from 'Ancestors and Species'

At Jabbertown - 1890 
for John R. Bockstoce

In reaction to my negativity towards the children, I sought the roots of their behaviour in a period of traumatic dislocation as a result of contact with white men during the 19th century.  The focus shifts to 1890 when commercial whalers created a cosmopolitan community known as Jabbertown five miles south of the village. Jabbertown lasted from 1887 to about 1914 when the bowhead whale had been almost hunted out and spring steel replaced baleen (whalebone) for corset construction. 

Besides the Yankees, there were Germans, 
Irish, black men, a few Kanakas (1): the frontier rabble,
‘lowest sweepings’ out of San Francisco’s water-front saloons –
feared and detested by the Protestant domestic missions -
unchurched ‘squaw men’ who sowed mayhem
in the mining camps and hunter/trapper stations,
doubly corrupting Eskimos and Indians
whose savage natural innocence
was thus more deeply paganised by frontier manners.

Still the Eskimos quite liked white men, found them useful
and amusing.  They pragmatically grabbed
each opportune convenience and expedient for subsistence
brought them to replace resources that the white man
destroyed with explosive harpoons and repeating firearms.

They stayed ethnically self-centred.  The moon,
whose spirit lifted off one winter,
taimmani (2), from Tikigaq, the criminal moon who’d raped his sister
and who hunted in the lunar ice fields,
giving sublunary hunters all the game they needed
or deserved by paradoxical propitiation,
the contradictory tatqiq (3)
was still focused on the sharp tip of the village –

its light poured in a line directly to the whale-blood of the ‘animal’(4):
the harpooned beast whose wound-scar from the Raven  harpooner
still lay here on the grassed turf of a beach-ridge,
reiterating and proclaiming the archaic shaman’s strike,
                          and refracted by association with the counter-trickster,
            in its sacriligious lunar separation,
deriving its rough order from taboo infraction,
            and which rendered land and people
            (victimised and perfect) dangerously sacred –(5)

thus identifying, in the shade of the archaic layers,
through which mind conflated dream with day-thought,
the Inupiat as real because they’d always lived
within this semi-self-created system:
and others from elsewhere lay beyond
the consecrated centre, and were not quite people.

If myth was the substrate, recent history was co-present:
the who and when of several generations fixed
the current of each momentary and successive context,
quick lives fleshed in lamp and kayak dialects,
and with a quick laugh summarized as landscape,
theirs in the maps the elders had adjusted
to their own long, now abbreviated storm days. 

In the middle distance, then, the last routines of purely local reminiscence
with horizons uncorrupted and uncluttered:  
but now on the skyline
there came cross-hatched structures, masted and then also funneled,
the scaffolding a-bristle, sketched in complicated silhouette
as though each rig were bird bone and sinew dried and lifted,
or disjointed from the meat part
in some planally disorganised arrangement,
a great wing flexing erect its exo-skeleton,
and then as the ships closed, they saw marvelous
hypertrophes of skinboat and fantastication,
alive, alone, aloof and curiously peopled,
heavy with stuff indefinably desirable,
but then abruptly gone in atmospheric summer shimmer.

Children stood on the shore,
their boots rattling the beach stones
that were mixed with spindrift fragments
and spots of Silurian fossil flora
in washed blue granite:
they watched the big ships in the mist consolidate:
their lines solidifying gradually more brittle,
like dust in cloud light,
something complex at their centre coming
for them: as though iron and carbohydrate,
with their outriders of nicotine and liquor
were some hazy tupitka (6)
constructed from detritus of the white man’s tackle,
with a bio-spirit likewise mingling
in arbitrary bric-a-brac, the epidemic viruses
which spun from the hale breath
of San Francisco and New Bedford whalers:
the spirits of measles, flu and whooping cough
in synchrony with scarlet fever, syphylis,
diphtheria and meningitis, microbally alive,
invisible, incurable, incomprehensible:
it was coming for them with the men
who would smile and maybe kiss them,
and whose breath leaped out,
with sometimes membra virilorum,     
to cut down every generation in the village.

              They were phantoms with eye-brows,
not genuine people,
with beards, hats, buttons, red ears (big ones)
high boots and waistcoats,
grey complexions, veined and whiskered,
noses variously sharp and stubby,
which like knives and their chins
ambitiously cut forward,
brains working through their blue hats,
single-minded on some project
which forged straight lines
into trade and commerce,
not circular, colluding
with the game migrations
or translating the contour
of an obligation to the animals,
but killing for those parts
they could exchange for money.

On the south beach where the shore-based whalers settled, I’d walked out to inspect some graves set back on high ground they called Beacon Hill between the beach, lagoons and tundra, above Jabbertown where Koenig, Hachmann, Max Lieb, Bayne, Tom George – a black man – and the courtly Jim Allen wintered, pushing their skiffs through the spring ice to hunt bowhead, polar bear and walrus.  Crushed to starvation, the Tikigaq men still disdained to work the naluagmiu’s (7) whale boats, so the whites fetched people from the river villages who settled here, competed with the locals and inter-married.

The grass on these graves was exhausted from their eighty winters
and snow capped in lumps its arched extremities,
but the grass supported two small picket fences,
each lath-head angled poignantly,
enclosing the ecclesiastic plots where Lieb and his partner
lay embalmed in permafrost, their ornamental crosses darkly rusted,
while the shaman Talaaq – who’d come from the Kobuk
to work at Beacon Hill in 1900, and who died next spring
as he paddled his kayak, floating peacefully all day,
a pipe of baccy frozen in his rigor mortis – lay off centre.

                         You only had to cut the turf
on Talaaq’s grave and turn it,
           to reverse the wind’s direction.

I’d tramped round Jabbertown,
put a tent up in the grass
above the fringe of driftwood
separating beach and tundra,
sat nights with ugruk hunters
with a blaze of birch, spruce, cottonwood
swept upcoast from the southern rivers,
sun low at midnight,
and a south wind beating –

We chewed fresh paniqtaq (8),
which sprang twisted and elastic
off the knife-blade
to the jaws that worked them,
and which painfully split
between the canines and incisors,
and then loosened the throat with ugruk blubber,
drank hot black tea,
staggered off to anaq (9) –

the face bathed sometimes
as you squatted
suddenly in honey
on the wind from
campion or saxifrage,

burying the faeces,
dry, forced and black
as dried out twisted seal meat,
in stones, sand, mica-grit and beach grass -

It reminded you of many stories:
Utuagaaluk, for example,
who couldn’t reach
the long grass that he needed
as he cast around to wipe his itiq (10),
to find as he shuffled, the toes
of his dead cousin that his
sakigaq had murdered,

or Ukunniq, on this same beach
dipping supernatural whale-bone wedges
in his anaq (11)so the wedges wouldn’t
knock his head off when he used them
to split logs with…

So these stories bound the small hours
as we watched the floe-ice,
bruise-purple-cloud-in-yellow-sunset,
crowbills (12) low across the open water
in long urgent lines of feeding adults,
eider duck and old squaw roaring
to their nests behind us on the marshes,
knots, snipe, small owls,
phalarope and plover,
sandhill cranes in thoughtful
couples from Chukotka,

Or we filched the children’s comics,
read ‘Richy Rich’
and his shaman butler
plagiarised from P.G. Wodehouse,
then slept in the morning
when the sun grew warmer,
till the men strolled out
and hunted on the rotting floes
for ugruk and walrus.

I combed the beach and headland
for some residue of Jabbertown,
some clue, inscription,
hardware, trace of a foundation,

but the white man had gone: his place was flush
with the contour of the bluff,
which was scoured by south wind,
rhythmically levelled since 1914

by the tide and current:
there was nothing of Jabbertown
just the bones
of animals hauled up
on the beach-head,
eroded with each pass of weather:

some hollowed
soft white morphs
whose cusps and whorls
and broken edges
were sanded by the wind
or water-eaten,
a joint and its socket
empty at the centre
of the vortex where the air
stopped at the apex
of the wind’s attenuation
and came finally to nothing.

Here and there
was something larger and more heavy:
the bones of a walrus or an ugruk (13),
ribs sprung in the grasses
and with saxifrage or beach pea
sprouting through
the interstices of a clavicle
or vertebra –

the whiteness flaking in short
granular splinters, or a whale’s disc
filled with crumbs of tundra mosses –

as if beasts
had hauled
up-beach here
to evolve near Tikigaq:
but dragged
themselves no further
than the early century.

Then I found what I’d been hunting:
it lay in the stones,
the bracket thinned from a crust of its blisters
which the salt had opened:
a vast hinge
from some 19th century foundry
between Pittsburgh and Lake Erie, maybe,
rollers seized-up, but the screw holes
clear and still visibly bevelled.

So I lugged the thing back and put it on my table
where it sat among paperbacks, tapes and carbons, shedding slowly,
dislocated twice now from the rising body of America industrialising:
Pennsylvanian iron-works forging Jabbertown’s
then Tikigaq’s harpoon irons:
the ice hunt protracted from that workshop
on whose anvil the great mammals
on their thinned migrations could be hammered.

‘Do not hammer,’ said the spirit people’s leader,
            when the One with Long Ears heard them
from their inland iglu,
             ‘when the whales are running.
Otherwise they will be frightened.’
            So the shaman returned
with what the spirit people told him.
            ‘I saw Pamiuguksaaq, the chief with a wolf’s tail.
He was there with his wife, and Siutitaq
            whose long ears pick up your taboo infractions.
And the spirits have already caught a whale.
            They’ve got it to their iglu.
I almost stumbled on the flipper.’

So the hinge opened, swinging easily on whale oil
– finest lubrication –  as it did, and neatly closed,
on feet and shoulders of those people in transition:

Europeans, Kanakas, Cape Verdeans, Americans,
Eskimo women and their half-breed children,
pushing at the door and drawing it behind them:
a division hinging the enclosure
that leaned out on the sea and back to long nights
filled with lamp-oil, hard tack,
boxed stores, journals, calculation,
talk and in trading jargon, pani pani (14),
south-seas whale-tongue, pidgin, Eskimo verb-stems
snapped off from their endings,
plots, drink, hairy knuckles, smooth copper forearms:
skin, wood and iron the constructive textures,
goods from the south and indoors reaching outwards,
changing or exchanging, as they travelled, value and intrinsicality.

When I thought back to the children, I understood them better,
or so I liked to think I saw them, as I’d tried to view myself
and antecedents in accretions and components
were accumulated and recessant:
haphazard products of unstable histories,
shedding separateness and animosity,
in mutual respect, confessing the limits,
contemplating our conditioning
and reciprocating opaque versions.    

I toyed with it now, what had swivelled
and defined a doorway through which aanas’ (15) mothers
had come working back then, as we now come too,
through frames, days and thresholds,

but which let enter more than faces and shoulders,
admitting, through the 19th century,
an American present to old America, (16)
and which opened a space where,
backwards and forwards, epochs in accelerated,
concentrated bundles shuttled,
the archaic and the modern grazing one another’s edges,
sometimes missing, and occasionally colliding.

Notes:

Copyright © Tom Lowenstein, 2012