"knowing oneself to be a dead relation": A Review Essay and an Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III (continued Part 2 of 2)

In honor of Black August, cosmic hoboes is publishing a review essay and interview Omar Ricks did with Frank B. Wilderson III about the release of his book, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid in 2008. This is Part 2 of the interview. (Part 1 is here.)

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A Review Essay and an Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III

Review Essay by Omar Benton Ricks

Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. By Frank B. Wilderson, III. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2008. Pp. 501. Paper, ISBN 978-0-89608-783-5). (2nd edition coming soon from Duke University Press.)

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Omar: Let me ask you to clarify this seeming paradox: Your membership in a bourgeois community that has access to Walter Mondale and the Marines. Sure, you were eligible for “honorary white status” and often play your Americanness, but, even more directly you have a father who is respected and a white woman who, if anything ever happened to you, would call the police or the Marines. How would you respond to the assertion that you, or the black middle class in general, already have a protective hedge against blackness?

Frank: It is true that, as opposed to two years ago, when I was working on my Ph.D., I now go to Trader Joe’s and I don’t look at the receipt when I leave. It’s absolutely true that I now have a certain kind of respite from the stress of 2004 that is important, and that I appear to be important to a large number of people—other faculty members and students. Those are tangible changes. Those are meaningful and a lot of my physical ailments have left. On the other hand, it was Randall Robinson who was talking one day to some people about one of the books that he wrote, and he made a very curious comment about his son being stopped by the police on the freeway. He said, “Last night, racial profiling came home even to me.” And he wasn’t being ironic, which I thought to be quite sad. Because what had happened is that his enhanced economic capacity—his capacity to have a home in St. Kitts and one in D.C. and his books and everything—had blunted his explanatory power. And there are days when I’m all for that, you know. Like I just don’t want to know shit anymore! [Laughter.] So I can’t say that I find that emotionally reprehensible because as a bourgeois academic I slip into it all the time. It doesn’t mean, however, that I have moved from a fated life to an agential life. I still live the life of “when” as opposed to the life of “whether” and perhaps my nostalgia, my disavowal—which is the misstatement “came home even to me last night”—like his son is not a Negro! “Oh! That’s Randall Robinson’s boy! Let’s not stop that nigger!” [Laughter.] The pigs don’t know and they don’t care. And if they did know, they might vamp even harder. The answer to your question is that one knows that, yes, perhaps Mondale would intervene if the Inkatha Zulus were to kidnap me, perhaps there would be an international incident, but only to the degree that the paradigm momentarily addressed other factors—like my dad’s prominence in the Democratic Party—as opposed to my blackness. There can be situational adjustments. You can even live a life of a situational adjustment. I don’t see how that’s completely possible because your nigger moment has actually packed its bags and is on the way to meet you, you just don’t know when it’s coming or where it’s going to hit you, and that’s an issue of being fated, as Lewis Gordon says. And I don’t think that any black person who’s not in a mental asylum really tells themselves, “I live a life of agential ‘whether’” when they’re alone with themselves. It’s always “when.” “When will I be treated badly?” “When will I be arrested?” “When will I be accosted for acting ambiguously with my white wife,” as Lewis Gordon writes. It’s not whether or not someone will mistreat me; it’s when. If one did not know where one was positioned, regardless of one’s attitude toward that, one could not move through the world. It would be like moving through ether. You’d just be crazy.

Omar: You point out how flimsily founded the ascension of the black bourgeoisie really is. The laughable notion of the Name of the Black Father is a prime example. On p. 150-151, after your father has told you the origins of your family name, you say this of the Name of the Father:

Then he looked at me, that sullen-Wilderson-look that my mom always found so disparaging, but she was wrong, for the first time I knew she was wrong. It wasn't a Wilderson-look, for it could just as well have been a Wilson-look. He looked that look at me, the look of chance, and said, "Now you know.”

“The look of chance.” So, even the features that we think of as the possessions of our families and defining characteristics of our families and things that give authority to our parents—are not ours. They have no name, or, rather, can only ever have an arbitrary (chance) name. Could you also speak to the notion of patriarchy as well as matriarchy and how this narrative troubles these concepts in relation to the African American family?  

Frank: Yes, you’re right. The name Wilderson was a name of chance and ascription, just like all other black names, so our names are symptoms of our bodies being possessions, where other people’s names are symptoms of their recognition and incorporation into kinship structure.

Omar: For example, Smith being the name of somebody whose ancestor was once a blacksmith or Cartwright being the name of somebody whose ancestor was once a cart maker—in the social structure.

Frank: I’m not suggesting that the way in which Europeans, and Asians, and Native Americans, and Latinos attain names is not arbitrary. All semiotics is semi-arbitrary. What I’m saying is that the paradigm recognizes and incorporates those names as the function of paradigmatic agency. So a good critical theorist could go back and look at the way they’re named and say, “Well there’s a pedigree of arbitrariness in this process as well. What are you black people talking about?” And what I’m talking about is that the arbitrariness is a function of subjects naming subjects. And once the name is put on someone, that person is recognized as a subject. This arbitrariness is a function of subjects naming objects. And the name becomes a moniker of further objectification. Every Negro name is a joke to the extent that the person tries to present it as a representation of genealogy. The can of tuna fish isn’t going to jump up and say, “Hey, I got a name! Now I’m a person too! I’m not your thing.”

Omar: Even if the can of tuna fish puts an African-sounding name on itself, it’s still just a can of tuna fish.

Frank: So we have a schism throughout this book—and it’s not a schism that the book tries to solve, it just tries to note it and explain—of someone living their name as though they were a subject, a patriarch, a matriarch, and that’s their attitude towards their name. And there’s a complete irreconcilable dissonance between their attitude toward their name and what their name really means paradigmatically. That is the paradox of negrohood. That is the lifelong struggle, which is why Cornel West says that blackness is a kind of meditation between suicide or madness. Do I just go through this dissonance for 80 years that no one else has, or do I just kill myself? And I’m not sure that either choice has any purchase over the other.

Omar: Your socio-economic position in writing this narrative is key because it exposes the fact that there is no escape from the onslaught. The features of the subject—god-given, inalienable rights, agency, the capacity to create culture out of nameless space and endless time, a contingent availability to violence, a narrative of immigration, the Name of the Father, and ontological resistance (what both Hegel and Lacan called recognition, and what existentialists call Presence)—are continuously embattled, contested, given no harbor, even for black families and individuals that have supposedly "made it." You expose how tenuously "respectability" is layered on the black body, how easily that black bourgeois "respectability" can be and is removed. Your parents find out they have been under surveillance after how hard they've struggled to be "respectable" and loyal Americans. Shelleen Johnson, after being voted chair of the department by her feminist sisters—there’s that language of family again—is policed by her white secretary Helen. This poses important questions to the achievements of the black bourgeoisie and the achievement ethic it teaches its youth and the youth of working-class and non-working poor communities. Many have pointed out how the black family socializes and politicizes its children into this politics of respectability. Absent these kinds of gestures—raising children in a “good” black neighborhood, or a “‘good’ Methodist girl in a ‘good’ Catholic school”—it’s not clear what a black parent is to do. So, what role does the black parent play in this drama of the emerging subject--the black child, the black Manchild or Womanchild?

Frank: I think one of the things that the book is showing is that it is impossible to be a black parent. And, again, I don’t really answer the question of “What should we do?” which your question is posing. I can’t parent my stepdaughter because I have no filial claim to her. Even though I’ve signed all the paperwork, the state and civil society already has the claim. And my parents can’t parent me because they have no filial claim. That was not as maddening and vexing to us on the plantation. In fact it was easier for us to understand than it is now. It is the truth of the paradigm and we don’t accept it today. And that’s where part of the problem is. It is a problem of understanding. If we did accept it, what could we do about it? Again, I don’t know. So, there is a question then of how do you look into the eyes of the black child. That’s a very terrifying encounter, one that I hope never to have again because the question is when you look into their eyes, what do you say? Do you say, “Don’t look to me for sanctuary because I can’t provide myself with that. The reason I can’t provide myself with that is because anything could happen to me at any time and I have no way to stem it. Therefore, your growing and your development and your mind is actually forming in this house right before my very eyes and I’m supposed to give you some lessons based upon a general set of predictive circumstances when all I can tell you is that any kind of shit can come down on you at any time, and there will be no recourse”?

Omar: —and it’s when, not whether. Reba says, “Daddy will they take our money” when the kasspirs [South African police and military armored vehicles] are coming and you say no they won’t, and the voice of your conscience says, “What possessed me to lie to a four-year-old child?” Indeed, not only does black parenting function via such lies of convenience. You seem to point out that the notion of a coherent “black culture” or blackness as an ethnicity—far from being liberatory—requires us to embrace such lies of convenience. So when you say,

I am nothing, Naima, and you are nothing: the unspeakable answer to your question within your question. This is why I could not—would not—answer your question that night. Would I ever be with a Black woman again? It was earnest, not accusatory—I know. And nothing terrifies me more than such a question asked in earnest. It is a question that goes to the heart of desire, to the heart of our black capacity to desire. But if we take out the nouns that you used (nouns of habit that get us through the day), your question to me would sound like this: Would nothing ever be with nothing again?

your answer to Naima’s question is bringing something into focus that often gets missed in conversations about black men dating or marrying white women. The implications of this are that blackness is not fundamentally comprehensible as a sociocultural identity, that we are united only in our nothingness, our position as slaves. You force us to focus on how even the things we see as comprising our culture are more essentially understood as indices of our constant availability to gratuitous violence. Many black women feel a profound sense of rejection when they see black men with white or nonblack women, a sense that issues forth from a sense of cultural entitlement—a sense that black people should be with black people just as Chinese people “should be” with Chinese people or Jewish people “should be” with Jewish people. According to this cultural entitlement, black people are, or should be, about making ourselves into, a culture or ethnic group, consisting of people with specific norms—like endogamy (marrying only within the group). In various places you share with us that blacks do have an unique and vibrant and deeply rooted culture, and that this cultural lens is a very important lens through which to view black people—as you share in the myriad references to “cultural things” like our hair, the mother-son familial dynamics, the common courtesies that black professionals afford each other, or when you cast [Motown founder] Berry Gordy as God in a sort of Ne(gr)o Genesis myth. But in your answer to Naima’s question you’re showing that, while our culture and ethnicity are important to us, they are inessential to blackness, to how we are positioned in the world always and already, before we can even offer performance.

Frank: Our being is a being in pain, as someone once wrote, and that’s very different than say an Asian or Latino or even Native American[1] person’s being as a being who experiences pain, even long periods of pain from U.S. imperialism and the usurpation of Turtle Island, the occupation of the Settlers on this continent. So the question is how to live. And what the book tries to do in this answer is to recognize the truly divided nature of the subject, such that in order to be with oneself and to feel that one is actually alive in the world, the only way to do that—unless one is in a revolutionary moment where one is just against the world—the only way to be otherwise is to have a little bit of whiteness in one’s life. Preferably in one’s bed. That then gets us back to the various gradations of blackness in the black position, such that black women who are black and American are least likely to be able to have a little bit of whiteness in their lives. I don’t think that Naima would ask that question if the racial dynamics were such that black men, thinking heterosexually, could not get black female lovers and black women could. Then I would be asking her that question. She’s asking the question on one level as a question of how am I going to perform in the world. But what I understand the question to mean is bringing us back to the problem of actual existence. Who we are. So I could answer it in the way that it was written that yes next year I’m going to date only black women, which would only put some salve on the question. It wouldn’t actually solve the dynamic. And it’s the same kind of question that I’m asking Khanya, but I’m accosting her in the beginning of the book when I say “You’ve just made a lateral move from kaffir to nigger” but what I’m really saying is, “Why won’t you be with me? You have more whiteness in your life because of your immigrant status and because you have that whiteness in your life I’m feeling abandoned.” Well, yes and no. Her actual performance in the world is not what’s abandoning me; it’s my recognition of how abandoned I already am through her capacity to climb a little bit out of the hole through immigration and she doesn’t want to fall back into the hole because she knows that were we to have a baby and that baby live here [in the United States], going back to your study—you know, Jared Sexton’s work has shown that black immigrants, African immigrants, Caribbean immigrants, are the only class of immigrants, are the only class of immigrants, whose second generation does worse than the first. Every other class of immigrants, the next generation does better, even Laotians. So immigration can’t slip the blackness.

Omar: It’s just another middle passage, then. Let’s talk about black rage. The black revolutionary impulse is always laboring under duress from the policing of whites. It seems that we are forever caught between a need to be, as you and your Grandmother Wilderson say, "mad at the world," and the fear of policing that comes in multiple modes, whether it be an Algiers Motel massacre in Detroit or the fear among African National Congress members in South Africa that the kind of radical reorganization of South Africa, such as Chris Hani advocated, might pose a threat to capital would bring the U.S. Marines to their shores. But you point out that there’s also a substantial amount of policing from white liberals like Harold Milton, your comrade in Berkeley who tells you that “black emotionalism” undermines black movements, that he, a white male, is a “people’s leader,” that he introduced a black girl who is a student leader to Mao and to all the philosophers that black revolutionaries were reading. After protesting the Kent State massacre and the bombing of Cambodia, he says of the Jackson State massacre – “Cambodia was like a universal thing… but …Jackson State…that’s like a special interest happening.” Special interests: How blacks’ demands are isolated performs a policing function similar to the question “What would you have in its place?” Milton wields power in saying that he’s more revolutionary.

Frank: We’re back to our problem being a problem of being. And we find ourselves in these moments with so-called white progressives and so-called white revolutionaries, where we lose ourselves because of a problem of performance and then something happens, a little conversation like that and they remind us that it’s a problem of being. Because I’m actually setting the terms. And he has set the terms because underlying what he’s saying is his understanding of what it means to suffer. He would say that people suffer through economic deprivation, class, they suffer through gender exploitation, patriarchy, and they suffer through American military occupation, imperialism. So he’s got these rubrics, and I’m not saying that they’re not important because I’m out in the streets with him, and I’m thinking that my rubric is in his mind also, and it’s not. And all of a sudden, he lets me know that it’s not. So now I’m jettisoned for the first time in my life into an understanding of really what I mean to white left-wing struggles. I can be a mascot, like a good lefty Negro cheerleader, for their causes, I can be a battering ram, when they need my rage and energy to knock down the doors of something, my “righteousness.” And what I forget in that moment, when I’m going off with my rage in their movement—I think that I’m struggling, I’m exploding, I’m moving forward, I’m battering down the door for not just their liberation but for black liberation—I forget that I’m a captive revolutionary, I forget that I’m captive to their will, and I push things too far. I push things for disrupting civil society on behalf of Jackson State— and it’s like, “Whoa! We weren’t going to the plantation!” he’s trying to tell me. “We were talking about whites and colored beings who did not have adequate access to the promise of civil society. You let your emotions and your mouth get your ass in trouble.” This is what he’s trying to tell me.

Omar: Thank you for bringing this discussion about leadership to the distinction between what is performative and what is ontological. Now, there are some possible exceptions to what you’re saying among whites and nonblacks on the Left, like Marilyn Buck or John Brown, or your Umkhonto we Sizwe comrade Trevor Garden—whites and nonblacks who were willing to die to all of their relations (in other words, become black) and be cast out of civil society as “traitors” and “terrorists” so that reality might be ethical instead of antiblack. But Harold Milton, it seems from this book, did not engage in that sort of ontological self-incapacitation. And this suggests that white and nonblack leftist activists may perform “people’s leadership” but will remain ontologically positioned as Masters in relation to Slaves (their black partners in struggle) and Settlers in relation to “Savages” (their American Indian and Native Hawaiian partners in struggle). Their struggles will liberate their Slave and “Savage” colleagues only to the extent that this liberation comports with their own liberation as Humans. But this concept you introduce of the structural antagonism between the Settler/Master and the “Savage” and Slave remains undisturbed. So who’s left to lead the struggle? Perhaps at this point we can talk about black leadership a bit. There’s a sense now with the looming election of Barack Obama that black rage is something that can be channeled into the electoral process to help give the Left—or if not the Left then at least the Democratic Party—that extra boost, more turnout than black folks have had probably ever, but no attention to what he’s going to do if he gets into office and lives past the inauguration.

Frank: The only way that America won’t kill him is if he can prove that he’s for everybody except blacks and rabidly against blacks. He might live four years. But the moment he seems to be for blacks—I mean, I hope it doesn’t happen. I actually feel sorry for him. But I think one thing that everyone is forgetting is that the only way that voting could actually be an ethical practice is if, say, every Indian had 22 votes and every black had a vote and everybody else sat back. There are only two groups of people who can vote: blacks and Indians. Having other people vote makes—forget the content, forget what you pour into the recipe—makes pulling the lever an unethical act. I’m not saying that people don’t understand this. I’m saying that they disavow it so that they can pull the lever. They pull the lever and call it ethical. They don’t say, “I’m pulling the lever and participating synchronically and diachronically in the massacre and the separation of Indians and in the further social death of blacks because I’m actually strengthening civil society which is a murderous projection.” They say, I’m pulling the lever and I’m making change—ethical change.

Omar: There is this sense that we’re channeling something that could be violent and thereby unethical or irresponsible into something that’s simply pulling a lever to make change. This reminds me of how pacifists aren’t really pacifists.

Frank: Yes. This comes from Joy James.[2] Pacifists prefer the violence of the state to the violence of blacks. And people used to ask me when I’d give lectures on my time in Umkhonto we Sizwe, “Did you ever kill anyone?” And I’d say, “Yes, I’ve killed many people—many people: Every April 15^th when I sign my tax returns I become a member of Murder, Incorporated, euphemistically referred to as U.S. citizenry. I become a mass serial killer. Oh, you mean did I kill anyone as a black insurgent? Well, that’s peanuts!”

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[1] American Indians and Native Hawaiians are positioned as a liminal case between blacks and Humans. This is because the “savage” is positioned by genocide (as opposed to groups of people that have experienced genocide as an historical event) and also positioned by the loss of sovereignty. Thus, one part (genocide) of the American Indian’s grammar of loss can find no possibility of redress, while the other grammar of loss (sovereignty) leaves intact the possibility, albeit extremely remote, of redress (the restoration of Turtle Island). See Frank B. Wilderson, III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. (Durham: N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

[2] Prof. Joy James, in-class conversation, referred to author by Frank B. Wilderson, III, 25 September 2008.

"knowing oneself to be a dead relation": A Review Essay and an Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III (Part 1 of 2)

In honor of Black August, cosmic hoboes is proud to publish a review essay and interview that Omar Ricks did in 2008 with Frank B. Wilderson III about his first book, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, published by the (sadly) now-defunct South End Press. The book's second edition is soon to be published by Duke University Press.

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A Review Essay and an Interview with Frank B. Wilderson, III

Review Essay by Omar Ricks

Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. By Frank B. Wilderson, III. (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2008. Pp. 501. Paper, ISBN 978-0-89608-783-5). (Second edition coming soon from Duke University Press.)

“Yes,” I said, and I felt how the sway of the room had shifted in my favor. It could not be registered at the level of agreement, not even the curious man in the corner had shown any signs of alliance with either me or the blasphemous oracle from which I read; but they all had shifted from aggression to curiosity, which meant that I had been granted the power to pose the question. And the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all. (110)

Is the positionality of blacks in the world shaped more by performance than by “the fact of blackness”?

In some fashion or another, this question is on many people’s minds at the present historical moment, as Barack Obama prepares to take the stage as chief executive of the United States. There are many forms of it—Are blacks prepared to lead? Will whites be able to relate to him as simultaneously human and black? Will Obama’s presence in office have an emancipatory, role-modeling effect on African Americans?—but the anxious questions surrounding Obama are linked to what his performance will mean for the ontology of race—even the question of whether there is such a thing as an ontology of race or if instead “racism” has been a matter of nonwhites not having access to the performance of power within civil and political society. 

The implications of the answers to this question are enormous for they bear on the question of what is to be done. For me, a performing artist and a black male who has to live in the world, the decision to become a performing artist, as well as the day-to-day performative decisions and habits that constitute “me,” are predicated on the optimistic assumption that my performance is in some way liberatory, that what I do shifts me individually and “us” collectively—as black people, as a nation, as humankind—closer to a time when my blackness does not precede my performance as a positioning mechanism. As I write this, there are still a lot of anxious questions surrounding all of the things that can happen to Obama before the inauguration—before he is even afforded the opportunity to perform—suggesting the myriad and complex ways in which blackness and violence are linked, both in the psyche but, at a deeper level, in the structure of which psyches are a part. The questions are essentially ones regarding how the performance of a ritual, like electing and inaugurating a new president, can at least begin to recalibrate a racial order in which resource distribution is unequal into one in which resource distribution is equal. But when there is a black man’s face, a black man’s gait, and a black man’s voice following the words “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States,” and Obama is no longer simply a signifier for equal opportunity in America or the power of the speech act but the symbolic Name of the Father of the world’s military and economic powerhouse, a symbolic brother to Indian killers and slaveholders and a Commander-in-Chief of CIA hit men—will much have changed in the world? Will performativity avow the much-vaunted shifting of America away from a racialized slave society into a “post racial” nation? Will, indeed, can the election of a black person to the presidency of a society founded and maintained by enslavement, incarceration, and genocide be truly revolutionary? Put simply, does performativity trump ontology?

If the memoir of Frank B. Wilderson, III, were to proffer an answer, it would be “Probably not.” Indeed, if some of these questions resonate with those of another multiracial nation that was on the verge of electing a black president for the first time nearly a score of years ago, then the timing of Wilderson’s neo-slave narrative of his life in early 1990s South Africa should prove instructive to the world today. Juxtaposed with his life in a conservative, theretofore all-white Minneapolis suburban enclave in the early 1960s, in the urban black power hotspots of his adolescence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in California’s San Francisco Bay Area (site of a very recent police murder of an unarmed black man) during the late 1990s and early 2000s culture wars, South Africa is clearly the place that anchors his narrative in the world because it is the place where we see him gain the power to pose the questions that he asks of his life up to that moment and following it. Indeed, part of what comes through in this narrative is that blacks, while sentient beings, have been rendered utterly devoid of the capacity to define space/time, so that even “black spaces” have no signifying power and, in the words of David Marriott, black fantasies have "no objective value"[1]—until, that is, the prospect of sudden, fundamental change to the social order is at hand. Blacks’ attempts to disrupt their continuous repositioning as objects, and even to create their own subjective relationality or cultural identities, are behaviors that may have value in the performative register and may help black people make it through the day, but always fail to reposition blacks in the ontological register. While a title like Incognegro might suggest that Wilderson’s entire book is centering on blackness as an identity that is masked, some specific moments from the book belie such optimistic readings and, instead, point out the ways in which Wilderson is setting up blackness-as-ontology against black performativity and showing how the former murders the latter when the two clash.

Performance, this memoir points out, is a necessary reality of black life but only insofar as it can stave off the encroaching awareness of the ontological reality of blackness qua incapacity and social death. “So driven was I by a need to impress her,” Wilderson writes of his first date with his ex-wife Khanya Phenyo in Chapter 3, “that I postured as though I could protect her from animus so fine and ubiquitous it filled the very air we breathed” (99). Frank (henceforth, I will use “Frank” to refer to the author’s persona in this memoir and “Wilderson” to refer to the author qua author) attempts to leverage his Americanness to take his date, a South African woman, to the heretofore “Whites Only” Café Zurich.

“Just walk in like you own the joint,” I said. Still, she held back. I touched her gently at the elbow. “Okay,” I said, “let’s go somewhere else, it’s our first date, it should be fun; it’s your town, make a suggestion.”

“It’s not my town,” she said, softly.

Several White couples trickled up the stairs, slipped past us in our anxious indecision, and crossed the threshold of the Café Zurich’s glass façade. They took their seats in the dark interior of cushioned chairs and candlelight. The entire mise–en–scène gave the café the ambiance of a dinner theater; the landing where Khanya and I stood, paralyzed by uncertainty and dread, was the perfect spectacle for their optimism and amusement as they sipped their wine and savored their dessert. For whatever tragedy could befall them, they could thank god that they would never be cast in our roles. Unable to bear the prolonged humiliation of their gaze, I urged Khanya to go inside. (99-100)

In a different historical milieu, this incident could have been read as a cautionary tale for Black Americans. “Freedom isn’t free, so be thankful for it because you won’t get it in other countries.” In the post-apartheid era it might also be read as a narrative of historical progress, a legitimation of the racial order in which racial problems will be resolved in due time with enough hard work and faith in the system on everyone’s part. Of course, this is hardly the point here and would require us to discard a substantial portion of the rich detail that Wilderson provides us from his actual lived experience. For one thing, the narrative is acknowledging what every black/slave narrative since the advent of blackness must perforce acknowledge: the white audience. In the tradition of black narratives, whites are always already positioned as having the capacity to in some way authorize, hence police, the narrative—as the benefactors that made the book’s publication possible by funding it, being part of the publishing apparatus, or warranting its legibility in the symbolic order (like the abolitionist amanuenses and editors who prefaced the narratives of North American slaves in order to enable the empathy of “the reader,” or Jean-Paul Sartre’s admonition that “readers” in the west “have the courage to read [Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth], primarily because it will make you feel ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling”[2]). Wilderson is also positioning the white audience here as that which makes Frank’s performance necessary in this moment, and, as we shall see in the interview, makes Wilderson’s performative act of writing Incognegro itself a necessary act while at the same time proscribing the manner in which he must go about doing that.

What unfolds in the course of the scene is that the maître d', an eastern European immigrant (a Slav?), points Frank and Khanya (the Slaves) to the sign “Right of Refusal Reserved” and ushers them out. Wilderson is not just pointing toward an instance of discriminatory behavior or a case of individual hatred of black people, but a more widely dispersed and “fine” antiblackness that wears a smile and speaks politely, even apologetically. Frank pushes back, insisting that he has just as much right to eat in the restaurant as any of the white patrons who are watching him make this very scene. One senses the ease with which Frank, and black men more generally, rely on the performance of confident carriage to such a degree that it's really hard to accept that it is a performance. As the scene unfolds further, we see that it's a performance that might even work on a case-by-case basis—perhaps even seem to work throughout something called a life— but never does anything to reposition the black. The maître d's sign, and the military functions that back it and that are always a few seconds away, mean that Frank and Khanya are already zoned (in Fanon’s parlance) by the gratuitous violence that creates a “Whites Only” sector. In other words, Frank’s resistance is never ontological resistance leading to a Hegelian dialectical synthesis. To be sure, it's a performance that sometimes works. It sometimes works because one is able to dupe a white into disavowing their reality (and Frank does indeed get the maître d' to consider the possibility that “the law [allowing the restaurant to keep blacks and Coloureds out] has changed”)—or sometimes because in the present ethical order it’s not polite to refuse blacks service—so that they treat the black as a Human and not a Slave. In the moment, the maître d' eventually does invite Frank in, hailing him as “my American friend.” Still, this does not reposition the Slave or suggest that the Slave had actually been part of the symbolic dialectic after all, for it is only the belated connection that the maître d' draws between the Slave and a geographically recognizable—in other words, white—“zone” (“my American friend”) that authorizes this provisional visibility and enables empathy. It thus reaffirms Ronald A.T. Judy’s claim that “black folk… are always already dead wherever you find them,”[3] whether that be in an all-white enclave in Minnesota, in Manhattan, or in a “racially integrated” neighborhood in Johannesburg. Performance, this book argues repeatedly and forcefully, cannot in any way rescue the black from blackness.

Wilderson also pieces together how the answers to these questions are revealed to him. In this moment, it is Khanya, of course, who is seeing the performance but acknowledging the ontological reality that is underwriting it. Whose town is it? She whispers the answer, “It’s not my town,” just as Wilderson-as-author stages the entrance of those who are the answer that question. (Khanya often reminds Frank of his audience, as, at the beginning of the book, when Frank must step into the next room in the house of his white benefactors in South Africa, his evening disrupted by a call from a white reporter pressing him to comment about being on Nelson Mandela’s list of domestic threats. He is forced to pretend that his white benefactors should not be troubled.)

Wilderson even tempts us to draw analogies between performance done by blacks and that by others.

 “Let’s take a cab,” I said, “rather than wait all night for a kombi to fill up.”

As metered taxi drivers came into view, and as we came in view for them, I became horribly aware of what a bad idea this was. But we had too much forward motion. The first and second drivers shook their heads and rolled up their windows. Khanya was set to leave when I noticed the third driver was an Indian and, unlike the others, he was rolling his window down.

“This guy’ll take us.” I made a beeline for him and she was compelled to do the same.

He said, “I’m not going to Soweto! I’ll tell you that right now.”

“We’re not going to Soweto,” I said in a tone that wanted to be accommodating for him and indignant for Khanya. It fell into a pit between the two.

“Or Alexandra, either. I don’t go to the locations.”

“We’re not going to the locations. We’re here, in town. Braamfontein. Wits University.”

Khanya was even more disgusted than before: “We’re going to walk,” she said and turned back up the hill. There was nothing to do but follow to her.

My accent finally registered with the driver and he called after me:

“Hey! You American? Okay, why not? Get in.”

“Khanya,” I whispered, “he’ll take us.”

“He’ll take you.” She continued up the hill.

“New York! Chicago? LA! You from LA?”

Wilderson’s record of this moment of the clash between performance and ontology turns on the “Okay” here performed by the Indian cab driver. “Okay” is one of the most thoroughly dispersed Americanisms out there—a simple turn of phrase, denoting a mild affirmation, which, because it is repeated so often, comes to signify the easygoing, pragmatic nature that makes America “great.” One senses that the Indian cab driver embraces the word here with its attendant pragmatism about reaching ends. It is the American's willingness to ask "why not?" (the quintessentially American corporate giant slogan went, "Enron: Ask why?") that frees him from such traditional hindrances as class lines or, in the case of the Indian cab driver, caste lines. The Indian cab driver’s performance of Americanism seems to be liberatory for him in this moment. But is it also liberatory for Frank and Khanya?

“Okay” is interesting for another reason: Its etymology may be at least partly influenced by the languages of the Wolof and Choctaw in the “New” World.[4] It is a word that never would have gone worldwide— only to become the province of a South African-Indian cab driver deciding whether to take an African American man’s money—but for the Middle Passage, the genocidal cultural exchange between Indian and Settler, and the violence of colonialist expansion and labor. Frank is attempting to accept it here as a signifier of that American-style willingness to try anything that works—read: makes money (in the previous action of this chapter, he said to the maitre d’ that his money was as good as anyone else’s). This set of meanings is important, but underneath, it is simply another mercy that is being afforded him, for he is the anything that is being tried, and only, again, because he is recognized as being attached to a white zone, America, instead of a black zone, “the locations.” He has thus been elevated by the Indian cab driver above the nonexistence of niggerhood to the position of “okay.” The power to be positioned, the narrative informs us, lies not with the black because the black is not a subject. Even in the face of a white immigrant and a nonwhite-nonblack immigrant to an avowedly racist country, the black, whether native-born like Khanya or an American immigrant like Frank, is an object to be positioned, but unable to position himself.

This incapacity to position oneself extends to the time of the black as well as the space. The sense of time is structured by intervals, as described by Frantz Fanon and emphasized by Kara Keeling. Each chapter, each scene contains an explosion in which, as Keeling puts it in her article “In the Interval: Frantz Fanon and the ‘Problems’ of Visual Representation,” the present is simply the “(re)appearance of the past, felt as affect” (106). The time of the black structures this book by way of the explosion for which Fanon and Keeling wait. For what do they wait? For the cognitive dissonance between the realities woven from performance and the Real that black ontology avows.

Frank’s friend, Jim Harris, a philosophical and hard-drinking black American expatriate in South Africa, is fond of playing the trombone, badly, and playing his role in debunking some of Frank’s lingering optimism. If choice and agency are the marks of free subjects, it doesn’t seem too much of a reduction to say that Frank’s discussion with Jim in Chapter 10 concerns the theme of the Subject’s “if” versus the Object’s “when.” “Jim Harris was real,” Wilderson writes (399), and, like the Real of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jim’s favorite role is as a spoiler of Frank’s sense that he has any symbolic agency in his life—even going so far as to lay out the subject matters of Frank and Khanya’s arguments and a precise timetable for their eventual breakup.

Yeah, [Khanya] thinks she’s got something special, something different than that ole South African who only wants to hang with his friends 24/7 and stay out all night at the shebeen. Then a year goes by, maybe two, three if you lucky.” He began playing his trombone.

“Will you stop with that insufferable horn and finish the story!”

“Insufferable.” He let the horn rest, and reflected: “Now there’s a word you don’t hear everyday from a Negro.”

“Jim, please.”

“She likes all your fancy talk, all your romance, all your Marvin Gaye, but no one warned her ’bout all your complications. That’s what my African wife told me when she left. 

In this moment, we can see yet another level at which Jim is functioning: He sets up the interval at which Frank explodes. Keeling writes, “Because the Black’s explosion has been anticipated within the terms of the hellish cycle to which he is confined, it does not liberate him; instead, it fulfills and initiates the infernal circle in which the world waits for the Black’s explosion” (105).

All of this provokes many questions, the most salient among them being, “Does Incognegro suggest that the performative is a pointless register for thinking black existence?” Perhaps at this point, it will be useful to turn to our interview with Wilderson on his performative act, the writing of Incognegro itself.

“I only knew I couldn’t breathe.” (414)

 ____________________________________________________

Interview, September 25, 2008, Irvine, California

Omar: You have referred elsewhere[5] to positionalities formed by the antagonisms that structure modernity. These are the Settler/Master, a position held by Europeans in the “New World” and by Western Europe and other colonial powers in their colonies; the “Savage,” the indigenous populations whose position in modernity is defined by (a) genocide and (b) displacement from its subjective capacity to signify; and the Slave, whose position in modernity is the collapse of all capacity into object-hood. With that in mind, we could read this “memoir of exile and apartheid” as exposing the reader to the three structural positionalities that define modernity and showing how the attempt to situate the black within each ends up rejecting the black bodies and black lives that circumstances toss into them. In South Africa, we see the indigenous position—what happens when the Slave and "Savage" positions are the same. And with you in South Africa and, briefly, Khanya in New York, we see the impossibility of living an immigrant narrative, which is really a subset of the settler narrative, when one is a black. And then, there is the slave. Although there is a positionality for the slave, there is really no narrative that is the slave’s. So, will you talk about how your memoir elaborates or modifies your thoughts about the triangulated subject positions of modernity?

Frank: Let me start by saying that I modeled this book as a genre form on the autobiography of Assata Shakur because I needed a way to talk about the structural antagonisms that your question alludes to as well as tell a story on a way that was acceptable to the needs of the genre. Part of the problem is that the genre of the memoir is predicated on what Barthes called the proairetic code[6]—the code of “and then,... and then,… and then…” There is the individual, and that individual moves from a state of equilibrium, to a state of disequilibrium, and finally the narrative recuperates its state of equilibrium.  That is the story of all seven of the seminal or “Ur texts” of Western modernity. Christ comes into a horrible world, he is born in a manger, he goes through disequilibrium, and he rises again. So, here’s the deal. I had a situation in which I needed to package what I’m trying to say in a creative genre that is acceptable to Western modernity so I can get it published and get paid. [Laughter.] Western modernity actually is the problem, not what happens in modernity itself. Those are problems also. And so we’re dealing with the story of someone who, based upon the semiotics of storytelling, doesn’t have a story. Which is to say, I must accommodate the anti-story of the slave—who is the anti-being— to the needs, the ideological needs of a cultural object out of western modernity. Why is that a problem? It’s a problem because the person in the story in question has a name and often believes himself to be an agent, but his blackness makes him not. Which is to say that the three large steps, or three general moves of the creative narrative of Western modernity—equilibrium, disequilibrium, recuperation of equilibrium—can’t work for that position—

Omar: —because there’s never an equilibrium? Because there’s not a subject?

Frank: Yes. And I felt that Assata Shakur’s book helped me with that in that she moved from a chapter of present tense oriented political struggle—violent disequilibrium—a moment of violent disequilibrium against the state—the shootout on the Jersey Turnpike—and uses that to talk about the state of disequilibrium in a dramatic way. So she’s taken some of the tools of the genre—which is dramatic storytelling— but she’s opening in an obvious moment of disequilibrium in the present tense. Then the next chapter oscillates back to childhood—and childhood in the west, in America, nine times out of ten is a moment of equilibrium. As the white new agers say, one must find one’s inner child to have peace—the same way they talk about “nature” as though it’s—

Omar: Something to get back to—

Frank: Yes, a pristine moment of innocence. As opposed to what [Slavoj] Zizek[7] would say, we have to understand that Nature is absolutely crazy—think of volcanoes and earthquakes and so on—there’s nothing pristine or peaceful about it. Geological, tectonic shifts—

Omar: So there’s always got to be a paradise to lose and then to regain. [Laughter.]

Frank: That’s it. So she was able to do that using some of the tactics of the western bourgeois narrative, but still illustrating the condition of this being who is born into disequilibrium, lives through various types of disequilibrium, and dies in disequilibrium. And so that’s how I was able to do that.

Omar: That brings up my next question, because Hortense Spillers talks about how blacks live in “mythical time,” and have “no movement in the field of signification.” Will you talk with us about how this mythical time is elaborated in your narrative—both in how you lay it out and how mythical time actually occurs in the narrative of black “life,” for lack of a better term?

Frank: Yes, well if we look at it in chronological time, the book moves from 1962 age of six years old through a kind of civil rights era as one of two (with my sister) first black kids in an all-white school, an all-white enclave of Minneapolis during the civil rights era, through sabbatical years as a young adolescent, my father’s sabbatical years and our falling into these various hot, hot spots of revolution. Detroit. Chicago. Berkeley. Jumping then to South Africa in the 1990s and white suburban California at the turn of the century. And so in one particular episode, the little boy persona, Frank Wilderson, is now an adolescent and the sabbatical years are happening, its 1970, we’re in Berkeley, and what I want is to be a part of a revolution that will change the world. So, what the narrative is saying is that my participating in the demonstrations that turn into riots at UC Berkeley, my working or learning from older college kids in SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and things like that at Willard Junior High School in Berkeley, my tutelage from the Black Panthers, are all things that are narrativized in the book as being politically more palatable, more correct, than my parents’ laissez-faire or their tenacious fixation on civil rights as opposed to black power. And so in one register I’m saying, “Yes, this is right. Where I was coming from is better than where they’re coming from.” But what the book also recognizes is that my political correctness—and I don’t mean that in quotation marks or ironically—and their political conservatism are important distinctions but ultimately inessential and irrelevant to what happens to us, to our actual condition in the world. And then some of the musing, when we move away from the actual storytelling and—because this is what you can do in a memoir, you can muse on, reflect on, the story—I realized that maybe they were smarter than I was for having given up on history. Because hasn’t history always already given up on the slave? And this gets back to what you’re saying in terms of this “no movement in the field of signification.” Hortense Spillers is exactly right. I can’t celebrate my parents’ not being down with Marxist-Leninism. On the other hand, maybe unconsciously they realized that Marxist-Leninism would free the worker, move the worker through time to another condition, but leave the Black where he or she always was.

Omar: Yes. In fact, you never allow the reader to indulge in the standard array of the narratives that American mythology usually imposes that imply any form of progress—that is, movement in the field of signification. For example, romantically conflating the arrival of black middle-class families in white enclaves with some kind of immigrant arrival narrative here would not work any more for your upper middle-class upbringing than for Claude Brown in Manchild in the Promised Land. The structure of your narrative brings out this element, as do your references to slavery and your parents’ lives in Louisiana and the Great Migration to Harold and Gloria Cooper, the black psychologist couple visiting in South Africa who describe the paper-bag test that her mother brings out, which is of course straight out of my parents’ generation, my grandparents’ generation.

Let me share a quote from an article:

In fact, studies comparing birth outcomes among white and Black American women showed that more low birth-weight babies are born to African Americans, but birth outcomes among white Americans and African-born immigrants to America were comparable. Moreover, the daughters of the African immigrants gave birth to low birth-weight babies at the same rate as African Americans.[8]

Researchers are at a loss to explain these kinds of disparities with reference to socioeceonomic class or genetics. African-born black women “become black,” in a manner of speaking, within one generation of being on U.S. soil. There is a Middle Passage in these numbers. Now, your book implies that Africans are very much aware that blackness kills. So, Khanya leaves New York and returns to Johannesburg because she feels herself becoming more “sullen and coiled”: becoming black.

Frank: Well, some people think of this as a paradox. In my writing, I think of it as a necessary condition for the health of everyone else.

Omar: Explain, please.

Frank: Well, I think that it’s necessary for us to die in myriad ways and for there to be the spectacle of black death re-inscribing itself, reproducing itself across various sectors, say the movies—and here we have, in your example, birthrates, so that a couple of things can happen. One, the isolation of black bodies from human bodies can remain constant. Why is there a threat of it not remaining constant? Because black sentient beings push against the paradigm of this isolation. And so the paradigm that isolates blacks outside of and away from human beings has to shape shift and morph its technologies so that that isolation stays because if it didn’t, then there would be no distinction between blacks and humans, which means that “human” would be an irrelevant or non-knowable category. There would not be a crisis in human relations; there would be a catastrophe in the epistemological fabric of the world. [Laughter.] So, there’s panic on both sides. There’s panic in the nonblack world, which has to guard the gate to keep blackness from becoming, from seeping into humanness. And there’s panic in the black world, which is internecine panic for various subsets of us to figure out how we can be less black. Which is to say how we can be less dead. And this is I think the foundation of the Black African-Black American conflict that you’re seeing in this marriage in the United States with the psyche of Khanya moving towards trying to aspire to and apprehend immigrant status, if only unconsciously, if only in her mind, so that that would ward off this status of pure blackness. And Black Americans do the same thing when they’re abroad, like when they join the Peace Corps. It’s a kind of movement, affect, structure of feeling, way to distinguish themselves from the black spot of where they are: the African. The isolation has tangible effects. In other words, this low birth weight in your example that comes in the second generation of African women is a function not of some people throwing people down the stairs, but a function of knowing oneself to be a dead relation and the stress of that knowing oneself to be a dead relation creating all sorts of adrenal problems that impact upon the reproductive apparatus and the womb. So the researchers or the scientists who are not privy to this study might say that the problem is coming internally from the psyche itself, but we know from Lacan and from Freud that the psyche is a component of a large set of relations. It’s not an isolated thing. So the problem in thinking, the problem in writing, the problem in analyzing is how to make what seems naturally internal read as an external phenomenon, which is very hard to do, because one could say that people have a low birth weight in 1690 because they’re eating slop and being chained up and beaten in the ship. Well, I’m suggesting that that same dynamic is happening here, even though someone is wearing a Gucci pair of shoes and a Liz Claiborne dress—

Omar: —and calling themselves a white person’s boss, as Shelleen Johnson, the black woman elected to be chair of the department at Cabrillo College by her white feminist faculty “sisters” is policed by Helen, the white secretary!

Frank: Exactly! And if you can think like that then we can begin to blame the world for the problem of blacks as opposed to blaming blacks for their problems.

_______________________________________________

[The second part of this interview is published here.]

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[1] Marriott, David. (2000). On Black Men. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 11.

[2] Sartre, Jean-Paul, in Fanon, Frantz. (2005). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

[3] Judy, R.A.T. (1994). On the Question of Nigga Authenticity. Boundary 2, 21:3, p. 212.

[4] The Origin of OK. Morning Edition [online]. Available: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1140939 (accessed on 8 August 2015).

[5] Wilderson, Frank B., III. (2010). Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010, p. 6.

[6] Silverman, Kaja. (1983). Subject of Semiotics. NY: Oxford UP. pp. 262-70.

[7] Zizek, Slavoj (2008). World Renowned Philosopher Slavoj Zizek on the Iraq War, the Bush Presidency, the War on Terror. Democracy Now [online] http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/12/world_renowned_philosopher_slavoj_zizek_on (accessed on 8 August 2015).

[8] Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? [online] http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/resources.php?topic_id=8 (accessed on 8 August 2015); see also N Engl J Med. 1997 Oct 23;337(17):1209-14.