Literature and Politics

Alice Notley’s narrative poem Alma, or the Dead Women (2006), is a highly experimental anti-war epic that engages in the work of collective mourning, and utilizes the power of language as a ‘weapon’ against ‘the usurper figment president’.    Notley interweaves the events surrounding September 11, 2001, and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, with the phantasmal trances of Alma and the cult of ‘dead women’ who surround her (13).  Collectively, the women form an elegiac chorus.  Their epic is not merely a lamentation, but also a conjuring capable of creation and ‘negation’ (125).   In keeping with the text’s aspirations toward literary shamanism, the chants of the dead women enact the ‘unmattering’ (the cellular deconstruction) of ‘the fathers of death’ (119, 340).  Notley’s visionary ‘shades’ return from their underworld disarmingly fluent in the ‘literal though not literate way of unsong’ (94, 100).  

This paper explores Notley’s interrogation of a nation paralysed by a violent cultural amnesia: ‘the rhetoric of this war takes no account for the shame of the past.  there is blood in the ground everywhere’ (68).  Notley illuminates the echoes of old ‘massacres’ embedded within the political language of pre-emptive strikes and permissible torture.  Her text embodies a poetics that is rooted in calling forth, and listening to, the discarded voices and blank spaces that exist in the wake of a war that is, seemingly, open-ended.   Alma and her subaltern chorus engage in a form of mourning that is at once fiercely personal in its clarity and specificity, and abstract in its capacity to vocalize ‘a howling, planetary grief’ (187).   Notley fuses local, cultural, and global bereavements to construct an ecopoetics of mourning, an act that is both borderless and inherent.