OLD FOOD

OLD FOOD
ED ATKINS
Fitzcarraldo Editions
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From one of the most lauded artists of his generation comes a purging soliloquy: a profound nowt delivered in some spent afterwards. Scorched by senility and nostalgia, and wracked by all kinds of hunger, Ed Atkins’ Old Food lurches from allegory to listicle, from lyric to menu, fetching up a plummeting, idiomatic and crabbed tableau from the cannibalised remains of each form in turn. Written in conjunction with Atkins’ exhibition of the same name, Old Food is a hard Brexit, wadded with historicity, melancholy and a bravura kind of stupidity.

Ed Atkins is an artist who makes all kinds of convolutions of self-portraiture. He writes uncomfortably intimate, debunked prophesies; paints travesties; and makes realistic computer generated videos that often feature figures that resemble the artist in the throes of unaccountable psychical crises. Atkins’ artificial realism, whether written or animated, pastiches romanticism to get rendered down to a sentimental blubber – all the better to model those bleak feelings often so inexpressible in real life.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS. THANK YOU.

My Review: Listen, from *ME*, three and a half stars for poetry is a goddam rave review. I really, really dislike being condescended to; poets are, of necessity, self-referential and therefore can't avoid a certain amount of "what do you mean, what do I mean by that?" It's irritating as all get-out to me. I feel about it the way I suspect not-very-bright people feel about being forced to read The Classics. THEN there's the unrelenting Englishness of the poem! I mean, don't read a tree book of this, my fellow Murrikinz, you gonna NEED that Wikipedia/dictionary function A LOT.

Red spider mites paused
there, druft
down through the gone
skylight
with other and more real
bits of the
summer, seasoning a
generous spread
of pokey galantines, upset
duck and
I think quail. Charged with
waves of
mortadella, fagged little
Portuguese
chicken livers, garlic
mosaics. ...

Not so much, then, on the pleasure reading scale. "Druft" and "galantines" and so on and so forth, well, yes it's titled "Old Food" but good lord! Brand-name junk foods, exotic-to-Colonials preparations of things we don't eat that much of, and just flat gross mental pictures you can't unsee:

Oodles of
dropsical maggots and lice.
The
maggots moving fast like
junior
sea penises. They got all up
in her
mouth and in her ears so
that for the
longest time she could only
declaim
in Martian, hear distant
wars and/
or futures. Wiping tough
tits, is
what.
–and–
Thank you for just opening
your legs
the goose wishbone and the
gavage to
engorge to torture. On
thick, doorstop
toast with mustard seeds
and sweated
green onions, served with a
squat
glass of a cool, pale
Sauternes and
with Hannah.

But sticking with it, keeping the pace of reading, pays off in a very strange way for the uncultured oafs like me: Bend your brain a little. Crank the handle again, spread the jalousie just a fraction more than before, and the weird, unlyrical pleasure of the writing will catch you.

Might catch you. Could catch you. Let it catch you.

And did anyone who's read a significant portion of my over seven hundred forty blogged reviews, over eighteen hundred total reviews, ever expect to hear me say that?

THE EPIC OF ASKIA MOHAMMED, a poetic translation of an African foundational myth

THE EPIC OF ASKIA MOHAMMED
NOUHOU MALIO (tr. Thomas A. Hale)
Indiana University Press
$14.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Askia Mohammed is the most famous leader in the history of the Songhay Empire, which reached its apogee during his reign in 1493-1528. Songhay, approximately halfway between the present-day cities of Timbuktu in Mali and Niamey in Niger, became a political force beginning in 1463, under the leadership of Sonni Ali Ber. By the time of his death in 1492, the foundation had been laid for the development under Askia Mohammed of a complex system of administration, a well-equipped army and navy, and a network of large government-owned farms. The present rendition of the epic was narrated by the griot (or jesere) Nouhou Malio over two evenings in Saga, a small town on the Niger River, two miles downstream from Niamey. The text is a word-for-word translation from Nouhou Malio's oral performance.

My Review: 1,602 lines of oral foundation myth. I was afraid to take it on, really, but was seduced by the sheer spoken beauty of it. And I can't stress "spoken" enough: Don't read this book, speak it!

As with any cultural record of a time and place unknown to me, and likely to most people raised in the USA, there was a learning curve to be surmounted before I could really understand the sounds I was making of the poetry. In fact, I found it most useful to read the line references in the Annotations section immediately after reading the Preface and the Introduction. These were all indispensable steps to appreciating the world that was unfolding before my mental eye. It's an astonishing fact that American students are simply not introduced to non-European information about Africa to this very day. I can't begin to fathom that, until I realize that the purpose of this is to make Africa "ours" by appropriation yet again.

The best way to push the veil of ignorance aside is always to read. Reading the foundation myths of a culture is a necessary step to becoming a well-educated person. This epic poem is a great piece of literature, and as such a great window into the West African world of the past thousand years. The fact that the Songhay Empire was a vast, sophisticated political unit and is unknown to most of us outside Africa is unnerving; that we have the nerve to place the people of Africa in the "developing nations" category is breathtakingly arrogant, given the gorgeous culture that unfolds in The Epic of Askia Mohammed. It is in no way acceptable to dismiss the Songhay Empire as "pre-European" since the Empire was formed and maintained without even a nod to European purposes and ruled through a sophisticated apparatus that owed no debt to any Eurpoean model or purpose. This culture was its own unique self. That shouldn't even need to be said, but the English-language references I've found to the Songhay Empire now that I know to look for them tend towards a tone of condescension and dismissal.

The reader, or performer, of this epic poem will quickly see the folly of that attitude. Translation is an imperfect art. The translator of The Epic of Askia Mohammed relied on many generous African colleagues to get it right. That the job was done well is most apparent as one speaks the phrases, finds the rhythms of the lines and the flow of the underlying dynastic narrative. It's a very good job, although I have no way to know for myself how faithful it is to the original epic. As with all translations, I'm left to glean accuracy and veracity from the feel, the texture, the sensation of the whole as I experience it first and latterly remember it. An imperfect gauge, yes, but it reads "excellent" to my eye and ear so I'm satisfied.

I am very grateful to Indiana University Press for sending me the review copy I requested. I appreciate the fact that I had the opportunity to experience this tale for myself, and I'd encourage you to do the same.