The Exhaustibility of the Body

In his 1974 essay on graffiti, Norman Mailer talks to a group of "painters," as he calls graffiti artists, about the problem of the name. The painters don't use their own names; "they adopt one. It's like a logo." The challenge is to "hit their names" as often as possible. Mailer notes that hit is an accurate term: "You hit your name," Mailer says,

and maybe something in the whole scheme of the system gives a death rattle. For now your name is over their name, over the subway manufacturer, the Transit Authority, the city administration. Your presence is on their presence, your alias hangs over their scene. There is a pleasurable sense of depth to the elusiveness of meaning.

Artist CAY 161 puts it this way: "The name is the faith of graffiti." He repeats it: "The name is the faith."

Logo as faith. Faith as logo. And might I add: Logos as faith.

But violence at the core. Resistance. A faithful subversion.

Akilah Oliver would tell you that graffiti has changed since Mailer's essay appeared, and she would know because her son Oluchi Nwadi McDonald was a graffiti artist whose name was LINKS: "by design i shall call my son / painter." Coffee House Press does a fine, if visually petite, job of reproducing murals (her son's?—there is no attribution) in Oliver's poem "the visible unseen."

McDonald died on March 13, 2003 at the age of twenty in an incidence of hospital malpractice widely covered by the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps unintentionally, Oliver's book of poems, which was written in the wake of the loss of her son but does not at all narrate his story, raises a twenty-first-century issue about the relationship between a crushing backstory, and what we might call Oliver's front matter: these beautiful, various—and variegated—poems. Two minutes on a search engine will give you more of this tragedy than you can bear, but one challenge remains: how does that inter-text affect these poems?

For instance, the poems are not really "about" McDonald's death.

On the other hand, they are. In fact, in Oliver's expression of her post-March 13 experience, we see (again) the breadth of her art and the depth of her intellect as she addresses a wide range of relevant social issues. Formally, the poems nod to William Carlos Williams, Black Mountain, Oulipo, the "negro spiritual," and more; the content strikes at poststructuralism, feminism, and queer theory, with specific hints of Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, John Berger, and Roland Barthes. For a book that is "about," finally, dreams of ghosts that used to have bodies—the exhaustibility of the body—its author has exhausted every way into the impenetrable: the after/math.

Oliver begins with a much-noted problem in the English language: its lack of a term that articulates the bodily relation of mother to child. "I his body is disintegrating," she writes, "I his body is ossification…. / … / The body inside the body astounds." She will discuss, in this work, the sacred: "To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]"; "i didn't expect to be in this temple"; and "what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site…."

Oliver moves on to frustrations with capitalist systems. The third poem gives us "a brown messiah, reproduced on a white hoodie" as well as "and to tender down the wayward slope, a loved boy / and to have leverage, like on occasion we did before / … / and to be born with a suit full of aces…." As it happens, this poem, "laughter from the altar," slopes to right margin as it proceeds, or would if typeset on one page, concluding, "and to show not fear when faced with thine enemies, a toast in the house of friends." The reader's eye is "tendered"—and "tender" is a word that appears frequently in these pages—down the same inevitable slope: the body as...