☀ Editor's Choice: "Verso 19.2" Dionne Brand

Alice B. Toklas on Gertrude Stein on Picasso on Gertrude Stein: In these
early days . . . the effect of the african art was purely upon his vision and his
forms, his imagination remained purely spanish . . . She was not at any time
interested in african sculpture. She always says that she liked it well enough
but that it has nothing to do with europeans, that it lacks naïveté, that it is
very ancient, very narrow, very sophisticated but lacks the elegance of the
Egyptian sculpture from which it is derived. She says that as an American she
likes primitive things to be more savage.
        Who on earth is left who did not say an awful thing, the clerk
wonders. Who. Who did not disguise it as sophistication, as knowledge,
as wit. What jaded poses dismiss all dreadfulness. How the author
bears all this is alarming. And that isn't even the worst. Such memory
loss you have. Melanctha. My amnesia is useful. How many microabrasions,
as they say, do you think I could take?
        Rose Johnson was careless and was lazy, but she had been brought up by
white folks and she needed decent comfort. Her white training had only made
for habits, not for nature. Rose had the simple, promiscuous immorality of the
black people. Rose Johnson and Melanctha Herbert like many of the twos with
women were a curious pair to be such friends. Melanctha Herbert was a
graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive negress. She had not been raised
like Rose by white folks but then she had been half made with real white
blood.
        Each sentence is a razor blade. Toklas says (and still I am honouring
the conceit) . . . And still you are honouring the conceit. Can you call it a
conceit anymore, truly? You're right of course but Alice says that
when Gertrude Stein wrote this it was the first definite step away from the
nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature. Well all that
is certainly generous, the clerk laughs. Sometimes the clerk laughs an
uncontainable laugh. An unruly, veering laugh. It veers and it cracks
and the author hears it like a bone being broken when a car hits it out
of the blue. And even so, the author quotes Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude
Stein concluded that negroes were not suffering from persecution, they were
suffering from nothingness. She always contends that the African is not
primitive, he has a very ancient culture and there it remains. Consequently
nothing does or can happen.
        Didn't Hegel say that? It's all I remember of Hegel. The clerk is
laughing now like machines cutting gravel in a quarry. See Picasso's
Acrobat and Young Harlequin, 1905. Just to state the obvious, the clerk
states the obvious. These effete and childish paintings, their organgrinding
stupidity. Then observe the utter ripping of Picasso's
sensibilities, the shredding of his senses when the African sculptures
entered him. Then, Head of a Woman, 1907. Head of a Man,. 1907. The
author and the clerk mimic Alice with their hostile pity, . . . the charming
early Italian period to the intensive struggle which was to end in cubism.
        Is there an essentialism creeping in here. The tentative author. No,
a tiredness with having to recuperate, from essentialism, the
conversations going on in the African sculptures so they may go on
their way. In a future uninterrupted they break their own
mythologies. Will I? The plaintive author. Who knows.