The necropolis and the psychiatric
institution meet congestion and diarrhoea in this text. Runaway brain mangles
much. What beautiful ruins. It is a gross-out, scat-splat, liquid fiery shot to
the senses whose cordite smells like Mondo films in places, yes. And that is a
great scent, in this context, because this is a gore-fest without gratuity.
Rare. And raw. An ideology, tentacles
flying, multi- pronged/fanged/fangled and liquid, seeps out with the
human-gravy as this work hurtles, manic, through the flesh-draped , doom-laden
night of it all, towards an aborted dawn, without let-up, breathless. It is there for the finding, without
didacticism nor fake documentary claim , where the text chokes in its own
density, asthmatic, spasmodic, shatter-brained. There are no respirators here.
And, uniquely shaped, It is
beautiful....when it bares itself. Omnivorous, Labou-Tansi eats up all schools,
fishy or otherwise. Here is revolution flying without flags. And sans maps. Carried
on the waves of a bloody exhilaration into both delirium and tedium. Writing
schizophrenia even as mass slaughter
makes Bataille’s corpses stack up. Albee’s corpse here is not content with just
getting bloated in the living room but multiplies and with Van Wyk’s, floats
up, on liquid amphetamines, into the courtroom of the world. Repulsive images
jostle for space with an electric urgency that makes for a deranged read.
Harnessed lightning. Cumulus, its impact. Writing with both sledgehammer and
scalpel. Dissect-and-smash, hoof-on-fire all the while. No murder like
language. This side-show freak should be canonical. Poetry of the Damned.
Amen-tract.
*
Katalamanasie. 228 national hog/holidays
per annum.
Run, at the beginning, by a cartoonish Pere
Ubu/Amin/Bokassa-type slothful character who’s his own fetish, (Narcissism gone
wrong, he’s monikered himself The Providential Guide) and then by a gallery of
buffoonish, garish, roguish and murderous dictators, seeming results of a
near-successful lobotomy. Said dictator stabs, chops up and machineguns
Martial, the leader of the opposition. This much-loved man though, refuses to
die, even as he is ‘obliterated’. bit by bit. All of his ‘rag-family’ follows suit,
going down the line in psychological-rape fashion. As each expires, the rest
are expected to feast on them. As pate (sp) and stew. (how much can you chew of
the Congo’s rubber?) Martial appears as more than spooky, hostile apparition to
taunt, harass and otherwise render the situation totally untenable and
absolutely horrible for The Head, gross archetype of the political leader as a
tumour, an aberration ugly-grown up and above the masses (read : ‘them asses’)
even as this office switches faces because... sore pop and pus squirt,
reverse-mode. That, on the surface, is the play. The sense-slaying commences.
All is tomb-level.
*
Chaidana, daughter, sole survivor, if calling her that is apt. 15
when her father and family murdered.
Her father appears to her in bloodied
(phantom?) form in moments when sex
threatens:
‘you
are the last stem of our blood. You have to leave before hell.’
Which she reads : ‘those eyes were the
words of the dead’
But she goes through the book carrying
a massive, electro-sex-charged,
vengeance-fueled ‘ons dak nie, ons phola’ attitude of rebellion. Against the
obscenely mutilated image of her father, office-bearers...and authority
crashes.
‘A
nude sovereign is the height of ugliness’...
So she sets forth to seduce power and
decimate the powerful:
They drank champagne and made love. But it was Chaidana-champagne, and a
few weeks later the Minister of the Interior in charge of security became fully
paralysed and died three years later after his last act of love with champagne.
Indeed, by the time this comes to pass she
has already done to death by champagne most of the influential membership of
the dictatorship. 36 of the 50 ministers and secretaries of the republic have
been the cold recipients of a state funeral. This much by the age of 22.
...’the bullet exited through his neck,
taking the tender life of the young colonel with it for centuries and centuries
in a haze of providential champagne’
By the time she marries the Providential
Guide and he provides her with a new identity, it is her 93rd.
& she is ‘sick of carting around the
meat of others’.
Hate is a formaldehyde. I’ll explain when
i’m dead. But back to the programme:
In/corporeal Martial is corporal. He slaps
his daughter every time she transgresses, especially the sex-matter way. Freud
diddles himself gravewards.
*
‘i
don’t want to die this death’...martial words said in the midst of A Dying of
sorts...become guiding slogan, liberatory mantra emblazoned on walls,
subversively snuck (and painted) onto soldiers’ uniforms by spraypainters
/graf-writers on guerrilla-warpath....one claims to have bombed a slogan on the Providential Guide’s arse.
The grotesquery extreme. Political. Hyperbolic. Death is Loud. Echo-chambered,
reverb-saturated and delayed ‘to infinity and beyond’ squeaks a voice out of Toy-Story....of the undying. Percussive, it haemorrhages throughout.
Aesthetic sounds sterile, this is grimiest dub-writing before the fact.
All existence is dinner-fare. All chew with
their mouths (they fart north) open in this Trough-town.
‘no...not this death...not like this’ this meat-hook clangs a refrain...on
repeat..in different keys..
‘so what death do you want to die?’, amid
the murder-madness, the man who refuses to die is asked to be ‘reasonable’ and
choose his own mode of expiration.
*
‘I ’ ve had enough of digital orgasms.’
Chaidana proclaims, when the dictator, ’tropically’ swollen dick in hand, still
failed to deliver, thwarted by Martial’s ghost.
Too much finger-fucking? one might ask of
the author.
‘I’m fed up with rubbing myself.’ ‘I am
hurting my cock’ ,the Providential Guide
had cried, earlier, in sexual
frustration, yearning for coitus with her.
Thus it is that the Providential Guide
threatens to shoot himself in the groin and his bride responds:
‘That would be too lovely. Machine-guns are
not for garbage.’
Delirious, ecstatic....the writing comes
with its bleeding veins/senses on the outside. It skins out, much like magma-bubble. Volcanic. Eruptive.
Steaming faecal. Disruptive as all scatology.... And there’s much
seepage. Of putrescence. Sewer-rage. And sewerage. Chaos. Vile. Foul. Rot comes
off the pages. (flush the toilet and it
all disappears? No, it bubbles up and over the bowl-rim, rises to dinner-table
level and joins in the feast, bad-mannered....no finger-exercises but cerebral
insurgence) There’s a stench...deep. throttling. Heated Smells. The malodorous:
‘she listened to the odor of her father in
her guts: it was a smell that could not be named- fetid, strong. It stood
between her and her decision’.
Violence. Brutal. Ribs break. Forks strike
bone. Pierce throats. And utterances bubble out of wounds.
&
(the
colour black is prohibited...off everything but hair and skin...because it is
Martial’s colour. People are
exterminated in large numbers because ‘stockpiles of Martial black were found’.
Warning...the book is about ‘writing
absent-mindedly’..A critic compares it to automatic-writing. NO. The word here
is Religious in the way Burroughs is. No mugwumps though, just ‘rag-people’ in
tropical tims/climes, hot and slobbered on. While they haemorrhage. The
American Psycho arrived with his sterile
etiquette and anaemic language after the feast, Labou-Tansi been and gone,
sucking at the marrow of it all.
Effluence. This is the writing of refuse.
Sewer-bound.
It
carries haemo-, copro- and necrophiliac, among other ill tendencies.
with sneering glee. Equal to the filth
at the heart of the murderous crassness it tosses up, maggots all wiggly.
Revolt.
‘that rotten blood, let me do him in like
this’
‘other people’s meat is painful’
*
Language swirls, topples over. Discordant
notes jump up and get beat down. Sound-fx...very sound.
Words here are strung up in a series of
hailstone-poems.& and they pummel. The effect can deaden. By design. The
context itself being one built on overkill.
Turbulence permeates,...consumptive elite?
Bloated class. Engorged. Hunger features a lot here. Same as hatred. And that
of self:
’i admire your carnal courage. I also
admire your shapely body’
Disgust.
Nausea.
Labou-Tansi writes bloodwet.
Form fits context. All is Butchery. Fetid, it has been
described, and it is gangrenous. As the
pages turn so too viscera, brains spill in all direction, like the words. Cutlery rattles around human flesh.
Death by champagne...think drowning in
golden showers. Satire is too flimsy a jacket to drape over this.
*
...-censorship is an amulet power wears
with pride : ‘ nobody thinks anything about the Providential Guide. That is the
law. That is law number one’.
Digs down south, years on...; ‘the
providential guide danced with his bride all night long, to the point that
wicked tongues spoke of nationalisation’ It is beyond the blown (pardon the
pun) up (be it fellated or cordite to carnal hell) pornography of violence
perversely beloved of progressive thesis...this is not writing but the
discharge of a PRE-,post AND INDETERMINATE-COLONIAL SLIME. Hardcore is this. In
the madness of Jarry whipped and pumped the hot-bloodspash Africaway. Call up
Apollinaire in his pornographic (diss)glory maybe. Swift, too. munching on
babies and Artaud will answer,
electro-shock-proofed to picking his teeth with the tombstone-chips of
psychotherapy.
Doesn’t stretch language but collapses it.
Implodes as it crashes out.
It is all much like flesh. Decayed.
Maggoty. Bulimic. Nothing pale, though.
Bursts out, floods...flows, ebbs....going
into stagnation...then...for no apparent reason, twists, turns. twirls around,
pirouettes and flops down then charges forth, on its burst belly, tongue
hanging out, fangs too, though.....from the first line. But the logic of it all
is carried in its own brutalised body. Its own damnation. And benediction.
The extent of pain, does it cover the map
of human reality if all writing can attempt
is a limp approximation..? Nothing is linear here. Or pretty. Non-death is
eternal. And putrid.
*
Sony Labou-Tansi : has said,
elsewhere: ‘the revolution has been
postponed’...death. too. here. stabbed, chopped up, machine-gunned...no matter,
expiration promises...never arrives.
Then again, somewhere else : ‘to die is to dream a different dream’
A candomble sister once said to me : ‘at
carnival we celebrate meat’.
Artaud’s blood-spurt gone stratospheric.
Hallucinatory.
Body-parts. Limbs. Severed heads. Butchery.
Corrupt. Degenerate ‘the living. the dead...the whole ones. The halves. The
chunks.
...Shreds of flesh bled dry....sludge of
meat on the run’
‘she heard her insides break like a dog in
a bone’s jaws...’
Humans are
meat, eaten...’independence is not beefy, beefy.’
Bits. Pieces. Forks dip in to live-flesh.
The dialogue is carnivorous. The sacresy of speech.
It flies and plummets. It both floats and
digs in, deep. Tugs at the senses. Deadens, even. Dull. Sharp. Hollow and deep.
Surface stuff, at times. The poetry of
it. Both crystalline and muddy.
Sexual fires rage. Rape hovers, the threat
imminent, them, storms down. And in.
Meat spreads across this book : Here, a
sampling of body’s descriptions, bits
and pierced on a power-plate:
‘
It was a perfectly heavenly body, with the look and symmetrical shape of a
carnivore, and crazy curves that seemed to extend into space, cooking raw,
carnal electricity’
The thesis is written on The
Body rendered sacrosanct and profane, in turn:
The body is absurd.
The body is an ugly battle, an ugly brawl.
The body is a traitor. It sells you to the outside world.
You can’t imagine, you have no idea how much this body and a half
vibrates.
My body is a wicked sum...
& thus the body is evoked.
Splayed...hallowed and defiled. Prayed to and cursed.
The father is an omnipresent influence.
Still, ‘Cruelty is communal’. She is raped by ‘thirteen cascades of militiamen-
the equivalent of three hundred sixty-three men. Her lower half was dead.’ She is left for dead but ‘her champagne
receptions had given her an infernal capacity to endure.’
‘one wondered how a life could persist at
the bottom of this human wreck that even a human shape had fled’
‘...tanks had no trouble getting through
the rammed human earth,...there was nothing left to pick up because the tanks
had come through in the wee hours of the morning, transforming the humans into
inhuman mud.’ there is much pulp, here. human and other-text-wise.
Carnage. Of the flesh’s embrace. And a
shrinking away from it.
‘that’s his blood. That’s his
meat – take it away from me in his wicked way.
Seeking solitude.
‘you are alone...you are alone’
Pain rides lettered waves. A swamp of
words.
‘All Truth Kills’. In any manner of ways.
At a time when ‘ people had lost the habit
of believing. They listened to the radio for the noise it made’ an official
poet, as per official mandate, sings the Providential Guide’s praises :
Oh bright guide
Brightened
Brightening
The gloomy masses...
All kinds of death, including the spiritual.
(off the book-page and into the life one :
may Mo Yan, 2012 punkarse ignoble Nobel laureate advocate for a literary ‘airport security control’, rot in piss)
*
‘You were supposed to be dead
already, martial. You should have already found a death that suits you’, The
Providential Guide cries in despair at Martial’s bleeding upper-body’s
frustration of his eagerly and proudly (‘he had a tropical hard-on’) awaited
conjugation with Martial’s daughter, the PG’s new bride.
The writing is about...writing.
JUDGEMENT TIME calls for the apocalyptic
visionary, obviously.
‘we
will come to a bad end if there is no judgement’
‘there is nobody to judge but jerks like
you’
Thus Bebelplatz lives in these pages. Books
are burnt by autocrats who can’t read.
Heads are contraband...traded for passage
out of hell.
This writing is narcotic.
(A nation has no parents for the simple
reason that it must be born everyday....the nation cannot arise from the
illusions of two or three individuals...)
Crammed. And cramped...-foreign debt and
intervention (the purchase of arms for sums more than 900 times the country’s
annual budget) Ridiculous commerce (the
manufacture of flies with 3000 bite capacity). The politics of it stings. And
stinks. Both outrageous proclamations and deep philosophical utterances. Outlandish names of individuals,
institutions, places. The grotesque abject. Hilarity alongside stomach-churn
perversity. Satire? The acid laughter of belly-burn, it scorches the umbilicus.
It is Richard Pryored all the way to a joke-desert.
The mopping up of human remains.
Cannibalism. The writing of autophagy.
Exsanguination. Human tides,
moving.& like them...the writing is cyclical. Dubwise.
Mutilation.
Bleeding. Disembowelment.
Excretion.
Visceral. Excoriating. Acid. Guts on the
page. Brainsplash.
Labou-Tansi , verbal/formal innovator, is
the ultimate ‘warrior-poet-Womanist’ .
And writes LOUD bloodscreams.. Nothing
mute, unlike the tender-meat of literary fashion.
The writing of Obliteration. Trying to get
to the End of Words...reaches for the destruction of all worlds.
‘life, you have to take someone’s word for
it’.
‘i am a cadaver, a burial’.
‘the law prohibits knowing why’.
‘let’s go back to the centre so i can see
things from very close-up’...the better to destroy them.
’the centre had become the Museum of Pain’.
& the book closes with an invitation to
eat. Cavier.
And
memory. Of a Body.
