much has been written about bob dylan winning the nobel prize for literature. i couldn’t care less about the prize itself – it reflects the kind of eurocentric, hegemonic, up-to-the-minute, dime a dozen politics that i have no interest in. however, poet natalie diaz had some interesting thoughts on the subject.
Natalie Diaz, poet, When My Brother Was an Aztec:
I didn’t grow up listening to Bob Dylan. On my Rez, it’s always been more about Bob Marley. I know that Bob Marley will never get a Nobel. And the reason the Nobel committee might give is because he was a song writer, but what they will mean is “he is still dangerous: by inciting resistance, by unifying the wrong kind of people, by being a black man, by turning the gun on the sheriff.”
Yes, I think music is poetic. Poetry was once music, is still music(al). Language, once spoken, even if you can’t hear it, is sonic. But I have only read the lyrics to songs I couldn’t hear the words to, mostly recently Rihanna’s “Work.” When was the last time you read song lyrics?
It seems to me that most academies want to pretend they have thought hard and felt hard about difficult things, but they are more and more often settling for fake and fast rigor. Maybe this is why the element of reading was taken out of the prize category this year. Maybe this is why we are having conversations about appropriation in writing: Don’t let the dangerous people write those dangerous stories. Let us write them. We can call it imagination and witness.
I’m not saying Dylan is not rigorous. I’m saying, Bob Marley will never win a Nobel. One is dangerous to the academy and one is not.
The academies want to pretend they are participating in art and literature that allows them to look deep into themselves, their power structures, their prejudices–really they’d rather look at themselves. Maybe this year the books written by women were all too rigorous for the academy, so they chose from all men, and still those men’s books were too rigorous. So they needed a break, from reading, from literature. So they poured some schnapps, put a record on…