Joyce Mansour: In the Glittering Maw
Daniel Barbiero
June 2024
Joyce Mansour
In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems
tr. C. Francis Fisher
preface by Mary Ann Caws
World Poetry Books
The poetry of Joyce Mansour, one of the last significant artists to be attracted to the Surrealist movement under André Breton, has been undergoing something of a revival in recent years. An Essential Poems and Writings came out in 2008, and in 2023 City Lights put out a collection of selected poems surveying her career as a writer from beginning to end. And now we have In the Glittering Maw, a selection of poems drawn from Mansour’s last seven collections, published between 1960 and 1981.
Mansour (1928-1986) is often described as an Egyptian-French author, but her background was considerably more complicated. She was born into a Syrian-Jewish family in England, and moved to Cairo shortly thereafter. Her first marriage, at age 19, left her widowed when her husband died of cancer after six months; it was the second traumatic loss she underwent in a short time, her mother having died, also of cancer, when Joyce was 15. When she married again it was to the banker Samir Mansour, a Francophone Egyptian who moved in King Farouk’s social circles. In addition to the English and Ladino she spoke while growing up, she now learned French, the language in which she wrote her poetry. After King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 and Gamel Abdel Nasser took control of Egypt, Mansour and her family were forced to leave Cairo for Paris, where they took up permanent residence. She published her first book of poems, Cris, in Paris in 1953. The book brought her to the attention of Breton’s circle, and she maintained a friendship with him until his death. She died in Paris of cancer in 1986.
The poems of In the Glittering Maw have a Surrealist vitality at once catalytic and disturbing. Victoria Carruthers summed it up best when she noted that Mansour’s poetry “invokes both Eros and Thanatos to describe a psychic, emotional and physical experience that is simultaneously creative and destructive.” On the side of Eros, Mansour’s poetry is permeated by highly charged, often troubling imagery. Libido by nature is an irresistible, irrational force; Mansour expresses it in a verbal fantasmagoria that pushes up against and beyond conventional restraints and taboos. The voice that speaks through her poems is volatile and excessive, explicit and direct. Images jostle up against each other in unstable combinations threatening at any moment to explode. Eros as it appears here is charged with an energetic violence. To pick a passage at random, from “What Are These Knives That Shine Above the Seine”:
No science can bring me
An easy end on your moving bed
My raging passion flays the grass
Your mother’s smile lights up my face
This is the rock that will crush your pride
But whom will I court without heat
What pulls “raging passion” back from the edge of being just an empty formula is Mansour’s unusual choice of the verb “flays” to describe its action: from the verb’s implying the presence of a sharp, cutting instrument – an image already suggested by the knives of the title — the poem metaphorically reverses itself to the blunt trauma of a rock crushing the ego of the person who falls into the speaker’s erotic orbit. Here, as throughout these poems, aggression makes itself felt as the engine driving love. In the late long poem “The Great Never,” they are mutually implicated in the same breath:
I have loved
I have killed
I have loved the one who was quiet
Postscript in Cairo
After everything
The trance follows carnage
Like the carnation the garbage
In “Beneath the Central Tower,” dedicated to the Surrealist painter Matta, she writes:
I heard the dialect of undressing sexes
Hands wrote on the valves
Twenty-four seven
And assassinations would have to follow
As she pithily sums it up in “Pierre Molinier or One Who Desires,” a poem titled for the Surrealist photographer of fetishes, “He knows/That the royal path of sex remains/Hatred.”
Mansour to a significant degree called Surrealism’s bluff by bringing it down to earth. Desire, in Surrealist theory and art, was often framed in idealized, almost disembodied terms. Mansour, by contrast, returned desire to the reality of the body that is its natural point of reference and, pulling back the metaphysical curtain behind which Breton and others had concealed it, exposed the often messy physicality without which it ultimately is meaningless. She affirmed the body at the same time that she wrote of it in concrete and often unpleasant imagery, acknowledging it as the ground on which desire is played out and beyond that, as the inescapable vehicle of human being. For Mansour, the body inevitably is the site of both “luxury and putrefaction,” as she put it in “Night’s Door Is Locked.” She doesn’t shy away from alluding to its effluents, malodorous exhalations, and liability to disease and corruption – what in “Bronze Like Nightfall” she calls the “Blood and vomit of real life.” Desire and disgust are simply two sides of the same well-worn coin. By linking them as she does Mansour, perhaps more than any other Surrealist artist, reminds us that the unconscious – or creative imagination, or whatever else we want to call that opaque dimension within us – isn’t a disembodied, free-floating cloud of images and urges, but instead is something lived through the body And not just any body, generically understood, but a particular body with a particular history encompassing not only its physical states, but the temperament, set of dispositions, needs, aversions, and so forth that are inextricably a part of what makes it a being in its totality.
If the body is made by Eros, it is unmade by Thanatos, which Mansour casts as Eros’ inevitable complement. Death runs throughout her poetry the way a basso continuo runs through a Baroque sonata. In “A Thousand Throats Howl Together”
Death pulls its silk stocking
On the upturned face
Blue green and livid
Erases the features
Of the friend
A thousand throats burn together
All voices go out
Their mixed tongues
Covered over
Night acts a sweater
It’s hard not to see her personal history, in which she had to confront the deaths of those closest to her early on, as having had a part in making this a theme to be returned to and woven into the fabric of so much that she wrote. She didn’t spare herself; the lines “Nothing will remain of my body/The dome of smoke will rise on the horizon” haunt these poems with a premonition of her own death of breast cancer at the relatively early age of 58.
Because Mansour’s poetry dwells so frequently on the fact of death, it often has been described as macabre. But it’s possible to see the fixation on Thanatos running throughout these poems as instead exemplary of Surrealist humour, or what Breton, drawing on Freud, defined as the “paradoxical triumph of the pleasure principle over real conditions, at the moment when those conditions are deemed most unfavorable.” We can read this passage, from the title poem of Mansour’s 1969 collection Phallus and Mummy:
Saturn uses his stinger
To stimulate his appetite
Death might be necessary
For others
as an oblique echo of the ironically humorous epitaph that Duchamp, who died the year before Mansour’s book was published, chose for himself: “Besides, it’s always the others who die.” In their irony, Mansour’s lines, like Duchamp’s epitaph, push the inevitability of death off onto others and, as Freud claimed in his late paper on humor – well-known to Breton – assert the invulnerability of the ego and thus spare it the suffering it ordinarily would experience under the circumstances. Mansour’s allusions to death and bodily decrepitude generally, are notably free of a sense of suffering, playing out instead in other affective registers: irony, mockery, and absurdity chief among them – precisely the registers in which Surrealist humor plays out. (Given her early experiences, it’s easy to understand how Surrealist humor would come instinctively to her.) When further on in “Phallus and Mummy” she writes, “Death is a revolving door/A soapwort a rump”, or in “You Must Buy Your Coffin…” “You must buy your coffin while alive/Filling it is nothing,” her insulting metaphors for mortality and cavalier belittling of it as an event that is “nothing” (or alternately, calling the corpse that fills it a nothing), embodies an important side of Surrealist humor that derives directly from Freud’s paper – its rebelliousness and ultimately liberating effect. When the terror that lies at the end of the road is defanged like that, we may feel freer to live with it as the inevitability that it is. Had Breton chosen to revise his 1940 Anthology of Black Humor when it was republished shortly before his death, he may well have wanted to include something by Mansour.
Fisher gives us a vibrant Mansour by putting her extravagant and often unsettling images into contemporary English. For readers of French, the original texts on facing pages will be a welcome feature. For anglophones unfamiliar with Mansour’s work, this volume will serve as a fine introduction.
Joyce Mansour
In the Glittering Maw: Selected Poems
World Poetry Books →
Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).
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