Cruelty/Killing Floor
Foreword by Carolyn Forché
Agai=
nst a
landscape of salt flats, fields, interstate and wind-blown clapboards, a tr=
uck
squats low on four tires. A boy circles it with an iron rod and there is on=
ly
the ringing of rod on metal and the disembodied voice of the boy's father as
his family pauses for a tableau of terror. The boy kills his father first, =
then
his mother and sister. He is "The Kid" who hits the road, dressed=
in
his father's best clothes, carrying in a suitcase his mother's nightgown, h=
is
sister's doll. "The Kid" closes it with: "I am fourteen. I a=
m a
wind from nowhere./ I can break your heart."=
;
In Killing Floor<=
/i>--the
1978 Lamont Poetry Selection of the American Academy of Poets, Ai's voice j=
oins
with that of a German soldier marching through Russia, who imagines eating =
the terrible
luminous eyes of Adolf Hitler. This chorus of personae also includes a woman
who slaughters her own children, a boy who makes love to a corpse, a woman =
who
sells herself and a man who commits hari-kari and then climbs the chords of=
his
own entrails to heaven. There is Lope de Aguirre, who in 1561 attempted to
conquer Peru "with his soul between his teeth," and he closes his
book with a message to the deity: "God. The boot hill an inch above my
head is mine./ God, say your prayers."
Who else but Ai, born to native America, Africa and Asia,
could so address the deity, with such defiance? Who other than the poet who
gave us Cruelty fourteen years =
ago,
speaking not for the distant self but the dispossessed, would have the righ=
t?
There have not been a poetry more sexual, nor a poet braver showing us how =
she
could "cut through life like a diamond/ in a sack of glass."
Encountering her work was for me like a coming upon a campfire on the outsk=
irts
of town built by a woman who could tell me everything I needed to know. On =
this
"black tire, Earth" we were beginning the twentieth-century decli=
ne
and in the years to come we would need to know what went on in the minds of
those who have suffered the most. Cruelty showed us where the rifles and knives were hidden, and
beginning with our blood-washed birth, what might be expected of a tenancy =
on
Earth.
From Russia, Mexico, Buchenwald and Minnesota, the voices
speak of patricide, necrophilia, self-immolation, cannibalism and torture,
converging in a single voice of an old soul, androgynous and driving, a gho=
st
ranging space and time, drawn to moments in which the oppressed one is move=
d to
act. Ai is concerned with that single moment, revelatory and disassociated,
which is the hinge of human history, facilitating radical change, allowing =
the
heart to open with a new order.
She discovers that it is possible to enter a psychological
state of anarchy (symbolic always of social anarchy) without becoming
hysterical. These poems are cold-blooded, tender and defiant narratives,
concerning themselves with the survival of the human will, and a differenti=
al
celebration of death as a magnifier of life.
In many of her poems, there are knives, axes, blades or
pitchforks, splitting skulls, slicing off pieces of flesh, jabbing the sun.
Their cutting edges become, in this poet's hands, instruments for penetrati=
ng a
social order which has become anesthetized to human agony.
In counterpoint, there are images of women lifting their
skirts, such as darkness lifts its own, revealing the feminine, revealing
daylight. There is constant repetition of burning, of fire and light: the
bullet holes in Zapata's body are "black, eight-pointed stars," that "gave off a luminous darkness."=
In a
primitive act of exorcism, a coffin containing a doll is burned: "I la=
ugh.
The boy dances and I follow him, /'round and 'round, two black tops on fire,
/spinning under a sky full of firecrackers and stars, /setting fall a few
handkerchiefs of light."
So it is that because of the belief in both death and lif=
e,
there are no senseless acts. In the human spirit's endurance, revolution is
possible and transformation, inevitable.
Ai as Emiliano Zapata climbs a
hill, and begins cutting "rows and rows of black corn." When the
stalks touch the field, "they turn into men." The poet/ Zapata
shouts: "Dying doesn't end anything. /Get up. Swing those machetes. /Y=
ou
can't steal a man's glory/ without a goddamn fight. /Boys, take the land, t=
ake
it; it's yours. /If you suffer in the grave, /Yo=
u can
kill from it."
There aren't many poets whose language so precisely reson=
ates
with the pervasive concerns of the contemporary human condition.