on a flood of feeling, writing

I wrote. I wrote despair. Writing does well at the end of an edge of oneself. Ti-Cirique no longer had time to read my things. He was overwhelmed by my avalanche of words undoing the alphabet, by my sadness cut up by commas to teach silences; that despondency which inspired my words slamming into each other impaled on hyphens, or these word left unfinished that would open the pages to my Arcadius. I would let my tears dry to burden each i with a dot. I would string the beads of my shivers onto threads of ink and crush them waiting for them to bloom in my closed notebooks. I would tie together the memories… and I grated them together like manioc, making ink from the tears I cried. I wrote haikais colder than seventeen coffin nails, plowed lines bitter as toad gall. I wrote dictionary words which popped out of me like a deadman’s clots and left me more anemic than a cow hanging at a slaughterhouse. I wrote feelings which mingled verbs the way sleeper-women do. I wrote colors like Rimbaud having visions. I wrote melancholy which reinforced mine. I wrote blinking howls which made my ink run by. I wrote thinking involuntary, coming from God knows where like frightened she-dogs… writers are mad to live out such things in their heart; he would tell me that today’s writers don’t go through such things anymore: they’ve lost the primal drive of writing which comes out of you like necessity, which you wrestle (forever along), your life getting in a tangle with death, in the holy inexpressible. And out of that kind of drama, no one can make a profession.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 359, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov