Dave’s Pottery: Containers for the Totalité-Monde

When Michael Chaney contextualizes Dave the Potter’s art and personhood within a “structure of relation” and “totality” in his essay, “the Concatenate Poetics of Slavery” (609, 610), Éduoard Glissant’s silhouette is projected clearly. Those are, after all, terms inextricably linked to Glissant’s writing. Dave’s ceramics are well-aligned with Glissant’s work; the jars’ inscriptions, multiplicitous natures, and errant patterns of travel (being sent across vast distances over the years in, circulated on some route with little form) help describe the Potter’s identity as a confluence of historical forces rather than a pinpointable subject. Chaney advocates reading Dave the Potter’s work against “the urge to seek out concrete dominance” in authorship or identity (Chaney 608), to dismantle notions of legitimacy that so much violence is built upon—to unroot, in a way. However, while Chaney recognizes Dave’s clay as an “instrumentalization of the natural world” (610), he doesn’t signify just how important that instrumentalization is-- how clay as a material obscures the Potter’s identity, letting it mix as relational mud. How pottery as a craft enacts a “symbolic mapping of the landscape” (Loichot 1016) that brings Dave in full conjunction with the totalité-monde forever around him. The poetry and poetics of Edouard Glissant, more precisely applied, make way for a clearer envisioning of the spirit of materiality implied by Chaney, especially within “a theory of the subject that foregrounds identity formation as a function of lack” (615).

There are moments in Chaney’s essay where Dave the Potter’s relational existence is highlighted without being disrupted: He is adamant about not letting “the poetry overshadow the pottery or vice versa” because they are interdependent, and he comments on their “refusal of anatomization” (607-608)-- yet, even in these early pages, I want to call upon Glissant to get deeper. To see more by saying less; to find a better way of phrasing the question, so I can get closer to what’s really being asked. Dave’s pottery often refuses anatomization, a way of rejecting separability (between the crafter, an inscription, and fired clay) phrased in terms of embodiment. Dave the Potter’s identity is decentralized, spreading outwards from the body of who-would-have-been David Drake into the land and the air, because his personhood is infused with the un-anatomizable pottery. It will not be reduced. Glissant gives some indication as to how pottery, as a craft, helps disseminate Dave’s identity throughout the whole world.

Valerie Loichot once visited Éduoard Glissant’s ceramic grave, and wrote about the experience in her aptly-titled essay, “Éduoard Glissant’s Graves.” She notes the philosopher-poet’s lifelong commitment to “ecocritical consciousness” (1015), a term for a type of engagement with world and text that I keep in mind when I use an ecomaterial lens to view Dave’s pottery. When a lump of clay is spun, opened, and shaped, there is a literal “’hollowing out of earth”’ (1015) which, for Glissant, allows life, death, and poetry to take place.

Dave combines poetry with pottery in a sublime act of hollowing, carving a distinct space for his self and making his hands the directors of the land he comes into contact with. Of course, it is not really a space that Dave creates, because the agency over space was forcibly removed from Dave by the people that enslaved him; it is a field of activity. Yet, in relation to Glissant’s idea of the landscape as monument (Loichot 1016), we can understand ceramics as monuments made of the landscape. In that way, Dave’s pottery is a reflective monument to place, affirming his connection to it and resisting the conditions that tried to dehumanize him.

The “flexible accumulation” that fueled the United States’ Antebellum economy, an accumulation maintained through enslavement (Chaney 607), is laid out in the accumulation of clay on Dave the Potter’s wheel. Dave’s art comes to symbolize the structure of his whole world, molded by his own intentions. Poetry and pottery become intertwined not only because one is inscribed into the other, but because of the immense poetice of the pottery itself as an expression of totality-- while reading Ethan Lasser’s “Writing in Clay,” I even conflate the words poetry and pottery if I am not looking closely enough. As Chaney and Lasser both note, the sheer size of Dave’s jars hold a faint physicality: Chaney writes about circling around one of the massive stoneware pieces and envisioning the torso of David Drake, and Lasser remarks on Dave’s final “‘Great & Noble”’ jar, named so because Dave himself had become great and noble (138). The imparting of self gives Dave’s pottery personality. By planting some of the human onto the material, the would-be-subject is disrupted, dislocated. The impermanent holds out a little longer. These ruptures, these reconciliations that must be made, are referred to by Chaney as “a structure of relation based as much on differences as on similarities” (609). Unfortunately, as Chaney’s word count increases, it is accompanied by an increasingly incomplete account of Dave’s identity. There is undue attention paid to questions on language, authorship, and materiality—attention that Glissant helps direct, when more thoroughly engaged.

Dave’s first two inscriptions, from 1834 and 1836, shift from “concatination” to “catination” (Chaney 608)—a linguistic movement from with-chain (or chainage) to just chain. Simplifying the inscription, shaving it down, brings it closer (so to speak) to earth, away from the individual, by reducing language’s real involvement. It is a shift emblematic of Dave’s progressive mastery of clay as/and language, through which he becomes increasingly connected to the land-world around him. Cutting off the prefix comes with Dave narrowing in on his thoughts; he becomes a more precise craftsman. For Chaney, though, the removal of con in the second inscription is part of a black “‘need to have a code that was/is indecipherable by foreigners’” (609). Dave’s words are deliberately written to be read by what is considered the foreigner in that context—they are in finely scripted English. Though they sometimes teeter on the precipice of legibility, there is nothing indecipherable about them. If the markings were intended to be indecipherable--inaccessible, particularly to the white people around Dave--they wouldn’t have been executed in
trained, practiced cursive.

Chaney sees Dave’s catination as indecipherable because of a lingering pretension that is exhibited subtly across his essay. Why delve into this deconstruction of “cat” and “nation,” or use phrases like “morphological elision” and “enunciatory rebus” (609), which are situated so far from the language of Dave’s pottery? Chaney’s tongue, thousands of feet in the air, soaring over Dave at work, ten toes down. The Potter’s direct, earthly poetics become unintelligible to Chaney, whose language runs on an incompatible operating system. Chaney’s verbosity and lofty jargon unfolds, blatantly unpoetic, across an essay where I just want the opaque profundity of Dave and his pottery-poetry to be respectfully acknowledged. To be seen without being chiseled away at. To be appreciated, as a massive jar, without needing to get all in its insides.

While Chaney champions dismantling “the urge to seek out a concrete dominance,” to “open up the inscription to a freer form of literary analysis,” (609) he does little work towards that freeing, and himself takes a domineering stance over the work. He refers to Dave’s pottery as a theatrical display of “‘spectacular opacity,’” a typical, performative act played out by “‘marginalized cultural figures’” (608). The theatrical and spectacular aspects are, presumably, the size of the jars and the fact that people in Edgefield would gather to watch the master-crafter work (Lasser 142-143). Dave had adept hands and conducted his labor publicly, which invited people in, but that doesn’t mean his work should be relegated to the dazzling and spectacular. If anything, his ceramics are anti-spectacular and anti-theatrical, because they required painstaking precision, were determined to be permanent and durable, and had so much spirit imparted onto them.

Chaney fails to recognize that, were such massive and unique pottery being created by someone from a dominant demographic (i.e. a white person), words like mastery, skill, and talent would be put into use well before the work would be called spectacular and theatrical. Indeed, Dave’s pottery seems to only be spectacular insofar as he is marginalized. Labeling Dave’s art as spectacular skirts around the spectacle of existence that enslavement itself enforces. Referring to his creations as acts of “hyper self-commodification” (613) ignores the fundamental commodification already enacted onto his body. How could Dave commodify himself any further? Sure, Dave’s pottery is sold (commodified), and it is undoubtedly spectacular (amazing), but Chaney’s language distances his words from their more sensitive meanings. He finds the authority to claim that the “haziness” of Dave’s inscriptions “free the word... from the strictures of dominant, rational language use” (609), positioning himself, the contemporary academic, as the one capable of (retroactively) giving Dave a subversive purpose. He manufactures indecipherability so that he can prove the radical acts of the ceramicist.

Glissant speaks on “numerous Chinese, Indian, Mayan, Aztec, and Egyptian texts” having no “concept of identity” (Poetics of the World 1), de-locating the self and referring to people through/as part of the surrounding world. Chaney positions himself as an innovative thinker by describing Dave’s identity in this dispersed, scattering way. I wonder if Glissant would think of Chaney as one of those who have forgotten that “this concept [of identity] was transmitted to us by the West” (Poetics 1). Towards the end, Chaney speculates that all of Dave’s pottery may have been some unified project, all of his jars some prolonged meditation on death (614). And they are, insofar as when things are made, they remind us of not being able to make things; but what fabricator makes like that deliberately? This is about my death… this is about the possibility of my dying… or what it will look like. Chaney tries to crack open Dave’s pottery, to get past its opacity—an approach that is (at best) quietly disrespectful, verging on exploitative (at worst).  

Chaney states that the value he finds in Dave’s work is relevant to “some Afrocentric scholars” (615, my italics), and addresses a tired semantic conflict over author and signature. His essay appears alongside one by Ethan Lasser in a collection titled “Where is All My Relation?” Both “the Concatenate Poetics of Slavery” and Lasser’s “Materiality of Dave’s Pottery” make use of definitively Glissantian language without directly pointing to him in any way. I cannot speculate as to why this is the case—avoiding giving credit when it is due—but I can conjecture that more attention paid to Glissant’s work would have helped tether both of their writings to the soil and the water.

Think again about Glissant’s grave: the ceramic/clay tomb was made by Victor Anicet, endowed with inscriptions where “the myopic visitor has to squat down, get closer to the earth, to decipher them” (Loichot 1014). It calls for an intimate engagement with the art (and, specifically, its text) in a way similar to Dave the Potter’s work. As Lasser writes, “it is virtually impossible for a viewer to overlook Dave’s marks”—the inscriptions on his jars—because of their placement (135). Many of the pieces require one to take “the time to walk around it” (138), a practice that requires duration and resists becoming spectacle. There is, as Betsy Wing writes in the introduction to her translation of Glissant’s poetry collection, Black Salt, a “poetry of duration… and accumulation” (5) that the massive jars represent. They are shaped mounds of clay, literally accumulated, and “the material is more resistant to corrosion and breakage than a lightweight, thinly-potted clay like porcelain” (Lasser 136). The messages and the spirit imprinted on the jars are determined to outlive generations.

The incisions/inscriptions were written into the mud-clay “with a sharp stick,” a method of imprinting distinct from most other Edgefield potters (Lasser 140). It’s like a message scratched into the mud or a wet shore (and is, really, a message scrawled into the mud), only more permanent. Because the method of inscription is so different from its local counterparts, one can assume that it was a deliberate choice to use that tool, and that the connection to a message scrawled in the earth itself is not lost.

Glissant spoke once about “archipelagic thought” (Poetics 8), expressed best through poetry, which emulates in a “continuous tremor” (8), a tremor visible in Dave’s spinning wheel, and through the ongoing dispersal of his creations. Poems from Black Saltcontextualize Dave’s art as shattering, shimmering fragments-- impressions of his individuality that create disparate floating islands. Clay, mixed soil; the “endlessly sculpted sea,” bursting, “always dislocated, always reiterated, and beyond consummation” (19). Dave collects and sculpts, repeatedly, creating dislocated nodes that provide the frame to some shifting grid. The silt that turns soil into fruitful clay is “the alluvia of the dead strata in your death” (55). Those kidnapped and brought across the Atlantic, lost to the ocean, actually circulate back to US soil, infused in Dave’s pottery, and imbedded in the dispersal and reification of his own identity.

Poems like “Elements” echo this sentiment even more directly: “I am in history to my barest marrow” (33). History is part of his innermost self, an embodiment repeated in the body-like structure of Dave’s jars. The Potter constructs an enclosed manifestation of his self out of earth and water, the “death-water no ocean can confine” (“Cold Weather Fever,” 44), with a hollow, shadowy inside. Imagine peering into one of Dave’s jars from above, seeing the complete, enclosed shape of the outside, but not being able to tell where the bottom is. As Glissant writes in “Cities,” the jar becomes “some object of silence one so immense” (41), a “space more complete upon you/ than any ocean makes an exile” (“Cold Weather Fever,” 44). The repetitious uttering of Dave’s name and spirit, the ever-flowering creations of his hands as they dig into the soil, concretize his subjectivity while scattering it in the wind like pollen.

Only two of Dave’s 45 inscriptions refer to specific places. The distance Dave felt from his narrow place-on-land is evident through the fact that it was not edified. While the jars, as singular objects, lack a “horizontal expanse” (Loichot 1014)—that overtly rhizomatic symbol—and are in fact quite vertical, there is a presentation of totalité-monde.