The Opposite of Confidential
Nobody questions the birds.
Their trills are never subject to inspection or
forced to satisfy requirements.
Light-boned libertarians
(the opposite of confidential),
they cannot keep it in.
You will not see them lining up in rows,
reeling off content-approved medleys
to a committee of creatures who know
nothing of song, and who
certainly don’t have wings.
Claudine Toutoungi’s The Opposite of Confidential appears to give birds a traditional poetic role. As “light-boned libertarians” they might even be cousins of Shelley’s skylark. The poem evokes their freedom with humour, placing them in a bureaucratic theatre of the absurd to proclaim their exemption from questioning, “inspection”, “requirements” and confidentiality. The freely trilling and flying are not required to satisfy the demands of a “committee of creatures” who are songless and wingless, and they probably wouldn’t satisfy them on principle: “You will not see them lining up in rows, / reeling off content-approved medleys …” But you will see others subjected to such measures, it’s implied. And the speaker seems to ask: Reader, are you one of them?
The “creatures” whose judgments the birds are spared are unspecified, but we all recognise the species: we’ve met them and suffered from their attentions. We might even have been required to sign up to their clan. It’s the sting in the tail that makes the poem more abrasive, and more metaphorical, than it might first appear. It prompts a return to the matter of the “light-boned libertarians” and their nature. Are they birds or metaphor, and if they represent a group of people, which?
Poets and playwrights like Toutoungi herself might be among them, or perhaps all humans, at least in an ideal state of prelapsarian freedom of expression. The lightness of rhythm is mimetic, meant to convey, casually, the cheery immunity of such free spirits to imposed specifications. “Nobody questions the birds,” the speaker declares in confident dactyls. But there are words which enter with a heavier tread. The idea of questioning (rather than simply asking questions) is laden with negative associations, like the controversial policy of stop-and-search, or police interrogation. It can be the start of a process which is less concerned with fact-finding than with accusation and punishment. The ensuing passive constructions (“subject to” and, especially, “forced”) hint at sanctioned brutality. Rhythms, and options, solidify around them. The “inspection” will inevitably be failed, the “requirements” unmet – the very vagueness of the demand adds to the sense of unease.
The most complicated thought, perhaps, concerns the description of the birds as “the opposite of confidential”. Although the line is in parenthesis, it provides the poem’s title, suggesting the writer has invested it with significance. The maintenance of confidentiality is generally virtuous in private encounters. But imposed by states and corporations, it can be malign. Whistleblowing readily comes to mind as a breach of confidentiality that might be justified as ultimately benevolent. The knowledge that people can’t “keep … in” may range from evidence of abuses of power to offbeat critical perceptions. It’s a somehow uncomfortable line: the formality of “cannot” in preference to “can’t” almost enacts an attempted muffling of simple speech. Under interrogation and torture, what can’t be contained might be as literal as our life-blood.
An altogether less negative reading would denote the power of the irrepressible and anarchic: laughter, exuberance, sexuality, wild humour, art’s opening of cages and borders. Toutoungi’s poetry sometimes functions like that. In poetry, too, there are committees “who know // nothing of song, and who / certainly don’t have wings”. The 11-lined form of three tercets and a couplet, a kind of minimalist sonnet, is exactly constructed, the final couplet delineating the committee’s missing qualifications with a fine cutting edge. Even the stanza break after “know” shows us the blankness where the knowledge of song has failed to reach.
I think at this point in the poem there’s also a glimpse of actual bird-like behaviour, which is at odds with the “poetic” view of unregimented blithe spirits. Birds do line up in rows: their medleys are, in a sense, content-approved, being evolutionarily successful and certainly meaningful to their neighbours; their behaviour patterns are social and communal. Perhaps the poem is satirising bird-romanticists, reminding us that we committees of well-meaning humans have custody of the “natural world” without the requisite understanding and experience.
But I prefer to think of the birds in the poem as metaphorical. Birds are us. Or they’re us at our Shelleyan best, pouring forth “profuse strains of unpremeditated art”, spontaneous, brave, creative, free-speaking and truth-telling. The interview committee, managerial board or panel of judges that fails to appreciate our brilliantly original work deserves its exposure. And while those ignorant bureaucrats are meant to provoke knowledgable grins as well as groans, this is one of Toutoungi’s typically playful-but-serious poems: we may grin, but we still taste the bitter and ridiculous invincibility of certain kinds of power.
- The Opposite of Confidential is from Toutoungi’s first full-length collection, Smoothie, published by Carcanet.
