What I am Reading Now… the online publication of Cooper Gallery (University of Dundee) invites Black practitioners and practitioners of colour to share, with a preface, a selection of five readings that are shaping their current thinking, research and practice.
In this special collaborative edition of What I am Reading Now..., writer Vanessa Onwuemezi shares readings from her time as the inaugural writer in residence at the Roberts Institute of Art Residency.
My Nan died in 2019. After her funeral I slept on the sofa in her living room and on the floor of that room I came across an article on the UAP phenomenon, ‘UAPs’ previously being named ‘UFOs’. By the end of the article I had a sense of the novel I was going to write. Thinking back to that moment now I wonder what captured me about the ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ the article described. I think that it is the same thing that captured Carl G. Jung when he wrote, in the book Flying Saucers, that ‘The cause [of the UFO] must strike at the roots of our existence…’
It was in a sense poetic that I discovered this article in my Nan’s home. At the time of her death I thought of the loss of her, and also of the language and heritage that tied me to the island she came from, Jamaica. Glissant’s Poetics of Relation has been on my reading list for a long while, and finally getting to crack it open awakened me to its similarities with Jung’s writing on UFOs, most profoundly, with the ‘totality’ that Jung suggests the UFO represents. The sphere, in the form of the UFO, and the ‘circle with volume’ as written by Glissant, both represent ‘the quantifiable vitality of every possible difference…the motor driving universal energy…’.
Glissant’s Poetics is a never ending process of Relation, the limitless ‘meeting and synthesis’ of differences that he terms ‘Creolization’. This extends to all cultural products, but most importantly to language. Glissant notes how the creole languages formed as part of the mixing of peoples and, in his own case, the relation to the ‘mother tongue’, French. Translation as a process demonstrates to us this form of Relation, and I felt supported in this view when I read the following sentence, in Kate Briggs’ This Little Art: ‘The translator: writer of new sentences on the close basis of others, producer of relations.’ Creolization for me also means accepting ambiguity; the muddling, confounding of history and heritage, the return of the creolized people of the Caribbean represents the return to wholeness, Creolization is not a new ideology, but a new dimension that allows the individual to be ambiguous, Glissant writes that it allows ‘each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea...’
This ambiguity, according to Wendt and Duvall in the essay Sovereignty and the UFO, is a form of subversion. In the same way that the Caribbean and its people embody the resistance of the totalising effect of empire. The UFO, according to Raymond and Duvall, presents a challenge to ‘anthropocentric sovereignty’ and therefore to ‘the foundations of modern rule.’
Gilssant considers ‘the dialectics between the oral and the written’ as one of the main themes of his Poetics, something which is echoed and deepened in Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, a fascinating book which explores the differences between oral and literate cultures, showing how the written word changed humanity, much like the computer, and soon A.I. will change us irrevocably. My readings, although seemingly disparate, seemed to feed each other, or perhaps all thinking leads to the same unspeakable end, addressing the perennial human questions: who are we? Where are we going?
Édouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing, Poetics of Relation, (The University of Michigan Press, 1997)
Carl Gustav Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, (Routledge Classics, 2002)
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, (Routledge, 1982)
Kate Briggs, This Little Art, (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017)
Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, Sovereignty and the UFO, (Sage Publications, 2008)
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