Of poetry, the Nobel Prize and haunting memories

Louise Glück, the lyric American poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 8, 2020, is a stylist of confounding desires; an expert raconteur who ruminates on the scent of memories that haunt us.

She writes about disintegration and loss but she also writes about the promise of summer and quiet gardens, of a world freshly polished and glittering — the smell of roses and lawns lush and iridescent.

Glück is an optimistic poet, always looking for the ideal and the beautiful. Each of her poems could be what Ron Charles, the Washington Book World critic, would call “a plaintive love letter to displaced, wandering people, to anyone who longs for home and reaches unwisely for the hand of a fellow wanderer”.

In the poem, A Summer Garden, longing for her mother pulses through the poem as she finds an old photograph. She writes: “Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph. The sun was shining.

The dogs were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping, calm and unmoving as in all photographs. I wiped the dust from my mother’s face. Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistent haze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood...”

Homesickness

Glück’s obsession with place and homesickness is akin to that of the Jamaican poet Claude McKay who lived in America, far away from his motherland of Jamaica. Aching with longing for his motherland, he penned teary words in a poem entitled I Shall Return: “I shall return again; I shall return/To laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes/At golden noon the forest fires burn/Wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies. I shall return to loiter by the streams/That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses/And realize once more my thousand dreams/Of waters rushing down the mountain passes/I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife/Of village dances, dear delicious tunes/That stir the hidden depths of native life/Stray melodies of dim remembered runes…I shall return again/To ease my mind of long, long years of pain.”

For McKay, even in America, Jamaica somehow swelled into view, always sneaking up on him. He had left Jamaica but it went with him everywhere like his own shadow. And this is real for many of us who grew up elsewhere and came to the cities later in life.

Childhood and rural life memories are never far away. Claude McKay, in The Tropics of New York, writes: “My eyes grow dim, and I could no more gaze; a wave of longing through my body swept. And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, I turned aside and bowed my head and wept”.

It is such memories that make Glück’s and McKay’s poems real. And this longing to return “home” to a past is universal. In Piano, by D.H. Lawrence, the sound of a woman’s singing transports him back to a childhood scene and to his mother. He writes: “Down the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past”.

Longing for home

James Wood, the English critic, once wrote: “It’s not uncommon for expatriates, émigrés, refugees and travellers to want to die ‘at home’. The desire to return, after so long away, is gladly irrational, and is perhaps premised on the loss of the original home (as the refusal to go home may also be premised on the loss of home). Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality.”

Throughout her career in poetry, Glück has represented people who are hungry for something, either longing for their childhood or a perfect relationship. For her, art is driven by spiritual hunger. Glück has described her desire to make art itself a yearning that “begins and survives as a craving, a hunger for what eludes, a beacon, a lighthouse. ..  I am simply in the hands of something, some periodic hunger.” And that hunger must be for what is elusive and can’t be grasped, “because the temptation to share in the good things of this world is so great that to taste would only disappoint.” “Why is it,” humans have asked themselves for centuries, “that we long for something and wait for it eagerly for years only to be disappointed once we get it?”

Glück is an artist and not a psychoanalyst so she only raises the questions. Sigmund Freud had a name for the disillusionment we get when we finally achieve our dreams and there is nothing we are chasing anymore – he called it derealisation.

That is why we must always be powered by purpose and a burning vision for something we are pushing ourselves to achieve. Glück’s poems put microscopic lenses on these big questions of life and at the same time addressing other issues like love, death and mourning.

There is no doubt that Glück is a great poet who deserved the Nobel Prize even though, as Kenyans, we were disappointed because, every year, we hope that our own Ngugi wa Thiong’o will win the Nobel and, so far, he hasn’t.

There is no doubt that the awarding of the Nobel Prize has been controversial over the years, raising more questions than answers. Perhaps, however, there is no doubt that Glück deserved it.

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