Historicizing the Echoes

Mattawa’s conceptualization of the zodiac is fantastic; he describes how “since the whole zodiac is in constant motion, and as this sun constantly spins about its orbit, some prayers become detached. Unable to resume their original ascent to the highest tier, the prayers spin about the zodiac filling it with their echoes. It is the mingled sounds of these unanswered prayers that give this zodiac its name.” In Diversity, Mattawa writes of a woman caught in daily life amid chaos, “her face dreamless, unhistoricized.” It seems that Mattawa’s entire work encompasses the undocumented aspects of life, personalizing these histories by people and their unnoticed echoes.

The personal level of his work is transcendent, for even well-historicized lands seem new by his poetry, documented by moments of heroism, love and difficulty. He describes not only political battlefields but also intimacy, where “the lover tells the beloved ‘I loved you first,’” pain like “a glow, an abandoned fire,” all the while wondering “how will I console the world?” Each poem seems to encompass at least one scene, a glimpse of emotion that describes places and events in a way that is impossible to technicality-driven history books.

This brings to question—what is history? Mattawa makes history his own term, defining it as anything past that can be captured or created. His work has a profound sadness, describing how “a woman picked and offered me/ a delectable sorrow, intractable: /our bittersweet insistence." His work depicts personal emotions and he allows these snapshots to stand for the places he describes, the struggles that inhabit every land and create unification. Mattawa describes a woman in turmoil by saying “she is not dead. she cannot stop dying.” It creates a sense of purgatory, caught between life and death. It seems this relates to emotional and locational division, for Mattawa describes a nationalistic sense of “ritualized terror” and the perpetual fear it inflicts.  

One of the first things I noticed about Zodiac of Echoes was that I have no idea how to pronounce a large part of the content. Upon closer inspection a lot of these unidentifiables are Mattawa’s references to countries and places that are entirely foreign to me and yet speak to his feeling of identification with other lands. Mattawa’s work is not only a depiction of spirit, love and pain amid the chaos of life, but also an unanswered question. He asks how to solve the world, an enquiry that feels almost rhetorical in its impossibility; however, his first step is clear: create unity. Mattawa’s work speaks to collective emotions and thus reveals the universal neglected echoes of the zodiac.