Adam Day

Jennifer Nelson’s fourth poetry collection (and sixth book), On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies, is a complex but accessible and fascinating read. It’s a joy to spend time with, and it is over before you’d like it to be.

Nelson is not only a poet, but a historian of early modern art at the University of Delaware, so she is perfectly positioned to confront institutions like libraries, universities, and museums. She opens the book with a prologue, “Sonnet,” where she tells us:

            This is the rule of ghosts. They endure

            as much as they’re remembered

            and carry loss like a song.

            This is the loam on the forest floor,

            the ongoing of the unremembered

            and those remembered wrong.

Nelson brings to us various texts (I use the term her broadly) in On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies, remembering them, adding to their life and prominence. But the question is how to remember in the right way, if there is such a thing. This is where “loss” comes in. Texts lose presence as they’re forgotten, and/or when they are “remembered wrong.” And complexity is brought, in part, by the fact that those doing the remembering are multidimensional, “a unison of bots,” as Nelson puts it. Thus, this is a book about, among other things, the resistance that texts pose to understanding and interpretation:

            …it’s a fantasy

            to return to conditions of creation, to the original,

            causes of things joined wrong, disharmony. The order

            of being only human

            is unnatural at best.

 And there is here a productive kind of disharmony; a constant questioning of the established, a making of good trouble, as such, which is connected to the resistance to interpretation, which is due in large part to the structural context in which texts are made. Who made it, why did they make it, how did they make it, and in what context was it created? Nelson largely brings forth texts that are indivisible from the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, indicating to us that if there is a right way to remember, then it is through a continuous cycle of reflection, action, and further reflection. This allows for ongoing learning and adaptation. Nelson examines the root causes of oppression and inequality, questioning dominant narratives, identifying how power operates within specific contexts. Such an approach challenges power structures, promotes social change, and potentially creates more equitable systems. But, again, all of this is dependent on how one sees (and  listens):

            Believing we can listen

            can be the closest thing

            to listening, and change

            life.

            One text Nelson confronts is the Boxer Codex, a manuscript from the 1500s produced in the Philippines, likely commissioned by a Spanish governor during occupation. It contains 75 colored illustrations of the peoples of China, the Philippines, Japan, Java, the Moluccas, the Ladrones, and Siam. About 270 pages of Spanish text describe these places, their inhabitants and customs. An additional 88 smaller drawings show mythological deities and demons, and both real and mythological birds and animals copied from popular Chinese texts and books in circulation at the time. The last lines before the introduction of the Boxer Codex are from the poem, “Condition for Retention”: “…In this museum / I brought a knife / to sabotage the famous/ triumph of death.” The knife is a tool for restoration, an object of research, and an object of disruption.

            Nelson ponders in “The Boxer Codex”:

            Why write an essay here. For the first time I notice a bundle of rods like a fasces

            dim in the sea, against its weave, and a CHamoru person diving after: this is iron,

            the only good

            CHamoru people wanted from the Spanish, the point of the coconuts, the water

            gourds, the fish, the thing

            that’s most amusing to the profiteers: the different market, that a stupid knife

            would fetch more goods than gold

Thus, Nelson links texts to the conditions in which they were created and explores their attitude to that world as a way of helping to illuminate the impact they have on ours. It brings to mind the slogan, “The long march through the institutions,” a strategy of creating radical change in government by becoming part of it. As a scholar, Nelson is in a position to help change the way we see texts, to critique or dismantle hegemonic power. In other words, Nelson creates a confrontation or opposition to the existing status quo and its legitimacy in various spheres of life. Thus, the contradiction inherent in dialectical thinking is key to Nelson’s writing. She is, she tells us, after all, “a scholar through and through.”

She does this in part by featuring the relationships indigenous people have with the earth and with each other: “Remind me to tell you / barangays still exist / each polity a sailboat / and community at once.” Barangays, for all intents and purposes, are well-organized villages or neighborhoods, but the word barangay originated from balangay, a type of boat used by a group of Austronesian peoples when they migrated to the Philippines. These barangays contradict colonial assumptions of the “native” as somehow in need of the structures and strictures of the imperial outsider. Indeed, Nelson points to the masterful paintings of the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and the woodcuts of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644)—the artists of which would have been seen as no less in need of “governance / and conquista” than those depicted in the Boxer Codex—as influences on the art of that very Spanish text.

            Nelson tells us:

            Scholars misinterpret

            images for a lving, call them

            worlds, a synecdoche

            based on faith in the moment

            of creation.

Yet she “resist[s] bad scholar listening,” and as seen in the poem “Frontispiece,” she never simply accepts her role as see-er/interpreter, but keeps in mind the complexities of the work she is doing, and the potential impossibility of seeing correctly, as such, which means seeing from numerous vantage points:

            I’m not ready to pass through the arch

            if to pass through the arch

            commits me

            to words. Supremacy’s

            binary. Print and white…

Yet, she goes on to recognize that she is “…sworn to complain / as the witness of all sides,” someone who can indeed contribute to reevaluating institutions, reevaluating ekphrasis through ever-evolving consciousness, despite asking later in On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies, “How could I judge anyone…”