Resurrection of the Ancillary: Two Books by Ammiel Alcalay
A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs by Ammiel Alcalay. Punctum Books: Dead Letter Office, 2021. $20.
Whoever does not fight against visible evil loses the protection of the invisible.
—Paul Celan, Microliths
The first thing one encounters in Ammiel Alcalay’s A Bibliography for After Jews and Arabs is an unusual note from the publishers: “Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/” (since you’re reading this online, you can take that moment as well). A little further on we’re introduced to their tagline — spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion — and the particular imprint of Punctum Books that produced the book, The BABEL Working Group: “a collective and desiring assemblage of scholar–gypsies with no leaders or followers, no top and no bottom, and only a middle.” BABEL, write the members, “roams and stalks the ruins of the post-historical university as a multiplicity, a pack, looking for other roaming packs with which to cohabit and build temporary shelters for intellectual vagabonds. We also take in strays.”
Whether Alcalay is a stray or one of the original pack, it's in this context that we might take the book itself, and not just because (as he mentions twice in the various essays this book contains) he hasn’t published another book with a university press since After Jews and Arabs appeared in 1993. There’s a story behind that, and part of it is contained in the 1999 essay “Behind the Scenes: Before After Jews and Arabs” reprinted here, a salvage into the shipwreck of the academic publishing industry. But more positively, this volume focuses attention on those parts of books often dismissed with the word “ancillary” (prefaces, forewords, introductions, epigraphs, notes, references, afterwords, bibliographies), providing vagabond insight into how they can both provoke writing and perpetuate it. As such, the book celebrates what’s becoming more and more mysterious: old-fashioned scholarly methodology, as dependent on chance and good fortune and networks of friends as meticulous research habits.
I use the word “mysterious” advisedly, because for some time now Alcalay has focused on bringing hidden things to light, whether forgotten or deliberately obscured: that’s true most visibly with his essential Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative but also in his previous works and a volume of poems, Ghost Talk (Pinsapo Press), being published concurrently with the Bibliography. The 40+ projects in the Archive — which grad students under his direction have undertaken since 2009, and which, he said in a talk at Kelly Writers House last year, “involve a higher set of skills than the standard dissertation” — have brought back into print works from important writers like Muriel Rukeyser, Diane di Prima and Langston Hughes, but also published tributes to musicians like Cecil Taylor: an early event was a 100th anniversary celebration for Sun Ra. The focus is on extra-literary pursuits (letters, journals, lecture notes, photos, old magazines) because the best thought among writers of the 1950s and 1960s, as he said at the Writers House, was in communication with each other: thus, the archive looks not just to preserve the work but to try to re-enact the conditions under which it was produced.
As Alcalay says in another context, “there were ways back to forgotten melodies one never knew” (p. 26). Those goals are part of this book as well: by letting us see “a little history” of After Jews and Arabs — the missing bibliography, anonymous old reader reports at presses where it was rejected, and a thoughtful essay on the “poetics of bibliography” — Alcalay has discovered in the Bibliography another way of preserving the disappeared past and ensuring its continued power.
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Thomas Ruff, press++ 20.33, 2015. David Zwirner.
After Jews and Arabs is a wildly ambitious book covering vast stretches of space and time, from the Abbasid Dynasty and the glories of Al-Andalus culture in Muslim Spain to current conditions of Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine (a period of more than a millennium) and from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, and some found it a little too ambitious. In the “Behind the Scenes” essay, Alcalay reproduces two anonymous reader reports from presses where the book was rejected; through them, he detects a form of academic censorship “technical, technocratic, and professionalized” in nature (p. 20) — if not racist — and “largely in service of state power and imperialist policies” (p. 24). It should probably be obvious that the politics of a book entitled After Jews and Arabs wouldn’t be identity politics, and Alcalay has some scathing rhetoric about the current state of affairs in those precincts:
State resources and propaganda mechanisms steered the necessary undertaking of identity formation . . . toward the very divisive free-for-all that identity politics now seems to have become . . . forcing people to divide along various lines of identity through disinformation campaigns and institutionalized forms of treatment according to category of person. (p. 27)
This isn’t an environment in which it’s possible to achieve common ground. At one point in his account, Alcalay meets “Moroccan and Iraqi-born Jewish Black Panthers in Jerusalem” (p. 28): one way to grasp the spaces the book opened is to ponder the cognitive dissonance of that phrase. In an uncharacteristically optimistic mode, Alcalay writes that “certain prior and prevailing assumptions, often racist and exclusionary at core, no longer have footing, or at least no longer pass uncontested” (p. 19). One can hope.
Another consequence of the book’s ambition was that a vast number of sources needed to be consulted: the bibliography, finished in 1992 and first published here, is 50 pages long and divided into seven different categories, notable because “The world I set out to investigate had no label, no category connecting to the present or tying various pasts together” (p. 28). But it’s not just the amount but the kinds of sources that are important:
from architectural accounts of the creation of new cities like Fustat and Baghdad, to fragments of early medieval bills of lading and letters written by merchants drawn from the Cairo genizah; from covert Judeo-Spanish translations during the Inquisition, to accounts of the destruction of Palestinian villages in 1948; from contemporary acts of resistance to cultural assimilation by Jews writing in Arabic, to the revolutionary context of the first Palestinian intifadah. (p. 17-18)
All of these sources were refracted through Alcalay’s personal experience living in Jerusalem for eight years in the 1980s, and that combination, he writes, demanded a methodology capable of accessing and collecting the information, perhaps no longer possible with today’s digital-only research. In this way, the “poetics of bibliography” start to reveal themselves.
That is, one of the goals in publishing these 30-year-old materials is to create “a form of world-making, an offering that provides an example of how materials from the past can be arranged to perforate the caul too often obscuring our vision, preventing us from seeing a ground we can actually stand on” (21). It’s true that the bibliography is arranged in standard MLA format, a bit inconvenient for world-making and not at all like Charles Olson’s A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn, which Alcalay quotes with justified enthusiasm. As such, it might be difficult to understand why it would need resurrection, especially considering the detailed and often provocative original notes that were published with the book: as he admits elsewhere, it’s “an artifact of an earlier era, curious, possibly useful, but very difficult to fully decode” (p. 32). But he’s also anticipated such an objection:
Mine was a bibliography largely composed through card catalogues; open stacks; smaller, more manageable collections; and used or antiquarian bookshops, as well as through a large network of informants based in different languages, geo-graphical sites, and particular human and political experience. Unquestionably, more than some of that residue remains in the very choice and organization of the items included. (p. 19)
In other words, “old scholarship,” the kind of research methodology that might uncover a medieval bill of lading, is disappearing. And as scholars, Alcalay writes, we “need to throw out wider nets to our students and readers to provide guidance for how some of this older experience can be assessed and transmitted” (p. 20). In that sense, the bibliography is “a constituent element, a creative act penetrating the fog to make available the ground upon which other realities can be imagined and enacted” (p. 30). Ed Dorn, in his memorial lecture for Charles Olson in 1981 published by Lost & Found, would seem to agree:
The value of a working instructional bibliography lies in its net of connections. It isn’t concerned with the latest so-called “corrections” and insights of the latest worker, or the latest hot number. The value for a student in a well-conceived bibliography is not in the bibliography’s comprehension, but in the engagement of certain of its genes.
Alcalay insists that he doesn’t want to “rarify” the pre-digital age, but does bemoan one unintended consequence of research in the digital world, namely that
while it’s much easier to find something already identified in particular, it has become that much harder to find something one isn’t looking for. Chance encounters leading down unknown paths have become exceedingly hard to experience. (p. 32)
Be that as it may, while working on this review, I discovered a book by Geoff Huth called The Anarchivist: History, Memory and Archives, which offers some apposite reflections. “Archives,” he writes, “are the evidence of the past, proof the past occurred, and an imperfect explanation of how it happened.” Conversation around archives usually presumes solid buildings or vaults that will last forever, but all buildings will be destroyed eventually: in his introduction, Alcalay mentions “the precarious nature of archives and of various living repositories of cultural memory” (xiv), while Huth, reflecting on the interplay between history, archives, and memory in how we imagine facts and truth into being, speaks of the necessity to “[hold] the text up to the light to see through it into the past . . . we must take this disarrayed past and give it structure, we have to divine the connections between events.” For Alcalay, such divination lies, as Olson writes, “in the collection of the materials”:
this process hearkens back to all kinds of different material situations: open stack libraries, antiquarian bookshops, personal collections, all of which must be physically looked at in markedly different circumstances rather than in solitary reception through a screen. (p. 32)
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Still from Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov, 1968. Criterion.
In Alcalay’s Ghost Talk (his first published poetry since 2011), he explores the invisible in a different mode, “more song than talk,” as an introductory note by Peter Blegvad has it. It’s a lament for a lost love, much in the vein of Villon’s “Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?”
How many times had she walked barefoot down the path and through the grass until her feet touched sand and she dug her toes in below the heat to get the cooler part? No matter how the song was sung, her heart was heavy. (p. 7)
One of the things poetry does is return us to our senses, the body, its sensations, but also its doubts, sorrows, confusions. Formally, Ghost Talk is a mix of prose and poetry, and while the poetry often seems like fragments of conversation or wisps of thought, with large gaps in between, one aspect of the prose is that the last two lines of most paragraphs are shorter, like poetry: a signal that the impetus behind the thought is receding and something else coming into view. For all the activation of the past that the Bibliography counsels, Ghost Talk is a reminder that recollection is always a mixed pleasure: “The poet knocks on silence,” writes Blegvad, “an open door”:
a dirge,
a cup, a stone —
merge, then pause —
unsung, some reminded
of a melody, one on
bones, another strings (p. 27)
while another page announces
THE SURFACE IS AS SHOCKING AS THE DEPTH (p. 14)
The visible and the invisible, memory and imagination, always embracing: “It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal,” wrote Marilynne Robinson about love. That seems about right.
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Remedios Varo, Allegory of the Winter, 1948.
Speaking of ancillary materials, part of the Preface to Ed Dorn’s first volume of Collected Poems (1956-1974, published in 1975 from Don Allen’s Four Seasons Foundation in Bolinas, one of the presses Alcalay praises here) has always stayed with me:
Throughout this period I have published through persons, and except for two cases not represented here, not with houses. I have stayed with that care because it is accurate and important. Important equally for those who have published me. From near the beginning I have known my work to be theoretical in nature and poetic by virtue of its inherent tone. My true readers have known exactly what I have assumed.
Ancillary, from the Latin ancilla, a female servant. Or ghost.
all our
dead floating around us
hovering among and
between us stuck here
on the ground (p. 29)
As the title of one of my favorite Sun Ra songs says, “There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)”; in these two recent books, in very different modes, Alcalay announces his continuing exploration of them.
Sun Ra, Other Worlds (album cover), 1965. Discogs.