Review: Oyster Mountain by Jalal El-Kadali

 

El-Kadali, Jalal. Oyster Mountain. Nine-Banded Books: Charlston, WV, 2020

El-Kadali’s debut poetry collection makes a strong impression. To begin with, the cover, by talented photographer and writer New Juche, juxtaposes a marble bust with the jaws of a dying whale in an indication of the dominant surrealist mode that will be found between the book’s covers. The back cover, in lieu of any synopsis or endorsements, features a prose poem that situates the text in the current era of lockdown-mad safetyism: ‘Follow the science into the panic room whose walls are the fear of death…' There is little in the main body of the text, the the poems themselves, that speaks directly to this theme, however, or to current events in general. One of a couple of exceptions to this rule, the third in a sequence under the group title 'There Are No Statues in the Unconscious', is an absurdist narrative that evokes the Black Lives Matter phenomenon of the same year:

The statue in the strobe lighting afforded 

By flares moved slowly frame by frame

Kneeling down before the phalanx

Of riot police to offer them a dove

Like a Benin bronze but made of human clay

But did not bring one for each of them

And so in punishment for this faux pas

Despite having gone viral

She was beaten to death

Unusually, the author has seen fit to write a long-ish introduction to his own collection. This rambling text is a polemic against everything from formal verse (why?) to neo-Darwinism and, in its peremptory, madcap style, reads as if it were written by a tag-team consisting of Andre Breton and Ezra Pound. It is doubtful whether any reader's appreciation of Oyster Mountain will be enhanced by first reading these remarks, unless they happen to share Kadali's idiosyncratic enthusiasms and bugbears. 

Perhaps the most impressive poem in the collection is the first: The Lifeboat Except—a kind of phantasmagoric family history in which the speaker describes

[…] all at once shaken out

Of the alayavijnana

My father, my grandfather and I

Joining hands as brothers

 

(The alayavijnana is a kind of universal consciousness posited in the variously-named vijnanavadin, or idealist schools of Buddhism.) Thence the speaker proceeds on his strange journey past several surrealist tableaus that are rather difficult to interpret:

Pillars of sand, anthills in fact

[…] twenty feet high, topped with the shell

Of a univalve curled up for the night

 

and

 

A sign in the form of a black bird

Emerging from a hollow leaf like a spider, its beak

Auto-vampirically buried in its own breast

One wing indicating the unfolding landscape

With Caesarian grandeur, as if to say, ‘Come on and see

What else there is to see around here

 

The juxtaposition of ‘Caesarian grandeur’ with the last line and a half produces the sort of bathetic falling off that, among poets of this surrealist-cum-postmodernist stripe, one associates with John Ashbery.

Here, still in the initial poem, we see for the first and by no means last time that Kadali is not embarrassed to express the most antisocial sentiments. This, it occurs to me, is unusual in contemporary verse, where the distinction between the poet and the speaker is typically non-existent or insignificant, and the censorious primness of literary cliques has passed all bounds. Kadali may well be writing about his own dreams, fantasies and neurotic symptoms (how could he not?), but he does not go out of his way to endear his himself, or his speaker, to the reader by the usual means of presenting himself as a victim:  

 

Bury me with a full-scale mode of the world

Carved in protoplasm

And vivified by something

Like galvanism, only state-of-the-art

No two articles the same

But none admitting the least imperfection

[…]

Then put it all to the sword to serve me in the next life

 

Despite voicing such grotesque extremes of pharaonic egotism, Kadali, as an authentic surrealist, is actually more interested in the id than the ego--except insofar as the latter tries and fails to rationalise the sexual and aggressive drives within the former. The latter dynamic is with great originality exploited in 'Poison Grass', a short narrative positing telepathic thought-transference between the speaker and some kind of psychotic, mass-impaling, Hitler-quoting doppelganger:

A man-shaped figure woke me not ungently

And let me in the morning twilight to that park

Where grass had grown into bamboo

To impale the picnickers transversally

So that they were now atoning for their crimes

Though by more humane means, my guide opined

Than the vertical alternative

It is one of the stranger poems I have ever read. The only point of reference I can come up with would be the Michaux or Kafka. 

Unlike most contemporary poets, one learns very little about Kadali's social identity from his work. Is he really Arab or Persian, or is his nom de plume a whimsical but deliberate red herring, a slap in the face to those who mistake ascriptive identities for the true self, if such a thing exists, and then make accusations of ‘cultural appropriation’ against those who would dare to find multitudes within? Not that there is any orientalism in Oyster Mountain, that I can discern. 

Another striking poem in Oyster Mountain is Barbarity Blues, which seems to have been written to prove Adorno right that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Rather than this famous aphorism, though, the epigraph is the lesser-known statement of Adorno’s that ‘nothing is more ruinous: the scentless bouquet, the institutionalised remembrance kills what lingers by the very act of preserving it’—words the poem goes on to explicate with its bizarre and seemingly (but, I trust, not ultimately) irreverent depictions of not only the Holocaust but of many other outbreaks of barbarism:

 

And two-week old paschal calves dumped into

A flaming hole that never filled up

The third, the little one that was ‘just right’

While others were taken for experiments

And subsequently dumped in fields

[…]

Yet soon this place was utterly demolished

Except for a herm at each of its four corners

Beneath a cerulean sky

 

The humour comes from twisting an image into a conceit; forcing the ‘facts’ narrated to fit the literary typology (thus, for example, the holocaust of a cattle sacrifice is paired into a single image with the sacrifice of the paschal lamb). But could humour ever be appropriate to the subject matter, and what are we to make of this strange approach? Perhaps it is a gesture towards the unrepresentability of such matter. To attempt to represent the Holocaust reverently, appropriately or tastefully is to betray the truth by creating the illusion that we who have not lived them (and even perhaps those of us who have) can communicate their meaning. This, Kadali seems to suggest, is a greater irreverence. 

Oyster Mountain—what is it? A prehistoric shell midden? The mons veneris? A plate of Rocky Mountain oysters? Sexual subject matter and imagery abounds in this collection, often of the most surreal kind.

They walk on, and train their feet to stand

For hands, neotenous dildo hilt for head

Carved and painted with the same feet

The make the source of a woman’s weakness

The sign of her ascendency

                                           ('Perfect Cleavage')

The book’s themes, sexual, megalomaniacal and historical come together in the penultimate poem, one of three truly ambitious pieces in the collection. As best I can the tell, the synopsis of this baffling narrative is as follows:

A supernatural being modelled on Lautreamont’s Maldoror is transported to Australia as a convict for stealing a handkerchief ‘as a pretext’. Once there he seduces or rapes a girl, one ‘Emilia or Amelia / with her lace fringed parasol’ in order to impregnate her with his ‘sacred seed’. This deed reveals him to be a time traveller gone back in time in order ‘that democracy / fulfil its promise’ which he defines as ‘a sacred monarchy premised / on absolute equality’ to be enforced by his ‘followers’ known by their uniform ‘the colour of Xmas beetles’’. There then unfolds an alternative history in which the French-speaking Australians are conquered by the Japanese in World War Two, a timeline that emerges in the context of a story about a young couple on honeymoon at a former penal colony turned into a cross between the historical site at Port Arthur and some sort of theme park out of Kafka:

Here they show visitors the amputation saw

The Judas cradle crafted from huon pine

[…]

Here where Fenians with pikes were pitted against

Poachers and robbers with small arms

[…]

Then came revolutionaries, traitors to la patrie;

Here among the sandstone cottages

With rose gardens, interiors with art nouveau wallpaper

The commandant’s now a restaurant (no Lotteria

This one, but a classy joint serving whale sashimi

                                                                                                    (Sperm Donor) 

The hapless young husband ends up locked in the same solitary confinement cell from which the spirit of the narrator has emerged after untold centuries to take over the latter's life, who will perhaps in time and through suffering himself mature into a supernatural being of similar potency. 

Kadali has a way with what, in the preface, he terms 'pseudo narrative', and Sperm Donor is perhaps the most impressive example of this in the collection. The story begins in the middle--as we are told all good stories should--but then, in true avant garde style, provides no closure, no clear beginning or end.

There is much to praise in the poet's imaginative range of the poet's often thrilling imagery, full of hints at undeveloped semantic possibilities--but, as with all literature of this type, the reading experience is mixed with frustration: What exactly is he trying to say? Why this image here and not another, or not there? Does the fact that Kadali has dreamt these weird up these weird vignettes so vividly make them meaningful to others? We may feel that we 'get' something out of one poem and not another. Well, 'no accounting for taste'--but is this always true? A premise of this blog is that at least to an extent, taste can be accounted for. Once we know the end in mind we can judge the means. Does it reach the goal or not?  With a little more aesthetic discipline, many of the poems in this volume might have been great, and the best ones, insofar as I am able to judge, are those that achieve a unity of purpose and effect, a concentration uncompromised by surrealist affectation.