Djbot Baghostus's Run.

Reviewed by Karla F. C. Holloway Duke University

As the second volume of a promised trilogy with its own enigmatic title (From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate), Djbot Baghostus's Run continues the epistolary run of the Bedouin Hornbook. In a series of letters addressed to "Dear Angel of Dust," N. - founding member, composer, and multi-instrumentalist of the Mystic Horn Society, a jazz group implicitly invites both the letters' readers (the Angel, and those of us outside of the story) to follow the narrative he tells which is woven around (and through) the band's search for a new drummer.

All titles - textual, names, and honorifics included - signify deeply in this resonant and wonderfully postmodern novel that teases, frustrates, but ultimately liberates the act of storytelling until every sense of composition is implicated in each space of the story's evolution. In other words, the story is not just about jazz, but is jazzy; and is not only about a cross-country trip, but is trippin' (note, for example, the signifying "angel dust" of the letters' addressee). In each of its various narrative dimensions, the novel is deeply invested with a language that insists upon the reader's active (although possibly reluctant) engagement.

Consequently, this is either a novel to love or to hate. Its word play is relentless, demanding, often daunting, and intentionally challenging. Despite the fact that Mackey's prose persistently accomplishes the task of advancing the story, it also insistently occupies whatever interstitial spaces (point and counterpoint both) that are encountered during the narrative journey of N. and the Mystic Horn Society. Its thick narrative style penetrates the very act of storytelling and is, in its often perplexing riffs and junctures, either a treat or a testament to the novel's skill. The story persists in its telling even while its language seizes every available opportunity to do to itself what jazz does to an aficionado's head. You've got to have a head for this story. Without some willingness to wonder at language, to engage in its playful potential, or to work at its deep structures, the language will threaten and the story may not seem worth the effort of the narrative's constant call to the reader to come out and play (signifying intended).

Cognitive and neurolinguistic science indicates that musicians listen to music differently than do non-musicians. Experts listen with the left brain, where there is (and this is an admittedly severe overgeneralization) a more analytical response to stimuli. Others listen with the right brain, where the whole "sound" of the music dominates over the "sense" of its particulate construction. This is a left-brained novel, and if you appreciate the consequences of ambivalence and ambiguity, the improvisational potential of this jazzed-up narrative is stunning.

If you stay with the complication of concerts and conversations that intervene in this story of the band's search and discovery of a new drummer, the novel will delight you with a thick, signifying, and metaphorically jazzy composition. The ludic moments of the novel are absolutely masterful, and the speculative, thoughtful, contemplative moments that the narrator shares with his "Dear Angel of Dust" (which we cannot rule out as a conversation with the self-once-removed through the intervening strategy and structure of the epistle) are intellectual feasts. The letters are both smart and funny. Sometimes their culturally loaded interpretations of our contemporary urban landscapes are stunning. Consider, for example, N.'s reflective consideration of the break dancers who are outside of Penn Station upon the band's arrival in New York:

Aunt Nancy ... was struck by the interplay and the counterpoint between the upward thrust of the surrounding buildings and the dancers' answering exploration horizontality, their insistence, variegated as it was, on "getting down." I in fact had . . . taken note of the same thing.

. . . "break" serves notice on as it diverges from the city's valorization of hardness, unyieldingness, rigidity, the upward investment in steel and stone. . . . The breakers' recourse to choreographed rigidities and robotisms arises as a caveat in the face of exactly the threat it wants to fend off. . . . the spins, the strenuous bendings and the acrobatic twistings constitute a reminder . . . of the malleability and thus the vulnerability of the human flesh.

. . . Coming from L.A., I couldn't help noting that the dancers' pursuit of exponential horizontality had a way of letting sprawl, so to speak, in thru the backdoor. That the body turns out to be that door makes a certain sense. More importantly, this relates break dancing to, among other things, Caribbean limbo, said by tradition to have been born in the cramped holds of the slave ships. Like any other such black negotiation of shrunken space (think of Henry "Box" Brown, Harriet Jacobs's garret and so forth), break dancing understands cramp as embryonic sprawl, embryonic spring.

If you like narrative indirection, linguistic troping, and the multiplex of a complicated interplay of literal and figurative twists of syntax, sound, and sense, you'll stay with this novel's story.

The band's search for a new drummer begins with a challenge by the group's two women, who contest the premise that the drummer should be male. The opening scene presents the reader with a moment of "double namesake negation," where Aunt Nancy and Djamilaa make plain their threat of secession if the group does not agree to look for a woman drummer. In the musical interlude where this challenge is composed and articulated, the women exchange "a curious compound play of identity and difference," wherein Djamilaa gains a namesake negative dialectic and a nominal near-identity with Aunt Nancy: "no longer exactly Djamilaa . . . but Ain't Nancy." It's one of the many laugh-out-loud-with-the-sheer-smartness-of-word-play moments in the novel.

Mackey knows words well, and fully works their potential. Word play is at once the novel's identity and its challenge. More than one composition is simultaneously at work in framing the novel's story. Music and language (spoken and played; read, sung, and written; in-process and finished) search for a common intertextual, albeit syncopated, space that I believe to be the object of the novel's quest. A drummer, after all, will "run" with the band. N.'s saxophonic improvisations share a common ground with the narrative's own improvisational exposition, and both are refracted through N.'s letters to the Angel of Dust. Within these epistles, N. exposes musical compositions-in-progress, like his recently composed "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" (which, he acknowledges, may "lack ideological solemnity" - but, then, we are warned not to "confuse solemnity with truth"). Mackey is talking to his reader here.

N.'s letters also review the musical interludes of his company: Aunt Nancy, for example, is known to play a Paganini "Caprice," with an emphasis on the "pagan." For a woman whose name and presence signify on Anansi, the emphasis fits. Drennette, the group's newly found drummer, plays with a "splintered support sparked and spiced by slippage" that N. reports to the Angel of Dust as "putative solidity and soul rolled into one." In the novel's final moment, N. introduces his own lyric "Ax Me Now," a variation on one of Thelonius Monk's tunes, "Ask Me Now." N.'s version, however, reveals a "blackening" convergence of "prompting and prohibitions" and implies "redwood height, operatic height," where the "question wasn't whether or not to fall but how to fall."

By this moment of/in the story, the group has achieved transcendental harmonic convergence. They share dreams and exchange erotic and spiritual visions. In a final scene, "run" reaches intertextual nirvana - limning all the compositional spaces of the novel. It is a musical moment, a physical exertion, an operation and a function, and, critically, a migratory flow of text, which, despite the challenge of this multivariate operation (Mackey might well label it one of his "quantum-qualitative incidents"), manages to bring the story and its ruminations to a figurable moment. One has to wonder, as the novel races to its conclusion, if it will indeed conclude. But rest assured. You even learn the enigma of the title in these last pages, and the conclusion fits the novel's scheme.

Mackey is a sure and skilled and authoritative composer/compositor. I'm convinced and impressed with the daring success of his artistic and imaginative storytelling. His is a timely prose that carries and emblematizes the complications of our time. The workings of his words indicate an uncontestable care and loving respect for, as well as a left-brained skill with, the most subtle and resonant nuances of language.