By Darnell Moore |
With thanks to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Thursday, October 31, 2013.
Writing the precarious
When I write, I tend to invoke
the ghosts that have populated and haunted my life. Rarely, do I summon
guardian spirits. I rely, sometimes overly so, on the autobiographical form as
a way of inviting the reader to deeply feel, to vividly imagine, to critically
think about a particular black life lived, worn, tried. I have written about my
many harrowing bouts with suicidal ideation and the few moments where I tried
to end my life. I have recounted instances when violence has befallen me and
others in my family, especially my mother, while living in urban space. The
endless narratives of out-group and in-group aggression—white racial supremacy,
homophobia, classism, and much else—figure as core themes in my writing. I
write in the dark. Unceasing calls to ghosts, much like perpetual returns
to shadowy memories, can be a dangerous undertaking, however.
Writing myopically
Recently, I returned home to
my parents’ house and stumbled upon my mother’s many timeworn photographs. I
asked if I could take several photos home so that I could scan them. Nearly all
of the photos, including the pictures of me lacking a haircut and donning tight
corduroys while on a big wheel, evidence the life of an overwhelmingly happy
child. I smiled a lot. My smile was bright. But, as hard as I tried, I could not
re-member my smile, my happy childhood self, or the many apparent moments of
bliss in my yesteryears. Looking through each of the photos was a
reminder of the gaps that have widened in my memory—a memory that has been
lined and paved with the markers of pain. Trauma, that which blunts memory
through the repetition of blows to the psyche, works in the life of the
impacted in the same way that a delete button refashions a page: it obliterates
some inscriptions to free space and allows all that is left to appear overly
animated. But much like a page, the traces of the impression remains in one’s
life even while it is seemingly veiled. In my writing, I often return to the
memories deeply inscribed, hammered even, in my psyche only to discover ghosts.
And there is no tension present in the writing because I have somehow forgotten
that I smiled too.
Writing through affect
After a special screening of
Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave at a theater in Manhattan, a
friend asked if I could describe how I felt while watching the film. He
mentioned that he noticed my seeming lack of response. It’s
true: I barely cringed while watching the film. The unrelenting and
excruciatingly brutal scene when Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) whips Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o) until her brown skin begins to almost
leap off of her back did dishearten and terrify me. There were countless other
scenes that depicted the mundane nature of the violences (i.e. rape,
kidnapping, lynching, enforced illiteracy, et cetera) that were enacted upon
the enslaved by villainous White profiteers and there were too many
reverberations that signaled the continued presence of structural forms of
violence in our present. There were scenes of laughter, play, and community
laced with scenes of subjection, too. I didn’t cringe because of an
astounding ability to anesthetize my feelings when confronted with violence.
Like many viewers, I have witnessed black bodies brutalized in the flesh and on
the screen so much that I am frequently in a state of shock: moments when I
experience emotional overload and psychic paralysis all at once. I feel so
much, so overwhelmingly, until my body and spirit denies that it feels at all.
So, I did respond. My response to the movie was quite similar to most
post-traumatic reactions to vicarious violence. It is also true that much of my
writing emerges from and within the same emotional space.
Writing reframes
Janelle Monae, the automaton
“Electric Lady,” when singing her way through a rhythmic sermonic selection
titled “Victory” on her newest album offers the following: To be
victorious, you must find the glory in the little things. In late 2010, I
traveled with colleagues from various universities to Cape Town, South Africa
as part of colloquium organized by scholar Kyle Farmbry. The trip is one that I
will never forget, not only because of the stunning landscape and the horrific
inheritances of apartheid, but also because of a lesson I learned regarding
perspective—especially in relation to the shifting nature of one’s standpoint
when faced with precarity.
Gugulethu is a severely
under-developed and under-resourced, but no less virtuous, township about 15km
from Cape Town. I tried my best not to succumb to my U.S. American liberalist
sensibilities by offering repetitive and sympathetic reframes about the amount
of poverty and blight impacting the space and the people. I refrained from
taking pictures of someone’s kids, without permission, as if they were
spectacles. I reminded myself that folk have dignity and agency despite the
matrices of oppression they may daily trek. But I could not rid myself of the
overwhelming senses of complicity and helplessness when squarely beholding the
dehumanizing and demoralizing living conditions that black South Africans in
Gugulethu confronted.
And while standing on a large
swath of severely parched land (itself a material consequence of colonialism
and apartheid), I pondered all that was wrong.
That is, until a small and
beautiful yellow flower sprouting alone out of the dry ground revealed itself
to me. It became clear at the moment that I hadn’t
trained my eye to search out skillfully and quickly the vast and thirsty ground
(the structure), but never had I trained my eye to search for that one flower
that cracked earth to sprout (the body). The parched land did not become less
of a daunting presence. Surely, it remained an overpowering structure. It
no longer consumed all of my vision, however. I was able, at once, to see both
the formidable bad and unassuming good, the all-encompassing structure and the
ever resilient body. I returned to my journal and forced myself to write about
the poverty and the smiles on the faces of the young people
who danced and played as they walked home from school (the bodies) in spite of
poverty’s force (the structure) in their lives. There is splendor in the dark,
too.
Writing beauty and truth
When interviewing Amiri Baraka
at his home a few years ago he stated in response to my question, What
is the role of the poet? Your role?, the following: “Well, you know,
it’s always the same role. You just have to say…tell the truth—you know as
DuBois and Keats said it, ‘A poet only has two things they have to relate to,
truth and beauty.’ So, if you can handle that: truth in a society made of lies,
beauty in a society that praises ugliness, than that’s the gig. It’s hard on
you because you must understand the resistance to that.” As a writer, a black
queer writer, putting words to paper in a society made of lies, during a time
when many praise ugliness, how might I learn to tell the “truth” and regard
“beauty”? My own narrative is not one of sadness, violence, and pain alone;
yet, that is what I re-member and privilege in the writing of my truth. I
smiled, laughed, enjoyed friendships, fell in love, made love, fell out of love
and experienced joy, just as well. I’ve trained myself to turn back and see only
the parched land, however. Visioning a black life that only animates
death—a life conditioned by and organized around the force of
trauma—results in me failing to see the glory of which Monae sings in
“Victory.” What is the danger of such a limited gaze? What do I lose, or gain,
by returning to the darkness only to sit within the expanse of its obscurity
and not its splendor? What traces are carried, or left behind, when a black
life is shortsightedly imagined and narrativized as a unitary force subject to
the conditions of cultural trauma and structural violences and not a miscellany
of sorts that animates the interconnectedness of subjection and resistance,
death and life, beauty and truth?
Coda
What is the role of the writer who wishes to write and re-write a black life in
these times when it is easier for some to believe that the black is more
monster than genius and black life is more lifeless than it is alive?
***
Darnell L. Moore is a writer and activist who lives in Brooklyn,
N.Y. Currently, he is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender
and Sexuality at New York University.