The title of Raúl Gómez Jattin’s poem collection Almost Obscene (2022) is already a provocation. If former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 maxim about obscenity (“I know it when I see it”) still holds, obscenity relies on literal or figurative visuality — something (sex, filth) coming onto the scene which should be kept from view. Yet, Stewart’s quip also reveals another important aspect of obscenity: It involves a when. Considered along this temporal axis, it’s difficult to think of obscenity as having a terminus, a place where it ends, a hard boundary beyond which it doesn’t exist. In this sense, “almostness” seems constitutive of obscenity, the way it is on the verge of something — of being seen, of being pushed from view — and brings us to the verge of either arousal or rage, imitation or ban. (Fittingly, the word verge is itself obscene, deriving as it does from the Old French for a measuring rod used to stake one’s claim to territory — or else a penis.)
The poems of Almost Obscene — by turns agile, charming, intimate, and dark, as precarious and hypnotic as a candle flame — have long been pushed out of sight; now, thanks to translators Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott, they are coming back into view. Colombian poet Gómez Jattin (1945–1997), their author, was of Syrian descent; he was also queer, mentally ill, frequently incarcerated, and, since he lived on the streets, literally adjacent to upright urban life. As his translators note,
Throughout all of it, he never stopped writing poetry or reciting it on street corners; his instantly famous public readings drew hundreds of listeners. In 1997 he was killed by a bus. It remains unclear if it was an accident, suicide, or — as the poet’s close friends claim — an orchestrated act of social cleansing.
Human Rights Watch has described the decades-long campaign of social cleansing in Colombia as “the serial killing of members of a social group in order to ‘clean out’ or ‘impose order’ on a criminal or unsightly populace” by vigilante groups — with police involvement, government encouragement, and the tacit promise of impunity. Outrageously, this violent termination of Gómez Jattin’s life is doubled by members of the literary establishment who have, according to Hedeen and Lott, excluded the poet from anthologies, criticism, and other accounts of Colombian poetry.
Almost Obscene opens with an irresistible one-liner, a nimble hit of Gómez Jattin’s magnetic, confiding tone — “I WAS A WEED but they didn’t smoke me.” As local icons of village life are affectionately hailed by the poet — a donkey, a childhood friend — Beauty and Death are also among his intimates; they blow portals for themselves right through the poet and replicate in and as poems. “BEAUTY TOOK ME OVER,” one brief poem begins,
just like you’d take a boat or a city From its captive pleasure my ordinary life trembling These poems sobbing
To me, this is one of the most obscene poems of Almost Obscene, obscenely frank about its devotion to and devastation by Beauty. The resulting poem cannot bear itself; it tries to cry itself out, but can’t, drawn into the eddy of its final continuous verb.
In the first few chapbooks collected here, friends and villagers recalled from the poet’s youth have the fleeting attraction of flames while Death, Beauty, Poetry, Love, and even Life have the permanence and cosmic agency of stars. Often Gómez Jattin turns from one register to the other in the same poem:
The folks from my village say I’m a dangerous wretched man And they’ve got a point Dangerous Wretched Poetry and love did this to me.
The guarded nostalgia Gómez Jattin evokes around his interactions with “folks” in these early books seem to me to be nostalgia for the category of the human that he might have once expected to also enjoy, but now realizes he must put aside. He is verging toward something else — toward Death, toward poetry. Toward becoming obscene.
In the middle books, Gómez Jattin’s poems tend toward what might more properly be called erotic; while still brief, these take a more bodily grip on the page. Male bodies are ecstatically present in this sequence, and the stanzas serve as tenderly constructed weight-bearing vessels for trysts. In the course of the sequence, the lovers meet in sailboats, hammocks, and even, delightfully, the number eight:
We live in the eight Dual infinity of two universes Circle 8 Like two twin stars Two eyes. Two asses close Two testicles kissing
Here, where Death’s infinity sign is temporarily upended so the earth(l)y lovers can physically meet, a queer cosmic canopy is briefly and triumphantly unfurled. The joy is unmistakable, and the queerness of this joy is distinct, which, as Hedeen and Lott convey in their afterword, led to these poems and the poet being largely excluded from the project of a (hetero-)national Colombian literature. But their brio is inextinguishable, returning from the land of the dead through the outlandish route of English — a further obscenity.
Even so, the joy of these erotic lyrics is not unmixed. Death, Solitude, and Poetry remain the bedfellows of these bedfellows, and the metaphor of “poison” often arises as that which capsizes the poem and the fragile skiff of love. The decline is often steep.
[...] There goes my illusion of a shared future body to body the fatal facts of our story and the time we won’t get back flow over me like a glass of sexual poison
These are Gómez Jattin’s most assured poems — alluring, alert, infectiously and affectionately translated by Hedeen and Lott. But the poems’ own eddying, elapsing constructions, with clauses and phrases reaching for each other across enjambments and caesuras, indicate that the union of the lovers, and the poems that are their bowers, cannot last long.
The fatality long figured in Gómez Jattin’s work rises to inundate his final, posthumously published work, The Book of Madness, which appears here in its entirety, translated with glinting, chiseled gravity by Hedeen and Lott. Many first lines of this superb, hallucinatory sequence are hyper-deliberate in locating the poem in a series of “real-world” thresholds and adjacencies: “GOING INTO THE BATHROOM BETWEEN HIS ROOM AND THE MOTHER’S,” “HE LOOKS OUT THE DOOR OF HIS HOUSE AND SEES THE POLICE LIEUTENANT.” Others establish supernatural coordinates: “THE DARK WIZARDS GOT INTO MY BRAIN.”
This vivid convergence of the “real” world and the otherworldly creates an unbearable oscillation, which, like a fit of vertigo, renders the the “wretched artist” prone and helpless. The emblems and concerns that occupied his previous poems reappear here saturated with sinister intent, in a space at once claustrophobic and exposed. Familial figures are sadistic and spectral, Death and God are fickle as lovers, Dark Wizards and White Wizards pursue their noxious errands, even benevolent friends and strangers merely lure him onto convivial thresholds where he experiences ejection and humiliation. Amid this evil threnody, the artist’s mother haunts the poems most intensely, sometimes depicted as tenderly maternal — “Hijo How’d you sleep?” — other times aristocratically ignoring his pleas, and, most frequently, preying on him with arachnoid venom:
I AM YOUR MOTHER LISTEN TO ME IN YOUR MIND When you were born I sold you to the devil I feed on you
No figure can really upstage the mother in this phantasmagoria — not even Death, who also belittles her son’s gender by addressing him as “daughter” and “sissy.” A Freudian reading of course presents itself — the mother preys on the artist-son, devouring his manhood by treating him “like a little girl,” while even Death is implicitly emasculated, made to ventriloquize her attack.
But matters of gender have been more fluid in this oeuvre than could support this reading — an early poem attests, “I’m about a woman and a man/Broken by a tender virility. My soul overpowered/by a feminality hardened on art.” Here we see two types of claims deployed against the binaries of heteronormativity. First, the speaker claims to be just “about” a woman and a man — not fully either, verging on both. Next, Gómez Jattin scrambles stereotypical qualities of masculinity and femininity, rendering the former tender, the latter hard. The neologism “feminality” evokes this melting of gender bounds; even language itself must flex — gorgeously — before this verge.
In this context, while the terms “daughter” and “sissy” are used by the mother and devil to belittle the speaker, what’s most devastating is the way these epithets reduce the sense of permissive fluidity that has given pliancy and discovery to the poet’s work heretofore. No longer can he shelter in the tender-if-temporary queer paradises, the humble hammock, the intimate number eight. If, as he reports, this onslaught leaves him “helpless,” it is because this cruelty, whether coming from a sister, brother, God, Jesus, or that icon of care, Mother, is a travesty of help or care. It is help inverted — the kind of relentless, percussive inversions that characterize the verge of madness.
Yet such mocking, predatory behavior is not just the way of demons, but the way of the “real” world. The urban world around this visionary space is made of hard edges. The poems show the artist sleeping on benches, parapets, the sidewalk, and amid ruins, bullied by children, exploited by successful friends. The final line of The Book of Madness shows him at a threshold he is not permitted to enter, ventriloquizing its ban: “This gentleman can’t enter without shoes.” This ban ends his final poem, just as the ban of social cleansing allegedly ended his life.
The Book of Madness is one of the most indelible sequences of poetry I’ve read in some time — it reached me in a dark place, and it shone like a flame behind a glass pane at night — or maybe like the black part of the flame that feeds on air and darkens the darkness. This unbearable, ineffable nexus where light meets dark is the line between sanity and madness, life and death, the obscure and the obscene. Surely, these hallucinations were intolerable for Gómez Jattin, just as his own existence was intolerable for the society to which he was adjacent. After all, the cast of irreal, ghoulish torturers who prey on the “wretched artist” in this sequence feel like avatars of the real-life forces who placed Gómez Jattin under ban and pushed him out of view, even into the precincts of death. While The Book of Madness cannot be read as triumphant, the publication of Almost Obscene may be read as a triumph for Gómez Jattin, hard won by Hedeen and Lott. Through their principled intervention, not just Gómez Jattin’s own incandescent obscenity, but the annihilative obscenity of the family, the police, the state, the church, and the censor, comes verging into view.
Almost Obscene by Raúl Gómez Jattin, translated by Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott (2022), is published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center and is available online and in bookstores.
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