Transposition

Busboys and Poets

"Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
[More deliberate. Solemnly chanted.]
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
[Read exactly as in first section.]
...
A negro fairyland swung into view,
A minstrel river
Where dreams come true.
The ebony palace soared on high
Through the blossoming trees to the evening sky.
—Vachel Lindsay, "The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race"

"Mr. Vachel Lindsay knows two things, and two things only, about Negroes: The beautiful rhythm of their music and the ugly side of their drunkards and outcasts."
—W.E.B. Du Bois

If this is racist now, what was it then?

"Lindsay's view of the Congo can potentially upset modern sensibilities."

You might think it's racist.

You might think it's quaint.

You might think it's quaint racism.

"But that's what everyone thought then. It was just in the water."

The water, then, was racist.

Although, Lindsay's finger stuck, created a ripple when

while eating at the Wardman Hotel, Langston Hughes, then a busboy there

handed him a folio of poems. "The next day,"

According to the DC restaurant named after the event "in

local newspapers, Lindsay informed the world of his discovering a 'Negro busboy poet.'"

That was just the water. Just the type of thing that people drank.

Pretty soon people were full of this water: swimming around the idea of the Congo.

"No colored man doubts your good intentions, but many of them doubt your understanding of their hopes."
—A 1917 Letter from Joel Spingarn to Lindsay

Stanley

(HIS YEARS HERE, Henry Morton; journalist-explorer-agent of behalf of Belgium's King Leopold)

duplicity
dupli
city
two-ply-city
duplicity

when a signature is not a custom
a checkmark will do

a judge will assume
you've read the entirety

when a signature is impractical
a thumbprint will do

you'll have ceded your land
via enforceable treaty

that's in quote marks
scare quotes

scare tactics

cede the land
seed the land

the land is seeded
with raw materials

copper, diamonds, gold
too valuable

and too difficult to grip from the earth
to reach common mouths;

the first tactic will be theft (primitive accumulation)
and hypocrisy (slavery under cover of

anti-slavery sentiment);
the second will be dynamite

(used to make the Lower Congo more navigable
to ease the flow of trade through the body politic)

could be used to demolish
the ex-Embassy at 1800 New Hampshire;

thus,

the "smasher of rocks" could become
the "leveler of nations"

Inhuman

You can put what you are on what it is.
It is almost not even there.
It is boarded up.
It is half a world away.
It is unseen.
It could be you, therefore.
Therefore, it is all the more hidden.
Therefore, it is the Congo of you
as you are the Congo of it.

Writers have often used the Congo as a synecdoche for Africa

as a synecdoche for something in the heart

of Darkness: "It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. And why not?"
—Joseph Conrad

the anti-human is

indicating the world as music

flows down the Ebola River

breaking down the organs

"characterized by the sudden onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. This is often followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function, and in some cases, both internal and external bleeding."
—The World Health Organization

as fluids drain from the body's sacks
as the banks of the river flood, suddenly
and then periodically
in waves of casualties:

Incubation period: two to 21 days

Pygmies

as the stone age
catches behavioral modernity
in its hunting-gathering limbs

how hands have changed
in our ideas
(still the vocabulary of honey collecting remains)

their bodies nevertheless tell a story
if not of what they were designed for
then of what world would have them

2003

though civil war makes an animal of their otherness

cannibalism by
Les Effacers (The Erasers)
took on a capitalist bent

since they were only
eating people
to open the land up

for mineral exploitation