Part Two: Balafres/Gashes by Marie-Célie Agnant
In her 1994 essay “The Regulating Effect of Chance,” Ingrid Christensen suggests re-arranging the letters of the Italian word for paradise—paradiso—to spell the Greek word diaspora. Christensen wants to think differently about diaspora, the scattering or diffusion of peoples forced or compelled to leave the lands they are from, thereby thrown into lives of exclusion, exile, wandering. Is it possible, she wonders, to understand diaspora as a place or position of possibility: “a mystical place of human beings’ undifferentiated existence in the world.” Diaspora is all too often the result of terrible forces: political violence, tribalism, religious zealotry & bigotry, xenophobia, racism, natural and /or climactic disasters. Christensen, perhaps somewhat idealistically, postulates that the scattering, the dispersal, might be seen as an opportunity to touch our true connectedness, to each other and to the earth.
I kept Christensen’s words in mind as I read and re-read both the original French and Legros Georges’ English translation of Haitian-Canadian poet and writer Marie-Célie Agnant’s Balafres— Gashes, in English. For Agnant writes stirringly, hauntingly, boldly from within the Haitian diaspora. Balafres is Agnant’s first collection, originally published in French (Éditions du CIDUHCA, 1994) the same year as Christensen penned her essay.
Agnant and her family left Haiti in 1970 when she was 17-years-old. The dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier had been in power for 13 years, virtually all of Agnant’s childhood. He used his paramilitary secret police to terrorize not only his political opponents but also ordinary civilians. In the early ’70’s “Papa Doc” was preparing his son Jean-Claude—“Baby Doc”—to succeed him. During their combined regimes, tens of thousands of Haitians were tortured, disappeared, killed. And many fled the country by whatever means they could.
Write from the scar not the wound, memoirist Glennon Doyle advises. Time is essential not only for understanding the nature of experience but also for crafting it into truly evocative poetry or prose. Balafres appeared 24 years into Agnant’s exile from Haiti. Many poems in the collection are written out of in the long shadow cast by political violence. Other poems, such as Perejil—which addresses the 1937 massacre of Haitian braceros in the Dominican Republic—reveal the fraught history of Haiti prior to Duvalier’s ascendancy. Agnant looks directly at both the wounds and the scars. Not in order to make sense of the incomprehensible but to disclose it, to make it known. In the poem Gash (Balafre in French) the poet-speaker tells us
Fingernails planted in the peel of the earth
deep in the lie
I want to write
phrases-of-witness
On all the complicit silences
Her fingernails both dig in and peel back the layers. Digging in, not letting go, claiming a place, memory, a history. Perhaps even under duress. Peeling back, getting below the surface, below appearances. The gash is the lie, rooted in colonialism, racism and the quest for power. The pain brought about by the lie is compounded by the many silences against which this poetry stands.
The collection’s title is revealing. La balafre in French bears a double meaning: a gash or intentional slash to the face, and also scar, primarily on the face. Translation involves choice-making. Legros Georges chose to title her translation Gashes. A gash or slash to the face is a particular kind of wound. It disfigures. Perhaps deep, perhaps requiring stitches. Gashes are often inflicted by others. An infected gash festers. Whether stitched or left to heal on its own, a gash will likely leave a scar.
Edward Said refers to the “median state” of exile, an in-between space in which one is neither fully integrated into the new location and its cultural system, nor fully freed from the old place and system. Gashes opens with the poem Euménides. Displaced from their ancient role of dispensing justice, these ancient Greek female archetypal figures inhabit a transitional position not unlike that of the exile. By using both Euménides and Érinyes to refer to them, the poem emphasizes this position.
The poem carefully constructs an enactment of the Érinyes’ energy. Lines of four or five words are followed by single word lines, an architecture which both slows the momentum and acts as a restraint on the speaker’s forceful assertions:
My body holds the habits
of delirious torrents
of rumblings of earth
in rebellious jolts
revolt in the body
fixed
since the first dawn
In Aeschylus’ play, the Érinyes, though many, speak as one. In Agnant’s poem the poet-speaker and the Érinyes are one. She possesses their power: “and time since the Érinyes/in my body/is no more.” These lines in French read: “le temps depuis les Érinyes/dans mon corps/n’est plus temps.” Time is no longer time in the body of the speaker. It has collapsed. She touches past, present, future. Even time before time, the archetypical, the universal. “Vengeance shall fester till my full heart pours….”the Érinyes declare in Aeschylus’ play. When righteous anger has no outlet and the thirst for justice remains unsatisfied, they fester like an infected gash.
“She came from nowhere” begins the poem La Gésine, which also centers female experience within an archetypical frame. Être en gésine: to be in labor. La Gésine of the title, a woman whose labor is unending: “I have been pregnant/for so long/waiting for my husbands to return….” Husbands who’ve been killed, disappeared, or conscripted, perhaps, by the regime du jour. Husbands who left hoping to return. Or those who simply left. Like her laboring, she is relentless, fearsome: “when her voice held the wind/mothers hid their children in their skirts.” She cries for “this gangrenous country”—the infected wound—and for the grandmothers
who no longer sweep
who don’t rock themselves on doorsteps
with scowls under their eyelids
they tremble
and close the shutters tight
they hear the devil’s breath blow by
Notice the shortest line, distinctly shorter than the lines which precede and follow, so that the grandmothers’ trembling fills the white space, before the shutters are closed.
La Gésine is both the land itself and witness to what has transpired there: “heavy blood/soaking my scarred land…Aie….” The long-repressed cry is released. La Gésine is also the poet. Together, poet and laboring woman voice the pain and betrayal of women, and of the country, the land, by men “who walk sideways/fangs out/asses wide open/selling their mothers and daughters.” This is the voice of a great bell—of anger, indignation and grief, resonating throughout the island of Haiti and reaching across the Haitian diaspora to all parts of the world.
Agnant’s poet-speaker also addresses Orpheus. But the poem Orpheus isn’t a paean to the mytho-historical figure who perfected the lyre and charmed both gods and humans with music and words. Here, Orpheus, as lyric poet of love, is told to break his pen, an imperative which becomes a refrain, the speaker telling him finally, firmly, “Break your pen and your mirror.” In other words, the speaker insists she won’t be his reflection, or a projection, or an ideal figure of his imagination. The poem is a plea to be seen and once seen to be touched, loved “with both hands/full-bodied.” It is also the speaker’s assertion of selfhood, a declaration of personal beauty and worth, the “rebellious nutmeg” of her mouth, “obsidian balafon” of her body, her sensual “bilimbao thighs,” her very breath that of an African savannah.
In a few instances, I question Legros Georges' translation choices. Two occur in this poem. Agnant’s original French has the speaker inviting Orpheus to leave with her: “Loin du royaume/des flonflons de tes mots/partons,” or “Far from the realm/of your blaring words/let’s leave.” In other words, let’s leave together, go far from where you’ve led yourself, led us, with your noisy words. Legros Georges translates these lines as: “far from the realm and frippery/of your words/move on.” Lost is the implication that the two will go together, that the speaker will guide him elsewhere with HER words. Lost, too, the noise of his words, the blaring, replaced by frippery, moving the poem away from the aural metaphor toward a visual, tactile one.
The poem’s embrace is as wide as the Atlantic Ocean. From West Africa to the Caribbean it reaches, employing a richly textured, particular language in which we hear the resonant, danceable, joyful rhythms of Afro-Caribbean music. I’m intrigued by how the poem manages to challenge and engage with the traditional Greek—i.e. Western—story. The poet-speaker doesn’t want to dismiss Orpheus but rather to speak to him, to be recognized by him. What would it mean for Orpheus to break his pen? Would it signify beginning again? Or is it a challenge to him to write into the true and blessed mystery of the other?
From her position within the Haitian diaspora, Agnant speaks for, to, and of the immigrant, the refugee, the asylum seeker, the powerless and disenfranchised of any society. Though published in Quebec over 30 years ago, her work speaks eloquently to and of this socio-political moment in the U.S. and elsewhere. “Vade mecum” means literally “go with me.” As in “come along, follow me, let me show you some things. We’ll see them together.” The Latin phrase also refers to 1) a small guidebook that fits in a pocket or purse; and 2) a companion, or personal item taken everywhere and used frequently, such as the kind of little notebook many writers carry to jot down ideas or observations. Agnant’s long poem Vade Mecum incorporates both the invitational aspect of the phrase and the guidebook /notebook meaning. The poem is a centerpiece of the collection.
Curiously it begins with a disavowal of the personal: “Don’t talk to me about your life/I’ll spare you mine.” Instead, the speaker wishes to speak of “those countries/of incessant absences.” Of her homeland, “in tatters,” torn apart, “five hundred years captive,” since its “discovery” by Columbus. She wants to speak as well of other places marked by racist violence, colonialism, oppression:
I have to shout out
the vice tightens
until the rot escapes…
The vice tightens
memory
ringing from Sharpeville
On March 20, 1960, 69 South African Blacks were killed and many others wounded in Sharpeville, a township near Johannesburg. Their “crime”? Peacefully protesting apartheid. Most of the dead and injured were shot in the back. One witness/survivor reported, “Without any word, without any argument, we just heard the guns being fired.”
The speaker’s voice extends beyond borders and boundaries, countries and time. Agnant is interested not only in engaging with history but also in interrogating it—who is allowed to write the histories of places and peoples? Whose stories and experiences have been altered, erased, disavowed? As we continue to consider these questions and grapple in our countries and communities with the profound issues they raise, this collection from 1994 bears a groundbreaking significance.
The poem also references figures important in communities of original inhabitants on the island known as Ayiti. Among them, Guacanagari, a Taino cacique who welcomed Columbus, and Anacaona, a woman chief and poet who fomented resistance against the Spanish and was publicly hanged. “HERE IS HOW PAIN IS BORN,” the poem’s speaker proclaims. Through conquest, through terror, through silencing. The wound itself becomes a voice in this poem. It speaks of and for naming, truth-telling: “I won’t let silence wrap my wound.” In other words, the wound must be allowed to speak, not gagged or hidden with a bandage. In French the line reads: “Je ne veux pas du silence pour tromper ma blessure.” Legros Georges’ translates “pour tromper ma blessure” (to numb, mask, deceive, or wrong my wound) as “to wrap my wound,” creating a marvelous paradox. What we expect—a bandage, a wrapping—to facilitate healing becomes a means of prolonging the injury. This wound needs air. It needs to breathe and be heard.
The collection includes poems of compassion and tenderness as well. In The Stranger the speaker observes “a man/alone/dragged by his tired soles.” The shoes have agency, pulling the man in their wake. Here, the English translation of the French “ses semelles,” his soles, lends itself so beautifully to the deeper realization that his soul, too, is exhausted by the “indifferent sidewalks” of a place of exile. The speaker recognizes the “scars of his heart”. The poem’s title and its final lines echo Camus and Baudelaire, writers whose work speaks from/to/of the existential alienation of modern life: “This man is my brother/the Stranger.” With Agnant, the alienation is compounded by displacement, dislocation.
Tenderness arises in poems such as For You. “I will be your river elsewhere/an island glow just for you,” the speaker assures the other. Sensual and lovely, delicate and earthy, the poem’s images glide from the bedroom to the moon, from sybaritic pleasure to the souï-manga, a hummingbird-like bird who probes deep into flowers to extract nectar with its long tongue. And finally, with her own skillful beak and tongue, the speaker will “amaze your blood.” Agnant allows paradox to complicate this love poem. With the beak there’s a hint of pain, because the joy evoked, the pleasure, carries with it its opposite: pain or grief. Everything is fragile, as the poem asserts. For the exile, as well as the lover, this knowledge is marrow-deep.
So, how do I think about Ingrid Christensen’s proposition now that I’ve spent so much time with both with these original poems and translations. Christensen herself was neither a political refugee nor an immigrant. But she was a great poet and deep and original thinker. Can diaspora as it’s come to be known and experienced somehow be related to paradiso, a place of communion between or among humans and/or between humans and the earth from which we are estranged? If paradise is a findable, achievable or possible place, it exists where we meet and recognize the other as other, not to exclude or draw irrelevant distinctions, but to be enlarged, to have our capacity for empathy expand, grow.
Agnant’s poems bridge a distance that all too often seems unbridgeable. The terrible, ongoing labor pains of La Gésine are our pains. We, too, carry the world in order to birth it, struggle by struggle, choice by choice, recognition by recognition. And we need poet-witnesses such as Agnant to midwife this seemingly endless process of becoming.
Works Cited
Christensen, Ingrid. “The Regulating Effect of Chance.” The Condition of Secrecy, translated by Susanna Nied, New Directions, 2018, pp. 79.
Galbraith, Iain. “Translator’s Introduction.” Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001 by W.G. Sebald, Random House, 2011, pp. ix-xvii.
MacRae, Matthew. “The Sharpeville Massacre.” Canadian Museum for Human Rights, August 8, 2023, https://humanrights.ca/story/sharpeville-massacre