Yodel: Complete acceptance of that which can no longer be hidden and therefore that which we always have to hide.
Yodel: Shimmering Adam’s Apple. It is not dissimilar to the sound we sometimes make unconsciously, a kind of croaking sound, a sound that is not so much made as emitted and then immediately and often embarrassingly, in a very unforgiving way, tried to cover it up with a fake cough or clearing of the throat. But this is it: yodel must be forgiven. And Yodel knows that the only way to grab the rose is to risk getting caught in the thorns. Instead of saying “that crooked” we say She died.
Yodel, like all forms of prophetic writing, resides in the threshold. This is the opening of the cage and the hand is moving inwards towards the bird and the bird is hitting the same cage. This, Yodel, has its violence and its innocence. Yodel is a fledgling, a dying fledgling. It is a thrush. How clear it is that such a word should mean songbird and mouth infection. Yodel is the biggest embarrassment to his family.
It is an exiled sound; The breath that is exhaled while inhaling is the sound that belongs to both the dead and the child.
There are many books we can open to hear the yodel coming towards us from over the mountain, but a great book to see the way the poet throws his voice, or the tremulous crack/ecstasy of the yodel, is Birhan Keskin’s translations. Yolk By Murat Nemet-Nejat (I will not discuss in detail the similarity to the word under investigation of the title.)
You are very human, my dear, very human,
While I am a wild animal, a beast,
My tongue speaks of forgiveness, to give
Free and your justice
Revenge
what needs to be said my love
just want to say this
The ace sniper I picked up was troubling me
snow of climanjaro my dear
snow of climanjaro
sl iiiiii ding down
In these translations, we can find revenge for the futility of the serenade.
Of course, yodel is too far-fetched FromThat is to say, it’s prepositions like a bridge has been blown up, it’s a staircase to nowhere that once was somewhere, a far cry from She also laughs, a raspy death that lives forever. It is an exiled sound; The breath that is exhaled while inhaling is the sound that belongs to both the dead and the child. Then the yodel is always the sound of a dead child.
*
Khet Mistry had left his entire community behind to join us. But we didn’t start with yodeling. We started reading. Sometimes we also used to write. they were given a keskin Yolk And from there he started yodeling for the first time. What about me he sang! In Chinese opera, there is a cross-dressing motif. Dan. Chinese opera is full of its own special kind of yodel – a controlled lament that whines and beats at the same time. Farm mechanic reading Keskin Yolkincarnated Donation In the shape of a white Midwestern man. He knocked down the moon and when the field mechanic came there there was not a single dry eye in the room. We all felt it: we had encountered the sound of a dying thrush, the last of its species. We could hear part of the voice.
Kim Gek Lynn in short china cowboy, She talks about the fallacy of the frontier myth and the supply-chain reality, the relationship between soybeans and nutritious and never-nutritious American grains:
“I begin to search and then conclude. An event. Something recent but so long ago, I forget who happens to be. I breathe, enough is enough. I get scared. I make promises. In my new life I will be white heat, pure, I will rise. I make promises. In my new life I will fade to ashes, light I will rise. I am scared. Please in my new life I will place this rubber seal on my soul, a swollen rubber I’m scared in my new life. He pulls the nebulizer out of my face. It’s like hell in my new life.
Grain, grain, grain. Through the voice of a man whose body is the only boundary left, Yodel becomes a space for kidnapping the kidnapped by his or her own.
*
Yodel is a distorted sound and thus is always political. This is the nose with the mesh left. With surprise and great shame the yodel is an orphan sound, a sound that turns the serenade towards an addressee who is destined never to hear it.
I have always believed that poets must sing and sing often, if they are to know how to write and when to write.
At a recent Nowruz celebration, my friend said that in Iran it is not a dinner party unless it ends with dancing. I can tell it’s not a Chinese house dinner party, unless it ends with yodeling.
Revenge…
Historically, the use of poison as an act of murder has been more likely to occur in female spirits than in male spirits. Being entrusted with ruling over the hearth, pantry, and garden area, they also had access to a distorted kind of knowledge: the knowledge of the earth.
I believe that revolution requires coordination. I believe it requires finesse, connection with the subtle bodies. I believe this requires knowledge of pharmacon. How, at the right dosage, a plant can be used as nectar and how, at the wrong dosage, it can be fatal. The oppressed have long been using “false dosages” in the service of their freedom. In black jacobinsCLR James describes the slaves on a plantation rebelling through poison.
The secret nature of poison, the way it hides, the way it infiltrates, the way it is ingested, the deceit, the act of administration, the act of revenge disguised as care and routine – its silence and its secrecy, is what makes it unforgivable – as if, unbearable and uncontrollable. This is the grassroots definition.
As we poison, as we expel little drops of our concoctions, we are singing. We are lazy. We are coming back. Lool and koo, in other words, are a form of disguise. We look like As inevitable. Baby sitters should always look vulnerable. And what is the sound in that lullaby? This is Yodel, transpersonal.
What might a language that grows from the grassroots, that is so cellular, look like?
You know where to find me
against killed on the left side of
A coordinated San Miguel
At the foot of such a vast history
Nothing sits too hard on the stomach
more than rocking
back and forth
through obsolescence
i feel blessed
hidden away from
eyes of enemies
and those who want
to wield my razor tongue
against me
never in company
of my colleagues
these are your children
I will reside (-Jasmine Gibson, a beauty has arrived)
Pharmacon. Yes, even pharmacon yodels.
Through the voice of a man whose body is the only boundary left, Yodel becomes a space for kidnapping the kidnapped by his or her own.
Guest and host…
The language of these types of poets, who engage in exchanges between guest and ghost, between retribution and mourning, inhabit the shivering yodel.
My father once shared a story with me, a display of so-called Asian politeness, when a friend, another Taiwanese-Chinese exile in America, apologized to my mother’s boss’s husband for bleeding on his body. One has to be willing to humiliate oneself in order to yodel, there is no spiritual bypass.
In ancient times, to welcome a guest was to outline an area and mark the responsibility of protecting that guest. There can be no greater upheaval in the social order than betraying one’s responsibility to protect a guest. There would be no greater backlash than allowing someone to take revenge on one’s guest. The host and the guest were a kind of kinship, the guest was with the host and the host was with the guest, and there was an unwritten sacred agreement in that relationship.
“There is no hospitality without sovereignty over one’s own home. The guest becomes hostage to the host insofar as the host becomes hostage to the guest’s presence.” That was Derrida.
I think in a moment of carelessness
i can fly from this silent prison
i can laugh in front of the jailer
i can start living with you again
(…)
I am the candle whose burning heart
illuminates a ruin
if i choose silence
I’ll break a nest (-Foroo Farrokhzad, Let us believe in the onset of cold weather)
The lamentation of someone – whether the host’s wife or a guest’s child – who discovers a poisoned body is always expressed in the form of a howling wail.
____________________________
pedestrian by Valerie Hsiung available from Nightboat Books.
