In the Wake of the Wake of the Wake

My favourite Simon Armitage poem, ‘Homecoming’, begins, ‘Think, two things on their own and both at once’, and tells, in brief, through juxtapositions of imagery, the story of a subject, ‘you’, a lost yellow jacket, a family falling-out, and the freefalling trust exercise where one person stands, blindfolded, and falls backwards into the waiting arms of one or more others. In the poem the lost jacket is the falling-out is the falling exercise — all things fused in the final stanza: the jacket made a body, the body made a rescue, the rescue, implied, at least to me, the transportation of the poem’s subject from the stifling situation they’re in into something better, with another:

These ribs are pleats or seams. These arms are sleeves.

These fingertips are buttons, or these hands can fold

into a clasp, or else these fingers make a zip

or buckle, you say which. Step backwards into it

and try the same canary-yellow cotton jacket, there,

like this, for size again. It still fits. (Armitage 20)

It’s a transmutation, if not a transcendence, that exists here as only a possibility. These ribs ‘are’ pleats or seams, but the subject still has to ‘step backwards’. This change could happen, might, if only the addressed moves into it, accepts it, falls.

I first encountered this poem as a schoolteacher. It was one of many in an exam-board-mandated anthology that included a section of ‘Poems from Different Cultures’ (the less said about which the better). The Armitage was an optional add-on to the main curriculum and I loved it, wanted to teach it, but couldn’t work out how to unpack it in the ways necessary to make my pupils understand it. To be honest, I wasn’t sure then, and even now, that I understood it. The fragments all cohered into a whole that I couldn’t name or fully explain: ‘think two things … and both at once’ felt insightful – a call to the kind of cognitive effort necessary to not be consumed by the world; an appeal to ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’ – or, in the poem’s context, a ‘both and and’ – things that are multiple things at once; but I couldn’t grasp it – I could feel it, but I couldn’t form the right words.

II

What do we do with these last two years? How do we talk about them? I want desperately here to introduce this issue, on the theme of ‘Crisis/Recovery’ with some clean insight into what’s just happened, what continues to happen, but it’s hard to find. We began planning this issue before the pandemic revealed its true scale, before Joe Biden’s election, and Brexit got ‘done’, and it felt more important as it progressed. As always, it started with just a theme – something the whole editorial team felt could be interesting – and we approached contributors we thought could do good things with it. As time passed, and the year, 2020, then early 2021, got worse, the issue started to shift — both from the perspective of the contributions we received and in relation to our thoughts about it. Eventually it felt like it would need to be our, Wasafiri’s, grand statement on now — on what had gone and what was to come. And, sitting here, at this moment, the pressure to summarise, contextualise, and encapsulate feels great, but all I have is Armitage: two things/both at once.

These years have had months of violence – war in Ethiopia and unrest in Colombia and Haiti ongoing at the time of writing, arms massing on the border between Russia and Ukraine, Armenia bombarded, civilians murdered by their military in Myanmar, death after death after death at the hands of the police in the United States – accompanied by the incredible tenderness and care shown, everywhere, to the millions who lost their lives to or suffered from Covid-19. In the arts, we've watched troupes and venues folding alongside outpourings of innovative creativity — artists using all platforms available to do what they’ve always done: reveal, complicate, reframe, make strange. Months of abject lies, political scamming and self-enrichment everywhere, alongside – like always, and everywhere – selflessness, compassion, sacrifice.

A narrative now circulating here in the UK is that the pandemic has revealed to us our own resilience, highlighted things that need to be changed and now, with energy and full hearts, we can all get to work on changing them … 

But is that how it works? The pieces collected in this issue seem to say think again. Perhaps a product of the context in which they were composed, in this writing the simple teleological movement from crisis to recovery, from conflict to peace, from a troubled past to a better future, is never quite so neatly completed. Every contribution to this issue is about processes of crisis and recovery – about work to achieve the latter, done always in the shadow of the former – and puts the two states into sustained tension. In Michelle Hamadache’s short story ‘Zohira’ the recovery of one person triggers a crisis of belief for another; in S J Kim’s at times frenetic, at times caustic, at times sublime hybrid life-writing piece ‘정’ crisis and recovery are so closely intertwined that sometimes both states are barely distinguishable. Those two works are indicative of and resonate with the struggles for recovery in, through, after, and during crisis captured throughout. From Pavan Kumar Malreddy’s interview on politics and poetics with Arundhati Roy, to Ivan Vladislavić’s reflections on apartheid writing, to Jessica Hemmings’ efforts to rescue Yvonne Vera’s works from oversimplifying interpretations, to Cecilia Knapp’s opening poem – there are no clean breaks – with or without the will to change.

I worry my gloss might make this issue seem politically, in our highly charged times, mute, pessimistic, hopeless. As containing a kind of ‘no matter what you do, the past and your crises are always with you … so what’s the point?’ perspective. But then, I think of Christina Sharpe’s spectacular book In the Wake, which argues that, for African Americans, to accept that ‘our individual lives are always swept up in the wake produced and determined, though not absolutely, by the afterlives of slavery’ (8), and to know that, ‘[i]n the wake [of slavery], the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present’ (9), is to simply accept the facts. It isn’t a call to throw hands up and abandon efforts but a call to action — to acceptance then action. Two of the most notable things about Sharpe’s book are its focus on effort, labour, and work in acknowledgement of the abjections of the present – of the crises that trigger and continually catalyse any efforts of recovery – crises that recur and recur and never fully fall away — and its rendering of that effort as a way of ‘re/seeing, re/inhabiting, and re/imagining the world’ (22). Crisis for Sharpe, in her context, is ‘the weather’ (102), the ever-present backdrop, the again and again and again, the ‘ditto, ditto, ditto’ (109), in relation to which there is an ongoing experience of renewal, recovery, resistance, submergence.

For Sharpe, in my reading, transcendence can never be total — you don’t step clear from crisis solely by desire, nor do you by effort alone: quite frankly, there is no ‘stepping clear’ of crisis. African Americans all live in and with the aftermath of Atlantic slavery and the crises it generate(s/d) — all recovery is in its context; all life is lived in its wake. The argument, I think, can be widened beyond Sharpe’s specific concerns without abandoning the singularity of the North American experience. We all – all of us – live defined in, by, and through crises, with our communal and personal ditto ditto dittoes – something which all the pieces in this issue are attentive to – but this is a state of both constant ‘disaster’ and constant ‘possibility’ (Sharpe 134).¹ The quiddities of those disasters, the shape of those possibilities, are different for each of us, but what we all share is something like Armitage’s ‘you’: the opportunity to transmute and transform; not abandon completely, but fuse into and make whole. Not a single crisis with a definitive recovery, but multiple crises in the life’s work of recovering, and recovering.

Notes

1 I think it’s important to note that I distinguish ‘crisis’ from ‘trauma’. All of us endure crises; some percentage of us will escape trauma. The experience of trans-Atlantic slavery was itself traumatic and trauma-perpetuating; it is also the source of crises great and small.