| Streetnotes | Spring 2005 | xcp |
Kara Lynch
episode
03
--meet me in Okemah
from Invisible
--->
We are a people
on the move
voluntary
NO
coerced
seduced
taken
for a ride
DRIVEN
<---
prologue
detourment
Q: Is there ever a
time when the
black body is not performing?
A: When it’s dead.
Morbid and not true.
As Yen Le Espiritu
has said,
‘Even dead, our bodies are contested.’
In late April 1911, a
posse
visited Laura Nelson, her son, L.W., and her husband.
They lived several miles and equally distant from, both Paden,
Ok
(a white town) and Boley, Ok (a black town).
The posse was looking for stolen meat – dead or alive. The posse was headed up by deputy
sheriff
George H. Loney from Okemah, Ok -- Okfuskee county seat and host to the
courthouse and jail. Okemah was an all
white town. Not native, not black – all white. All white in a frontier
of
settlers and boomers and statehood only five years old. An all white
town in a
region that ten years prior had been Indian Territory and designated
Creek.
Like all the other rivers turned to lakes in Oklahoma, a trail of tears
dammed.
The deputy and his
posse came
looking for stolen meat. What they got
were a couple bullets in the leg and a stand-off. And
two bodies swinging in the breeze hovering above the North
Canadian River, six miles from the county courthouse.
So the story goes:
the deputy
bleeds to death while the family keeps his boys at bay. The mother and
son go
to jail for the same murder. The
husband turns himself in for the original crime – grand larceny. The
husband is
found guilty as charged and sent to prison out of town while mother and
son
await arraignment. Two weeks before she sips her last breath, everyone
knows
Laura Nelson didn’t do it. 11pm the night before her arraignment, they
come for
her. First, the men drag fourteen year old L.W from the county jail. At
the
courthouse they think to fashion a gallows from a telegraph-post and
the rope
they carry on their saddles. Their minds shift and quietly head for the
bridge. All manner of things happen
between hushed tones as they ride silently out of town with their
quarry. Six miles down Old Schoolton Road
the group
loops 1/2” hemp into two knots. The steel bridge is christened by this
judge
and jury execution. Pants at ankles and hands tied at wrists, head
down, L.W.
swings. Dress cinched at waist, hands loose by her sides, head cocked
heavy,
Laura floats.
The next morning, a
young boy,
black, walks the riverbed. Looking up, he sees his own swinging,
floating,
hanging dead from the trestle. Slow,
slippery N. Canadian river below laps sandy, silty shores listening to
the wind
whispering the evening’s deeds. By afternoon a crowd gathers at the
bridge to
see the sights. God-fearing settlers stand side by side looking out,
down,
across. No black people on the bridge only under it. Below a
photographer captures
the moments, one by one.
A week earlier, Laura
tries to
escape. She bites the jailor in the scuffle and he calls her wild and
unruly. He recounts that as he choked
her back into the makeshift women’s cell in the courthouse, Laura
begged he
kill her.’[1]
As a closing to a conference/festival of art and technology at UCSD called Powering Up/Powering Down[2], George Lipsitz spoke about performance as an important part of our work and struggle. He reminded us that it is the repositioning that happens when you run the ideas, images, etc. through your body that is powerful. Detourment. It is this kind of vigilance that is most necessary in the current moment. He reminded us that creative and artistic communities have always embodied and enacted democracies that are living and growing. The political climate that we confront right now has not happened because we are weak but because we are potentially strong. I go this far to paraphrase him because I feel that I needed that reminder. This relationship is a working through of lived experience coupled with political consciousness and a commitment to collective engagement. Sometimes I need to remind myself that for me to take a break from working myself into the ground can be an active response to the current political moment. I needed to recognize the ways that even when I think I am taking a break, concentrating on my work, in the studio or in the library, in the seminar room, on the bus, talking with friends, teaching college students, making dinner, having a dance party, sobbing cause I’m done laughing, that even in these moments that do not look like going to meetings, or demos or collaborating or whatever may constitute art/activism these days, I am still engaged and involved in resistance.
The
space of imminent danger and casual violence
Black folks are left
out of history. We are spatially outside of time.[3]
Laura Nelson is
floating.
This
does not however lift the weight of the crime of the hurt of the
violence meted
out upon hers and her son’s bodies.
This violence is a repetition of life for them.
It is a reminder to us all. Exemplary.
But
she is not pulling downwards.
Just
kill me now.
Laura
knew well what was in front of her.
Kill
me now.
What
are the other options? Watch a mob of
men beat and rape your only son, then string him up beside you. Look up at the stars focusing on the heavens
rather than feel the thrust of some cowboy or gentlemen loose a load
into your
womb. Your only consolation: that this
time it won’t matter. You won’t live to
see that child into this ugly world.
What
are the other options? Imagine that the
judge will take pity upon you and set you free without protection –
then find
yourself preyed upon by every white, black and red man in the county
who hears
you are on your own and beaten down and wouldn’t try to protect
yourself for
fear of a hanging this next time….
Not
many options.
Just
kill me now.
the body in
relation to subjectivity, recognition and double consciousness
Identity and
identification are processes of
power, subjugation and recognition.[4]
For black folks recognition as it’s understood in western philosophy,
has
always been experienced through our relationship to
whiteness/power/master.
Dubois/Fanon/Hall/Carby et al. describe the process of seeing
through
this veil of subjugation to understand oneself and propose a
self-recognition
that engages this double consciousness.
I think that there are folks making work that takes this double
consciousness as a baseline and then pushes forward to imagine that we
not only
know ourselves through this veil, but we also know
whiteness/power/master in a
way that it can never fully know itself without us.
I think the driving question in my work these days is: what if
black people just didn’t show up? If we just followed our parallel
logic/trajectory without whiteness what would power look/feel like?
This line of inquiry
of course
brings up all of our investments and dependencies as Black people upon
those
power structures and narratives that we want to disrupt, fracture and
resist.
invisibility
conspicuous
invisibility:
In my work around
issues of race and
representation I have found that race’s constituent elements - gender
and
class - always inform and interrogate
the processes of racialization.
Understanding this, is one way to understand how power works. In the last few years, it has become
relevant and even necessary to include the national subject as one of
the
constituents of RACE. In light of this,
I have been fascinated by the hyper present absence of black and brown
female
bodies and reproductive potential within the production of power.
The most
representative and analogous image of
this is the Hottentot Venus, Sartjee Bartman, the South African woman
who was
exhibited throughout Europe in the 19th century. On the surface she is powerless – an object
viewed as a freak of nature. The western representation of her -- big
booty,
hyper-sexual, primitive -- erases her as a political subject. It is her very hyper presence as a body that
makes her disappear and in turn, unrecognizable. Meanwhile,
if you scratch the surface a bit deeper, you find out
that this woman did agree to participate in these tours.
You find that she was literate and fairly
educated. And though we don’t know all
of the circumstances of her decision to join the circus of western
colonialism,
there is the possibility that she in fact had some agency.
Maybe she wanted to travel, see the world,
and on someone else’s dime.
I give this example
because my work troubles this
question of subjectivity and agency that I think most liberal thinking
simply
describes as un-empowered. If women,
and specifically black and brown women, do not exist in any meaningful
way in
western philosophical[5]
and political discourses, nor in Black discourses: veiled in Fanon[6]
and in Dubois’ descriptions of double consciousness[7],
or Carmichael’s Black Power; I propose we take on these conspicuous
invisibilities as spaces of resistance where we can name ourselves and
perform
those identities.
Power can be
invisible, it can
be fantastic, it can be dull and routine.
It can be obvious, it can reach you by baton of the police, it
can speak
the language of your thoughts and desires. It can feel like remote
control, it
can exhilarate like liberation, it can travel through time, and it can
drown
you in the present. It is dense and superficial, it can cause you
bodily
injury, and it can harm you without seeming ever to touch you. It is
systematic
and it is particularistic and it is often both at the same time. It
causes
dreams to live and dreams to die. We can and must call it by
recognizable names,
but so too we need to remember that power arrives in forms that can
range from
blatant white supremacy and state terror to ‘furniture without
memories.’[8]
The project
Invisible is an ongoing
episodic
multidirectional, multimedia, narrative that speculates the black
liberation
parallel to eurotrash western civilization in the conflux of public
record and
sci-fi.
In 2099, the
transatlantic slave trade never
happened. The event disappeared from
the history books. A strange cult keeps
the false memory alive through ritual bondage and transport of bodies
across
imaginary borders. In ‘Invisible’,
maritime meets speed of light. Inspired
by Ralph Ellison’s novel, ‘the Invisible Man’, Virginia Woolf’s
‘Orlando’, and
John Akomfrah’s film ‘Last Angel of History’, this time based
electronic
blkgrrrlretrofuture, sci-fi action-documentary takes on issues of black
radicalism, turn of the century phenomena, passing and cross-over
cultures. Two main characters dominate
our experience in this futurescape.
One, Z.L. Rhinehart is a CLEANER, the other, Nia Tabono, a
TIME-TOURIST. We now have the
technology to move freely between a time/space continuum without
adverse
effect. There is no present/future
‘consequence’ for altering the past. The grandfather paradox has no
weight:
thanks to a corps of CLEANERS. This
chameleon caste melts into any era as they follow the every move of
careless
TIME-TOURISTs, picking up after them, shifting events to remedy their
clumsy
interactions with past and future landscapes.
‘Episode
03 here, now
and
then: meet me in Okemah’ activates
a
documentary photograph of a lynching in Oklahoma circa 1911. The first
installment of this episode: an outdoor video projection and ambient
sound
piece, launched 12.01.03 to 12.07.03 in the visual arts facility of the
UC, San
Diego campus. Another installment at Art Center will live as audio and
video
projection within spaces of transition, movement and suspension -- the
stairwell, the airspace, the elevator. Part visceral experience, part
clairvoyance, these site-specific audio and video installations
intervene into
the time and space of memory and architecture through a speculative
fiction.
When this episode begins, our time
tourist, Nia, finds herself
yanked from a rivers edge to a skiff.
An entrepreneurial photographer enlists her help.
Above on the bridge, our Cleaner, Rhinehart,
blends into the crowd of working Joes who have come to see the sights. Dangling from the steel girders, Laura
Nelson and her fourteen year old son swing in the breeze, necks broken
by one
inch hemp rope.
The performance/execution of this project was a 7day audio/video installation embedded into transitory public space: stairwells, vestibules, catwalks, hallways and elevators. The installment concentrates on multiple perspectives of violence and environment set at the moment of a photograph of a lynching of a black woman, Laura Nelson and her son, from a bridge in Okemah, Oklahoma on May 25, 1911 and the present day recovery of that place/time. The piece encourages the audience to perform by way of internalization or incorporation as well as by way of disassociation and dismissal. It is as much a performance to not see/hear the piece as it is to acknowledge its presence. Anyone could walk through, into or past the work. Just as we do or don’t witness, recognize, engage in, open ourselves up to the daily, ordinary violence of becoming a political subject.
space/time,
performance, non-narrative strategies
and reception
The narrative keeps
me afloat as myself in my
world without excuses or explanations.
It is an antidote to “keep that nigger boy running.”
I have a very
elaborate back-story to my project,
Invisible, that at this moment is only for me. My back-story is set in
a future
where time travel is possible, Time Tourists are picked up after by a
commoner
caste of Cleaners, a resistance movement plots the disruption of a
Eurocentric
time/space continuum, and the transatlantic slave trade never happened
but is
kept alive by a pseudo-religious cult. I chose science fiction or
rather it
chose me because it is unlike the more character-driven genre :
literature.
Sci-fi speaks to and contends with social relations. The back-story,
the
narrative, is the vehicle for me to get into the issues at hand: the
inherent
violence of subjectivity.
I still grapple with
the place of the narrative
and its performed-ness in my work as its own body.
When experience is everything to a piece, what happens when you
refuse a narrative to your audience? Is this a way of silencing myself
or
speaking more loudly? And what really are the strategies of conspicuous
invisibility that originally brought me to this material in the first
place?
More recently, my work has found its way into the tricky world of
abstraction.
form
‘don’t
forget
to pick up your stone…’
a bridge. a mother.
a son. a crowd above. a river
below. the shutter opens and quickly closes - as quickly as a breath
held by a
new devotee dressed in white at the river's edge dunked gracelessly by
the
pastor and comes up panting for air - saved.
as quickly as the knot tightens and the neck breaks. suspended, this moment rises above the river
below taunting gravity. it lengthens.
we remember. we blink. we see
the horizon. we take it with us. we sink.
We listen and voices carry us.
we float. we blink and it's over.
it's like it never
happened and we feel it in our
bones.
‘Invisible’ is
propelled by
movement. Not progress perse, but movement nonetheless. It is
traveling,
mobile, and transitory in its relationship to form – stopping in one
place only
for moments – but leaves behind traces and memories of its expanse. I
traverse
media: video, audio, text, and architecture. Each installment utilizes
diverse
media building upon the strengths of the relationship of form and
content. Each
element is conceived within the whole but with the conceit that it may
function
independent of other elements. In
keeping with my theoretical and material concerns, the piece plays with
grand
scale spectacle in the form of two-story video projections, discreet
sound
infiltrations in elevators, hallways and entry-ways, and the uneasy
relationship of the body to the art object or aesthetic experience by
way of
public and private performance.
Structured as an
episodic
project, ‘Invisible’ unfolds over time. Each episode has its own
integrity and
relationship to the other. They do not
appear in chronological order and each takes form through multiple
installments. The performance of these parts regenerate from the
process of
research and immersion, to the production of each element, to its
presentation,
to the audience’s participation.
episode 03.
One image has held my attention for over a
year. In
researching G.H. Farnum, the ‘bachelor foto graffer’ of Okemah, Ok, I
found two
more images that bookend the one published in Without Sanctuary –
Lynching
Photography in America. In one, the frame tightens, boxing the
spectators
in and brings more detail to Laura and L.W. swinging below the bridge.
Few
stances change, and everything is in focus – just a document of what
happened.
A good souvenir for folks to take home. The other is the blooper, the
un-staged, the unrehearsed. The frame is closer still, and all heads
point down
as the spectators on the bridge lean over the steel railing to see the
bodies
below. The three together move spatially and temporally but resist
narrative.
They are not chronologically fixed
Pushed. Shoved.
Jostled.
Swaying
off balance, righting himself he looks past the tow-headed boy between
arm and
torso. He looks past the railing resting between them and the river
below. Past
his toes hovering the edge, water slips below, he sees jute, knotted,
twisted. kggghhhrrrrrrkahh. Spiraling
held taut and heavy pulling downward.
Rhinehart sinks at knees. hffffuuuh. The walls of the room
flicker
blank. Breathe. hssss--h. Fingers raw
and red grip thick mass hemp woven, a handful. Gloveless wrap round
rope, over,
around, through -- a lanyard. Temporary not staying long.
brrrrrrhhhhhuuuuph.
Head down, eyes closed; mane shakes worried and impatient.
Another handful of rope, thicker and longer.
Looping three four times, rough edges saw callous and skin tough from
wear.
Pulling through coils waiting and ready. The standing end short and
knotted and
strangled.
Neckless
the rope pulls free, a magic trick.
Gripping metal, a
ball; kneecaps cradle Rhinehart’s forehead. Light touch - heavy load.[9]
In late June, 2003 I
traveled to
Okemah, Oklahoma to collect images, sound, text and a sense of place. I
spent
several days at the bridge at Yarbough’s crossing shooting video,
photographs
and recording sound. On my last day of shooting, I decided to walk
across the
bridge, now a well traveled two lane paved county road. Glued to the
shoulder I
peered over the edge with the lens of the video camera.
I
lean over
the side of the bridge. I’ve spent the
last week nervous, anxious, tentative.
Just before ‘leaving for good’ – I’ve got everything I need.’
I’ve only
looked across this river from its bank. The river water close to my
toes. My feet on sandy shorelines and
sinking a
bit.
I
lean over the side of the bridge.
Minutes ago I was in the red rental car with every intention of
leaving
the scene, on my way out of town. a job well done.
So long, it’s been good to know ya. Gotta
go. I scanned the
roadway, empty on a good Christians all in church Sunday morning. I had been concerned about cars passing and
the shoulder too narrow for me to walk the length of the concrete. I was concerned about people asking me a lot
of questions. I was worried about being
alone, nobody knowing my whereabouts or activities.
then I thought, how much of a risk can it be to walk over this
bridge. One car passes every 20minutes
at the most, the shoulder is wider than me, and all week long I’ve
driven this
stretch of road, climbed down to the riverbank, wandered through these
woods
without incident, why now would anyone take notice.
I hold the
camera at chest level cradled by both hands.
I walk without looking. I’m sure
it looks fine, I switch everything to automatic. This
is not ideal, but very convenient. I know
that the footage will bump with each step I take. I
keep walking. Every so often I stop to
look around, take it all in. the woods,
the road, the river in the
distance, below. I get over my
worries. I walk confidently to the
middle of the bridge and point the camera down over the side.
Half
expecting Laura Nelson to appear before me, I stare the lens down into
the
ripples of the water. Zoom ravenously
at so much brown – green liquid and the sparkles from the sun like
stars lost
at sea. EEEhhhhn! Eeeeeehhhn!
Eeeeeerhhhn! My head turns, back
straightens. I face a ford F150 barreling
towards the
bridge. I am not interested in big
pick up trucks and what they want to honk at me. Again
the honks and more urgent.
I look up more carefully this time and more annoyed. Wide load.
Wide load. black on yellow. Bold strung across the bumpers of
the F150
and the flatbed behind. A house
approaches. Wide load. I assess my size
and the sliver between the house and the waist high cement wall of the
bridge.
The F150 passes, I sprint across the two lane paved county road to the
other
side. Only a few good options and my body took survival.
In another version of the same story I jump
over the bridge and meet Laura Nelson on the way down.
With no time to
switch the
camera to standby, this episode is recorded on video tape. This footage
becomes
the template and mirror for the video loop entitled: ‘rope’. ‘Rope’
pieces
together the perspectives of the three main characters in this episode:
Rhinehart walking on the bridge looking down, Nia nervously shifting on
the
riverbank below looking up, and Laura Nelson hanging, swinging,
floating eyes
fixed on the horizon. ‘Rope’ is part clairvoyance as it situates us in
the
moment that Rhinehart experiences the bridge and all its trauma. This
six
minute loop incorporates my near death experience with multiple
perspectives of
the past, present and future violences of the site: the Old Schoolton
Bridge at
Yarbough crossing of the North Canadian river, Oklahoma. This loop then
inhabits a semi-circular wall beneath a staircase and catwalk and it’s
double
image dominates an adjacent wall a full story above.
There is a break
between the
double projection of the still image of G.H. Farnum’s photograph ã 2897[10]
of the spectacle of Laura and L.W. Nelson’s lynching and a loop of the
riverbed
and water moving below. This messy line emphasizes the iconographic
potential
of the top image where townspeople from Okemah, Ok circa 1911 now lean
against
the metal railing of a catwalk of the Visual Arts Facility and Laura
and L.W.
shift the weight of two brick columns one functional the other
decorative. It
also questions the point of view of the photographer, past and present,
of this
scene.
Both sets of double
projections
infiltrate and dominate space. From above, they stare across to one
another,
from below they are separated by a long, semi-enclosed hallway. They
also work
to transform these transitional spaces, illuminating a walkway with
flowing
water or with its flickering details of trees, riverbanks, bridges and
birds
soaring above lends texture and shape to an neglected wall. In the case of the first installment, these
sites of public architecture activate the image and open up meaning to
incorporate both aesthetic and social concerns. Space is the new
frontier.
Being haunted
draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit
magically,
into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not
as cold
knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.[11]
Sound travels and
resonates. It
is the audio component of this project that reverberates over time.
Implanted
into the architecture, under the stairway, in the elevators and within
a
vestibule, the voices of crickets, birds, cars passing, a church
sermon, a
whip, a moan, footsteps, water splashing, a choir, echo. These voices,
culled
from field recordings from research at Galveston, Texas’ Juneteenth
celebration, ten June days in central Oklahoma, and a reading by Grisha
Coleman
of two paragraphs of text from episode 03, are refashioned into
representative
excerpts and journeys. The shortest, ‘rope’ 1min. 16 sec. conflates
Laura
Nelson’s memory of the white mob two weeks later at the courthouse and
her
subsequent passage from jail cell to the North Canadian river. The
longest
piece, ‘church’ 8min. 06sec. time travels an ambient landscape that
hints at
revelation and redemption. I am loath to narrate these sound-scapes
because
their strength is that they defy narrative structures, but they do tell
our
stories.
The most formidable element of this project
is the
text itself. It is multi-layered. Zoom out: there is the meta project
and time
travel meta-narrative of Nia, Rhinehart and the archivist who builds
their
stories out of traces and artifacts. Zoom in: we are in the woods along
a
riverbed staring at a spider’s web pulling the focus ring of a digital
video
camera. From reams and reams of imaginative prose, self-reflexive field
notes,
fictional diary entries and postcards I have pulled out two paragraphs
to brace
the two installments of episode 03: meet me in Okemah. Beyond its
influence
upon other elements and inspiration for further research, the written
text of
this project remains an archive. There are plans to incorporate the
specific
narrative of episode 03 into a final installment that takes book form.
This
object will carry sound image and text equally with two versions: the
LP box
set and a chapbook with accompanying CD.
Methodology
1. Stax v. Motown
Stax is always the
raw cousin,
rebellious stepchild of an American musical landscape dominated by
rhythm and
blues in the early 1960s. Motown was the sound and the style that
crossed us
over, filling Top 40 lists and juke-boxes nationwide. Both are
innovations in
their own right. The ‘stripped down
soul’ of Stax gave voice to singers like Otis Redding and the Staple
Singers
and songwriters like Isaac Hayes and David Porter. The finish and
finesse of
Motown does not gloss over the dominance of Black music and culture in
the
popular consciousness and its relationship to a growing civil rights
movement
and the push towards integration in the 1960’s and 70’s in the United
States.
I am looking for the
moment of
impact and innovation that plays out in the everyday tension of Stax v.
Motown. I propose it is this tension
that propels culture, history and memory for Black people in the
Americas. You cannot have one without the
other.
Denmark Vesey necessitates Frederick Douglas and vice versa. The Underground Railroad stays on track in
dialog with maroon communities. Meanwhile each form lives within a
construct of
captivity and struggle.
At it’s most literal
my approach
is one of pitting artists, events, objects, information and styles
against one
another to push their potential to the fore.
I look at work that may be considered raw and gritty in tandem
with its
contemporary crossover cousin. As a process and approach, Stax v.
Motown is the
Black vernacular dialectic. Move over
Herr Hegel.
2. performance
There
is a spider’s web and she is in the center - spotlit.
I want to capture that image. That moment. At
the very least I want not to disturb
it. I am glad I see it before I plow
right through turning the lacework into sticky threads across my neck
and
shoulders. I step to the side. Flash
forward -- wipe my face clean with one solid stroke down forehead over
eyes,
across nose fist closing past mouth. I
stare. Flash back -- the sun treasures
this web. Lattice. An
eye tugging at nearby branches. It seems
stupid to point the camera at
something so thin and commonplace. For
the first time in hours, my eyes settle calmly. And
I steady the camera smoothly and turning the iris, the focus
ring and readjusting the eye-piece I finally find it.
shards of light against the strings are so delicate that they
get
lost in the fuzz and noise of the camera lens.
Focus, unfocus, turn left all the way then right all the way. No stop right there. Slow
down, take your time. There it is. slowly pull focus and zoom in.
don’t move a muscle and take a breath to hold for at least a
minute. My body becomes a tripod as I
swallow down the urge to gulp the thick cool breeze.
Stupid really to think that I could see anything this way.
Panning
down from the web I imagine what Nia would see. The
rush of anxiety for this girl alone losing her shit in the
woods in a time that is not hers thrusts my eyes and then my hands
pointing the
camera from floor to ceiling of this lush green place.
Looking for a calm spot. A way out.
Looking for air. Looking for the
footsteps coming closer. Footfall -
light through heavy sand then a rustling crunching steady rhythm. Quiet.
Look up. There he is.
white shirt collared. Black bands
running from waist over
shoulders hoisting up pants also black.
A brim far out from a hat that covers a face with bright eyes. A hand reaching down. She
slaps it away, ducks her head down and
lets out another moan.
Documentarian,
archivist, researcher, ethnographer,
carpet bagger, griot. In all of these manifestations, the work of
gathering and
transmission insists upon active physical presence. The body is a
vehicle for
research and social interaction. I pick up and leave the safe haven of
the
studio and head straight to the source. I follow in the footsteps of
social
theorists like Foucault, Dubois and Fanon and artists such as Anna
Deveara
Smith, Shu Lea Cheang, Janet Cardiff, Mark Dion and Renee Green.
The line drawn
between performing and researching wears down, spread thin by constant
crossing, stretching, bending and breaking. At once the ethnographer
and
documentarian gathers field recordings and returns ‘home’ to condense
these
experiences into representative image, text and audio tracks. The very
act of
gathering informs each subsequent step. Intrinsic to the collecting is
the
knowledge that these recordings will be synthesized and assembled into
a
document with its own characteristics and criteria for presentation.
This
built-in reflexivity informs and often determines the treatment of the
recordings for the next phase of the performance. Each document has its
own set
of rules and logics, but inhabit a larger whole. These documents are
malleable
and reform as I rework, revise and revisit the materials and the
performance
itself. The viewer is also implicated in this cycle. The completed
circuit
includes a participatory audience.
An outsider with
good intentions[12],
the
archivist carpetbagger drops in on a community and rummages it for its
jewels
and treasures, then catalogs the local resources for use at a later
date. What
may be described as pillaging doubles as a reclamation project. The
Diaspora
necessitates a transitory griot. This 21st century griot
reconfigures these stories with sound and image and gives voice to our
collective memories within a public sphere. In this way, the narrative
shifts
from its traditional oral form to a non-linear spatial experience.
3. sci fi
Octavia Butler
teaches me the
limits and constraints of the body in concert with the limitlessness of
the
imagination. Samuel Delaney teaches me the semiotics of science fiction
and to
engage the form for the purposes of social critique and personal
discovery.
Through these living legacies of Black sci fi, I’ve learned that
science
fiction as a genre reflects back the society and its norms. Both
Delaney and
Butler provide journeys rich with sentient beings, shifting realities
and a
potential for change. These two skilled writers/scholars/visionaries
pen worlds
anchored by familiar details and a deep, dark, distant referent of the
Black
experience in the Americas. But these worlds are also places we’ve
never been
before, liminal and transformational. The spaces of Afro-future in
their
writing are visceral, emotional and visual. I owe a great debt to them
for
infuriating and exciting me into exploring the potentials of
speculation.[13]
In the case of Invisible, science fiction is a strategy that veils and
unveils
in order to open up a broader dialog around race, space, time and
vision.
1. Black holes and
time travel
‘note to future
self: You
forgot something, go back and get it.’
Physicists currently
know how to
travel into the future. It is all about speed.
They say, If you get
on a space
ship – the space shuttle for example – and you travel at light speed or
at as
close to light speed as possible, you will be moving faster than those
you left
behind. In order to notice a difference, you must travel far. And what will be 25 years for those left
behind, will be 5 for you.[14] You will
return to a future that may not
remember you at all.
They say that the
past is more
difficult.
You need a black hole. At the edge of the black hole just before it
sucks you in – time stands still. Static. If the black hole, this huge
vacuum
of anti-matter had an egress one could travel back in time. It would
become a
portal or what sci-fi buffs call a worm hole.[15]
Though I would be
excited to
hover at the edge of a black hole imagining the possibilities… I wonder
if the
past is not already wedded to the future so much that the first trip to
days
and years ahead doesn’t also take us backwards. What happens to the 20
years
difference upon your return to earth after rapid travel far away?
2. Master :: Slave //
Hegel ::
Reconstruction
“From century to
century you'll remember me
In
history - not a mystery or a memory
God
by nature, mind raised in Asia
Since
you was tricked, I have to raise ya
From
the cradle to the grave, but remember
You're
not a slave
Cause
we was put here to be much more than that
But
we couldn't see it because our mind was trapped
But
I'm here to break away the chains, take away the pains
Remake
the brains, reveal my name
I
guess nobody told you a little knowledge is dangerous
It
can't be mixed, diluted; it can't be changed or switched
Here's
a lesson if ya guessing and borrowing
Hurry
hurry, step right up and keep following
The
leader
…. and follow
and follow, because the tempo's a trail
The
stage is a cage, the mic is a third rail…”
- Radio Rakim Follow
the
Leader.[16]
slavery the peculiar
American
institution.
There is much to be
gained from
theorizing subjectivity and representation through the black body.
Susan
Buck-Morss makes a compelling argument that in his work on
Phenomenology of the
Mind and more specifically in considering the Master/Bondsman
relationship,
that Hegel does indeed consider the context of the transatlantic slave
trade as
well as independence and resistance movements in the Americas as
exemplified in
the case of Haiti at the end of the 17th century.
We
are left with only two alternatives.
Either Hegel was the blindest of all the blind philosophers of
freedom
in the Enlightenment Europe, surpassing Locke and Rousseau by far in
his
ability to block out reality right in front of his nose (the print right
in front of his nose at the breakfast table [Hegel read Minerva
religiously –
and it reported upon the revolution in Haiti]); or Hegel knew – knew
about real
slaves revolting successfully against real masters, and he elaborated
his
dialectic of lordship and bondage deliberately within his contemporary
context.[17]
The traffic of Black
bodies
between the African continent, the Americas and Europe is the invisible
ground
in which Hegel theorizes the life and death struggle of coming to
self-consciousness: the process of becoming which he attributes to
Spirit.
But
now this young lecturer, [Hegel] … made the audacious move to …
inaugurate, as
the central metaphor of his work, not slavery versus some mythical
state of
nature (as Hobbes to Rousseau had done earlier), but slaves
versus
masters, thus bringing into his text the present, historical realities
that
surrounded it like invisible ink.[18]
I believe that this
invisible
ink that Buck-Morss proposes is RACE.
It is the racialization of African slavery in the Americas which
remains
unspoken in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Hegel assumes that the slave, and
especially
in this case the African slave had not had subjectivity prior to
contact. With
that, it will always appear that the African slave should struggle and
fight
for ‘freedom’ and subjectivity.
The problem is that
there is no
acknowledgment really of what captivity means.
In the case of the transatlantic slave trade, captivity means a
stripping away of culture, history and tradition as well as a total
displacement
of close to 15 million peoples. We cannot underestimate the effects of
the
experience of the middle passage for these kidnapped people. Within the
varied
traditions and world views how was this journey across an ocean in
total
confinement and lock down understood by these enslaved African peoples?
Orlando
Patterson describes the transition that a slave goes through to become
a slave
and thus become socially dead. The
first is to totally break with the past.
The slave is uprooted from his/her community, “he is
de-socialized and
depersonalized.” The next stage is the introduction of the slave into
the world
of the master, “but it involves the paradox of introducing him as a
non-being.” The slave is totally
defined in relation to the master and is socially dead without history
or a
past and without his/her own community: “the slave will remain forever
an
unborn being.”[19]
This is where we find
Hegel. The
description of the Master/Bondsman relationship is described from the
point of
view of the becoming subject, the Master. This precludes any other
cosmology of
a life except that of the dominant culture. In this way, freedom via
Hegel will
always be a trap for the slave. A trap
of interdependency or death. You may argue that for the slave
population in
Haiti, there was no choice but death – better to fight for independence
than
live a social death without rights or agency.
Then why Hegel?
Hegel’s
dialectic, by way of the Master/Bondsman passage, alerts us to the
inherent
violence of subject-ness. The other reverberates against the self
--- and somehow we know more (§179, 181, 184). My theory is that Hegel
discusses Master/Slave independence + dependence in regards to
self-consciousness
as a way of understanding the life or death struggle that this process
necessitates WITHOUT the negation of death. Self + other as equals both coming to
self-consciousness in relation to one another, recognizing (Hegel §184)[20]
can only result in a life or death struggle, that’s what Hegel proposes
to us,
that’s what he comes to (Hegel §187)[21].
And then he throws out that that won’t work because Death is the
ultimate negation (Hegel §188)[22].
Then presto – Master/Bondsman (Hegel §190). Like
magic he has found a way to work out this process without the
risk of real death. Possibly the risk (in the place of
death),
persists in the dependency/independence between the Master + his slave. Death exists allegorically as a social death
as in the case of the slave[23]. Hegel offers a little role-playing as a
stand-in for the trial by death between these equals: self and other.
If you then step back
to Susan
Buck-Morss’ discussion of the historical context for Hegel’s dialectic
we must
consider seriously the significance of the Black body with regards to
this
inherent violence of recognition and becoming. W.E.B. Dubois highlights
the
peculiar nature of the institution of slavery in the U.S. in his
discussion of
the Reconstruction period. In many ways, the southern plantation
system’s
reliance upon slave labor was antithetical to capital and economic
growth
during the industrial revolution. Dubois’ perception of how race trumps
class
in the case of Reconstruction and its relationship to the failures of
manumission and emancipation for the economic and social systems in the
U.S.
further emphasizes the presence of another dynamic process that is not
just
about the price of cotton.[24]
The institution of Code Noir: the legal insistence upon the ‘thingness’
of
Black slaves in the Americas, presents evidence that the relationship
is
cathectic.[25]
It is not
just that the presence of racialized slavery in Europe and the Americas
offers
a paradox and scapegoat to cries of freedom, but it is a case study for
the
both the internalization and representation of the violence of
self-consciousness for the Western subject.
3. violence and
representation
Miss Otis Regrets,
she’s unable to lunch today,
madam,
Miss Otis Regrets,
she’s unable to lunch today.
She is sorry to be
delayed,
But last evening
down in Lover’s Lane she strayed,
madam.
Miss Otis Regrets,
she’s unable to lunch today.
When she woke up
and found that her dream of love was
gone, madam,
She ran to the man
who had led her so far astray
She drew a gun and
shot her love down, madam,
Miss Otis regrets,
she’s unable to lunch today.
When the mob cam
and got her and dragged her from the
jail, madam
They strung her
upon the old willow across the way,
And the moment
before she died,
She lifted up her
lovely head and cried, madam….
Here is a strange
and bitter
crop.[26]
Miss Otis regrets,
she’s unable to lunch today.
Miss Otis regrets,
she’s unable to lunch today.[27]