But the Haitian got his freedom before the Harlemite: “centuries, in time, have changed their numbers/San Domingo, breaking the chains, the leather bands”. This new-found freedom transports the Haitian to Harlem: to see his old brother and renew the fraternity that fell apart at the time of separation:
Harlem as a site of psychological succour and security is also central to Senghor’s “New York”. More than Brierre, it is in Senghor’s poem that we begin to catch a whiff of what is to come in Irobi’s offering several decades later: the presence of cold, dehumanized, materialist capitalism. In line with the standard Négritude procedure of constructing Manichean binaries between white and black, the roaming poet-persona in “New York” first encounters the white, cruel capitalist streets of Manhattan where he sees only:
And then, the poet goes home to Harlem in the familiar retour aux sources (return to source) pattern of Négritude philosophy:
In line with Négritude essentialism of the Black African Ur-text, Senghor almost begins to see the millet fields and the masks of his native Joal in Harlem! Suffice it to say that the victory which transforms Harlem to a site of respite, Black pride, and communion for Senghor and Brierre is pyrrhic: the cold capitalism of primitive accumulation, which Senghor naively separates from Harlem and confines to Manhattan in order to operate his formulaic binary, reappears with a vengeance by the time Irobi enters the scene…
If one was tempted to consider the idea of battle as a metaphorical rendering in “The Battle of Harlem”, Irobi punctures that illusion with an opening stanza that immediately deploys history at the service of art:
Some familiarity with the history of Harlem is necessary to grasp the dynamics at work here. The place now referred to as Mount Morris Park was indeed a real battleground, first between Dutch colonists who established the town of “Nieuw Haarlem”, and the Native Americans they swept away. Then, during the American War of Independence, the place’s strategic location close to the Harlem River occasioned skirmishes between the Patriots and the British. In essence the poet-persona’s location at the opening of the poem was already a real battleground of European greed during the conquest and “pacification” of the Americas. This historical battle provides the background to the contemporary battle which Irobi records: the unleashing of the primitive accumulation instincts of global monopolist capitalism whose arrowhead is Senghor’s Manhattan!
Irobi’s theme, therefore, is sufficiently familiar. For the battle of Harlem is also the battle of Maroko in Irobi’s homeland; it was the battle of Sophiatown in South Africa and still is the battle of Johannesburg; it is the battle of Mumbai; it is the battle of history, culture, and memory against profit. Anytime a rundown, disinherited neighbourhood demonstrates the potential to become “chic”, like the Che Guevara of Ogaga Ifowodo’s poem, “You are Chic Now, Che”, primitive accumulation must set in, clear what French Interior Minister, Nicholas Sarkozy has called “la racaille” (scum), in order to make the place investor-friendly. But that is as far as Irobi’s romance with the familiar goes. In his preface to the 1947 edition of Césaire’s Notebook, André Breton holds that the hallmark of truly great poetry lies in its ability to take the familiar and divest it of every trace of its familiarity: the much-vaunted defamiliarization of postmodernist critique. Irobi achieves this not necessarily with his stimulating grasp of the historical material he treats but with the power of his imagery, the seductive concatenation of effects on the senses – visual and aural – as well as the lyricism that powers his imagination. These qualities come out in the second stanza where the violence of eviction builds up and meshes with the image of the huge metal ball used for demolition. The violence itself is attenuated by the half-serious, half-bitter, a little self-mocking tone of the narrating voice. Nevertheless, the poem does not lose sight or the possible consequences of the victory of capitalism in Harlem:
Pius Adesanmi is a a poet and Associate Professor of English at Carleton University, where he is also Director of the Project on New African Literatures, PONAL.
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