Robert Hayden in Verse by Derik Smith

Author:Derik Smith [Smith, Derik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Here guilt,

here agenbite

and victimizer victimized by truth

he dares not comprehend.

Here the past, adored and unforgiven,

its wrongs, denials, grievous loyalties

alive in hard averted eyes—

the very structure of the bones: soul-scape

terrain

of warring ghosts whose guns are real.

Hayden’s haunted southern landscapes of the 1950s are dangerous and violent, “hard bitten and sore-beset.” They flower “with every blossom fanged and deadly.” They are sharp, serrated by alliteration: “the landscape lush, / metallic, flayed; its brightness harsh as bloodstained swords.” And thus they are another rejoinder against the fantasy imagery of plantation literature suggested in Stephen Benét’s hope for a black-skinned poetics harmonized in the “Soft mellow of the levee roustabouts, / Singing at night against the banjo-moon—” (348). Hayden’s southern landscapes, imbuing natural ecology with a history of violence, participate in a tradition that Édouard Glissant finds throughout the postcolonial writing world. While planter and colonial classes of European stock willed into being the sensuous literary charm of the plantation landscape (Benét’s “banjo-moon” in the soft night), ethnic writers of the twentieth-century Atlantic world stamped that same space with the viciousness that gave life to colonial society. As Glissant puts it, the colonial world developed an aesthetic emphasizing “the gentleness and beauty” of the landscape, meant to “blot out the shudders of life, that is, the turbulent realities of the Plantation, beneath the conventional splendor of scenery” (70). The response was an ethnic literature that “went against the convention of a falsely legitimizing landscape and conceived of landscape as basically implicated in a story, in which it too was a vivid character” (71).

Hayden’s “bloodstained” southern landscapes are then in keeping with a resistive paradigm of representation that Glissant thinks of as “creative marronage.” Likening cultural dissent to the political insurgency of the Maroons (slaves who escaped into the hills of the Caribbean islands to form fugitive communities in opposition to plantation order), Glissant identifies several forms of representational disruption in the work of New World writers. Violent vivification of landscape is only one strategy of interference he recognizes. More central to creative marronage is the deformation of a traditional linear concept of time so at odds with a New World reality marked by the continual explosion of linguistic, familial, and ethnic continuities. Within the reality that Glissant metaphorically spatializes as the “Plantation,” “the always multilingual and frequently multiracial tangle created inextricable knots within the web of filiations, thereby breaking the clear linear order to which Western thought had imparted such brilliance” (71). Hayden’s 1950s poems, stabbing fragments of the past into landscapes of the writing present, cutting through tidy temporal boundaries, seem to be quintessential examples of the creative marronage undertaken by New World writers who responded to “Plantation” history by exploring the “coils of time” and asserting that, to quote Glissant once again, “Memory in our works is not a calendar memory; our experience of time does not keep company with the rhythms of month and year alone” (72).

Yet, as I’ve argued, the temporal manipulation and deformation of Hayden’s poetry of the late

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