What’s going on
“The expressions of a solitary researcher tend toward the assemblages (agencement) of a collective enunciation…” (Deleuze and Guattari)
AR:RANGE:MENTS (Fonograf, 2025) is a collection of poems and images that in their present arrangement, are a possibility of time and space that is felt now, has been felt, and is yet to be known/unknown. Gathering language and memories as a means of becoming whole. The hope for language, omnidirectional temporality, and multispatial presence zests in the arrangements made and yet to be made from language, memory, space, and time.
In their book From Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari stake out how the term minor literature does not come out of a minor language, but rather that which minority constructs within a major language. ‘Con’ meaning together, and ‘struere’ meaning to pile/build. To construct a poem is a means of putting together, while the act of putting together (arranger) is arranging. My mother made arrangements, in the sense of a musical arrangement, meaning “adaptation of a composition to voices or instruments, or to a purpose, for which it has not been designed.” A Kenyan woman adopted by Germans; how that happened is not yet known to me at this time. I have composed poems each one an experiment to put together a form of language of goings on. Professor Ken McClane once asked me “Ever heard of Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On? Your poetry brings that to mind.” I am not sure if he meant that as a compliment, but to me, it sounded like high praise, as Gaye’s album is one of the greatest albums (in my opinion) to have ever been made. The songs all fade into one another, forming a continuous dwelling sound that questions all the things that take away any sense of home. What semantic arrangements are made to make life possible in a space that constantly asks when you are leaving? Where are you from? May Ayim responds: “Grenzlos und Unverschämt” (Borderless and Brazen). What arrangements does Ayim make to come and go when she wants, to remain borderless and brazen?
Fumi Okiji, in her dwelling/listening to the ineffability of blackness and black jazz, writes, “We should experiment with ways to become susceptible to the music. We should arrange our thoughts and actions to allow ourselves to be gifted or messed-up by it” (65). I hear these experiments in the poem “in black Music” by Raja Lubinetzki. A short poem that constructs words in one count of breath such as “Kaffeesonntagstrassen” or “Kerzenschimmertrug” which I translate to mean candle gleam illusions/deceptions/delusions…The poem ends with the two final lines
“covered in sweat
without you” [1]
The poem reveals an absence that is realized in the arrangement of the poem that dwells/listens/composes black music in a language for which it was not designed.
The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance experiments by Audre Lorde arrange thought and actions in such a way that she becomes susceptible to the poetry of Lubinetzki in a language that she does not speak. In an interview titled “Above The Wind’” for Callaloo with Charles Rowell in 1991, Lorde says:
“One of the most interesting black writers that I met in Germany is a woman who was originally from East Berlin, a poet Raya Lubinetsky [sic]. I find her work very, very exciting,.She is doing in German what many of the Black poets were doing in the 1960s with the English Language, creating a new Africanized linguistic approach to language that is part and parcel of her poetry. It’s not something that translates very easily. I just really enjoy her work. Writing is not easy for a Black poet in Germany. It is very, very, diffcult to survive and create as a Black person in a situation where you are not only discriminated against but wiped out in terms of your message and your identity, and your consciousness.”
In Berlin, Lorde can hear Lubinetzki as well as the poetry of Black poets here (Harlem? Detroit? San Francisco? St. Croix? Grenada? Yaoundé...). Lorde applies the Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance, which she defines as the “basic ways that distance alters the way that we see.” The basic here is important, as Lorde defines the distinction between mathematics which deals with algebraic equations that involve “all of the higher and symbolic ways of interacting numbers,”while arithmetic deals “with the basic ways in which you combine numbers, which are: adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing.” Language carries distance; language covers temporal and spatial distance. While being far away in a practicable, measurable distance from the 1960s and the Black poets that Audre Lorde is thinking about in the interview she can calculate marvelous arithmetics that equates, to her hearing the 1960s and the poetic alchemy of making a language from metal scraps that the Black poets from Lorde’s here made. Lorde is aware of the arithmetic progression, which is to say that the numbers are in themselves whole integers, meaning that the number is whole by itself; it is not a fraction. Lubinetzki’s poetry is whole, it is not a fraction of what the Black poets here are doing. But it is in a sequence of an arithmetic progression with a common difference. I want to be careful here, in the way that I think with and share this, as Lorde is very clear about distinguishing mathematics which “deals with theoretical relationships” and arithmetic “that deals with a pragmatic actuality.”
Arithmetic is about the “shifting actualities created by distances.” How do I feel about my childhood in Berlin when I am sitting by Ithaca Falls? How do I feel about my father’s (b. 1946) passed-on silences, on the bus to New York City? How do I see the Kenyan-Indian British education system that I attended in Mombasa while walking down Rye Lane in Peckham? How do I hear my mother listening to Mahalia Jackson while poking cloves into oranges in the ‘90s in winter in Berlin, here? How do I perceive the wall, think about Berliner Wohngemeinschaften while reading Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Seltsame Sterne Starren zur Erde, in a building made of bricks across the Atlantic Ocean?
Audre Lorde emphasizes that no feeling that is felt in the distance is “less valid, or right, or wrong.” It is in thinking with and knowing this, that her final collection, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance, gathers itself. Collection, coming from the Latin collectionem (nominative collectio) “a gathering together,” noun of action from past participle stem of colligere “gather together.” In collecting Lorde says “As I went through these poems, what I realized was that no matter what they were about (...) the difference between Eleanor Roosevelt and my mother, whether it was what happened when people listen and don’t listen. What happens if you, you know… All of this. And I realized that the underlying theme of all these poems was just that… the miraculous [sic] arithmetic of distance.”
The poems that I have arranged in AR:RANGE:MENTS are a gathering that to me comes from a miraculous distance…they have traveled, and some have been with me for an extended period of time. This book is the first time that I have arranged them, and while doing so, I have realized that I am trying to deal with this idea of arrangement, of arranging language, which to me is one of many things that poetry does. However, it is also about the arrangements I have made with language and the arrangements I have had to make to be here today, writing this essay.
In arranging or engaging in what Deleuze and Guattari call agencement. I have made possible a collective enunciation that is neither spatially nor time-bound (grenzenlos und unverschämt). Through this arrangement, my aim is not to bring the memories, voices, or pieces together. Instead, I am engaging in sampling a circling composition from Toni Morrison’s Sula, which can sound out Nel’s “fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow” (174).
Morrison shares that when she was writing The Bluest Eye, her novel before Sula, Morrison was not thinking about making memories or events line up; instead, “to be related but not to touch—to circle, not line up, because the story of this prayer was the story of a shattered, splintered life. The novel turned out to be a composition of parts circling one another, like the galaxy accompanying memory.” The poems here have no bottom and no top; some of them reside on the edge or beginning of the page, while others are positioned in the center. They do not touch, nor are they made to all line up in a format that is linear; however, they are marvelously related in distance.
Notes
This essay will be forthcoming in print in the Soffit series with Tilted House Press.
[2] Audre Lorde in Berlin on The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance.
Works Cited
May Ayim, grenzenlos und unverschämt (1990):– ein gedicht gegen die deutsche Scheinheit«, Weitergehen. Gedichte, Berlin: Orlanda Verlag (2020).
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by Dana B. Polan. University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Marvin Gaye. What’s Going On. Tamla, 1971.
Audre Lorde. The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems, 1987–1992. W. W. Norton, 1993.
Raya Lubinetzki. Der Tag ein Funke: Aus dem Tagebuch des Logikzerfalls. Janus Press, 2001.
Toni Morrison. The Bluest Eye. Knopf, 1993.
—Sula. Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.
Fumi Okiji. Jazz As Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2018.
Charles H. Rowell and Audre Lorde. “Above the Wind: An Interview with Audre Lorde.” Callaloo, vol. 23, no. 1, 2000, pp. 52–63. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/6200.
