Here and Away: A Review of Music for Exile by Nehassaiu deGannes

Nehassaiu deGannes is the author of two previous chapbooks: Percussion, Salt & Honey, published in 2001 (which won her the Philbrick Poetry Award for New England Poets) and Undressing the River from 2011, winner of the Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Competition. Chapbooks, of course, given their limited print runs & circulation most typically among fellow poets or people in academia . . . don't usually arouse very much interest from the mass-market of more casual/occasional poetry readers; even if they have garnered many prestigious literary accolades. So it is then that Music for Exile now warrants the designation of being deGannes' first real official full-length poetry collection: a kind of new beginning or proverbial opening-up to a wider potential audience. As a poet who is primarily also a well-known actor and overall theater-person, deGannes is able to cultivate a certain ironic distance from the notion of big Poetry with a capital "P" while also keeping the poems formally inventive, personal and also political (the latter is a rather loaded modifier here) all at the same time.

The "exile" of the title provides the first hint as to deGannes' unflinching exploration of the idea that in fact the personal is always political. Her experience of her own life is like a fragment broken off from the larger structure of the history of countless others she feels herself corresponding with in a number of ways . . . sometimes literally in epistolary forms, or sometimes as with the imagistic poem "Bessie's Hymn" it is more abstractly in terms of music and allegory: 

The door, I’ve been
shouldering

is ajar—a spoon of light, a threshold
of honey—

a cataract, a riot, a trumpet

Whether or not we recognize some of the characters/proper nouns in these poems as historical figures or they're names we've heard in the news before—or they may be people from deGannes' actual life or dreams she recorded—depends largely on where we are coming from as readers. There are no footnotes, but when deGannes summons a headline and/or piece of newsprint from the San Jose Mercury News about an unarmed man being brutally shot by police, this particular act & art of appropriation feels as organic as when the poet pulls any of her other and perhaps more traditional or to-be-expected poetic tools out from her toolbox to build something on the page that we can wander through. The headlines and the newspeak, if you will, cut harder and faster than your average lyric . . . suddenly the reader is kicked off the dreamy Parnassian fantasy cloud of poetry and thrust back into the present real-life political and overall social reality we are all slogging through today. Something about the all caps, too, girds the sense of outrage at the horror, obscenity, inhumanity and senselessness of racist violence. Also inhuman is the stock-ticker like stream of the enjambement and the strange indifferent details, the rather ornamental word choice ("erstwhile"?) which I guess we can assume was made by some journalistic underling:

AND FOUR HOURS LATER, AFTER OF-
FICER BRUCE UNGER PUMPED THREE
OR FOUR BULLETS INTO THE ERSTWHILE
FOOTBALL STAR AS HE RAN TOWARD
HIM, IT WAS CLEAR THAT SOMETHING
WAS CLOSING ON ROGERS FAST.
San Jose Mercury News

This appropriation causes a certain interesting rupture amid the poem-space of the page, it is basically collage, one of the oldest Modernist tricks in the book . . . yet here it suggests that poetry can be in fact located within a real-life political project for social justice, that the poet is bringing these perhaps all-too-soon forgotten injustices to light so that we may finally, fully remember, understand and ideally work together to prevent them from ever re-occurring. It is the poets' prerogative to find a way to do this without, perhaps, being too literal in any case . . . preferring the free play of language as melody, rhythm and image, inflecting it with personal experience while also demonstrating an assiduous knowledge of objective history. Sometimes the poems address the author's family or close friends or deceased relatives, and the writing is rather idiosyncratic while also being accessible and swift . . . somewhat colloquial at the threshold of attention where we first begin to see the poems unfolding before us.

Another interesting spatial event that happens right away in this collection is a kind of stylistic pre-empting of the traditional order of the book. A four-page poem "Letter for Khadejha" begins the book immediately after a quote from Kamau Brathwaite in the book's front-matter ("to be blown into fragments. your flesh / like the islands that you loved") and this is even before the official beginning of the collection: the table of contents and the rest of the sequence of the poems that make up the bulk of the collection occur only after this first poem grabs our attention. It's a compelling gesture, call it an overture if you like, or some kind of sneak-attack that defies or expectations:

Letter for Khadejha

Hummingbird    servant of hybrid Light
and of Asé   to the

twelve tribes which are scattered
abroad  Greetings

Caught your exhibit at the AGO this August
Entering the Millennium   Didn’t even know
you were there in the room at the end
of the corridor of British painters a few Henry
Moores   Picasso and some African masks

DeGannes starts things off with a sense of the everyday, and a degree of casualness, waving hello to her audience, with an almost-list poem that brings to mind any number of antique Modernist/Postmodernist styles, with some name-dropping of famous painters and a recalling of a stroll through a museum, nicely parallel the reader's stroll through this poetry, which can resemble a kind of museum. This idea would seem to go hand-in-hand, perhaps, with the idea of exile, or even of language: how an object could be in exile from it's origin, like language could be positively exiled, somehow, from it's original use or context, as it may be used anew to make more meaning in a new context, like that of poetry. The term exile develops a definite two-or-more-fold meaning here . . . being a poet may be a kind of automatic exile from mainstream culture, or even what we could even call the basic social contract. Exile could also just mean the act of leaving home, whether by choice or because of circumstances, putting everything suddenly behind you, or  the act of going elsewhere, anywhere beyond . . . growing up, moving on; some of this could be self-imposed in certain cases. The term may even resonate with us all as we find ourselves more and more exiled from our own reality . . . or what could be called a shared civic or political reality.

And while this book does in some parts enact an inevitably politicized expression of the author's real-life identity—there is no getting away from this really, ever, for anyone writing, especially these days—Music for Exile accomplishes it with much more grace and, as a book of course, without relying on or at all referencing social media. Ironically and unfortunately, it would seem that the tacit marginal utility of that particular style of poetry (which is not deGannes') is how it offers for the potential reader a comfortable proxy for any real-life political action; like the kind that might have even prevented the 45th President from ever getting elected in the first place. Instead, as New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino wrote in her 2019 debut book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, on the surface we may think we're getting a more visible, tangible brand of "diversity" in any number of realms, like poetry online, in at least an aesthetic and/or pseudo-cultural sense . . . as one novel form of representation; though it is not in itself a step towards greater political representation for anyone. Given the distorted social dynamics of the internet & social media algorithms . . . how people get stuck in their echo-chambers, etcetera . . . this all comes usually at the expense of any greater IRL solidarity: " . . . solidarity [becomes] a matter of identity rather than politics or morality . . . the most mainstream gestures of solidarity are pure representation [ . . . ] and meanwhile the actual mechanisms through which political solidarity is enacted, like strikes and boycotts, still exist on the fringe." Poets end up helping social media tech giants (largely run by white men) become more and more influential throughout politics, and we the writers and readers become only further trapped, as Tolentino describes . . ." at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy . . . " because in the end, all we each may really care about at the end of the day is individual success, right? It's a pretty bleak portrait of human nature. In regards to the #MeToo movement, for instance, Tolentino questions the function of the hashtag, noting how it seems to erase the variety of women's experience. It is actually the difference between women's stories that matter: " . . . the factors that allow some to survive, and force others under—that illuminate the vectors that lead to a better world."

DeGannes may in her own way understand the problems of poetry better than anyone. A poem cannot, for example, get on a bus to travel to picket in a far-off state where people's voting rights are in jeopardy, nor can it repatriate stolen artifacts back from a museum which was probably bankrolled largely thanks to colonial violence. Poets are not politicians; politicians don't care about poetry. And the poets politicians hire sometimes are just there to trick us into thinking otherwise,  to model poetry as some sort of alternative leisure lifestyle that goes well with say, a bunch of other & more expensive consumer products we should really be buying more of to help the economy, rather than using poetry to awaken new ideas of how to restructure things like the economy . . . who knows? Music for Exile feels free from many of these common contradictions and hypocrisies, delving into the personal and the political. It is rooted in the present while also showcasing a certain recollection of a past that is not quite lost, but does seem to be perpetually in danger of fading fast from our public view, which could be seen as macrocosm for anybody's personal experience or family history. Exile can happen to anyone and often does, it's a state of being that can however be well-suited to poets, just like old Dante Alighieri. Similarly, we get the sense of deGannes owning up to the uncertainties she feels in her own life, the idea of a perpetual crossroads, at a fork, figuring out which way through the wood to go, making sense of it all via writing, and as readers we may even be able to read this book and make sense of our own lives in a more humane fashion. We may further learn that we are not alone, or that there is after all something we can do to help others feel less so.