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, taken from her first full-length collection Smoothie, 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: they are exempt 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 it is implied that you will see others subjected to such measures, and the speaker seems to ask: reader, are you one of them?

The “creatures” whose judgements the birds are spared are unspecified, but we all recognise the species. It’s the sting in the tail which 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, casually conveying the cheery immunity of such free spirits to impositions. “Nobody questions the birds,” the speaker declares in confident dactyls. But there are words that enter with a heavier tread. The idea of questioning (rather than simply asking questions) is laden with negative associations, like “stop-and-search” and 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. The “inspection” will inevitably be failed, the “requirements” unmet: the very vagueness of the demand adds to the sense of unease.

The description of the birds as “the opposite of confidential” – also the poem’s title – is also concerning; the maintenance of confidentiality is generally virtuous in private encounters, but, when imposed by states and corporations, it can be malign. Whistleblowing readily comes to mind as a (birdlike) breach of confidentiality which might be justified as ultimately benevolent. The knowledge that people can’t “keep… in” may range from abuses of power to genuine criticism. The formality of “cannot”, rather than “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.

A less negative reading would denote the power of the irrepressible and anarchic: laughter, exuberance, sexuality, wild humour, the opening of cages and borders through art. In poetry, too, there are committees “who know//nothing of song, and who/certainly don’t have wings.” The final couplet delineates the committee’s missing qualifications with a fine cutting edge, and 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 they 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 Toutoungi’s birds as metaphorical. Birds are us – or, they are us at our Shelleyan best, pouring forth “profuse strains of unpremeditated art”. The committee, or board, or panel that fail to appreciate our originality deserves its exposure. And while those ignorant bureaucrats are meant to provoke knowledgeable grins as well as groans, this is one of Toutoungi’s typically playful-but-serious poems: we may grin, but we can still taste the bitter and ridiculous invincibility of certain kinds of power.