.
Hastings was standing beside me, like he says, to speak about what was his role in these meetings right off the silence and being.
Would you like to speak to that question? No, no, no, I don't have a reason to be a male commentator.
If you were just into that.
I just wanted to go back to something Marina said about Beckett and French.
One of the things I have always felt for the longest while when I work with English, it's as if I work with a foreign language.
I never take anything for granted. It creates a lot of tension, but it's a tension that can be quite generative as well.
But in terms of your question and about reading on Kanya, which moves me deeply when I go to Africa,
I've been there a few times that those moments are when I understand the loss,
when I hear the different mother tongues being spoken in different tongues being spoken, I, I, it strikes me or very much again.
How did that loss cause one of the things I see is that has displaced peoples like we
have had to improvise from the beginning from the slave coffle onto the slave ship.
So there's always a sense of improvising. African-Americans talk about making a way out of Norway and so on.
So they all these ways that that has led to tremendous creativity in this new old world,
in places of extreme deprivation to the question of mother and father.
You know, one of the again, one of the challenges for me is that the two sources of my love of English, the Book of Common Prayer,
because I was raised Anglican and I really loved it, and the Calypso audience,
you know, and what I see is that I cannot pretend it's like having an abusive parent.
You can't pretend the parent doesn't exist. Do you know?
And many people we know that from some reports from literature that even though a parent may have abused you, you continue to love that parent.
The child continues to love that parent. So that is the contradiction that the one balances on English is my mother tongue is my father.
Tongue is a foreign language, you know. So it's one of those things that one has to somehow embrace and work with its morality.
Someone asked Marina about morality. What is interesting for me is that is that John has moved to a morality now.
And I didn't if I was telling you, Marina, that I was exploring because I feel that I'm tied to the book,
but when I perform it, it moves into morality.
So I actually experimented with tying the book to myself in certain performances to see what would happen.
If it's still something that I am exploring. You know, I share the story with you.
So we know we talk about fragmentation and postmodernism and this for the longest while I understood this to be a work coming out of that tradition.
Modernism, I came across something about two years ago, some work by English woman Karen Barber,
anyone know still a lot of work on original James is published when I came to see me.
I sent her an email and she responded to me. And so on.
The one the work I'm thinking I could sing, I could sing all night.
I could. It's one about the women who sing Reekie in Nigeria and or Ricky.
If I say praise song, I'm not doing it justice because you can have already required weddings and so on.
But when I read her description of Iraqi, which are fragments,
it really was a moment when I was so struck by how much this this resonates with an Iraqi type of.
Practise, and so I wrote to her and I sent her a copy of the book and so on,
and I actually wrote to ask if she had any videos of some of these women singing or.
So that was another moment of revelation for me, that it does it in no way discounts that this is coming out of out of the modernist tradition.
But there is also this this other this other aspect to it that I am exploring and
seeing how it fits in to an aesthetic or Yacoubi aesthetic that is also quite,
quite, quite fascinating. Yeah. In the interest of time, I can't believe how the time has flown.
I'm going to move to a close because we're going to invite you to continue the final reading, I think, from from SOMET.
So I would just like to take chair's prerogative and ask a question about leadership of the audience.
Says So I'm interested in whether you sort of scoring a piece almost as a musical performance or whether you're writing something that is much more,
if you like, text based, how aware you are of sort of casting your voice across to an audience or interacting with a listener or reader.
I wonder if if you if if there is something that I mean, I'm assuming from what you've been saying,
that it's almost something that is as natural as breathing in you in your work, that sort of that give and take with a listener respondents.
But I just thought I'd ask the question by way of closing, how aware of that fact, that community, that group,
that single person who's who's who will listen, who will receive the work and who as these listeners have received it already?
I can't say that I overly aware that there is a particular reader that I have in mind or that I'm necessarily aiming the work towards.
Apart from those two voices behind me there on this work, I felt if there was any audience I had in mind,
and this may not land in the way it should here, it was actually the ancestors of that I was very conscious of when I was young.
And I don't even understand what I mean by that.
But it felt like it was. It was being.
So there was a moment when the war was first done, the first publication,
when they sent me the proof, it was a narrow book and everything just felt very cramped.
And I said, no, I couldn't agree to that. And so it was sent back and this this size.
But it took such a long time. I remember feeling almost at the end of my my my resources.
And then I had this thought, I thought, oh, but it has taken 200 more than 200 years for these voices to be heard.
What's another month like that? That, in fact, I remember that moment very, very clearly.
So if I'm not sure it's a satisfactory answer.
But I was very aware of something talking to that silence, to that to that history, that there was something going on there.
One of the quick story about publications, I the publishers wanted me to cut the work by 25 percent.
This was before it was in this form. It was written in the more conventional the more conventional way that poetry tends to be written.
I couldn't see how to do it. I consulted with a colleague.
She said you would lose quite a bit of war. What was important then?
I went to Ghana. I did a summer course there.
I felt I had to ask permission. And I think that's a really important concept.
We won't talk much about it. Now, it may seem odd, you know, because we've had a lot of arguments in kind about appropriation of voice and so on.
And I think part of that discussion has to do with permission.
And it may seem odd to say that I felt I needed permission, but I felt I needed permission to bring these voices forward.
And so I met with a friend in Ghana and we spoke to a traditional priest about it and so on.
I came back to Canada not knowing what I was going to do with this text.
I went to a friend's farmhouse and then suddenly I had this idea of spread the text out and it solved the problem of lenth, you know,
so there were these serendipitous things that would happen, you know,
in the text that almost sort of was running parallel to to my consciously working on it.
So I don't know if that answers your question, but it's it's the most honest way of off out of trying to deal with what you're asking.
It asks in terms of Moby Dick, there was no conscious.
There was no there was not one of Moby Dick.
Yeah, no, there was no conscious reference to that. Zone number four, this is not was or should be.
This be not. Should be this should not be is lip up, which as these cheapo D'Adam Non's.
Tsong No.7. First, the wind, the which, the who, the world, the throwing overboard, the be come apprehended exists did not.
When you listen me, Ngaio, or die.
Defend the dead.
Weight of circumstance, ground to usual and et cetera, where the ratio of just in less than is necessary to murder the subject in property,
the save in underwriter weather, etc., tunes justice.
And the ratio of murder is the usual in occurred Akela Silopi, oh, my wake Ubaidi.
The just in Russian. The suffer in Los.
Defend the dead, the wait in circumstance eight in necessary.
The ration in just. Age, the act in the way to justice.
Massively, nearly, O'Mahoney Ramla Ajani.
I'm going to read just from this last section here, and I will. I saw the way Ray all stand doing on deck his cape is to run.
It must be so there is scope and of mass chronicles where.
Stopping to part of Alisyn Ghafoor million area of the ASP, Oracle of Hope, Lord and so master the slave God and man you and I all meet in the no day.
That is his hit declare. I know this tale.
I must recite all the same.
They suffered only you, me, you, me or my go deal me what I if if I can't you or me, you, me or me or my go to me.
What if if I can if if I can.
If only Ficano that remar.
Or me or me or me or my go to me water, if I can, if I can, if only fact, I know that Remar in xiri words, I do not.
Oh they Omeo.
Oh me to me or my go don't you will at you if I can.
If I can. If only if only fire can all that Rimma, inspiring words, I do not read water, then they sing Who did win?
I mean, we suffered only, you know, me or my goal and, you know, my God, oh, me, me, me or my go, don't you need you or me?
You, me or me or.
Meal on your meal, meal.
Me or me or. We owe me.
MeOh Oneal. Me.
We'll. You may go home, you, me.
Homeo me or my God, Homeo Camille, Camille, Camille.
Camille. Homeo. Neil.
We'll meet you, Michael Amiel. Leo, Leo, I mean, you, Michael, Leo, we'll Leo.
Well, me, you, Leo. Thank you.