Du Bois Protests Italy’s Assault on Ethiopia (1935)
“Negroes [suffer] from Nothingness.”
—Gertrude Stein
I.
To see ugliness in Sade,
to feel ugliness in Eliot,
to hear ugliness in Pound,
vis-à-vis the ceaselessly droning, Latin quarters—
The Vatican, The Sorbonne—
is to understand how arose
black-heart, black-shirt government
in a white-marble state.
Frost is bleak, Eliot frosty—
a fool gabbling Kitchen Dutch,*
prematurely ejaculating whimpers
about “the world’s end”—
i.e. the extinction of Albion’s axiomatic, albescent Supremacy.
That’s what Mussolini and Hitler symbolize.
So, Italians, agitated, shake swords at Selassie,
and now phalanxes go into abbatoirs—
where scythes (half mandibles)
swing with the pendulum gravity
of Poe-louche, Poe-designed, horizontal guillotines.
The sky over Ethiopia is burnt-cork
because Musso’s bomblets—
cluster-clouds of poison gas—
as radioactive as God’s visage—
blaze the dry-grass huts
and incinerate sleeping numbers—
charred characters—
all human characteristics erased.
Skin goes to boiling; it sloughs off the bones.
Deer-coloured Abyssinians—
tawny, chestnut-tint Abyssinians—
die, but fight,
as indignant as pepper,
launching spears contra machine-guns.
Partial Blame for these pogroms?
Pound! Yeats? Pound!
& Eliot, though he’s inapprehensible—
an obscure War Criminal,
camouflaged as an affable banker,
Ol’ Possum, obscenely smirking
as History advances its obituary
for the final, free, African state.
(No, I don’t count Liberia as sovereign.)
This clan of poets backs tacitly the Ku Klux Klan,
hopelessly lisping Christian irrelevancies,
or lustfully barking anthems.
I could give up Shakespeare.
I’ve given up on Pound.
I give away Eliot.
Indifferent to killing,
they license indifferent killing,
croon unintelligible Eliot’s asinine Grief,
his fear that Spengler is Socrates.
II.
Oh, the cruelty of the modern poets—
to edit History,
black-up or white-out consitutions,
paper over dark-dark hearts,
italicize the globe as Europe’s property,
and, in all, act as chaste as corpses!
Well, joint by joint,
this is how the current monsters
got pieced together:
all those elegies decrying
Caucasian Decay, Devolution, Decadence,
the downward trajectory of post-Darwin,
animalistic Theology,
the tantrums of anthems—
all became instruction manuals
for surplus police stations,
Judas legislatures,
arsonist parliaments,
the actual wreckage of Versailles
and the castration of the League of Nations,
and Poetry gone to Odium and Ordure,
with Sadean governors
constructing Machiavellian prison-camps,
Rasputin palaces,
and according fresh maiming,
new Mayhem,
to Africa.
III.
Plunge into the dark abyss of the Occidental classroom,
where chalk eclipses Blackness,
squawking,
and Reason vanishes
into either foggy Erasure
or swirls of smudged figures,
squealing.
Here’s where scribblers, in training for Music,
get torn up,
trying to score Deutschland
Dixieland.
IV.
I recall 1929—
the routine swarm of bankers
leaping out Manhattan skyscrapers—
to make a big splash,
bellyflops, ruddy—
after turning investment portfolios
into sieves of red ink.
Economic History is Ado and fuss—
Adolf versus Dreyfuss—
the 20th century bled into by the 19th.
Indeed, Victoria mothered an Empire of Rippers—
imperialists, promiscuous capitalists—
permitting child labour as a form of sex-work.
No wonder the theologians can’t explain
Versailles or Ethiopia:
They are still investigating Golgotha—
and the unanswerable torching of Alexandria’s Library.
I am sure of this:
Musso and Adolf will die
to get swallowed up
in the glittering enigma
of Napoléon’s sarcophagus—
for there’s no other hiding place for their ilk—
nor for their Lilliputian legislators—
not even in opaque smoke.
Besides, they believe they will mirror
Napoléon’s baroque failure—
if not Caesar’s conquests.
[Ottawa (Ontario) 15 janvier mmxvii
& Whitehorse (Yukon Territory) 18 janvier mmxvii]
Notes
* Pidgin English.
* In Haligonian cemeteries, the Titanic graves—
so miniscule—
multitudinous marbles—
still are laid out like store-shelf items—
lots of dainties for earthworms’ palates.
* Cf. X.
