Unwashed by Daniel Maluka

“Culture is ordinary,” said the Welsh Marxist philosopher Raymond Williams in a 1958 essay of the same name. In saying this, Williams meant that culture doesn’t come to us from a plane any higher than the reality of our daily lives. You don’t “get” it from social status, from a line on your CV or by inheritance. Culture is immanent. It comes from the complex of our common, habitual interactions with objects, places, languages, other people and the histories sedimented in each of these. Culture is the art you create but it’s also your apartment, your bus commute: in the contemporary moment especially, because people do listen to music, watch movies, even write poems in public transit. Daniel Maluka’s début poetry collection, Unwashed, is a powerful argument in favour of Williams’ claims. It’s a book about the day-to-day reality (sometimes dreamy, sometimes nightmarish) of growing up as an artist, in this case as a Black and immigrant artist, in the often ecstatic, often alienating world of twenty-first century Toronto. 

Unwashed gives us poetry where a green “2000 Chrysler Neon”, “Dragon Ball Z” and “grainy 240-pixel videos” have the same poetic value as “the kings of old Egypt”, the lives of Dr. King. and Malcolm X, or the hagiographies of Buddha and Krishna. Maluka’s lyric “I” deploys all these elements with stunning facility, creating poems of great specificity and variety at once. “I” has an uncommonly sharp sense of observation, but isn’t by any means a disincarnate observer, else he perhaps wouldn’t notice as much. He always registers his observations in the flesh, often through sensations of warmth or wetness. Even the falsehoods of experience, the realm of the inauthentic, the illusory, the mendacious, he speaks of as registered “through arteries and veins” of the human body, and even into the “rocks and ravines” of its surroundings.

Besides the body, the flesh, Maluka’s speaker often discusses the flesh of his flesh: his father, his mother, a brother, a sister. The scene is always intimate, familiar, brought out in precise, documentary detail, its drama “illuminated/ through the pale light of screens” in kitchens, in living rooms with “TV dinners eaten on trays of aged newspaper”. Maluka’s settings are “more common than taxes” and it is precisely, paradoxically, in this “common” world that the greatest heartbreak and worst injustices occur, often unnoticed, both because and in spite of their commonness. Maluka tells us about the “flower-fueled John Lennon dreams” of an Uber driver who “was an artist back home you know”. He tells us about an Assistant Manager at a mall, a paternal figure from whom he learned soccer tactics, the meaning of masculinity, but also the “scent” of cancer. He often returns to the figure of his father, known only as The Navigator, who as a kid he believed was “a spy”: a polyglot who could “listen in Portuguese/ and ask about the weather in Russian”. On every page, Maluka shows us that despite their sometimes classist connotations, the terms “ordinary” and “common” rather are distinctions of multitude, of detail, complexity: truer both to the world and to the words themselves.

Maluka renders this intricate world of multiple identities, languages, locales, in a deceptively simple poetic idiom. Many of his poems take the form of anecdotes self consciously striving to “tell it to you straight/ No need for bells and whistles”—an easy claim to make, difficult to achieve. I would call Maluka’s language “conversational” if that weren’t a terribly inaccurate way of describing both his work, or conversation itself which often isn’t lucid, direct or clear. Maluka’s anecdotes often describe conversations that don’t connect. He describes the ordinary act of talking with his father as “unintelligible” as though “he [spoke] in Sanskrit and me in hieroglyphics”. Three poems titled “Father,” “Mother” and “Sister” form a triptych of monologues, each one ending with the speaker off, mid-word. Maluka is always a realist about intimacy. His speaker knows that closeness between two people doesn’t always mean mutual understanding. What it does mean is having to work harder to understand. Daniel Maluka’s poems always do.

The last poem in the collection is also devoted to the non-verbal, about “shrieking with our internal mouths,” about the “worldless warnings” that pierce “fat silence”: the different resonances silence can have, whether wielded by us or imposed on us—how silence is often both. Because not everything can be “said,” not even in a poem (assuming that’s even what poems are for), Maluka also features three of his own visual pieces in the collection, all done in stunning black and white. I would talk about these, but ultimately readers ought to see these for themselves and read the poems in light of what those images tell them. 

On the subject of things unsayable, I’ll add that many poems in this collection deal with experiences I have no way of speaking to. As a white guy from Quebec, I can’t speak to what it means to be Black or to be a first-generation immigrant. I can’t even speak to what it means to be from Toronto. What I can speak to, however, is how the mirror-world of art can be made to serve as a shield against the intrusion of force into daily life, of the reductive forms of power we collectively call oppression. This quality of art Maluka wields with great subtlety. A case in point, here’s a poem called “Willowridge Towers (God Speak)”:

the place I 
once lived had
three towers
Richgrove Drive
lined with
houses my
mother would
never own
my Nike backpack held
drawings, crayons and issues
I hadn’t named
the end of
the street 
felt like 
the end of 
the world where
my mother
rented ten thousand
residents half
of them cockroaches

Entries like these have the curious quality of being both maximal and minimal, both tight and loose at the same time. The sole figure of speech in this poem is a simile, one you hear very often in conversation: “like the end of the world.” In this case, the simile isn’t just idiomatic: the world under such conditions as the speaker evokes, with its unaffordable housing, insalubriousness, imposes very literal limitations or finalities to the speaker’s world, which if socially imposed are nonetheless ontologically felt. With baffling simplicity, and again with barely visible ornament, the poem opens up, in the space of a simple anecdote, a whole world of individual and collective suffering, unrealized possibilities, fashion, urban living, routine family life: all this artfully drawn up in a tower of verse, whose heights the reader’s gaze descends, along with the speaker’s, from the skyline of Richgrove Drive, down to the level of the street, to finally sinking further down, among the cockroaches. 

By walking us through so many layers of hardship, the poem also shows, very discreetly, where the escape route is: it’s in art — in the “drawings” and “crayons” at the very center of the poem, at the core of the anecdote. Art has the power to “name” the “issue.” More than just name it: it can reflect it, shadow it, make an image of it. Maluka’s art tells us everywhere about the subtle artifice of oppression, but also never allows us to forget that even the most literal forms of power take their basis in even less durable fictions about who people are, what they are capable of, what lives they ought to lead. Maluka’s art of the “ordinary” reverses the terms of that dynamic. In reminding us of our own vulnerabilities, it hints, even in the space of the most innocuous simile, at how vulnerable power itself is.

Source for Williams: Williams, Raymond. “Culture is ordinary,” Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. Ed. Robin Gable. Verso, 1989. 3-18. Print.

James Dunnigan

James Dunnigan is a writer from Montreal, author of four poetry chapbooks, including most recently "Windchime Concerto" (Alfred Gustav Press 2022). His work has appeared in Maisonneuve Magazine, HA&L, CV2, Event and The Imagist. He edits for Cactus Press (Montreal) and Black Sails Publications (Toronto). A fifth chapbook, "I Spurrina" is forthcoming in June. He is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Toronto, and a proud TA to brilliant students.

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