The Ethics of Materiality

Christopher Kondrich reviews Aditi Machado’s “Material Witness”

By Christopher KondrichOctober 22, 2024

• Poetry

IN THE PARLANCE of the American judicial system, to be a material witness is to have significant information or to be able to provide evidence deemed significant to court proceedings. You may or may not have participated in whatever alleged crime was committed, but your knowledge about who was involved or what happened implicates you. And the prosecution can’t succeed without your involvement. Whether you want to or not, whether you like it or not, the knowledge you have is used by the prosecution to try to secure a conviction.

The nuances of the term loom over Aditi Machado’s masterful new collection, Material Witness, not merely because of its title. Its poems—almost entirely long and exhilaratingly intricate—explore notions of involvement and participation in the consumptive and colonial forces of late capitalism, in the plundering of the living world. And, in so doing, they unpack materiality (and the language of materiality) itself. They ask what it means to be significant, to be “the consequent animal,” as she writes in “Bent Record,” and what it means to play a role in what you may or may not know about, in what you may or may not be able to name.

Early on in the title poem, materiality comes looking for the speaker, or, to put it another way, the material world intrudes. The first few pages in the sequence describe a speaker listening to a band playing, a speaker concerned with the weather, with “some vegetable-colored sky toward which stupefied you grew,” but the line “Deaths, then” arrives on its own page. The blankness around the words is palpable, as though the speaker does not quite know what to do with “Deaths, then,” until, that is, “Deaths, then” returns several pages later, and the speaker follows the intrusion of death with “A green bath to strip out of, feeling yourself nothing in the dark but an orange erupts in odorous flame and kisses you with the kiss of its mouth.” This moment—which recalled, for me, the reconciling of the mundane with the horrific that Etel Adnan powerfully contends with in “To Be in a Time of War”—skillfully renders the ways in which we assimilate the violences of the world into our lives, into the dailiness we feel we have no choice but to continue, and the ways in which we are merely haunted by these violences. “You woke and were haunted,” Machado writes, “Haunted by discursive strategy. / Haunted by an inability to name species.” And yet the speaker only toys with the idea of addressing the origin of what haunts her: “You could solve this problem, in theory.”

What “Material Witness” is indicting, then, is the collapse in our ability to identify, respond to, or even cope with the myriad traumas unfolding in material ways around us, and yet it also indicts the ways in which we are able to identify, respond to, and cope with these traumas because we perpetrated them, would perpetrate them again, and have no qualms about saying so. In “Bent Record,” the speaker admits to various nefarious activities in a way that fetishizes admission. “It was I / who ‘discovered’ the plant and I who named it imperially / after my own self” exists alongside “I did indeed compose the philosophy / and did so in broad daylight, bearing its illegal whips,” revealing the speaker to be emblematic of those who wield empire, of those whose self-proclaimed supremacy is insidious and systemic. “I knew just enough / to be toxic to the earth,” the speaker asserts, but this isn’t enough. It never is:

I have done only some of what I could do to secure my freedom.
Of nuance I am the consequent animal. Unsubtle,
I live in intricacies of the obvious. Into which I permit
your entry. For indeed, yes, over this too
I maintain a modicum of power.

In these last lines of “Bent Record,” the speaker asserts dominance over the poetic space itself. They admit to having the power to exclude and execute that exclusion by ending the poem. We are no longer welcome in the poetic space since there is nothing left to admit, and, since such admission serves only the speaker, there is no reason for the poem to continue.

What makes “Bent Record” remarkable, and what it makes clear, is how cleverly Machado portrays poetry (and the material of poetry) as within the domain of empire, that there is nothing beyond its reach—even the poem’s attempts to extradite itself from empire or to rectify its fallibility in some way. Getting back to “Material Witness,” a recurrent “No” keeps sending the speaker back into language to reconsider or redirect it, as in “This was a period of decay. No. / This was when you forked out opinion,” and “It was like things deferred their freedom to you. No. / It was their kinetic enchantments.” The “No” in these lines is freighted with the knowledge that an ethical relation to the material world vis-à-vis the material of poetry is elusive and slippery, and so these instances of “No” keep asking the language of expression to try again, supposing that an ethical relation might be achieved if we keep trying.

Material Witness is also concerned with how ethicality presents itself through what and how we eat. In “Concerning Matters Culinary,” which takes its title from the alleged “first” cookbook, De re coquinaria, attributed to Apicius, the flora and fauna served to the speaker (in a context that can only be described as fine dining) are often rendered in the language of predator and prey—“A SCENT OF LIME / EVADES DETECTION,” “AND THE SCALLIONS WITHER IN MY ARMS”—but also as creatures that have the potential for resistance, that refuse to be prey even on the plate—“THE INEFFABLE CURRY LEAF […] REFUSES THIS APPROPRIATION.” It is as though the speaker is primed and poised to strike like a lion in tall grass waiting for the right moment to pounce—“THERE IS DEATH FOLDED / IN MY MOUSSE TODAY”—only to discover that what is about to be consumed has agency, integrity, an overtakelessness (to borrow a word from Dickinson):

WERE THOSE NOT MY LIPS
SACCHARINE LEFT DUMB
TO YOURS O PEACH MOUTH
IN WHICH I MACERATE

In these lines, and perhaps more so in the “adscription” (Latin for addendum) of “Concerning Matters Culinary,” what can be detected is a soupçon of remorse about the whole dynamic, a faint whiff of sorrow as the speaker is consumed by what they are consuming:

                THE SAP OF FIGS
        IS CRUEL THE WAY THEY ARE WRAPPED
        IS CRUEL

                THEY BURST

                SO THAT I LEARN
        KINDNESS

                THE FIG
        THE FIG

Although Machado concludes “Concerning Matters Culinary” by underscoring the fig as a creature unto itself, by identifying it as a creature whose treatment is deserving of being characterized as cruel, I can’t help but hear Marlon Brando in my ear whisper-exclaiming “The horror, the horror” when Machado writes “THE FIG / THE FIG.” It is a testament to the richness and malleability Material Witness is after that there is an unmistakable humor throughout “Concerning Matters Culinary” and the rest of the collection.

Material Witness returns to using the second person in its final poem, “Now,” as it did in its opening poem “Material Witness,” the kind of second person that resonates as though the speaker is addressing themselves. But there is a sense of acceptance, of tenderness, in “Now” to the way the second person is used. In the opening poem, when the speaker asks, “Could it be you were divided into a body, politic?” the comma splitting body politic apart seems accusatory, seems to highlight how we have been fractured from the collective or from our own intentions to orient ourselves ethically toward the material world, but in “Now” that comma seems to highlight the body in addition to the body politic, as an essential ingredient in a body politic that must include the flora and fauna around us:

you came
& you knew to come tender

you will do the work

you will tend these last
but accurate lives

In “Now,” these “last / but accurate lives” are flowers, grasses, foxes, all the creatures who are “inured to these the metals of their collective unconscious / it is for them you collect the movements, for them you fill the umbels.” In these gorgeous lines, Machado is articulating an ethos of witnessing. The speaker is adamant that they come to visit flowers, grasses, foxes in the now where they live, but only having recognized that a field is “an historical medium,” and that it contains “prehistoric truths.” To visit now, the poem seems to say, means having recognized the traumas of the past and the potential for both additional trauma and reconciliation that the future represents. All of it is embedded in the materiality of the material world, in the materiality of language, and in the generous, unforgettable poems of Material Witness.