An Africa at every turn : Nathaniel Mackey’s layered landscapes and puns of place

Abstract

As that complex of developments that we now call “globalisation” continues to shrink and collapse our sense of planetary Place, serial poet and epistolary novelist Nathaniel Mackey’s works can be read as ongoing critiques of utopian “One World” dogmas. In Mackey’s Cubistic approach to locale, wordplay (as world-play) allows several sites to overlap and inhabit a single node on a trans-historic map. His jerry-rigged journeys ‘put one place/atop another’ so that history doesn’t merely repeat, but engages in counter-point and co-existence. For Mackey, “elsewhere” is an ever-advancing horizon, a site that never stands still for complete nomenclature, and an Africa scattered and felt primarily as a mocking residue and a womb turned inside out. Suitably, a large portion of his poetic energies are spent discovering new ways to merge sites together. In his page-layout itself, a ceaseless enjambment causes the poetic line to be forever ‘round[ing] the bend’. In an interlinked saga that connects over a dozen volumes of poetry and prose, Mackey’s layered landscapes treat Setting like an ‘Inn of Many Monikers’ in which Locale and History are vertically stacked chords, the African scattering-of-tribes is treated as a primal scenario, and linear time is collapsed into a singular Present.