Envoy to the World: Nomadic Cosmopolitanism in Yusef Komunyakaa’s The Emperor of Water Clocks

A water clock is a contradiction in terms: it evokes the human desire to name, control, and understand, as well as the relentless malleability of the natural world. Another term for water clock, clepsydra, stems from the Greek roots kléptein, which means “to steal, conceal” and hydra, which is a derivative of the word for “water”; therefore, the very origins of the term suggest a somewhat clandestine human intervention in the natural flow of volatile and mercurial matter. The title of Yusef Komunyakaa’s latest poetry collection to date, the 2015 The Emperor of Water Clocks, announces a poetic subject that turns this surreptitious activity of time measurement into a project of citizenship-formation, as he takes reign over the paradoxical empire of objects whose successful operation depends on the continued flux of their material, yet whose purpose is to provide some human mastery over the intangible. As the poems collected in the volume suggest, at the dawn of the twenty-first century this delicate condition of blurred boundaries and ambiguous belonging is becoming increasingly real for the globalized world we inhabit. Komunyakaa’s cosmopolitan poetic consciousness traverses all kinds of boundaries: geographical and national borders, limitations imposed by the linear flow of time, and perimeters of cultural difference. It searches for truths and ethical parameters whose reach would be universal, but remains open to a multitude of a situated subject’s positions, life experiences, and interpretations of what is true. Thus, The Emperor of Water Clocks participates in what may be termed a nomadic cosmopolitan discourse, driven by a neo-humanist ethics of forging cross-cultural and transnational solidarity through an accommodation, rather than erasure, of differences, and a sense of shared responsibility for the world inhabited by all kinds of “others.” At the same time, in both furthering and complicating this discourse Komunyakaa’s poems advocate for a rhizomatic mode of belongingness and a planetary sense of empathy and responsibility, but do so from a specific perspective that echoes the ideals of global Black solidarity proposed by Black (inter)nationalist and Pan-Africanist philosophies. In Monique-Adelle Callahan’s analysis of Komunyakaa’s 2011 collection The Chameleon Couch, she interprets Komunyakaa’s poetic project as one that aims to “illustrate contemporary transformations in our understanding of the relationship between literature, language, and citizenship as both a local and global phenomenon within the context of a growing transnational ethos” (2). Indeed, throughout the four decades of Komunyakaa’s poetic oeuvres, his poetic subjects have often spoken from a perspective that is firmly situated in the poet’s own identity—Black, male, North American, locally Southern, globally Western, modern, human—and imaginatively