(or verbalizing gentrification)
"blight: v. (Perhaps from the same roots as bleak; the meaning of blight in that case comes from to be, to grow, or make white or pale, bleach.) To affect with blight; to blast; to prevent the growth and fertility of; hence to ruin; frustrate; as to blight one's prospects."
-Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language
G and C Merriam Company, 1933
i.
b land
b lock
b lot
b lank
b lond ( i said lawned)
b lithe
b lame
b lin(e)d
b leach
ii.
b light
b laze
b lush
b link
b lur
b lare
b lue
b loom
b lood (or lewd)
b lade (you heard me)
b leed (so lead)
b liss
b less
b low
b lack
b last
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Monday, July 03, 2006
An OTHER Way to Be:EthnoAberrations in Wynter and Ferguson
"Ethno or Socio Poetics" Sylvia Wynter (in Alcheringa), 1976
Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique Roderick A Ferguson, 2004
Walking on a sunny afternoon in downtown Oakland some summers ago, a woman jumped out of nowhere and proceeded to ambush me with an unsolicited reading of my "blue-green" aura, insisting that she had an important warning for me, if I could pay for her services. In response, the friend that i was walking with (a third generation American communist) concluded, "Capitalism. Makes people do the wildest shit."
Indeed. Wynter and Ferguson are both concerned with the relationship between the capitalist production of certain racialized groups as "surplus", the dependence of this relations on the construction AND production of wildness, heresy, and deviance. Wynter and Ferguson, in different ways are interested in reclaiming that wildness, heresy and deviance as revolutionary potential.
Wynter's essay, from a talk at a conference on Ethnopoetics (featuring Glissant's formulation of natural/forced poetics on which I have been/will be writing about for months---and a talk by Fred Jameson which admits to stealing Wynter's title and doesn't do much besides emphasize the penultimate paragraph of Wynter's talk as a warning for us all) came out almost 30 years before Aberrations in Black...so ladies first.
(excuse me while i meditate on the experience of watching Sylvia Wynter speak via video at the Assoc of Caribbean Women Writer's Conf)
To be Sylvia Wynter for even one Jamaican afternoon...to have two y's in my name and to question the foundations of Western Civilization through a razor sharp economic analysis as an expert...as a master thief who immediately owns all of the knowledge that she will cripple...to speak in whole clear sentence that incorporate obscure quotes by Nieztche...to let Stanford pay me for the use of my name alone...and at the same time to deny them my presence until it suits my convenience...to sit in sunlit offices with open windows (in Jamaica, in California, in Florida) and to point out the single lie that gives us this unsatisfactory world. Sigh.
So... in this earlier talk, at the Ethnopoetics conference 30 years ago Wynter does what she does and puts socio next to ethnos, demanding as usual that this concept around which her fellows (literally she's usually the only woman wherever she is) have gathered emerge in its historical specificity, tracing the term ethnos back to them moment when it stopped meaning "we" and began to mean a dehumanized heretical "they" upon which the new "we" depended on. Wynter describes the 16th century development of a global economy through european colonization as a mutation in the human narrative through which "we" became a violent category dependent on and enforced through the abuse of a dehumanized "other". The discovery of the "new world" populated with "others" is for Wynter the X-factor that caused a former "we" among other "we"'s to become THE "we" against which all others would be measured and punished. For Wynter this is the birth of the mutation that she called Western capitalism (and which she now calls global capitalism) the discovery of the new world is the catalyst for such a mutation. Racism then is not an aberration, but is rather the mechanism through which a surplus is created...is the mechanism through which some labour (and life-value) becomes undervalued and some becomes overvalued.
This is achieved through the creation of cultural norm through which deviance can be ascribed to others. In her more recent talk she was explicit about pointing out that the function of "blackness" in creating an overvalued white norm is one tendency among others that include the delination of queerness as the mechanism through which straight privilege is bolstered and rewarded and criminality as the mechanism through which "respectable" consumption is validated (thus her current empahsis on prisons).
Ferguson would agree...but with more attention to the transgressive relationship to space that the relationship between the nation and surplus labor requires. While Wynter would emphazise that the racist secular construction of humanism depends on the labelling of racialized people as deviant, Ferguson is interested in the way that this surplus relationship requires (for example in the context of the great migration) racialized people to move (and be displaced)in ways that create fundamentally queer positionalities, subjectivities and performances. For Ferguson the relationship between capitalism and the nation as narrative and economic entities (if looked at deconstructively) produces an important queerness. However, according to Ferguson everyone...including Marx is in denial about this. Ferguson focuses on the figure of the prostitute as the exemplary figure of capitalist alienation and points out the way in which this figuration frames Marxist critique in a way that validates heteropatriarchal norms...in concert with the racist narrative of the reproductive nation-state as such.
SO Ferguson wants an economic critique of capitalism and the nation that does not reproduce a heteropatriarchal logic. In fact he wants to emphasize the queerness that this relation is already requiring from the subjects involved. In other words Capitalism(and the nation-state). MAKES people do the wildest shit. For Ferguson the question is how to acknowledge this relationship in a way that amplifies these queer subjectivities into something that articulates an OTHER way to be.
Similarly, Wynter wants to emphasize the way in which black cultural production has created a mode of being human which does not require the negation of another in order to create community. She wants to argue that whereas western capitalism offers a model through which objects (technologies of war and production) name and create another object "labelled human" and produce a relationship in which one human being is master and another human being is servant based on their relationship to the means of production, poetics (and by this she means art generally) offers a mode in which human beings name the world and are human because their active relation to the world is one of creation.
So what do I learn from this? What do I make from this in my current work to somehow use poetry to create non-violent community structures here in my neighborhood? Well conveniently (providing a concrete continuity between the blog that comes before this) Ferguson talks about the third world women's movement (sparked in order to mobilize in response to brutality against women of color just like this work that we're doing) as a fundamental site because of the way that "lesbian" was used as a label that referred to a critique...not a relation to a state, a race, the means of production or the means of heteropatriarchal reproduction. And conveniently this exact movement is a major focus of my work and a model through which i act as a community artist. SO all this talk of other and critique not only helps to clarify the function of the word "queer" in my self-description and analytic intervention, but also means that as we activartists avatars "we", ethno and poetic in this socio, speak we create our community relations and we do that not as identification but as critique and therefore as constantly co-produced recreation (in the sense of making a world again and in the sense of having fun outside of the context of alienated labor.)
Yes.
Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique Roderick A Ferguson, 2004
Walking on a sunny afternoon in downtown Oakland some summers ago, a woman jumped out of nowhere and proceeded to ambush me with an unsolicited reading of my "blue-green" aura, insisting that she had an important warning for me, if I could pay for her services. In response, the friend that i was walking with (a third generation American communist) concluded, "Capitalism. Makes people do the wildest shit."
Indeed. Wynter and Ferguson are both concerned with the relationship between the capitalist production of certain racialized groups as "surplus", the dependence of this relations on the construction AND production of wildness, heresy, and deviance. Wynter and Ferguson, in different ways are interested in reclaiming that wildness, heresy and deviance as revolutionary potential.
Wynter's essay, from a talk at a conference on Ethnopoetics (featuring Glissant's formulation of natural/forced poetics on which I have been/will be writing about for months---and a talk by Fred Jameson which admits to stealing Wynter's title and doesn't do much besides emphasize the penultimate paragraph of Wynter's talk as a warning for us all) came out almost 30 years before Aberrations in Black...so ladies first.
(excuse me while i meditate on the experience of watching Sylvia Wynter speak via video at the Assoc of Caribbean Women Writer's Conf)
To be Sylvia Wynter for even one Jamaican afternoon...to have two y's in my name and to question the foundations of Western Civilization through a razor sharp economic analysis as an expert...as a master thief who immediately owns all of the knowledge that she will cripple...to speak in whole clear sentence that incorporate obscure quotes by Nieztche...to let Stanford pay me for the use of my name alone...and at the same time to deny them my presence until it suits my convenience...to sit in sunlit offices with open windows (in Jamaica, in California, in Florida) and to point out the single lie that gives us this unsatisfactory world. Sigh.
So... in this earlier talk, at the Ethnopoetics conference 30 years ago Wynter does what she does and puts socio next to ethnos, demanding as usual that this concept around which her fellows (literally she's usually the only woman wherever she is) have gathered emerge in its historical specificity, tracing the term ethnos back to them moment when it stopped meaning "we" and began to mean a dehumanized heretical "they" upon which the new "we" depended on. Wynter describes the 16th century development of a global economy through european colonization as a mutation in the human narrative through which "we" became a violent category dependent on and enforced through the abuse of a dehumanized "other". The discovery of the "new world" populated with "others" is for Wynter the X-factor that caused a former "we" among other "we"'s to become THE "we" against which all others would be measured and punished. For Wynter this is the birth of the mutation that she called Western capitalism (and which she now calls global capitalism) the discovery of the new world is the catalyst for such a mutation. Racism then is not an aberration, but is rather the mechanism through which a surplus is created...is the mechanism through which some labour (and life-value) becomes undervalued and some becomes overvalued.
This is achieved through the creation of cultural norm through which deviance can be ascribed to others. In her more recent talk she was explicit about pointing out that the function of "blackness" in creating an overvalued white norm is one tendency among others that include the delination of queerness as the mechanism through which straight privilege is bolstered and rewarded and criminality as the mechanism through which "respectable" consumption is validated (thus her current empahsis on prisons).
Ferguson would agree...but with more attention to the transgressive relationship to space that the relationship between the nation and surplus labor requires. While Wynter would emphazise that the racist secular construction of humanism depends on the labelling of racialized people as deviant, Ferguson is interested in the way that this surplus relationship requires (for example in the context of the great migration) racialized people to move (and be displaced)in ways that create fundamentally queer positionalities, subjectivities and performances. For Ferguson the relationship between capitalism and the nation as narrative and economic entities (if looked at deconstructively) produces an important queerness. However, according to Ferguson everyone...including Marx is in denial about this. Ferguson focuses on the figure of the prostitute as the exemplary figure of capitalist alienation and points out the way in which this figuration frames Marxist critique in a way that validates heteropatriarchal norms...in concert with the racist narrative of the reproductive nation-state as such.
SO Ferguson wants an economic critique of capitalism and the nation that does not reproduce a heteropatriarchal logic. In fact he wants to emphasize the queerness that this relation is already requiring from the subjects involved. In other words Capitalism(and the nation-state). MAKES people do the wildest shit. For Ferguson the question is how to acknowledge this relationship in a way that amplifies these queer subjectivities into something that articulates an OTHER way to be.
Similarly, Wynter wants to emphasize the way in which black cultural production has created a mode of being human which does not require the negation of another in order to create community. She wants to argue that whereas western capitalism offers a model through which objects (technologies of war and production) name and create another object "labelled human" and produce a relationship in which one human being is master and another human being is servant based on their relationship to the means of production, poetics (and by this she means art generally) offers a mode in which human beings name the world and are human because their active relation to the world is one of creation.
So what do I learn from this? What do I make from this in my current work to somehow use poetry to create non-violent community structures here in my neighborhood? Well conveniently (providing a concrete continuity between the blog that comes before this) Ferguson talks about the third world women's movement (sparked in order to mobilize in response to brutality against women of color just like this work that we're doing) as a fundamental site because of the way that "lesbian" was used as a label that referred to a critique...not a relation to a state, a race, the means of production or the means of heteropatriarchal reproduction. And conveniently this exact movement is a major focus of my work and a model through which i act as a community artist. SO all this talk of other and critique not only helps to clarify the function of the word "queer" in my self-description and analytic intervention, but also means that as we activartists avatars "we", ethno and poetic in this socio, speak we create our community relations and we do that not as identification but as critique and therefore as constantly co-produced recreation (in the sense of making a world again and in the sense of having fun outside of the context of alienated labor.)
Yes.
Friday, June 30, 2006
producing the crisis: reproduction, the underclass, self-publishing and unlikely pleasure
Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, Stuart Hall et al, 1978
Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women, Cheryl Clarke (Kitchen Table Press), 1982
Un Marquer de Paroles (preface to Chamoiseau's Chroniqu de Sept Miseries), Edouard Glissant, 1986
Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer, Maryse Conde (Yale French Studies), 1993
Time Binds or Erotohistoriography, Elizabeth Freeman (Social Text), 2005
What pleasure have I been hiding, even as I seek to articulate an "ethics of queer desire"? It seems that my relationship to the word "ethics", works well in terms of "accountability" and "justice" and "so on and so forth":), but when it comes to desire I believe that I may be creating an unacknowledged binary between "ethics" and "desire". In other words...in my recent writing, our ethics is not something we adopt because it turns us on. Our ethics is something that our oppression makes necessary, that our trauma forces us into, or at the very least something that my poetic and convincing arguments make obvious, not as choice, but as an imperative. No good. Disclaiming myself to the predicament of forced poetics, I lament the fact that I have been reincorporating the energy of desire into the duty of ethics (and doing so because i need your agreement so badly) and not admitting to the pleasures that I already get, and am motivated by in this (still maligned) practice of being free. man as in Elizabeth Freeman in her convincing contribution to the "What's so Queer About Queer Studies now?" issue of Social Text points out that oppressed folks generally, and queer people specifically connect to each other across time, not merely through traumatic renewal of violence, but also through pleasure desire...and in my case booklust. I mean what is it that I am doing anyway but creating a breathless links to past and future black girls through reading back/writing back/writing towards/writing because of the fact that it turns me on? This is pleasure that I need, an ethical pleasure that requires me to face my multiple partners and fall apart YES, because of the trauma that has not stopped, but also because i want you.
How else can I explain why i keep on reading these little books by these crazy third world women who were writing circa 1982. I want to think of it as a queer desire for the maternal (the ephemeral material): black women disperse into paper and I am born. So Cheryl Clarke for example self-published, community published and republished (goshdarnit) her book of poems in 1982 with the collaboration of women as illustrators (GAIA) and typesetters, and blurb writers and printers. And she wrote about madness and trauma and pleasure. She wrote about creepy families and solid lesbian love. She wrote about embattled pleasures secreted in kitchens and women who broke her heart. She wrote about violence and silence and made them stop rhyming for a bit. She was (for me) articulating "tradition" in a way that was not biological, patriarchally reproductive, but that felt real anyway. Printing...even printing two editions...should not be called reproduction because it is unlikely, not natural clearly embattled and nonetheless as strategy that black queer women are embracing...in a queer way. I still want to call that co-production. We'll see. What is clear though is that Clarke (and shortly following of course Shange, Walker, Morrison will do this too) needs to make visible the violence experienced by girls and women under the cover of race coherence such that that violence is not reproduced again.
In an brilliant and long-relevant collaboratively written monograph that thinks in careful Marxist/revisionist Marxist terms (Policing the Crisis) Hall et al seem to unwittingly reproduce the invisibility of black women or at least seem to lose the opportunity to analyze the feminization of the black labor class that is perpetually reproduced and disenfranchised. This collective does what Irigaray does (and what the third world women's movement at least from the moment of the combahee river collective statement cannot afford) and forecloses intersectionality by presentingthe struggle of unemployed blacks in the streets and women in the home as parellel struggles. What about the black women who are out in the street..what about the other,non-sensationalized violence committed against black girls and women at home? Why mention the black hustler pimp specifically and the prostitute only through Marx? Why is it so salient to quote the racist sentencing judge pointing out that "notably no west indian women have been mugged", but then not relevant to look at the gender dynamics in a masculinized unemployed/criminal underclass that they are analyzing specifically through economics of reproduction and the reproduction of an economic relationship. I guess because that is my work to do...but damn.
Glissant would seem to fall into somewhat of the same trap in his analysis of language (in his analysis of the forced and the natural as i am writing about elsewhere) but also in the preface to Chronique...where he centralizes the djobuer, marginally informally employed cart pushers in Martinique, as the site oflanguage production, code making, and logic changing resistance. This kind of masculine, tentative, magical work of course also becomes the marvelously real work of writers in the West Indies...and the male writers specifically...unsurprisingly.
Conde draws this out in her article, but I think the reproduction is still playing an invisible role in her argument, or at least some sor tof naturalized gender binary which seems only to be a slight reappropriation of the momentum of stereotype. In this text "order" is what male writers do in order to reproduce themselves and achieve their ambitions for political power. In "order" to do this they must suppress the desires and the violent experiences of women which would awaken a femininized "disorder" in the region. "Freedom" on the other hand is yet to come, and is evidently in the province of the youth. Forced poetics again? Is it that coherence requires this formulation to emerge in the configuration of a bad, but productive heterosexual dialectical coupling of order and disorder?
The concept of forced poetics (the reason that i will critique but never abandon glissant) seems to have with in it the presence of force and the structure of rape that is always being denied, repressed and suppressed. Freeman might want to insert some SandM logic to the other possibilities of a forced poetics...like pleasure (like filling other things up besides wounds...as she puts it). Could it be that my positionality (informed by a global order of rape that will never be necessary evil..or otherwise justified in my view at all) that puts me next to you is not to be seperated by my all consuming love for you, want for you, want for us to be free?
Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women, Cheryl Clarke (Kitchen Table Press), 1982
Un Marquer de Paroles (preface to Chamoiseau's Chroniqu de Sept Miseries), Edouard Glissant, 1986
Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer, Maryse Conde (Yale French Studies), 1993
Time Binds or Erotohistoriography, Elizabeth Freeman (Social Text), 2005
What pleasure have I been hiding, even as I seek to articulate an "ethics of queer desire"? It seems that my relationship to the word "ethics", works well in terms of "accountability" and "justice" and "so on and so forth":), but when it comes to desire I believe that I may be creating an unacknowledged binary between "ethics" and "desire". In other words...in my recent writing, our ethics is not something we adopt because it turns us on. Our ethics is something that our oppression makes necessary, that our trauma forces us into, or at the very least something that my poetic and convincing arguments make obvious, not as choice, but as an imperative. No good. Disclaiming myself to the predicament of forced poetics, I lament the fact that I have been reincorporating the energy of desire into the duty of ethics (and doing so because i need your agreement so badly) and not admitting to the pleasures that I already get, and am motivated by in this (still maligned) practice of being free. man as in Elizabeth Freeman in her convincing contribution to the "What's so Queer About Queer Studies now?" issue of Social Text points out that oppressed folks generally, and queer people specifically connect to each other across time, not merely through traumatic renewal of violence, but also through pleasure desire...and in my case booklust. I mean what is it that I am doing anyway but creating a breathless links to past and future black girls through reading back/writing back/writing towards/writing because of the fact that it turns me on? This is pleasure that I need, an ethical pleasure that requires me to face my multiple partners and fall apart YES, because of the trauma that has not stopped, but also because i want you.
How else can I explain why i keep on reading these little books by these crazy third world women who were writing circa 1982. I want to think of it as a queer desire for the maternal (the ephemeral material): black women disperse into paper and I am born. So Cheryl Clarke for example self-published, community published and republished (goshdarnit) her book of poems in 1982 with the collaboration of women as illustrators (GAIA) and typesetters, and blurb writers and printers. And she wrote about madness and trauma and pleasure. She wrote about creepy families and solid lesbian love. She wrote about embattled pleasures secreted in kitchens and women who broke her heart. She wrote about violence and silence and made them stop rhyming for a bit. She was (for me) articulating "tradition" in a way that was not biological, patriarchally reproductive, but that felt real anyway. Printing...even printing two editions...should not be called reproduction because it is unlikely, not natural clearly embattled and nonetheless as strategy that black queer women are embracing...in a queer way. I still want to call that co-production. We'll see. What is clear though is that Clarke (and shortly following of course Shange, Walker, Morrison will do this too) needs to make visible the violence experienced by girls and women under the cover of race coherence such that that violence is not reproduced again.
In an brilliant and long-relevant collaboratively written monograph that thinks in careful Marxist/revisionist Marxist terms (Policing the Crisis) Hall et al seem to unwittingly reproduce the invisibility of black women or at least seem to lose the opportunity to analyze the feminization of the black labor class that is perpetually reproduced and disenfranchised. This collective does what Irigaray does (and what the third world women's movement at least from the moment of the combahee river collective statement cannot afford) and forecloses intersectionality by presentingthe struggle of unemployed blacks in the streets and women in the home as parellel struggles. What about the black women who are out in the street..what about the other,non-sensationalized violence committed against black girls and women at home? Why mention the black hustler pimp specifically and the prostitute only through Marx? Why is it so salient to quote the racist sentencing judge pointing out that "notably no west indian women have been mugged", but then not relevant to look at the gender dynamics in a masculinized unemployed/criminal underclass that they are analyzing specifically through economics of reproduction and the reproduction of an economic relationship. I guess because that is my work to do...but damn.
Glissant would seem to fall into somewhat of the same trap in his analysis of language (in his analysis of the forced and the natural as i am writing about elsewhere) but also in the preface to Chronique...where he centralizes the djobuer, marginally informally employed cart pushers in Martinique, as the site oflanguage production, code making, and logic changing resistance. This kind of masculine, tentative, magical work of course also becomes the marvelously real work of writers in the West Indies...and the male writers specifically...unsurprisingly.
Conde draws this out in her article, but I think the reproduction is still playing an invisible role in her argument, or at least some sor tof naturalized gender binary which seems only to be a slight reappropriation of the momentum of stereotype. In this text "order" is what male writers do in order to reproduce themselves and achieve their ambitions for political power. In "order" to do this they must suppress the desires and the violent experiences of women which would awaken a femininized "disorder" in the region. "Freedom" on the other hand is yet to come, and is evidently in the province of the youth. Forced poetics again? Is it that coherence requires this formulation to emerge in the configuration of a bad, but productive heterosexual dialectical coupling of order and disorder?
The concept of forced poetics (the reason that i will critique but never abandon glissant) seems to have with in it the presence of force and the structure of rape that is always being denied, repressed and suppressed. Freeman might want to insert some SandM logic to the other possibilities of a forced poetics...like pleasure (like filling other things up besides wounds...as she puts it). Could it be that my positionality (informed by a global order of rape that will never be necessary evil..or otherwise justified in my view at all) that puts me next to you is not to be seperated by my all consuming love for you, want for you, want for us to be free?
Thursday, June 29, 2006
three
alexis is a third world
dislocated
queer
like the holy ghost
everywhere
like desire
like the possibility of poison
like numerical magic
like tri
like try
like trying
to be free
dislocated
queer
like the holy ghost
everywhere
like desire
like the possibility of poison
like numerical magic
like tri
like try
like trying
to be free
Monday, June 26, 2006
desire: spirit and flash
photography, the haitian diaspora, dance and white west indian sex for sale
The Spirit of Haiti, Myriam Chancy, 2004.
Desire in Seven Voices, (Dionne Brand et.al) 2003.
Voyage in the Dark, Jean Rhys, 1934.
Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, Deborah Willis ed., 1994.
American Smooth, Rita Dove, 2004.
The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales, Bessie Head, 1977
So here I go again, trying to smash together the six books that I happen to have read most recently as if they are thematically linked. Just be happy that I didn't add Stuart Hall et al's Policing the Crisis...which I technically finished in the middle of writing this blog. So. Let's play. To be honest these books look like the reason slightly unfocused black instructors name their courses "diasporic"...but of course (well not "of course") Jean Rhys is not necessarily black. Maybe together these books mark out at multi-sited geneaology of desire. Maybe together these books actually do help with the inconvenient definition of "diaspora" that I am more interested in: that falling apart on the level of the body, the space, the call for an ethics of queer desire.
According to Dionne Brand in her submission for this Canadian collection on Desire "maybe to desire is to complicate", and definitley in her piece, desire is what provokes the act of reading. Since the rest of the collection seems to focus on rather creepy complexes and sexual appetites/secrets of some Canadian women writers...mostly, usually heterosexually desiring the same(homo)old(ancien)thing-with the notable and delightful exception of Shani Mooto-tho even Mooto has daddy issues...dissappointingly...all of these women want the love of a father figure...Mooto simply moves thru wanting to be her father in order to have access to women...and then finally wanting to be her damn self-but I digress. Since Brand's chapter in this collection is (predictably) most useful to me, I want to invoke Desire as a complication, as an act of reading...provoked by the representation of the body falling apart.
So (which) things fall apart? Haiti falls apart, and as the trend which is leading to my redefinition of diaspora goes, Chancy represents this falling apart on the linked levels of the body and the geographically political space. Starting before the Haitian revolution...and the violent aftermath...which still had not ended..and so therefore moving through to the repeated US/Europe invasions (official, economic and criminal) Chancy focuses on the body and spirit of a visionary wracked by AIDS and trapped in sex tourism, military violence before and after Aristide, street violence against Haitian immigrants in the US, and domestic violence "at home" in Canada. The political, physical and emotional narratives of this text are experienced in the temporality of trauma. Interestingly, so is the spiritual. Spiritual voices of the "long-dead but not departed" witness of the full history of Haiti haunt the narrative, but also allow for transcendence and facilitate connection. As usual this text is somewhat queer, but strangely it ends in a very Masters of the Dew type of way. In this case it is the "other woman" who dies(Leah the blind water goddess advisor...who has a sensual relationship with Carmen...she who gives birth) and somehow the beautifully named central male artist character "Alexis" steps in to father the child of a traitorous white man. SO what does it mean for these trauma borne voices of resistance and connection to facilitate connection in the specific form of a new water goddess with an racially mixed nuclear family with recuperated haitian parentage? (in this sense the text might be refusing its own falling apart).
(Transition from Chancy paragraph version A)White girls fall apart too (as maybe the birth of a racially impure...quarter haitian water goddess insists)...Jean Rhys's scandalous novel detailing the life of a creole (white west indian) chorus girl-turned kept woman-turned whore in England. Yes. Suprisingly (to me) this story seems to have the power to make at least two islands or an empire fall apart. Told in a mode of trauma that disrupts narrative and dealing with a source of rape and unviability on bodily and colonial economic levels this text rails against British concepts of purity, economic coherence and sexual propriety/property seeming to insist that the colonial relation reveals the impossibility of all of these things.
(Transition from Chancy paragraph version B) Speaking of the persistance of reproduction, Deborah Willis's project "Picturing Us" makes me wonder about the funciton of photography. Or really, is it possible to be non-reproductive in a book about photographic reproduction? Interestingly almost without exception these essay, which are supposedly about African-American Identity, end up being about African-American family. (Granted one author does try to queerly halt his mother from taking the reproduction action that will produce him...and then tries to step in to her photographic place...and also granted that somehow family and photograph do equal death for this and one other writer..but still.) Still indeed this is some sort of collective photo album...which worries me and (i think) limits the collection's ability to challenge the status quo.
While Rita Dove's American Smooth is somewhat dependent on the trope of men and women dancing with each other in pairs, and on military and juridical citizenship, it does seem that Dove opens up a space for critique. Dove make sa concerted effort to rewrite or unravel the bible and maybe even the constitution to a lesser degree. i think the long poem on hunting, "Meditation at 50 Yards: Moving Target", especially the section written in the voice of the bullet exemplifies the "homecoming" that is the body falling apart (when the bullet "comes home" into the target) and this falling apart is related to the ways that bodies do and do not connect while dancing.
Have I overdetermined my reading of Bessie Head with my irresponsbile and repeated invocation of Achebe? Perhaps. What is important to me about this, Head's first ever collection of short stories, is that I think it is a good example of diasporic literature written on and about the "original" continent. Head's are stories in each case about gendered violence that changes the bodies and physical locations of the characters. Colonial frameworks and neocolonial economics often play a role in this dispersing violence, but in the geneology Head creates this dispersing is older than them and can just as easily be instigated by masculinst new nationalist governments. In each case the queer an invconvenient prioritization of love between and for women is what causes the creation of new modes of community...especially in the title story in which women who have killed their husbands create some sort of utopia in prison.
I'll stop there...my next post will talk about crime and theories of black underclass...treating Policing the Crisis and Glissant's essay on "djobeurs" *which i'll be reading in french!!!* peace
The Spirit of Haiti, Myriam Chancy, 2004.
Desire in Seven Voices, (Dionne Brand et.al) 2003.
Voyage in the Dark, Jean Rhys, 1934.
Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, Deborah Willis ed., 1994.
American Smooth, Rita Dove, 2004.
The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales, Bessie Head, 1977
So here I go again, trying to smash together the six books that I happen to have read most recently as if they are thematically linked. Just be happy that I didn't add Stuart Hall et al's Policing the Crisis...which I technically finished in the middle of writing this blog. So. Let's play. To be honest these books look like the reason slightly unfocused black instructors name their courses "diasporic"...but of course (well not "of course") Jean Rhys is not necessarily black. Maybe together these books mark out at multi-sited geneaology of desire. Maybe together these books actually do help with the inconvenient definition of "diaspora" that I am more interested in: that falling apart on the level of the body, the space, the call for an ethics of queer desire.
According to Dionne Brand in her submission for this Canadian collection on Desire "maybe to desire is to complicate", and definitley in her piece, desire is what provokes the act of reading. Since the rest of the collection seems to focus on rather creepy complexes and sexual appetites/secrets of some Canadian women writers...mostly, usually heterosexually desiring the same(homo)old(ancien)thing-with the notable and delightful exception of Shani Mooto-tho even Mooto has daddy issues...dissappointingly...all of these women want the love of a father figure...Mooto simply moves thru wanting to be her father in order to have access to women...and then finally wanting to be her damn self-but I digress. Since Brand's chapter in this collection is (predictably) most useful to me, I want to invoke Desire as a complication, as an act of reading...provoked by the representation of the body falling apart.
So (which) things fall apart? Haiti falls apart, and as the trend which is leading to my redefinition of diaspora goes, Chancy represents this falling apart on the linked levels of the body and the geographically political space. Starting before the Haitian revolution...and the violent aftermath...which still had not ended..and so therefore moving through to the repeated US/Europe invasions (official, economic and criminal) Chancy focuses on the body and spirit of a visionary wracked by AIDS and trapped in sex tourism, military violence before and after Aristide, street violence against Haitian immigrants in the US, and domestic violence "at home" in Canada. The political, physical and emotional narratives of this text are experienced in the temporality of trauma. Interestingly, so is the spiritual. Spiritual voices of the "long-dead but not departed" witness of the full history of Haiti haunt the narrative, but also allow for transcendence and facilitate connection. As usual this text is somewhat queer, but strangely it ends in a very Masters of the Dew type of way. In this case it is the "other woman" who dies(Leah the blind water goddess advisor...who has a sensual relationship with Carmen...she who gives birth) and somehow the beautifully named central male artist character "Alexis" steps in to father the child of a traitorous white man. SO what does it mean for these trauma borne voices of resistance and connection to facilitate connection in the specific form of a new water goddess with an racially mixed nuclear family with recuperated haitian parentage? (in this sense the text might be refusing its own falling apart).
(Transition from Chancy paragraph version A)White girls fall apart too (as maybe the birth of a racially impure...quarter haitian water goddess insists)...Jean Rhys's scandalous novel detailing the life of a creole (white west indian) chorus girl-turned kept woman-turned whore in England. Yes. Suprisingly (to me) this story seems to have the power to make at least two islands or an empire fall apart. Told in a mode of trauma that disrupts narrative and dealing with a source of rape and unviability on bodily and colonial economic levels this text rails against British concepts of purity, economic coherence and sexual propriety/property seeming to insist that the colonial relation reveals the impossibility of all of these things.
(Transition from Chancy paragraph version B) Speaking of the persistance of reproduction, Deborah Willis's project "Picturing Us" makes me wonder about the funciton of photography. Or really, is it possible to be non-reproductive in a book about photographic reproduction? Interestingly almost without exception these essay, which are supposedly about African-American Identity, end up being about African-American family. (Granted one author does try to queerly halt his mother from taking the reproduction action that will produce him...and then tries to step in to her photographic place...and also granted that somehow family and photograph do equal death for this and one other writer..but still.) Still indeed this is some sort of collective photo album...which worries me and (i think) limits the collection's ability to challenge the status quo.
While Rita Dove's American Smooth is somewhat dependent on the trope of men and women dancing with each other in pairs, and on military and juridical citizenship, it does seem that Dove opens up a space for critique. Dove make sa concerted effort to rewrite or unravel the bible and maybe even the constitution to a lesser degree. i think the long poem on hunting, "Meditation at 50 Yards: Moving Target", especially the section written in the voice of the bullet exemplifies the "homecoming" that is the body falling apart (when the bullet "comes home" into the target) and this falling apart is related to the ways that bodies do and do not connect while dancing.
Have I overdetermined my reading of Bessie Head with my irresponsbile and repeated invocation of Achebe? Perhaps. What is important to me about this, Head's first ever collection of short stories, is that I think it is a good example of diasporic literature written on and about the "original" continent. Head's are stories in each case about gendered violence that changes the bodies and physical locations of the characters. Colonial frameworks and neocolonial economics often play a role in this dispersing violence, but in the geneology Head creates this dispersing is older than them and can just as easily be instigated by masculinst new nationalist governments. In each case the queer an invconvenient prioritization of love between and for women is what causes the creation of new modes of community...especially in the title story in which women who have killed their husbands create some sort of utopia in prison.
I'll stop there...my next post will talk about crime and theories of black underclass...treating Policing the Crisis and Glissant's essay on "djobeurs" *which i'll be reading in french!!!* peace
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
framing murder: paradise, tituba and narratives of HIV
Paradise, Toni Morrison 1998
I, Tituba Black Witch of Salem, Maryse Conde 1986
Flexible Bodies, Emily Martin 1994
Infections and Inequalities, Paul Farmer 1999
How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, Paula A. Treichler 1999
Last Served?: Gendering the HIV Pandemic, Cindy Patton, 1994
The Birth of Social Medicine, Michel Foucault (year?)
Okay. So this is what happens when I go to Chicago for the weekend and traipse around speaking about "stillness in diaspora" and galavanting in the city with the one that I love with no access to (or desire to) blog. I drop a journal entry on you that combines way too many texts. However, all of these texts seem to me to be speaking to each other. Though it is a coincidence that I was reviewing the AIDS theory stuff at the same time that I was re-reading Paradise and reading I, Tituba for the first time, death through HIV seems to be a major contemporary way in which the world becomes unlivable for black women and girls.
Why is the world unlivable for black women and girls? Or how. Paradise and I Tituba seem to be explaining this phenomenon in devastating specifcity. I am completely convinced. I have to question whether I am alive. Morrison and Conde both suggest that the experiences of black women in this (new) world require a fundamental shift in the meaning of life. While Morrison creates a spirit space between life and death next to river for her houseful of heroines (I have to mention that a space for the redemption of black women is rare in Morisson. It seems only to exist here, and then later in Love, and arguably in beloved...black men are transcendant much more often in Morrison's work), Conde creates a worldview that invokes the Yoruba invisible world and creates a cycle, the rebel is burned but the spirit remains, this burning is the new function of life in a world that cannot compete with the pleasures of death. The way in which black women become abjected in each of these cases (and indeed in the AIDS work) is through the violent social inscription made out of their queered sexual expression. The women in Paradise have desires for men that cannot be incorporated into marriage or nation and they desire themselves and each other, which is somehow more dangerous (interestingly here racial solidarity, or ambiguity is built into the text in the figure of the anonymous whitegril). The people of Ruby, see this non-familial love as a threat to the strict reproductive functionality of women in their town. It is the possibility of the rape of black women by white men, the denying of food to pregnant women, the specter of mixed breeding and reproductive diversity (they want duplicates) that keeps the town in order. Women are the silenced symbols (including the dead Ruby, whose body the town is mapped upon) that generate history in the town. Their desire expressed and unrestrained has a diasporic potential, the potential to scatter everything. This, in the minds of the scary racially pure black fathers (really sons) is reason enough to hunt them like animals.
Tituba on the other hand, loves sexual pleasure in a way that even she pathologizes. It is her attachment to the penis (literally) that enslaves her over and over again, but the possibility of connection with another woman (an appropriated Hester Prynne with a rival life-ending) remains throughout the book. While Tituba's relationships with men are traumatic repetitions of a story that always ends with disaster and death, her sensual relationship with Hester is one narrative, uninterrupted by death, that runs throughout the book. Tituba's body somehow becomes the site for an impossible connection; a racial solidarity that is corrupted by oppressive gender dynamics and a feminist solidarity that is corrupted by the pervasiveness of racism. I wonder what the relationship is between this impossible desire fo connection and death. It seems that Tituba's ability to connect with the world of the dead (which is and is not the spatial native land she craves) is the justification for her persecution. In the sick (yes I am choosing this word of all words) imaginary of colonial Salem (which is the sick imaginary od the all-black Ruby as well) Tituba/the Convent is both necessary and intolerable. People need Tituba's connection to nature and death in order to heal them, but they cannot reconcile her connection with their alienation. Somehow despite individual love (see the cases of Betsey and her mother) Tituba falls to easily into the category of the black witch (who is the black bitch) in the imaginary of the dominant class (and even in the mind of John Indian). Tituba's sexual agency is pathological because it is the site and which she connects worlds, the site of the absolute terror of being the constructions of community (colonial and rebellious) refuse.
In the case of the discourse around AIDS as well, the recurring site of disease is the sexualized racialized female body. This works on a number of levels. For Treichler the "difference" of the bodies of third world women, women of color, sex worker etc. enabled a society that saw itself as nomal and clean to narrate the disease as deviant and therefore to maintain the coherence of their imagined normality. This is also in operation in the globalizing of AIDS the Patton describes which tries to fortify the first world nation by reinforcing borders and a logic of space that pretends the disease can be contained. Farmer points out the ways that behavior, race and place are used to construct narratives of infection that cover over the poverty and inequality produced by neo-liberal economic violence that first world nations enact on the globe. Foucault traces this construction of containment to the very birth of social medicine, arguing that the leper colony is the constitutive model of western public health. It seems to me that this containment is always economic. Could a disaporic politics, a politics of falling apart that cannot be contained, the acknowledgement of the context of queer desire be a part of this redefinition of life/death that the experiences of black women call for?
I, Tituba Black Witch of Salem, Maryse Conde 1986
Flexible Bodies, Emily Martin 1994
Infections and Inequalities, Paul Farmer 1999
How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, Paula A. Treichler 1999
Last Served?: Gendering the HIV Pandemic, Cindy Patton, 1994
The Birth of Social Medicine, Michel Foucault (year?)
Okay. So this is what happens when I go to Chicago for the weekend and traipse around speaking about "stillness in diaspora" and galavanting in the city with the one that I love with no access to (or desire to) blog. I drop a journal entry on you that combines way too many texts. However, all of these texts seem to me to be speaking to each other. Though it is a coincidence that I was reviewing the AIDS theory stuff at the same time that I was re-reading Paradise and reading I, Tituba for the first time, death through HIV seems to be a major contemporary way in which the world becomes unlivable for black women and girls.
Why is the world unlivable for black women and girls? Or how. Paradise and I Tituba seem to be explaining this phenomenon in devastating specifcity. I am completely convinced. I have to question whether I am alive. Morrison and Conde both suggest that the experiences of black women in this (new) world require a fundamental shift in the meaning of life. While Morrison creates a spirit space between life and death next to river for her houseful of heroines (I have to mention that a space for the redemption of black women is rare in Morisson. It seems only to exist here, and then later in Love, and arguably in beloved...black men are transcendant much more often in Morrison's work), Conde creates a worldview that invokes the Yoruba invisible world and creates a cycle, the rebel is burned but the spirit remains, this burning is the new function of life in a world that cannot compete with the pleasures of death. The way in which black women become abjected in each of these cases (and indeed in the AIDS work) is through the violent social inscription made out of their queered sexual expression. The women in Paradise have desires for men that cannot be incorporated into marriage or nation and they desire themselves and each other, which is somehow more dangerous (interestingly here racial solidarity, or ambiguity is built into the text in the figure of the anonymous whitegril). The people of Ruby, see this non-familial love as a threat to the strict reproductive functionality of women in their town. It is the possibility of the rape of black women by white men, the denying of food to pregnant women, the specter of mixed breeding and reproductive diversity (they want duplicates) that keeps the town in order. Women are the silenced symbols (including the dead Ruby, whose body the town is mapped upon) that generate history in the town. Their desire expressed and unrestrained has a diasporic potential, the potential to scatter everything. This, in the minds of the scary racially pure black fathers (really sons) is reason enough to hunt them like animals.
Tituba on the other hand, loves sexual pleasure in a way that even she pathologizes. It is her attachment to the penis (literally) that enslaves her over and over again, but the possibility of connection with another woman (an appropriated Hester Prynne with a rival life-ending) remains throughout the book. While Tituba's relationships with men are traumatic repetitions of a story that always ends with disaster and death, her sensual relationship with Hester is one narrative, uninterrupted by death, that runs throughout the book. Tituba's body somehow becomes the site for an impossible connection; a racial solidarity that is corrupted by oppressive gender dynamics and a feminist solidarity that is corrupted by the pervasiveness of racism. I wonder what the relationship is between this impossible desire fo connection and death. It seems that Tituba's ability to connect with the world of the dead (which is and is not the spatial native land she craves) is the justification for her persecution. In the sick (yes I am choosing this word of all words) imaginary of colonial Salem (which is the sick imaginary od the all-black Ruby as well) Tituba/the Convent is both necessary and intolerable. People need Tituba's connection to nature and death in order to heal them, but they cannot reconcile her connection with their alienation. Somehow despite individual love (see the cases of Betsey and her mother) Tituba falls to easily into the category of the black witch (who is the black bitch) in the imaginary of the dominant class (and even in the mind of John Indian). Tituba's sexual agency is pathological because it is the site and which she connects worlds, the site of the absolute terror of being the constructions of community (colonial and rebellious) refuse.
In the case of the discourse around AIDS as well, the recurring site of disease is the sexualized racialized female body. This works on a number of levels. For Treichler the "difference" of the bodies of third world women, women of color, sex worker etc. enabled a society that saw itself as nomal and clean to narrate the disease as deviant and therefore to maintain the coherence of their imagined normality. This is also in operation in the globalizing of AIDS the Patton describes which tries to fortify the first world nation by reinforcing borders and a logic of space that pretends the disease can be contained. Farmer points out the ways that behavior, race and place are used to construct narratives of infection that cover over the poverty and inequality produced by neo-liberal economic violence that first world nations enact on the globe. Foucault traces this construction of containment to the very birth of social medicine, arguing that the leper colony is the constitutive model of western public health. It seems to me that this containment is always economic. Could a disaporic politics, a politics of falling apart that cannot be contained, the acknowledgement of the context of queer desire be a part of this redefinition of life/death that the experiences of black women call for?
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
map to living/doorstone
Reading Journal Entry One-
Looking for Livingstone, Marlene Nourbese Philip 1991
Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand 2001
If you were looking for Livingstone
could you use a map to the door return
drawn in words by a woman speaking in neuter for
those of us "flung out and dispersed" in the "Black Diaspora"?
What does space mean in these two texts?
Why does discovering charting marking Africa provoke the project
for these two women writing in Canada from Trinidad and Tobago?
Looking for Livingstone is a self described "odssey of silence" that
refigures the colonial project as one of language, religion and strategically deployed time.
Gender seems to be everything here and the relationship between colonizer and the postcolonial colonized subject is (as in "She Tries her Tongue") an explicitly sexual one. Philip creates an alternate logic in which silence (already gendered and racialized) can disrupt time, chartability, this is an anti-epistemological project, that mocks and defies logics of time and power and space (sometimeswritingthewordsalltogetherlikethis). This is a rival mythology that foregrounds the use of language to silence and colonize. Don't forget that alongside this heterosexual struggle between the word and silence there is the explicitly lesbian relationship between "whore words" that weave together the colors of silence. The relationship to space here seems to be one of leaving, what is the diasporic significance of this so called journey to "the interior". What does it have to do with Fanon's project to insist on a black interiority? What does this project teach me about desire? What does it tell me about the ability to know? To speak?
A Map to the Door of No Return calls itself "notes to belonging", though Brand does not seem to make this move in the text, I am interested in what the ontology of longing is. What is it to "be longing"? This is a question that Brand asks more explicityl in her most recent novel "What we All Long For". To BE longing. This seems to resonate with Brand's claims that the black body (i am slightly disturbed by the neutral gendering that she seems to take on in order to create an inclusive and representative narrative about the "Black Diaspora" not always black, but always capitalized) is domesticated and inhabited. This book also creates absolute rupture and unaswerability, it defies the historical, cartogaphical and periodical documents that it refererrences because it insists on unknowability, as desire as an alternative to epistemology. After all Brand never actually goes to the central site of her book, instead the haunting of this place causes an unfulfillable (queer) desire that replaces witness as we usually know it, highlighting seperation, speculation and acts of imagination. She includes a piece specifically about desire, relating desire to the act of reading and trying desperately to parse consumerism and desire. I think the needed move is to make desire queer, that thing that she says she cannot make sense of, that desire that the nation/family/movement as we know it has no room for, cannot incorporate. That non-reproductive and impossible desire that provokes reimagination, that represences the encounter. This book is a set of encounters that stand in for a desire. (Somehow I am remembering a dream in which I am writing this line.)
Dreams function in both texts in different way, but in each case they seem to be entryways for a temporality of trauma. Band discusses dreams as a state of captivity, the dominant cognitive schema for those in the diaspora. Dreams are persistant recurrent modes through which the mind joins the body in a state of captivity, of destinationless/agency less movement, of falling apart. Brand on the other hand, seems to avoid dreams, we often see her staying awake on airplanes, trying to remember when she is passing the door of no return, reading Coetzee and Morrison, waking at 4:45 am to write back to Cesaire. Brand seems to resist the captivity of dreams in exchange for the desire in the act of reading. What does this say about the word? What would Philip say about this use of books. In the Philip the recurring dream (and the vision and so on) is the place where the already allegorcial gets even more metaphorical, where the narrator is actually inseminated with Livingstone's word, where the marketplace of ideas is a real place where people try to use a Caribbean demotic to sell words (where is the space of the Caribbean here? Is there a Caribbean interior? Is the actual Caribbean too edgy for this exercise?)
What is the possibility of revolution in these texts. Brand recounts (for the first time really since Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, or In Another Place Not Here) the failed revolution in Grenada and the traumatic experience that that moment was (again). She describes herself has forever dropping a glass of water in the moment that her friends and comrades are murdered (is the the glass of water in Thirsty?) water more water more water. Philip discusses the still apartheid South Africa with Livingstone, 1987 the year of a certain violence in a place called Livingstone in South Africa. She (or her narrator, excuse me) talks about contemporary white south africans in their relational similarity to slaveholders. This is the temporality of trauma my love. Both of these books completely recontextualize progress by taking on the trope of the journey/ of discovery and perverting it (them). They reveal that this desire to discover is queer and violent and impossible and fictional, but these are not novels.
Intercut with poems, Philip's text seems to be what it is, a fake journal or an real allegorical journal of foreclosed journey. It is somewhat speculative in its use of time and space. It is making fun of research. It is in someways the performative version of Ranji's book on "dark continents", a demonstration of the psychotics (yes the psychotics) of colonialism and the persuit of enlightenment humanism. Brand's book titles section after section "map" but it does not equip us to go anywhere, is not chronological is not not not an "autobiography" as the publisher suggests as a marketing category next to the price. It is what it says it is: "notes". I saw many of these notes in notebooks, on napkins, in blue pen on the back of email printouts in the Canadian national archives. I see these notes as a conversation that Brand's life is having with her poetry and her fiction. I honestly can't think of a reason for someone who does not already love Brand to read this book at all. That said, this book looks like the only book that I could write right now. The book that would come out of these random musings about the out of order reading I am doing in order to tease expertise. Can you even wait for tomorrow? I'll be reading Paradise (because Brand mentions it, and Erica wrote about it) and Paul Farmer (because I have to write this article about public health). See you.
Looking for Livingstone, Marlene Nourbese Philip 1991
Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand 2001
If you were looking for Livingstone
could you use a map to the door return
drawn in words by a woman speaking in neuter for
those of us "flung out and dispersed" in the "Black Diaspora"?
What does space mean in these two texts?
Why does discovering charting marking Africa provoke the project
for these two women writing in Canada from Trinidad and Tobago?
Looking for Livingstone is a self described "odssey of silence" that
refigures the colonial project as one of language, religion and strategically deployed time.
Gender seems to be everything here and the relationship between colonizer and the postcolonial colonized subject is (as in "She Tries her Tongue") an explicitly sexual one. Philip creates an alternate logic in which silence (already gendered and racialized) can disrupt time, chartability, this is an anti-epistemological project, that mocks and defies logics of time and power and space (sometimeswritingthewordsalltogetherlikethis). This is a rival mythology that foregrounds the use of language to silence and colonize. Don't forget that alongside this heterosexual struggle between the word and silence there is the explicitly lesbian relationship between "whore words" that weave together the colors of silence. The relationship to space here seems to be one of leaving, what is the diasporic significance of this so called journey to "the interior". What does it have to do with Fanon's project to insist on a black interiority? What does this project teach me about desire? What does it tell me about the ability to know? To speak?
A Map to the Door of No Return calls itself "notes to belonging", though Brand does not seem to make this move in the text, I am interested in what the ontology of longing is. What is it to "be longing"? This is a question that Brand asks more explicityl in her most recent novel "What we All Long For". To BE longing. This seems to resonate with Brand's claims that the black body (i am slightly disturbed by the neutral gendering that she seems to take on in order to create an inclusive and representative narrative about the "Black Diaspora" not always black, but always capitalized) is domesticated and inhabited. This book also creates absolute rupture and unaswerability, it defies the historical, cartogaphical and periodical documents that it refererrences because it insists on unknowability, as desire as an alternative to epistemology. After all Brand never actually goes to the central site of her book, instead the haunting of this place causes an unfulfillable (queer) desire that replaces witness as we usually know it, highlighting seperation, speculation and acts of imagination. She includes a piece specifically about desire, relating desire to the act of reading and trying desperately to parse consumerism and desire. I think the needed move is to make desire queer, that thing that she says she cannot make sense of, that desire that the nation/family/movement as we know it has no room for, cannot incorporate. That non-reproductive and impossible desire that provokes reimagination, that represences the encounter. This book is a set of encounters that stand in for a desire. (Somehow I am remembering a dream in which I am writing this line.)
Dreams function in both texts in different way, but in each case they seem to be entryways for a temporality of trauma. Band discusses dreams as a state of captivity, the dominant cognitive schema for those in the diaspora. Dreams are persistant recurrent modes through which the mind joins the body in a state of captivity, of destinationless/agency less movement, of falling apart. Brand on the other hand, seems to avoid dreams, we often see her staying awake on airplanes, trying to remember when she is passing the door of no return, reading Coetzee and Morrison, waking at 4:45 am to write back to Cesaire. Brand seems to resist the captivity of dreams in exchange for the desire in the act of reading. What does this say about the word? What would Philip say about this use of books. In the Philip the recurring dream (and the vision and so on) is the place where the already allegorcial gets even more metaphorical, where the narrator is actually inseminated with Livingstone's word, where the marketplace of ideas is a real place where people try to use a Caribbean demotic to sell words (where is the space of the Caribbean here? Is there a Caribbean interior? Is the actual Caribbean too edgy for this exercise?)
What is the possibility of revolution in these texts. Brand recounts (for the first time really since Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, or In Another Place Not Here) the failed revolution in Grenada and the traumatic experience that that moment was (again). She describes herself has forever dropping a glass of water in the moment that her friends and comrades are murdered (is the the glass of water in Thirsty?) water more water more water. Philip discusses the still apartheid South Africa with Livingstone, 1987 the year of a certain violence in a place called Livingstone in South Africa. She (or her narrator, excuse me) talks about contemporary white south africans in their relational similarity to slaveholders. This is the temporality of trauma my love. Both of these books completely recontextualize progress by taking on the trope of the journey/ of discovery and perverting it (them). They reveal that this desire to discover is queer and violent and impossible and fictional, but these are not novels.
Intercut with poems, Philip's text seems to be what it is, a fake journal or an real allegorical journal of foreclosed journey. It is somewhat speculative in its use of time and space. It is making fun of research. It is in someways the performative version of Ranji's book on "dark continents", a demonstration of the psychotics (yes the psychotics) of colonialism and the persuit of enlightenment humanism. Brand's book titles section after section "map" but it does not equip us to go anywhere, is not chronological is not not not an "autobiography" as the publisher suggests as a marketing category next to the price. It is what it says it is: "notes". I saw many of these notes in notebooks, on napkins, in blue pen on the back of email printouts in the Canadian national archives. I see these notes as a conversation that Brand's life is having with her poetry and her fiction. I honestly can't think of a reason for someone who does not already love Brand to read this book at all. That said, this book looks like the only book that I could write right now. The book that would come out of these random musings about the out of order reading I am doing in order to tease expertise. Can you even wait for tomorrow? I'll be reading Paradise (because Brand mentions it, and Erica wrote about it) and Paul Farmer (because I have to write this article about public health). See you.
anti/indi/genocide hologram
san fernando trinidad, carnival 2006
invocation:
quoth the
east indian
west indian
mas parade chief
faceing the tradewind
through the heat of synthetic suede
spilling a half-full carib (tm) beer
"min de truck"
offering: (in chorus)
tek dis neon feathered bumsie-dress
mek we leave us stay
tek ds rhinestne plaited mohawk
mek we leave us stay
tek dis mix-breed red brown glitter skin
mek we leave us stay
tek dis half-made bleacher pyramid
mek we leave us stay
tek dis plastic pepsi precussion line
mek we leave us stay
tek dis free form green bottle glass street mosiac
mek we leave us stay
tek this procession mocking funeral
mek we leave
us stay
invocation:
quoth the
east indian
west indian
mas parade chief
faceing the tradewind
through the heat of synthetic suede
spilling a half-full carib (tm) beer
"min de truck"
offering: (in chorus)
tek dis neon feathered bumsie-dress
mek we leave us stay
tek ds rhinestne plaited mohawk
mek we leave us stay
tek dis mix-breed red brown glitter skin
mek we leave us stay
tek dis half-made bleacher pyramid
mek we leave us stay
tek dis plastic pepsi precussion line
mek we leave us stay
tek dis free form green bottle glass street mosiac
mek we leave us stay
tek this procession mocking funeral
mek we leave
us stay
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
blue
airmail letter deconstructed
"dear mama, hope you are well and enjoying the best of health"
hope
you
our
well
place
me
planted
seed
buried
vanity
granted
flight
into
alone
borrowed
pain
made
new
take
care
love
you
"dear mama, hope you are well and enjoying the best of health"
hope
you
our
well
place
me
planted
seed
buried
vanity
granted
flight
into
alone
borrowed
pain
made
new
take
care
love
you
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
wet
to dionne brand
on my baptism in her papers at the national archives of canada
sky blue pen turned waves
unlined paper map to what
i need to know now
you were making this
round revolution
on paper, in the streets, in
the classroom, in bed
and i was being born and
learning to walk and
making first words out
of a fist and a cry, so
thank you for knowing
on my baptism in her papers at the national archives of canada
sky blue pen turned waves
unlined paper map to what
i need to know now
you were making this
round revolution
on paper, in the streets, in
the classroom, in bed
and i was being born and
learning to walk and
making first words out
of a fist and a cry, so
thank you for knowing
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