At the heart of the latest issue of Witty Partition, Issue 14, appear three astonishing pieces. The video Gonna Die by Bill Hayward commemorates the anniversary of the 1965 Bloody Sunday voting rights march in Selma with the words of a woman who was fourteen years old at the time; following that comes Eric Darton’s angry and frightening essay that looks at what’s happened or hasn’t happened since the Attica Prison rebellion; and Teddy Jefferson’s brilliant review of Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Notturno, which was recorded in Syria, Kurdistan, Iraq and Lebanon, about the aftermath in people’s lives under Isis. Plenty of other delicious reads in this issue but these three stand out as extraordinary political and artistic statements.
Gonna Die, a video by Bill Hayward, uses images, movement, and interviews to evoke the 1965 Bloody Sunday voting rights march in Selma. Watching it launched me backwards and forwards at the same time. A woman who was fourteen at the time of the march speaks about getting hit on the back of her head and on her face and said that she was so scared she “I didn’t want any freedom, I didn’t care if anyone voted, I just wanted to go home because I was so scared that I was going to die.” Just wanted to go home. I was bowled over hearing her voice as she became her young self again. Then she talks about a white guy with one leg, on crutches, who told her he’d die trying to protect her. “Okay,” she says, “He eased my fear a little bit,” though she adds that she “never felt fear at this depth.” Once again the courage and bravery of those protesters is astounding.
11 x 14 inches. 1971.
Be Cool, Eric Darton’s essay, begins with a frightening quote from Ernst Bloch. “Of course, humanity always sets itself tasks it can solve, but if the great moment of solution is met by a faint-hearted generation . . .” Filled with emotion, Darton’s essay “Be Cool: Fifty Years Down the Line from Attica.” illustrates the results of that “faint-hearted generation.” Darton writes, “’Attica means fight back,’ a hoarse-voiced slogan if ever there was one – accompanied by D-Yard style clenched fists pumped in the air. But that forest of clenched fists never fought back, or forward. And what was not clearcut by the Man got excised by the Movement itself in its self-excoriating degeneration. After Attica, to paraphrase Lou Reed, came bitter nothing. Nothing at all.” So Darton asks us to read about it, do our research, and get active. Inspiring in spite of its despair.
Teddy Jefferson’s review of Gianfranco Rosi’s Notturno follows Eric’s call to action. Jefferson writes that in this documentary: “We are taught that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, yet human behavior suggests the opposite is true. We do what we know. Knowing history is what causes us to repeat it. What does this mean for the representation of atrocity, or a documentary about life in the wake of Isis? Can a work of art provide some inoculation against its reoccurrence? Or is absolution a worthy enough goal: soothing the audience’s guilt at what happened to others with the illusion of having taken some sort of action?”
About the reception to Notturno, Jefferson adds, “It was praised by critics for celebrating the “humanity” of its subjects, though this is precisely what it does not do, which may be why it was bypassed for the top prizes. It refuses any interpretation or sweetening.” Jefferson describes how the film allows the viewers to see in order to feel and his essay does the same, allows us to “see” the film. His descriptions reminded me of Butoh dance and how it conveys meaning through the body. “The shifting of the mode of the scenes from the (seemingly) allegorical to the surreal to the clinical to the quotidian would be considered in a fiction film stylistically incoherent. And yet this anomalous assembly feels seamless and deeply coherent. Though its sequence follows a logic nearly impossible to identify, its build and culmination have extraordinary visceral power.”
So Witty Partition Issue 14, offers an assembly of poems, short stories, essays, and book reviews that feel “seamless and deeply coherent.” Heading up the delicacies, Dana Delibovi’s essay, Found Poetry, looks at Found Poetry, Dada, Blackout Poems, and Tristan Tzara. Setting the tone for rest of the issue, this article examines our debt to the past and the fun and usefulness of unconscious choices. However, the Tzara fragment Delibovi quoted from “Vegetal Swallow” with its “nonsense” images: “rain falls under the scissors of/ the dark hairdresser-furiously/ swimming under the clashing arpeggios.” I had to laugh: these dadaesque random words were an almost literal picture of my husband, a Black hairdresser who listens to jazz as he snips at someone’s hair. Something about Dada both attracts and repels me; this article showed me see the freedom at its center.
After the Dada poems, comes poems by two writers. Teddy Norris “English Teacher’s Recurring Post-retirement Dream” reminded me of my English teacher dad whose article about teaching fiction appeared in Issue 7, https://the-wall-archive-issue-7.weebly.com/the-short-story.html. And Carmen Firan poems about time and nothingness flowed with the same blood of the rest of the issue:
raised on a heap of nothing
the truth sits at a table with the lie
the scale tips from nothing
stars are annihilated
and put themselves back together again
what is unyielding plays with us;
nobody believes in nothing anymore
Broken Kismet is an excerpt from a novel by Hardy Griffin. Following her mother, the narrator leads us through the streets of Istanbul, the day before the narrator is to leave for college in the United States. We go to a strange place to meet a strange woman to partake in an ancient Turkish custom of spilling lead. The chapter ends with:
“Mom, do you really believe in that stuff?”
She opens her palm and I see she still has the hunks of lead in it.
“You know the old Turkish saying, ‘Don’t believe in fortunes, but don’t go without one.’ Think about it Eser, it’s a ritual that’s been around for more than three thousand years. Must be a reason, right?”
Hearing Eser and her mother’s fortunes read made me want to go on whatever path writer Griffin leads us towards his characters’ futures.
Then comes three chapters of the memoir Becoming by Chris Sawyer-Lauçanno, These chapters are so filmic in their attention to detail they reminded me of Teddy Jefferson’s review of Notturno: “The minds of the viewers are given more -and trusted more. They are neither told nor led. Each scene is set before them, intact, complete, uninterpreted, without music, comment, or indication. The goal is not to transform or wow or fool or move; the goal is to make us see, not feel. Seeing must come before feeling, as well.” In Chapter 24 “I Become a Resident of Piedras Negras, ” Sawyer-Lauçanno writes about his initial difficulties as a seventh graders struggling with new language in a new place, “I saw the store front to which he had directed me. I walked in expecting to wander as inconspicuously as possible down the aisles until I found the coffee, then pay for it at the cash register. But there were no aisles. Instead a large counter filled the front of the store. Behind it an array of bins, boxes and canned goods stretched nearly to the ceiling. I divined, probably by observing the customers in front of me who were placing their orders and receiving goods, that the same procedure was also expected of me.”
Then we’re treated to Basil King six non-representative paintings from “The Black Opal Series.” They offer a meditative experience, somewhat akin to the desert area Chris passes through on his way to the mine in his memoir chapter. His images are followed by Diggin’ the Scene, a meandering essay by me of my meandering thoughts on meandering through the books around me, an ode to superabundance and the discreet charm of gorging on books.
In Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno writes about the Tribute to Lawrence Ferlinghetti heldon March 24, 2021, “what would have been his 103rd birthday.” Sawyer-Lauçanno recalls protesting against Kenneth Rexroth’s forced retirement from UCSB in 1970. He helped organize a protest with poets. “I wrote Lawrence. Within a few days I heard back. ‘Yes,’ he wrote. ‘I’ll come and I’ll bring a few pals.’ A week later I heard from Allen Ginsberg who said he was coming, too. So was Gary Snyder and Diane DiPrima.” A link to the video of the tribute is available with this article.
In Ed Foster, Dana Delibovi writes: “So it’s no surprise that Edward Foster’s new collection, A Looking Glass for Traytors, warmed me like hot cider in a drafty old Colonial manse. Of course, to be warmed in New England is to feel a heady mix of grief, loneliness, and more than a touch of rancor; to pull on austerity like a well-worn flannel slipper. But it is also to bask in the freedom to be authentic, or more precisely, eccentric.”
Bronwyn Mills reviews Ngugi wa Thiong’o epic The Perfect Nine, a book originally written in Gikuyu, the language native to central Kenya that explores epics, myths and written vs oral story-telling. Mills sums it up: “I remember Ngugi saying that another argument for the use of Gikuyu, of one’s mother tongue, was the simple fact that if a language is not used creatively, as a means of invention, to tell stories, for literature, the language becomes impoverished. That won’t happen on Ngugi’s watch, that is for certain.”
So go for it. Check out Issue 14 of Witty Partition, its stories, essays, poems and videos are like a salve after watching and listening to the terrifying news these days. And I’m not just saying this because Witty Partition’s editors recently bestowed upon me the title of “Consulting Prose Editor.” I’m saying this because I’m moved by the writing to want to tell you about it, to let you see and feel it. But if you go to only one thing, go to Gonna Die, the video by Bill Hayward about the march in Selma.