PIVOT

Through its ‘linguistic marronage’ Imani Mason Jordan’s PIVOT unshackles language, writes John Field

Imani Mason Jordan’s debut is a book-length poem which works with the 1791–1804 Haitian Revolution staged by people enslaved in the sugar plantations of the French colony of Saint Domingue. It is the only successful revolt by enslaved people and achieved independence for Haiti whilst becoming one of history’s great turning points, or pivots. However, Mason Jordan’s poem is not a straight narrative account of the revolt. As M.E. Bahrī comments in their introduction to the poem, ‘PIVOT reminds us that to write, to speak, to breathe in the wake of the Atlantic, is already to turn the world’ and that Mason Jordan ‘stretches syntax to its breaking point, testing the elasticity of the tongue, the English tongue(?), until it trembles with other frequencies.’ PIVOT uses language on its own unique terms and, through its ‘linguistic marronage’, Mason Jordan unshackles language.

The poem opens with:

men in linen fragments holding coin altar,
i write moulting, burning
heaving metamorphosis, symbol seeds,
the pivot smoulders
individuation by machete

The Haitian Revolution was announced on 21 August 1791, with a Vodou ceremony celebrated by Dutty Boukman, one of the revolution’s leaders. Perhaps Mason Jordan’s opening lines remind us of Milton’s invocation of the Holy Spirit, his ‘Heavenly Muse’, and asking it to sing through him. Here, we’re presented with Vodou ritual as linen fragments create a connection with the Iwa (spirits) and the speaker becomes the conduit through which the reader connects with the past. It’s a moment of synchronicity and the poem which follows sees the reader ‘spilling / downward in waterfalls’ as we slide through unbroken ripples of syntax, from pool to pool, page to page, as if in a dream.

We catch echoes of William Blake, and eighteenth-century qualms about the brutality of revolutions here. The third section of PIVOT opens with:

the forests at night, the signs of unrest,
revolutionary tracts, murders, and
mutilations, bloodily, repression, for and
against literature, circulating, running for
their lives

Throughout this period, The Times characterises the French Revolution as a tiger. Take, for example, this 1792 assessment of the ‘Present Situation of France; And Probable Consequences’ in which ‘The people [are] loose from all restraints and, in many instances, more ferocious than wolves and tigers.’ As Mason Jordan’s speaker shows us revolutionaries in ‘the forests at night’, we see that they are not burning bright, nor are they tigers. The animalistic brutality in this historical moment was the brutality of those who enslaved their fellow man. The listing captures the dynamism, the confusion and the fragmentary qualities of rolling news before historians repackage events as something more readily digestible. Lower case literature – articles, pamphlets and tracts – circulate, and their circulation is another form of flowing, life-giving blood to nourish the nascent body politic.

The poem’s fourth and final section takes a moment to view events through white eyes and the romanticised, sanitised perspective on slave labour is sickening:

                                                               the most
sincere attachment bound master to slave,
these men who had become our children,
neither locks not bolts, on our doors, the
opprobrium, and dishonour in which they
lived, enter a villain, idyllic, the destruction,
and convulsion of despair, we live in peace,
in pretensions of vanity, let slip the elegant
drapery, disgusted

The speaker is blind to the irony of speaking about attachments and bonds, and perhaps their reference to children suggests that they think that they love the people they have enslaved like family – indeed, we know that Toussaint Louverture, the leading light of the Revolution, was sold into slavery but, given that he was emancipated in 1776, one imagines that the people who enslaved him fancied that they held fine feelings. Nevertheless, a man becoming a child is a birth in reverse. It’s unnatural and hidden behind this ostensibly warm language there lurks a degrading sentiment. A few pages on and the poem pivots as we look again from the perspective of someone who had been enslaved. They see:

                                                                   the
most insincere attachment, boundmaster
and slave, these men who had our children,
neither lock nor bolt, neither door, they lived
in opprobrium and dishonour, enter the
villain, idyllic, the destruction and
convulsion of despair

To live in a place with ‘neither locks not bolts, on our doors’ sounds like paradise but, according to Gene E. Ogle in ‘Slaves of Justice: Saint Domingue’s Executioners and the Production of Shame’, in Saint Domingue [Haiti’s pre-revolutionary name], crimes perpetrated ‘by free “people of color” or slaves resulted in draconian punishment.’ Slavers thought that they had nothing to fear from a brutalised population but their pretensions of French civility masked the depths of human depravity. It’s difficult to fathom self-delusion of this magnitude but it’s still out there. I first encountered the website for Southdown Plantation, Terrebonne, Louisiana, when researching Brandon Jacob Jenkins’s plantation play, An Octoroon. The Southdown Plantation website is the offspring of an unholy union between Barbie and The National Trust and characterises the plantation house as ‘a lasting tribute to the sugar industry, which helped to nurture Terrebonne Parish from its infancy to its present population of over 100,000 residents.’ You’ll find no references to slavery here.

Mason Jordan mythologises, dignifies and elevates the Haitian Revolution and, in the process, stretches language close to breaking point. PIVOT stages another revolution: one which enables new ways of speaking, and reading.

Imani Mason Jordan’s PIVOT (HELA Press) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2026. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.