Description

Poetry. African American Studies. Nathaniel Mackey's third book of poems, WHATSAID SERIF, is comprised of installments 16 through 35 of SONG OF THE ANDOUMBOULOU, an ongoing serial work whose first fifteen installments appear in his two previous books, ERODING WITNESS and SCHOOL OF UDHRA. Named after a Dogon funeral song whose raspy tonalities prelude rebirth, Song of the Andoumboulou has from its inception tracked interweavings of lore and lived apprehension, advancing this weave as its own sort of rasp. These twenty new installments evoke the what-sayer of Kalapalo storying practice as a figure for the rough texture of such interweaving. Mackey has suggested that the Andoumboulou, a failed, earlier form of human being in Dogon cosmology are "a rough draft of human being," that "the Andoumboulou are in fact us; we're the rough draft." The song is of possibility, yet to be fulfilled, aspiration's putative angel itself.