Weave a Circle Round Him Thrice: Komunyakaa's Hoodoo Balancing Act

When objects are taken off an altar to be introduced into ritual action, or when they are moved from one ritual arena to another, they are first swung from side to side, or the people carrying the objects turn around and around themselves, often with the sacred pots or bottles perched on their heads. When the yams were cut and ready to be cooked, Madame Jacques's daughters were told to pick them up and balanse, balance, dance by turning round and round, as they headed up the stairs to the kitchen. To "balanse" in Haitian Creole does not mean to achieve equilibrium. It means to activate or enliven, to dance in a back-and-forth way. To raise energy by playing with conflict and contradiction is to "balanse." Balancing is a way of exposing the true nature of something by bringing it within the forcefield of clashing energies and contradictory impulses.

—Karen McCarthy Brown, "Serving the Spirits: The Ritual Economy of Haitian Vodou," Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou

In the opening essay of Blue Notes, entitled "Shape and Tonal Equilibrium," Yusef Komunyakaa underscores his hermeneutic grounding in a jazz poetics: "Jazz discovers the emotional mystery behind things; it provides a spiritual connection to the land, reconnecting us to places where its forms originated" (4). For Komunyakaa, jazz carries something of the old function of Louisiana Vodou mystery rites. And while we might locate jazz "originations" in any number of places (Southside Chicago, Harlem, Kansas City, 52nd Street, etc.), it is the "Govi of New Orleans" (Reed 6)—tagged by Ralph Ellison as "the home of mystery" (484)—and even more particularly, Congo Square, that may be most deeply considered "the originating locus of American jazz" (Kodat 2). Cognizant of jazz's mainstream import and of its filial connections to a matrix of New Orleans Vodou aesthetics, Komunyakaa asserts, "It's easy to recognize contemporary American culture in the graceful shadows swaying with the night in Congo Square. They committed an act of sabotage merely by dancing to keep forbidden gods alive" (4). The swaying counterclockwise motion of Congo Square dancers, like the ring shout, worked to "balance" mind and body against slavery's zombifications, helping balance as well the Afro-creole ethnic mix in a Louisiana that was "perhaps the most seething ethnic melting pot that the nineteenth-century world could produce" (Gioia 7). Louisiana's Afro-creole cultures owe much to a foundational Senegambian slave presence (Hall 97–118, 157–200) and to waves of Saint Domingue refugees migrating to New Orleans. During the last nine months of 1809, 9,059 refugees—over six thousand of whom were either free black Creoles or slaves—entered New Orleans in a massive "re-creolizing" wave of migration after being forced out of Eastern Cuba where they had first found asylum (or exile) following Haitian defeat of the Leclerc expedition in 1803 (Lachance 105). This is a likely period for the arrival of Louisiana's earliest recorded Voodoo priestess, Sanité Dédé, a quadroon from Sainte Domingue (Mulira 49). Komunyakaa's native south Louisiana has indeed been a deeply creolized location. The "emotional mystery" and "spiritual connection to the land" that jazz nurtures has risen from a circum-Caribbean/North American crossroads, from what Alejo Carpentier famously termed a "marvelous real" that is "not the unique privilege of Haiti [or South Louisiana] but the heritage of all of America, where we have not yet begun to establish an inventory of our cosmogonies" (87). Among the strongest North American poets who consciously work this mix of marginalized and absolutely central material (Jay Wright and Nathaniel Mackey come most immediately to mind), Yusef Komunyakaa stands out through the manner in which his rootedness in a now-mainstreamed jazz and blues helps to render him more immediately accessible—more vernacular—than these powerful kindred poets, while a passion for the surreal imagery of an Aimé Césaire, the darker masculinist edges of the blues, and a Vodou-inflected balancing power (with its old swing) gives his recently collected Pleasure Dome an edginess that refuses closure.

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