Butterfly Burning Book

Noon is too much like the middle of things, not a useful time for proposals, conclusions and disasters. Noon is just that, sunlight pouring down to melt shadows, and therefore, too many witnesses to every fall. The hope for writing lies in the writers who treat with it as a limb and not with themselves as a god. To flex composition as musculature entails the burn of acid when oxygen is rendered insufficient, the pain of tearing in the aim of new growth, the itch of healing bone and the chance of spilling blood. None of this means anything to a god, who uses and chooses and appeals within the safety of that circle that is the right subject, the right grammar, the right self. In literature as in life, there is little chance that they will be cut down far too soon. There is plenty of time to indulge in the hegemony of current times and call its aspects universal. An axis is an anchor, an origin, not the emotion itself. Emotion is much more charged and cannot be fastened to a single location; it consumes the whole body. The body relents like a canoe keeling over in turbulent streams, then skims the surface of the water to a welcoming border, without sinking; something about the weight of wood, the apex, the slender vessel, and the position of the drowned. Fact: This work is one of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century. Fact: Yvonne Vera, Zimbabwe-born and Canada-expatriated, died on the cusp of her fourth decade. Fiction, as all opinions, even the historical ones, are: I can't be the only one to find this work excruciating in the sense of the sublime. Ignore the phallic gargantuan context established for the word long ago, if you please. It's not my fault modern English is so insistent on linguistic separation of fear and worship, and the lingo of terror and horror and awe just don't conjure up the right tonal ring in my consciousness of the word. As such, it must be sublime, but in a close, burning, fish wire run too fast for the endorphins, self-administered abortion feel of the phrase, a battlefield little touched by authors that all men fear. Catharsis grounded in the mid-twentieth century, of the sort no white person can grasp. So tall, these trees, firm and impossible. They look as though they have been built by hand to carry improper histories. Anyone who takes potshots at this for the plot obviously had no idea what they were doing when they read Romeo and Juliet. Soap opera, little children, all this quick and easy self-defense blown apart when Eros and Thanatos refuse to stop fucking for the sake of your comfort zone. A shot in the dark, a boiling pot in the air, seventeen men hung from a tree and all the universal tones of a white world rendered useless when sidewalks are anathema and asbestos is acknowledged without flinching. The lack of tetanus shot's a drag, but so is the centuries-long equating of sanitation to genocide. It's not that you couldn't analyze this text without considering the politics of women and fertility and skin color and the social euthanasia that is that idol of capitalism, but that there is no literary surgeon skilled enough to trap the benign bits in a vat and leave every last measure of metastasis behind. To all those whose first instinct in reading is to sidestep corruption: you're out of your league here. Black wood in a flood moving in full circles. If there is a shore along this river it is not yet a shelter but something hostile. It is an unknown possession. An obstacle against which the bodies are blindly thrust, and thrust again. Wood floats on water: blazes in flame. I'll never become used to mourning writers. Desire is for the slow examining of wounds.