Sony Ton-Aime’s Konbit is a book of anniversaries: birthdays, deaths, the day(s?) before, the day after. Centered in the orbit of days recurring and days past, the Bois Caïman ceremony: August 14, 1791, the start of the Haitian Revolution, a voodoo ceremony held in the northern city of Bois Caïman, during which revolutionaries first established plans for independence. In Haitian creole, “konbit” describes an act of sociopolitical work pursued within a community — “a communal work that started on August 14, 1791, at Bois Caïman,” in Ton-Aime’s words. Anniversaries give way to a series of congregations throughout the book: leaders of the Haitian Revolution, Dutty Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, voodoo priestess Cecile Fatiman; writers of the 20th century, Frantz Fanon and Jacques Stephen Alexis; and into the present, dotted outlines, thrusted into the past, The Seer and LaWomann. I begin with context: if poetry is a medium of time, Konbit strategically pressurizes how history overlays its poetic method.
“Do not mourn my hands in your doom,” says Dutty Boukman in one of the book’s several lyric monologues. “Boukman Says Goodbye to His Master on the Eve of the Bois Caïman Ceremony,” continuing, “Though men like you I shall order to kill, / you, sir, my rebirth will see.” Here, Boukman’s speech is placed across a sequence of poems anticipating the Bois Caïman ceremony: divided into three sections, Konbit happens on the eve, the day of, and the day after. The narrative fractures into our present, lyrics interrupting chronology, displacing the book into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “Do not mourn my hands in your doom:” this poem, like the book, torques repeated phrases and echoes across rhymes to create a sense of time that draws inward, constructed by the formal patterns of the poem. “Do not mourn me when my head is pruned to bloom,” then later, “Do not mourn my departure from your room,” “do not mourn their fate, for in death they bloom,” and finally, “Do not mourn my departure from your room.” Upon each iteration, one feels, sonically, what has stayed the same across the obvious changes. This is Ton-Aime’s accomplishment in Konbit: a narrative ambivalence across individual lyrics that denounces nostalgia while suggesting, in structural terms, the profound cultural significance of the Bois Caïman ceremony.
The day before: the first section of Konbit inhabits a mode of anticipation and establishes formal patterns that will be extended and reinvented later. “This all will come to pass on Assumption Day; / your soul will rise up as you become a savage” — foretold and prophesied, Ton-Aime usefully foregrounds early in the book, among the cast of characters, the figure of “The Seer,” as here in “The Seer Predicts Boukman’s Death on the Eve of the Bois Caïman Ceremony.” By extending the prophesied acts beyond the literal events of the Bois Caïman ceremony, Konbit complicates the historical narrative: into the days after, the decades after, and into present-day Haiti. In other words, the figure of “The Seer” describes the poems’ attitude towards themselves, their process of making, and the book’s relationship to history. In “The Seer Addresses the Poet on the Day of the Bois Caïman Ceremony,” for example, Ton-Aime mockingly confirms a method:
Look at you, digging in the past and thinking
you’re it. You ain’t. How can people let
this happen? You asked, as if Palestine
was not once a country and Joe is not rotting
in Congo. Not the country. The box down
in Louisiana. This evidence, to be seen,
requires open eyes.
There is a degree of playfulness in the overlap of you: two sides of the same figure, the future induced through poetry. What does the sentimentalizing “open eyes” suggest in the context of making a mistake: thinking you’re it, incorrectly placing Joe in the Republic of the Congo. After all, what kind of evidence does not require open eyes?Upon suggesting this question, the poem asserts its self-reflexive conditions. Evidence can be contrived simply for the purposes of its own creation. The poem continues, “Your revolution, dear, / these words will not amount to a thing / if they fail to make their targets rich.” The poet speaks back to himself. In speaking to himself in this way, the poet does not propose an answer to the eternally American question about the social function of poetry, but instigates a more private ambivalence: I must do this, I am compelled to do this, but to what effect?
In the konbit spirit, one answer to this question might be to offer these words — this idiosyncratic account — to the people around you. These social linkages clarify how a private language is fashioned: “Plainly put, the seer cannot write, so / a prophet is needed, a middleman,” Ton-Aime writes in “A Business Lesson on the Day of the Bois Caïman Ceremony.” The day of: now in this present that exceeds itself, that recurs in the small interactions surrounding the ceremony. For Ton-Aime, an offering of language might present itself as an idiomatic lesson — “This is what we do; / we survive ‘till we die,” from “To Be Optimistic in a Dying World” — or as an anecdote that reacts to the surprising mundanity of memory: “When I was little, my momma told me / the future is a snake swallowing its tail. My daddy said / it was a dog sucking on his own dick…” The ouroboros revised to subvert its classical charm, once again the poems playfully comment on their own making: the future, for a book obsessed with the formal structure of time, is a masturbatory image. An event on the day of the Bois Caïman ceremony is transposed into another moment. If one remembers “Attending a Wake on the Day of the Bois Caïman Ceremony,” this death is inseparable from occasion: “The end, like a circle, has come / in many forms depending on who / you ask, if you ask me.” Here again the figure of the ouroboros appears with an echo of T.S. Eliot, yet these lines are also funny. The great historical attention of this book is complimented by Ton-Aime’s wit and charm, a way of challenging a tone that often borders sentimentality.
The seer, the prophet, the middleman, revolutionaries: this is a book of relations and relational actions. Another figure who appears in the cast: LaWomann, a “New World Christian / armed with a killer smile sculpted in shock,” as described in “Rotten.” (It’s perhaps useful here to note that Konbit was preceded by a chapbook titled LaWomann, published by Ironworks Press in 2019, dedicated to Ton-Aime’s mother). LaWomann is notable among the figures of Konbit in that she’s described as being constructed relative to other people, a figure that stands between symbol and historical reality. We learn at various points that “LaWomann married the wrong man,” that she also “invigorates delicate men,” that she “grew up with her parents and siblings / but happy is a tricky word to translate when / stomachs and baskets keep emptying their guts,” and perhaps most notably:
LaWomann is made of important griefs.
Apollinaire stole her kinky hair and
replaced it with blonde weaves. Verlaine
took her sun, her coconut tree, and her beach;
gave her snow and a sense of second class in return.
Baudelaire gave her a big bottom, a creole complex.
This catalogue of “important grief” consists of French colonial depictions of Haitian women — when she feels most unreal and othered, most like a trope that develops synchronously with the events of Bois Caïman. Upon her own physical transformation, the Haitian landscape is displaced, figuratively linked to a national displacement through French colonialism. LaWomann is a mother suffering from postpartum depression, “in the corner sobbing,” who experiences the death of her own mother, who chants “Samba he, samba he, samba he.” In a book of relations and relational actions, LaWomann centralizes the necessity of generational caregiving: to one’s community, to parents, to strangers, to children.
“To a Son on his Fourteen Birthday,” then, opens with a condition: “If we must start somewhere, let it be with death.” One must start to find their way to the middle, the place where prolonged change can happen. But starting is no inevitability for this prose poem, neither does it suggest across this collection a point before which nothing has happened: “But before that, we will live.” It’s this pronoun “we” that stands out more than any other word in Konbit: across the Haitian revolutionaries and characters, symbols and allusions, an ambivalent “we” is the ever-expanding center of these poems, referring at once to a specific community while also changing in context. There are lessons passed down across generations, a familiar knowledge made idiosyncratic by the people who tell it. “Speak when it is necessary,” for example, or later, “For politics — not that I know much but — I have seen monkeys with checkbooks do better.” On his fourteenth birthday, in the liminal stage between childhood and adulthood, axiomatic turns take on a profundity because of the “I” who shares this knowledge. Monkeys with checkbooks: the framework of knowledge characterizes what, exactly, a fourteen-year-old son is willing to hear, determined by the person speaking, by how these figures count themselves in the “we” of their larger community. It can’t all be playful, or rather, playfulness begets a tone that allows for the most severe truths, as the poem ends: “For race, nature decided you had to wear your crime in your eyes, hair, and fingers. For death, live in the smallest details.”
Nature decided, the French colonialists decided, or so decided another figure positioned against the pronoun “we.” “Feed the voice of liberty unto us. And forgive / them for they know not the pit they have dug,” Ton-Aime writes in “The Seer Predicts Boukman’s Death on the Eve of the Bois Caïman Ceremony.” Less oppositions than fractioned constellation, these communities exist apart from the other: Konbit animates their tremendous overlap and counterinfluence, extending beyond the past and into our present cultural moment. César Vallejo, Frantz Fanon, and the 20th century Haitian poet Jacques Stephen Alexis overlay contemporary poets like Tim Seibles and Tyehimba Jess, reinvented forms like “a broken sonnet,” and recent historical events, as in the poem “1994”: “FDA announced patient zero! / Guantanamo, declared HIV prison camp!” Perhaps one word for this method would be a structural braiding, a way of accounting for the several political and cultural influences that first necessitated Bois Caïman and now a continued Konbit spirit. I earlier described these forces as ambivalent: let’s go back to the immediate future, “On the Day After the Bois Caïman Ceremony.” The poem begins, “We wake up the same, and the world changes.” This is another way of describing how a poem moves its readers: as one pattern stays the same, another ruptures, and we feel that change in real time, attending with a sonic and figurative knowledge to how this moment recurs. Poetry as a medium of time, Konbit as a structural force that congregates everyone in the present: the poem ends, “The world’s end the seer had promised did not come. / No one died of weakness, it was a lie. / We wanted too much.”
