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"—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”).
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,”
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.
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)
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Interview, September 25, 2008, Irvine,
California
Omar: You have referred elsewhere 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—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 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.
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.
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How do we name the violence of a paradigm of antiblackness that is still going? Hortense Spillers essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" outlines a revolutionary theory of the violence that created and continues to create Blackness through the rape, murder, incarceration, and misnaming of Black people by a central figure in the psychic formation of western society: the Name of the (white) Father. Spillers reading helps us understand Fanon's notion that African "metaphysics [were]...abolished [by] a new civilization that imposed its own" and calls for a radical renaming of Black people by ourselves.
