Expressionism in Becher’s Abschied (Farewell)

 

Endnotes are in brackets.  For the convenience of those who do not read German, I provide references in endnotes to both the München:Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987 and the Seven Seas translation of 1959.  

                                1924 portrait of Becher by Lajos Tihanyi

    My English copy, an unlikely thrift store purchase, is a 1970 edition of Johannes R. Becher’s Abschied, under the title Farewell, translated by Joan Becker under the Seven Seas imprint based in the Eastern sector of Berlin.  Founded by American Communist Gertrude Gelbin, the wife of German expatriate anti-fascist writer Stefan Heym (born Helmut Flieg) in 1958, who had left the United States in 1952 in protest of the Korean War and McCarthyism.  This company published English books by leftist authors like W. E. B. DuBois, John Reed, Christopher Caudwell, Herbert Aptheker, Philip S. Foner, and Walter Lowenfels, and classics by Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Cooper, and Mark Twain as well as contemporary German works by Heym, Bruno Apitz, Johannes Bobrowski, and Louis Fürnberg.

*          *          *          *

     The distaste which one must feel for the dictatorial East German and Soviet regimes need not influence the evaluation of artists from these countries, even those who accommodated to tyranny.  Though most critics can see past Stalin to appreciate the virtues of Eisenstein’s movies and Shostakovich’s music, much of the literary output labeled “Socialist Realist” is today ignored.  This prejudice has resulted in the neglect of Americans worth reading (Dahlberg, Ridge, Conroy, Gold), and, even more, of Germans, Russians, and other Eastern Europeans who wrote during the Soviet era without expressing explicit dissidence.  The case of artists who actively embraced totalitarian control over the arts such as the German writer Johannes R. Becher is more troubling yet. 

     Becher is admittedly a difficult man to justify.  After a youth as an avant-gardist, rebelling against the social and aesthetic order, he became a harsh guardian of the party line.  Having written a book of lyrics titled Always in Revolt (Ewig in Aufruhr) in 1920, by 1926 he had submitted to discipline.  A critic observes, “from an intellectual anarchist he turned into a disciplined communist.” [1]  With the introduction of Zhdanov’s reductive “Socialist Realism” in 1934 his work looked ever more suspect and, a refugee in the Soviet Union, he was accused of Trotskyite tendencies and, in his own self-interest, informed on other writers.  In the last phase of his life as Cultural Minister of East Germany, the Warsaw Pact nation with perhaps the most elaborate system of surveillance and informers, he persecuted dissidents very much like himself when young.  He was perennially in shaky mental health and several times attempted suicide. In the end he renounced his lifelong Marxist allegiance in a book Das poetische Prinzip (The Poetic Principle) published only posthumously.  Yet, whatever one might think of Becher’s politics or ethics, his work remains.

     Becker’s Abschied (Farewell) is a typical semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman describing the childhood and youth of a bourgeois boy in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of World War I.  For the most part the writing is solidly within the nineteenth century Realist or Naturalist model, here modified in two ways: the author’s ideological commitment and vestiges of his Expressionist practice.  The writer’s party membership, not to mention his residence in exile in the Stalinist Soviet Union, leads to the emphasis on socialism in the book’s themes.  The book’s main character seems meant to be an Everyman, typical of his fellow-countrymen.  The radical novelist Sack says as much.

 

 “You know, what you’ve told me about yourself is a real story, an adventure story.  Write it down!  You’ll write it sometime, perhaps after many, many years.  You’re not the only one who’s taking farewell of himself, there are plenty like you, and you’ll all be needed. You could call it ‘Farewell’.  A German tragedy . . . The book will be about yourself, but it won’t be a conventional biography.”  [2]

 

     Yet the petty bourgeois Gastl makes an unlikely proletarian hero.  Far from an idealized worker, he resembles the neurotic author who had been a confused and self-doubting schoolboy with little strength of character.   The reader might wonder why the lost lad is so peculiarly susceptible to the ideas suggested by Hartinger and the Little Jew, why he is fascinated with the “Internationale,” piping up with it inappropriately, why he ultimately decides to avoid service in World War I.  He seems more in Oedipal rebellion against his father than a prospect for a revolutionary cadre.   

     This weakness becomes metafictional with the story of Fanny.  Becher himself when just short of nineteen years old had made a suicide pact with a young prostitute named Fanny Fuss.  He killed her and wounded himself severely, but his father then managed to protect him from prosecution by having him declared insane.  This incident not surprisingly obsessed him for years, but in Abschied his treatment is evasive.  Though many fictional details correspond to the historical ones, even to Fanny’s shop’s location, in the novel Fanny’s character dies at the hands of malicious others after making love with Gastl, thus erasing the issue or reducing it to a simple matter of a sordid demi-monde.  Becher’s own responsibility is absent in this fictional version, though the author’s continuing return to the incident suggests that his treatment is unsatisfactory.  He seems to share some of Hans Peter Gastl’s drifting fecklessness.

     The coterie in the radical Café Stephanie is clearly like him middle class, artists and intellectuals, many of them bohemian in habits, scarcely a promising foundation on which to build a worker’s state, though accurately reflecting Becher’s youthful associations.  Expressionism survives in Abschied only vestigially, in certain extravagantly bizarre characters such as the insane Uncle Carl and the cocaine-addicted psychoanalyst, in periodic dream fantasies and images, and in a constant existential dread lurking in the background. 

     Such moments, though intermittent, carry the narrative’s thematic burden.  In one such passage, a prolonged, visionary dream, tumbling coins gives way to a Last Judgement as familial, academic, national, and apocalyptic authority figures mingle and Hans feels his secret sins are all revealed, though receiving “bad marks” is the only specific offense mentioned.  The boy is left pleading for that change which is the book’s primary motive [3].  But what change does he have in mind?  The possibility of a socialist future is repeatedly invoked, but the desire for change seems more often to be a simple plea for psychological relief.   

     History seems more absurd than dialectically determined when the deranged Uncle Carl fondles a book titled Foundations of the Twentieth Century only to look up in horror.  Feeling he is in the middle of vast contending forces, he calls out “No pardon will be given!” [4]  Here is a despair beyond any socio-economic conditions.

     In a later dream, as he “groped his way into the new life” [5] young Gastl imagines a medieval innkeeper, tortured by the ruling class, an image of the soul battered and defeated by the stresses of the world.  Once again, the figures of the Trinity are present, as is the narrator’s father, the judge, while the Headmaster and even the mad Uncle Carl appear as well in another figuration of the narrator’s stresses, leading him to exclaim “Things must change!” [6] 

     In all these passages Becher is clearly expressing not social outrage but rather existential dread, most familiar prior to Sartre and Camus from Munch’s 1893 The Scream.  The reader finds extreme psychological alienation and scarcely a word about economic injustice.  Witnessing his grandmother’s death he loses any faith in eternity and imagines her singing a sort of blues for him: “Little Hans went off alone to the big, wide world, far from home” [7].  Her decease culminates in  yet another dream in which the dreamer is denounced as a coward, a madman, aboard a runaway train in danger of crashing off a bridge as phantom accusers denounce Gastl for all “the scandalous things you’ve done.” [8]

     As Camus said that the only philosophical question was suicide, for Gastl the specter of the Grosshesseloh recurs as a constant temptation to despair and follow other suicides. [9]  This is the real problem of the novel, not politics.  Even the vision of revolution that appears is entirely phantasmagoric; in the tide of red flags, the message is indecipherable hieroglyphics [10].

     Given Becher’s biography, this psychological theme is unsurprising.  Apart from his suicide pact as a youth when he succeeded in killing his lover but not himself, followed by years of addiction to morphine, Becher continued to struggle with severe depression and attempted suicide several times.  His persecution by both Weimar and Stalinist regimes, his informing on others, and the ultimate ambivalence that led to his apostasy from Marxism, all must have exacerbated his instability and magnified his mental distress.  This inner conflict is the true center of Abschied.

     The fracture in the novel generated by its largely realistic picture of early twentieth century bourgeois Germany and the profoundly alienated sensibility of the protagonist forms in fact the central theme of the book.  Even a utopian social vision cannot soothe the soul of this young misfit.  Bohemian in tendency, he is far more engaging than a heroic worker hero like Pavel Korchagin in Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered.  The contradictions of Becher’s life may have distressed him deeply, but they allowed him to write in Abschied a more nuanced narrative, one as revealing about psychology as about history, arising more from neurotic avoidance and anxious self-doubt than from revolutionary zeal.  The reader need admire neither Becher nor his protagonist Gastl to realize that their characteristics are in part our own. 

 

 

1.  Theodore Huebener in The Literature of East Germany After 1926 (p. 39).  

2.  In German Abschied p. 415, München : Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987; in English translation the Seven Seas edition titled Farewell p.364.  The original text of this passage:  “Was Sie da erzählt haben von dem Anderen, ist ein Roman.  Ein Abenteuerrioman.  Schreiben Sie ihn!  Sir werden ihn schreiben, vielleicht erst nach vielen, vielen Jahren.  Nicht nur Sie nehmen Abschied darin von sich selbst, ihresgleichen sind nicht wenige, und alle werden gebraucht werden, auch solche wie Sie .  . . müsste er heissen – ‘Abschied.’  Eine deutscge Tragödie . . . Sie werden über sich sellbst schreiben, aber dieses “Ich” herkömmlich biographisches sein.”

3.  Abschied 36, Farewell 54.

4.  Abschied p. 86, Farewell p. 80. “Pardon wird nicht gegeben.”

5.  Abschied German 180,  Farewell 162. “So tastete ich mich in das neue Leben hinein.”

6.  Abschied 185, Farewell 164.  “Es wird anders werden!”

7.  Abschied 224, Farewell 200.  “Hänschen klein/ geht allein/ in die weite Welt hinein . . .”

8.  Abschied 236, Farewell 211.  “Wir Wissen um deine Schandtaten.”

9.  Abschied 257, Farewell 229. 

10.  Abschied 353, Farewell 312. 

Drunk in the Morning with Arthur Rimbaud

 

     Rimbaud’s “Matinée d’ivresse” from Les Illuminations scarcely needs a new English translation.  Superfluous though it may be, the reader will find one here, along with an interpretive paraphrase and a few further comments.  Rimbaud elicits from some of his readers an unusual intimacy. 

 

translation

     Oh my good!   My lovely!  Terrible fanfare in which I do not falter!  Faery torture!  Bravo for the work never heard and for the wonders of the body, for the very first time!  This all began amid the laughter of infants just as it will end.  The poison will remain running in our veins when the fanfare pivots and we find ourselves in the old, old dissonance.  Oh now!  We whom these agonies suit so very well, we must collect on the superhuman promise made to our created bodies and souls – such a promise, what madness!  Elegance, science, violence!  We were promised the tree of good and evil would be buried in shade, the tyranny of propriety sent away that we might claim  our exceedingly pure love.  Beginning with a certain distaste, == unable at once to seize eternity --  it ends with a cascade of perfumes.

     The laughter of Infants, the discretion of slaves, the austerity of virgins, a dread of people and objects here, sacralized by the memory of last night. See -- what began in total philistinism ends among angels of fire and ice.

     Little drunk vigil – holy!  Were it only for the mask you have granted us.  O method, we affirm you!  We have not forgotten that yesterday you glorified our every age.  Our faith is in poison.  We know that every day we must offer our undivided life. 

     Now is the time of the assassins.

 

original text 

     O mon Bien ! O mon Beau ! Fanfare atroce où je ne trébuche point ! Chevalet féerique ! Hourra pour l'oeuvre inouïe et pour le corps merveilleux, pour la première fois ! Cela commença sous les rires des enfants, cela finira par eux. Ce poison va rester dans toutes nos veines même quand, la fanfare tournant, nous serons rendus à l'ancienne inharmonie. O maintenant, nous si digne de ces tortures ! rassemblons fervemment cette promesse surhumaine faite à notre corps et à notre âme créés: cette promesse, cette démence ! L'élégance, la science, la violence ! On nous a promis d'enterrer dans l'ombre l'arbre du bien et du mal, de déporter les honnêtetés tyranniques, afin que nous amenions notre très pur amour. Cela commença par quelques dégoûts et cela finit, - ne pouvant nous saisir sur-le-champ de cette éternité, - cela finit par une débandade de parfums.

     Rire des enfants, discrétion des esclaves, austérité des vierges, horreur des figures et des objets d'ici, sacrés soyez-vous par le souvenir de cette veille. Cela commençait par toute la rustrerie, voici que cela finit par des anges de flamme et de glace.

     Petite veille d'ivresse, sainte ! quand ce ne serait que pour le masque dont tu as gratifié. Nous t'affirmons, méthode ! Nous n'oublions pas que tu as glorifié hier chacun de nos âges. Nous avons foi au poison. Nous savons donner notre vie tout entière tous les jours.

     Voici le temps des Assassins.

 

paraphrase and comment

     Here is Rimbaud’s recommendation for the systematic derangement of the senses which has led many to the brink of self-destruction (or beyond) and which the author himself abandoned when he devised an even riskier way to live his life.  In this Romantic view, the artist must suffer and sacrifice self in order to create. 

     The prose poem opens with mystic cries for the absolute, a verbal fanfare, as though Platonic forms might be summoned by command.  The trumpet calls announcing visionary breakthroughs resemble a torture device, the psychic strain is so great, yet at the same time the sufferer feels enchanted.  The brand-new art (l’œuvre inouïe) arises from the physical body with a joy resembling that of the discovery of sex.  The desire for the absolute signaled in the initial addresses to goodness and beauty corresponds in purity and innocence to the laughter of children, present at life’s beginning and end, yet elusive in between.  For, during life, one is afflicted with a poison, the drug of conventionality and idées reçues, which art may temporarily banish, but which will “remain in our veins.”  Our divided character, semi-divine and semi-damned, renders people torn in agony.   Thus elegance is associated with violence and both with visionary truth.  Love can overcome distaste only with the abandonment of bourgeois morality, but the afflatus will inevitably dissipate.  Enlightenment is bound up with laughter but with dread as well and the ecstatic moment will inevitably become a mere memory.   Yet drunkenness is holy since it provides a route to the ultimate, and, when that oceanic feeling recedes, it leaves only a pose, a mask, the spoor of liberation, when liberation itself has fled.  Rimbaud has faith, but it is a frightening faith in poison.  One recalls the fact of which Derrida made so much, that φάρμακον means both medicine and toxin.  It means as well scapegoat which suggests a new set of contraries, which may seem inconsistent or antagonistic, but which in fact require each other.   

     Rimbaud walks the ridgepole, on the one hand in exaltation and insight and on the other amid pain and blindness, both poles amped up to the highest pitch.  His experience is profoundly ambivalent, dialectical in fact, a weird and arduous harmony of pain and pleasure, fear and triumph, darkness and light, an amalgam which seems at times to mirror life.  One might view Rimbaud’s attitude as simply facing the facts, looking head on at the agonizing process of living, while it may seem to another a self-indulgent diversion of a neuraesthenic.  Surely it is both.

Aggression and Poetry

 

     The data in this essay to me possess independent poetic value and the kind of fascination one associates with the old cabinets of curiosities, but my principal point remains the fact that critics tend to discount the combative and the selfish, doubtless due to considering such traits socially undesirable or morally unattractive.  It may be due to Black Americans’ outsider status that popular genres in African-American subculture express this neglected aspect of poetry so energetically, as they likewise do with sexual jouissance.  Indeed, the ancient Greek poets excelled in similar ways, and thus theirs is  the other period on which I here linger.  Greek texts of translated passages are included in endnotes the  numbers of which appear in brackets.

 

     Poetry is commonly thought of as appreciative.  Love poetry praises the beloved, nature poetry finds the landscape sublime, religious poetry adores the holy.  Yet just as we are governed by competitiveness as well as eros, and love itself has elements of domination as well as self-sacrifice, poetry, too, has an aggressive side.  Literary history from the start includes boasts asserting the speaker’s power, insults demeaning the opponent, and arguments between two speakers. 

     Poetry knew, from the earliest written records, the exultation of full-throated insult.   In a  Sumerian poem from the third millennium B. C. E. the speaker denounces his opponent, tossing out ingenious insults.

 

He is a good seed of a dog, the offspring of a wolf! He is the stench of a mongoose, an unruly (?) hyena cub, a fox with a covering like a crab's, a monkey not pleasing to its homeland, its judgment confused. [1] 

In another poem of that era the epithets include “fool, “disgraced man,” “madman,” “braggart,” “a monkey,” “a rogue,” and “blocked at the anus” [2].  The genre continued with Akkadian examples some of which were epideictic displays of disputes between such imagined debaters as an ox and a horse or a tamarisk and a palm. 

     At the beginning of the Iliad, Achilles and Agamemnon are arguing and Achilles provides an example of literary vituperation that probably closely resembles what contentious warriors might have said. 

  

Wine-guzzler, eyes like a dog! You have a deer’s heart!  Never do you take up arms with the army to fight nor to set an ambush with the best of the Achaeans.  You avoid this just as you shun death. [3]

      People clearly relish hearing tirades including catalogues of insults.  For the listener the experience is perhaps similar to that of the tragic audience, at once feeling superiority over the one taking all the punishment and relief that one is not oneself being made the goat by fate in a pale reflection of tragic pity and fear.  But the phenomenon also resembles that of schoolchildren who bully an individual, glad not to be the butt and excited at the cruelty of the scene.  Just as people slow down to see a road accident and rude talk radio hosts get the biggest audience, a show of conflict will dependably attract attention.

     Entertainment is not, however, the sole motive for invective.  The ancient Greek iambic associated with insult and obscenity had its origins in rituals worshipping Demeter.  The “Homeric Hymn to Demeter” describes how the goddess was wasting away in mourning until Iambe lifted her spirits by  amusing her with jokes [3].  Apollodorus calls Iambe “an old crone” and notes this incident as the reason for women’s joking during the Thesmophoria [4].  In an Orphic Fragment, it is Baubo rather than Iambe who cheers the goddess and she does so by lifting her skirts to reveal her genitalia [5].

     According to one authority such “ritual obscenity” (αἰσχρολογία) was the norm during the women’s observance of the Thesmophoria.

 

Both many games and jokes are spoken. The women alone entering an amnesty are able to say whatever they want. And in fact they then speak the most shameful things to one another. The priestesses, secretly approaching the women, advise something unspeakable in their ear about illicit love. All the women proclaim shameful and indecorous things to each other, holding up indecent male and female images. [6]

 

      Processions involving transgressive language and satiric insults were not confined to that one women’s festival, however.  One might witness comic processions (κῶμος) [7] featuring such banter at other festivals as well such as the Greater Dionysia.

    Iambic poetry as practiced by Archilochos, Semonides, and Hipponax often employed insulting and obscene language. Here is Hipponax cursing a foe.

 

seize his naked body (he can get his fill of evil

eating slavish bread)

rigid from cold! Let seaweed

rise from scum and bind him!

Let him grind his teeth, lying

spent and muzzle down,

dog-fashion in the surf … !

These things I long to see

because he wronged me, walked upon his oaths,

who was once my friend. [8]

      In pre-Islamic Arabic poetry both boasting about one’s own tribal group (hija') and attacking rivals (qit'ah) are common.  The verbal combat or naqa’id was a fixed form which later evolved into the zajal form in Andalucia surviving yet today in Lebanon.  Perhaps the most celebrated composition in this genre is the seventh century contention of Al-Farazdaq and Jarir.  Likewise, the heroes and gods of Celtic and Germanic deities were said to engage in boasting and insult wars, called senna in Eddic poetry .  In the Poetic Edda’s Lokasenna (The Flyting of Loki or Loki’s Verbal Duel) the trickster god Loki assaults the Aesir, denouncing their sexual improprieties among other failings.  In The Feast of Bricriu (Fled Bricrenn) a war of words among the women of Ulster parallels the men’s physical contention.  Each boasts of her own beauty and nobility and her husband’s valor. In fifteenth and sixteenth century Scotland the flyting (in Scots Gaelic immarbág), known since the twelfth century, but only recorded three hundred years later in “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie” [9], became sufficiently fashionable to be enacted in the courts of James IV and his son James V.  Old Occitanian genres included the gab (“bragging”) and tenso (a poetic debate), while some other forms, especially sirventes, might be similarly combative (10).  

     Such staged wars of words occur across the globe.  Initially the ancestor of today’s haiku, haikai no renga featured exchanges in colloquial, often coarse, language; oral Finnish poets practiced kilpalaulanta or duel singing, while Galician poetic battles were called bertsolaritza, and in Argentina the gaucho payadores compete yet today in contrapuntos, trading insults in verse.  In the Kalevala, the hero Väinämöinen contends in this way against Joukahainen. [11]   Debates by a single author between imaginary contending parties are equally widespread, including the “Cha Jiu Lun,” a debate Between tea and wine from approximately 8^th century China, the medieval English Owl and the Nightingale, and Šālôm (Sālim) al-Šabazī's seventeenth-century debate (in Arabic though written with Hebrew characters) between coffee and qāt. 

     Direct contention between two participants is a feature of a number of modern African-American poetic forms, notably the recreational insult war called the Dozens.  Virtually all American are familiar with this game [12] which very likely had African roots in amusements like the Igbo Ikocha Nkocha.  A typical exchange in this Nigerian genre, performed like the Dozens with the participation of appreciative spectators, is recorded by a researcher.

 

Ibe: "Eze, let us play Ikocha Nkocha."

Eze: "All right, are you ready?"

Ibe: "Yes, I am ready, but you start."

Eze: (to audience) "Churu m ya. " [meaning “scare him away for me.”]

Audience: (to Ibe) "Cha, cha, cha. " [shoo, shoo]

Eze: "Look at him with his ears shaped like the pricked ears of a dog that has just heard the

pounding of food in a mortar."

Audience: (to Ibe) "Are you going to let him get away with that?"

Ibe: (to audience) "Churu m ya."

Audience: (to Eze) "Cha Chza C/a."

Ibe: "Look at him with cheeks like those of a child whose mother bore him a junior sibling too

early."

Audience: (to Eze) "He gave you a worse one."

Eze: (to audience) "Churu m ya."

Audience: (to Ibe) "Cha cha cha."

Eze: "His back looks like that of a person who has spent years in a sick bed."

Audience: (to Ibe) "Nobody has been so disparaged before."

Ibe: (to audience) "Churu m ya

Audience: (to Eze) "Cha cha cha'"

Ibe: "Would everybody here look at him for a moment, Isn't his mouth pointed like that of

a shrew?"

Audience: (to Eze) "He has 'killed' you; if I were you, I would not let him get away with that."

Eze: (to audience) "Churu mnya.

Audience: (to Ibe) "Cha cha cha."

Eze: "His fingers are shaped like those of a maker of poisons."

Audience: (to Ibe) "Poison! I cannot stand this devastation any longer; I am going to leave.” [13]

 Typical taunts in American Dozens include the following.

  

Your mother’s address is Sewer Seven, Pipe Eleven, Ash Can Drive.

Your house is so hot the roaches carry canteens.

Your momma’s so ugly she looks like a baboon sucking on a lemon.

Man, your mammy’s ass is so big she has to wear suspenders for her drawers. [13]

      The dozens were mentioned in “Ballin’ the Jack,” a 1913 song with lyrics by Jim Burris and music by Chris Smith.

 

It makes no diff’rence who you are

Please don’t talk about my Ma and Pa

Talk about my sister, my brother and my cousin

But please don’t slip me in the dozen.

Talk about my past or my future life

Talk about my first or my second wife,

I’m beggin’ ev’ry human on my bended knees

Don’t slip me in the dozen, please.” 

 

Bo Diddley’s “Say, Man” (1959) consists of classic Dozens with Jerome Green with exchanges like the following.

  

Why, you so ugly, the stork

That brought you in the world oughta be arrested

That's alright, my momma didn't have to put a sheet

On my head so sleep could slip up on me.

Other popular artists who have recorded versions of the Dozens include Count Basie, Speckle Red, and Quincy Jones.

     Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” (written by Elise LeGrow) is another highly aggressive song with the following intimidating lines.

 

 

I walk 47 miles of barbed wire

Use a cobra snake for a necktie

I got a brand new house on the roadside

Made of rattlesnake hide

I got a brand new chimney made on top

Out of a human skull, oh

      With its mingling of violence and supernatural threats, this resembles several of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ hits such as “I Put a Spell on You.”  The sinister tone was further popularized by the Rolling Stones who also combined eros with boasting and vague invocation of Satanic forces.

     The rich vernacular soil from which such songs emerged includes the toasts, which regularly are boastful and even menacing, especially those which evoke “the life,” that is to say, prostitution and pimping.   

  

The name of the game is to beat the lame,

Take a woman, make her live in shame.

 

It makes no difference how much she scream or holler,

‘Cause dope is my heaven and my God the almighty dollar.

        *          *          *          *          *

I, the Hustler, can make Astaire dance and Sinatra croon,

And I would make the Supreme Court eat shit from a spoon.

 

Do you know what it means to wear two-hundred-dollar suits and forty-dollar hats,

To drive through the street in  Fleetwood Cadillacs?

        *          *          *          *          *

Do you know what it means?  No, you never could know what it means, and you never will,

‘Cause you’re one of the chumps who pay my bill. [15]

     A similar arrogant and contentious ethos underlies the songs of the New Orleans Mardi Gras krewes whose parades remain competitive, though the brawling of the past is now rare.  Thus the Wild Tchoupitoulas promise they will “Meet de Boys on the Battlefront” where they intend to “stomp some rump!”

 

 

I'm an Injun ruler from the thirteenth ward

A big Chief Kahuna and I won't be bought

I walked through fire and I swam through mud

Snatched the feathers from an eagle, drank panther blood!

“Iko Iko” (originally titled "Jock-A-Mo"), which was written and released in 1953 by James "Sugar Boy" Crawford and his Cane Cutters, includes these lines.

   

Oh, my spyboy met your spyboy

Sittin' by the fire

My spyboy told your spyboy

"I'm gonna set your flag on fire!

 

Oh, look at my queen all dressed in red

Iko iko an de

I bet you five dollars she'll kill you dead. 

Even “They All Asked for You” by the Meters, popular among zoo-loving small children, was at first a coarse insult song.  Zigaboo Modaliste, the lead singer, says it was adapted from the Dozens and then bowdlerized for release to the public. [16]  

     The rap battle, generally freestyling (improvised), has emerged in the last generation as a central expression of Black American poetic competition, and has attracted hundreds of millions of viewers online and filled large venues live [17].  The appeal of the most aggressive poetry is clearly as strong in the twenty-first century as it was millennia ago. 

     As art provides representations of moments of human consciousness, the two strongest elements in the mind -- love and aggression, altruism and ego, generosity and selfishness – are both present in poetry.  Beauty need not be pretty, and aggressive self-assertion is at least as characteristically human as the appreciation of a picturesque scene.  Love charms and curses are both common in magical practices.  Not only is belligerence and bragging an ordinary element of human behavior, people enjoy as well being a spectator to contention among others.  The fondness for watching violent acts is proven not only by the shows in the Coliseum but also by the latest action movie and by true crime books.  Love and hate may inspire equally elaborate rhetorical displays.  Yet people tend to be uneasy about their selfish and violent impulses in spite of the universality of such feelings.  A full view of poetry will embrace its ego-aggrandizement as well as its idealism, its selfishness along with its magnanimity.   

 

 

 

1.  “He is a good seed of a dog” (Diatribe C) in the Oxford Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), available online.

2.  “A diatribe against Engar-dug” (Diatribe B), ETCSL.

3.  Bk. I, 224-227.

οἰνοβαρές, κυνὸς ὄμματ’ ἔχων, κραδίην δ’ ἐλάφοιο,

οὔτέ ποτ’ ἐς πόλεμον ἅμα λαῷ θωρηχθῆναι

οὔτε λόχον δ’ ἰέναι σὺν ἀριστήεσσιν ᾿Αχαιῶν

τέτληκας θυμῷ· τὸ δέ τοι κὴρ εἴδεται εἶναι.

4.  The Library 1.5.1.

5.  Fragment 52.  The story is also told by Clement of Alexandria Clementum sequitur Arnobius, Adversus Nationes V 25 p. 196.

6.  Scholion ad Lucian, Dialogues on Courtesans 7.4.13–20 Rabe p. 280).  See Derek Collins, Master of the Game: Competition and Performance in Greek Poetry, Hellenic Studies Series 7. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies2004. καὶ παιδιαὶ λέγονται πολλαὶ καὶ σκώμματα. μόναι δὲ γυναῖκες εἰσπορευόμεναι ἐπ᾽ ἀδείας ἔχουσιν ἃ βούλονται λέγειν· καὶ δὴ τὰ αἴσχιστα ἀλλήλαις λέγουσι τότε, αἱ δὲ ἱέρειαι λάθρᾳ προσιοῦσαι ταῖς γυναιξὶ κλεψιγαμίας πρὸς τὸ οὖς ὡς ἀπόρρητόν τι συμβουλεύουσιν. ἀναφωνοῦσι δὲ πρὸς ἀλλήλας πᾶσαι αἱ γυναῖκες αἰσχρὰ καὶ ἄσεμνα βαστάζουσαι εἴδη σωμάτων ἀπρεπῆ ἀνδρεῖά τε καὶ γυναικεῖα.

7.  The word κῶμος is generally thought to be the basis for comedy, though Aristotle (Poetics III) suggests it derives from the Dorian word for village, referring to Megaran mimes.

8.  from Todd M. Compton, 2006. “Victim of the Muses: Poet as Scapegoat, Warrior and Hero in Greco-Roman and Indo-European Myth and History,” Hellenic Studies Series 11. Washington, DC.

λάβοιεν—ἔνθα πόλλ’ ἀναπλήσαι κακὰ

δούλιον ἄρτον ἔδων—

ῥίγει πεπηγότ’ αὐτόν· ἐκ δὲ τοῦ χνόου

φυκία πόλλ’ ἐπέχοι,

κροτέοι δ’ ὀδόντας, ὡς [κ]ύων ἐπὶ στόμα

κείμενος ἀκρασίηι

ἄκρον παρὰ ῥηγμῖνα κυμα … . δου·

ταῦτ’ ἐθέλοιμ’ ἂν ἰδεῖν,

ὅς μ’ ἠδίκησε, λ[ὰ]ξ δ’ ἐπ’ ὁρκίοις ἔβη,

τὸ πρὶν ἑταῖρος [ἐ]ών.

 

9.  This poem includes the first written occurrence of the word shit as an insult.

10.  By definition this is simply an Old Occitanian song which does not treat of love (as cansos do).  Sirventes were often, however, often satirical, controversialist, and not uncommonly vituperative.   

11.  In Cantos (sometimes called runes) 3-5.

12.  The dozens had reached even  the benighted white suburb of my childhood where children had learned to say, “Your mother wears combat boots,” though we were unaware that this jibe had originally a sexual component, implying that the boots had been given in return for sexual favors.  Compare with the French verbal insult game “”ta mère.”

13.  Amuzie Chimezie, “The Dozens: An African-Heritage Theory,” Journal of Black Studies Vol. 6, No. 4 (Jun., 1976).  Similar games are played in Ghana and elsewehere.  Other advocates of the African origin of the dozens include William Elton, “Playing the Dozens,” American Speech Vol. 25, No. 3 (Oct., 1950).

14.  From Onwuchekwa Jemie, Yo mama! : new raps, toasts, dozens, jokes, and children's rhymes from urban Black America.  Another popular collection is Snaps by James Percelay, Monteria Ivey, and Stephan Dweck.

15.  From “The Hustler” and “Do you Know What It Means?” in Dennis Wepman, Ronald B. Newman, and Murray B. Binderman’s The Life, p. 170, 172.

16.  His interview is available at https://somethingelsereviews.com/2011/08/04/one-track-mind-zigaboo-modeliste-funkify-your-life-desitively-bonaroo-they-all-askd-for-you-others/.

17.  Ben Barzilai, “Battle Rap Soldiers,” June 18, 2023 New York Times.