In Search of a Drummer: The Politics of Time in Nathaniel Mackey’s Djbot Baghostus’s Run

초록

This essay examines the politics of time in Nathaniel Mackey’s Djbot Baghostus’s Run. The second volume of his ongoing prose series is loosely structured around a jazz band’s search for a drummer. The search for a drummer provides an occasion for the band members to lay out their different views on jazz drumming. Although one member hopes that the presence of a drummer will provide rhythmic solidity, it becomes increasingly clear that the band needs a drummer who can question and even rescind the punctuality of time. Due to the tradition of polyrhythm in African drumming and the historical experience of the Middle Passage, jazz drumming contests the hegemonic temporality of modernity. On the formal level, Mackey experiments with heterogeneous temporalities in two significant ways. First, he inverses the quest narrative. What initially begins as a search soon becomes its opposite. The drummer arrives first as a dream, then as sound, and finally in person. Second, Mackey constructs a complex temporal structure in his series that replicates the models that appear in N.’s letters. The recursivity cultivated by Mackey’s series contests the dominant temporal structure of modernity. While energy is employed to accelerate social change in the modern era, Mackey’s work employs energy to deepen our relationship to time.

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