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“Many today may not be aware of this, but the Black Arts Movement
tried to create Black Literary Theory and in doing so became prescriptive.
My fear is that when Theory is not rooted in practice, it becomes
prescriptive, exclusive, élitish.”
--Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,”
Cultural Critique, Spring 1987, U. Minnesota Press.
In my imagining Black The [Or] Y: Praxis, Sum Unknown for the Winter 2021 Issue of Interim Journal, my hope was to center, by way of open invitation, Barbara Christian’s call for a mode of Theory, which for me is The [or] Y—emphasis on the “or,” the Y axis, the vector, a range that spreads across and towards an alternative nexus of theory where generative praxis becomes possible among “people of color, feminists, radical critics, creative writers…for whom literature is not…discourse…but necessary nourishment for their people and one way by which they come to understand their lives better.”
And as I read, danced to, sung with, stared into, thought with and felt my way across the following works, beautiful in power, range, purpose, form, and discipline, I was excited to encounter and experience what happens when the press of such a call, now, successfully invites writers, thinkers, and artists to follow Christian’s timeless and essential lead into a radical clarity of remaining open, through her understanding of maintaining the vantage point and vivid enactment of a shared creative-critical horizon, that is, in Christian’s words:
“…open to the intersection of languages, class, race, gender in the literature. And it would help if we share our process, that is, our practice, as much as possible, since, finally, our work is a collective endeavor.”
And perhaps this was, and continues to be my hope, in bringing this selection, “a collective endeavor” of brilliant poets, fiction writers, translators, visual, sound and interdisciplinary artists, cultural critics, all radical thinkers and makers, together across forms, genres and disciplines in the spirit of Christian’s still urgent call for variety, multiplicity i.e. “that which is alive and therefore cannot be known until it is known,” until you say/write it.
It, is here. It, is now. It is—in these pages, across languages, screens, images, sounds, video, songs, sights, and beings. I am honored to have had the pleasure to receive and be in the company of this work, as an editor, and am now so thrilled and honored to share it with you, as I continue to think and live with these works, in conversation with one another, and with the power and generosity of Christian’s urgent and enduring call, again and again.
Ronaldo V. Wilson
Editor-at-Large
Interim Journal
Y the or, why
You or I
Yes or no
In or out
Pro or con
Hero or zero
The Y or X
Female or male, or other
Black or white, or other
The one or the other
Left or right
Life or choice
Able or unable
Legal or illegal
Fake or real
Rich or poor, wealthy or not
Paper or plastic
Half full or half empty
It’s true or it’s false
I agree or I disagree
I will or I won’t
My freedom or your freedom
Or fork in the road of Y or Y not
O eauiu o aiou ie o ae a o ai
i eey oie a i
o ue ouai aeie aoe e uie ai
i ea a eae i
Aeia Aeia o e i ae o ee
i i e aoie o iey
a o y oo i oeoo o ea o ii ea
e ou eoii ie i a e iei ie
e i eou ou a e oi ea
Black body Black books
Academic alien Artist ally
Reigning reactionary Radical resisted
Biological blueprint Break binary
Attack Africa Affirmation articulated
Repeating repressive Radical reclamation
Authority appalled Another approach
Coopted critics Celebrated creating
Humanists hegemony Hidden hieroglyphs
Repulsive reason Reading riddles
Institutions infiltrated lmagine intersection
Social stereotyping Sensual spiritedness
Theory takeover Theorizing today
Ignore insight Ideas influenced
Abstract assault Activity accelerates
Narrowness narratives Necessary nourishment
The curse of life as a prison guard tormented by a squalor of miscreants.
The capstone of lice as a periwig truncated by a semblance of mediocrity.
The cult of larceny as a pilferer tempted by a surplus of merchandise.
The creaking of leather as a pioneer tanned by a sunbeam of mortality.
The cocaine of lounge lizards as a piñata torched by a swig of mezcal.
The cartoon of Leviathan as a polka dot tricked by a simulacrum of mystery.
The consummation of lust as a primate tickled by a sirocco of metaphors.
The currency of lying as a profiteer tutored by a scholar of monetary policy.
The constancy of ligatures as a predator taunted by a stagflation of multibillionaires.
The cushion of lush life as a pornographer torn by a scalpel of misery.
The costume of legitimacy as a patriot trampled by a skinhead of manifest destiny.
The chemistry of Lilium as a pimple cream test marketed by a skimption of majority.
The curtain of languishing as a pipsqueak telegraphed by a signal of marginality.
What’s a me 2-4? What are you, me twofer?
Turn your tote bag inside out.
Shake up all the junk you got—
loose change, pencils, lipsticks, rings.
Take you off to get a brand
new bag to carry things.
Snatch a one-size sack, all black
faux leather with a sturdy strap.
Matches all your outfits so
anywhere it’s good to go.
What you use your me too for?
Put a bag over your head.
Yeah, that’s what he said.
Harryette Mullen’s books include Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006), winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002), a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A collection of essays and interviews, The Cracks Between, was published in 2012 by University of Alabama. Graywolf published Urban Tumbleweed in 2013. A critical edition of her poetry is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in 2022. She teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA.
She couldn’t get in—he, not out—
until the frame was yanked to his left,
her right, halving him framing her: -eme
streaming “a sort of seventh son”
ofaybombed by the First “baboon in heels,”
okay uprooted by okra. They took a dive
and half: she went down on the 4th,
he, out cold as stripes declaimed the Tenth,
necessary, if predictive, stays
as the possibility of going
apeshit among the humans hanging
with a fifth chased by a forty
acre hold. Led by the light
from the deck, they climbed,
a king and his queen
about to be played.
Tyrone Williams teaches in the English and Race, Intersectionality and Gender Studies departments at Xavier University in Cincinnati Ohio, He is the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry.
In “Artifice of Absorption”[1] Charles Bernstein invokes Edmond Jabès in an epigraph that reads:
“Then where is truth but in the burning space between one letter and the next? Thus the book is first read outside its limits.”
Following this thinking, and moving to disrupt
the limits of genre and discipline, let us consider
the liminal as a generative space for critical production.
How different rhetorical registers, in their intersection,
can create a form in which to imagine potential alternatives.
A critical thought hurled to the ground
breaks into fragments. The dispersed multiples
gather a heretical prototype.
In suturing the bifurcation between creative and critical writing,
an amorphous text emerges. This is an introduction. A split tongue. A constellation
assembles such gestures into a multivalent “form” – a formless
form, a form against the formalities of form.
We form a counter-archive of small interventions.
A sample of critical essayistic analysis that gestures
towards a larger anti-genre to consider and further the work being done in
many different contemporary disciplines of archiving counter-narratives
and addressing the gaps within the archive.
We are interested in questioning the forms
and literatures we have been handed, how they have been integrated
into our social conditions, and how we might
activate an epistemological disruption.
What we are forming can take on
various names, a body inherently hybrid. This work is
not a move to commodify a genre but rather to acknowledge
an aberrant way of thinking critically. In its interdisciplinarity,
this provocation seeks to explore the boundaries of a critical
writing imbued with a creative approach. It embraces dissent.[2]
If we agree with Lukács that: “The forms of the artistic genres
are not arbitrary…they grow out of the concrete determinacy”[3]
then we can say that the cultural history of our poetic forms
becomes a history of social thought and practice.
Poetry is a conduit; and artifice– a possible technique for disruption.
Our current conditions require a new formation,
an interdisciplinary anti-genre that takes from
and goes against the idea of genre, cannibalizes
them to create something new.
We form a constellation of heretics who work
outside of and against the rigid forms of critical writing.
Consider our methodologies. The fragment is a space
that offers a dialogic exchange between archives, quotations,
and critical thoughts. It allows room for a speculative thinking
and a generative reading (both active and passive). It rejoices
in Keats’ “negative capability” and embraces paradox.
Bernstein writes:
“Why not a criticism intoxicated with its own metaphoricity,
… in which the inadequacy of our
explanatory paradigms is neither ignored
nor regretted but brought into fruitful play.”[4]
We embody a writing that revels. It is both
critically engaged and lyrical[5]. We inhabit a threshold
between research and poetry. At times we will be fully
present, at others a slight apparition. We are not alone in this work.
Criticism is here expanded to encompass multivalent forms
of critical thought. If we consider criticism to be a piece of
writing which is always addressing an object of critique,
this work adheres to the definition. However, the object
of critique here becomes something pliable, that can
be turned over, flipped upside down, inverted and fragmented.
Rather than argue for what Susan Sontag,
Bernstein and many other literary critics
have championed as a transparency in
criticism, we are more more aligned with
Edward Glissant’s call:
“to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.”
Our project is inherently ambiguous
but in its impossible horizon lies its potential–
the invitation to explore different approaches and various
emerging methodologies in flux. Tracing Gertrude Stein’s
“continuous present,” historical texts are placed
besides and in conversation with contemporary pieces.
This is a move to dismantle hierarchies between them,
against canonical assumptions. Following a lineage
of the avant-garde (a word ambiguous in itself) –
our writing aligns itself with traditions
against the norm and hierarchy, and moves towards
what Marjorie Perloff calls “a language of rupture”[6].
By piercing our critical thinking, we can start
to texture our thinking in different orders. We can
refuse the forms institutionally imposed upon
writing, we can refuse to be legible within capitalism
and form a formless form.
[1] Charles Bernstein, 'Artifice of Absorption,' A Poetics, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1992).
[2] Bernstein, ‘Artifice of Absorption’
[3] The Sociology of Genres p79
[4] Bernstein, ‘Artifice of Absorption’p16
[5]The term “lyrical” can be ambiguous and amorphous, here the word makes reference to the lyric essay and the musicalities of prose
[6] The Futurist Movement: Avant-garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture
Emma Gomis is a Catalan American poet, essayist, editor and researcher. She has published three chapbooks: Canxona (Blush Lit) and X (SpamZine Press) and Goslings to Prophecy cowritten with Anne Waldman (The Lune). She was selected by Patricia Spears Jones as The Poetry Project’s 2020 Brannan Poetry Prize winner. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Poetics from Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in criticism and culture at the University of Cambridge.
Everyone showed up as a representation of themselves,
the hour underlit against a stark white screen,
inside the photograph, night was falling.
I texted myself, the discursive moment’s eating itself,
got back, “the discursive moment’s eating itself,”
got a text from an ex, “I love the shadow world more than thee,”
the shantytown up the street roared toward the end of history.
Make your senses not be mimetic,
“Make your senses not be mimetic,” ok!
Heav’nly Venus, illustrious, laughter-loving queen,
sea-born, night-loving, of an awesome mien,
pray prevent confusions,
ridiculously besot with their full meanings,
with cemeteries that exceed themselves.
In Paris, on screen, a of row women filmed one by one
appear dancing simultaneously.
Got back, “Words are markers with shifting occupants
in their corresponding graves,”
no reference,
lost reference.
Anne Lesley Selcer works in the expanded field of language. Their writing on, with, around, and underneath art has created a book of essays called Blank Sign Book, a book of poems called Sun Cycle, and a multitude of multiform publications, performances, and moving pictures. Most recently they have collaborated with artists to make off-page works based on their poetry. Girl is Presence, The Mouth is Still a Wild Door, and The Sadness of the Supermarket: A Lament for Certain Girls have shown at International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, The Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, Cork International Film Festival, The Berkeley Art Museum, Crossroads Film Festival, and ProArts, in addition to other places. Their poetry and art writing is in Prelude, Jacket2, Hyperallergic, Fence, The Chicago Review, and GaussPDF, and other publications, as well as several anthologies and exhibition catalogs. Sun Cycle won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize, and their work also won the Gazing Grain Prize.
LEONORA M. PEREZ
1. That my mother walks walks walks in this state of wake is revelation itself.
2. That revelation itself: geographies in tension. Those geographies in tension: future-memories of narrations. Those narrations: transitions. Those transitions: a parking lot. That parking lot: a destruction of language. That destruction: an accumulation of content. That content: this slow construction of self. This self: a labor. This labor: a nurse. This nurse: Filipina. This slow construction of body in spatial and temporal traffic.
3. Traffic remains metaphor of interior. I walk in the history of my mother. I walk against grain of syllabus. I walk against promise of bibliography. I walk against inclusion. I walk against ruse of relevance. I walk against remaining traffic. And yes, yes, I walk against such metaphor.
4. And there goes my walking mother, a walking volta, in a post-shift trance, in white polyester nursing uniform, in black rubber shoes, in handcuffs covered by black sweater, my walking mother held by a blur of white men, held in violation, held in throat of world progress. I walk for the history of my mother.
5. Here are fragments thrown together—my mother's body is war, my mother's body is threat, my mother's body is collateral. And I, another genre of collateral.
6. Something fishy happening, my mother says. The FBI is here to arrest the suspected serial killer walking walking walking—the delicate crunch of gravel underneath her black shoes, cameras shuttering, slow traffic passing, a crowd of onlookers speculating, the sound of vein against skin, the sound of a history beginning.
7. History becomes black shoes and a white polyester nursing uniform within the context of racial capitalism. History becomes a black sweater draped over handcuffed hands at the mercy of imperialism. History becomes flowers checked for explosives in my mother's delivery room.
8. From which refusal emerges such History?
9. I refuse to follow you into knowing, and I leave you walking, mother, walking walking walking in the irrational.
10. Some stay working here for a sense of home, in fluidities of domination, in serial resistance, in hands undoing settler capitalism, a matter of realism draped over our very knowing. Amidst reporters everywhere, I walk against the ruse of innocence.
11. O, how serial is this crime, this white work in motion.
12. I walk at the history of my mother. And I believe in the disruptive role of her imagination.
13. The violence of news. Do not follow my mother into grave temporalities of racialization. Walk in gravel, walk against contribution, hold my hand as we walk through the history of my mother in the VHS cassette of Michigan, then Illinois, then Michigan again. Of this speculative history, I am suspect.
14. What remains muted in frame are the horrors of working white men just doing their jobs. Come with us, they say. Or we will drag you, they say. The silhouette of my mother passes; she holds in what most will never see. Here is what children do when everything done here is done against presence.
15. While underneath this scene there are alternative outlines, countermemories, underfutures. Here in the replay the ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person. We pray for the ghost. We are prey to the ghost. The underfutures ghost whatever we thought we desired in the first place.
16. What is the material history of the Filipina walking body, walking war, walking collateral, walking ghost?
17. I am a simple figure investigating where history indicts love. Love as roar, love as the ideology of underfire, a site in which I want to die laughing. I do not mourn the white scene. I do not mourn the white discovery of white regret. I suspect my mother does not tell me of the heaviness, of her own imperceptibilities. I'm so over description.
18. I walk against the history of my mother. I walk against legibility.
19. I walk directly alongside my mother, between those white FBI agents, inside the VHS of white Evanston. I walk against visibility, against articulation, and my mother says to me go ahead and smile, go ahead and cross the street: we stay delicate in our walking, perhaps shaking slightly, perhaps we walk through the epistemological break between history and fiction, and perhaps we become fiction someday.
20. We narrate against legitimacy, alongside the brightly archived rewind of image and volume of here not quite here and not quite bright, but open and slow, and my mother, I swear I swear, walks walks walks. There is merely something about you, walking walking walking, in front of a crowded anywhere, an anywhere that needs a theory. And the screen fades to black. Against a whiteness of timelines, against timelines of whiteness. And so I walk against state. I walk within the history of my mother who walks within a history of discrepant settlements, migrations, and fugitivities. We walk relationally, dear relatives. We walk, see, how my mother and I, still walk walk walk, without words, without propertied syntax.
NOTES
This essay reassembles language describing the scene of Leonora M. Perez's arrest as found in Jason Magabo Perez, "Because Love Is a Roar: Sketching a Critical Race Poetics," Entropy Magazine, 2018, personal conversations/oral histories between the author and his mother, and the independent film Yonie Narrates (2009), written and directed by Jason Magabo Perez. This essay is after Chrytos, "I Walk in the History of My People," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color, 4th Edition, edited by Gloría Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 53. This essay samples, reconfigures, and draws its critical-poetic energy from the following lines, fragments, and sentences, and from the larger works within which they appear: "because your mother's body was war", "because love is a roar", and "because it is the destruction of language" from I Was Born With Two Tongues, "Letter to Our Unborn Children," Broken Speak (Asian Improv Records, 2002); "toward a countermemory, for the future" (22) and "The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life" (8) from Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); "The relevation iself may affect the narrator's future memory that happened before" (15), "That past has no content" (15), and "In other words, the epistemological break between history and fiction is always expressed concretely through the historically situated evaluation of specific narratives" (8) from Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); "Geographies in tension" (149), "seeing the world only through meatphors of interior or contained spaces" (6), and "Recognizing this relationship is important for making sense overall of the processes and fluidities of domination as well as the varied forms of resistance required to address the ongoing consequences of mutable colonialisms" (10) from Natchee Blu Barnd, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism (Corvallis: OSU Press, 2017); "Here are the fragments put together by another me" (89), "A slow construction of my self as a body in a spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema" (91), "I wanted to kill myself laughing" (91), "here I am at home; I am made of the irrational; I wade in the irrational. Irrational up to my neck" (102), "hysterical throat of the world" (107) from Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philox (New York: Grove Press, 2008); "disruptive role of imagination" (77), "what is the material history of the Filipino dancing body?" (58), "descriptors of Filipino/a (racial) imperceptibility" (4), and "I interpret these historical spots of time as temporalities of Filipino/a racialization" (14) from Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire (New York: NYU Press, 2013).
Jason Magabo Perez (he/him) is the author of This is for the mostless (WordTech Editions, 2017) and I ask about what falls away (1913 Press, Forthcoming). Perez’s prose and poetry have also appeared or are forthcoming in various publications such as Witness, TAYO, Eleven Eleven, Entropy, The Feminist Wire, The Operating System, Faultline, Sonora Review, and Kalfou. Previous Artist-in-Residence at Center for Art and Thought (CA+T), Perez currently serves as Community Arts Fellow at Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies, Associate Editor at Ethnic Studies Review, and is a core organizer of The Digital Sala. Perez is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University San Marcos.
Micah Perks is the author of a short story collection, a memoir and two novels. Her novel, What Becomes Us, won an Independent Publisher’s Gold Medal and was named one of the Top Ten Books about the Apocalypse by The Guardian. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Epoch, Zyzzyva, Tin House, Kenyon Review, OZY and The Rumpus, amongst many journals and anthologies. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, ten Pushcart Prize nominations, the New Guard Machigonne Fiction Prize and residencies at the Blue Mountain Center and MacDowell. Micah directs the creative writing program at UCSC. She’s working on a novel about utopias. More info at micahperks.com
I’m sorry, I made a mistake. I meant horror. I said terror
Sorry, I made a mistake. I said terror. I meant error.
I’m sorry I said error, I meant theory, I meant pleasure. I am a late settler
on U.S. terrain, nearing Algonkian, Nonotuck land.
I find myself in an action/adventure scene—with a helmet, hazard gear, and supplementary
air—approaching
the bunker
of American interiority, a pricey
hermitage—accompanied by Bobby Day, the Bobolink drone. A radio geek, he breathes another
medium, teaches me the bop
through some rad headphones. I guess you could say we talk.
I say into my com: Hey Bobby, what’s the mission? Where do I start?
Bobby Day whispers: Hack the merle amerique,
the bird-come-down-the-walk, tweedle-lee-dad-dee of Emily D’s keep.
I turn on my bird display. I go: tweet, tweet.
Bobby Day sings: Go-bird-go.
Her forcefield’s a sizzling business, but cheery from afar. Now, bop-bop-bop onto the street.
I bop onto the perimeter
of the flashing circumference, scaling its kinks. I wear its terror font, its error font, its rockin’
robin font, a violation. My head blazes orange. I begin to crawl in shock.
Bobby Day says: Go-bird! Walk!
Then, I see her: Emily D with her endless bots and spy cams. Emily D with her nanotweaks and
tender-ware, her sender-worms, and gardens. Her emissions! Her royal arms! Emily D, 17,
buttoned-up and still, frozen in a spell! Hair parted in the center, glowing neon yellow! Perilous.
Emily D squared off, shielded like Fort Knox!
I see a neon-wet worm
emerge from the silt of her part. It slinks out to the verge where I stand.
Eat it, says Bobby Day,
and I eat the fellow raw. Bobby Day does
a high-resolution scan
of my gut morphology as the worm passes through, testing the bristles and ventral nerves, to get a
flavor of its lethal,
data-rich hue. My gut seizes up like graffiti! Bobby, I’m gonna spew!
Bobby Days says: Go-bird-go, vomit into the dew. Careful, now. She’s watching! Make like
you’re the Orient at Dawn coughing up the Sun.
Bop-Bop-a-Lu-Ow! Oh, Kat-man-du!
Her circumference crunches in, expands, out-bops me. I puke up a mischance,
unravelling my invasive,
alien scaffolding
onto the private, domestic sphere. I catch my toe in the skew. A jouissance
of flail and slant and sick.
Beep-beep-beep
Alarms go off at my awkward dance! Emily D’s
bots emit a chemical slew! Oh, Bobby I’m tripping, and running out of air!
Bobby Day sings: Go bird go. Go Switcheroo. Play the frightened innocent,
velvet sweet but scared.
Tweedle deedle dee, Tweedle deedle dum.
Maybe she’ll feel bad, and offer you a crumb,
to settle your insides, then you can hop on home.
Hop. Hop. Hop. Away. Plashless.
Mission done.
Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building, science fiction, and graphic media. Her poetry book, The Trouble with Humpadori (2016), imagines a cosmic mythological space for marginalized transnational subjects. Avatara, a chapbook from Portable @Yo-Yo Labs Press, is situated in a post-apocalyptic gaming world where A.I.s play at being gods. She has published in the Poetry, Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, Aster(ix) Journal, and Leonardo, among other journals. In her latest poetry book Daughter Isotope (OS 2021), she engages in a “cloud poetics,” as a way of thinking about personal, collective, and digital archives as a collaborative process with comic artists, dancers, and video artists. A Djerassi resident and Kundiman fellow, she teaches at Rollins College.
blue light in the mirror, the moon, and you
let gloom gleam like rot heath mired into
blues prosody mimics usurper dew
clit klitschnass drips snot, sheath gyred in two
axonemes, porphine moths’s teeth sunk into
the sea between us, luminous light, spumes
smithereens, slurred ovaltine sunken through
oceans, endorphins those lizard entombs
opium tongue stunned on starless night blooms
bruise blue, conjuring typhoon and monsoon
swallows we two as infinite night looms
consuming flame blue licks at honeyed moon
in gloom—we wend through—blood moon—doom—I see—
we bloom—vivisected—hope scorn’d—y’all’ll see—
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Refusing work is environmental justice
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Whitey’s on the moon like Gil and Sun said.
Sade LaNay is a poet and artist from 3rd Ward TX living in the NY Catskills. They are the author of I Love You and I'm not Dead, 2020 winner of the Lambda literary award for transgender poetry. Witness and support their creative work at seesade.com
Falling waves & full-throated fumes
do not care about you.
Blonde horses, bland
winds rise and do not
care about you.
Our sister does not
in her flushed face want
what you
want
at all.
--
There’s a light in a room three rooms away.
I’m not, I’m never, going to turn it off.
This sapling night’s just steeped in that dust
puddle. Message me. I’m staying here
in the green green
of under.
--
Vodka-drenched
charcoal night—we
dance, our feet
gash
and stain.
through the glass door
my elbow
smells of lake and old navy boy
& dad in matching
T’s- I found a knife
from a different era
convenient store
water in my
car. all doors we’d thought we’d locked
slid open. the private bed was
broken in two
I had a child needed water
they always do – nothing has changed
most I know are still alive
but not all
how might I keep my kids at home, how might I keep them safe?
ask the dreamed women who
rape each other it was
freedom-day a day
like all days
to gather the lone ones in a
thunderous roll, holding hands everything talking running rain
through their hair.
the boy and his dad had slogans on their chests: the cops
love us. it was
father’s day (murderous) night, at least,
I said, they know how it works.
Julie Carr is the author of seven books of poetry, including 100 Notes on Violence, RAG, and Real Life: An Installation, and the prose works Objects from a Borrowed Confession, and Someone Shot My Book. Climate, a book of epistolary essays co-written with Lisa Olstein, is forthcoming from Essay Press. With Tim Roberts, Carr is the co-founder of Counterpath Press, Counterpath Gallery, and Counterpath Community Garden in Denver.
Ben Roberts is a cellist and composer living in Boston Massachusetts. He is a graduate of Cleveland Institute of Music and is currently a graduate student at New England Conservatory. Horse Cafe is Ben Roberts, Katie Knudsvig, Carson McHaney, and Kat Wallace.
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sets of an exhale/inhale routine that gradually
lengthens.]
Solarfield Scrim
[00016-AUDIO.wav: rainfall or the white noise
of a boiling pot interspersed with mechanical
chirps, as of bats.]
Breeding Distribution
[00035-AUDIO.mp3: h old]
Land Lock
[00040-AUDIO.wav: rain on the roof, hard.
heavy coastal rain.]
Pipe End
[00043-AUDIO.mp3: the creak of a chair as
someone leans forward to get up, rubbing
flattened palms across knees.]
Plains Anatomy
[00056-AUDIO.wav: drrrrrmmm%%%%%
(as if elsewhere—a hallway?)]
Rain Hinge
[00057-AUDIO.mp3:
drrrrrrrrrrrrmrr=mrr==mrr===mrmr====
(as if there’s a fan pushing it)]
Pipe End
[00058-AUDIO.wav: ping ping thump & ping ping
& thump & ingingtump & gngngtmp ^^shudder]
Water Met
Amaranth Borsuk is the author of the poetry collections Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press) and Handiwork (Slope Editions) as well as three collaborative books of poems. She is associate director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell. amaranthborsuk.com
Terri Witek's newest collection is The Rattle Egg (2021). Recent work has been featured in two new international anthologies: JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset, 2021), and in the WAAVe Global Anthology of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry (Hysterical Press, 2021). Her many collaborations with artists and writers have been featured in performances, museum shows, and gallery exhibitions. Witek teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes, and their work together is represented by The Liminal in Valencia, Spain. terriwitek.com
for Meena Alexander
– ^ –
Hadi bakalim, come on, let's go.
Let’s pretend I know just how to build a home
that breaks these waves of false belonging.
And they are so warm and various -
the seats you pulled for me.
Just for a moment, let’s pretend, I know how to sit in those you taught
would never be of comfort.
--- The strange passage of a harbor
opens up. It fights all form and center ---
– ^ –
Enough, I said. You knew.
--- But then the sun became so bright against my thought
that language melted into something cosmic ---
So just for a moment, let’s pretend that I know all about the mirror --
and how resemblance is blood-streaked.
Let’s say I set my own eight eyes on the empty hand
that pulls us naked through the sky.
– ^ –
Come on. Let's go.
Let's find another room with better window access.
Let's talk about the ways you chose
to write about your blackness.
Because we're not so tired, are we darling?
We rise to write at 3am
with hopes of pleasant weather.
We are perhaps just one bright passage
of encounter -- some flickering
strength in flickering -- slicked oceans, new fragments --
This grief will never turn me into a better writer
I wrote, into my notebook -- ( Oh mushroom-headed city notebook
of water stone and wind, and I’m still not even sure how all
these haunted bugs of cold new light crept in )
-- but then I sent my words out farther.
after Daisy Atterbury’s writing and notes on my poem
– ^ –
I am looking for influence
and context. I have been repeatedly set upon this path,
although I reject it, although I must stubbornly reject
all the language that begins to touch my eyes.
Did I make it up, my eyes?
The self is a long symbol – self.
If self is true – if self is current.
– ^ –
I like blunt facts that accumulate in order to become sentiment.
Like lineage, like gender, like Frankenstein, or Drac.
I like where shame comes in as shame. I want the infection; I want
these formal voice shifts. I want the you question to be idiomatic; obtuse.
– ^ –
A strange sentiment erodes the narrative.
Erodes consciousness, erodes grip.
Like : language, language, language, lang.
It also erodes lang.
Our current quote of self is ‘thrash’
If self orders – look back ten.
– ^ –
My refusal to cite becomes : a cluster
and a child, posing as a father.
A false daughter becomes : fevers, intimacy,
and pornographic fame.
What are her locations?
– ^ –
Arrives : the you question.
Arrives : the question of you.
How will we treat these objects of study?
How will we find Dracula again?
– ^ –
She connects penetration with receiving. She connects receiving
with pain. She is noticing, she is academically admitting.
How else is this gesture occurring?
Else?
– ^ –
I write : you, voyeurism, void. A beingness
that won’t cohere. You, aparthood. You, the invariant.
You, a heart-shaped negation; a frame.
Close your values, close the sea.
If self is trailing –
please stop.
after Daisy Atterbury’s writing and notes on my poem
– ^ –
How romantic !
How people imagine academia, barbarism, dating other people’s libraries, the
quantum physics of jealousy, this strap-on as an idiom, the deeper knowledge
gained by finally – by truly – by sincerely
knowing nothing at all.
Here’s a good reminder : not everywhere is New York.
Here I am again soliciting a reader, although I stubbornly reject her. Here I am
refusing to reference, to be read alongside. Here I am existing (or not existing) in
the present. I am leaving the bar, I am constantly
in exit. An an an an. I am erasing the word an.
Whereas you – you build a world out of luxurious citation.
You evaporate through echo, vibe on distant meta-buzz.
You channel the wiser voice of explicit explication, you speak in holes
and then near-holes.
– ^ –
I spent twenty years learning that poems are not stories, are not
people, are not anything about.
Later on, the couples’ therapist turned to me and said :
Your feelings are all your own.
By controlling the terms, we imagine controlling
the scene that they are already carving.
– ^ –
The voice-over in this narrative is distracting. True or false.
Betweenness as opposed to nearness as opposed to subject
as opposed to what?
Negation and dissolution as opposed to admitting. False.
Sara Deniz Akant is a Turkish-American writer and educator. She is the author of Hyperphantasia (forthcoming from Rescue Press), Babette (Rescue Press 2015), and Parades (Omnidawn 2014). Her work has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and supported by the CUNY Graduate Center, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Willapa Bay, Yaddo, and Macdowell. She currently teaches writing at Baruch College, and co-curates the Kan Ya Makan readings series with Hala Alyan.
Dear Forgiveness, in the Second Year of the Pandemic,
Pantone Announces Ultimate Gray as Color of the Year:
after Katie Willingham
We are here in the twenty-first century and even technology has betrayed
my grief. Over lunch I learn a friend periodically searches Google Earth for
her dead father. There in the network: complicated code and pixelation, he
is still preserved gardening, not left to the afterlife like mine, not unfairly
relegated to a calendar square on an ill-fated commercial holiday, saturated
in candied and neon hearts, an annual reminder his fragile blood pumping
organ failed him. Pantone has proclaimed this year’s color Ultimate Gray,
has granted the general public an appropriate marker, dignity, solace and
space for their private dread, yet there is no announcement, no declaration,
target market analysis, trend forecasting consumer report, color authority
or proprietary shade for: Year of Ultimate Twin Aunt Suicide, Year of Ultimate
Attempted Abduction, Two Years of Ultimate Two Houses Burned Down, Year of
Ultimate My Father Dying in His Sleep, Valentine’s Day, My Aunt Dying, My
Younger Cousin Dying, My Friend Shooting Himself and How We Found Out via a
Celebrity Gossip Blog, My Grandmother Dying As I Arrived Overseas, Year of
Ultimate Garden Apartment Stalker, Year of Ultimate Automobile Accidents and
Uninsured Invisible Injuries, Year of Ultimate Domestic Violence Incident, Police
Report at the Station and Crime Scene Photographs, Year of Ultimate Second Trip to
Planned Parenthood, Year of Ultimate Layoff from Corporate Management Level Role
and Recession, Year of Ultimate Lawsuits and Chapter Seven Filing, Year of Ultimate
Losing Christopher and Hearing He Had a Baby with Another Woman Through Text
Message, Year of Ultimate Undiagnosed Mental Breakdown at Thirty and Selling My
Possessions in Exchange for Carry-on Luggage, Year of Ultimate Year That Followed,
Being Resigned to Silence and Hardly Speaking to Anyone at All, Year of Ultimate
Wrongful Termination Then Eviction, Year of Ultimate Discovering My Sister
Hoarding Exotic Parrots and the Eighties, Year of Ultimate My Mother Threatening
to Kill Me Again, Years of Ultimate Weathering Adolescence and Los Angeles. I have
already lived a personal pandemic, it lasted a decade, it was my twenties.
No one called and no one showed, there was no expertly stylized color
palette expressing a message of strength and endurance, and now I am
bored with everybody else's bereavement and losses. I tell my therapist I
hope they have everything taken so that someone might suffer as I have,
but my feelings are expired, outdated and inaccessible because today there
is language, a container, a color, bandwidth for sophisticated intelligence:
geo-browser able to access satellites and aerial imagery to memorialize their
difficult three hundred sixty-five days, smart machines, devices, tools to
catalog their temporary loneliness, missed birthday parties and girls’ trips,
deaths of co-workers, communities and households down the street,
uncomfortable conversations following unpleasant news cycles, virtual
funerals and Zoom wakes. I tell another friend I think society deserves this
and I do not feel except while watching the latest season of Grey’s Anatomy
Meredith's purgatory beach where she is reunited in weepy episodes with
all-time audience favorites, Derek Shepherd and Little Grey, and if I am
remembering right, her deceased parents, and residents and interns who
marked her pivotal platonic relationships. The primetime drama makes me
wonder who I want to encounter on my metaphorical death sand, makes
ugly crying between my sweats and sheets, tears disappointing to me at this
point. I decide no one. Dear Forgiveness, I’ve lost count of the people I have
disappointed, I’ve lost count of the people I am angry at, who I have
blacklisted, blocked, deleted, and while we're here, Dear Forgiveness, I must
confess how long I have resisted writing you, how long I have stayed in the
seven stages of rage, the mention of your name, syllables, spelling of
loosening, lessening, lifting, letting go angering me. I read online about the
guillotine slugs, Elysia marginata, who sever their heads for the sake of a
fresh body, one without disease of sadness and the past, meanwhile my
dear friend is somewhere strategically planning mailings and trying to
forgive her sick body since she cannot generate a new one, and I hunger to
pare myself free from generational curses, childhood trauma, the ten years
every relative who knew me as a girl spent dying and dying, too many bad
men, and why each holiday is tragedy for my family instead, my resentment
at the TV, how easily simpler women have brunch and belly laughs, cleave
my wrath towards partygoers, those romantics favored for Saturday date
nights, destined to celebrate anniversaries, pray I could reap the parts of
personality which render small talk impossible, somehow cut out all that
melancholy and dark, but what would I have left to show for it, would I
retain this parlor trick of poetry. How if I survived the violence of lacerating
others, then taking the blade to myself, in each incarnation my body will
still remain a middle-aged Black woman, modest, soft, and inevitably tragic.
Dear Forgiveness, do you believe in karma, in everyone eventually getting
what they have earned, given this means worldwide pandemic, is revenge a
gateway drug, are you distant cousins leading us to the same sugar slicked
shack in the forest. Dear Forgiveness, I admit that I hate the slugs, their
capacity for detachment, brave heads discarding faulty hearts and flawed
bodies, their leaving behind for a better version, their ability, and yes, their
willingness to believe a better version. Dear Forgiveness, please forgive me,
because I wish the friend’s father away, anticipate that day seven years in
the future when Google will dispatch its efficient clean energy vehicle to
reshoot the juvenile landscape of the lunchtime acquaintance, how in the
moment she will search as she has always, seeking confirmation, comfort,
or perhaps relief, the blemish of her ghost father perpetually pruning his
peonies will have vanished, computerized mourning replaced by the
updated street view: the glittering new housing development, the glint of
late model cars. I am struggling to forgive myself this delusion, this
contentment in the vision of his shocking absence, fingers frantic, typing
and retyping their address into the search bar. I see her clearly, terribly, feel
my blood rushing warm in speculation whether she will choose to save her
head heavy with yesterday, abandoning her sad innards and muscle memory
beside the now extinct coordinates, hue of her neighborhood amputated
from history, a digital ultimate gray gloaming almost in my imagination.
S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet and author of the chapbook Glory to All Fleeting Things. She has received fellowships and generous support from PERIPLUS, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Poets & Writers +Reese’s Book Club’s The Readership, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Cave Canem, and Callaloo. Her Pushcart nominated work has been exhibited in New York, is anthologized and appears internationally in Magma, Michigan Quarterly Review, and wildness.
I’m very proud and grateful to have been invited by Professor Taylor to remember Barbara Christian here today, with all of you; but I can’t help but feel that rather than me it should be one of my old schoolmates Gabrielle Forman or Sandra Gunning – eminent scholars who, like Professors Keizer, Livermon, Winters and Taylor and so many others, worked closely with Professor Christian. At the same time, I’m conscious of how it’s possible to be someone’s student even if you never took a class from them, even if your intimacy with them is confined to, but also released in, having tried to read them and to read along with them from the unbridgeable distance between Wheeler Hall (where the English department remains) and Dwinelle Hall (where African-American Studies used to be) and from the somehow more traversable expanse between, say, 1985 and today. Though I never took a class from her I was still able to work in the atmosphere Professor Christian somehow helped to sustain at Berkeley in the late 80s and early 90s and to work and study and play (a word she uses pointedly and to which I want to return) under her protection, which she enacted, only seemingly paradoxically, by leaving the Berkeley English department in the years immediately preceding my matriculation there. In leaving it, she didn’t leave behind the black students who came to that department in search of her and in her wake. Folks like Professors Gunning and Foreman, and Eleanor Branch, Keith Harris and Francesca Royster, and me, all engaged and remain engaged in various modalities of following in her footsteps, not only from Wheeler to Dwinelle, but also in those of Professor Christian’s footsteps that modeled an exodus we have sought and continue to seek to carry out and carry on, as a practice of abolition.
One way to understand Professor Christian’s refusal of the English Department is as a nonlocal instantiation of that same impulse that led the writer then called James Ngugi, along with his colleagues Owuor Anyumba and Taban lo Liyong, to call, in the late sixties, for “The Abolition of the English Department” at the University of Nairobi and, by extension, everywhere. At the same time, Ngugi’s and his colleagues’ assertion of a shift from a department of English to a department of literature branches from another shift Professor Christian had already been involved in before coming to Berkeley, when she and colleagues such as June Jordan, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich – teachers of composition to the supposedly ineducable black and brown working class students of the City of New York, who tried to take advantage of open admissions to that city’s university – began to serve those students by finding the way back into the ground of literature, which is, as Professor Christian says, literacy, but a literacy immersed in sound, in orality and aurality and, more fundamentally, the general and generative sensuality of the shared experience of sharing. In that moment, as all throughout her career, Professor Christian bore the standard of a panafrican cultural insurgency that allowed, in her particular and special case, a flourishing exfoliation of literature in the wake of the digging, the tilling, the careful gardening of its conditions of possibility. Along with, but in a specifically feminist disruption and augmentation of her contemporary, Walter Rodney, Professor Christian’s groundings with her sisters and brothers and sons and daughters teach us how to read.
Though I am here, then, I hope, to represent the vast majority of her students, those who never took a class from her, I am blessed to be able to say that I breathed air that she made possible and that I heard the beautiful and critical and insightful sound of her own breathing on a special occasion or two, like the day when she delivered the lecture what we now know as “The Race for Theory” or the evening when she debated Ishmael Reed on the significance of The Color Purple, illuminating for him and for their audience the difference between Alice Walker’s novel and Steven Spielberg’s film. Of course, it has been for me and for most of us in her writing where the sound of her voice – so often attuned to the sound of our treasured writers as they record the sounds of the black social life they treasure – comes through in what she called “layered rhythm,” in a polyrhythmic complexity that demands her readers play with what she and they read together. This is how Professor Christian accompanies and complements Toni Morrison, refusing the distinction between criticism and fiction precisely in order to see how Morrison, in her turn, plays with, and against, Virginia Woolf and so that we, Christian’s readers, can join the choir she has joined and amplified, as it is itself in search of “the chorus of the community, living and dead,” that bears us and that we all bear, alive, unknown until its known in knowing. Listen closely to Professor Christian talking with Morrison until you’re ready to line it out and sound it out. Reading doesn’t get any more beautiful than this:
In your work, as in Virginia’s, inner time is always transforming outer time through memory. But since memory is not only individual, but merges with others to create a communal memory, outer time also transforms inner time. It is that reciprocity between the individual inner and the communal outer which your work seeks. The folk’s time, however, is not mechanical time, the march of years, which your chapter titles in Sula mock, but time, as it marks an event in human society but also in Nature, which for you includes the folk, as much as it means the seasons. The mythic quality of your worlds seems to be in opposition to many people’s concept of human history, when in fact history and myth have always been related, myth being a central part of any people’s history, history itself creating myth, time and timelessness in dialogue.
At her own unique but still ensemblic intersection of myth and history, Professor Christian brings the question of the world online. Right here, from everywhere we gather, at the end of this world and the beginning of every other, all the earthly way through the very idea, it’s cool to be together in the dis place/meant Barbara Christian plays. Right now, always, not sometimeish but timelessly, as we head off into the future in the present she still builds for us, Barbara Christian is right on time.
Remarks delivered January 25, 2021, in the Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The occasion was a panel, “Barbara Christian and the Futures of Black Studies: A Roundtable with Her Former Students, Arlene Keizer, Xavier Livermon, Fred Moten, Lisa Ze Winters.” The panel was convened by department chair Ula Yvette Taylor.
Fred Moten works in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. His latest book, written with Stefano Harney, is All Incomplete (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2021).
“This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in anyway deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas. And it is a message that unless you kowtow an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the US Senate rather than hung from a tree.”
— Clarence Thomas, Senate Confirmation Hearing, October 12, 1991
Dear Kossola:
We have known each other for many years now. I do remember the moment we met, but I want to recall a time a bit later when you stood before an auditorium of students and chose to recount a story rather than to read from one of your many novels. You reminded us of why we write, the deep place of our storytelling past. This evening of your storytelling is significant because it was also an historic evening of an American election. Above and behind you on an enormous projector screen, a student technician had put up the changing electoral results as they were reported across the nation. Just as your story ended, blue splashed across those united states, and a mixed race son of a Kenyan father became our President. I remember your bemused face looking out from the podium at the ecstatic crowd, jumping from their seats, hugging and crying, cheering your story nested within another, well, another of your stories. Now we have together seen these years pass, the politics of the presidency now remade for reality television, dumped from any assumption or model of integrity or statespersonship into the success of a deal made that you cannot refuse.
Today, June 26, ten years later, the Supreme Court repudiated its previous decision on Korematsu versus the United States, that upheld FDR’s Executive Order 9066 incarcerating 120,000 Japanese Americans, my family included, during World War II, while, in the same opinion, upheld the Muslim travel ban, another executive order instigated by Donald Trump, calling for, in his words, “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Justice Sotomayor, in her dissenting opinion wrote:
This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue. But it does not make the majority’s decision here acceptable or right. By blindly accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu, and merely replaces one “gravely wrong” decision with another.
So you would say, stories repeat themselves, or we repeat the same stories again and again, and unless we change those stories, we cannot change our very lives. We hold in our minds and heart the assumptions of stories. But you also have a finely tuned ear for narrative’s linguistic challenges and the precarious meaning of meaning, the logistics of reason that can be useful for any endeavor, any story. But how dangerous it is to use these presumptions to judge, to make judgments that have consequences on the lives of others. The lives of others. This is not a small matter.
The basis of the Court’s decision today as concurred by five justices: Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, rests on the government’s claim that the executive order does not mention “Muslims;” that countries like North Korea and Venezuela are also implicated; that waivers for undue hardship are in place on an individual basis; that this is about “aliens” who are outside of the United States; that the conditions of the proclamation will be reviewed every one hundred and eighty days; and that the President, for reasons of national security, has a right to protect the borders. On the face of it, it’s a rewriting of a previous version of the same executive order so that the original idea (banning Muslims from entry into the US) might be obfuscated from the text. The conservatives on the Court can now read and interpret the order with impunity because it does not involve the rights of American citizens nor mention the right of religious belief as guaranteed by the Constitution. That is, it’s not about you, but some abstract you, that is, an alien out there, a non-American in an un-GREAT-ful place. Its meaning should then be read for its “rational” words only. But, what story, indeed what executive order, has no underlying meaning, no context, no depth of thought, no history, no unreliable narrator? And what President and his appointed scriveners could be more unreliable?
The curious, though when you look at Thomas’s record for the past twenty-seven years, probably not so curious, addendum to this opinion, is Thomas’s concurring ten-page writ. It seems that Thomas decides to go further in his concurring opinion by questioning the authority of the lower courts to constrain the President’s authority by “universal injunction.” Now I might have this wrong, but I think he means that the District Court and the Ninth Circuit Court did not have the power to submit universal injunctions of the executive order to ban Muslim travel, that is, to stop it everywhere, nationwide. And then he proceeds to give us a history lesson that goes back to the eighteenth century and The Federalist Papers, and for that matter the English court system under a Crown pre-dating the founding of our country, to demonstrate the “judiciary’s limited role.” That is, Thomas would further limit the judiciary’s role to check the powers of the Executive—president or king, because that’s the way they did it back in the eighteenth century. This is, I believe, what they call an “originalist” or fundamentalist reading of the Constitution, as if its words can only be read as stuck in the past. So, the good news is that, just as the word “Muslim” does not exist in Trump’s travel ban, the word “slavery” does not exist anywhere in the Bill of Rights or the original Constitution. Thomas must have his court clerks scuttling around looking for original meanings; the historic details are dense, arguments summoning citations, citations summoning citations, twisting evidenciary linguistic logic. You could and have, as a novelist, made absurd the fictions of this as nonsense, but again, as you’re aware, real people will live the consequences.
But let’s go back to some original past events. We hang on the decisions of the Supreme Court because we believe our ethical understanding as a democratic people will there be adjudicated, that Dred Scott, or Homer Plessy, or Fred Korematsu, will have their day in court, and justice will prevail. I cannot however see how any judge or any judgment is devoid of politics; hanging onto an originalist interpretation of the Constitution is a strange justification, an arrogance of determining the rules, perhaps a way to sleep at night. And then there is the original past event of the Senate confirmation hearings, the cloud of Anita Hill and her young courage to speak. The parallel, not without differences, of Thomas’s and Hill’s lives are noted in their biographies: both raised in the South and influenced by familial examples of hard work and self-sufficiency; both recipients of policies of affirmative action; both educated in law at Yale; both headed to Washington DC, selected to work on issues of civil rights and equal opportunities. Thomas, confronted by Anita Hill’s allegations, never really answered his accuser, but rather lashed out at white senators and accused them of conducting a high-tech lynching. It worked. What remains of this story is the bizarre residue of a techno-lynching, Long Dong Silver, and a kinky coil of hair on a coke can. The speculative remains of this story is that, 27 years later, the person who replaced Thurgood Marshall on the Court has concurred with one politically conservative opinion after another and is poised to reverse opinions on affirmative action, voting rights, a woman’s right to choose, and to sanction the discrimination of another group of racialized people.
The heart of this story is the unrequited heart of hatred. Your narrator calls it pafology. Bigger Thomas kills a rat, then a white woman, then a black woman. He chops up the white woman and throws her into a furnace. Then he makes the black woman his accomplice, rapes and bludgeons her, and throws her down a garbage funnel. Along the way, he could have also killed a shopkeeper, his best friend, his mother, his mother’s pastor, a Jewish communist activist, the blind mother of the dead white woman, and any one of the reporters or police investigators. Defended by a white communist attorney who manages to blame this pathology on liberal white people, Bigger’s epiphany is that he can die knowing that freedom is embracing his violence. However any reader perceives the terrible anxiety of, shall we say, a lot of really bad choices, this is an awful book, but presumably it’s the book that Clarence Thomas said explains his psychological self. Franz Fanon aside, Thomas is, for better or worse, our native son. This is not good news.
Kossolo, how shall we crawl away from this fiction, recuperate our better sense of ourselves and of others? I invoke here, Richard Wright’s counterpart, Zora Neale Hurston, and the fictional figure of Janie Crawford, who sees God’s eyes watching hers. Living through two unhappy marriages to free black men whose property and accomplishments give her stability without love, she finally finds happiness with a gambler and storyteller who, in the end, she must kill to save. Life is not fair. Justice is finally political, and certainly not blind, not colorblind.
Kossolo, I am not writing to you for answers. Though perhaps you can merge these irreconcilable parts into whatever it is that fiction writers do. I only want to say that today I require a story that will release us from hopelessness.
And so,
Please take your ticket and proceed forward.
The voice is melodious to my ear. I can’t help but respond, Yo brother, don’t mind if I do. I wait for my ticket, but it doesn’t appear.
The machine hesitates, then: That’s some car you have there. Candy-apple red BMW 230i 248 turbo-charged four-cylinder, zero to sixty miles per hour in 5.3 seconds.
I stare at the machine, then look around for the surveillance cameras.
The machine continues impassively: Of course, you could have gone for the M230i turbocharged 3.0 liter inline-six; that babe lightning rockets to sixty mph in a second less, but that would be another ten thou. What’s another second? I’d say, brother, this is a good starter package for the newly tenured.
I could be hallucinating. It’s been a difficult morning. Ah, do you think you could give me my ticket and raise that arm?
Now hold on a minute. You started this conversation. You can’t just drive on by and park.
But this is a parking lot.
So it is. So it is. But didn’t you call me out?
Call you out?
You know, call me “brother.” I certainly appreciate it.
I think, okay, this must be like that Alexa thing. It responds to “brother.” I say with authority, Brother, open the gate now.
Not so fast. Not so fast. Plenty of appropriate parking spaces in here, give you all the room Manitoba needs to keep those pesky nicks and scratches far away. Besides you got the extended body plan.
I sit in silence, fuming. I glance at my Apple watch, search for my phone.
Brother, the machine continues, just settle down. It’s rare to meet another brother in this parking lot. And I got one helluva story to tell you.
I look in my rearview mirror. The cars are backing up behind me. What about them? I ask, pointing behind.
No problem, says the brother in the machine.
I get out of my car and walk over to confer with the silver Volvo. When she sees my face, I can see her fumble with the controls; her window rises to close, but I can hear her screaming inside the glass. What the fuck? Did you break it? A head pops out of the black Honda behind her, and he says, what’s the matter? I got tickets to see the matinee. Hey, he looks at me. Let me tell you how it works. You push the call button and get some help, see? Patronizing son of a bitch. The guy in a beat-up green Subaru behind him yells to the car behind, Move back! I’m backing outta here, can’t you see? The thing’s busted. Him and his overpriced sportscar, he waves at me. He had it coming! The woman behind him honks and yells, Hold your horses. I am backing out. Can’t you see? Now she’s yelling at me. It says it’s full! Full, you fool. I look at the signage: FULL. I point to the sign, shrug at the all the irritated drivers lined up behind me, and walk back to my car.
Micro-aggressions, the brother in the machine sighs. You have no idea. I get them all the time. Think about it. All those folks behind you, they used to be kids, cute babies and innocent children. You and me included. Now we are all in different stages of ugly.
I get back into Manitoba. The rearview mirror frames the cars behind backing out in various attitudes of hostility. Then, it’s quiet, and the brother in the machine begins.
If anyone knows my story, it’s the short version on the headstone with my name misspelled:
Louden Nelson
Native of Tennessee
Born May 5, 1800
Died May 17, 1860
Misspelled?
What would I know? I was illiterate. Signed my last will and testament with an X. What’s in a name given by a master named William Nelson? Except he named my three brothers Canterbury, Cambridge, Marlborough, and so I got to be London. Know what I’m saying?
London Nelson?
The one and only. And I might have come from Tennessee, but I was born in North Carolina. Hey, I can’t complain. At least I got a headstone. Below that is a plaque dedicated in 2006. Says I was born a slave and came to the California Gold Rush in 1849, secured my freedom, came to Santa Cruz in 1856, worked as a cobbler, bought a piece of land near River and Front Streets. Before I died, I willed everything I owned, 716 acres, to the Santa Cruz School District for the purpose of education. I am buried at Evergreen, an honored pioneer. This is mostly true. Local California history for fourth graders, but wouldn’t you like to hear the whole story?
I look purposefully at my watch, but the brother is on a roll.
Like I said, I was born on a midsized rice plantation in North Carolina along Cape Fear River in 1800, twenty-four years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and thirteen years after that of the US Constitution. The master of the plantation, William Nelson, was a Tory loyalist for the British, but after their defeat at Moore’s Creek in 1776, old man Nelson tucked away his loyalty and in the intervening years only named his slaves after places in England. You might say that my becoming London was ironic.
Wait a minute, I interrupt the brother. Just to be clear about this, you’re telling me a tall tale, right?
Brother, what I’m about to tell you is all true as best as I can pull together the facts into true fictionalization.
I shake my head. I think about ripping that box out of the cement, but it stands there solid like London Nelson’s white marble headstone itself, and it keeps on talking.
Don’t you worry, what I’m about to tell you is pure poetry. Now, where was I?
Irony, I prompt.
Oh yeah. Not that there weren’t others in the vicinity who supported Cornwallis, but the Nelsons were set apart, shall we say. Sometime after the last of my brothers, Marlborough, was born, old man Nelson died. The oldest son John had already got his inheritance and started his own plantation some parcels away. Daughter Mary married and moved to Charleston. The next son Luke died in a hunting accident. That left Mark who got the land on Cape Fear and the youngest, Matthew; he got us. Matthew got the slaves. Matthew had enough of being set apart, the Patriot vs Tory thing, so he took himself, his widowed mama Fannie, and us – Canterbury, Cambridge, Marlborough, and me -- far away to Tennessee. Some said that Matthew got the raw end of the deal, no land, just slaves. But old man Nelson had some kind of plan to keep his operation insular. He made Canterbury his blacksmith. Cambridge got trained as a carpenter and bricklayer. Marlborough took care of the horses. I became a cobbler and I knew about planting. We all knew how to plant and raise small livestock. Matthew Nelson got us: the technology to start again. But let me be clear about this. We were still slaves, you know what I’m saying. The young Matthew Nelson put Canterbury’s son and Cambridge’s two daughters on the block as collateral to buy a sweet piece of land just outside of Memphis. Then the rest of us went to work, building and propagating and creating everything that makes what you know to be a plantation: white porch and Roman pillars, old oak spreading shade across deep grassy lawns, slave quarters, horse stalls with waiting carriages, cotton and tobacco as far as the eye can see.
Once Matthew Nelson set up his household with his mama Miss Fannie at the center, he got restless. He was only about twenty-something. Maybe a wife might have fixed that, but he started breeding horses, thoroughbreds to be exact. That’s where my brother Marlborough came in. Turned out Marlborough was part-horse himself, talked, ate, and dreamt horses, raced them to win every time. This went on for a streak, and then President Polk made it official: Gold in California. Master Matthew caught the fever, and by New Year 1849, he had a plan.
Not like we had a choice to go or not, but Marlborough and I got taken with the same fever with the idea that we could get our freedom. Canterbury was getting along in years, but he was still blacksmithing, making everything from hoes to fancy iron gate work. This was steady income for the Nelsons. They were like sub-contractors who kept all the money for themselves. Same with Cambridge who got sent out to build houses in town. And they had wives and other children and even grandkids. Marlborough and I had nothing but ourselves.
Canterbury drove us in the carriage to the port at Memphis, hauled out the luggage, boxes with picks and axes he’d made special. I remember he had a funny look deep in his eyes. He didn’t linger long, didn’t take to the clamor of the crowds, didn’t pause to notice Negroes chained together vacating the boat’s hull, didn’t wait to see how a riverboat could float away on steam. Even as we boarded the plank, he was turning the horses, following a paddy wagon full of caged black bodies. I stared over the deck at his hunched back, older but still powerful. In 1822, when we heard the news that Denmark Vesey had been hung, I saw Canterbury’s eyes grow wide and flood with tears, but when they dried up, I never saw him cry again, not when his wife Alyson died, not when his son Roger was sold. For him, I think life was a mean mistake. As the gigantic paddle began to churn and pull us away down the Mississippi, I thought I knew Canterbury’s premonition, but I heard Marlborough whoop like he did when he raced a horse over the line. So I let the sad resignation in Canterbury’s shoulders slip away from my own.
The machine goes quiet, and I think I can hear water cascading from the riverboat. I look forward and see the gate arm lifted. I say, What about the rest of the story? But the brother says, Please take your ticket and proceed forward.
Days later, I’m driving to Sacramento, and Manitoba decides to start talking to me, too. The voice pops out of the cyber satellite system, and it turns out it, too, is a brother. I think if I’m crazy, I’m crazy. Just pay attention:
You get into UC Santa Cruz on affirmative action. This was the 70s, and they wanted you. Your people came to San Francisco during WWII from Louisiana to get jobs in the war industry. Moved into emptied-out Japantown on Post Street and got to work during the day. During the night, they brought out their instruments and entertained themselves with the blues. That’s where you grew up. Harlem of the West. Fillmore. That’s where you got your musical education. On the streets, hanging out. Through the walls. In church. And there was the band at Galileo. Your instruments were brass with the Ts: trumpet, trombone, tuba.
Wait, I say, you are not talking about “me.”
No, it says, I’m talking about “you.” And he continues: In those days, no one thought about what was practical. Especially affirmative action colored kids. You were the ones with dreams. The revolution was gonna change everything, and you were gonna be there to be the change. You were not a militant Panther sort, mind you. You knew Huey hung out in Hist Con, his aide-de-camps standing around protectively, but you also knew Huey’s dream wasn’t exactly practical. Anyway, you were secretly in love with a white Jewish kid who played the saxophone.
I shake my head, turn off the system and drive to the motherlode in silence. After several miles, I call up my partner who lives on Long Island. I’m going crazy, I tell him. You were always crazy, he responds. But this is serious, I say. I can see him over there rolling his eyes. He asks, Do you know what time it is? I don’t, so I hang up.
Weeks go by. I park in the brother’s parking per as usual, have dinner a Laili’s, late movie at Cinema 9. Then, I proceed to pay for the ticket at the machine, and the thing perks up like yesterday. Brother, he says, accepting my ticket, I’ve been wondering what happened to you. Now let me continue my story:
At the tail of the big Mississippi River appeared the city of New Orleans. My memory is that it was busy and colorful. And in every corner of that pretty city, in high class hotel rotundas and public slave pens, colored people were on the block. I saw folks auctioned next to furniture and tools. I was born a slave, but I had never seen the actual commerce of it. Supposedly, Marlborough and I were going along to serve the master, but he could, in a pinch, sell one or both of us, if he fancied. Those nights in New Orleans, I rolled around on the floor at the foot of my master’s bed, while Marlborough slept curled up like a kitten. In the day, he wasn’t but eighteen. Freedom was a promise dangling from a long pole extended out there on the road before us. If we had known the road beforehand, would we have turned back? Turned out young master Matthew was anxious to leave too, didn’t want to wait two weeks for the next ship to sail around the Cape but booked a steamer for Chagres, convinced that cutting across the isthmus to Panama would give us a head start.
On the steamer, I met two Louisiana slaves who said their master was taking them to California to set them free. Was that the case with Marlborough and me? I kept quiet. It wasn’t wise to tempt fate. Night before we left Tennessee, Cambridge came to see me, gave me a small wood dog he carved himself. He rolled the carving around in his palm, probably remembering his two girls, got sent away with the same carvings. It was his warning; I kept it in my pocket. Then we got waylaid an extra three days in a storm somewhere out in the Caribbean. Folks on the ship were either sick from the rolling sea or sick from cholera, we didn’t know which. I figure the three of us were seasick because we didn’t die. Being seasick meant we lost the stomach to eat, and not eating must have saved us from catching that plague. Every day, one or two passengers or crewmen died and found graves in the sea. I said a silent prayer for the body of one of the Louisiana slaves slipping beneath the waves. I knew it wasn’t because he’d tempted fate; there was no difference between the two of us. Then the sea calmed, and as we approached Chagres, fish flew from the sea, and we managed to catch a few. Chagres turned out to be a bunch of grass huts with half-naked natives selling bananas, pineapples, coconuts, and oranges.
The isthmus from Chagres on the Atlantic to Panama on the Pacific, as the bird flies, is about 45 miles. That’s something like from here to Monterey or from here to San Jose, but with all the twists and turns by canoe, over mud trail by mules, disease and unknown treachery – natural and human, it was maybe tripled. We might have crossed it in a week, but Master Matthew caught the fever. Before he was completely stricken, he managed to hire two dugout canoes, what they called cayucos, and two natives and gave directions to load our provisions and tools onto both, with Matthew laying under some palm leaves in one. On either side of the Chagres River, it was a knitted jungle, with plumed birds in exotic colors, chattering monkeys, slithering lizards and snakes, and alligators dozing on the beaches. We rowed through this strange paradise, but it was made hell by the scalding sun always pointed directly at us. I couldn’t understand a word of Spanish, but the natives hacked open green coconuts and pushed us to keep getting Matthew to drink that water. Two nights, we camped out in the canoes, roped to trees a distance from the shore, to be safe from tigers and alligators. Mosquitoes and a thousand species of bugs swarmed in thick clouds. All night I listened to the creatures, bouncing above in the foliage and flitting beneath the cayuco -- hunting, procreating, eating and playing.
In the morning, Matthew was yellow with his fever. He whispered to me about the pouch secured around his belly, and Marlborough and I secretly divided and hid the cash between us.
By noon that day, the natives docked near a particular hut on the Chagres, and we carried Matthew there. The woman in the hut was a Negro from Cuba who spoke English. She’d been a slave in Mississippi. Looking over Matthew, she shook her head. You got to rest him here. Matthew tried to rise to protest. Fever for gold is one thing, she said. But this fever will kill you. Mama Hagar? he called, his eyes glassy. What’s he saying, she asked. Hagar, I said, name of my mama. Hagar is my name too, she said and whispered into Matthew’s ear, Mama Hagar says you got to rest, understand? And he calmed. So we stayed there for as long as it took for the fever to break.
The machine pauses, and I look around and check the time. It’s almost midnight. What am I doing standing here? Then I hear: Please take your ticket. Do you want a receipt? Please take your receipt.
This time, I wait for my partner’s call. I whimper pathetically, why are these machines talking to me? He asks, Have you tried recording what they say? Could be new material for your next book. He’s right. The next day, I spend the evening at Verve, wait till closing, then drive purposefully into the Brother’s parking lot. I get my iPhone ready to press “record.” The machine responds, You remember that sister Edna Brodber? Like Zora Neal Hurston, she pressed record, and it just didn’t. You have to listen, you hear? I put down my phone, and I listen.
In that interlude on the isthmus, Hagar and I got along. If Lizzie had lived, maybe we might have been an older couple like that. My own Mama Hagar and Lizzie had their babies at the same time. Mama Hagar had Marlborough, and Lizzie had little London. But Lizzie died. Mama Hagar raised Marlborough and little London together, like brothers. You never know what it means to have kids underfoot until they are no longer there. I had to fish my boy out of the river. He was only five. I buried him next to Lizzie. We got that little bit of time together. That was my lesson.
Finally, Matthew came to, but even if he could hardly raise his arms, all he wanted was to get to the gold. Hagar went about her healing and made preparations so we could leave. One day, she stood on that rickety dock, watched us pack into the cayucos, and said good-by. I wondered if she wouldn’t ask me to stay, but all she said was, You got to take that boy, she meant Marlborough, to California, keep him safe. Hagar knew my story. She sent me on my way. I can’t help but think that’s why she cured Matthew.
To reach Gorgona, we had to help push the cayucos with poles up river. I don’t know why the natives didn’t just rob us blind and abandon us on some alligator beach. It must have occurred to them, but maybe they had compassion for Marlborough and me. Hagar told them: we were slaves, and they were free. Put a spell on them. From Gorgona, we had to continue over land. We hired mules, one to carry Matthew, and two to load our provisions. Marlborough and I went along on foot. Mules are sure-footed beasts, but this old trail was narrow, and with the rain on and off, a mud-slick trench. Loaded with their burdens, the mules sank into the muck, and not few were rotting dead along the trail. Marlborough, half-horse as he was, cooed the mules on, adjusted their loads. On the second day, we came up on a native beating a stuck mule with a rod. There was no room to pass, so Marlborough went over to do his magic. The frustrated native moved aside, but some white man rode forward, screaming, and started flogging the native and Marlborough as well. Suddenly, a shot cracked the air, and I saw Matthew with his shotgun raised. Every day since we’d resumed our travels, I’d been cooking up a makeshift meal of bananas, dried meat and gruel, and making Matthew take Hagar’s concocted medicine. I guess it worked.
Predictably, the story stops. Please take your ticket and proceed forward. I swing around and leave the now empty parking lot. The exit arm swings open, sweetly. Thank you.
I call my partner in Long Island. I don’t care what time it is. This time, he’s more reassuring. He says, I googled it. It could all be true. I deep-breathe in and out.
But two days later, Manitoba wakes up and says:
You know who you are. You were that homeless brother wrapped in three down and hooded jackets, tucked deep into a personal sleeping bag like a black Eskimo in bubble wrap, so no matter the weather, it must have been the same weather inside. And you pushed a literal train of connected shopping carts loaded with your belongings up and down the hill from the post office to Evergreen Cemetery, up and down, every day for years. No one knew what was hidden beneath those blankets and black plastic. You could have been the next Miles Davis, the next Louie Armstrong, the next Tommy Dorsey. Then one day, you disappeared.
I think, I’m getting rid of this car. It must be the car. The car is cursed. But my partner says, You love that car, what do you mean? Why is it talking to me? It’s not talking to you. It’s a car. There’s a homeless brother living in my car, I scream. Do you want me to keep this car? Calm down. I take Manitoba in for fine-turning and get myself a Honda rental, but I still got to park it in the brother’s parking lot.
Panama was a dirty cobblestoned ramshackle town, crowded with men keen to get to the gold. Nobody talked about anything else. The town was surrounded by encamped men. Townsfolk exploited any opportunity to make money off these so-called Argonauts while they waited and hustled for an open berth on those ships passing around the Cape. I wonder how many of them finally got to California, didn’t lose their fever to women and gambling. Matthew thought he’d cut off that long leg of travel, but now he had to compete with hundreds of other gold-seekers. Every ship arrived already full to over-crowded, the passengers on board refusing to disembark, fearing the loss of their coveted places.
In town, Matthew met a widowed lady from Louisiana with five children, the youngest a baby girl just beginning to walk. He was incredulous that she had made the same crossing over the isthmus. This was the wild idea of her husband, who dying of cholera mid-way, made her promise to continue to California. Back in Louisiana, the husband had sold the cotton plantation and all the slaves; there wasn’t anything to return to anyway. Before leaving New Orleans, he’d purchased two years’ supply of provisions, clothing, camping and mining outfits, a set of tools with all the locks, hinges, paints, even doors and windows for a house. Along the way, his widow had abandoned most of it, but even so, she arrived in Panama with eight mules’ worth of baggage. The oldest girl was around ten, and every one of the five children were in some degree ill. An epidemic of measles was spreading. The widow was anxious to leave. It was Matthew who negotiated passage for her on an old Peruvian whaler named the Callao. The captain took pity on the woman and her sick children, and because of Matthew’s attentions, she claimed him as a brother and we her slaves. In a few days, we boarded the Callao, housed in the whaler’s roach-infested and windowless mid-section.
As it turned out, the captain had made concessions for other families with children, but he failed to stock the ship with enough food and clean water. Rations ran low, and the children suffered the most. One child after another died, the babies first. The widow sewed her little girl in a small canvas bag, and the brothers and sisters watched their sibling tossed into the sea. When the widow became ill, Marlborough and I gathered her four remaining children and brought them up on deck into the sea air, made up small games, told them stories. Listless from hunger, they had little energy, hugged their dolls and stared into the open sea. Tabetha, the oldest girl, watched the sun sparkle against the waves, and repeated the continuing dream, They say, when we get to California, we’ll pick gold nuggets right off the ground.
At Mazatlan, the ship stopped several days to restock water and provisions. Matthew and Marlborough took a small transport and spent their time on shore. I remained behind, watching the sailors towing barrels of water back and forth. When we got out to sea again, a storm took the Callao off course. It would be another 75 days before we reached land again. We spent days rolling and rocking in the suffocating dark. Then the winds stalled, and once again we were low on water and food. The captain gathered the men and had us draw straws. The short straw, if need be, would sacrifice his body to feed the others. One man protested and pointed at Marlborough and me and two others who were also slaves, saying we were the ones who should be sacrificed. Matthew grabbed the man and drew a knife near his throat. You touch my boys and I will gut and truss you up for dinner now. The argument Matthew made was that, as we were not really men, we could not draw straws, but others retorted that we ate just like any other men. Later, Marlborough and I argued among ourselves over this nonsense; Marlborough defended Matthew, but only later did I understand why. In the end, the short straw got drawn by a man who days later died in his sleep. They saved his body somewhere, but we never got that far.
Three days later, we saw the Farallone islands, and the Callao cast anchor in the San Francisco bay on the last day of July 1849. I watched the widow, her children following single file, youngest to oldest, down the plank to port. Tabetha turned, looking back at the ship for one last time, saw me, and waved.
Manitoba comes out of fine-tuning and keeps quiet for a time. Then weeks later busts out and says, In those days, it was a stretch to transition to female, but you thought it might be possible. You took your chances, but the drugs screwed you over. You couldn’t find your balance, and you wandered away, confused. Packed your instruments, your tuba, your trombone, your trumpet in those shopping carts along with canned goods and assorted provisions, toilet paper, toothpaste, bars of soap, beers, and camping equipment. Like Sisyphus, you pushed your load up to campus everyday where no one recognized you and no one cared, and nightly, you camped out and slept on London Nelson’s grave. Then you rolled the whole train downtown and hung out near the post office. Up hill. Down hill. Every day. Every night. For an eternity. You didn’t know why. You just followed the voices.
I step out and lock Manitoba. I need to walk. I walk up around the post office to the back of its parking lot, then around again, nodding to two black homeless men propped up on the side of the building. I walk up the post office steps, pass a black gentleman walking out on a cane. What are the chances, four black men passing each other on the same day on a street in Santa Cruz? I need to talk to the Brother. I walk to his parking lot and pull the ticket.
As soon as we docked, the commotion of our arrival became intense. Folks charged out of the ship, thinking they were leaving behind death and disease. Except for the captain, not a single crew member remained, everyone rushing off to find gold. I could see there were ghostly boats and ships of every kind abandoned in the bay. On the docks, every sort of huckster and propositioner was selling their wares and expertise. Matthew moved discriminately and chose to speak with a man with a disinterested pose, sitting on a wagon with plain signage. Elihu Anthony, the man introduced himself. A blacksmith by trade and, he added to assert the honesty of his work, a pastor by faith. Matthew bought Anthony’s pans, picks and shovels, buckets, nails. It was good quality; we could compare it with Canterbury’s work. These implements were added to our baggage, and Marlborough and I got loaded up like mules. Anthony adjusted our packs but looked Matthew in the eyes, saying, Young man, you ought to know, California is free territory. Matthew chuckled, Free to get me some gold, but Anthony returned, That’s not the free I mean. Matthew answered, I know the laws, sir. These boys will not be fugitives, mark my word. Anthony had nothing more to say and seemed to toss his last words indirectly but clearly: My shop and church are down the coast on the Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz. You will always be welcome there.
Matthew had a choice of taking a boat up the Sacramento or going overland. He’d had enough of boats and water, so chose land, got Marlborough to rig a horse and some mules and we found our way to the American River, made camp, and tried to figure out how to separate the gold from the land. Eventually, I built us one of those rocker boxes with a grate and cleets to catch the gold. For seven years, we camped up and down the rivers and creeks from the American to the Sacramento, around the San Joaquim to Mokelumne, prospecting, sluicing for those gold bits. For a while, we labored, heat or snow, and we could make about a hundred dollars a day. When we could sit still, I cobbled shoes. On my own, I could make some good money and got paid in gold. When you think about it, the shopkeepers who sold us provisions made off like bandits, got richer than any of the foolish miners. I realized that if I just settled somewhere and made boots, I’d be doing fine. Seven years, they say, is biblical, and at the end of it, I knew we’d more than paid off our debt to Matthew. I could have walked away I suppose, but Marlborough would have stayed on. Matthew made promises to Marlborough, promises about raising and racing horses back in Tennessee. My debt to Marlborough was over too; he was my brother but no longer my son. I’d kept my promise to both Hagars. And true enough, the unspoken secret was that William Nelson had fathered us all.
One day I had a half-dozen boots cobbled to order and Matthew sent me off on mule to finish my sales. I returned two-days later and found Marlborough and Matthew, both mutilated and strung up on a tree just beyond our campsite. Canterbury’s pick was tossed beneath, blood encrusted over the steel. I couldn’t read the note stuck to Matthew’s body, but I could imagine what it said. I cut them down, dressed them up proper, and dug their graves. I tucked Cambridge’s carved dog into Marlborough’s pocket and set Canterbury’s pick to Matthew’s side. Everything of value or use -- gold, tools, and animals were gone.
I dug up our hidden gold, followed the water down river to a Chinese camp and hid there for a time. And then I made my way toward the Pacific, searching for a town called Santa Cruz on the Monterey Bay.
Walking Tour: Begin at the Louden Nelson Community Center on Center and Laurel Streets. Walk down Center Street toward downtown. Make a right at Cedar and walk down Plaza Lane (next to the Locust parking lot), past Hidden Peak Teahouse toward Pacific Avenue. Walk past Lulu’s and around Verve where Pacific and Front form a fork; from there, cross over to the US Post Office. Walk between the Post Office and the Veterans Memorial Center to the parking lot back of the post office (site of London Nelson’s small farm). Come through the lot to Water Street. Walk around toward the clock tower up Mission Street, just past Center to the brick steps below the Santa Cruz City Schools Administration offices. Walk up the brick steps to the plaque dedicated to London Nelson. Walk across Mission Street to the Holy Cross Church and Mission Plaza, down High Street to the highway overpass. Walk over the overpass and make a left, following the bicycle path to the Evergreen Cemetery. Look for the Chinese arch. London Nelson is buried next to the Chinese.
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of eight books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently, Sansei & Sensibility, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the National Book Foundation 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contributions to Literature and a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is currently Dickson Emerita Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Ronaldo Lopes de Oliveira is an artist in wire sculpture and painting via a background in philosophy, theatre, and architecture. He studied philosophy at the University of São Paulo and graduated in architecture and urban planning from the University of Mogi das Cruzes. In his early career as an architect in Brazil, he designed and planned remodels of government hospitals and clinics. In 1984, he immigrated to California with his young family. He began coursework in art and architecture at Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, and at El Camino College working with teacher and sculptor Andy Fagan and drafted residential homes and business structures for Douglas Leach and Associates in Redondo Beach. Ronaldo eventually founded his own architectural firm, Oliveira Design.
“The Black Arts Movement did result in the creation of Afro-American Studies as a concept, thus giving it a place in the university where one might engage in the reclamation of Afro-American history and culture and pass it on to others…Rather than having to view our world as subordinate to others, or rather than having to work as if we were hybrids, we can pursue ourselves as subjects.” Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory” (1987)
“Well into my 30s, I was far more knowledgeable about the literature and history of black America than I was about that of black Britain, where I was born and raised, or indeed of the Caribbean, where my parents are from. Black America has a hegemonic authority in the black diaspora because, marginalised though it has been within the US, it has a reach that no other black minority can match.” Gary Younge, “What Black America Means to Europe” (2020)
In June 2021, the Berliner Zeitung ran a story confirming that a city council in Berlin, Germany, had voted to rename part of one of its streets in an effort to honor the Harlem-born Black feminist lesbian poet Audre Lorde.[1]
Image credit: FU Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, NL Lorde, Sig. 176, Photo by Dagmar Schultz
This particular honor had followed more than a decade of decolonial activism in Germany that focused upon changing racist street names, such as those celebrating German colonialists, and having them renamed for notable Black anticolonial activists and artists. When I think about the famous litany that Lorde used to describe herself, “black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet, warrior,” I don’t often think to add “American” to that list. And yet to my knowledge, no U.S. born person has been granted this particular honor in the wake of Germany’s recent reckoning with its colonial past.
Soon after I read this news article, I saw fit to post it in a Facebook group for Black Berliners that I’ve been a member of for several years now. The first day the post accrued a number of likes, but had no real engagement. The next day, however, one commenter wondered publicly: Were there no Afro-Germans – and here I believe they meant people of African descent reared in Germany rather than those who, like Lorde, had come to Berlin as intermittent exiles – were there no any actual Afro-Germans worthy of this recognition?
For a moment, let us suspend the question of whether Audre Lorde – Black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet, warrior, American – is deserving of this honor; a honor that had previously been granted to the poet and activist May Aim in 2010, and the eighteenth-century philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo just last year; as well as to Anna Mungunda, who on December 9, 1959, was killed by police in the Old Location massacre, sparking the fight of Namibian independence.[2] The question-behind-the-question of the commenter’s query – whether Lorde’s legacy had become an imperial one – was somewhat silly and somewhat profound.
Silly in that most people with a cursory awareness of Audre Lorde’s life and career are aware that her relationship to Berlin has become part of the mythos of the city, one that is especially resonant for the Black feminists who benefited from her diasporic mentorship, as well as for the successive generations of queer, activists, artists, and radicals of color who reside there today. Adding Audre-Lorde-Straße to the city’s lexicon of street names is a fitting commemoration of one of the midwives of contemporary Afro-German identity. To question whether there are other Afro-Germans more worthy of this honor is to also state quite plainly that there are other histories that we do not know and have yet to encounter. As inelegant as this provocation may be, it allows us to reflect upon how the canonization of activists and artists can inadvertently exert “hegemonic authority” over the stories we reclaim, both inside and outside of the academy.
Lorde is one such figure, a star with such a massive following that other historical and cultural narratives seem to orbit her, trapped in the gravity of her vital contributions to an array of intersecting movements and fields. Far from this being a singular event, we might also think of the rehabilitated figure of Marsha P. Johnson, whose participation in the Stonewall Riots, their work as co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with Sylvia Rivera in 1970, as well as their motto to “pay it no mind”—the “it” referring no doubt to the prescriptive social norms that cross-cut her black, poor, and gender-nonconforming existence – all of these biographical details have posthumously turned her into an hallowed icon in the trans and queer community today.
Image credit: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "Marsha P. Johnson pickets Bellevue Hospital to protest treatment of street people and gays" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1968 - 1975.
And like Lorde, Johnson has also been recently honored through a renaming of public space: Williamsburg’s East River Park was renamed as Marsha P. Johnson Park last year.
Via Flickr Creative Commons
Perhaps we should remain clear-eyed about these belated moments of recognition of Black queer and trans figures through the renaming of public space, however. A case could be made in both Brooklyn and Berlin that the memories of Lorde and Johnson have been enlisted by global capital to hide the violence of hyper-gentrification, to pinkwash away queer, trans, and houseless folk of color from the very public spaces being commemorated in their honor. Such contradictions illuminate the fractures of our society like broken pottery held together by gold resin.
Whether we receive these venerable acts with enthusiasm or with suspicion, I would caution us to make sure that all of our critical interest in and attention given to these particular subjects is not wholly subsumed in the spacetime of their particular existences. The term “spacetime,” taken from Michelle Wright’s 2015 book Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, aims to displace dominant and hegemonic origin stories of Blackness that begin with the horror of transatlantic slavery before progressing in a linear fashion outward. Understanding Blackness as a construct of space (a where) and time (a when), Wright’s work helps to destabilize the “slavery-to-freedom” narrative arc as the sole path to authentic Black identity formation. Complicating the wheres and whens of Blackness through our contemporary moment of archival retrieval – “the ‘now,’ through which the past, present, and future are always interpreted,” Wright’s framework allows us to “account all the multifarious dimensions of Blackness that exist in any one moment, or ‘now’—not ‘just’ class, gender, and sexuality, but all collective combinations imagined in that moment.”[3]
For theory’s sake, let’s consider the spacetime inhabited by one Black woman whose appearances and disappearances in the transnational archive complicates canonical understandings of diaspora and national identity. Performing a spacewalk, if you will, between the life she lived in Berlin in the 1940s, her death in Buffalo, New York less than a decade ago, and our contemporary moment of archival encounter continues a project of historical recovery begun by the Black women in Lorde’s poetry course at the Freie Universität nearly forty years ago, while also troubling the tether between freedom and citizenship for the African Atlantic subject in exile.
*
Van Vechten, Carl, 1880-1964. Smith, William Gardner. Box 224. 1948 December 10. https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2023698.
In September 1946, in Berlin, Germany, the African American writer William Gardner Smith interviewed a striking Black woman, a woman who “seemed out of place among the German blondes, brunettes, and redheads” frequenting one of the U.S. Army enlisted clubs in the occupied city. Smith served in the U.S. Army as an occupation soldier in postwar Germany. Alongside his everyday military duties he also worked a side hustle as a special correspondent to the Pittsburgh Courier, the Black newspaper made famous for its promotion of the Double V campaign during the war, a paper he had also worked at as a high school student before being drafted into the service. Smith’s assignment as a clerk-typist in Berlin gave him direct access to the former tools of his trade, and as a “special correspondent” to the Courier he wrote a slew of articles that detailed the injustices faced by black soldiers in Germany, the covert attempt to purge them from overseas service, and their reluctance to return to the United States.
But even among the many articles he wrote for the Courier’s readership back home in Philadelphia, this story was unique. Rather than offer another antiracist critique of US Army policy in Germany, Smith channeled his fascination with this tall and well-dressed Black woman into a feature-story.
“Here,” he wrote, “she stood out like an orchid in a field of gardenias; she was something rare, something to be sought after.”[4] The woman in question, identified in print as Madeline Guber Goodwin, had been born in Berlin, and her presence in Germany was, for Smith, was something of a mystery.
“So the American Negroes want to know about the German Negroes,” she said. “Very well. I will tell you what I can.”
Chatting in German, Goodwin told Smith that she worked in the city as an entertainer, and before the war she had traveled all over Europe. In fact, Goodwin came from a family of performers; her father emigrated from Togo in 1896 to take part in the "German Colonial Exhibition" at Treptow Park, Berlin. Decades later, during the Nazi regime, she performed in her family trapeze act “The Five Bosambos” in the Deutsche Afrika-Schau, an updated “human zoo” meant to showcase the benevolence of Germany’s colonial rule.[5]
After surviving World War II, Goodwin married an African American soldier during the occupation period, took his last name, and as soon as she was able, she planned to move with her husband and daughter to live in the United States. Taking a long drag from her cigarette, she told Smith bitterly, “I have learned to hate the Nazis.”
While African American GIs routinely described service in Germany as a “breath of freedom,” Goodwin made the decision—informed by her experience under Nazi rule—that she would rather immigrate to the United States than remain in Berlin.
Before the war, she estimated there were perhaps 2000 Afro-Germans in all of Germany, and most were, like herself, entertainers. “Negroes set the style in clothes for Germany,” Goodwin said. “Everyone followed their pattern of dress.” Her father was African and her mother was a white German, and Goodwin grew up as the youngest of five in her family, which lived in the neighborhood now known as Neukölln. Because there were so few Blacks in Germany, she said, her family lived well for at time. But once the Nazi regime came into power, all of this changed. “Life became very different. Once the Nazis brought their theories of racial superiority, things became bad. We were scorned as semi-apes. We were insulted on the streets. We could not work in the factories. Such a thing is crazy,” she said.
The point of no return for Goodwin involved one of her close girlfriends, also Afro-German, who had been sterilized by the state. Her friend had fallen in love with a white German man. The couple wanted to marry but were denied by the Nazi authorities. “Then,” she said, “one day the police came to her house and took the girl to a hospital. She was told by the medical authorities that it was feared she might bear a German child. But the child wouldn’t be an “Aryan.” So they performed an operation on her. Now she can never have a child.”
Because Goodwin’s father held French nationality, the American authorities gave her permission to marry an American soldier. “I think I’d like to go to America,” she said pensively, and Smith noted how her eyes ‘lit up’. “After so many years under the Nazis I think that would be a paradise. From the books I’ve read, and from what I’ve heard people say, everyone is treated exactly the same there, regardless of race.”
With that statement, Smith ended Goodwin’s profile bluntly: “She didn’t see me smile.” Smith treated her lack of knowledge of American racism with derision and dismissed her dreams of freedom in his own native land forthright. Yet he was so taken by Goodwin’s persona and experiences that he chose to interpolate her life story into his novel Last of the Conquerors in 1948.[6]
The thinly veiled portrait of his experiences as an African American soldier in a trucking company in occupied Berlin gained him great acclaim, and in recent years it has received renewed critical interest, especially from feminist historians of the German-American postwar military encounter.
Its protagonist, Hayes Dawkins, an African American soldier in Berlin, is told about the existence of Lela, an Afro-German dancer who worked in theater and clubs before the war. Like Madeleine Guber Goodwin, Lela was also waiting for her American soldier boyfriend to send for her to come to America. As Hayes’ girlfriend, Ilse, attests, “[Lela] was born in Berlin and then went to many countries in Europe to dance. She speaks so many languages, darling. You should hear her.”
“Negroes! I did not know they were here!” Hayes exclaims, with the same amazement that characterized Smith’s assessment of Goodwin’s uncanny presence in Germany, fracturing the author’s own “Middle Passage epistemology” that was loath to understand Black being & belonging as anything other than American, as anything other than a product of transatlantic slavery.
In the epilogue to my book Contagions of Empire, I offer a brief examination of William Gardner Smith’s tour of duty in Berlin, and argue that his witness – as subject and scribe of the overseas military apparatus – offered a counter history to America’s official military record of occupation. His communiqués and literary reflections of the American occupation still stand today as a singular record of the fervor of that disorienting and discomfiting moment for African American soldiers, reifying their experiences into protest and prose, and continuing a tradition of black military cultural critique that had been centuries in the making.[7]
As it stands, the contemporary historiography of African American military service has played a vital role documenting the black struggle for civil rights at home and abroad. In so doing, it has helpfully reimagined the black soldier as a black international, and has taken seriously the ways race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship have been negotiated within the contact zones of American militarism. Yet I would also suggest that the relative lack of critical inquiry into black military life overseas has fixated upon the freedom dreams of heterosexual men. In doing so, it has inadvertently trafficked in a heteronormative discourse of manhood rights, whereupon the demonstration of a particular form of masculinity (martial courage, for example) entitles the black male subject to rights and privileges of citizenship.[8]
All of this said, I must admit that, like Smith, I too am fascinated by the figure of Madeline Guber Goodwin. The rakish angle of her hat, positioned just-so atop her head; the fur-lined lapels of her embroidered coat; and the familiarity of her smile; her diasporic family history of colonial performance in the 1890s through to the 1930s; her personal witness to the sterilization of Black Germans during the Nazi regime – all of these things make Goodwin an incredibly alluring historical figure. To me, the Afro-German/African-American encounter as chronicled by Smith carried the possibility of anti-colonial & anti-racist solidarity within overlapping Western imperial archives, the kinds of encounters that have been known to occur in the contact zones of American militarism, a possibility of belonging forged in the ruins of occupied Berlin.
Smith’s European service ended on January 21, 1947, and he arrived in New York harbor on the S.S. Marine Robin on February 1. During his return voyage he took time to reflect upon the paradoxical feelings of freedom and constriction he experienced as an occupation soldier in Berlin, and began working on his novel in earnest soon after. The success of Last of the Conquerors paved the way for his own permanent emigration from the U.S. to France, where he lived for two decades before dying in Paris in 1974.
And what of the figure of Madeline Guber Goodwin, whose encounter with fascism in Germany gave her the conviction to expatriate? With the research assistance of Brigette Reiss and Kim Everett – two friends of mine in Berlin – I learned that Goodwin did in fact emigrate from Germany in 1947 to the U.S. on the USS General Muir, only a year and two weeks after her profile in the Pitsburgh Courier. With her child Hertisean in tow, she arrived in the port of New York on September 21, 1947.
What’s more, Brigette –who is a crackerjack genealogist – discovered that Smith’s transliteration of Madeline’s surname was incorrect. Instead of Guber, it was Garber. With that information, she was able to substantiate the claims Madeline made about her family, her birthplace, and her role as a member of the Five Bosambos in the Deutsche Afrika-Schau – complete with pay lists for the “Garber Geschwister,” the Garber siblings.
Madeline Goodwin moved to Buffalo with her husband Jack, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. She remarried in 1958, and lived the rest of her very long life in Buffalo, dying in 2013 at the age of ninety-four.
Considering the archival traces of Madeline Garber’s life once again, I remain amazed by the radical possibilities and potentials of diasporic kinship produced in the wake of overlapping militarisms – that the creative use of difference can usefully destabilize our understandings of race, gender, and national origin. At the very least, Smith’s death in Paris and Goodwin’s in Buffalo necessarily complicates who and what we mean when we speak of “African American” in the aggregate, as an imagined community forged in the fire of chattel slavery and not, for example, through the kiln of colonialism. Swaths of Garber’s life intersect with canonical texts of Afro-German history, and here I’m thinking of the multi-authored Farbe bekennen (Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out), Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft’s Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960, Tina Campt’s Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich, as well as Tiffany Florvil’s recent Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement. I take issue with William Gardner Smith’s insinuation that Garber was naïve to believe she might have a better life for her family in the states. This doesn’t read as naivete to me; I see it as a courageous proposition, no doubt filled with risk. But she knew, better than most, what she was leaving. The fact that she decided to take her chance on life in the U.S. Jim Crow North only enriches what we might understand as the vicissitudes of the Black European experience; and once the whole of her story is told, her life may offer us additional models for understanding how African Atlantic feminist subjects negotiated race, gender, sexuality, and nation, in the long twentieth century marked by displacement, war, and migration.
*
I should note, here, that I was so captivated by Garber’s story I had planned to include it in my book, as the epilogue to the epilogue, if you will. Once Brigette located the phone number of a woman she believed to be Garber’s daughter, she urged me to follow through.
So I did. The conversation started sweetly enough. I introduced myself, and told her about my research. After confirming a few biographical details Brigette had stitched together I then mentioned I thought I had found an article about her mother in Berlin after the war.
For one reason or another – an attempt at transparency on my part – I read her the opening paragraph of Smith’s article. I hadn’t quite finished the third clause of the first sentence, where he remarked that Garber had “inhaled deeply on the last cigarette she had” that she stopped me dead in my tracks.
“No, no, no, no, no.” she said. “My mother hated cigarettes. She never touched them.”
In my mind I thought: It was 1946. Everybody smoked, and if they didn’t smoke cigarettes, they used them for currency. Still, recognizing I had crossed an invisible line in my attempted openness, I circled back to one of my original questions. “Ma’am, was your mother born in Berlin?”
“Yes!” she exclaimed, and added in an exasperated tone, “and so was I!”
At this point, recognizing my skills as an interviewer were lacking, I thanked the woman for her time, and asked her if I might send her the article so she could read it herself. She said that would be fine. An hour and a half later she sent me back a three word reply.
“Not my mother.”
The brevity of the refusal stung more than I could have expected. I didn’t care so much that Garber’s story wouldn’t make it into my book. Rather, it was as if Madeline Garber Goodwin had been free-floating in the spacetime of occupied Berlin, forgotten by most if not all, and here was a tether of living kinship who had, at the very last moment, refused her curtly, leaving her to walk in space alone again.
It made me incredibly sad. I called up my mother, who was waiting on the outcome of the call, and told her what happened.
“Well,” she said matter-of-factly, “Sometimes folks don’t want to be found.”
This truth, the very definition mother wit, embodies one of the tenets of Black feminist thought that those of us invested in chronicling the historical lives of Black women must continue to work through: the culture of dissemblance. Historian Darlene Clark Hine coined the term to define the behavior and attitudes of Black women that created the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives from their oppressors—making it difficult to find evidence of their inner lives and inner thoughts within the historical archive.
Some folks don’t want to be found. Over time, that has become easier for me to understand, and to even respect. But that doesn't mean we won’t stop looking. Even without a living tether, Madeline Garber Goodwin’s story destabilizes the when and where of Blackness in our present moment, complicating our own spacetimes with her witness and her will, and making us wonder how many other Black women in Germany found self-actualization through similar forms of exile. Her archival traces move us beyond the culture of dissemblance, even if only for a moment, to help us imagine radical possibilities of reinvention in life and death.
Notes:
[1] “Part of Manteuffelstraße to be renamed after American poet Audre Lorde.” Berliner Zeitung, June 16, 2021, https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/manteuffelstrasse-to-be-renamed-after-the-us-poet-and-activist-audre-lorde-li.165529?fbclid=IwAR09ngnOJkc8qVoTRf18Y54O1Oebre6eemzUYhNorXDSeG2GFib3bmlON9c
[2] “Activism to promote LBTIQ human rights in Namibia. Online talk with Liz Frank, Windhoek, Namibia.” Blog der Hirschfeld-Eddy-Stiftung. https://blog.lsvd.de/activism-to-promote-lbtiq-human-rights-in-namibia-online-talk-with-liz-frank-windhoek-namibia/
[3] Wright, Michelle. 2015. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 4, 20.
[4] Smith, William Gardner. “Negroes in Germany Set Styles Until Nazis Started Hate Drive.” The Pittsburgh Courier · Sat, Sep 7, 1946.
[5] Robby Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft, Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diasporic Community, 1884-1960, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 254. My thanks to my collaborator Brigette Reiss for locating the primary documents I have used to reconstruct Madeleine Garber’s life history
[6]Smith, William Gardner. Last of the Conquerors. New York: Farrah, Strauss, 1948.
[7] Polk, Khary Oronde. Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020, 218.
[8] Polk 8.
Khary Oronde Polk is Associate Professor of Black Studies & Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of Contagions of Empire: Scientific Racism, Sexuality, and Black Military Workers Abroad, 1898-1948 (University of North Carolina Press). Contagions of Empire was a finalist for the Organization of American Historians 2021 Lawrence Levine Prize, awarded to the best book in American cultural history.
Last week, I had an enlightening discussion with a (Black) graduate student I’m currently mentoring at an MFA program in Interdisciplinary Arts. We were, together and separate, speaking of the processes of codeswitching.
And then I said something I’ve never said before, had never theorized for myself in quite this way before: I don’t know how to speak of my own relationship to codeswitching because I don’t have an original for the code to switch from.
This, dear Reader and Viewer, brought tears to my eyes.
Let me explain.
I grew up in a world of language that I never could fully claim as my own. I was raised by a difficult, tyrannical, totemic father who was born in Nanjing, China in 1948, just before Communism took its hold of his mother country. He was raised in Taiwan but because he was raised by Chinese nationalists, doesn’t claim a Taiwanese identity.
We hold within us, my twin and, before he moved to Taiwan a decade and a half ago, my older brother, a handful of the Mandarin words my father spoke to us as children: Baba (father), chi fan le (come eat), lai (come), zouba (let’s go), and a few others.
We took Mandarin in high school, a language that had begun to be offered while we were attending school. My fraternal twin stepsisters, who had just moved to the States, did our Mandarin homework. We did their English assignments.
Aside from those handful of words from early childhood, Baba stopped speaking to us in Mandarin. He instead spoke to us in broken English. At times, that particular variety of English was so wedded to how Baba understood us that he had a hard time understanding a sentence (even if he technically understood what all the words meant) unless we, too, spoke in that structure.
Baba was incredibly controlling and restrictive. He would claim that his restrictions had to do with a deep love and worry for us to get in trouble—especially my twin and I since we were born and raised as girls, but I believe that was a rationalization for his controlling behavior. There were other ways, ways I won’t get into here, that demonstrated his complicity in other types of danger finding their way to us.
From the time I was 8 (and maybe younger, trauma has a way of cutting off memory at the root) until I left his house, my father was heavily involved in a Chinese theater group. They put on plays in the Chinese community, epics and contemporary dramas, and my father acted and produced the plays with his friend community. When he wasn’t rehearsing or performing, the group was having long dinners at Chinese restaurants followed by hours of karaoke at one or another’s living room. We were always forced to come along on these outings. And so, my childhood, a formative time in language acquisition, was spent in silence, watching and listening to my father and his friends (and their children) speak in a language that was foreign yet familiar. We would bring books with us. Baba would set up a little area for us in the corner of whatever room they had found to rehearse, most often an abandoned police station. At the restaurants, we sat at “the kids table,” but all of those kids knew Mandarin and they used it as a distancing device. It was often clear that they were mocking us, in one way or another.
Of course, the school we attended was an English speaking school, and although I come across as a person who is as fluent in American English as the next person, it’s my firm belief that my relationship to language and oral communication has been greatly impacted by the amount of time we spent in silence. Well, I should give a brief disclaimer. The hours that I spent watching my father and his friends speak and rehearse, watching their every shift in tonation and change in facial expression, my brother and sister were off playing with the other kids. I was the one who was teased—for my naivete and vulnerability, my eagerness and affection. It was easier, and more interesting, to be the watcher.
Most days in our adolescence and teenhood, if we weren’t with my father and his drama club, we were at home. Well, I was, because I spent my life handling trauma (or the risk of further trauma) by being as obedient as possible. Newsflash: It doesn’t work like you think. And so, my brother and sister pushed boundaries, defied Baba’s order, and thus, were more integrated socially than I ever was. Funny that it would be me to become a writer.
And so, because I never fully socially integrated into any framework, especially linguistically, it’s my sense that codeswitching isn’t quite the right term. I thought of a better term, recently.
Codetwin.
But, let me explain.
I am the only left-handed person in my family. It’s a consequence of being born a mirror twin, in which twins are born with mirroring features (it has something to do with how late the egg splits). I hated my handwriting. I preferred the elegant coiling shapes that my eldest stepsister (two of my stepsisters came to the States many years earlier than my twin stepsisters did) scratched onto her notebook paper. And so, surreptitiously, I studied every aspect of my stepsister’s physical practice of writing: which fingers held her pencil, the pressure one finger gave the pencil over the other, where her wrist fell (if it fell at all). She was right-handed, of course, so I had to do make some small adaptations.
In other words, I gave her handwriting on the page careful study, and twinned my own writing practice to hers. This wouldn’t be the only time that I would do this.
I exhibited a similar practice with language, phrasing, accent, writing.
Now, it’s important, faithful Reader, that you understand I didn’t plagiarize another’s writing style, but that others (in a variety of skills and practices) were anchors for me to study in order to find myself. As I grew more into myself, I learned how to make my own way. But, being a twin was how I first understood myself, and doubling is also how I continue to discover myself, again and again.
*
In February of 2021, we were still deep into quarantine and lockdown due to the dangers of COVID-19. Only a handful were able to get a hold of any COVID vaccine. I had been divorced for a year at that point, my divorce having become final a year prior, just as the world was shaken to its core. I was shaken to its core. I had deeply loved a person for seven years who turned out to be a fantasy, a mirage. I was unmoored, living in a house I could only associate with grief. I craved physical contact, connection that can only happen in the squishiness of close proximity.
It started during Black History Month, quite organically.
I started playing with making self-portraits in which I “remade” myself into photographs taken of artists who had influenced my thinking, art-making, being in the world in some way. With only what I had in my closet, in the little limited space of my grief apartment.
Too grief-stricken to write, too dangerous to be outside of my apartment, it was a way to shift the interior while the interior was all we had. It enabled me to stay connected to my creative self in small ways, until the larger ways could happen, in my mind and my heart. And it was a way to give homage to those artists that have meant so much to me.
I made a remake every day of February.
And then I went into March and remade photos featuring women for Women’s History Month.
In April I made double-exposures of cover art from poetry collections for National Poetry Month.
On the heels of the murders in Atlanta, I celebrated Asian American artists for Asian Heritage Month.
Of course, June was pride.
In July, the Delta variant of COVID-19 began to impact the world, and I lost my steam. I had hoped to make these photos for a year. Now, I make them when it feels right, when I’m compelled.
*
A few rules, or parameters, made by no one but me.
With only two exceptions so far, I only remake photos of artists of color.
It felt an important framework to uplift the work of those who deserve to be centered after a lifetime of seeing the same white artists get remade again and again.
With also very few exceptions (sometimes props had to be bought), I don’t purchase clothing or accessories in order to make a photo that appeals to me.
Of course, in many of the images that I find or source, the artist of focus is wearing clothing and accoutrements that are much fancier than anything I could afford. I’m intrigued by the space between what I have in my closet and the (often) polished stylistic look of the original.
It’s not just the clothing that makes a particular image a contender.
Sometimes it’s the makeup, the gesture, the facial expression. In fact, some of the images I choose to remake aren’t “fashion” photos at all, but photos in which I see a particular aspect in a person that has had an immense influence on my life that’s reflected in the face, or the hand, or the body.
As much as one can be conscious of it, I try not to appropriate.
That means if an image includes a Black artist wearing hoop earrings, I don’t wear the same. I don’t choose African fabrics, etc. It feels important to take on the general structure and look of an ensemble and the shapes the face and body makes without “wearing” the cultural identity. To me, that would feel potentially harmful where I want to find joy and potentiality.
All genders allowed.
The remakes that excite me the most are the ones in which I’m taking on a gender depiction that is unusual, or unexpected, and how they’re received by the small group of followers that have been responding to the series. As a non-binary person who has felt increasing affirmation by embodying a traditionally-masculine look, I appreciate the exchange that happens when I take on a portrait by an iconic male artist.
Throw away the hierarchy.
I’ve chosen to focus on artists that are incredibly well-known in the mainstream as well as a musician I saw at a small venue in Tucson. It’s about the artist that has made some sort of impact on me and on the way I think through art-making, not the celebrity currency they happen to have with the American public.
*
As a twin, living in that liminal space between that of a “copy” and that of a singular fact remains a site of complication and conflict, but also renewal and rebirth. This series speaks to the power that comes for me in the codetwin, to learn the parameters and extensions of my body, subjecthood, and boundaries therein and beyond, by layering my own face, body, and manner of dress next to those who have had a role to play in my evolution as an artist, image-maker, writer, thinker.
Addie Tsai (any/all) is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. Addie holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. She is the author of the queer Asian young adult novel Dear Twin. Unwieldy Creatures, their adult queer biracial retelling of Frankenstein, is forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press in 2022. They are the Fiction Co-Editor at Anomaly, Staff Writer at Spectrum South, and Founding Editor & Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy.
Zero ○
Karate the merger of
Kara 空 meaning empty
Te 手 meaning hand—
you are sky
which means
you are bare
unarmed yet
unalarmed by
vulnerability
show me with
your eyes how
your hands
will act.
Ichi 一
From anyone's gaze
your foe should be as you are
in hall that expands
as each of you breathe
on opposite ends, distance is set
breath's length only their gaze
and your focus can compress
this space.
Ni 二
Opponent is partner.
There is rhythm not music don't think—
if this was dance there would only be
grace. Grace has no voice
in the absence of self and other.
San 三
Let go of yourself to obtain yourself.
Yon 四
This is supposed to be agonizing
let it be.
there is peace somewhere; it will not show itself
If you ask… are you aware
of what you are in?
Go 五
Ohshima sensei says,
they take skin, you take flesh
they take flesh, you take bone
they take bone, you take life.
Roku 六
To find an opening you must
be open
attack as you block—
don't ever block
there is no defense—
no reason to attack
you're in sequence
compliance is not acceptance
In vile funk, Vaseline shudders. Got trouble, dem boys watching; dey quota not gonna bonus
dem cross country. Holiday here, got tickets. Parking meter? I aint see it. Fine, charge, execute.
Not permanent but damages huh? Guilty until proven incompetent, sick with this.
Sic mastiff, guarantee me stiff. Guaranteed life insurance, ninety-eight dollars a month,
four weeks behind on payment, two-dollar interest got me tripping. Brake on busy-busy—
what the name of this street? Aint it after five? I’m not fin, I’m not finna— huh?
Pop the trunk? nah-nah, I’m just out to get some—
Air; horns blare for gold, glowing between emerald and ruby
Took tooth to clench my crown. Yo mans aint riding shotty. nah-nah, We Cadillac DeVille: seats
nimbus, Black Ice Tree necklace, hood:king mattress, chrome got charm, rims got ribs,
car cleaner than cane. Slick as dap-clasped Jackson. Clip got foliage. We eating…evening turn
morning when my locomotive come humming.
*
Coming home, the sky squints. Chopper hovers
from the corner of a building; don’t got any business with—Five Below. Five above. Limit: 25
residential. Feel an eye. Hill, throttle. Slope, coast. Sky breaks—curbside. I see tire-marked
roadkill. Light splashes on my windshield. Papers, proof, plates; we good. Grass has crunch.
nah-nah. Boots on gravel. I’m in uniform, no nametag— If I lose the polo, would I look more
residential? Slide window. The ray snares me white. I swallow a tooth and yield
my daddy’s name: papers, proof, plates. This my daddy’s car, we good?
August stains my collar, the judge gavels; three months to feel freedom.
87 regular. Twenty on three. Don’t need full, last me this week. Squeeze each ounce, clang
spout. Petroleum won’t combust outside its tank. Got somewhere to be. nah-nah, gotta be.
Jorrell Watkins hails from Virginia, is a 2020-21 Fulbright Japan Graduate Research Fellow, and alum of Hampshire College and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. His chapbook, If Only the Sharks Would Bite, won the inaugural Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series in Poetry. Currently, he's studying Enka, poetry, and Aikido in Kansai.
