Oh, the places we'll go!
There is a kind of darkness that doesn’t exist
because of the absence of light,
but due to its displacement.– Klara du Plessis
That all art, and in this case poetry, is considered a privilege is also what compels its practitioners to be responsible. There is often a responsibility to illuminate human suffering for the sheer belief that illumination is the first step toward alleviation. It is considered to be rather difficult to perform emergency surgery in pitch darkness, after all. Yet, I think Klara du Plessis’s Hell Light Flesh operates carefully in a very different place, under very unpropitious conditions. The project of looking at and changing how we see at times when clarity is displaced might provide an alternative space for who has ownership of and who gets to do the work of seeing. And the lights don’t need to get turned on to see better.
That all art, and in this case poetry, is considered a privilege is also what compels its practitioners to be responsible.
This is a book that teaches us how to look. Looking, with humanity, at human beings under the inhumanities of themselves is made both visually, a pleasurable project and literally, a heavy-handed one in this undertaking. Within the pages of this tripartite manuscript, we do not leave the property of a family home, but one can lose one’s bearings nonetheless, led by the different family members to the same places seen so differently. As I read and re-read, trying to find places for my own “thoughts [to be] kept safe elsewhere,” my mind darted to James Baldwin positing that “human beings are too various to be treated so lightly” and “too various to be trusted.” By elucidating that the wordsmith (i.e., all wordsmiths, or all humans) are untrustworthy (ethically unstable) we are forced to question whether this is so—and there’s the fun, and there’s the rub. And it is so. Fathoming out the universes of the artist-parents and their children is complicated terrain, but du Plessis insists that the negative spaces within the given ones are equally important to confront, to extend across.
I. THE STUDIO: MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ACTIONS
Maria turns left out of the bedroom
and left again into the main corridor,
up the stairs to the studio.
His life has a veneer of confidence,
but the door is ajar and light
filters in from the rest of the home.
We are brought inside Maria’s studio. It is at once a site for the father’s strict artistic practice and a place for the son’s corporal punishment. We see it—still, spacious—as an opportunity:
Getting work done is dependent
on boundaries
the speaker asserts. And that space, space itself, kept by making boundaries, is equally a privilege and a violence. A position that requires an imposition on others.
The studio as “one of the nicest rooms / in the house” could be seen as a favourite place for the son, for example, were it not seen under the circumstances of being disciplined there:
Upstairs is shorthand for upside down, sometimes
heaven gets bored of having the upper hand,
I screwed up, no fun at all.
The words at the ends of the lines accumulate as threats to bodies at times and open endings at others. The lines split with deliberate terseness in places, but the enjambments can be forgiving. Throughout the collection, the speakers become bodies of shifting resilience and ritual perpetrators. There are variations of suffering, of self-sacrificing, of harm, of healing, infliction and injury. And, through these amendments and recurrences, there’s a reuniting of the poles of subject and object, value and fact, reason and nature, aesthetics and ethics, which are often riven apart by social movements, political trends, or delineated by strict poetic or literary conventions or limited-perspective narration or adherence to fixed personas. And as much as the book teaches us to look at them, it also asks questions of ourselves: What does it take to be disciplined? What does it take to have a discipline? What does it take to be a disciplinarian? What does it mean to feel awe? What does it mean to feel awful?
Aesthetic conscience is socially necessary, but memory is a fickle story. Du Plessis is at once telling these stories and their anti-stories, the deconstruction and construction, linking together these co-existing playing fields in and throughout the time and space of one’s family life.
Without transgressions of boundaries like these, there is no frisson, no experiment, no discovery, and no creativity. Without extending some hidden or visible frontier of the possible, without disturbing something of the incomplete order of things, there is no challenge and no pleasure and no joy. Du Plessis shows that she has the rigorous discipline it takes to bring ourselves to places we wouldn’t willingly go, the joy of seducing or dragging her fellow readers and writers in spite of themselves to places deep in ourselves where wonders lurk beside terrors, this delicate art of planting delayed repeat explosions and doing this while—and by!—enchanting each other with the beauty of violence as creation.
Du Plessis is at once telling these stories and their anti-stories, the deconstruction and construction, linking together these co-existing playing fields in and throughout the time and space of one’s family life.
II. THE GARDEN: CULTIVATING CONSCIOUSNESS
Mum and kid
are avoiding the inside of the house,
or rather mum is imposing
this avoidance, thinking that the sound
of her brother being punished
would distress the kid,
not knowing that she relished
this sound, or doesn’t relish it yet,
doesn’t know that she relishes it,
but will come to relish it,
unconscious to conscious shift.
We are introduced to the garden here as Mum’s makeshift studio, tarps spread across the grass and easels propped up. It is shown in contrast to Maria’s indoor studio, which is big enough to house empty drawers. And this garden atelier geography is neither fully inside nor outside the confines of the home; it is at once a generative place and one of avoidance, not wild, not pastoral, not loose, but living. And on these tended grounds an art is tended to while tending to “the kid,” the son’s sister, but it’s not definitively clear what to make of it all.
For Mum, the fact that all “possible art /prescribed by the environment” could be seen as a limitation, or it could be looked at as a way of letting the outside in to increase one’s own possible artistic expressions. Alternatively, “the kid rushes into the rest of the garden” and we, as readers, feel that rushing elsewhere, out, deliberate. It feels good. Whatever good means.
Ambitious poetry necessarily shifts definitions of quality to contribute to a new mode of value and du Plessis cultivates this discourse to shift the ethos of our imaginations by keeping even the earth from being sacred and children from being pure.
If, previous to the book, we had thought that the hard-nosed work of moral conscience was better suited to artists and poets like these parents than, say, politicians or scientists, we find in Hell Light Flesh that we still haven’t arrived at good places under their hands. The smaller seeming imperatives of a child needing to run or a plant needing to grow might be better tended to but even these imperatives are suspect. Ambitious poetry necessarily shifts definitions of quality to contribute to a new mode of value and du Plessis cultivates this discourse to shift the ethos of our imaginations by keeping even the earth from being sacred and children from being pure. In the act of making, every material entity has an ego:
Concatenate the garden,
graft water to greenery to light,
and photosynthesize the ego
til nutrients seep through the face,
and hands and skin leak
in the act of making
violence is wrapped up
in the ability to create at all.
Water dissolves in the garden, “eventually allows for growth,” but a growth that still trips us up enough to ask, gravely:
What is this
oasis of dismissal?
before it’s “Time to go back in . . .”
A type of evolution, yes, between the Mum and kid but not as a form of consolation—a becoming without progression, growth without essential development, change made rather as a form of consequence.
Du Plessis’s poetics in this section might be best summed up in the process of the almost involuntary uprooting that takes place in a garden, in which plants are, perhaps necessarily, pulled up and their living being taken from them in order to make room for new or different growth to take place. The earth is not exactly a mother here, though. While the politics are in land and water and generative processes, it is not on sacred ground that they tread: dedicated to surviving but deliberately set apart from flourishing. A type of evolution, yes, between the Mum and kid but not as a form of consolation—a becoming without progression, growth without essential development, change made rather as a form of consequence.
III. THE WASHROOM: SELF-CENTRED SELF-CARE
The elongated nature
of the washroom,
this cryptic, solitary space.
In the mediated light
of window privacy, quality time
is seeped with a green glow, envy
gentle afternoon pale, sacrosanct
that little latch
on the door sealing me in
from others.
We are given a bathroom for shedding tears and for cleaning up after. Crying, un-containing oneself while contained by privacy, can be a cleansing act. But even in a “washroom’s foster care status” there can coexist the discrepancy of uncleanliness: the smell between laundered and used towels. Smears from childhood activities along a sink basin side.
Even when we are looking for places to soothe, to be soothed by, we are shown their true colours: “The interior soul of a washroom / is always light bluish-green” the speaker determines. For the “kid” it is “benign”; an “[a]nthropomorphic room / that infantilizes [her] / in a cradle of apology.” Fortunately, even in her accountability to us readers, du Plessis voices the logic of so many conflicting arguments and feelings that she is freed of any obligation to settle questions, to aim at any purity or resolution, and can leave it to the very individual reader to produce—within the limits imposed by a particular position in time and space by the characters—her or his own structure of centre and digression.
In this final section, it is moving to read:
I am peripheral, but I will be central,
surrounded, less hemmed in
but when articulated by a character that we know has the propensity and will grow to love the sound of a belt smack, we might not feel sure how central a figure we want them to become. Yet we can know that the formation of one’s sexuality under the formation of patriarchy through the rituality of violence might just look a little like this domestic image. Good, bad, and all the places in between and across. That this might be the underlit art–making world–making we need to adjust our eyes to. And it might just be the truly formidable book we’re holding in our hands as a mirror to look on. Admit it:
I situate myself
I’m not scared of the dark. I’m scared of keeping myself there. But I’m looking. For the places I’ll go.
Author photo credit to Richmond Lam.
