N + 1: Before-the-Fact Reading in Nathaniel Mackey's Postcontemporary Music

At the close of Djbot Baghostus's Run we learn several facts about the title character. We learn that his father sang with the Ink Spots (188) and that this accounts in part for the rhymed name "Djbot," a syncopated sort of onomastic Rorschach blot. We learn this information from a grasshopper, the ghost of the father whispering in our ear, who also tells us how to spell out the name: "d as in dot, j as in jot, b-o-t as in bottle." This "namesake ink" proffered by the ghost grasshopper provides a thematic rhyme with the closing pages of Bedouin Hornbook, where we encounter Jarred Bottle, "a band of aliases," known as "JB for short" (190), which will remind any number of readers of James Brown, Mr. J.B. himself, though the "Bottle" of this band's name prompts others, we read, to think of "J&B." It is not such a stretch, as associations go, for the band renames itself "Flaunted Fifth," a name that calls to mind sneaky drinking and audacious play, the flattened fifth of more interesting music and the emptied bottle swung out over the sea to bear its message to other shores. Jarred Bottle also proves to be a character in Djbot Baghostus's Run, someone who comes to recognize that he is all that his name implies, that he is the book's bottle imp, "an atavistic note-bearing bottle set adrift by black malapropistic shipwreck" (164). He is simultaneously a vessel carrying the metaphorical ancestral traditions linking the bottle tree of the Kongo with African America's savvy survivor of the Titanic's class and race politics, the shipwrecked detritus of middle passage who alone is survived to tell us, Shine (don't bother to look for him in James Cameron's movie). Jarred Bottle lives within the faux/folk etymology by which the name we are called out of becomes us.

What the author of Bedouin Hornbook terms the "namesake recollections" at the book's end seem, then, to have been written in the eponymous ink of Jarred Bottle, ink spots spilled out to spell out a "namesake epigraph" delivered in a letter from one "DB" and addressed to Djamilaa. Djamilaa recognizes in her turn that "DB" might be short for "Djarred Bottle," initial pseudonym of Djbot Baghostus, the ghost of a name floating through the narrative. Djamilaa's own name incorporates the Rastafarian "Jah" as well as its close cousin, the Dahomean "Da," which finds its echo once more in the poetics of "Baghostus." Mackey's fictive correspondent writes that "Baghostus" was an Osirian play on the adopted name ("Maghostus") of Malachi Favors, the extraordinary bassist for the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a band whose motto, "Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future," seemingly animates the poetry of Mackey's letters. "Ba," we are informed, is what "Egyptians called the soul" (184). The name game that Mackey sings, then, is a spirit writing, a music that answers to the name of "soul music." But Djbot's "Ba" is also conjoined to the spelling of the Afro-Bahamian trickster hero B'Anansi (who, in another twist of Osirian play is rewritten in the name of another character, as "Heidi" becomes "Aunt Nancy," a member of the fictional Mystic Horn Society). All of this indites an "Egypto-Bahamian harmonics" that typifies the books' scriptural logic, a close listening to the overtones (oversouls?) of the language. (For example, another member of the Mystic Horn Society, Penguin, has a recording of The Penguins' song "Earth Angel" on his answering machine. This answer finds its call at the other end of the line as Djbot Baghostus, drawing namesake ink from his jarred bottle, pens an after-the-fact lecture/libretto titled "E Po Pen," calling from his pen to Penguin's namesake while recalling the names of Ibo Ben and Ibo Bend.)

And, of course, it will...