Holiness and Jewish Rebellion: "Questions of Accent,"
Twenty Years Afterwards
by Murat Nemet-Nejat
[First published in
Languages
of Modern Jewish Cultures/ Comparative Perspectives, co-edited
by Joshua L. Miller and Anita Norich (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 2016, pp. 386-393)]
"Questions of
Accents," first published in 1993, was my response to Andrei Codrescu’s
invitation to contribute to his literary journal The Exquisite Corpse. I chose my topic because we were two writers
born in neighboring, foreign lands (Romania, for centuries under the domination
of the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey, the surviving residue of that defunct
empire). We were Jews, writing in English in the United States. We both spoke
the language with an accent. After a false start, which I soon abandoned, the
question inescapably became: how is speaking a language with an accent
reflected in the writing of it? The essay is an analytical meditation on the
nature of Jewish writing and its relation to my work within the framework of
American poetry.
The essay created
an uproar at the time, multiple people writing to the journal attacking or
supporting it.[1]
The present essay hopes to show how the explosive ideas in that essay contained
the seeds, the trajectory of my writing during the ensuing twenty years by
focusing on one book Eda: An Anthology of
Contemporary Turkish Poetry[2]—on
the one hand an anthology, simultaneously, a book permeated with the disruptive
holiness of a Jewish accent.
I. Consciousness Makes Jews
of Us All
"Scared
like a Jew."
"No,
smart like Jew."
Whether secular or
believer, Sephardi or Ashkenazi, what pulls Jews together is an "absence of indifference"[3]
to a group of events (or myths, it does not matter): as the chosen people, Jews
were given a piece of land by God, accompanied by a series of injunctions.
Then, they lost that land. The majority of stories in the Torah circulate around this toxic/intoxicating mixture of
empowerment and loss and its ensuing suffering, the Garden of Eden and the
Fall, The Tower of Babel and its destruction, the sacrifice of Isaac and the
withdrawal of that injunction, the hasty
escape from Egypt and forty years of slow
exile, etc., etc. Continuously, there is the double bind of being a Chosen
People, also chosen for punishment. Job, God's favorite Jew, is picked by Him
to reflect His glory by his loyalty to Him through undeserved catastrophes: the
absolute and stunned silence (in the suffering Job and in the reader) this act
evokes, or infinite commentaries:
RAINBOW
Rainbow is
the first gauntlet of boast by God in The
Bible. Serial criminals,
hearing voices, emblazon their message in
red on the mirror, rouge, blood,
after
having butchered their victim on the bed. The killer, drained, in its
murderous ecstasy, does it say,
remorseful, for that very moment, "I'm sorry.
Pardon me. I'll never do this again?" Then, write the message
in the
As if out of a
Greek myth, Adonai is a jealous master, as if, part of Him at least, was
created in man's image:
Thou shalt
have no other god before me.
A Jew can assume
any attitude he/she wishes towards this set of factual or mythical events, for
or against God's behavior, identifying with or rejecting the tribalism implicit
in being His chosen people, trusting or doubting their literalness, it doesn't
matter. But he or she can not be
indifferent to them. The awareness and stance towards them define one's
identity. Without this consciousness a
Jew (or Jewish history with a delineable identity) does not exist.
Ambiguity
towards power is... the contemporary Jewish theme.... This
ambiguity is embedded in Jewish history, in
Jewish identity.... Despite its
protestations,
the Torah is history written by the
powerful, a nation chosen
by God, taking
somebody else's land to make its own. On the other hand, the
history of the diaspora is the history
of the victim, the dispossessed, the
Galut,
the pogroms, the Holocaust. Where does the Jew's allegiance belong?...
Though this conflict has become
explicit after the birth of Israel, it was
implicit,
as Jews embraced assimilation and moved physically out of the
Ghetto, in the Diaspora also. Often,
economically, Jews belonged to the
privileged
class; but culturally, and linguistically, they were the outsiders, the
underprivileged...."
("Questions of Accent")[5]
An enduring
ambivalence towards power, embracing it as a recipient and possessor of a
magical gift, physical or moral; but also identifying with suffering, the
victim as a consequence of the same gift, permeates Jewish writing. Jewish
thought enacts a dialectic, moral, political, spiritual and literary, between
the have and the have-not. This dialectic constitutes its essence. It is the
magma for what I call its "accent."
A diaspora Jew can
not imagine putting a sword to the neck of a fellow sufferer, Jewish or not.
From where does his sense of power come then? From a withholding (an emptiness), as God orders Abraham also to do, or
as Freud sees the power in Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses in Moses's grip,
his withholding the impulse to smash the tablets into smithereens seeing Jews
spurn their jealous God worshipping the golden calf.
History and spirit
unify in a psychic anagram. Jewish history is a saga of dispossession, pogroms,
a spectacle of yearning of the have-not. Simultaneously, it may be seen, and is seen, by the same Jew in a
reverse manner: despite suffering through centuries, the Jew has remained, is the chosen tribe,
victorious, the possessor of the gift. One has two mirrors facing each other,
two angles of the same coin.
II. Hebrew, and Writing Written by Jews
Since the Torah
was written in Hebrew, one may assert that the mother tongue, the dream
language of Jewish consciousness is Hebrew. If so, then a startling truism
reveals itself. Outside a group of religious texts, poems, prayers, essays,
etc., starting with the Babylonian Talmud, by far the majority of Jewish
writing—all that embodies its moral, political or philosophical thinking, its
soul, its literary achievements, religious or secular—were written in foreign
tongues, in languages which in a critical (though perhaps unconscious) sense
were alien to the writers. Because exiled from mother tongue, the language of
his/her soul, the Jewish writer can choose, must choose his/her tongue.[6]
Language is a potentiality. The implicit unity between land and language is
ruptured. More than any semantic matter, this
distance between the holiness of a perfect language and the specific
mode of the language at hand (its physical reality) determines the texture of
the language. How does the Jewish writer resolve this dilemma?
What is,
then, writing which has an accent? It is a writing which does not
completely identify with the power,
authority of the language it uses; but
confronts,
without glossing over, the gap between the user and the language.
Such writing reveals an ambiguity
towards power: the writer chooses to
embrace
a language (because of its pervasive centrality) which he/she knows
is not quite his/her own, is
insufficient for his/her inner purposes. Accent in
writing has little to do with explicit theme or semantic
context; it rather has
to do with
texture, structure, the scratches, distortions, painful gaps (in
rhythms, syntax, diction, etc.) caused
by the alien relationship between the
writer
and his/her adopted language. Accent is cracks (many unconscious,
the way a speaker is unaware of his or her
accent when speaking, does not
have to create it ) on the
transparent surface. ... Accented Jewish writing
III. The Parable of the Writer's Block
In 1959 I
left the hurly-burly of Turkey, its rich vein of bigotry and psychic
resonance behind. Though I did not focus on it
then, I left my mother tongue
behind,
which is Turkish, which I am not. In 1961 I decided to become a
writer. As an American writer my first
act was self-immolation. I had to
destroy
the Turkishness in me, feel, hopefully one day, dream in English. If I
had a thought in Turkish, I aborted,
nicked it. I chose not have a thought exist
unless
originating in English, a language which overwhelmed me because I
had said my first words in it only six years
before. The result was a writer's
block
which lasted about ten years during which I wrote three or four poems
The ten years were my years in the desert. The central
discovery of the essay is that one can not escape one's mother tongue, even
though one can not write in it. Along with it came the realization that full
assimilation into English is an illusion, if not a suicide. English must remain
a cool, basically alien language. The result is a condition that describes the
poetics of accent:
American
English, as a poetic language, is not a mother tongue in the usual
sense but a pseudo-mother, step-mother
tongue. It can have no tradition, its
vocabulary
no public or mythical, only personal, private resonances. It is the
language of pervasive power, without resonance,
of authority in which the
immigrant,
the victim must speak. Writing poetry in American English is a
continuous act of translating from a
radical inside or from a radical beyond.
Its
well of inspiration is always outside, never in the mining or contributing
My memory of a
mother language is ensealed for me in my intimate relationship with the
thrilling, elusive, melancholy resonances of modern Turkish poetry. That poetry
contains my mother tongue, the way the Torah
contains Hebrew. I did not know it at the time in 1993, but the next stage
for me as a poet was set: to mine the totality of that mother lode. I was going
to become a poet, being a translator. The two were one, part of a single
process.[10]
In 2004, when Eda Anthology was published, a startling
reaction accompanied its publication. Some readers both in Turkey and the
United States called it an invention, "made-up." Though all the poets
in the anthology are real and the translations represent specific texts in the
original (listed chapter and verse in an appendix)—therefore, in any literal
sense the assertion is incorrect—this intuitive reaction in both countries
reveals something true and significant about the book. Eda is not a poetry anthology in the usual sense—a representative
sampling of "best" poets—. It translates a language. Poems are
station points within a wider, spiritual process. Consequently, each poem
becomes a fragment pointing to a totality. The very first sentence of the
introduction "The Idea of a Book" spells out this difference:
As much as
a collection of translations of poems and essays, this book is a
translation of a language.... [From] the
creation of the Turkish Republic in the
1920's
to the 1990's... Turkey created a body of poetry unique in the 20th
century, with its own poetics, world view and
idiosyncratic sensibility...
[These]
qualities are intimately related to the nature of Turkish as a language
its strengths and its defining limits. As
historical changes occurred, the language
in this poetry responded to them, flowered, changed; but always
remaining a continuum, a psychic essence, a
dialectic which is an arabesque.
It
is this silent melody of the mind—the cadence of its total allure—which
this collection tries to translate.... I
call this essence eda, each poet,
poem
being a specific case of eda, unique stations in the progress of
the Turkish
soul, language."[11]
What eda as a poetics adds to the original
texts (in that sense, "makes up") is a vision of the Turkish
language, a sinuous dance of the mind that runs through the poems: Eda is an anthology that is also a
radically melancholy and erotic-ecstatic gesture of love, suffering and desire,
what the Jewish poet and painter Basil King called "a spiritual wet
dream."[12]
At the core of Eda lies the elusive, peculiar nature of
Turkish as a fully agglutinative language, giving it an infinitely flexible
word order.[13]
Words in a sentence can be arranged in any permutable order, all fully
colloquial, each representing a different shade of meaning. Turkish is a
language of endless nuances.[14]
This is the exact reverse of the rigidity of the English syntax. It is this
grammatical distance—more than anything else—that seals Turkish from English
enabling the former to become a sacred, dream language. In this sealed off
state Turkish becomes a poetic mother tongue from which threads, rays, fragments
may appear.
The sinuous,
melancholy yearning moving ghost-like through the subtly bent skeleton of
English in Eda is the alien
spirit—previously a non-being— appearing and being heard in the peripheries of
the cooler body of English. It is heard in the first lines of the first poem in
Eda, Ahmet Haşım's "That Space":
Out of the
sea
this thin
air blowing, let it play with your hair
if you knew
one who,
with the pain of yearning, looked at the setting east,
you too,
with those eyes, that sadness are beautiful!
Neither you
nor I
nor that
evening gathered around your beauty
nor that
harbor from the sea,
for painful
thoughts,
knows
closely the generation unfamiliar
In 1666, the
excommunicant kabbalist Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam along with a group of
300 families. Their descendants, the dönmeh (the converted), were part of
the revolutionary group (Young Turks) which finally led to the creation of a
modern Turkey out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. I consider Eda Anthology belonging to this
tradition, transforming Turkish poetics by redefining it—to the chagrin of
critical authorities—in turn, making American poetry grow a new limb to
accommodate a language of process, ideas not as categorical statements, but in
motion; thought as linguistic tissue.
The transcendental and transgressive Jewish
spirit of accent expresses itself as eda within the Jewish context. The
ecstatic suffering and yearning to reach God in Sufism—eda—echoes the Jewish yearning for Jerusalem in the diaspora, the
ecstasy deriving from the sense of being the chosen. Kafka is the
quintessential accented writer in the twentieth century, in his yearning for
God and rebellion against God's deeds. The
Trial devoid of a list of particulars, is ultimately a trial of God's
shameful (or mysterious, take your pick) behavior in the Old Testament. The Castle is permeated with God's
awesome, elusive presence and the aching yearning to reach it. "Questions
of Accent" discusses this potent mixture of home and alienation in
relation to Amerika in the very word
"Oklahoma": "Why did Kafka write Amerika, why was he attracted to the subject of the United States?
German also accents Am-erika. What did he hear in the word Oklahoma? A wild,
alien, distant sound in German, Oklahoma! At the same time, an intimate sound,
one of the rare words in English with vowel harmony, which is also, I imagine,
in Czech. Kafka hears in Oklahoma the alien ground in which his private soul
can nest itself, the synthesis between the powerful and the victim. That is why
he associates his open-ended, endless nirvana of liberation in the Theater
(Noah's Ark) of Oklahoma. What is the word Oklahoma after all, but the imprint
of the Native American, the victim, in the language of the master, American
English.: the language which embodies that peculiar combination, victim and
victor possessing the same language, yoked together by fate."[16]
June 8, 2014
[1]
The essay "Questions of Accent" and letters responding to it letters
are republished in Thus Spake the Corpse:
An Exquisite Corpse Reader (1988-1998) (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press,
1999). The essay is also available on line at http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~sibel/poetry/murat_nemet_nejat.html
and a selection from it is available at https://jacket2.org/commentary/murat-nemet-nejat-%E2%80%9Cquestions-accent%E2%80%9D-what-then-accented-writing;
and at https://jacket2.org/commentary/murat-nemet-nejat-%E2%80%9Cquestions-accent%E2%80%9D-what-then-accented-writing.
[2]
Eda: And Anthology of Contemporary
Turkish Poetry, edited by Murat Nemet-Nejat (Greenfield: MA: Talisman
House, 2004).
[4]
This poem is from part V Camels and
Weasels of my seven-part serial poem, The
Structure of Escape.
[6]
This happens literally and self-consciously in Maimonides, who wrote in Hebrew
and Arabic, his choice depending on whether he was addressing directly his own
tribe or was opening up its beliefs and trying to integrate them with the
outside, the Western philosophy of the time.
[10]
The parable of the Writer's Block reveals Hebrew's ability as a holy tongue to
morph into other holy tongues. It delineates the ever subversive impulse in
Jewish ethos to cross its own boundaries and ties. Even the departure from
Egypt can be read in that light. Talmudic commentaries may be regarded as
contingent, contradictory readings (fragments) of an elusive, sacred totality.
Each translation being a reading, the
Talmud can be approached as an anthology of translations from a holy tongue.
[13]
Eda is actually built on a tripod: geographical (the city of Istanbul),
metaphysical (Sufism) and syntactical (agglutinative nature of Turkish). One
can read in detail the interweaving relationship among them in "The Idea
of a Book" (Eda, 4 - 9).
[14]
The word nearer to the verb, which itself has no fixed place in the sentence, possesses
the greater emphasis. This quality makes Turkish a language of mental process:
"a movement of the speaker's or writer's affections..., a record of
thought emerging.... This ability to stress or unstress—not sounds or
syllables; Turkish is syllabically unaccented—but words (thought as
value-infested proximity) gives Turkish a unique capability for nuance, for a
peculiar kind of intuitive thought." (Eda, 6).
*****
Poet, translator from Turkish and essayist, Murat Nemet-Nejat's recent work includes the poems Animals of Dawn (Talisman House, 2016), The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Talisman House, 2011), the collaboration with the poet Standard Schaefer "Alphabet Dialogues/Penis Monologues"; the translations Seyhan Erözçelik's Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds (Talisman House, 2010), the republication by Green Integer Press of Ece Ayhan's A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (2015); and the essays "A Dialogue with Olga" (Olga Chernysheva/ Vague Accent, The Drawing Center, 2016), "Dear Charles, Letters from a Turk: Mayan Letters, Herman Melville and Eda" (Letters for Olson, edited by Benjamin Hollander, Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), "Holiness and Jewish Rebellion: 'Questions of Accent' Twenty Years Afterward" (Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Joshua L. Miller and Anita Norich (University of Michigan Press, 2016), "Istanbul Noir" (Istanbul: Metamorphoses In an Imperial City, edited by M. Akif Kirecci and Edward Foster (Talisman House, 2011). He is the editor of Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, edited by Murat Nemet-Nejat (Talisman House, 2004). He is presently working on the poem Camels and Weasels, and a collection of translations from the Turkish poet Sami Baydar.
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