Here’s a link to a New York Times article–written by John Noble Wilford, who often (but not often enough to reward my own interests) reports on ancient cultures, archeological digs, and prehistoric human beings–about the oldest musical instrument discovered to date.  It includes a lovely photo:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/25/science/25flute.html

The flute, a narrow, delicate instrument which in its undamaged form was about a foot long, may be as old as 40,000 years–the date that Gary Snyder has often used to suggest how long ago poetry itself, as song and prayer, was first composed and chanted, as a natural part of rituals that included sacred dance.

The purposes for which prehistoric Homo sapiens might have used poetry are easy to imagine in general but impossible to imagine in particular.  Words with special phonemic coloring and special rhythms, when uttered to propitiate a god, bless a child, curse an enemy, or sanctify a hunt, would have seemed just efficacious enough–given that some weather and harvests and hunts, some babies, come out well, and some enemies do falter and depart or are killed–to have seemed magically powerful.  As in all religions, to this day, the words that did not bring desired outcomes could be blamed for their failure on the person who chanted them, perhaps, or on stronger magic from elsewhere, or on an indifferent or angry god.

Our own propitiations, blessings, curses, and the like continue in all languages, but we don’t often think of our words in this way except when praying.  In fact, much more than prayer participates in such magical hopes; yet the hopes don’t need to be magical for the words to be effective, sometimes, since we are all, as human beings, tremendously responsive, and in fact vulnerable, to what is said to us and about us.  Not least because others may act on the basis of those words.

Which raises the question of how our own poetry and fiction, and other writings, too, draw on the genuine powers of language–which can be explained by linguistics, psychology, traditions of the arts, and (in our time and place), 40,000 years from somewhere, by money, too, and spectacular fantasies, and mistaken beliefs.

However that may be, what a beautiful little flute, and what a reverie one might awaken in oneself thinking about it.

… he had five or six unruly sentences in his head, with which began a bizarre and irresistible poem, or story–he wasn’t yet sure which, but already he thought he could see some of the sentences in lines, or wrestling with lines.  All of them were squirming, but he had enough to assure him that in the morning he could sort it out, at least provisionally, and find the clues to what would come next.  Waking at dawn, what he still had was several lines, so it was definitely a poem, but the lines were pulling at their leashes and he found it hard to manage them all at once, since he wasn’t even fully awake yet.  Waking for the last time, realizing immediately that he had fallen asleep for another twenty minutes, but was now finally able to rise and begin the day, he caught sight of the tail of one, just one, astounding line as it rounded a corner and disappeared, scurrying back into the night, racing after the others, escaping both him and daylight thinking.  A vague feeling remained–of something he had never thought before.  But for this he could not find any words at all.

JOHN KEENE–poet, fiction writer, and translator–is an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern, and teaches courses in both creative writing and literature. This excerpt is from his own online blog: http://jstheater.blogspot.com/

A few recent events I’ve attended have included readings by Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker Tsitsi Dangarembga, who spoke at the university as part of the Program in African Studies‘ 60th anniversary; authors Thomas Glave and Dorothy Allison, who presented new work at Women & Children First bookstore; and anthropologist and leading scholar of Afro-Atlantic religions J. Lorand Matory, who spoke on his new book project as part of DePaul University’s African Diasporic studies series.

Tsitsi Dangarembga visited the university as part of the Program in African Studies’ yearlong celebration of its 60th anniversary. (I believe it’s the oldest in the United States.) I found myself delivering an impromptu introduction for Dangarembga, which was an honor to do as I’ve been a fan of her work for some time, and have repeatedly taught her first novel Nervous Conditions, which I imagine is probably one of the best known novels outside Africa by a late 20th century African woman writer. Dangarembga, whose name I pronounced correctly phonetically (though the accented syllable was wrong–I think she pronounced it Dahng-GAHRM-gah) read from that book, and its sequels, The Book of Not (Oxford: Ayebia Clark) and the third in the trilogy, Bira, which cumulatively explore the life trajectory of her protagonist, Tambudzai, as she grows up in pre- and post-revolutionary Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe, whose current sad fortunes the world is quite familiar with. The excerpt from the third, not-yet-published book in the trilogy was particularly disturbing; in it, Tambudzai, whom society has molded into an utterly alienated quasi-person, not only witnesses, but cheers on a violent attack against a coquettish young woman who fails to show proper decorum, in behavior and clothing, at a bus station. Dangarembga talked about all three books, her filmmaking career (the university screened two of her films, which I unfortunately wasn’t able to catch), and the difficulties, especially economic, of life in Zimbabwe today. In response to one graduate student’s query, she discussed writing in English, which she feels most comfortable working in and which has allowed her to reach a wide audience, alongside Ngugi’s dictum to write in an African language, which in her case would be Shona. One of the problems for anyone writing in Shona, as opposed to English (the colonizers’ language, of course), or some other African languages like Yoruba or Gikuyu, is the lack of any mechanism of standardization for Shona. When I mentioned this to a Zimbabwean student at the university, he agreed, and said it was an issue under debate back home.