Category Archive

Two poems from Gorée babobab island
I

perhaps happiness is so far away
invisible among the tamarind leaves
when my hand brushes the fruit
to share them with spirits laughing at man’s
cruelty to man

perhaps the hope in my eyes drags
the future in clouds of dust where I seek
sparks and the dignity of condemned souls

when the horizon in the early hours
creates images and silhouettes between sun and sea

you are not here to see my eyes
where you have never seen the humour of the world

with the blessing of the island’s
invisible inhabitants I become alive again
as your look is not a poem

but the vast sea that pours infinite pages
by my feet

peut-être le bonheur est-il si loin
invisible dans les feuilles de tamarinier
quand ma main effleure les fruits
à partager avec les génies riant des cruautés
faites à l’homme par l’homme

peut-être l’espérance dans mes yeux traîne-t-elle
l’avenir en nuages de poussières où je cherche
étincelles et dignité des âmes en sursis

quand l’horizon au petit matin
dessine images et silhouettes entre soleil et mer
tu n’es pas là pour voir mes yeux
où tu n’a jamais vu l’humeur du monde

avec la bénédiction des habitants
invisibles de l’île ici je revis

car ton regard n’est pas un poème
mais toute la mer qui coule à
mes pieds
des pages infinies

II

here too I drank at the source
words covered with mildew
like walls oozing all the sorrows
carved on the door of time

I drank the life source
that gives us memory and the capped path
of days to come
I lost count of the mouthfuls of elixir I drank
so that the poem
that has for ever haunted my steps survives

tomorrow I will return
to hear you talk to me
again of you and me

here too the sheets where history snoozed
are white and empty

the covers of time alone
are green like the last word in the world
when the wind howls
day and night at the gates of chaos

then I wrap myself in the words of your look faraway
beyond the sea that separates us infinitely

ici aussi j’ai bu à la source
des mots couverts de moisissures
comme murs suintant de tous les malheurs
gravés aux porte du temps

j’ai bu la source vive
qui nous donne mémoire et chemin majuscule
des jours à venir
j’ai bu je ne sais combien de gorgées élixir
pour la survie du poème
qui hante mes pas depuis toujours

demain je reviendrai
entendre ta voix qui me parle
encore de toi et de moi

ici aussi les draps où l’histoire fait la sieste
sont blancs et vides

seule la couverture du temps
est verte comme dernière parole du monde
quand le vent tourbillonne
nuit et jour à la porte du chaos

alors je m’enroule dans les mots de ton regard horizon
par-delà la mer nous séparant infiniment

(Gorée île baobab, Le Bruit des autres/ Ecrits des Forges, 2004)

Tanella Boni was born and brought up in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, before going to
university in Toulouse and then Paris. She is now a Professor of Philosophy
at the University  of Abidjan (Cocody). She was the President of the Ivory Coast Writers Association from 1991 to 1997 and is often invited to address international conferences on poetry, the arts and literature. Her poetry collections include Labyrinthe, Grains de sable, Ma peau est fenêtre d’avenir, and Gorée île baobab.
She has also published novels (Une vie de crabe and Les baigneurs
du Lac rose), short stories and children’s literature. Tanella Boni has lived in Abidjan for more than twenty years.

A gallant woman’s singular glance
Sliding towards us like the white beam
The undulating moon sends to the trembling lake
Where she wishes to bathe her nonchalant beauty;

The last bag of coins in a gamer’s  hands;
A wanton kiss from some skinny flirt;
Annoying and tender, musical sounds
Like the distant cry of humanity’s hurt

None of that equals, bottle deep,
The penetrating balms you keep
For the sacred poet’s debased heart

You pour him hope and youth and life
And the beggar’s only treasure – pride,
That turns us all conquering, godlike!

Le Vin du solitaire

Le regard singulier d’une femme galante
Qui se glisse vers nous comme le rayon blanc
Que la lune onduleuse envoie au lac tremblant,
Quand elle y veut baigner sa beauté nonchalante;

Le dernier sac d’écus dans les doigts d’un joueur;
Un baiser libertin de la maigre Adeline;
Les sons d’une musique énervante et câline,
Semblable au cri lointain de l’humaine douleur,

Tout cela ne vaut pas, ô bouteille profonde,
Les baumes pénétrants que ta panse féconde
Garde au coeur altéré du poète pieux;

Tu lui verses l’espoir, la jeunesse et la vie,
— Et l’orgueil, ce trésor de toute gueuserie,
Qui nous rend triomphants et semblables aux Dieux!

On some now forgotten day, I dumped into the sea
(though beneath what sky I no longer recall)
what little was left to me of a peerless wine, tossing it
as though it were an offering to the pitiless deep.

But who demanded your loss to the tide, O my elixir?
Did I obey a prophet, or was it my own worried heart
imagining blood poured out as though wine?
Yet in the act the sea reclaimed its purity,
and, after the bloody infusion, its expected shine.

My wine was lost, though, and the waves were drunk–
but in them I saw, thrown high up in the briny air,
a panoply of such astounding faces!

Note: The ‘translator’,Roger Hunt Carroll,  had this to say about his approach :
“A pure translation is never my intent. These are songs I sing out of their original languages and into my particular American English prosody with the aim that their essential poetry be kept intact. (…) My terms arranging and transcribing bear some resemblance to what is done in the instrumental or vocal music sense. I don’t make translations: I place a poem in an alternate language, as if in another musical key…. I recast its images, as though for some other instrument. I hear languages as distinct musical instruments, listening to their harmonies, dissonances, assonances, all things in structured music.”    S.H. 

YOUTH

The instructive voices exiled…Physical ingenuity bitterly repressed…Adagio. Ah! the infinite selfishness of youth, studious optimism: how full of flowers the world was this summer! Airs and forms dying…A choir, to allay the impotence and absence! A choir of glasses of night melodies…Sure enough, the nerves will soon find something to hunt.

(from Les Illuminations)

MORNING OF INTOXICATION

O my Good! O my Beautiful! Dreadful fanfare where I never stumble! Magical rack! .Hurray for the extraordinary work and the miraculous body, for the first time! It started amid the guffaws of children, it will end with them. This poison will stay in all our veins even when, the fanfare changing, .we are returned to the old disharmony. .O now we so worthy of these tortures! Let us receive fervently this superhuman promise made to our created bodies and souls: this promise, this madness! Elegance, science, violence! ..We have been promised .that .the tree of good and evil will be buried .in the shadows, .tyrannical .decencies deported, that we may bring in our most pure love.  It began with some disgust and it will end — we being unable suddenly to seize this eternity —  it will end in a riot of scents.

Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerities of virgins! Horror of the .faces and objects here, blessed be you .through the memory of this vigil. It began with complete boorishness and now it ends with angels of fire and ice.

Little vigil of drunkenness! Sacred if only for the mask with which you have gratified us. We extol you, method! We have not forgotten that yesterday you glorified our every age.  We have faith in the poison. We know how to give all our life each day.

This is the time of the ASSASSINS.

(from Les Illuminations)

CITY

I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen of a metropolis thought to be modern because every known taste has been avoided .in the furnishings and exteriors of the houses .as well as in the layout. of the city. .Here you will not .be able to make out the remains of any monument to superstition. . Morality and language have been reduced to their simplest expression, at last! These
millions of people .who do not need to know each other conduct . their .education, . profession .and old age so similarly .that .the course .of their lives .must be several times shorter than that which mad statistics show for the peoples of the continent. . Just as, from my window, I see new spectres rolling through the thick and eternal coal smoke – .our woodland shade, our summer night! – new Furies, before my cottage which is my homeland and all my heart .since .everything here .resembles this – Death .without tears, our active daughter and servant, a desperate Love and a pretty Crime whimpering in the mud of the street.

(from Les Illuminations)

Love of my life, my fear is I may die
Not knowing who you are or whence you came,
Within what world you lived, beneath what sky,
What age or times forged your identity,
Love beyond blame,

Love of my life, outstripping memory,
O fire without a hearth lighting my days,
At fate’s command you wrote my history,
By night your glory showed itself to me,
My resting-place…

When all I seem to be falls in decay,
Divided infinitesimally
An infinite number of times, all I survey
Is lost, and the apparel of today
Is stripped from me,

Broken by life into a thousand shreds,
A thousand disconnected moments — swirl
Of ashes that the pitiless wind outspreads,
You will remake from what my spirit sheds
A single pearl.

Yes, from the shattered debris of my days,
You will remake a shape for me, remake a name,
A living unity transcending time and space,
Heart of my spirit, centre of life’s maze,
Love beyond blame.

Catherine Pozzi   (1882 – 1934)      translated Sebastian Hayes

Note: This was the only poem to be published during Catherine Pozzi’s lifetime — though a novella Agnès appeared anonymously. Ave figured in La Nouvelle Revue Française on 1st December, 1929, that is, just five years before Karin’s death (as she preferred to be called). The Latin title Ave is a reference to Catullus’s poem Ave atque Vale on the death of his brother, and this was in fact Karin’s original choice of title. However, she subsequently wrote a second poem on the same theme which she entitled Vale and considered the two poems to comprise a ‘diptych’.
Karin believed in reincarnation so the ‘très haut amour’ commemorates a liaison of cosmic  proportions, spanning several individual lives, thus her strange admission of ‘not knowing who you are or whence you came’.  However, on one level the poem undoubtedly commemorates her relation with Paul Valéry, a poet much more famous than Catherine Pozzi but who strikes me as being considerably below her level poetically and intellectually — and as a human being as well !  She saw him at once as her ‘double’ or ‘kindred spirit’,  while Valéry noted in his private Journal that his meeting with Karin was one of the two most important events in his life. He wrote in his Journal in 1922:

“Il y avait ceci d’étrange dans ces amants, et dans leur amour, que l’un et l’autre le ressentaient, non comme une affaire particulière entr’eux, et comme amour d’une personne et d’une personne, mais comme nécessité d’une intelligence parfait entre des systèmes vivants, car ils prenaient également au sérieux, au tragique, — ce que les hommes réduisent à l’état d’opinion, de speculation — à savoir leur condition meme d’hommes, — événements pensants.”

“What was strange about these lovers, about their love, was that both of them felt that what was happening was not a particular affair between two persons, not the love of one individual for another, but rather something imposed on them, a perfect understanding between two living systems. This was so because they considered with the utmost seriousness, not to say with tragic intensity — what most people dismiss as a matter of opinion, a mere speculation — namely that the very essence of their condition as human beings was to be metaphysical events (literally, thinking events).”

However, Paul Valéry was married and a father at the time of their meeting and their turbulent love affair was at first hushed up at his demand. Karin resented this and eventually told Paul Valery’s wife about what was going on which led to her immediate exclusion from smart Parisian society somewhat in the manner of Anna Karenina (while the reputation of Paul Valéry seems to have been little affected).
The French of Ave is given below :

Ave

Très haut amour, s’il se peut que je meure
Sans avoir su d’où je vous possédais,
En quel soleil était votre demeure,
En quel passé votre temps, en quelle heure
Je vous aimais,

Très haut amour qui passez la mémoire,
Feu sans foyer dont j’ai fait tout mon jour,
En quel destin vous traciez mon histoire,
En quel sommeil se voyait votre gloire,
O mon séjour…

Quand je serai pour moi-même perdue
Et divisée à l’abîme infini,
Infiniment, quand je serai rompue,
Quand le présent dont je suis revêtue
Aura trahi,

Par l’univers en mille corps brisée,
De mille instants non rassemblés encore
De cendre aux cieux jusqu’au néant vannée,
Vous referez pour une étrange année
Un seul trésor

Vous referez mon nom et mon image
De mille corps emportés par le jour,
Vive unité sans nom et sans visage,
Cœur de l’esprit, O centre du mirage
Très haut amour.

Catherine Pozzi   (1882 – 1934)

MORNING OF INTOXICATION O my Good! O my Beautiful! Dreadful fanfare where I never stumble! Magical rack! Hurray for the extraordinary work and the miraculous body, for the first time! It started amid the guffaws of children, it will end with them. This poison will stay in all our veins even when, the fanfare changing, we are returned to the old disharmony. O now we so worthy of these tortures! Let us receive fervently this superhuman promise made to our created bodies and souls: this promise, this madness! Elegance, science, violence! We have been promised that the tree of good and evil will be buried .in the shadows, tyrannical decencies deported, that we may bring in our most pure love. It began with some disgust and it will end — we being unable suddenly to seize this eternity — it will end in a riot of scents. Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerities of virgins! Horror of the faces and objects here, blessed be you through the memory of this vigil. It began with complete boorishness and now it ends with angels of fire and ice. Little vigil of drunkenness! Sacred if only for the mask with which you have gratified us. We extol you, method! We have not forgotten that yesterday you glorified our every age. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give all our life each day. This is the time of the ASSASSINS. CITY I am an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen of a metropolis thought to be modern because every known taste has been avoided in the furnishings and exteriors of the houses as well as in the layout of the city. Here you will not be able to make out the remains of any monument to superstition. Morality and language have been reduced to their simplest expression, at last! These millions of people who do not need to know each other conduct their education, profession and old age so similarly that the course of their lives must be several times shorter than that which mad statistics show for the peoples of the continent.  Just as, from my window, I see new spectres rolling through the thick and eternal coal smoke — our woodland shade, our summer night! — new Furies, before my cottage which is my homeland and all my heart since everything here resembles this — Death without tears, our active daughter and servant, a desperate Love and a pretty Crime whimpering in the mud of the street.

translated    Robert Yates

[The following piece on the French poet René Char is based on the translator's Notes for his presentation at the Poetry Café Wednesday 26th May -- see Events and Meetings.   S.H.]

René Char’s name can generate mixed reactions. He has a high reputation amongst the international avant-garde, and counted amongst his friends Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso and Martin Heidegger. Yet, he also has a reputation of being difficult. In some ways, Char is to blame for this. His poems often throw up strange phrases, and surreal images aimed at provoking imaginative leaps. He once said it was not possible for us to live without the unknown. He invites us to leap into the unknown to change our way of looking at things. Yet, he also believed in the healing power of beauty, and even in prose poems, displays a lyrical side that can have great simplicity as in this late poem of his, with a haiku-like delicacy.

TO A TREE-BROTHER WHOSE DAYS ARE NUMBERED

Small harp of the larches,
On a spur of moss and fertile rocks
— Edge of the forest where the clouds break —
Counterpoint of the void in which I believe.

René Char was in 1907 in the village l’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, in Province. The young René was an angry passionate young man. He lost his father early and sought solace from nature in the woods around his home. Tall and powerful — he later played rugby — he would punch tree trunks to let off steam…  A local blacksmith took him on board. In the 1920s, Char attended a Lycée in Marseille to study business, but spent more time reading literature.

He read Paul Éluard’s poems and on meeting, they became friends. It was Éluard who introduced Char to the Surrealists. Though later to break amicably with them, Char is still often referred to as a Surrealist poet. It’s around this time he married his first wife, Georgette who was Jewish.

This was in the late nineteen twenties / early thirties when Fascism was on the rise. The Surrealists campaigned against them. Char briefly joined the Communist Party, but left them, being too much of an individualist. He also broke with the surrealists at about this time. His poems of the time reflect this, there is a sense passionate engagement with politics and life. Here is a typical poem from his from his first major collection Le Marteau sans Maitre / The Hammer without a Master:

WATERSHED

Let’s yield to blessings of happy oblivion
Unperturbed
Let’s flee with the dust from those things we clung to
Let’s abandon those watery facades we call our fate
With the dignity of leaves
At the moment they shed all precedent
For whatever window appears through our tears
What are you waiting for
You partisan hearts?

The words “partisan hearts” has a prophetic ring to it. When the Second World War broke out, Char was called up. When the Germans invaded, he escaped back to Province, only to find himself outlawed as a Communist on the grounds of being married to a Jew.

He joined the Resistance. Being familiar with the Provencal countryside, made him well equipped for waging guerrilla warfare. He became the regional commander there, known as Capitaine Alexandre. He had many adventures, often sheltered by peasant farmers, escaping death many times. His memories of this are recorded in a collection of prose pieces from his notebook at this time, published after the war under the title Leaves of Hypnos, edited by Albert Camus with whom he remained friends until the latter‘s death in 1960. Hypnos is the name of the Ancient Greek of sleep, which was also Char’s codename in this time.

When war ended, Char refused all decorations and refused to co-operate in witch-hunts for collaborators, saying: “We must triumph over our rage and disgust in order to make both our actions and our morality nobler.” He was haunted by memories from this time for many years — deaths of friends  and by the fact that he had had to kill others. There’s a change in his poetry brought about by this time.

His new collection Fureur et Mystère / Furor and Mystery was published in 1948. The poems still have anger and passion. They are also denser, more hermetic, drawing on many sources. The war taught Char the importance of codes and imagery, as both a way of hiding things and as a short hand to a larger reality.. There are more descriptions of things, more imagery, and in this collection has an underling a sense of terror underneath the beauty. This next poem entitled The Swift demonstrates this.

THE SWIFT

Swift spreading wings too wide as he wheels in the air, circling round the house, crying out for joy. Just like the heart.

He dries up thunder. He sows seeds in calm skies. Touching ground tears him apart.

The swallow is his response. The familiar that he detests. What is the use of lacing round towers?

His silence’s reach into the most somber depths. No one can inhabit a smaller space.

Through the lengths of summer’s brightness, he will weave amidst shadows, through midnight’s shutters.

There are no eyes to hold him. His whole being is his voice. A rifle is going to shoot him down. Just like the heart.

The next poem is an invocation of the River Sorgue, which flows through l’Isle-sur-le-Sorgue, Char’s home-town out towards Avignon. It is an incantation to the river and has been set to music by Pierre Boulez. It was later used by Char in the 1950’s for a radio play he wrote about environmental protest which he became increasingly involved in as he grew older.

It’s in rhyming couplets, which is unusual for him, as he rarely uses rhyme. It also has many associative layers for the river. Many of these are self-explanatory. Two require clarification.

You will hear about “the sun leaving its plough to fall in with the liar.” I only found year explanation for this from notes in a French selection of his work. It is a reference to a Provinceal folk-tale. The sun was an honest worker who put his plough in the sky each night. A liar came by and they became friends. The sun stopped working.

The second is in the dedication: “Chanson pour Yvonne /. Song for Yvonne”. Yvonne was Char’s close friend, confidant and muse, Yvonne Zervos. Yvonne was the wife of a patron of the arts, who he knew. Char was also a painter, and Yvonne and her husband helped organize exhibitions of Char’s paintings. The poem suggests that he saw something elemental in her nature, and it flowed through her.

The very last line literally translated is “Keep us violent and friendly with the bees on the horizon”. This has caused some comment by academics, and not least problems for the translator! What are the bees? This I believe is simply what ever lies in the future. But bees can be a mixed blessing: they make honey and they sting! The word “violent” is also a problem. It’s a word that Char found evocative of the elemental violence in nature, which he felt was mirrored in human passion. It’s remarkably similar to Ted Hughes’ elementals in English poetry:

SONG OF THE SORGUE

River rushing by so fast, at full pelt, on your own,
Give my country’s children the full face of your passion.

River where the lightning ends, where my home begins,
Who rolls into oblivion the rubble of my reasonings.

River, in you the earth is shaken,  the sun made uneasy.
Let the poor facing night’s darkness feed from your harvest.

River, whom we so often abuse and then abandon.

River, teacher to novices of life’s calloused condition,
There is no wind that ever fails to bow down to your wave-crests.

River of the empty soul, of rags and suspicion,
Of ancient griefs let loose, of elms and compassion.

River of the foolhardy, of the feverish, of the knacker,
Of the sun leaving its plough to fall in with the liar.

River of our betters, river of the clear morning haze,
Of the lamp that dispels fears left in its shade.

River who respects the dream, river who rusts iron,
Where shadows the stars keep from the sea are hidden.

River of transmitted powers, of ferryman’s cries,
Of strong winds that nip the grapes announce new wines.

River whose heart is never broken in this mad world of prisons,
Keep our spirits violent and friends with bees on our horizons.

Char also wrote many love poems. After the war his marriage to Georgette broke down and they divorced. He wasn’t to marry again until just before his death in 1988. In the meantime he had many women friends.

This poem is a prose-poem, and in it Char also speaks of poetry as if it were a mistress that he is making love to. The Penitentiary in the title is a play on the words “penitentiary” for prison as well as implying penitence.

THE LIGHT OF THE PENITENTIARY

I wanted only the briefest night with you, so your silent stepmother would grow old in the background unable to marshal her powers.

My dream was to be beside you, a harmonious fugitive that few ever noticed, as we chanced along this sad but angelic route. Nothing would dare slow us down.

The daylight suddenly closes in. Losing all the dead I loved so much, I am casting off that dog rose, the last living thing left, a distracted summer.

I’m emptied out, yet full. Finnish me, you melancholy beauty, your eyelids fluttering in drunken rapture. Every wound from you awakens the phoenixes whose eyes appear in my window. Something sings and sighs its satisfaction at being complete out there inside the wall’s gold.

This wind that is driving my yoke along.

Gradually in the poet-war years Char’s psychological injuries healed. He looked forward to better times. His next collection Les Matinaux / The Dawn Breakers reflects this. The next poem, is really a group of aphorisms, describing his vision of an ideal country. The title is “MAKE IT SO!” which he prefigures with the note that This land is a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulchre. This reflects something Char says in another poem, that humanity flees from suffocation.

MAKE IT SO!

This land is a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulchre.

In my land, the tender evidence of spring and meagrely clothed birds are preferred to far off goal.
Truth awaits the dawn by the candle.
The windowpane is ignored. To the watcher what does it matter.
In my land we don’t question someone who has been touched deeply.

There is no malign shadow over capsized boats.
A half-hearted greeting is unheard of in my land.
We only borrow what we can return with interest.
There are leaves, many leaves on the trees in my land.
The branches free not to bear fruit.
Nobody trusts the good faith of a conqueror.
In my land, we say thank you.

During the years from the 1950’s onwards until his death in 1988, Char lived between Paris and Provençe. They were not as exciting as the war years in terms of external life. He dedicated it to his vocations of writing and painting

All his life Char loved art. The next two poems are taken from a sequence he wrote about the cave-paintings at Lascaux which he visited after the Second World War. The first is titled after the stags of the frieze there. In it Char looks across the whole of human history in wonder at the beauty of the paintings at Lascaux. Maybe also we are being shown Char’s belief in the power of beauty to save us, and how long it has done so.

BLACK STAGS

The waters spoke into the ear of the sky.
You stags have leapt across millennia
From darkness in the rocks to the air’s caresses.
The hunter driving you, the spirit watching you,
How I love their passion, viewed from my wide shore!
And what if, in a moment of hope, I had their eyes ?

The second poem “Young Horse With Hazy Maine” relates these paintings to other works of art. The “White Lady of Africa” is a cave-painting found in Africa. The Madaleine by the Mirror is a painting by Georges de la Tour, a reproduction of which Char carried round with him in his Resistance days, and which gave him much consolation.

YOUNG HORSE WITH HAZY MANE

Spring, horse, how beautiful you are,
Riddling your mane across the sky
Splashing the reeds with foam!
All love is there in your breast:
From the “White Lady of Africa”
To the “Madeleine by the Mirror”,
Warrior idol, grace deep in thought.

In this later period Char wrote many of his greatest poems. Many become much simpler less dense. He is a visionary poet who also still kept his sense of involvement, for example being as mentioned previously he protested against both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

To finish of I’ll leave with a poem from this period. Like the Song of the Sorgue earlier, this poem has also been set to music by Pierre Boulez. In it a lizard lies on a stone in the Province taking in the sun. There danger, and a sense of nature going about its business. Perhaps we get a sense of Char himself, in his own element, taking in the mystery and violence of creation. It seems right to leave him here.

LAMENT OF THE AMOROUS LIZARD

Don’t pick the sunflower seeds
Lest it annoy the cypresses.
Goldfinch take flight, speed
Back to your woolly nest.

The wind will let go of you
You are not a stone in the sky
Country bird, the rainbow
Comes together in the daisy.

The hunter has his gun, so hide.
The sunflower is his accomplice.
Only grasses are on your side,
Field-grasses that bow and crease.

The snake does not know you,
And the grasshopper is sullen;
The mole sees nothing true;
The butterfly has hate for none.

It’s midday, goldfinch.
The groundsel becomes shiny.
Stay here, out of danger’s reach:
The hunter is back with his family.

The echo from this land rings true.
I watch, prophesy well.
From my ledge I see all, view
Even the twittering owl.

Who better than an amorous lizard
Can tell the secrets of this land?
O gentle, kindly king of the skies
Why not nest on my rock’s side!

Graham Mummery