Take a potato peeler, grab a cumin seed, try splitting it and see what happens. Whatever you try, the narrow seed will happily jump out from under the iron with every attempt. It performs a dance in which it refuses to be pinned down. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld performs such a dance in his new, bulky bundle Cumin Splitters.
That brilliant title alone, you might think, is a tease to all those who think they can find something of his. Mosquito sifters, a more banal alternative might say, or hair splitters. Biggs is another. Rijneveld gives a number of examples in the title poem. For example, there is the person who knows everything, has his heart on his sleeve, ‘but rarely knows the formula for a good life’. Or the one whose words are ‘made of scaffolding wood’, while he does not see the fish that have come up from lack of oxygen. Of those pulpit preachers, in other words, who turn their eyes too little inward and outward: ‘everyone can think of them’, writes Rijneveld about them, ‘but nobody really knows them.’
A bundle full of heat seekers
Splitting cumin is like splitting atoms, in any case it releases a lot of heat. Just put a cumin seed on your tongue, place it between your teeth and bite it in half. A warm, earthy flavor fills the palate. As a cookbook author recently told me, in terms of taste, cumin is the plump sister of black pepper. With this in mind, we can Cumin Splitters can also be read as a bundle full of heat seekers. And you can count on the longing in Rijneveld’s poetry. To borrow an image from Rijneveld himself, ‘galaxies of yearning’ flow through these verses. And, to use another, they breathe “swoon.”
So small and yet so full, the seed is overflowing with meaning. Poetry does not stop at a single interpretation. Cumin is also known by another name borrowed from Malay. In jinten something almost ghostly resounds. Meaning by sound similarity: jinn are seen by some as supernatural, invisible beings who deprive people of their will. They are below the angels, but above man. If a jinn takes possession of you, it leads to an almost demonic possession. In that sense, Cumin Splitters are read as ‘Djintensplitters’, as a collection of figures that cut the demons in the head in half.
Head and body
The following also applies here: there are plenty of them in Rijneveld’s collection. Who pays attention, sees how the head in Cumin Splitters overflowing, overcrowded. It is filled with ‘a dark field of clouds’, ‘too many people’, ‘terrorists’, ‘nightingales’, ‘thunder sermons’, ‘poetry lines’, ‘bombers’, ‘the sleeping dog’ with ‘mud feet’, ‘numerous ‘, ‘the black/blame and the candle wax of the evening’, ‘a design,/an angelic appearance’, ‘shells’, ‘moisture’, ‘apparent coolness’, ‘the storage room’, ‘coincidences’, ‘picket posts’ of ‘injuries’, ‘travels you only make in your head’, ‘folly’, ‘manufacturability’, ‘monsters’, ‘the sink’, ‘explanations’, ‘crow black’, ‘all those voices’, ‘the rapaille true you just can’t get rid of it’ and ‘riots’, riots of ‘not-knowing’. There are those who would be mad at less. Fortunately, Rijneveld writes full verses with it.
Under that head is the body. Rijneveld has a lot to say about that body. Many, if not all, poems deal with the inhabitation of the body; or about the struggle over the body, about the struggle one sometimes has to fight for one’s own body and about the struggle within one’s own body.
And then there is also the space above the head, which in this collection is remarkably often filled by trees. Trees are fragile, stiff, tall and helpless with their arms. They go from season to season. Trees sparkle in budding and blossoming. Messages are carved in trees, love is noted. Trees cast shadows, deprive us of the light or ‘they protect you from/the sun, from looking in, they keep you out of harm’s way, even now you know’, writes Rijneveld, ‘how you are grown, how you suffer from root rot, and how you caresses the bark, / blows the wind from their weary peaks.” Trees, by the way, just like the cumin plant, offer a screen to hide under with full head and body. And, according to Rijneveld, they reach for heaven, just as we humans do.
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld: Cumin splitters. Atlas Contact; 104 pages; €19.99.
