A
collection of
poems and
short stories/
vignettes by
Jean Toomer.
While reading the first section of Cane I had the overwhelming
feeling of – presence. Not of
something spiritual or divine, but a physical, amorphous, miasma of … something.
Cane has … texture. It has a degree of humidity … it felt to me like nothing short of a cloud of the
fluids of life.
In “blood
burning moon” we are exposed to the taste of cane that filled the air in town to a degree
that it was pointless to chew cane stalks for the flavor. We are
also exposed to the
horribly organic odor of burning
flesh at the end. In Esther, she becomes disillusioned
with Barlo in the midst of
“thick licker fumes” and when she
decides to make her
vision of McGregor’s shop
less immaculate she adds the smell of
burning tobacco from spit of the men who sit and watch. The
scent of pine smoke drifts through
“Karintha” and
just the name “fern” conjures up the sweet not-quite-rotten
vegetation smell of ferns in the summertime.
The sense of
smell here is inextricably entwined with the flesh here, the pleasures and pains of it. The smells used are not light and airy but thick and full of life. They evoke the most primal human themes: fertility and death.
Are we
then to assume that
these are the
smells of the south? and why do they seem to
occur most frequently
there and much less up north? To be sure physically the heat
enhances smells,
humidity makes
them more physical – but perhaps this is also a way of conveying to the reader the connection with the deeper parts of
ourselves that are embodied in the farms and towns of the south that are forgotten in the north.