Canisia Lubrin.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Canisia Lubrin’s brilliant, challenging and ecstatic new work, Code Noir, refracts hundreds of years of history into a lively book of fictions – or, as the internationally acclaimed, Griffin Award-winning, Windham-Campbell prize-earning poet calls them, metamorphoses, or drafts, or stories.
If Lubrin’s kaleidoscopic first book of fiction defies categorization, well, that’s the point; the work speaks in many voices, across the world, in and out of time, and through many genres to give life and language to a vibrant cacophony of Black stories.
“I wanted to be omnidirectional,” Lubrin says, over morning cortados at Toronto’s Bar Raval. “I wanted to move in the future, come back into the present, move sideways into the past.” There’s a playfulness in her voice as she describes the work, a story collection about Black life. But then she gives me a serious look. “I mean, story is a continuous material. It’s constantly evolving.”
Books we're reading and loving this week: Globe staffers and readers share their book picks
And so Code Noir has stories in a realist tradition – of childhood disillusionment in St. Lucia, of gossiping with friends in Toronto, of homesick students and queer, grief-stricken daughters struggling to conceive – alongside philosophical essays on loneliness; Oulipian jokes about language as a numbers game; and abstracted science fictions set far, far, far in the future. There are homages to musicians and revolutionaries; there’s a short story in the form of an art show review. Few modes or methods are beyond Code Noir’s scope. One short entry, for example, is called “Bad Temper” and reads, in its entirety: “Well, finally, I’m getting a gun. Killer robots have learned how to dance.”
Lubrin’s virtuosic variety coheres in the face of a specific history. She is writing against, within and around the original Black Code.
In 1685 France’s King Louis XIV passed a decree consisting of 59 articles meant to govern not only chattel slavery but Black subjecthood throughout France and its colonies. Le Code Noir, as the document was called, outlined the legal statuses of both free and enslaved Black women and men, and the circumstances by which children born to enslaved women could legally inherit freedom, or, more often, enslavement.
King Louis XIV’s code is reproduced, partially, in Lubrin’s Code Noir. Each story is set beside one of the original articles, as a kind of historical framing device. The articles are obscure, figuratively, in that they are from the past and bear apparently very little direct relation to the story at hand, but also literally: Each article of the code has been drawn over with original graphite and charcoal artworks by the American artist Torkwase Dyson. In some of her drawings, certain words are boxed around, in others the text of the original code is fundamentally illegible.
“I knew that I didn’t want the legal articles to be front and centre,” Lubrin explains. “I didn’t want them to be legible in the way that the historical master narrative is so entrenched.”
Inviting Dyson into collaboration happened late in the process. While trying to figure out how to include the literal master narrative, even if only to counter it, Lubrin realized she would need more than just literal reproductions of the code. The collaboration, she says, “is the thing that happened by necessity.” She asked Dyson, who lives in New York State, to consider working together, and Dyson started drawing directly on the proofs, letting her intuition guide her. The end result is exactly right, obscuring and countering, rewriting and reweaving, the colonial ordering of the world.
Code Noir, by Canisia Lubrin.Supplied
When she shows me her finished copy of the book, we marvel over the faithful reproductions of Dyson’s drawings, her strong lines and the few works where you can glimpse a smudgey fingerprint and sense the magic of the unknown, almost feel for yourself the possibility in the artist’s hand hovering over top of the ugly legal texts.
“The history of Black being in the west is one of immense loss and immense dehumanization,” Lubrin says. “So I wanted the articles to be featured like artifacts. I wanted them to be messed up. I wanted them to not be so legible. I didn’t want to recentre their logic, but I did want them to function as the narrative that they are; they are that master narrative.”
History, she is telling us, is not coherent.
“That discoherence cannot help but be evidenced in all of these official structures and principles and philosophies and ideologies that structure and bracket our lives, historically and into the present.” She gives the example of carding, of the overpolicing of Black people in general. In Code Noir, there is an affecting story of a taxi driver whose life is upended by a violent encounter with police, as told from the distanced perspective of the driver’s friend, a man who was simply waiting for a ride to a party. But Lubrin is wary of creating a spectacle of Black suffering, of dehumanization: “I’m kind of tired of that. I see it in a lot of books that are about Black lives, the tradition of the ceaselessly dominated subject, the impoverished subject.” She inhales, a pause. “I wanted to go after the unimaginable interiority.”
Lubrin links the diverse stories not only through the appended, reworked code but through a meta-narrative, a slippery voice, a unique consciousness – yes, a vast interiority – that skips through the pages. Code Noir begins and ends with remarks from a narrator of sorts, admonishing the reader to abandon notions of belief or disbelief: “If anybody tells you they have the only truth, you use your nose instead.” The narrator functions like an archivist, presenting collected testimonies, stories, missives. You see their voice pop up again and again, but the distance between reader and that one narrator is tantalizing; you never quite can pin down what precisely it means when they appear, or what they might say next.
'I wanted to treat the stories as things with consciousness, as though the stories themselves are aware of each other,” Lubrin says.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
When I tell Lubrin I found that meta-voice both playful and accusing, a postcolonial trickster who pulls linguistic pranks and also reveals the dimensions of so many lives across the 59 stories, she smiles.
“I wanted to treat the stories as things with consciousness, as though the stories themselves are aware of each other,” she says. “And that meta-voice is a kind of writing counter to the typical God-like omniscient voice that we expect in narrative, the voice that knows everything. There is also this tradition of Black testimony as a disruptive force, and it shows up in all of the stories.” It was important, she says, “to have that voice gesture toward a kind of counter to the perspective that tells you that you have to know everything, that everything has to be clear and there doesn’t need to be any mystery.”
Life, of course, is mysterious and despite our desire for certainty the world is still filled with unknowable things. Many of the stories in Code Noir point directly at the seemingly magic uncertainties in the world. There is a highly skilled blind seamstress, a woman named Ethel who returns home after a trip of a few hours with her hair gone grey as if through years of living, a story in the form of a song that reiterates that “the world is not its maps.”
Lubrin’s genius in constructing her Code Noir is in creating a world off the map, or around the map, or where the map and its delineations are insignificant compared with the relationships between people, parents and children, the living and the dead.
She laughs when I tell her I found the language of the King’s codes flat, unmusical. “None. No poetry, no music, no nothing. It’s just a blunt instrument,” she says. “King Louis’s black codes are about this very typical, structural sense of the world, which is about making people into these machines that produce and reproduce and deepen the wells of capital in almost every way.” Lubrin’s dazzling achievement is to counter the evil encoded in that unmusical language with a lush symphony, where readers might listen both for clamour and silence.
“I wanted the stories to simply be banal in a lot of ways,” she says, “with everyday human concerns. To allow the characters the latitude of what it is to make a life out here. To wrestle with loneliness, to share a meal with someone or, you know, to walk into an art gallery and see someone you desire.”
In the opening and closing remarks in the book, the stories, spectacular and banal alike, are referred to as drafts, a nod to the never-finished nature of history. “I always like to think of every opportunity, every new day, as an iteration, as an attempt at carrying on,” Lubrin says, “and really, that’s the best thing that we do, especially when faced with the more horrific end of the human spectrum. We carry on, we carry forward.” She pauses. “I am attempting to think, I am attempting to make a music.”
In Code Noir, she more than succeeds. The poet triumphs.