‘The Mesh’
has been credited as ‘one of the frequently anthologized poems of Kwesi Brew’
may be because it is a ‘love’ poem, may be too because of the title which
Senanu and Vincent going on yet comment on as ‘perhaps the most interesting
thing about the poem’ seeing that it ‘particularly captures the moment of
certainty and assurance when love is naturally given and accepted(A Selection
of African Poetry 1976:76);
a reading that headlong ‘falls into error through a finite determinateness of
an interpretation of meaning’(Jaspers 1959), a reading ‘[im]possible, as long
as the language of the text can[not]support it’(Akwanya, Verbal Structures 225).
For ‘certainty and assurance’ arising from a ‘giv[ing] and accept[ing]’ are the
very things lacking in the poem. At least if ‘I lingered over the choice’ (‘The
Mesh’ line 3), the Voice is decidedly uncertain which way to take at ‘the
cross-roads’ (line 1), as ‘I must either leave or come with you’ precludes,
however subtly, the chances of alternatives which are a condition of choice,
which in turn throws up ‘the choice’ (line 3) as sham, leaving the speaker
finally with just the lone road in ‘your face’ (line 6) after ‘You lifted the
lamp of love.’ At any event the final movement does not even certify that the
Speaker ‘accepted’ or even took this ‘road’: he merely ‘saw’ it as ‘that I
should take’ with all the initial agony of his indecision, all the terror and
convulsiveness of the gaze still ‘linger[ing]’ (line 3).
There is, nonetheless, a way to read the
title as ‘the most interesting thing about’ the poem that yields a critical
pertinence, if one is ready to read it as the whole poem, integral and
unviolated, if one is ready to read it as the constitutive thing of the poem not the thing about it; for as Frye has written ‘The literary universe…is a
universe in which everything is potentially identical with everything else’
(Anatomy 124), which really means there is no telling one thing apart from
another, no telling of, say, the title, from the poem and vice versa. This
precisely is the prevailing mood in the poem with I, one of the personages and utterer of the lyric itself, incapable
of telling his being wholly apart from the second personage You, whose being is throughout assigned
in relation to I:
We have come to the cross-roads
And I
must either leave or come with you.
I
lingered over the choice
But in the darkness of my doubts
You
lifted the lamp of love
And I
saw in your face
The road that I should take (emphasis mine).
The result is
that one is seeing ‘the mesh’ of two discrete individualities in one, a process
perhaps most radically realized in the inaugural ‘We’ whose status as
containing both I and You shatters their individualities in
its very mode as first person plural pronominal. Henceforth, it is undecidable
whether ‘We have come to the cross-roads’ by the mutual agreement of both, or
whether either is pandering only to the domineering if inescapable prompting of
the other.
Only the agony of I in lingering over the choice, in having to linger till ‘You
lift[] the lamp of love,’ in groping ‘in the darkness of my doubts’ till after You’s lamp-lifting to see ‘the road’ in
‘your face’ ‘that I should take’
gives it away more readily as the one being lorded over between the two. But
this does not certify that You is the
superior or even more powerful of the pair, for if I sees itself always in relation to, that is in terms of, You, You
is by the same reason as bonded to I
as I to You. And though I is not
seen to ‘put up a token resistance’ (Akwanya 255) in the manner of ‘Never. /
[You] terrify me’ (Machado, ‘And He was the Devil of my Dreams’) to You, You’s
situation is no less unhappy, no less restive as I’s,for the mesh is ‘a network
for trapping or catching a desired object, a tangled situation’ (Nwoga, West African
Verse 164) and the seeming trapping
of I in You’s network only tangles You
in selfsame trap.
This loss of grip of the ‘situation,’
because unwieldy, by You is more
readily decipherable in Dennis Brutus’s ‘Let not this plunder be misconstrued’
where the lyric-speaking Voice, I, is
more perceptible as the one not being lorded over by, but lording it over You. But the divide remains as undecided
as in Brew, for the shattering of the individualities of the pair and the
resultant mingling of their specificities subsist yet. In fact Brutus’s I, the more obvious plunderer of a
similar pair is particularly anxious that ‘the plunder be [not] misconstrued,’ that
it not be rashly invested with attributes of maybe sheer cruelty, unprovoked
and masochist, for the other is willy-nilly implicated:
Let not this plunder be misconstrued:
This is the body’s expression of need—
Poor wordless body in its fumbling way
Exposing heart’s-hunger by raiding and
hurt;
Secret recesses of
lovely desire
Gnaw at the vitals of
spirit and mind
When shards of
existence display eager blades
To menace and savage
the pilgriming self:
Bruised though your flesh and
all-aching my arms
Believe me, my lovely, I too reel from
our pain—
Plucking from you these your agonized
gifts
Bares only my tenderness-hungering
need.
It is
possible to read Brutus’s own poem such that one assigns the whole utterance to
Brew’s You as its Speaker, whereby You’s shared acute restiveness and
exquisite agony with I becomes more apparent.
For, then, the mingling of the individual properties of the pair, the
‘heart’s-hunger,’ must be ‘by raiding and hurt,’ by gnawing ‘at the vitals of
spirit and mind,’ by ‘shards of existence display[ing] eager blades / To menace
and savage the pilgriming self;’ by sharing in the pain of Your ‘bruised’ flesh as a mutual pain, ‘our pain,’ in my
‘all-aching’ arms; by ‘Bar[ing]…my tenderness-hungering need’ ‘of lonely
desire’ in ‘plucking from you these your agonized gifts.’
Early on already is raised the matter of
the Speaker, I’s agony in Brew. In Brutus
it is assigned more starkly to You
(Your agonized gifts) but nonetheless communicated to Brutus’s I, who ‘must’ (Brew line 2) pluck these
agonized gifts. What is more, Brutus’s own poem perceives this meshing of
individualities as a matter of necessity, as ‘the body’s expression of…’ ‘my
tenderness-hungering need,’ a perception not altogether wanting in Brew’s,
however more non-apparent. For if in the radical shattering of their
uniquenesses in ‘We,’ ‘I must either leave or come with you,’ it must needs be
because their bonding is a necessity, a requisite condition of their mingled
being. This saps Brew’s I’s situation
of any element of dilemma—there’s really no predicament, only a lingering that
ultimately brings on the lamp-lifting, that brings on the tension that probably
accounts for the irresistible if haunting force of the ‘mesh,’ namely, that
though the tangled pair exist in a ‘universe in which [they are] potentially
identical,’ in which they ‘are identified,’ ‘each retains its own form’ (123)
Frye insists. For the shattering and intermingling of their individualities is
at once needful and painful, investing their tangled plight with the logic of
‘what has to be done,’ with a tragic orientation.
The transference/sharing of properties
between the pair in the specific poems and across them is immensely maximal:
Brutus’s I is ‘wordless’(line 3) as
Brew’s especially as to what decision is
finally taken—it only ‘saw,’ not took, in You’s
‘face/ The road that I should take;’ Brutus’s I is ‘the pilgriming self’ whom ‘shards of…eager blades/…menace and
savage’ as Brew’s is associable with a likeness of pilgrimage from ‘the cross-roads’
to the point where You’s ‘lamp of
love’ dazzle-sheds its ‘doubts,’ again recalling Machado’s devil’s ‘red
lantern’ that ‘blinded’ I, placing it
therefore on the same footing as, coterminous with, those in Brew and Brutus.
And the blinding facility of ‘the red
lantern,’ ‘the lamp of love,’ ‘the shards of …eager blades,’ always already
renders I and You’s resistance (the lingering in Brew, the fumbling and secret
desire in Brutus, are after all degrees of ‘token resistance[s]’) to the tragic
meshing of their beings pathetically impotent, ensuring that either never again
can assign its individuality wholly apart from the other.
this poem inspires me a lot.
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