The Activist and Poetic Immediacy of Andrea Abi-Karam’s Villainy
Andrea Abi-Karam’s Villainy (Nightboat Books 2021) channels political energy into poetic immediacy. The value of directness and immediacy, which is compatible with protest, is privileged over meditative musing that comes to seem comparatively defanged. There is, of course, a difference between activist work on the ground and literary writing. As Abi-Karam puts it in the preface to the collection’s final poem “After Cecilia Vicuña,” “literal action is necessary” (117). But the context of political activism nevertheless suggests for Abi-Karam the possibility of a literature that can activate the same degree and register of energy. Villainy is an experiment in merging a political voice with a poetic one.
From its outset, the collection feels calculated incite a reader who upholds a firm distinction between the poetic and the political. The first page of the first poem establishes its manifesto register in its use of all caps. Here is that first page in its entirety, title included:
THE END OF FASCISM LOOKS LIKE CENTURIES OF QUEERS DANCING ON THE GRAVE OF
1. CAPITALISM
2. THE STATE
3. COLONIALISM
4. NAZIS
5. RACISM
6. OPPRESSION (1).
Villainy by Andrea Abi-Karam, Nightboat Books, 2021.119 pages. $16.95.
The phrase “CENTURIES OF QUEERS DANCING” raises the specific image of a dance party picked up on the next page that describes such a party in more detail. I also paused over the choice of “CENTURIES,” as opposed to, say, millennia, and found this degree of specificity compelling. But the addition of “ON THE GRAVE OF” then threatens to collapse that specific image into a figure of speech, and the list further reinforces the sense of speaking in general terms. The choice to end the list with “OPPRESSION,” which can be seen as the larger umbrella under which the more specific terms fit, takes this tendency toward generality and abstraction to the utmost limit. Indeed, the term “oppression” is general enough that it barely feels political. Who wouldn’t claim to be against oppression? In this way, the poem identifies the political speech that deals in generalities as having a tendency to lose force.
This first page seems to affirm a reader who sees the idiosyncratic language of poetry as more alive than the isms of political activism. But it also sets the stage for the more specific and vivid language of poetry to come into the all-caps register of protest to revitalize political speech. The second page of the first poem initiates this project:
IT WILL BE A GRAND PARTY EVEN GRANDER THAN MARDIS GRAS & THERE WILL BE NO REASON TO SLEEP B/C THERE WILL BE NO NEED TO WORK & THERE WILL BE SUCH A REVELATORY PALLOR TO THE WHOLE THING THE PHOTOS WILL BE EXQUISITE & THE LIBATIONS & SNACKS FUCKING DELICIOUS (2).
I begin to linger over the word choice when I reach “MARDIS GRAS,” which makes me revisit “GRAND” as a French word, which reinforces my sense of a French (and therefore by association revolutionary) feast. I reach “B/C” which does not just register as because. Instead, the “B” which is a self-rhyme with the earlier “BE” breaks off from the “C” in a way that is visually reinforced by the slash and can be interpreted as being breaking off from causes. One might sleep, but not for the reason of having to work. The poetic operation of the language becomes clearest in the line “THERE WILL BE SUCH A REVELATORY PALLOR TO THE WHOLE THING THE PHOTOS WILL BE EXQUISITE,” which incorporates diction which seldom appears outside of literature. The revelatory pallor also evokes the development of photographs in a dimly-lit room. This activates the phrase “THE PHOTOS WILL BE,” which would otherwise blend into the promises about how great this party will be.
Experimental poetry, which seeks to expand the range of work that gets included under the category of poetry, is different from political projects such as prison abolition and LGBTQ rights movements that are oriented toward the social inclusion of people. Abi-Karam blurs the boundaries between the projects of promoting poetic and social inclusiveness by making the case for seeing their poems as a socially excluded bodies. This comes through especially vividly in “THE INTERRUPTION VS BLOCKADE:”
I
HOPE
OTHERS
WILL
NOTICE
MY
DISFIGUREMENT
TOO (78).
This constitutes the fourth page of the long poem, and the “I” refers both to the speaker and to the poem itself, which asks to be noticed in its all-caps lettering and line breaks, which emphasize the unevenness of the words that comprise it. The poem then seems to be making a political claim for itself as body that is excluded from counting as a human: it says, “I am a body, too. I too can be aware of being disfigured and want others to be aware of that.” A later section of this poem says just as surprisingly,
I AM WINGED
I AM RED
I AM WINGED
I AM RED
I AM WINGED
I AM RED
I AM FLAT AMONGST THE OTHER RUINS
I AM FLAT B/C I AM
COVERED IN GREY ROCKS
I AM FLAT BUT I BREATHE ANYWAY
I BREATHE I AM CONTORTED I BREATHE I AM CONTORTED
I BREATHE I AM CONTROLLED I BREATHE I AM STILL
I AM RED
I AM WINGED (83).
One might see the poem as positing a magical or avian speaker who is winged and red, or a speaker who alternates between being winged and red or between saying they are winged and saying they are red. But the all-caps of each line and the fact that each is a complete “I AM” statement invites us to read each line as making an ontological claim for itself. Each line of the poem is then a speaker who says “I AM WINGED” or “I AM RED” or something else. The series of “I AM” repetitions creates a column off of which “WINGED” and “RED” come off like tags, causing the reader to register each line as, “This is a ‘WINGED’ line, this is a ‘RED’ one.” The visual form of the poem thus substantiates the ontological claim that each line makes for itself. The line “COVERED IN GRAY ROCKS” draws attention to another aspect of that visual form, which is that the lines above crush those that come under. This substantiates the lines’ claims that they are flat because they have been crushed and contorted by the likewise embodied and therefore weighty lines that came before. A poem can thus ask readers to take seriously the poem’s claims about its own embodiment. It can make this political claim for itself, whether or not readers accept the claim as coming from a potentially political subject.
Poems that engage and use activist energies and language forms for their own aesthetic can feel complicated to the degree that they ask multiple positions of their audience—to attend to poetry as a (political) body attends a protest. At the heart of Abi-Karam’s Villainy is an impulse to keep us alive to the world and to language in a way that is necessary to activism.