Reconstruction 7.4 (2007)
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Alice Notley. Alma, or The Dead Women. New York: Granary Books, 2006, 300pp. ISBN 1-887-12372-5 (sbk), $17.95.
<1> Alice Notley's Alma, or The Dead Women (composed between July 2001 and March 2003), is one of the most frightening books I have read in some time. For one thing, the text excludes me as a reader, almost exorcising me. Coming to a poem like "Radical Feminist," expecting to connect with Notley's vision of a world (our world) ruined by the greed and violence of men, I find the stakes laid out in such a way that it is impossible to deny that the book is not speaking to me:
how will we dead women avenge ourselves now when there will be nothing but vengeance transpiring. oh these distractions says one. we intend that you keep on the subject says another. keeping on the subject is part of our vengeance. i am touched by men's love says the third but it isn't a world. men have died too someone says. they can take care of themselves someone else says but don't let one come near me again in the name of care. i want a chance to care for myself, perhaps i finally have that being a dead woman. (43)
Taking these sentences seriously, at their word, as a male I can only read them as if overhearing them. It is not a poem speaking to me, but dead women speaking to themselves who do not want me to participate.
<2> But who are these dead women, these women I can overhear but who will not speak to me? That question is made problematic by the ontological category of death, of course, an "impossible" question discussed by Roland Barthes in his analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's "Valdemar." When Valdemar utters the statement "I am dead," which is a statement uttered throughout Notley's text, what occurs is "the paroxysm of transgression, the invention of an unheard-of category" (Barthes 190). In "Death Says to Alma," a woman executed in Kabul for adultery alludes to three types of death: "but i am dead now, though i was also dead in life but much more constrained, i am somewhat free in death but would be freer. i see that my freedom is contingent on our movement of dead women. why is that?" (44). In this latter formulation, there is the physical death inflicted on men and women, the death women suffer (throughout the world) by being denied any legitimate existence outside of male power, and this third category, the one that does not speak directly to me but which seems to be a chosen state, a total refusal of the masculine ideal of violence that Alma witnesses running/ruining the world by injecting herself with heroin (heroine?) straight into the forehead - the third eye of spiritual wisdom. This "total" refusal is not a "simple" refusal, but is, to allude to Barthes again, "an unheard-of category."
<3> This unheard of category of death is a place that is barely imaginable because it is negative, as "Negative Space" would describe it: "i stumble away. who needs a lot of thoughts? sometimes it's empty as in smoke, and sometimes landscapes appear and dissolve out of memory" (49). It is conceptually elusive, yet it can become a place of "safety" because it does not acknowledge the values that we hold most familiar - even self-preservation is a matter of indifference, although anger at the other world (our world) remains. And here is another frightening aspect of the book. To enter the space that Notley describes begins to seem inevitable if we are to imagine something other than, in Sylvia Plath's words, "the roller / Of wars, wars, wars" (222) that have become an end in themselves. In fact, it is this unheard of category of death, even more than the book's epic scope, which makes Notley's propositions transcend the category of an "anti-war" poem. Bush, Cheney, Iraq, Al Qaeda and others make their appearances here, but unlike the short-sightedness that plagues most liberal politics, the current administration is not viewed as an aberration but as an the most current example of a general tendency in militaristic nation states (run by men). The problem is not to impeach Bush, but to imagine completely different ways of existing, ways that are not based upon the accumulation of capital at the expense of others. But to live in negative space is to embark upon an endeavor that we may not be equal to, even if we can imagine it. As "Rite Against Fear" puts it, "some of the fathers of death are against the war but they won't give up their spaces in the Times will they" (340). Rather, "Safe Owl" challenges us with what has often been, in cynicism and fearfulness, dismissed as a naive utopia: "in the negative space of no country, be equal to its air. . . . they cannot get through. become smaller. have small voices, have never sung, hooted or heard the sound of the quietest flight in the universe" (50). In a truly globalized world where the nation state has withered away, we have peace of a haunted kind, the negative image of a globalization fueled by corporations and national identities. Are we willing to become smaller, able to give up our space in the Times? Or will we walk away like the rich man whom Jesus told to give away all his possessions? If you immerse yourself in Notley's poem, political and philosophical challenges will present themselves to you with the urgency of a confrontation, even if you are not exactly sure how to negotiate its aporetic qualities.
<4> This negative image or negative space where the dead women are trying to figure out how to exist constitutes the thread running throughout the six sections of the book: "Alma"; "Almanac"; "Guardian of the Earth"; "Emergence"; "The Gully"; "Rites." Alma, or The Dead Women is a spiritualist text in the most traditional of senses in that the empty space it works in is a noisy, polyvocal space where it is not always clear who is speaking. Even though there are recurring characters ( Alma, Moira/Mara/Myra, Carmen, Cosette, Anna, The Cherokee, the Guardian, Alta, to name a few), they change form, status, and self-conception so often as to make every poem uncanny and haunted in a utopian sense. Notley's book, beginning with refusal and negation, and never leaving the troubling wager of an absolute interpretation of these terms, is at the end an uncertain tale of imagination so potent that to imagine differently is to commit oneself to utter transformation. As suggested by the allusion to "noise" and "polyvocal space" above, a spiritualist text of the kind Notley has produced is surprisingly well-suited to address, obliquely and subversively, the communications that occur and have real effects in our time, a global world constituted by networked communications made invisible through a combination of digital technology and corporate/national secrecies. In true negative fashion, Notley's hauntology simulates with a difference, mirroring our current, wireless wasteland in a way that connects to and interprets that world while refusing it at the same time.
<5> In the end, Notley's book is most frightening because it presents us with the challenge to completely revalue our values, and to live this difference. The prescriptions are sometimes uncompromising in a way that makes them seem impossible to follow, and other times are open-ended to the point of inscrutability. If men are to enter Alma's world, they must become dead women, and yet to be a dead woman in the unheard of way the book describes is a difficult calling for women and men alike, requiring an ability to flit almost instantly, like a ghost, as a ghost, between unimaginable asceticisms and flights of utter imaginary plenitude. And yet, Notley's book will possess you if you allow it to, drawing you into its world which is a world that is not yet fully imagined or complete, but lays the ground for imagining a truly new world space that refuses to work within existing logics. Alma, or the Dead Women not only offers us a challenge but answers one in its own right, interpreting in the most radical way imaginable Henri Lefebvre's admonition that in order to change a given regime, one must imagine a completely new space to be realized rather than just making alterations within the existing spatial logic. Or as Artaud expressed it in 1925, "There are a few of us. . . who have tried to get hold of things, to create within ourselves spaces for life, spaces which did not exist and which did not seem to belong to actual space" (79). Notley has imagined spaces for life as negative spaces for lively dead women. And who are these dead women again - "who am i i ask a figment of mine you are a shaman it says but what is that" (339). A shaman is a dead woman who leaves the world to enter the nonspace represented by a desert gully, who goes there to imagine rites and is never closer to the world than when she leaves it, in the "crash purple desert storm" (338) taking us back to another war which is also this one, which is all wars that can only end when we are able "not to want anything they want" (340). Taking us? Yes, because at one point, at several flowering points, Notley tells me, a naked man, that she is "in the gully forever and you have fasted long enough to join us here," and I can join her, if I dare, saying, "i will join you. . . but i no longer know my name" (229).
Works Cited
Artaud, Antonin. Selected Writings. Trans. Helen Weaver. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Barthes, Roland. "Textual Analysis: Poe's 'Valdemar'." Modern Criticism and Theory. Ed.
Lodge, David. New York: Longman, 1994. pp. 172-195.
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Harper and Row, 1981.
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