Richard Bowker
SLAVE TRADES AND AN ARTIST’S NOTEBOOK by Ari Sitas (Deep South)
Ari Sitas’s new book, Slave Trades and An Artist’s Notebook, 190 pages long, .consists of just two poems – those of the title. Though geographically specific – the action of each poem takes in a ravaged and destabilised Ethiopia – the historical canvas is broad.
From Slave Trades and the murky late-19th century life of Arthur Rimbaud, former avant-garde poet become trader of coffee, guns and hides, and ambiguous, if ambitious, imperialist, we move to the near-live Ethiopia of jazz-playing Abdullah, Clea, magistrate-in-training (read political dissident), one-legged Mangesha, chalice-smoking Rastaman and the ever-growing cast of international characters that make up An Artist’s Notebook.
There is an overwhelming sense of displacement and of searching, of struggle and resistance: the expansionist European imperialism of the last century (of which Rimbaud – being there, displaced – is himself a symptom); civil war, famine, poverty in the present: “The country sighs/ its harps untuned/ its voices parched and lean/ the rhythm only of the scythe/ and of coins// Jangling in a tin.”
Each of the eight sections of Slave Trades begins with excerpts from Rimbaud’s letters. These historical shards form the ground from which the voices of the named and unnamed characters articulate their worlds. The poem opens with Rimbaud contemplating his own corpse-like body, which initiates the dialogic interplay of dream and reality, of mastery and submission, that structure the poem.
Stylistically Slave Trades is rich, using well short-line imagistic stanzas, narrative verse paragraphs, and prose that reminds one of the Aim Csaire of Les Cahiers. There are elements taken from traditional oral poetries: pronoun constructions such as “you who”, “he who”, addressee-orientation, and repetition. In the first section there is the eerieness of an imperative incantation – repeated commands (“come here”, “come closer”) come to function as a refrain, with Rimbaud assuming his impossible mastery of this place and these people as natural, default background noise.
Slave Trades is all voice. Initially those of Rimbaud, but soon, other voices – from the marketplace, the street, the church, the court – begin to suffuse the poem as the reality of anti-colonial war draws closer. Eventually the trade ethic, the opportunity for commerce – Rimbaud’s reason for being here – dictates, to the extent that in section three and section eight poetic discourse breaks down to resemble an invoice.
An Artist’s Notebook serves as counterfoil to and extension of the first poem: “I had to go to Ethiopia. It was written somewhere in some larger narrative that I had to get there” (March). Here the form is more openly dramatic, the sections divided according to month. The characters are named, socially self-aware, their actions defined, their narratives contiguous.
Voices are recognisably contemporary, more colloquial, engaging each other in making their own history – Sitas concretising the fugue that is Slave Trades in time and in person, making more of the mundanity of lives lived in interesting times. Rimbaud eventually reappears as well – as simulacrum in a failed film venture.
Elements of humour, of tragi-comedy and farce enter, as in May, when Mangesha responds to Clea’s “You are all stupid” by saying “we are artists. We are finding ourselves!” and when Abdullah and Mangesha attempt to bathe a dishevelled aid worker-cum-refugee in a well and almost drown her.
The characters of An Artist’s Notebook are constantly grappling to make sense of themselves, their histories and their situation. Abdullah has a mimosa box filled with documents from which he tries to unravel his own past: “There are wild spirits in that box – there are ancestral shadows” (March).
On the one hand, “Ethiopia is an idea, a sense of place” (July); on the other, “searching for origins [is] perverse and finding them a prison. Roots [are] chains” (August).
Along this narrow space-time bridge Sitas constructs an imaginary narrative that enacts an historical succession of possible genealogical and actual international circumstances over a century, linking Slave Trades to the globalised landscape of now: derelict cars, Coca-Cola, transnational commerce, modern warfare and economic injustice.