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.