We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture December 7, 1993
Speaking the Unspeakable, Anahid Nersessian. A review of Fady Joudah’s […] in New York Review.
Still, even as it insists upon the poem’s acoustic dimension, that “[…]” hints at what exceeds or baffles speech and therefore, as Abrams might say, reckons with what cannot be reembodied or returned to life. Joudah belongs to a poetic tradition for which the unpronounceable mark—the ellipsis, the bracket, a large space on the page—has an intimate relationship to historical violence. It’s a tradition that includes Paul Celan (born Paul Antschel), a Holocaust survivor whose prolific ellipses, em dashes, and colons suggest the incommunicability of severe collective trauma, and M. NourbeSe Philip, whose 2008 masterpiece Zong! repurposes the text of an eighteenth-century legal case involving the murder of over 130 captive Africans, creating a fragmented work whose large white spaces signify the gaps and silences in the official record.
These typographic gestures draw attention to what poetry can and cannot do, and to its always abortive attempts to make sense of what is beyond moral comprehension.
…
There is the threat of subordinating ethical concerns to artistic ones, or else of turning the work of art into a newsreel, in which case we might ask: Why shouldn’t we just watch the newsreel? Besides, what would it mean—aesthetically, morally, politically—to write a good poem about genocide?
The poems in […], while occasioned by death, are poems that insist upon life.
