Randall Kenan
This tribute was originally published in Pembroke Magazine, No. 29 (1997). Randall died a month after Daphne, on August 28, 2020.
Help me, help me
I am free.
I am what I cannot be …
—from “Song of an American,”
poem by Daphne Athas
She was Da in the Day-light, a dashing damsel, dangerous, dagger-dangling, damning daemon of dumbness; she was Ph as in Funtastic: a funny, funky, Phaedra of the faith, fighting the Philistines, fleeing fledgling foolishness; she was Ne as Night began, nimble, neat gnashing nay-sayers, knitting nettles for the nabobs of negativism—Da-ph-ne, a diphthong of phonemes in the nether; a diaphanous, phantastic, neology: Daphne. Daphne. Daphne. Daphne.
(I cannot resist the temptation of playing further with Daphne Athas’s name—a wordsmith who abhors the bothersome trend of turning perfectly good nouns into verbs or perfectly good verbs into nouns—as in “authoring” or “stoppage” or the jerry-rigging of nouns or verbs into awkward adjectives. But I can’t help but wonder at the possibilities of Athasize, Daphicate, Athasify, Daphnesque, Athasian, Daphniation, Athasmentation, Daph…)
As an undergraduate at Chapel Hill, I certainly knew of this woman before I knew her: saw her pedaling her vintage bicycle down Franklin Street or across the campus toward Greenlaw; heard rumors and testimonials from her former students, still wide-eyed and bewitched; noted her laughter down those tell-tale halls of English literature, a sonic blast of joie de vivre; recognized her knowing, wise, gentle, mischievous smile and that platinum/plutonium glint in her eye—but it was not until English 47W—a writing course in stylistics—that I came to begin to reckon with this latter-day Hypatia of Chapel Hill, a high priestess in the Alexandrian Faith of the Word.
English 47W, as Daphne chose to run it for years and years, so became some-what controversial within certain Old-Guard quarters, primarily because Daphne shunned the notion that learning should be perforce dry-as-dust, austere, proper, remote, apart—a Holy Fetish of the Cardinals of the Church of English. In her hands, language revisited its funkiest roots, became juicy and ribald, dynamic and potent; once again the language for bodily fluids and amour fou, for the tongues of the saints and prostitutes: 47W was fun. Serious fun. As for me, I learned—and came to respect—the English language more than I had to that date. Nuggets from such disparate sources as Jacob Jacobson, H.L. Mencken, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Sid Caesar, William Shakespeare, Milton Berle, Geoffrey Chaucer, S.J. Perlman, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig van Beethoven, Noam Chomsky, Groucho Marx, J.S. Bach, William Faulkner, and the authors of the Old Testament, were deconstructed, reconstructed and then not merely studied, but made into the clay from which they were originally formed. And we students were then bid to play with them, play around, play up, play down, play over, play under, play light, play hard with this language, these rhetorical devices of the sentence, these denotations and connotations of the word, these resonances of the sound. Music and meaning. Look at the language Beethoven chooses for “Ode to Joy.” Hear the music in “Jabberwocky.” Turn the words of Hemingway into gibberish and with what are you left? The tones and structures of Genesis! There is sense in “Non-sense,” Daphne taught us, and glorious non-sense in “Sense.” And, perhaps if you’re lucky, by putting non-sense and sense together, you may get that elusive Holy Grail of meaning; perhaps, you might find, on some alluvial, some damp, swampy, oozing and primordial plain, some ur-truth about this thing that Anthony Burgess has called A Mouthful of Air: Language.
In the end, our work begat a show about language, equal parts education, edification and entertainment: word fugues and word symphonies, playlets and monologues, language turned on its head, parodied, pushed, stretched and shattered. For me, the descendant of men and women who were forced to take up English, and who, through cleverness and necessity, created new forms from the language of Shakespeare and King James (the Bible) and of lost Africa (Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, etc.), this study with Daphne opened my eyes to new possibilities, to old fundamental truths—I came to see that I could spend a lifetime playing with language and would only begin to get to the center of its power. Daphne, in short, made me a Sorcerer’s Apprentice of the Word.
My next formal encounter with Daphne Athas was in the benighted English 99—the honors writing seminar at Chapel Hill—which, that semester, Daphne team-taught with the writer Doris Betts. I fondly remember Daphne and Doris sitting in their respective places among the dozen or so students, students gathered in a miasma of youthful ego, trepidation, energy, and hope. Were we dreaming of Joyce and Styron, Wolfe and Faulkner? Were our eagerness and ambition palpable as honey on dry bread? Daphne and Doris have and had different styles in teaching and critiquing students, but they share a complimentary and complementary sense of irony and wry wit. Of Daphne, I remember her powerful mix of down right bluntness when she felt she encountered something false or implausible, both situational or emotional—and her effusiveness when she found some-. thing praiseworthy and real. Her eye was always on the look-out for the distinguished and the unusual lie that told the truth, often its way of telling being its own veracity. Daphne seemed to possess a homing device for bullshit, and an equally diligent one for the honest and the true and the human.
* * *
Upon leaving Chapel Hill, I was laden-heavy with gifts, and not a few were the gifts of having worked with Daphne Athas. She gave as gifts especially Gertrude Stein and Vladimir Nabokov. (Theretofore Stein made absolutely no sense to me, but through Daphne’s passionate interdiction, Four Saints in Three Acts became frightfully clear; her exegesis of Nabokov’s short story, “Signs and Symbols” truly altered my concept of what fiction could do to human perception.) And so much else was her bequest, much of which was simply Daphne being herself. As one sees Daphne—Daphne traveling, Daphne teaching, Daphne going to the movies, Daphne seeing and indulging and enjoying her friends, Daphne writing, Daphne reading, always, always, always reading—one sees a whole person; one sees a woman defying stereotypes, defying age, defying the definitions of ennui and atrophy and entropy that are supposed to overtake her; one sees, in Daphne Athas, the blueprint and the working model for a life well-lived, and it is difficult to spend any time with Daphne, or talk to Daphne, without being affected by this wonderful zest, this virus for good living—not the Good Living of money and laziness and ease, but the good living of an active and voracious mind, the desire to see and to hear and to taste and to smell and to touch the world, to learn and to grow and grow.
For me, this was Daphne’s legacy—the sum total of which, over the years, I would see as a shaman’s pouch: seemingly small and finite on the outside, but inwardly containing worlds without end.
But thankfully my apprenticeship continued and (perhaps I flatter myself in thinking) still continues with Daphne Athas. Each year, after I left for New York, I would return to Chapel Hill and meet with Daphne always at the Looking Glass Cafe. And why the Looking Glass? A tribute to little Alice and Lewis Carroll? We didn’t say. Perhaps the gentle atmosphere, perhaps, and I suspect the real reason, after our first conversation there was that the memory remained so strong and true that we wanted to continue that rare, good meeting and so it became “our place.” In 1994, when I returned to the Triangle to teach for two semesters, we then would regularly meet at Elmo’s Diner in Carrboro and there the intensity and fidelity of our conversations soared even higher, and I continued to learn.
Mind you, a conversation with Daphne Athas can be an experience in and of itself. The phenomenology and philology of her speech alone are both arresting and instructive. Daphne has been described as speaking in stream-of-consciousness. A typical conversation with Daphne would begin with a discussion of Tolstoy’s characterization, which would lead to a discussion of Dostoyevsky’s characterization, which would lead to a discussion of Haitian mysticism, which would lead to a discussion on her nephew in Oakland, which would lead to a discussion of California, which would lead to a discussion of Athens, which would lead to a discussion of London during the War, which would lead to a discussion of her friend and fellow writer and colleague Max Steele, which would lead to a discussion of Frank Porter Graham, which would lead to a discussion of Senator Jesse Helms, which would lead to a discussion of government, politics, and the military, which would lead to a discussion of Hillary Clinton, which would lead to a discussion of Margaret Thatcher, which would lead to a discussion of Vivien Leigh, which would lead to a discussion of Thackery, which would lead to a discussion of Dickens, which would lead to a discussion of Dostoyevsky, which would lead us back precisely, logically, as if the topic had never been left—to her original point about Tolstoy’s omniscience and humanity and sureness. Her conversation is a brilliant exercise of fluidity and intellect, woven right before the eyes in a language rich and punning and always intelligent and be-jeweled with insights.
I am pleased that Daphne often refers to our successive conversations as a “continuing conversation.” Once we had a discussion on one of my own stories, “The Far; or, A Body in Motion,” a story written from the point of view of Booker T. Washington, a story which disturbed her in regard to my playing fast and loose with historical figures so close to our present—a conversation that went on for almost two years, a conversation carried on over dinner, over the phone, through cards and letters. And though I am not to this day certain if each one of us came to change the other’s mind, radically, about this issue, I for one am certain that, because of Daphne, my understanding of the matter is deeper and broader and better considered.
To me that is what Daphne does, what Daphne is, at once a lightning rod and the lightning. Like Gertrude Stein before her, I can see Daphne saying: “One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows.” Or, “Supposing no one asked a question, what would be the answer?” Or, “… I just tell you and though I don’t sound like it I’ve got plenty of sense, there ain’t any answer, there ain’t going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that’s the answer.”
* * *
By birth and by nature and by circumstances, I have always seen myself as an iconoclast and an outsider, and perhaps because I sensed something of the like in Daphne Athas (Northern-born and partially reared, coming young to the South; of a strong Greek heritage in a bastion of Southern hegemony), that I felt instantly akin to her. In her essay, “Why There Are No Southern Writers,” a decidedly iconoclastic take on the prevailing need to lump Southern writers into one Big Regional Tradition, and in her novels and in person, one sees Daphne Athas always as a figure pushing against conformity, knocking on the doors of right reasoning, celebrating the Other, not simply because of its “Otherness” but because of its inherent value (if value is there) often overlooked, ignored, discredited.
Thus Daphne’s theories about language, thus Daphne’s most lasting gift to me, and to so many others. For Daphne believes, like truth in the Old Testament, that Language can make you Free. In her unpublished magnum opus on language she presciently, and in detail, lays out what Toni Morrison so forcefully put forth in her 1993 Nobel Lecture: That language can enslave us, cut off our tongues, imprison us, stultify us, kill us. Yet fresh new language, the language both of the gutter and of the soul, can lift us from the muck and mire of television and advertising and governmentese and legalese and institutional bone-and-ash talk and military claptrap—from the demonic power of race-baiting and the sinister power to degrade women. Therefore, the sense and the non-sense of Daphne Athas have their roots solidly sunk into the good earth, and are based in—though she would scoff at the word (so ill-used, so misused, so robbed of meaning) —a morality. Thus the meaning. Thus Daphne. Or, to paraphrase Robert Browning: “Daphne Athas means and she means good.”
As a continuing and bless’d student of Daphne Athas, I continue to sing her praises, in sense and non-sense; I continue to hope to learn how she robs bad language from the ignorant and spins it into fine gold, how she takes the most poisonous of phrases and makes them edible, how she scoops up dust-laden and brittle sentences and makes them flow—how she sets words on fire.
Surely Daphne Athas is a sorceress of the word.
May we all learn her witchcraft of wordcraft—and of life.