Ulysses is unusually obsessed with questions of death and dying and the hereafter or lack thereof. Like Teju Cole’s recent Open City – and though not as obvious – it is a ‘walking’ novel in which the protagonist traverses a city – in this instance, Dublin, in one day. Bloom’s character alludes to Odysseus and the former’s journey through the city mimics the epic wanderings of the latter in Homer’s The Odyssey. In the dark, funereal Hades chapter of that novel, Bloom marches to the cemetery with a funeral cortege during Paddy Dignam’s burial. In the stream-of-thought style made famous by Joyce, this maverick, apostate Jew-turned-catholic unbeliever ridicules the idea of a physical hereafter typical of the usual way Christians misread the Bible:
Lots of them [the dead at the cemetery] lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers, old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last Day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.
The ridiculousness of the raw physical sense in which Christians talk about the afterlife is expressed in the stream of Bloom’s consciousness above.
What Joyce is saying through the thoughts of Bloom is that there is no proof of an afterlife in the usual Christian way it is usually described by the clergy and accepted by the laity. Beyond the physical world there are metaphysical as opposed to physical principles at work, which the ‘church fathers’ refuse to comprehend. When one dies, the physical world has ended in a sense. Whatever comes after, if at all, is either beyond our comprehension or of a completely different order – a hyperreal or surreal and dreamlike state and so on. Hence ‘once you re dead you are dead.’ This is why another modernist like Joyce, T.S. Elliot, declares, “in my beginning is my end.” The End begins at the moment of birth. In a Wole Soyinka poem, “Abiku,” about death and reincarnation, the newborn ‘abiku’ child, whose mythical fate it is to be born and to die repeatedly in infancy is described as “shaping mounds [graves or death] from the yolk [of infancy or life].”
Every time another prophet of doom stands up in public to sell us his nightmares, we should be prompt in reminding him or her that the whole idea of a ending of the world is philosophically contradictory since the world ends everyday for the departed. If they persist then we ought to sing them their own “Endsongs” as offered by the Nigerian poet, Chiedu Ezeanah:
You have lost the world
You ‘ve lost the words
You reap plots of silence
As silences dismantles the leaves
As silences dismantles lives around me
In the minute and hour approaching stars
The trees stink of rain.
World without end, Amen.
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“The future is always a present.” – It’s like being trapped in another persons nightmare! This is a great piece Ama. An alarming prognosis of the progressive operations of the inequity in South Africa.
This is a passionate piece – and a sad one too. If only Zuma could be so self-reflective.
“To a Louse, on Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church”
And would some Power the small gift give us
To see ourselves as others see us! (Robert Burns)
Was thoroughly shamed by the role-reversal. And I remembered Ayi Kwei Armah saying something about love for the white man and the expulsion of colonialists…
Contagion. I was so moved by our conversation that we had months ago so I wrote a poem about it because I am a poet. I wrote about blood being spilled, innocent blood, mother’s milk (our blood rushing through our veins is the same color it is just that we have different faiths. The color of our skin if you cut deep enough is the same color. We bleed the same.
People do terrible things and what does the world do around them, always circling and circling like vultures above carrion. They respond with silence. Of course there are voices who demand answers, elegant solutions to poverty. Ignorance is bliss. ‘White’ ignorance. ‘Black middle class’ ignorance. Brutality was ignored once again.
The world is a cold place for Indians, Muslims, coloreds, blacks, the Chinese, every racial group on this planet who do not have money. Money makes the world go round.
I’m going to leave it there for now. I will post my poetry on the Lonmin incident/Marakana Inquiry on my Facebook wall. Will we ever live in bliss one day or will the divided between the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich grow and grow and grow. There’s too much history between all of us in South Africa and instead of the introverted diplomat coming out, intellectual, bright, engaging us with how we can make this country work, the extrovert has come out in all of us standing in line with our credit cards, handing them over to tellers.
The Rainbow Nation, the African Renaissance, what will this generation be called, what will be our clarion call, our legacy.
This is a beautiful piece of writing, and sad, and enraging. Thanks so much, Amatoritsero.
Intriguing editorial here.
I do agree that there is an afterlife; though the word metaphysical may not be my choice word to describe life in the ethereal. It is a shame how certain religions choose to comprehend the afterlife as a physical existence.
Now I’m really interested in reading the rest of this issue!
Speaking in 666 Tongues
Madness is an old man’s art,
Dear brood in the throes of second birth,
Possession becomes miracle-mongers
Acting out the booming babel
Beneath the august realm of the mad:
Madness is not an affair of youth.
Armed with stagy child’s play of mimic maniacs,
Blood-and-thunder prophets ham the art
Up the painted shrine of pentecostal expo,
And thereabouts city slickers profess madness,
Kicking and clashing over one ball
Even as the sage pro scores with two balls.
In number as ancient as sin
The unhinged tongue of tongues stakes out
The adjacency of heaven and hell
And the advent of the beast of doomsday
Touting magic amid chic glossolalia:
The genius of madness takes more than forked tongues.
– Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
I have many things to say with regard to this unique edition and its philosophical/theological editorial, but I would choose to hold my peace until I consume the whole piece buried in this edition. You never can tell. Let’s see….
I have many things to say about this philosophical and theological editorial. However, I would, rather, prefer to remain calm until I gulp the whole content to know the real taste, but that doesn’t mean I’m in between the road. No! I’m not. Precaution is the reason. You never can tell. Anyway, the editorial denotes something far from inferiority. Hence, I wish to hold my peace at the moment. The editor pushed me to do so. Thanks!
Nice poem by Amatoritsero Ede