The Yale Review

Table of contents :
IntroductionNew writing from Windham-Campbell Prize recipients
Why I WriteFinding a life’s work
essayFree All NecksLessons from anAmerican artist
essayThe Night WatchSeeking sanctuary from the Troubles
essayThe Temporary SurvivorRevisiting the Dag Hammarskjöld crash
fictionWinner
fictionIn Medias Res
port-folio
dramaThe Emcee Inquisition, RevisitedAn excerpt and annotation
dramablack pain reduxA dramatic monologue
conversationDarran Anderson and Sapphire GossA writer and an artist onthe alchemy of place
poetrymaterial elements of some years of the artist’s lifeor fabric, wood, paint,and strings
poetryStill Life
booksLife in the AlgorithmTwo new books on the culture of the web
Contributors

Citation preview

Introduction: New writing from Windham-Campbell Prize recipients

Michael Kelleher, Meghan O'Rourke The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 5-7 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914438

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914438

Introduction New writing from WindhamCampbell Prize recipients

I

n 1982, the poet Seamus Heaney delivered the commencement address at Fordham University. He sat on the stage in the pouring rain between two honorary degree recipients: Robert S. McNamara, former U.S. secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War, and Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets. “I looked to either side of me,” he told an audience later, “and I thought, well, between the puppeteer and the politician sits the poet.”

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The world of literature likewise sits adjacent to both the gravity of politics and the levity of puppets, as the writers in this special issue of The Yale Review demonstrate. In its pages, you will find new work by this year’s recipients of the Windham-Campbell Prizes at Yale University—prizes that we at The Yale Review admire for elevating international work (in poetry, in drama, in fiction, in nonfiction) that pushes the boundaries of contemporary literature. Like Heaney, the Irish writer Darran Anderson animates what it was like to spend his childhood in a country torn by violence, raising crucial questions about the damage that colonial power inflicts on individual lives. Susan Williams, who has done extraordinary work on the West’s covert war against African decolonization, builds on her earlier book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? (2011) with a piece that looks at recent developments in the investigation into the mysterious 1961 plane crash that killed the second secretary-­general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld. Alexis Pauline Gumbs explores the influence of twentieth-­century painter and educator Alma Thomas on her own work, thinking about how the art of puppetry can uniquely render the horrors of the Jim Crow South. The work here is not just thematically bold but also formally playful. Percival Everett’s story “In Medias Res” begins—yes—in the middle; the result is a visceral reminder of the thrill of encountering stories that disarm us. The narrator of Jasmine Lee-­Jones’s dramatic monologue “black pain redux” lives in the painful gap between the two poles of IRL (in real life) and OAT (online all the time). In her story “Winner,” Ling Ma’s narrator haunts her old apartment, only to find that things are not as she imagined; the ordinary becomes alienating, as Ma uses tone to enact the slippages of identity in late capitalism. The Iñupiaq Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik, who spent her childhood living with an adoptive white family, offers poems that celebrate the icy landscapes of her ancestral home, punctuated with the cries of animals and tender plant life. In “The Emcee Inquisition,” Dominique Morisseau channels characters whose verbal pyrotechnics evoke both the ravages of racism and misogyny and the vivifying power of Black joy. We have also

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included an essay called “Why I Write” by Greil Marcus, whose keynote lecture at this year’s Windham-Campbell Prizes festival was a rousing reminder of how mysterious yet precise writing can be. Between the politician and the puppeteer sits the poet—or sit the writers, in this case. We think you will find, as we have, that in this space that Heaney evoked are writers who shake us out of complacency and into new forms of attention. —michael kelleher and meghan o’rourke

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Why I Write: Finding a life's work Greil Marcus The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 8-18 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914439

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914439

essay

Why I Write Finding a life’s work Greil Marcus

I

When I started in 1968, with a record review in Rolling Stone, I don’t think I even knew the word, at least insofar as it referred to a kind of writing, or thinking. It seemed pompous and pretentious. I didn’t want that. I was a fan, writing out of fandom, out of love and betrayal: You have to hear this! This is a fraud! You have to hear this even more! Then, one day in late 1969, I set out to write about the forthcoming Rolling Stones album, Let It Bleed. I heard it, I read it, as much more than another Rolling Stones record, though in those days, every Rolling Stones album was an event, a summing up, a document of where the world its listeners lived in was at that moment. But Let It Bleed was more. It had a longer look back and a longer gaze forward. It was about— or it was an attempt to enact—the close of a chapter in history, the end of the idea, already being sold as a brand, of “The Sixties.” write criticism.

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From its first song, “Gimme Shelter,” to its last, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” the music said that a thrilling time when anything seemed possible was about to turn to stone and open into a future of dread and terror, into a realm where to speak falsely, or even carelessly, could be fatal to body and soul. And I found that to get that down, to get at what was going on with Mick Jagger’s voice and Keith Richards’s guitar, I had to broaden the context of the music as far as I could. I had to write about photography and movies and fiction and every form of cultural speech that was feeding into the album and bleeding out of it. Writing that piece was when I got an idea of what criticism was and what it could be. It was an analysis of one’s own response to something out there in the world, in this case a $3.98 LP. Why am I reacting to this so intensely? Why does this make me smile and scare me at the same time? Does it matter if he’s saying “death” or “bed,” or does the real power in the word lie in the way it slides away as it’s sung? To ask these questions was a claim of cultural citizenship: not only do I have the right to say in public what I think this is and why that matters, I have an obligation to do so. Listen to me; I’ll listen to you. That was the beginning of what I have done with my life since. I realized I had a choice as a writer: make the world bigger and more interesting and live in that world, and find a life’s work, or shrink everything down to your own crabbed and paltry self, hang on for years conning editors and publishers and yourself, and find your life’s a lie. that have shaped my own sense of what writing can be and where it can go, confrontations with something outside of yourself, experiences that cause the world to suddenly look different, and you have to come to grips with that, you have to think about that, and a germ is planted and sooner or later you will have to write about it. Maybe there are hundreds, thousands. But only a few really stand out. Reading Moby-­Dick for the third or fourth time, and finding myself overwhelmed at the way a single line early in the book can

there are other critical events

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bring the next two hundred pages rushing back as if I’d lived them myself—which, since this is a book, and you’re supposed to read it, along with all the generations since 1851, I had. Listening over and over to the Firesign Theatre’s 1969 album How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All from 1983 to 1988 while writing a book because every time I did, I heard something I had never heard before. Reading The Great Gatsby for the twentieth time and still not quite believing that any ordinary person, drunk or sober, could have written “… a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” It’s a critical event that for me never ends: It was only a few years ago, reading that last page, that I saw how the limitless floating image of the green breast of the new world falls down, is reduced, just a few lines later, to the paltry and impoverished image of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Just as it is only now, writing this, that I noticed that the new world pandered in whispers, as if whispers had never been there before. There’s something about the spell the book casts, the way it again and again conjures its own transitory enchanted moments, that can make a reader miss such things, being too carried away by one rhythm to recognize another. There was the day in 1989 when I was merging onto the freeway off the Bay Bridge toward Berkeley, with “Gimme Shelter” on the radio, wondering what it was that had kept it on the air for twenty years, wondering what made it seem absolutely new, in the strongest sense somehow unheard, and deciding that, when I got home, I would have to try to write about that, when a car cut in front of me, and I had to change lanes without looking to avoid hitting it,

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and thinking, as my heart went back down to my chest when I realized the lane was clear, that if I had to go, there were worse ways. There was a night in 1970 when, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, on what I remember as a huge screen that was not a rectangle but a square, I saw F. W. Murnau’s 1927 silent film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and felt for the first time that I was being given a glimpse of what movies could be. The vamp stands up from the dirt where she’s seducing the farmer into murdering his wife for her. She begins to shimmy. Sell your farm and come with me to the City!—and then suddenly a shaking montage of noise and movement and jazz and dancing takes over the screen, everything happening at once, every image fading into and then rushing out of every other, smiles exploding over pounding drums and a rush of air, the air of machines and electricity, blows through like a wind blowing trees and farms and rivers off the map. There was the day in 2013 when I walked into the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and stopped in front of Jackson Pollock’s 1947 Alchemy, one of his first poured paintings, one of his first experiments, or proofs, that by practicing an arcane art you really could turn not merely a few cans of lead paint into millions of dollars, but turn something anyone might have in a garage into something no one could have predicted and that had anything been different on the day it was made would never have existed at all. I had walked past it many times before, but this day I stopped. I stood up close, and started looking at it, and then realized I couldn’t. There was too much there, too much going on, too much movement, like the montage in Sunrise, which you can’t see all at once either. I began to see, or think I did, that just as I can only remember Sunrise on a square screen, now I could begin to discern the intention hidden in the chance. I decided I would divide the painting, eighty-­seven inches wide and forty-­five inches high, into square inches, and look at them one at a time. I stood there trying to see into the first square inch in the top right corner. I did that for twenty minutes before realizing

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it would take the rest of my life, or another life on top of that, to traverse the whole thing. In 2006, at the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, I was invited to present a showing of The Manchurian Candidate at the Piazza Maggiore—a huge square with a huge screen hung from a huge building under a blue-­black sky. It had been my favorite movie since the first time I’d seen it, and I had seen it dozens of times since. I even wrote a book about it. I knew every line of dialogue, the way every scene was set and unfolded, and yet every time I saw it I had the uncanny sense that what was happening didn’t have to happen, that there were a thousand choices between every word or gesture that didn’t have to be made in the way that they were. I always had a sense that what was happening could be taken back—that at the end, with Frank Sinatra looking down from himself, as if he has to hide himself from himself, and cursing in shame and despair, “Hell. Hell,” it did not have to end the way it did. The thousands of people watching were silent. As the movie headed toward its climax they were even quieter, as if they had sucked the air out of the night, or the movie was sucking the air out of them. I knew what was coming, but I had never felt before what then happened. Was it the crowd, and the aura it gave off, that made it seem as if the whole city, the whole world, history itself, was witnessing this event, and that this event was the end of the world? When Laurence Harvey’s first bullet hits the forehead of would-­be president James Gregory, and then when his second kills Angela Lansbury, the mother, his mother, I felt as if the bullets were entering me. I couldn’t move. I was pinned to my chair. After a seeming suspension in time, a long ovation rolled through the piazza. People were cupping their hands around their mouths to join the sound, getting up to leave, but I couldn’t move. I sat there until everyone was gone, wanting with everything I had, more intensely than ever before, for it all to come out differently. Finally, I got up and walked through the empty backstreets of the city until I couldn’t walk anymore.

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All of those events and more have stayed with me. I’ve gone back to them, wondering what was going on, wondering at works of art, or the events they make as one looks and listens, again and again, trying to understand what they were saying and what, if I could, I could say to them. But none really measures up to the day I first saw Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin. I’ve always believed that the divisions between high art and low art, between high culture, which really ought to be called sanctified culture, and what’s sometimes called popular culture, but ought to be called everyday culture—the culture of anyone’s everyday life, the music that we listen to, the movies that we see, the museum objects we pass by or are fixed by, the advertisements that infuriate us and that sometimes we find so moving—are false. Nearly everything I’ve written is based on that conviction, and on the learned belief that there are depths and satisfactions, shocks and revelations, in blues, rock ’n’ roll, detective stories, movies, and television as rich and profound as those that can be found anywhere else. In 2015, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, I took part in a public conversation with the late conservative philosopher and musicologist Roger Scruton. In his book The Soul of the World, about the disappearance of the sacred in the modern world and how it might be retrieved and restored, he had defined music, in a passage I quoted back to him, as “a perceived resolution of the conflict between freedom and necessity made available in a space of its own… a reality that cannot be grasped from the ordinary cognitive standpoint.” I said I thought that the dimension of the sacred, of what could not be grasped by the everyday unthinking mind, could be present in any music—pop music, blues, rock n’ roll, jazz—where the listener, whether alone or face-­to-­face or a hundred rows back, can at any time be overcome with a sense of unlikeliness, of the listener’s own inability to account for what is happening—any music where the listener is struck with a sense of awe, a sense of impossibility, a sense that something is taking place beyond intention, that the composer’s or artist’s or performer’s intention cannot account for the sense one receives of the presence

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of some force outside the ordinary thinking mind, the intervention of some external intelligence or even gnosis. Scruton spoke about standing at a train station that morning and how he was overwhelmed, to the point of feeling his humanity taken away, by the inundation of canned music, by electronic dance music on boom boxes, by the mechanized beat of rhythm machines. I told him about an experience I’d had later that same day, at the 34th Street Herald Square subway station. Coming up the stairs, I heard someone playing an electric guitar. The sound was made with extraordinary confidence, it was atonal, notes were shattering in every direction, the volume was like a storm—it was tremendously abrasive and full of life. I walked down to see who was making the noise, and found a middle-­aged man wearing a crown emblazoned with his name: Remy François. That conflict between freedom and necessity came into view: François was playing “House of the Rising Sun,” and he was cutting it to pieces, breaking its back, but there was something about the melody of the song and the history it carried that held its shape, that could not be taken apart. Here was a song that goes back to the nineteenth century, was first recorded in the 1930s by the old-­ timey singer and banjo player Clarence Ashley, was taken up by Bob Dylan in 1962 in a version that two years later was heard by The Animals, who made it into a worldwide hit and brought it into the consciousness of people globally, where it still remained as we were speaking. Remy François, I said, was affirming the tradition the song had made by showing, in a way, that it could not be broken, and that there were infinite ways of seeing and feeling and taking meaning from that little concert. Scruton demurred. “Let me be strictly honest,” he said. “I think that the classical tradition, as I understand it, is the greatest achievement of Western civilization and it contains within it a reflection on the human condition which has no match elsewhere. That is a heretical view from lots of standpoints, but that is what I think.” His demeanor and his certainty, the consideration that had gone into his statement of belief, demanded respect, but I didn’t

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understand it—I didn’t understand how one could live in that world. Who, I thought, leaving the conversation to take questions from the audience, could argue that the sense of transportation, even in the religious sense—being taken out of one’s self, connecting the self to something greater, something, you know in your heart, that every person ever born must experience or be left incomplete—is not as present in the third verse of “Gimme Shelter,” as Merry Clayton pushes out of herself with a last It’s just a shot away, with a pause between It’s and just that speaks for a hesitation in the face of history, an immediate apprehension of its weight, a pause something between taking a breath and the appearance of a new idea—or in the scene in The Godfather when the camera is moving in on Michael Corleone, so slowly, so inexorably, and Al Pacino says, “Then I’ll kill them both”—as in any art, the most exalted in motive, the most revered in time? Well, I believed all that when one day in 1996, on a first visit to Venice, I walked into the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari and saw Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin—a sixteenth-­century altarpiece painting of the Virgin Mary being borne up to heaven by scores of angels while people on the earth look up to her, God looks down, and she, in the middle, is caught somewhere between deliverance and terror. The painting is more than eleven feet wide and more than twenty-­two feet high. As Pollock’s Alchemy is too dense with the stuff of movement and history to grasp in a lifetime, this is so big you can barely take it in, no matter how close or far back you stand: big in size, but big in every other way, too—as will and idea, as drama and spectacle, space and time. I was stunned. I thought I knew something about art. I had seen paintings all over the United States and Europe. I had been moved to tears by some and scared by others. I had seen hundreds of movies, listened to thousands of albums, some of them hundreds of times. I thought I knew something about art, and instantly I realized I knew nothing. I was transfixed. Again and again, I walked back and forth in front of the painting. I stopped and looked up at it. I walked to the

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back of the church to see it from a distance. I walked up to the base again. I did this many times. I kept trying to leave the building, but every time I reached the door, I found myself pulled back in. I couldn’t get out. I was trapped by revelation. Yes, I said to myself, I finally understand. The only great art is high art. And the only high art is religious art. And the only truly religious art is Christian art. Three things to the bottom of my life I don’t believe—yet I was reduced to a puddle of acceptance. I got over it. I’ve gone back to see the painting many times; it was still singular, still overpowering, but now as a work a team of people once made in a particular time and place. That first day has stayed with me, though—as a proof that what art does, maybe what it does most completely, is to tell us, make us feel, that what we think we know we don’t. That’s what it’s for—to show you that what you think can be erased, cancelled, turned on its head, by something you weren’t prepared for. Anything. The turn of a body as an actor delivers a line in a play. The way a guitar passage in a song seems to physically turn over as if it were a person. A scene in a movie when the picture suddenly darkens. A break in a collage that dissolves its apparent language into speaking in tongues. The appearance in an advertisement of something that doesn’t belong, that doesn’t seem to be selling anything, as if it’s the creator’s letter in a bottle, a gremlin sneaking in after the piece has been put to bed, or a cry for help in a fortune cookie. Those occurrences, those tiny critical events, can generate a transformative power that reaches you far more strongly than it reaches the person next to you, or even anyone else on earth, if it reaches any of them at all. Art produces revelations that you might be unable to explain or pass on to anyone else, but revelations that, if you are a writer, you might try desperately to share, in your own words, in your own work. What is the impulse behind art? “I have to be moved in some way,” the guitarist Michael Bloomfield said in 1968, explaining why he didn’t like the San Francisco bands of the time. “They just

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don’t move me enough. The Who moves me, their madness moves me. I like to be moved, be it by spectacle, be it by kineticism, be it by some throbbing on ‘Papa ooh mau mau’ as a chorus, a million times over.” And that, he said, was why he played. Bloomfield was saying, in his way, what I am trying to say: whatever language is the language of your work, if I can move anyone else as that work moved me—as “Gimme Shelter,” Al Pacino’s voice in The Godfather, that painting by Titian, moved me from one place to another, from this place on earth to one three steps away, where the world looks not the same—if I can move anyone even a fraction as much as that, if I can spark the same sense of mystery, and awe, and surprise, as that, then I’m not wasting my time.

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Free All Necks: Lessons from an American artist Alexis Pauline Gumbs The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 35-46 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914441

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914441

essay

Free All Necks Lessons from an American artist Alexis Pauline Gumbs

“Do you see that painting? Look at it move. That’s energy. And I’m the one who put it there. I transform energy with these old limbs of mine.” —alma thomas , on her painting “Red Azaleas”

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the first graduate of Howard University in fine art, founder of the first art gallery for students in the public schools of Washington, DC, and the first Black woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum, is today best known for her bright paintings of plants in motion. Views of fields of flowers from overhead, as if someone who loves color, maybe a baby sister child angel, is zooming by above. Born in 1891, eventually she

alma woodsey thomas,

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Alma Thomas at an exhibition of her work at Howard University Art Gallery in Washington, DC, on April 20, 1966.

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made paintings inspired by images of space travel, another view of the heavens. In 1935, at the age of forty-­three, during a summer off from teaching art at Shaw Junior High School in segregated Washington, DC, Alma took an intensive course with Tony Sarg, often called the “father of American puppetry,” in New York City. The class entailed “one hundred hours of instruction in every phase of the Marionette Theatre.” A year before, in her master’s degree thesis in arts education from Columbia Teacher’s College, Alma had argued that the creation of a marionette theater could bring together multiple educational subjects for her students. It could also offer a beautiful way to bring her earlier work, as a costume designer for the Howard University players, the drama troupe at her beloved alma mater, into her pedagogy. The students, Alma reasoned, would learn history while researching the characters, learn design and color theory while creating the costumes, learn shop while building and lighting the stage, learn writing while crafting the dialogue, learn drama while acting out the plays, and learn civic responsibility while reaching out to the community to attend their shows. And what did they learn while creating small people from fabric and stuffing, stringing them up from a wooden platform they had built? They learned how to animate life on their own terms. They say that by the time Alma Thomas retired from teaching at Shaw Junior High School in 1960, at least half of DC’s Black community had been her students. There is a power in being first and an even greater power in lasting. What does it mean that in the land of political puppets a woman born at the high-­water mark of U.S. mob lynchings taught her students to saw the wood, connect the strings, bring joy and laughter to their families and communities by giving life to hanging dolls year after year? Could I learn that? with Alma Thomas was also a sort of summer enrichment. In 2022, the photographer Joan E. Biren

my first in-­d epth encounter

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mentioned that I should see the new Alma Thomas retrospective “Everything is Beautiful” while it was on view at the Phillips Collection in Thomas’s hometown of Washington, DC, but I missed it. When I learned that the exhibit was showing at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, where I happened to be passing through a few months later, to honor the retirement of crucial Black feminist theorist and teacher Hortense Spillers, I knew I couldn’t miss it. My partner and I would spend a morning there, I thought. But when I saw the scale of the paintings, the depth of the research, the philosophical wonder of Alma’s view of the world, not to mention the replicas of her fabulous outfits and her brightly appointed living room, I knew that I would need to spend more time listening to what her work was teaching me. I couldn’t stop wondering what it meant for a Black woman born at the end of the nineteenth century near Columbus, Georgia, at a time when color was used to enforce a deadly racial code, to become the greatest color theorist in the world. That wasn’t the lesson of a morning, to mull over during lunch. It seems a lesson for many lifetimes. So I never left. 2. wood rose hill, georgia. 1891. Every breath a prayer. Amelia Thomas was shaking. Would that she could be as rooted as poplar, but she had to be ready to run. Big with her first child, she prayed that the men with dogs and ropes would pass by, disperse, give up, go away. Eventually, the Georgia trees received her anxious prayers, breathed in her carbon dioxide pleas and used them to whisper their own wonderings. What tree would the mob choose next? Which of their limbs would be desecrated by the cruel white supremacist enforcement of “man’s inhumanity to man?” Amelia survived that night in Rose Hill. But when she gave her soul to light, birthed Alma, her first child, and sang to soothe her brown baby’s dreams, she noticed that her daughter was born hard of hearing. Her fear, Amelia believed, transmitted through amniotic fluid, had blocked her baby’s listening ears. Even before she was born, Alma had heard too much.

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“Through color I have sought to focus on beauty and happiness rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.” —alma thomas once upon a time, H. E. Mahal asked four Black artists, including Alma Thomas, for their “approaches to inhumanity.” What survives is Alma’s deflection of the terms of the interview, a lament for what poet Robert Burns called “man’s inhumanity to man.” She recentered her energy. Clarified her offering: beauty, happiness. The quotation appears almost everywhere her work is displayed or discussed. Almost as if to give permission to a predominantly white set of viewers or institutions to enjoy the painter’s vibrant use of color without thinking about the cruel calculus of color in a racist world. But the almost ubiquitous quote is not included in the profile on her work in Free Within Ourselves: African American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (1991). This book, edited by Regenia A. Perry, instead begins its section on Alma Thomas with a quote that includes these words: “Light is the mother of color. Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.” Is that what Amelia prayed for while she hid from the lynch mob? The spirit and living soul she would name Alma? And what did the trees have to say about it? alma thomas left georgia with her family as a child because there

were no high schools that would admit a colored girl. And because Amelia already knew the sound of the Atlanta race riots, she said no more to white men once again roaming with dogs and weapons, seeking whatever parts of their souls they had bartered to whiteness. “Take off your shoes and shake all that Georgia sand out of them and don’t look back,” she told her daughters when they got to Washington, DC. But Alma did look back. The trees were still beckoning. And the land held more than memories of segregation and racial terror; it also held the body of

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Alma’s younger sister Fannie, who died of diphtheria in the early 1900s at ten years old. Fannie was the subject of Alma’s first sculpture, which she kept in her room, for the rest of her life. Maybe that’s why Alma never stopped painting those flowerbeds of Rose Hill, those elder poplar trees. at the “Everything is Beautiful” exhibit in Nashville, and then I went home and ordered a calendar and several children’s books about Alma Thomas. And for 365 days I started every morning looking at either an image of an Alma Thomas painting, or an archival photograph, or a study, or a sketch, or a puppet. And I wrote poetry that startled and astounded me. It wasn’t until I had written for a whole year that I finally read back over what I wrote. I still don’t know what it is. A partial index of my personal childhood associations with color? A testimony of the sweet taste of being in love? A listening space for Alma to whisper dreams? A psychedelic record of a year where nothing made sense and yet shone so brightly you would want to remember it? i bought the catalog

3. paint diphtheria is a disease of fluids, transmitted through droplets holding bacteria. Today, diphtheria is rare in the United States of America because of vaccination, but when Alma Thomas was growing up the transmission of bacteria through a sneeze or a cough or from a surface could be deadly for a child. When Fannie died, the entire family must have been devastated. Maybe as the oldest sister, Alma felt custody of Fannie’s soul, an assignment to remember her well. A continuing connection. Grief also often moves through fluid substances: tears, snot, the vapor of ragged breathing. Or maybe, if you are an artist, you create a ritual. Maybe you would use earth itself to make a replica of your little sister in her Sunday best, bow in her hair, a knowing smile. Maybe you would shape the ceramic with your hands, glaze her carefully and keep her beside you. Alma Thomas slept with a ceramic bust

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of her sister Fannie next to her bed throughout her entire adult life. Maybe sister is a job that death simply does not end. When I think of Alma Thomas painting rushes of color, bright from the perspective of one flying above, I think not only of a woman whose life moved from what she called the horse and buggy age to the age of aerodynamics and into the space age, but also of a small angel’s perspective. What Alma would have wanted Fannie to see. In the most vivid of Alma Thomas’s paintings I see Fannie’s heaven, beautiful with the care an older sister might offer a little girl who didn’t get to grow up. I’m not saying that Alma Thomas’s every painterly choice was a choice with Fannie in mind. Or that her status as an older sister and mentor to so many DC artists and Howard University students meant that older sister was a primary identity for Alma Thomas like it is for me. But I do think that if Fannie was the secret audience for her paintings and puppet shows, she did create a worthy world. And I know that Alma Thomas’s commitment to giving her students the education her younger sister Fannie didn’t live to participate in was profound. She not only taught them during the week, she also organized after-­school and Saturday trips to museums, a beauty club based on the philosophy that they would need to learn to see beauty in their own community, in themselves. Therefore, I think Alma Thomas thought about the necks of her students as she taught them to hold their heads up higher. I believe that as she taught them to stuff and stitch marionettes together, she dreamt they would learn what they were made of. 4. strings

the relationship between a puppet and a Black child in the early twentieth century, or a puppet and a Black grown woman in the early twenty-­first century, for that matter? What I know is that I keep thinking about Alma Thomas’s work with marionette theater. I can’t stop looking at the materials listed in the caption

but what is

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of an image of a marionette she made: “fabric, wood, paint and strings.” What am I made of, I wondered? And so, for a whole summer, approximately one hundred hours, I wrote a series of poems where I looked at the educational encounters in my own life (broadly speaking, because isn’t birth an education? isn’t being my father’s daughter or my sister’s sister an educational experience?) and asked myself a series of questions: What is the fabric? What is the wood? What is the paint? What are the strings? I surrendered to the possibility that I might learn about a variety of subjects if I asked these questions again and again. fabric, wood, paint and strings (Our Savior Lutheran c. 1992) pleated tunic corner computer marvel mutants failing names sharp nails ready knuckles oregon trail tetherball twine fire glasses smarts the only one When my family moved to South Florida in 1992, it wasn’t to escape racism. In fact, in order to be closer to my mother’s family after my

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parents got divorced, we moved to a town called Plantation, an accurate marker of what the land had been or a nostalgic predictor of what white people moving to newly developed apartment complexes and subdivisions might have longed for, I still don’t know. If we had stayed in New Jersey, I would have started middle school, but here in Broward County I still had one more year of elementary school to go, and so my sister and I both went to Our Savior Lutheran, a small school attached to a church we did not attend, where we had to wear navy-­blue tunics and penny loafers. I was the only Black girl in my grade. As far as I can remember, my sister and I may have been the only Black girls in the whole school. I remember playing four square and tetherball and hanging upside down from the monkey bars in the colorful shorts I learned to conceal under my uniform. I remember that the X-­Men were popular, but I don’t think my classmates liked them for the reasons I liked them. I thought I must be made of something entirely different from my peers. And that I needed to craft what I had into a set of superpowers that could shield me from the sharp words and messy jokes of fifth graders. fabric, wood, paint and strings (mangum st. 2005) repetition sitting on the floor toner emails the words of the black woman writer deities the hours before usual new sun devotion paper always paper and then thicker paper and pressed black ink my hands

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And I did create a set of superpowers, or at least I thought they were superpowers, to keep myself safe in the tokenization I navigated from my earliest education right through graduate school. But by the time I moved to Durham, North Carolina to get a Ph.D. in English at Duke in 2004, I felt like I might be outgrowing my shield. And it was the trees, or at least my relationship to paper, that was helping me find ways to be present that, if not always safe, were at least accompanied. The accompaniment of ancestors, the technologies of finding other Black feminists, the feeling of contributing to a multigenerational community. I woke up early and created a Black feminist heaven and used paper to invite other people into it. I thought of myself as practicing in the tradition of post-­emancipation Black schoolteachers; I imagined myself in communion with Black women who offered their creativity to generations of learning. I did not know the name Alma Thomas. fabric, wood, paint and strings (overlook hospital 1982) for Pauline McKenzie breath coral saltwater sinew death mineral blood continue eyelash cheekbone pressure that full head of hair

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What is the fabric, what is the wood, what is the paint, what are the strings. Maybe this is what Alma Thomas called “transforming energy.” Returning to the scene of my own birth, a C-­section in which doctors cut cords prematurely, I can reimagine the materiality of my connection to my mother and to the universe. Questioning what I am made of, I can question what we make and remake collectively. I can make space to notice and to grieve what it means that even before I was learning to be a student or a teacher, institutions averse to Black life were trying to tell me how to be born, were threatened by the time my mother needed to bring me here, were disciplining the throughline. And though I am shaped, quite literally, by all of that (my mother says when I was born I had a cone head, shaped by the tools that brought me out, not the shape of moving through her), I am not made of it. My geography is oceanic and unlimited; my beauty school is the abundant wet presence of life. I wrote dozens of these “fabric, wood, paint, strings” stanzas. And I encourage you to write some too. The biggest result of reexamining my education is realizing that there are more subjects for me to study than I can ever name. In fact, the basic questions of puppet formation give me the opportunity to learn something more than the logic of being an individual subject of power. What happens when I take responsibility? When I say, See that energy? I’m the one who put it there. The visionary thinker Grace Lee Boggs theorized that in addition to revolutionaries we needed solutionaries, people dedicated to finding solutions to the complex problems that face us as an interconnected mass of life. She said that if our educational systems were just that, intergenerational spaces where we figured out how to solve the problems of water supply, of how to care for each other, of sustainable food systems, we would learn all the math, all the critical thinking, all the history, all the creative writing, all the biology we would need. And what stage have you built? And what story are you acting out? And whom have you conscripted into your drama, tying their hands and feet? If only we could let

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our need lead our learning instead of an imperative to reproduce what we think already exists. Alma Thomas knew that too, and in her marionette practice she was a teacher of all topics. But most importantly, she offered the practice of supporting bodies and creating new stages. She gave children opportunities to play with connection and light. She asked them to invite the whole community into a story that needed telling. An alternate system created by and for Black children, a respectful use of rope and trees and breath. The pedagogy of a worthy prayer.

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The Night Watch: Seeking sanctuary from the Troubles Darran Anderson The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 52-69 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914443

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914443

essay

The Night Watch Seeking sanctuary from the Troubles Darran Anderson

W

hen i was a little boy, I would lie awake for hours, holding out against surrender to sleep, listening to the helicopters drone above our neighborhood. After the government dismantled the border checkpoints, including one at the end of our street, the watchtower the last part to go, a curious series of visitations took place. They began as a deviation in the hum of a city night and steadily grew. Even though it was mechanical, it had purpose, intention behind it. As the source of the sound

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grew closer, a light would grow in the corner of my room, next to a pile of books, beneath the switch, enlarging, then turning wild and tesseract on the ceiling. It became clear the hum that I was hearing was the sound of pursuit. A hunt was on. Boy racers. Joyriders. Hoods stealing from their own. Paramilitaries on some mission. The cops and the army were hot on their trail, gunsights wavering. If the runners got to the border, the authorities could not follow. I often reached the window just in time to see the red taillights of a car vanishing into the mist of rain, leaving a breach in the night air like water in the wake of a ship. If they made it over that borderline, they were safe, protected by a partition invented by colonists earlier in the century. But the curve leading up to our housing estate and beyond to freedom was elongated and easy to misjudge, especially if you were driving at high speed in the perpetual rain of a continent’s edge. Some did not make it. On several occasions, I found myself inside those cars, with acquaintances, friends of friends, hitchhiking. Only once had I the naiveté to ask, “Jesus, lads, how can you afford a motor like this?” to a howling hyena chorus, betraying my greenness in a town where being streetwise was not just currency but a matter of self-­ preservation. I learned to keep my mouth shut and ask no questions. There was much to deal with. Handbrake turns in industrial estates that sent the entire planet spinning backward on its axis. The abrupt fairground terror of a chase from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, holding onto the dashboard for leverage. Then the g-­force of the sudden halt at the unlikeliest moment and all four doors open, everyone scrambling in different directions, clearing as much space between here and there as possible, only slowing down when back in the maze of streets, and you were left with no company but your own pounding heartbeat and the blind stars above. If we reached the border, there would be a long trek back, trying to avoid the police by minimizing time on the roads, even the barricaded ones, passing sleeping farmsteads and bemused cattle and clambering over stone walls and entanglements of barbed wire, following the telegraph poles back to what called itself civilization.

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The next morning, to suspicious glances from my mother, I’d insist the night was uneventful, too shamed to make eye contact. For a long time, I thought the road itself was cursed. We lived in Derry, in British-­controlled Northern Ireland, not far from the border of the independent Republic of Ireland. I dreaded every time I walked the road’s unlit miles at night, the blazing headlights unveiling a nocturama of watching eyes as they sped by. And yet what it led to, the border, and beyond it the “Free State” of the Irish Republic, was a relief from the Troubles, even if we always had to return, called back like revenants to our lives. County Donegal, on the other side of the border from Derry, was its own land. Castle ruins. Cults. Beaches, some too dangerous to swim in. Mass rocks in the middle of swamps where secret congregations had once met and priests with bounties on their heads would convert bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Life was by no means easy there, on the periphery of a periphery, but it was nonetheless a parallel world that showed us how deeply we might breathe without a boot on our collective throat. When Northern Ireland was invented, a century ago, its Irish Catholic citizens were left behind as part of the UK, marooned within a state that did not want them and demonstrated this existential hostility in every way up to and including murder. It was an escape then, however temporarily, to enter Donegal and the Republic. In truth, Donegal, like its wayward twin, Derry, is an edgeland of shifting identities, unreliable narrators, secrets, and revelations. We grew up in noir. You move away by necessity, not will. You live longer elsewhere than you did at home. But you never really leave. The cost of growing up in a low-­level police state is that you end up, no matter where you go, with the situational awareness of a paranoid low-­ level cop. No one notices that you are always clocking entrances and exits, who comes in and out, or the baseball bat underneath your bed. Few notice that a film of another life is always rolling in your subconscious. My mother called in the early hours, speaking softly as if not to wake the neighbors, who were already down at the crash site.

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Lit up by the sudden arrival of floodlights, she had stood in the doorway as they cut an injured man from the wreck. They kept repeating the man’s name but at some stage they stopped. If you aim for the border, you have to make it. Until sanctuary, you’re damned. we climbed up there , to that concealed world of rooftops, because

we had to. We were searching for a space in which to be left the fuck alone. Even then, the authorities would hound us, alerted by will-­o’-­the-­wisp cigarette lights in derelict windows or just the malcontent energy that was, by that stage, seeping from our pores. For want of the utopia of a free house we hung around on corners, then in alleyways, then construction sites, abandoned buildings, tunnels, condemned warehouses, and under the docks, dodging rats on sleekit beams, shimmying across gantries, pushed onward and onward by warnings from the RUC, the army, security guards, nightwatchmen, the IRA, all manner of bastards. Continually moved on, into subsets of nowhere. The further we were edged out of sight, the more nefarious we appeared. You did not look for trouble, it looked for you. Avoiding street fights and riots was like avoiding the weather. If your existence is a transgression, you embrace transgression. There was little choice left to us. The excuses come easily. The desires are harder to explain. We claimed our space in the sky, music and curses and howls echoing off the dome of night. We had nothing in those years, but we owned every one of those sunsets and the stars that followed. They came for us, of course. But we were ready. We had secret escape routes and ambushes, hollows and unwound fences, long memorized, deliberately designed to taunt and demoralize out-­of-­ shape pursuers. In truth, there was nowhere to go. We were only beginning to understand what it means to be left out of the plans, to be superfluous. Where your presence, even your existence, is a violation, an affront, a sin. We thought that it was a question of delinquency, that we’d eventually outgrow it. The true reason involved a whole byzantine system, perfected over eight hundred

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years, designed to make us strangers in our own land, language, culture, and so on—a system we could not possibly comprehend. With nowhere to exist, everywhere is trespass. I did not know it yet, but we were running up against a dreadnought, as our parents had, and before them, for centuries, our people and other peoples. Every aspect of our lives was silently dominated by a word I had thus far not encountered: sanctuary, from the Latin sanctus, meaning “holy.” A place of peace, respite. Visiting homeless alcoholic uncles in wet houses and aunts in battered wives shelters as a boy. These places were treated as exceptions, even aberrations, but I would come to learn that they were in fact the rule, the most explicit forms of a condition that permeated everything. It felt as if the society we lived in was specifically designed to exclude you (Catholic, poor, under suspicion as treasonous, etc.) from security or safety. Wherever you chose to be or were forced to be, the authorities could come along and demand to know your whereabouts, identity, and intentions. Your presence, even your existence, was an affront; the social fabric was not one in which you were allowed to find any rest. Of the dozen or so kids I spent my childhood with, only a few would find sanctuary in their lives. Having been informed they were discarded, some of them started to believe it. Two were exiled forcibly from the city. Two changed their names. There was jail and rehab and psychiatric wards. Some died in their twenties, others almost made it to forty. In my memories, they are vivid, extraordinary even. In my mind, they are still those teenagers wandering high above the busy streets, not yet spotted by those below or by fate. I do not entirely know why I did not follow them. Blind luck. Belligerence. Cowardice, perhaps. Maybe even books, which were for me more than a thread, a lifeline. I swam and I dived where my friends drowned, and my guilt is my shadow. I still have stray wandering dreams of that time, decades later. They are always strangely terrifying, dreams of hauling myself bleeding over walls and into backyards to cower, hearing breaths and shrieks in the alleyway, occasionally bursting through someone’s home to shake off our pursuers. Often, I can hear the others

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being caught; I wake almost four ­hundred miles and twenty years away with the last shout still echoing in the room. In an old issue of The Paris Review, Jean Rhys talks about how villagers thought she was a witch when she moved to Devon. Then she says, “A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.” We were young enough to still imagine there were no wolves, not realizing they were everywhere, including among our own number, our own selves. a lion’s face. Blazing hollow-­eyed on the cathedral door, it looks more like a pagan Green Man than anything belonging to Christianity. If, in the northeast of England, hundreds of years ago, you were pursued and managed to reach this church and strike this door knocker, you would be permitted entry and the safety of sanctuary for thirty-­seven days. Lookouts kept watch twenty-­four hours a day, some on the night watch, ringing the Galilee Bell when a refugee was accepted. Once inside, no one was allowed to seize you or cut you down, regardless of what crime you may have committed. The refugees would don the protection of the robe of St. Cuthbert, upon which no blood could be spilt without incurring a lifelong stigma. The medieval concept of sanctuary, in which the Christian church would provide temporary protection from both authorities and individuals seeking revenge, emerged from lives like that of St. Cuthbert, whose story helped shape the idea. Cuthbert was a strange one, as saints tend to be. The patron saint of Northumbria, he was an aristocrat who became a hermit cave mystic. After his death, his remains were carried in a coffin by monks who were traveling the land to escape marauding Vikings; the pursued could take shelter in the shadow of Cuthbert’s coffin—or so the legend goes. Having reached safety, they could decide to face trial or go into exile (“abjuring the realm”). If they chose the latter, they would leave the church sanctuary wearing white garments, carrying a cross aloft to ward off the vengeful, and make their way to the nearest port, where, after dousing themselves ritualistically in the sea, they would board a in durham, the sun has

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ship, never to return. Such protections from state and citizen lasted until 1624, at the beginning of the modern age of imperialism. Down the ragged years, as an adult who had left Derry and Donegal behind, finding no home abroad, that subconscious film still played in my head. I noticed that I kept encountering the remains of former sanctuaries. Living in Edinburgh for a decade, I’d occasionally pass, on the cobbled streets of the Old Town, the brass sanctuary markers that marked out the boundaries of the Abbey Sanctuary, a disreputable five-­mile area within which debtors could not be arrested; it lasted until 1880, when imprisonment for debt was abolished. Among those who sought refuge in Abbey Sanctuary was the essayist Thomas De Quincey, who died there in a state of penury. For years, I visited his grave to pay tribute, keep it clean, and leave mementos for reasons I’m not entirely sure of, apart from adoring his writing. The fear of forgetting, perhaps. Over the years in Scotland, I spotted other sanctuaries scattered across the landscape like spiritual bothies. Not far to the west of Edinburgh, for example, at the standing stones in the village of Torphichen, the pursued could claim the protection of the Knights of St. John. You would have to walk the hard shoulders of motorways to reach it now. Sanctuary is not the same as refuge. Refuge is protection. Sanctuary is the power to confer protection. Entire cities have been refuges. Cambridge was set up by students who had fled bloody melees in Oxford, taking asylum in the fens. Venice was a wonder-­ city on stilts built by exiles from the mainland who were hiding out in the lagoon. The Nigerian city of Abeokuta was built by people seeking protection in the outcrops of Olumo Rock. Even after reading about the concept of sanctuary, it was a puzzle to me why the monks would admit, for example, murderers who were being chased by the families or communities of those whose lives they had taken. Paradoxically, these sacred places became filled not only with the persecuted, but also with people running away from their crimes. Gradually, they became seen as havens of sin.

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But what, I kept wondering, was really behind these imaginary zones? What gave rise to the magic of passing a boundary and being instantly protected? Theories abound in academic circles: sanctuary was a way to break costly cycles of killings and to de-­escalate tribal violence. Others argue that sanctuary emerged much further back, to protect women and girls running away from familial abuse and incest. It might even be a Darwinian or resource imperative. Certainly, sanctuaries have existed in all cultures; there are Celtic, Bedouin, Japanese, Hebrew, and Hawaiian equivalents, to name but a few. You move away because you are compelled to. There is no want involved. It is a question of need. I was not exiled like some I know nor was I given a choice or ultimatum. I left because of the city across the sea, a beckoning star and a black hole. An economic migrant, joining a long lineage of uncles, some of whom who had lived with us in spare rooms and on spare mattresses, unexpected older brothers. They had gone to London and slept on park benches and found their footing in digs. (Other uncles went to Boston, New York, Philadelphia. They were classic tempest-­tossed characters, whose stories resonated with me as much as those of Balzac, Verne, and Hugo, stories wild enough I started to believe that America might be a fictional place.) London had long been an attraction, if a Faustian one. In Ireland when I was a child, there was still a pervasive folk memory of the famine that killed a million people and sent another million or more to the ends of the earth, some having to convert to Protestantism to “take the soup” at the docks. Yet progress brought little reprieve. Modernity had its own horrors. It was the ’70s and ’80s, the time of the neo-­fascist National Front in England, and “No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish” and “Irish Need Not Apply” signs were everywhere. The strategies of the Irish who emigrated to England were varied. Some became street fighters. Others adapted, changing accents, becoming Spurs or Arsenal fans overnight. I didn’t fault either approach. They did what they needed to do. They would never be forgiven for reminding London

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of their otherness, of what the Empire did. The civilized feel civilized only when others are savage. The othering makes them feel human. But it is not sufficient. They cannot be completed. Long before I ended up in London I felt myself bound for it. The most interesting developments tend to happen on the peripheries of lands and empires, but sooner or later the gravity of the capital pulls those on the extremities in. The city was no refuge, and cannier men than I had been lost in its vortex. It was easier to make lovers there than friends, easier to stay awake in nightclubs than sleep in basement flats. After a while, you look for a safe harbor or at least an anchor, just to remain still for a moment. I made my haunts in old Irish pubs tucked away on forgotten passages and mews. Scattered pieces of home. I listened to the stories of old men, sentimental, sullen, unreliable at times, never letting the truth get in the way of a good or bad tale. Drunk on nostalgia for a land they could not abide to live in. I could feel myself slowly shape-­shifting against my will to become them. Yet they were different from me. They were men who had built colossal skyscrapers; before them were men who built the tube, that circulatory system. Yet there were no markers or memorials to them. Not a mention. There were no plaques honoring St. Giles Rookery, where Irish migrants had lived in the worst conditions London has ever seen, outside war or plague. Perhaps it was healthier not to be noticed. The Caribbeans who had arrived on the Windrush and had driven the trains for decades were rewarded with deportation letters. I finished up my shift hauling boxes under the streets of Soho and in the spine of a department store and traipsed to where the Rookery had once stood, south of Centre Point, near the sunburst of Seven Dials. There were ghost signs there but only commerce survived, “B. Flegg Estd 1847 Saddler and Harness Maker,” “F.W. Collins Elastic Glue Manufacturer (Sole Inventor 1857) Leather Grindery & General Ironmongery Warehouse.” The Mercer’s Maidens gazed not down onto the streets but with glazed eyes into eternity. Of the Irish who had once struggled to survive here, I could find no trace. St. Giles was never afforded the status of a

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sanctuary. And now those Irish immigrants who had sought refuge there were denied even the status of phantoms. As I pushed on eastward, the rain soon became a colossal wall of water. I ducked down into the Tube, shaking off my coat, and sought out a Tube map. A horse’s nervous system on a wall. I traced a path to the most notorious sanctuary London had known, worse than Fulwood’s Rent or the Caribee Islands or Montague Close or the Clink or even Deadman’s Place: Alsatia, an area that was a sanctuary for debtors. It also held a motley crew of criminals, brigands, prison escapees, sex workers, the persecuted, and sin-­eaters. It was still raining as I climbed the escalator and stood in the gateway of Blackfriars station. There was no choice but to brave it. The skyscrapers in the near distance were evaporating into the clouds. Here began a miscible place of the sacred and profane. Alsatia had stretched from Blackfriars to Temple and from the Thames to Fleet Street. In current times, the areas bounding what was Alsatia can still feel diabolical. It is hard to forget that in 1982, under Blackfriars Bridge, the Vatican’s banker was found hanging, his pockets full of stones; that in the City of London stand the banks where the world’s blood money was cleansed; that Fleet Street still bears the signage of home to the press and its demon imps, of whom I was one, working for years in the belly of these beasts. Next to them, Alsatia’s sins seem modest, amateurish. What is the robbing of a bank, as Brecht put it, compared to the founding of one? I took my leave from the rain, dashing into a string of arcane pubs from St. Paul’s to the Strand. The Bells, the Punch Tavern, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese. There were few journalists now in their former haunts, and the ghosts of earlier ages were unforthcoming, but there was something about these places that comforted—the quiet of a mahogany snug next to a bull’s-­eye window, the low-­ceilinged shiplike stairways down into the crypt light, where I gathered with others round the warmth of a glass of firewater. The whole surface world above melting away in the deluge. Gone was the Devils Tavern. Gone too was the Mitre Tavern, with its secret door for a quick escape into Ram Alley and Alsatia.

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Gone too were the old coffeehouses, on the boundary of Alsatia, vaunted as meeting places of the Enlightenment but also where men haggled over slave trades. One would have faced all manner of degradation passing through that covert passage into Alsatia, but none were as truly godless as those selling souls as chattel, no ignominy comparable to that of the respectable men who operated the cargoes of flesh on the Middle Passage. Before its fall from grace, Alsatia had been the site of a Carmelite monastery, Whitefriars, where swaddled friars tended to gardens and rang the hours. Until the day they were noticed by the Crown. The monks of nearby Charterhouse heard knocking at their gate and, upon opening it, found the severed arm of one of their congregation, John Houghton, nailed to the door. The wreckage caused by the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which took place from 1536 to 1540, can still be seen in the ruins along Magpie Alley. Defying the authority of the Vatican, Henry VIII had disbanded the English monasteries and appropriated their wealth, with the aim of establishing the autonomy of his regime, which, intentionally or otherwise, laid the groundwork for the empire to come. Little was left of Whitefriars monastery, but the protection of God survived the destruction of his agents on earth. Already stricken with gout, ulcers, and boils, Henry VIII donated the land that became known as Alsatia to his doctor, Sir William Butts, who looked after it as well as he had the king’s decaying body. In 1553, Bridewell Palace become a prison and hospital dedicated to the “correction of the disorderly.” Like any borderland, including the one we’d grown up on, Alsatia became a place of shifting identities and secrets and metamorphosis. Its inhabitants spoke their own language of thieves’ cant and were united in being outcast, though some preyed on others. Any attempt to storm the sanctuary was resisted by all therein. There was solidarity in ruin. For a long time, as its seventeenth-­century dramatist Thomas Shadwell noted, it was “unconqer’d.” Leaving the pub, I ran from door to door to escape the downpour. Where Alsatia survives is in language, the winding streets

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and byways of etymology. Saints’ names and religious references abound in what still feels, for all the modern buildings, like a medieval warren, the shape somehow surviving the Great Fire and the Blitz. Pilgrim Street. St. Bride’s Passage. Hood Court. Hanging Sword Alley, formerly Blood Bowl Alley. The world’s first recorded glory hole nearby, they say. When Dickens, a local to the locals, wrote of the area, he populated it with body-­snatching “resurrection men” and dying alcoholics. It remained a quarry of stories for writers and a bolthole for at least one, the dissenter Daniel Defoe, who dreamed of plagues and islands when he lived there. Its presence now comes in the form of absence. As I walked through it in the pissing rain, with a head full of whiskey, I attempted to neither condemn or romanticize, but to see what it might have looked like and to whom. What it would be like to occupy a safe space that was also a prison, a citadel of cupidity that was also besieged? and the long, brutal, meaningless nature of his dying, I took on the task of going through my father’s belongings. It was a painful process, but I was glad of the pain. In a curious way, I uncovered a portrait of the man in reliquary and detritus, for which a painting or book would be but a poor translation. Among many newspaper cuttings, mostly of musical performances, I found one from the local paper in the early 1970s, headlined, “Their Home Has Been Raided 50 Times.” It opened, “A family in the Rosemount area of Derry have reported to the police damage caused during an army raid on their home last Monday Night.” I recognized my uncle’s name and the address of my father’s childhood home; I had played as a boy in its overgrown back garden, nettles and all, in the shadow of a derelict factory. The article continued: still stunned by grief

Mr. William Anderson, who lives at 41 Osbourne St, said his family home has been raided over fifty times by the army, including twenty times by the Staffordshire regiment, who were the regiment involved in last Monday’s raid. Mr. Anderson said: “At 6:45 they broke in the front door and searched every

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room in the house. A soldier hit me on the head with his rifle and a crowd gathered outside in the street. The soldiers threatened to bring up a water cannon and use it against the crowd. One soldier went up into the attic and started walking about. He was then handed up two torches and he kicked at the ceiling until his foot finally came through. This is nothing but harassment and I complained to the police about it. I also complained to the police about the fifty other raids, but nothing was done about them. The first time we were raided was two days before Operation Motorman. Given how often the raids must have taken place, what would have been the chance of leading a functioning life? How could one sustain a family amid such a curse? My father’s stories always came to me obliquely. He never said a word directly. I never worked out if it was down to protection or distance. Yet I managed down the years to mosaic together shards I’d overheard from his conversations with others. How his older brother Willy had been interred in prison without trial, alongside hundreds of other young Catholic men. How on at least two occasions as a boy, my father narrowly escaped being murdered by the army. And how the family, my grandmother a widow with a multitude of children, had been brutalized. And how this treatment had begun in her a slow-­motion, irrevocable downward spiral that, in my father’s opinion, eventually resulted in her death by misadventure/suicide. There is an old Bill Hicks stand-­up routine we used to pass around on fluttering VHS tapes, in which he recalls a Western where the bully throws a gun at a shepherd’s feet and goads him into picking it up as a pretence to shoot him. My father picked the gun up and spent the rest of his life paying for it. There is a cost to the soul from violence. It corrupts its targets as well as its enactors. Yet I’ve no doubt, if given a chance to do his life over, that he would pick it up again. He signed up with the Provisional IRA the way other kids join the Scouts. After various attempts to take eyes for eyes, he was sent to jail, arrested by other teenagers, the ones who

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had been sent as fodder from across the sea to terrorize the inhabitants of housing estates not unlike their own. In prison, despite being a sixteen-­year-­old child, he was tortured. This was revealed in another document, from the Historical Institutional Abuse Redress Board, that came to light after his death. An eyewitness said my father was never the same afterward. I never knew the man before and barely knew the man after. Discovering that he had been tortured was the answer to many questions I now regret asking. He was no saint, for sure. Such a luxury did not exist, by that stage. I was old enough to bear witness but young enough to be protected from the worst of the Troubles. My father did everything in his capacity to make sure of that, to the extent of shunning me, lest I become like him. A task which he ultimately failed to do. I feel my likeness to him in many senses, some of which I treasure, but there is a fire in me, too, for vengeance and honor, reading those depraved and lousy accounts, a fire that might incinerate my life if I’m not careful. The desire for justice or retribution, and with it the burden of revenge, the stirrings of a blood feud that he had tried hard to keep from my knowledge. Oh, they made wolves of us. After a youth damned to be eventful and then abruptly curtailed, my father became a gardener for the council. I did what he by his nature did: as Seamus Heaney put it in his poem “Digging,” I took up a pen, and I began to dig. Every time I delved, beneath the dusty soil of dogma and faith, I hit the same bedrock. It was housing every time. The most basic needs and rights for shelter for self and family. In my hometown, until 1954, a curfew bell would ring and Catholics, banned from owning property within the city walls, had to leave Derry between the hours of nine at night and nine in the morning. They would go back to their dwellings, the tumbledown hovels clinging to the outer wall, which ran down to the barely reclaimed marsh of the Bogside. When the slum finally gave, my father’s family went wandering with dozens of other families until they came upon a moldering abandoned American army base. The Northern Irish civil rights movement was born there, led

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by the mothers of the camp. Demands were modest—the right to shelter that did not ravage their health and that of their children; the right to vote; the right to fair treatment; the chance of a job, to rise out of enforced penury; and the right not to be murdered with impunity. Sit-­in protests took place in Tyrone. In 1969, the skies of Belfast were lit up in what were essentially pogroms. The right to a private home remained an issue right until the end of the so-­called Troubles. Catholics were hemmed into their neighbourhoods to facilitate Orange marches pounding through. Home invasions occurred on both sides—parents shot in front of their children, children in front of parents. The home was no longer a sanctuary. It was haves and have-­nots in the most elemental sense, and the situation became a blood feud. Meanwhile, those who had orchestrated it all washed their hands of it and chastized us for our backwardness, locked as we were in some dark-­ages conflict. It is one thing to dominate and crush resistance. It is another thing entirely, far more callous and cunning, to poison the very soil of the narrative. The secret was that Northern Ireland was not the distant past but rather the future. What they enacted upon us they would one day enact upon their own people and themselves. In exile, I have seen it all slowly begin to unfold again, watching houses fill with mold. Generations who will never own a home, broken by rent and austerity; homelessness enveloping cities; and politics becoming the old familiar issue of division and essentialism and witch hunts and whataboutery. However, between 1969 and 1972 there was one brief reprieve in my hometown. An autonomous community space called Free Derry, encompassing the Bogside in the valley and Creggan on the heights. A sanctuary, the last on these islands, that one could flee to, but like all sanctuaries a temporary condition. It lasted three years but the state could not tolerate the treason of its existence. My father stood on the shore and watched, not knowing what was in store for the city, for his family. A military flotilla arrived like an invasion force. They sent in tanks and bulldozers to dismantle Free

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Derry, backed by 1,300 soldiers. A total of 21,000 soldiers took over Catholic working-­class areas to re-­establish “order.” There was no justice, either legal or economic, to be found or even attempted. The absence of justice does not result in chaos but in a vacuum that is quickly filled. Paramilitaries thrived. When the authorities who run schools and hospitals also shot their own citizens dead and ran death squads, justice must be sought elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, it has never been found. the characters who sought it out, as colorful as they might be. It was made for those who could confer the status of sanctuary, those who had the power to magic these protective boundaries into existence and then police them. In its earliest guise, it was the priestly who bestowed sanctuary; gatekeeping gave them power. Sanctuary gave the church authority, but the pursued had to forfeit their land and property to the Crown. It was a mutually beneficial deal, and justice was not its aim. Sanctuary ended when the empire of capital could no longer tolerate the empire of religion. The clergy, after the reeducation of persecution, learned their new subsidiary place. The king replaced the pope, the state replaced the king. What was once pure about sanctuary, its early numinous roots in sacred groves and islands, was lost. As industrialization and rapacious empire stripped the world of the last of its magic, Caspar David Friedrich painted the holdouts, churches and crosses in the mountainous wilds, disappearing in the mist. The state is a jealous god. In its efforts to civilize the Northern Irish in the Plantation —the organized colonization of the region in the seventeenth century by people from Great Britain in an attempt to relieve us of our savageries—they first cut down the natural refuges of the forests. It would be untrue if it was said they created no sanctuaries. They built homes in garrison towns. In the Scottish borders, they built still-­visible peel towers. In the army base with its watchtower at the end of my street, the strangers lived in a hostile landscape, a precursor of the Green Zone of Baghdad and so sanctuary was never really about

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on. Fragments of home from which to usurp others from theirs. The state keeps sanctuary for its own devices, granting it in the form of diplomatic immunity, embassies, gated communities, offshore accounts, private security, property portfolios, laws for the independently wealthy, citizens of the world. For all the managed decline, for all the profitable turbulence, all the organized theft that is austerity, the calm is eerie, like that before a cataclysm. Borders became the magic line. We read daily here in the UK of the small boats sinking in the English Channel on their way to our shores. More uncounted dead. The government plan to fly migrants to Rwanda. They construct prison hulks to house them. They build anything but housing for natives or arrivals alike. One is pitched against the other for votes or virtue, to sell papers or policy. All are pawns. I lived next door to a safe house for migrants. I never saw the same person twice. Different kids every day playing in the garden; different women smoking at the windows. None there the very next day. I feel an affinity to those from other elsewheres, but something, many things, held me back from speaking across the fence. There are different forms of exile, different gradients of descent and ascent that you find yourself on, different places of refuge, different wolves. With the birth of my son, I slowly realized I no longer needed a sanctuary. Living in city after city, bedsit after bedsit, some barely better than a dosshouse, I’d watched friends and loved ones succumb, in slow motion, to drugs and drink and mental illness and suicide, and I was afraid, deeply afraid. I wanted to be protected, whether by walls or soft comforting lies that everything would be all right. I sought sanctuary the way explorers used to set off for cities of gold or the fountain of eternal youth. What I needed wasn’t the illusion of sanctuary, but to provide it for someone else. If sanctuary can exist, as temporary or tiny as it might be, it must be built. The church, the Crown, the state, the market cannot be trusted with the task. No ideology can supply it. No one else can supply it for you. The task is by no means certain, but there is no other choice. I watch my little boy sleep. I nestle in beside my

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love. Just one room in tens of millions in this city on the plain but as significant as any other. When my father was dying, when my son was small, I kept watch until dawn, as if on castle battlements in the long night of some lost century. I feel it still, keeping guard against whatever the night contains. The moon through the sliver in the curtains, the sound of speeding traffic through the opened window, baseball bat nestled under the bed.

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The Temporary Survivor: Revisiting the Dag Hammarskjöld crash

Susan Williams The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 124-144 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914447

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914447

essay

The Temporary Survivor Revisiting the Dag Hammarskjöld crash Susan Williams

S

on September 17-­18, 1961, a DC-­6 aircraft flying from Leopoldville (Kinshasa), the capital of the newly independent Congo, plunged into dense forest in central Africa. The crash occurred about nine miles from the town of Ndola in Northern Rhodesia, then a British colonial territory (now Zambia). It was a moonlit night with a slight haze and no cloud, and the weather was fine. The plane was carrying Dag Hammarskjöld, the second United Nations secretary-­general. Hammarskjöld had arranged to meet at Ndola with Moïse Tshombe, the leader of the breakaway Congolese province of Katanga. A little more than a year earlier, the Congo hortly after midnight

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had become independent from Belgium, but Tshombe, with the support of the Belgian government and mining interests, had almost immediately orchestrated Katanga’s secession. His forces, which were dependent upon white mercenaries from Europe and South Africa, had been fighting with U.N. peacekeeping troops, and Hammarskjöld was hoping to negotiate a cease-­fire. News of the crash and of Hammarskjöld’s death was celebrated by some white settlers in central and southern Africa, who saw him as a supporter of African decolonization and of majority rule. But it was met with horror across the world. The blue and white flag of the U.N. flew at half-­mast at its headquarters in New York, and the flags of the ninety-­nine member states were lowered. And, as strange details swiftly emerged about the crash, suspicions about the cause grew. “Whether this was due to accident or some kind of sabotage, I do not know,” observed Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India. Former U.S. president Harry S. Truman is reported to have said to the press: “Dag Hammarskjöld was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, ‘When they killed him.’” In the decades that followed, the crash has remained a mystery. In 2011, I published a book called Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, which presented the case for a new inquiry into the crash. That led to the establishment of a commission of distinguished jurists known as the Hammarskjöld Commission: Sir Stephen Sedley of the UK, who served as chair; Ambassador Hans Corell of Sweden; Justice Richard Goldstone of South Africa; and Justice Wilhelmina Thomassen of The Netherlands. There is “persuasive evidence,” stated the commission’s report in 2013, “that the aircraft was subjected to some form of attack or threat as it circled to land at Ndola.” The commission recommended that the U.N. re-­open an earlier investigation into what had happened to Hammarskjöld’s plane. That recommendation was taken up. In December 2014, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for a fresh investigation into Hammarskjöld’s death. The U.N. Secretary General then appointed the Honourable Mohamed Chande Othman, the former

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The arrival of U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld (second from the right) in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) on September 13, 1961, just days before the crash. Harold Julien is at the far left, carrying a bag. Hammarskjöld is between the Prime Minister of the Congo, Cyrille Adoula, on his right; and on his left is Antoine Gizenga, Adoula’s deputy.

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Chief Justice of Tanzania, to lead the inquiry, which is ongoing. Over the course of this inquiry, Justice Othman has paid new attention to evidence that was dismissed in earlier decades and discovered new information. In his last three reports he has written that “it appears plausible that an external attack or threat may have been a cause of the crash.” on board Hammarskjöld’s plane. But only one person survived long enough to be found alive: Harold M. Julien, an American who was in his mid-­thirties. He was suffering from burns over roughly half his body, a partial fracture of the skull, and a dislocated right ankle. Julien was the acting chief security officer of the United Nations Operation in the Congo (known as ONUC). He and a dedicated team of aides and security personnel had flown to Northern Rhodesia with Hammarskjöld. A newsreel shows the team waiting together on the tarmac of Leopoldville’s airport to board the aircraft, which was called the Albertina after a hit song by Papa Wendo, the star of Congolese rumba. As the Albertina neared Ndola airport between ten and fifteen minutes after midnight on September 18, it obtained clearance to land. But the plane never made it to the runway. Extraordinarily, the British High Commissioner to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Lord Alport, who was at the airport heading a group of British officials preparing for Hammarskjöld’s arrival, announced that the secretary-­general must have decided “to go elsewhere.” Shortly after 3:00 a.m., the air traffic controller closed down the runway and put out the lights in the tower. Apparently there was no tape recording of communications in the control tower that night. Even odder, as this essay will reveal, there was a mysterious hiatus between the times when the wreckage was first discovered and the official response. Despite reports of the sighting of the crash site in the morning, no help of any sort was sent to the site until 3:10 p.m. local time, which colonial officials recorded as the time the wreckage was discovered. This was about fifteen hours after the crash.

there were sixteen people

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When police officers and ambulance men finally arrived, they saw that 75-­80 percent of the fuselage of the plane had been burned and that most of the bodies were charred beyond recognition. Only Hammarskjöld’s body was not burned, and only Sergeant Julien was breathing. “The smell of death was everywhere,” reported one of the first journalists on the scene. “Large mopani flies were beginning to settle on the bodies before they were covered by blankets and put into waiting trucks.” Julien was conscious and able to speak, but in terrible pain from his burns and fractures, aggravated by acute sunburn and heat prostration. He was taken to the hospital in Ndola at 4:45 p.m. That evening, Senior Inspector A.V. Allen of the Northern Rhodesian police asked him some questions: Allen: The last we heard from you, you were over Ndola runway. What happened? Julien: It blew up. Allen: Was this over the runway? Julien: Yes. Allen: What happened then? Julien: There was great speed. Great speed. Allen: What happened then? Julien: Then there was the crash. Allen: What happened then? Julien: There were lots of little explosions all around. Allen: How did you get out? Julien: I pulled the emergency tab and I ran out. Allen: What about the others? Julien: They were just trapped. have tended to focus on the U.N. Secretary General. This was inevitable, given the significance of Hammarskjöld’s distinguished role and the high regard in which he was held by many. President John F. Kennedy said of Hammarskjöld studies of the crash

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following his death, “I realize now that in comparison to him, I am a small man. He was the greatest statesman of our century.” But as Hammarskjöld would have insisted, every person on the flight of the Albertina was serving the cause of peace and the U.N. Charter. And in the case of Harold Julien, there are many questions about the flight and the crash that have yet to be answered and compel particular attention. “Harry” Julien, as he was known by most people, was good-­ looking: five foot ten inches tall, with brown hair and blue eyes. A former Marine who had served in Korea, he had a dignified bearing and was extremely fit—an enthusiastic athlete and a fine swimmer and diver. He was well liked by his U.N. colleagues. Julien left the U.S. Marine Corps in 1952 and joined the U.N. Security Force. As someone with a French mother and an Italian father, he felt at ease in the international atmosphere of the U.N. While working in New York, he met his future wife Maria, who had been born in Cuba and was also at the U.N. They had two young sons: Michael and Richard. In 1958, Julien took on a year’s assignment in Jordan, and in July 1961, he joined the Congo mission. By then the family had moved to Florida. It was at home in Miami that Mrs. Julien received the shocking news that her husband had been in an air crash and had been hospitalized. The U.N. arranged for her to fly to New York and then on to central Africa, leaving the children with family. The plans for the journey were made with great urgency but took several days to implement. Meanwhile, Julien was visited every day in the hospital by the resident U.S. consul in Lusaka, the capital of Northern Rhodesia. On Tuesday, September 19, the day after Julien had been taken to the hospital, he was “slightly better.” Though “still dangerously ill,” he was expected to survive. A day later, he was reported as “holding his own.” Even so, there were many missed opportunities to care successfully for him. It is odd that he was not airlifted to a better and

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more modern hospital in the region, such as the ones in Lusaka and Salisbury (now Harare). Dr. Mark Lowenthal, a junior doctor who usually worked in the “African” hospital but had been brought to the “European” hospital in Ndola to assist in Julien’s care, could not understand why Julien was not flown to the United States. “Julien was a strong young man and, with the best that modern care of the time could offer, would have survived,” stated Lowenthal later. “I was inexperienced, four years out of medical school and not in charge of the case. A mature me would have unofficially told the Americans to send an aircraft to take him to the US quickly. The matter remains with me as a great regret.” in Ndola on Thursday, September 22, and was with Harry on the final day and night of his life. He was sedated and did not speak much. But she knew he was fully in his senses, because he asked about a chain that he had sent to her to be repaired—a chain to a medallion of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. They were both devout Catholics, and Maria had called a priest to her husband’s bedside. But on the morning of the next day, her husband died—despite the expectation that he would survive. This was five days after the crash. The coroner’s summary report listed the cause as “Renal failure due to extensive burns following aircraft accident.” In the last hour of his life, according to a nurse who was present, Julien said to his wife: “Honey, take me home. We must get out of here quickly. You will take me home?” Mrs. Julien reassured him. Then he seemed to become very anxious. “Where’s the book?” he asked; after a pause, he called again for “the book”; and yet again, more agitated, “the book.” His wife said that she had it, and Julien then relaxed. It is unclear what Julien meant by “the book.” Possibly it was a coding book for the CX-­52 cipher machines used on Hammarskjöld’s mission. (Hammarskjöld and his team were not aware that these machines had been developed with cooperation from U.S. signals maria julien arrived

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and intelligence agencies, which could decode with relative ease encrypted messages sent on them). That was not all Julien said. His son Richard told me that after his mother had returned to Miami, she told her sister that her husband had said that in the last minutes of the flight there had been three explosions on the plane. Julien’s medical staff also later provided testimony about what they heard him say. Dr Lowenthal, for one, had tried to extract as much information about the crash as possible. When he asked Julien why the plane had not landed as expected, Julien replied that Hammarskjöld had changed his mind or had said “Turn back.” Julien then said that there had been an explosion and a crash, first in that order, then in the other. According to one of his nurses, Julien stated, “I was the only one that got out, all the others were trapped.… We were on the runway when Mr. Hammarskjöld said go back, then there was an explosion.” Another nurse heard him refer to “sparks, sparks in the sky.” Julien’s statements—as well as his replies to Inspector Allen in that first interview after the crash—match many of the testimonies of people on the ground. Davidson Simango, a charcoal burner who was working at night in the forest where the Albertina crashed, said that at midnight he saw two airplanes flying closer together than was usual. The noise from the planes faded, but within a few minutes grew louder again. There was then a flash, after which the other plane went down, then a loud explosion. He later saw one plane flying back. Dickson Buleni, also a charcoal burner, was sitting outside his home that night with his wife when they saw a large plane with a small plane flying above it. He saw a “fire” coming from the small plane to the roof of the big plane, when he heard the sound of an explosion. Then the big plane fell down and crashed. Squadron Leader John Mussell, who was the officer in charge of the Royal Rhodesian Air Force (RRAF) detachment in Ndola on the night of the crash, reported that at approximately 9:15 a.m. on September 18, messages originating from police headquarters

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in Ndola “gave reports of flashes seen during the night.” Further reports included one by R. A. Phillips of the Vacuum Oil Company, who was on duty at the airfield at the time, and saw “the aircraft pass overhead going out Westwards and he watched the lights for approximately two minutes.” He then lost sight of the aircraft “and shortly afterwards he saw two flashes, one big and one small.” of the Albertina is like a jigsaw with thousands of pieces. Some of them seem to fit together easily, such as the testimonies of Julien and of the witnesses who saw a flash in the sky. Other pieces are odd shapes that seem to have no place at all. Many are baffling. And some of the most important pieces appear to be missing. Recently, though, some of those pieces have turned up. This is so in the case of Harold Julien. In 2019, new information emerged relating to Julien’s stay in the Ndola hospital, provided by the government of Zimbabwe to the current U.N. inquiry. This fresh information reveals that the Rhodesian authorities actively sought to prevent Julien’s statements about the flight and the crash from being made public. A senior Rhodesian intelligence official instructed Julien’s medical superintendent that “no one of his hospital staff must talk about this,” in relation to Julien’s statements that he had seen sparks in the sky. The superintendent and another doctor were warned about “the security angle” and asked “to make sure that none of their staff talked.” Justice Othman views this new evidence as significant. In his view, “a general undervaluing of the evidence of Harold Julien… may have affected the exhaustiveness of the earlier inquiries’ consideration of the possible hypotheses.” It also suggests that Julien may have said more about the last moments of the crash than we have yet heard.

the story of the crash

tried to keep Julien’s statements from becoming public were working for the government of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. This white-­ruled entity, which was made up of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (now

the men who

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Zimbabwe), and Nyasaland (now Malawi), had been created by Britain in 1953 despite widespread African opposition. There were around eight million Black people living in the Federation in 1960, and roughly 310,000 whites (less than four per cent of the overall population), who labeled themselves “Europeans” (regardless of where they were born). The official creed was one of partnership between the races. But Roy Welensky, the prime minister of the Federation at the time of the crash, described this partnership as “the same as exists between rider and horse”—the white settler being the rider and the Black person the horse. (In 1960, the Federation had been included in a tour of Africa arranged by the U.S. State Department for Louis Armstrong, the world-­famous trumpeter. While Armstrong was there, he was interviewed by local white journalists. One of them asked, “Well, Mr. Armstrong, how do you like Rhodesia?” Armstrong’s answer was biting: “Y’all sure know how to keep little Black children in bare feet!”) The Albertina crashed in the forest next to an “African township” called Twapia. No so-­called “Europeans” lived in Twapia, which had been built on the outskirts of Ndola in the early 1950s as a way of segregating Blacks from whites and keeping them out of the town when they were not working there for whites. Townships were built for Black people all over the Federation, who had to carry an identification pass at all times; a special pass was needed to go into the towns at night and for other purposes. The historian Robert I. Rotberg has described the color bar in Northern Rhodesia: “Post offices retained separate entrances, hospitals separate services and plants, and the railways differential facilities of all kinds.… Hotels, stores, and private establishments discriminated. An industrial color bar effectively prevented Africans from competing with whites for jobs. Even the federal civil service remained a white preserve.” Black people had to buy meat at the back door of a shop or from a hatch opposite the European counter. They had no meaningful representation or power in the Federal Assembly.

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Whereas whites had access to adequate health care and education, services for Blacks were rudimentary or nonexistent. By 1961, though, the Federation was teetering. A nationalist movement in Northern Rhodesia had orchestrated a civil disobedience campaign against white supremacy called the “Cha Cha Cha.” (Its name came from the exuberant hit song “Indépendance cha cha,” which had been written by Joseph Kabasele in 1960 to celebrate the forthcoming independence of the Congo from Belgian colonial rule.) Thousands of people insisted on being served in shops that were “whites-­only,” and they burned the chitupa—the hated identity pass. The government cracked down severely; the prisons became so full that there were “as many as three prisoners to a blanket.” Among them had been the resistance leader Kenneth Kaunda, who in 1964 would become the first president of independent Zambia. “Our demand,” insisted Kaunda, “is home rule and secession from this fraudulent and abominable Federation now!” Many of the whites in the Federation loathed the U.N. But for the majority population, it offered reason for hope. In his introduction to the U.N.’s Annual Report of 1960, Hammarskjöld described the new states of Africa and Asia as “powerful elements in the international community,” whose independent voice in the world polity was a factor to be reckoned with. The U.N. was to them their “main platform” and protector, he said, as they “feel themselves strong as members of the international family but are weak in isolation.” That helps explain why a large group of people were waiting outside the airport on that night of September 17-­18, 1961 to welcome the secretary-­general. Wanting to show their appreciation of Hammarskjöld’s work and his commitment to majority rule, they carried placards stating their opposition to the Federation and their support for a unified Congo. They had been shocked by the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo, on January 17, 1961. That tragedy had taken place eight months earlier in Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi), fewer than 125 miles from Ndola.

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They were forced to stay outside the airport, since no Black people were allowed into the terminal—even though this was their country. By contrast, any white from anywhere could enter the airport without restriction. It was a common occurrence for South African, British, Belgian, French, and other mercenaries to drink in the terminal bar. They were employed by multinational mining interests and the Katangan government to fight against the U.N. in the Congo, on the other side of the Northern Rhodesian border. Katanga was one of the richest areas of the world in terms of mineral resources, including uranium. The mining companies, supported covertly by the United States and other Western powers, were determined to maintain control of the region. On the night of the crash of the Albertina, there were a number of mercenaries in Ndola. These men included the notorious mercenary Mike Hoare, whose work for the CIA in the Congo in the 1960s was recently established by a file released under the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. three inquiries into the cause of the crash were conducted in 1961-­ 62: two under the auspices of the Rhodesian government and one by the U.N. The Rhodesian inquiries were conducted under, and influenced by, the conditions and attitudes of British occupation and colonial rule. Nearly all the statements and testimonies of Black witnesses were dismissed or disqualified. In the photographs of the victims, the bodies are labeled according to their nationalities, with the exception of Sergeant Serge Barrau from Haiti; his body is simply labeled as “Coloured.” Some Black witnesses, as we know, said they saw a second, smaller plane in the sky, which, they said, shot down Hammarskjöld’s plane. But their testimonies—even those of the charcoal burners living and working near the crash site—were rejected. “It was incredible,” observed Timothy Jiranda Kankasa, who was the secretary of Twapia Township at the time and would become a government

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minister after independence, “that all the Black witnesses were supposed to be unreliable.” The November 1961 report of the Rhodesian Civil Aviation Board of Investigation was unable to reach a firm conclusion. It regarded pilot error as one of several probable causes but also considered other possibilities, including the “wilful act of some person or persons unknown which might have forced the aircraft to descend or collide with the trees.” It regarded this as unlikely but was unable to rule it out, “taking into consideration the extent of the destruction of the aircraft and the lack of survivor’s evidence.” The subsequent Rhodesian Commission of Inquiry reached a conclusion in 1962 which it presented as “more precise”: that pilot error was the cause of the crash, an explanation that over the years became the prevailing view. It did not make this claim because there was any positive evidence for it, but because all other possible causes had supposedly been eliminated. As Sgt. Julien was the only person left to describe what had happened on the flight, his recollections should have been crucial to the investigations of the Rhodesian Commission. But the commission discounted Julien’s statements to the nurses, writing: “No attention need be paid to remarks, later in the week, about sparks in the sky. They either relate to the fire after the crash, or to a symptom of his then condition.” Even Julien’s comment about the plane having blown up, made to police inspector Allen, was not given serious attention. The senior medical staff at the hospital dismissed Julien’s recollections of the crash as the ramblings of a sick man; his reference to “sparks in the sky” was attributed to uraemia. But Dr. Lowenthal took a different view. He stated that Julien’s recollections were spoken during a plasma transfusion and before an injection of pethidine, which means that Julien had not been sedated at the time. Lowenthal felt so strongly about the need to establish this truth that he participated in the Rhodesian hearings as a volunteer witness; he insisted that when Julien spoke about the crash, he was “lucid and coherent.”

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one might have expected the 1961-­62 U.N. Commission of Inquiry

to dig more deeply into other explanations for why the plane went down. But the commission, which issued its report in April 1962, had to rely on evidence already gathered by the Rhodesian authorities, and its inquiry was to a large degree shaped by that process. It sought to circulate requests for information not just in English but in the local languages, but it was compelled to operate under the constraints of white minority rule and enforced segregation. It took witnesses more seriously than the Rhodesians had done, but not comprehensively, and it paid inadequate attention to Julien’s statements. Still, the U.N. Commission reached an open verdict and did not rule out sabotage or attack. It argued that while it could not exclude the possibility of pilot error, it had “found no indication that this was the probable cause of the crash.” Because the U.N. Commission reached an open verdict, the General Assembly adopted a resolution in October 1962 requesting that the secretary-­general inform the General Assembly of any new evidence relating to the disaster that might come to light. It was this resolution that—more than fifty years later—enabled the opening of the current inquiry led by Justice Othman. And what Othman’s inquiry has made clear is that there was a great deal of evidence that those original inquiries ignored or simply never uncovered. Most notably, the 1961-­62 official inquiries concluded that the first sighting of the crash site was at 3:10 p.m. on September 18 by a RRAF pilot flying overhead; at around the same time, there was a report of a sighting by the two aforementioned charcoal burners. Following these reports, police vehicles and ambulances were immediately sent to the site. But a mass of evidence has emerged that shows that many people knew that the plane had crashed—and where—long before it was officially located. Indeed, the crash site was reported to the Northern Rhodesian authorities between 9:00 and 9:30 a.m. by Timothy Kankasa. Some charcoal burners had come across the

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burning plane in the morning and, in great concern, rushed to tell him. The men reported the crash to him, rather than to the police, because they mistrusted and feared the white authorities. Kankasa hurried to the site of the crash and then contacted the police. He later remembered the policeman to whom he had made the report: a white man in charge of the Western Division in the Copperbelt, and someone with whom he, as Twapia secretary, had had dealings in the past. “There was no reason for him not to believe me,” pointed out Kankasa, “because whenever I had any problems, I telephoned him and the police came to my aid. Always.” But nothing was done. According to Kankasa, “There were no police at all, no police, no one from the army, nobody at all until the afternoon. It was not until between two and three, when at last we heard the sound of the ambulances and other vehicles going there.” “I believed someone should have come,” he insisted. “We could not understand why they did not respond.” Margaret Ngulube, a resident of Twapia, was twenty-­three years old on the night of the crash. The memory stayed with her. “It was a terrible experience,” she told the Times of Zambia in 2005. “I saw a ball of fire in the sky and later on heard a loud bang. When I saw the fire in the sky, I realized something was wrong. Most of us thought the plane was shot or faulty somehow.” that the wreckage of the Albertina was seen from the sky shortly after dawn. This claim was made in 1994 by Colonel Don G. Gaylor, the USAF air attaché stationed in Pretoria, who was sent to Ndola on September 15 by the Pentagon. The reason Gaylor gave for this mission was “to meet Mr. Hammarskjöld and offer my assistance and transportation if he so desired.” Gaylor’s later memoir, From Barnstorming to Bush Pilot, published in 2010, described his functions as intelligence-­gathering in sub-­Saharan Africa. Gaylor was one of three U.S. air attachés who are known to have flown to Ndola airport during the period of September 15-­18. Commander Don L. Ely, the U.S. naval attaché for air in Pretoria, arrived on September 16. Colonel Benjamin Matlick, the U.S. air it’s also possible

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attaché in Leopoldville, arrived at Ndola airport on September 18 at approximately 12:15 p.m. According to a letter Gaylor wrote to an official Swedish investigator in 1994 (a letter I was recently sent by Hans Kristian Simensen, a Norwegian researcher who, like me, is assisting Justice Othman on a voluntary basis), Gaylor was in the control tower at Ndola airport on the night of September 17-­18, waiting for Hammarskjöld’s aircraft. The letter states that after the plane failed to arrive, he and his crew prepared for takeoff at first light to look for a crash site. Gaylor wrote that he spotted the wreckage shortly after dawn and immediately contacted the “Ndola rescue frequency and gave them the map coordinates of the site.” His letter adds: “Then I circled the site for a considerable period to give the ground party a point of reference.” This account is consistent with Gaylor’s memoir. To illustrate his 1994 letter, Gaylor included a photograph: “I am enclosing an aerial photo I took of the crash site. You will note my aircraft shadow as the hour was not long after dawn and the sun was still low on the horizon.” Dawn in Zambia in mid-­September is just after 5:30 a.m. It should be noted that there is a discrepancy between this claim by Gaylor and a report by Matlick to the U.S. Secretary of State on September 22, which states that Gaylor had wanted to search in the morning but was not allowed to do so by the Rhodesian civil authorities. Matlick adds that Gaylor flew the second aircraft to spot the crash site in the afternoon, following a sighting by a RRAF aircraft; this was echoed by Squadron Leader John Mussell in his testimony to the Rhodesian Board of Investigation. Without further documentary evidence, we cannot resolve these conflicting pieces of evidence, or verify Gaylor’s claim that he found the crash site shortly after dawn. This makes it all the more important to obtain and study the report that Gaylor said he sent to the Pentagon: “My report to my superiors in the Pentagon was acknowledged with some accolades.” So far as the discovery of the crash site is concerned, then, there are a number of different reports which give various times,

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many of them before 3:10 p.m. They range from Gaylor’s claim of shortly after dawn to Timothy Kankasa’s report to the police in the early morning. Together, they reinforce Matlick’s judgment that “communications and air search by Rhodesian authorities [were] unexcusably late in getting started.” He attributed this failure by the Rhodesian civil authorities “either to their negative attitude towards the U.N.…or to cover up their own inefficiency.” If Harold Julien had been found earlier in the day, he would not have had to lay suffering under the blazing sun for so long, without any medical care or relief from pain, and his chances of survival could well have been greater. (It is also possible that, as the Swedish doctors who reviewed the autopsy reports in 1962 on behalf of the U.N. concluded, Hammarskjöld himself survived the crash, and might have lived longer if he’d been taken to a hospital sooner.) of Gaylor’s involvement is worth noting. After the Albertina failed to land, a team of Norwegian U.N. soldiers flew to Ndola to assist in the search. Their aircraft was parked near Gaylor’s DC-­3. Because of white Rhodesians’ hostility to U.N. personnel, they were not allowed to enter the airport terminal. So Gaylor’s crew invited them on board to get some food. To the surprise of the U.N. soldiers, they discovered that the American plane was packed with highly sophisticated radio equipment. We know from other testimony that the U.S. Embassy in Leopoldville was communicating with Ndola via a U.S. aircraft, which presumably was Gaylor’s DC-­3. And that may explain an intriguing aspect of the story, namely that Edmund A. Gullion, the U.S. ambassador in the Congo, sent a cable to Washington on the morning of September 18 that explicitly referred to the possibility that the plane was shot down. “Hammarskjöld’s plane believed lost in vicinity Rhodesian border near Ndola,” the cable read. “There is possibility he was shot down by single pilot who has harassed U.N. operations and who has been identified by one usually reliable source as van Riesseghel, Belgian, who accepted training lessons with so-­called Katangan Air Force.” (The ambassador’s

one other aspect

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communique included an error—the name of the pilot in question was Jan van Risseghem.) That hypothesis is bolstered by the experience of Commander Charles Southall, an American naval pilot who was working at the National Security Agency (NSA) listening station in Cyprus at the time of the crash. Shortly after midnight on September 18, he and some other officers found themselves clustered round a loudspeaker, listening to the recording. They heard the rushing noise of an aircraft engine and the commentary of the pilot: “I see a transport plane coming low. All the lights are on. I’m going down to make a run on it. Yes, it is the Transair DC-­6. It’s the plane.” The pilot’s voice was “cool and professional,” said Southall. Then they heard gun cannons firing—and the pilot saying, “I’ve hit it. There are flames! It’s going down. It’s crashing!” At this point, Southall told me, the voice had some “excitement.” He had the impression that the pilot was “expecting the plane.” Southall suspected that the pilot was communicating with the CIA or with some other Katangan, Rhodesian, or British base that was cooperating with the CIA. also knew of the plane crash long before it was officially located. In 2011, Lord Alport’s private secretary, Brian Unwin, wrote an article for the Guardian with an attention-­getting headline: “It Is Wrong to Suggest That Dag Hammarskjöld Was Murdered.” In the article, Unwin states that he and Alport, both of whom were at Ndola airport that night and spent it in their parked aircraft, knew at dawn of the crash of a plane. The article adds that this was confirmed as Hammarskjöld’s plane at noon, when Unwin and Alport arrived back at Salisbury airport. Unwin later said that he had misremembered the chronology of events. But the times in his article mesh perfectly with a report to London by the British Ambassador to the Congo stating that the “wreckage” of Hammarskjöld’s aircraft “was discovered at mid-­day on the 18th of September.” senior british officials

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The British consul in Elisabethville, who had come to Ndola, gave a similar account. In an unpublished memoir, he recorded that he had arranged a lunch for Tshombe and his advisors in Kitwe, a town nearly forty miles from Ndola. But before the lunch, he took a wireless set to Ndola post office to be repaired. This delay enabled him “to receive the definite news that Hammarskjöld’s plane had crashed before going to lunch.” of the inquiry Justice Othman has asked U.N. member states with potential information in their intelligence, security, and defense archives to appoint an independent and high-­ranking official to identify and inform him of all relevant records. The majority of these states, including among others France, Portugal, Sweden, and Zimbabwe, have sought to cooperate in a serious manner. But the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Africa have not disclosed any significant information to Justice Othman since 2017. He reported in 2022 that in the case of South Africa and the United Kingdom, “not a single document has been disclosed in that period. The US provided one document in 2018/19 and a further document in 2021, both of which were publicly available. Documentation responsive to my specific search requests has not, however, been received.” The Zimbabwean government provided the Justice with evidence that Rhodesian intelligence officials were intercepting U.N. communications in Katanga. This matches information in the slim file that was made available to the Justice by the British government in 2017, in which there are several references to the interception of U.N. communications by the Rhodesian and British authorities. Justice Othman has referred to the “possibility of the interception of communications on the travel arrangements for the Secretary-­General’s mission to Ndola.” Should it surface that such communications were intercepted, he observes, “it would have rendered futile the United Nations efforts to maintain the confidentiality of the journey.” Such interception of U.N. communications

over the past few years

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would have exposed the flight to the possibility of hostile action while en route. Ambassador Gullion, as we have seen, raised the possibility that a Belgian pilot in the Katangan Air Force shot down Hammarskjöld’s plane. That air force had been supplied by the CIA with Fouga fighter aircraft, and the NSA and the CIA had the means to intercept the communications sent from the CX-­52 machines used by Hammarskjöld’s team. So information about the flight path of the Albertina could have been transmitted by the CIA to Katangan forces. At least one official working for the British intelligence service MI6 was at Ndola and the surrounding area for about six days around the time of the crash. This official, Neil Ritchie (who was operating under the official cover of Lord Alport’s First Secretary), was involved in a top-­secret mission relating to Hammarskjöld’s visit and was in frequent communication with Alport. Cyrille Adoula, the prime minister of the Congo at the time of the crash, believed that Hammarskjöld had been murdered and held “the great financial Powers of the West” responsible. “How ignoble is this assassination, not the first of its kind perpetrated by the moneyed powers. Mr. Hammarskjöld was the victim of certain financial circles for whom a human life is not equal to a gram of copper or uranium.” was submitted by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to the president of the U.N. General Assembly with a personal statement of support: “It remains our shared responsibility to pursue, with renewed urgency, the full truth of what happened on that fateful night in 1961.… I consider this to be our solemn duty and I will do everything I can to support this endeavour.” The Rhodesian Commission’s theory of pilot error as the cause of the crash has been largely discounted. This means that the official record produced under the auspices of British colonial rule—and with the support of other Western powers with economic interests in the region—is no longer credible. This is apparent in the growing

justice othman’s 2022 report

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support of U.N. member states for Justice Othman’s investigation. When Sweden presented a resolution to the U.N. General Assembly at the end of 2022 to continue the inquiry, 141 nations out of 193 co-­ sponsored the resolution—a record number on this matter. The United States did not co-­sponsor the 2022 Resolution, even though four American citizens—a quarter of the victims—died as a result of the crash. The United Kingdom also declined to do so. The Zambian Bishop Dr. Trevor Musonda Mwamba has closely followed the investigation. For him, the tragedy is intensely personal: He was ordained a priest in Ndola, served as a parish priest nearby, and holds Dag Hammarskjöld in deep admiration. Bishop Mwamba believes it is imperative that the circumstances surrounding the crash of the Albertina are known and understood. “It’s important for Zambia’s identity,” he insists, “to know its past in order to embrace its authentic self in the future.” For ultimately, he adds, “the truth does set a person free and a country too—­ennobling both, making them better, to do good in the world.” I am extremely grateful to Hans Kristian Simensen for his generosity in sharing the fruits of his research and copies of critical documents. For sharing their important memories and references, I thank Richard Julien, the Right Reverend Dr. Trevor Musonda Mwamba, Maurin Picard, Monique Rime, B. Rosato, and Mike Shine.

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Winner Ling Ma The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 19-34 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914440

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914440

fiction

Winner Ling Ma

I

hadn’t returned the keys because the landlord hadn’t returned my security deposit. That’s how I remember it, though it’d been a long time since I’d moved out. I came across the keys again when I was rifling through a desk drawer one day, looking for something, batteries maybe. There were three in the set—one for the building entrance, another for the mailbox, and the last for the apartment unit itself. I would not have recognized the keys if not for the daisy keychain. I closed the drawer again, not wanting to touch them. The deposit didn’t matter by this point.

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A week passed, then another, before I thought to return them. It was the most karmically clean solution. But maybe I just wanted to go back. and where I used to live aren’t that far apart. The distance is less than a subway stop—if you took the train, you’d overshoot it. I don’t remember the last time I was there. “There is no time like the present” is something my therapist tells me, although I guess that’s a common adage. It was midday on a Friday. I put on my shoes and took a walk. My old neighborhood has become gentrified like anywhere else. The assisted living facilities and retirement homes, outdated even when I lived there, have been converted into luxury condos and rentals. The laundromat has been replaced by an eco-­friendly dry cleaner. I missed the Indian takeout place that sold, next to the front register, these big samosas under a heat lamp. In the winters, getting off the train from work, I would buy two for $5, before hitting up the liquor store at the corner for a beer on the way home. The liquor store was still in business, repainted with a selfie-­ bait mural of animals punching each other in a rainbow boxing ring. Inside, the inventory had been completely revised. There were shelves of celebrity tequilas, and in the fridge section, wellness drinks replaced the old Mistic juices and Coke varieties, those thick Goya nectars. I took a bottle of mushroom-­infused water that was inexplicably $7.99, and when I went to check out, I saw that they still had not taken the banner down. There was a photo of me on it, shaking hands with the owner, as we both looked at the camera. My old bangs, my greasy skin. WINNING LOTTERY TICKET SOLD HERE!!! $$60 MILLION!! Sixty million is Britney Spears’s estimated net worth, I read somewhere, maybe in an article about myself winning the Power­ ball. The amount was inconceivable to me, but for Britney Spears, it somehow didn’t seem enough. I hoped she would never have to work again if she didn’t want to. I myself have not worked in years. where i live

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“There’s a surcharge of 3 percent,” the cashier said. “Our policy for credit card purchases under ten bucks. Is that okay?” “Sure, that’s fine.” I needed to make a habit of carrying cash. “Can’t get out of surcharges,” I added. “What’s that?” He looked at me. “Nothing.” I looked away. It was unlikely he would recognize me from the banner. The girl in the picture had ascended into lottery-­ winner heaven. She was ziplining through a Colombian jungle, or Birkin shopping in Paris. Or she had joined the fate of most lottery winners and fallen into destitution. When you are struck by the lightning of extreme fortune, there is no middle path forward, only the paths of extremes. “There’s an ATM in here if you want to do cash,” the clerk said, then remembered something. “But there’d still be a withdrawal fee.” “It’s fine. Thanks.” Suddenly I wanted to get out of there. There’s a feeling I have sometimes that, having narrowly escaped my life, I am about to be found out. I brace for a blow that never comes. I don’t know why. Being lucky isn’t a crime. He rang up the water. “You want a bag for this?” He gestured toward a stack of black plastic bags, with a wry smile. “It’s seven cents, but I won’t charge you.” “No thanks.” I took my water and backed away. the old apartment building to be razed and replaced with new construction. But like the liquor store, it was still there, different and only slightly recognizable. Walking down the block, I almost passed its new brick façade. The building had been repainted a neutral Dilbert gray that covered up its confusing fleshy yellow shade. Someone had planted hedges along the front; only up close could you tell that they were plastic. I couldn’t find the rental office, where the landlord used to sit at his desk, watching baseball on a small, goofy TV, discarded fastfood wrappers everywhere. When you went in to ask about repairs, he would only half listen, his eyes darting between you and the game. We called him Mr. B. We didn’t know his surname, but it i half-­e xpected

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was just as well. He had inherited his family property and had mismanaged it into shambles. A management firm had mounted a sign with its contact details near the entryway. Mr. B had finally sold the building, I assumed, and the new owner had contracted the firm to maintain it. When I lived here, we heard rumors that Mr. B was going to sell it to a developer and retire—a matter of when rather than if. I thought to call the listed firm to return the keys, but the idea of leaving them with an anonymous company based out in the suburbs held no meaning. It was unlikely that the missing keys had been registered in the sale and transfer of the property. I stood on the sidewalk, gathering neck sweat. It had gotten hot. I had come out all this way, and I had no one to be accountable to. At the building entrance, I tried the keys. The door opened easily. I stepped inside. The musty smell of that foyer, the mailroom, the hallways was so familiar—marine air freshener and faint secondhand smoke. Technically I was trespassing, but it didn’t feel like a crime. You can’t trespass into what’s familiar. I walked up the stairs to the second floor. It was a small studio at the end of the hallway, next to the janitor’s closet. From inside, I always seemed to hear the elevator chiming in the night and early morning. I lived in that place through most of my twenties, working at an insurance brokerage firm the entire time. My supervisor was what we would call “abusive” and “toxic” now. When I wasn’t at the office working, I was at home, blanked out, sleeping or watching TV. Those were the only two modes. The door had been repainted gray, a lighter shade than the building’s exterior. All the doors had been. I recognized the dent along the bottom of my old door, from having kicked it in anger one night. The unit, spelled out on the door, was 205—loser numbers that I’d incorporated into my Powerball entry as a joke. When I tried the key, the door opened just as easily as the one downstairs. Someone lived there, it looked like, but no one was home.

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in bed beside my husband, I couldn’t quite slip into sleep. One trick to relaxing, my therapist advised, is envisioning a familiar space. You imagine yourself walking around, taking inventory of every detail. As my husband’s breathing deepened into little snores, I thought back to my old studio that, hours earlier, I had broken into. The unit had seen some updates and renovations, a development probably effected by the management firm, not Mr. B. Aside from the new paint job, it had updated light fixtures, a new fridge. Something else, too. The grime, the general mustiness, had been dispelled. The place was tidy and pleasant, if a bit impersonal with its soft, muted tones—ocher curtains, heather sheets. The framed photos of natural wonders—a cactus palm, a seaside cliff—could have been stock images. The occupant had organized the space more effectively than I had. I respected that they had opted for a twin-­sized bed, which allowed for a desk and sofa within the 300-­square-­foot space. The American choice would have been to sink a space like this with an extravagantly large mattress, so that all other functions—eating, watching TV, surfing online—would have to be conducted from where one slept. It is not choosing the “big” things that is fundamentally American but the blind insistence on grandiosity despite the reality of circumstances. It’s not living beyond your means, it’s the unceasing, headless insistence on “the best,” whatever that is. The biggest compliment my supervisor used to give me was “You’re no American.” It meant that I had a work ethic adapted to what is necessary, that I was not blind to circumstances. My supervisor often told me this in the evenings, when I was staying late at the office at her encouragement, or rather at her demand. It was typical for me to stay two or even three hours after everyone else left, before returning to the studio to collapse into my small, hard bed. My supervisor was born and raised in the country of my parents. I wondered if that was why she had hired me. At times, I conflated her approval with that of my parents. That may be the reason that night, lying

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I stayed at that job for as long as I did, the only full-­time job I have ever held in my life. I thought her toughness, her demanding nature, would improve me. The chosen metaphor was of a blade forged by fire, a necessary tempering, when the more fitting one was that of a tree slowly burning to death. Not being American, according to her, was also being able to take suffering. In our bed, my husband stirred. “Go to sleep,” he murmured groggily. His voice sounded distant, blurred out by the sound of the AC. It literally took winning the lottery to quit that job. And even then, I stayed another month to ensure a smooth transition. “You’ll never make it,” my supervisor said to me routinely, casually, at unexpected moments. Only toward the end did I question what “it” was. I didn’t have ambitions to climb to the top of the company, and I wasn’t committed to the field of insurance brokerage, which was ugly and corrupt, like all things healthcare-­related in the US. What did “it” mean? When I told my supervisor I had won the lottery, she was confused at first. We were in her office. She wanted me to explain how the Powerball system worked, something I didn’t totally understand myself. So we looked it up on her desktop. We Googled it. We read guidelines for lottery winners (“Avoid sudden lifestyle changes,” “Diversify your investments”). We pored through the articles for some time. She was both solemn and overzealously congratulatory. But I was tasked to work through her confusion with her. Her continual, now incessant, questioning began to feel exaggerated, pointed: Any good fortune could not have occurred unless she had personally verified it. I began to feel trapped. I had planned to give notice, but it would have to wait until another time. When she asked, “Why you?” I said, “I don’t know.” was Saturday. Montessori was closed. We did family time—some configuration of stroller walk, coffee shop, ­farmer’s market, and playground. Maybe a brunch restaurant. A nice, middle-­class family doing nice, middle-­class activities. Then we

the next day

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returned home, where my son took his nap while I played video games, shooting out tanks and personnel carriers in a DMZ-­like setting. My husband read the news in the other room. It began to rain. In the afternoon, we took our son to the library. In the children’s area, I read him a picture book about a zoo filled with sad animals, which turned out to be about climate change. We were interrupted by an eerie, synchronized beep—a flash flood warning on everyone’s phones. When we prepared to leave, our kid protested with whimpers, then screams; we had to drag him out. He darted into the parking lot, splashing into a puddle before my husband grabbed him, wet and wailing. On the drive back, my husband fumed. “We’re doing it wrong,” he said, echoing his mother’s stance, which is that it is unnatural for our lives to revolve around entertaining a two-­year-­old. “Whatever,” I said. “Drive to the toy store.” Our son had been placed in the NICU after his birth, and for a while it was very touch and go. His thighs, the only puffins of fat left, were punctured with needles and IVs. I kept a notebook, a narrative of his condition, because I did not believe that the system, a scattering of nurses and doctors tending to multiple patients, would be able keep it straight. I stood next to him, reciting the narrative, making sure they didn’t miss any details. At one point, the doctor said they had done all they could. “It’s up to him now.” Only at this crucial moment did they recognize his agency. It was winter. I looked around, trying to find something that would tip the scales in favor of living. The paper cups of coffee, the linoleum-­tile flooring, the bouquet of spray carnations that had come, questionably, with a white Condolences balloon. My husband had taken the balloon out of the room and was looking for somewhere to throw it away. He had been gone for twenty minutes. Outside the window, the hospital parking lot was covered in a porridge of gray snow and slush. A cluster of coats waited at the bus station across the street. There was nothing I could convincingly point to.

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But I spoke to my son through the plastic. I said that from his vantage point, the world may not seem like an inviting place. But if he was willing to wait, strange, spectacular things happened every day. Like his birth, for one, and everything leading up to it. I said that the chances of winning the lottery were extremely slim, but it had happened, and the money was what had made his conception possible, the fertility treatments and so on. If anything, the extremely narrow odds leading to his existence meant that he was supposed to be here, that he deserved to be here. So I hoped that he would stay. I was surprised by this line of reasoning as I spoke. But his little face, closed up like an old fist, seemed to relax at the sound of my voice. Finally, I said that if he could keep going so we could leave this hospital, I would use the lottery winnings to make his life great. The toy store was closing early when we got there, due to the extreme weather. But the clerk opened it and I managed to grab a Duplo set, along with a mock smartphone that played musical notes and something called a Pop-­a-­Balls Push & Pop Bulldozer, at the clerk’s recommendation. Rushing out into the rain, I put the shopping bag into the back seat instead of the trunk, which was a mistake. “Wait to open the boxes when we get home,” my husband instructed our son. “Don’t make a mess!” I chimed in, getting into the passenger seat. “You can hold the toys, but don’t open them yet.” In the rearview mirror, we watched helplessly as he tore into the boxes. He was surprisingly strong, with fast-­growing nails I could barely keep up with trimming. “Yeahhhhhh!” he yelled, waving the toy over his head, like an eighties wrestler. “Yeahhhhh!” We drove home slowly as our toddler rampaged in the back seat. The streets were eerily empty, and though the rain was heavy, the gutters weren’t overflowing. I didn’t think the conditions warranted this kind of response, but we were all primed for catastrophe now. “We’re doing it wrong,” my husband repeated, looking straight ahead at the road.

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“There is no right way.” “I might not know what the right way is, but I definitely know we’re doing it wrong.” “Yeah, you keep saying that.” Outside the window, even the parking lots of box chain stores were deserted. “Look, if a kid is screaming and being disrespectful, he shouldn’t get rewarded. It’s as simple as that.” He gestured to the back seat. “If he’s throwing a tantrum at the library, we don’t need to take him to the toy store right after. It just encourages bad behavior.” I glanced in the rearview mirror. “Maybe those are two separate things. We went to the library, and we went to the toy store. Not everything is cause and effect.” “That’s not how it comes off to him.” My husband turned into our driveway. “He needs to learn about consequences. We need to instill some kind of moral code.” He paused to locate the clicker for the garage door. “We need to teach him that, you know, you don’t just get rewarded for nothing. That’s chaos.” “Okay,” I said, as we pulled into the garage of our house, a three-­story refurbished single-­family home with a rooftop deck, dual-­zone heating and cooling system, and landscaped bamboo courtyard. “I hear what you’re saying.” on monday, i received an email from my former supervisor. It read,

How are you? Occasionally, I still get emails from her. They come unpredictably, every few months maybe. They are not sent from her work address, which I blocked long ago, but from one of multiple personal addresses. It is always a brief message, often a question or a leading statement. Sometimes it is an inside joke we once shared. A few times, it was a news link asking my thoughts about something related to insurance. In all cases, I delete the message. The thought crosses my mind that I should keep them as evidence, but evidence for what? I have to get rid of it, or I’ll keep thinking about it. How are you?

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I deleted this. Then I emptied the trash folder. I did this from the comfort of my old studio, which I had snuck into again. The space was just as clean and tidy as it had been last week. There were no dishes in the sink, no dirty cereal bowls or coffee mugs abandoned before they rushed out the door to catch the train. The white countertops looked smooth and spotless. The bed was made. Who did that? Who kept their apartment that clean on a Monday morning? This time I felt like an intruder. But I didn’t leave. This time, I had brought an iced coffee and my laptop, which I set up at the desk. I planned to apply to jobs that morning, something I had been procrastinating on for weeks. There was just no urgency when I worked from home. In my old apartment, I updated my résumé. Mostly, I just refreshed the design; I didn’t have much to add. I constructed a template cover letter, describing my work gap as a decision to spend time at home as a new mother, without any mention of the lottery. If an employer Googled me and figured out who I was, then fine. I looked up various postings and bookmarked a few positions I might have a chance at interviewing for. Most of these were entry-­ level communications-­type jobs. None were in insurance brokerage. I created a LinkedIn page, as advised by job-­hunting articles, and sent former coworkers, but not my former supervisor, requests to connect. This was the most productive I had been in months. The longer I stayed, the less I felt like I was intruding. And when I was done, I cleaned up after myself, making sure not to leave anything behind, including trash. As I exited the building, a neighbor coming in smiled at me. I almost froze, but I smiled back. “Have a nice day,” I said. passed in much the same way. After I dropped off my son at Montessori, I would come to the apartment and work on job applications. On one of those days, I even did my virtual therapy appointment from the studio. “I’m cat-­sitting at a friend’s place,” I explained to my therapist.

the next few days

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“That’s very nice of you,” she said. “But is this something you wanted to do? Walk me through how this request played out.” The previous week, my therapist had given me a chart on the four communication styles. We both agreed that I resorted to my default “passive” style too often and needed to practice “assertive” style. “My friend asked me a while back and I agreed. They live near me, so it’s not a big chore.” I was unprepared to make up more lies on the spot, but I tried to convey that I had not been finagled into this by my passivity. “I just feed the cat and spend time with her. She’s sweet.” “I thought you were allergic to cats.” “Not, like, super allergic. I can be around them for a couple of hours.” Then, switching gears, I added, “I’ve been using the time here to start applying to jobs.” She nodded in approval. Finally, some progress. We had recently come to the conclusion that I should seek out gainful employment again. It was a grounding measure, a way of ordering my days, which had become increasingly slippery and meaningless. “How is that going?” “I’ve sent out a handful of applications so far.” I chuckled uneasily. “It’s been so long since I worked. I don’t know if blind applications are the way to do it anymore.” “Well, regardless. This is a great first step. I’m proud of you.” “I’m a little worried because I don’t have a lot of references. And I don’t want to put my former boss’s name down.” “What do you think would happen if you asked her to be a reference?” “I don’t know. She might feel that I owed her. I’m afraid that…” I trailed off. It sounded ridiculous to say that I was afraid she might come back. “Are we dealing in fears or plausibilities?” “I’d rather not even open that door,” I said. “It’s why I have been applying to entry-­level jobs. I’d rather just start over.” “What would happen if you were to approach her?”

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“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to engage in more thought exercises. “I think she’s still angry at me.” “Why does she still feel angry towards you?” “Because…” I struggled to find the words. “Because I escaped, and by escaping, I upended the order of things. She wielded her power over everyone. Especially me. But suddenly I had an escape hatch out of that whole system.” “Lots of people quit their jobs.” “But it was almost as if, by quitting, I was saying that the system, the one in which she reigned, was stupid. That anyone would leave if given the chance.” My therapist paused. “How do you know she feels this way?” “I just know.… From working with her for all those years. I know how she thinks.” “You’ve given a lot of thought as to how she might feel toward you. Tell me how you feel toward her.” “She was a mean-­spirited person who made my life hell in subtle ways at first and, as time accrued, more obvious and egregious ways. But by that point I was used to it, and so I just took it.” “So you feel angry.” “I feel angry,” I said, then added, “But I’ve been very lucky.” “You’re minimizing yourself.” She jotted something down. “You don’t have to minimize your anger. The more space you allow yourself to take up, the more this world will accommodate you.” She paused. “And the less angry you will feel.” I sighed. “That line of thinking seems so American, though. If everyone gets to take up space, it would be…” I searched for the word. She laughed, a little bit. “Yeah, tell me. What do you think would happen?” “It would be… annoying.” I wanted to say disgusting. “News flash,” my therapist said. “You’re an American.” that day, I saw that the door to the janitor’s closet was open. It emitted a dim, orange light, incongruous with

leaving the studio

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the cool, white lumination of the hallway. Peeping inside, I saw a single bulb dangling low on a string. It was jiggling, as if someone had just turned it on. But there was no one around. Even when I lived here, I had never seen inside the closet, which was the size of a homey walk-­in. There were a few shelves of cleaning sprays and bottles, some brooms and vacuum cleaners, and a floor sink where the mops were washed out. Nestled amongst these was a little cot with a wrinkled floral sheet spread over it, lilacs against a white backdrop. A McDonald’s burger, unwrapped from its wax paper, had been left on the cot, alongside some fries. When the elevator pinged, I moved toward the stairway. the next week ,

I was in the studio, in the middle of writing an email to follow up on an application, when the door opened. I turned around, bracing myself. The person at the door was an older man. There was a pause. “Well, you’re not supposed to be in here,” he said, only mildly surprised. It was Mr. B. Which was also surprising. I’d assumed he’d retired. “Oh, hi, Mr. B,” I said, for lack of anything else to say. He looked smaller. He still wore the same thing—white T-­shirts, yellowing around the pits, tucked into belted chinos. I’d forgotten about the white tube socks and black Reebok sneakers. “You’re not supposed to be in here,” he repeated. “There are showings here tonight.” “Oh, okay.” I tried to recover from how startled I felt. “Are you trying to find a new tenant for this place?” “No, the showings are not for this unit, they’re in this unit,” he said, impatient. “This one is not for sale. This is the sales model.” “Oh, really?” I reassessed the studio again. It made too much sense—the sterile tidiness, the framed stock photography, the impersonal décor. I could have figured it out. “You’re lucky no one lives here.” He chuckled. I did not seem to be in any trouble. “This studio is too small to rent out. Hasn’t been lived in for a couple of years. So they spruced it up as a sample.”

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“But I used to live here.” I wondered why they would use the smallest unit as a sales model. He looked at me, incurious. “Okay, well. That was probably a mistake.” I didn’t know how to respond to that. “I used to live here,” I repeated. “Like, for six years. Back when it was your building.” “Ah, the good old days.” He squinted as if trying to place me, but I don’t think he remembered. “Why are you here now?” “I was going to return the keys.” It wasn’t exactly an answer, but I fumbled through my bag. “Here,” I said, holding them out to him. As if I had been waiting to do this all along. “I held on to the keys because I never got the deposit back.” He did not move to take them. “Did you come back for the deposit, then?” he asked, and I knew that I had remembered correctly, that he had never returned it. “Don’t worry about it.” I still held out the keys. “Because if you’re asking for your deposit,” he continued, as if not having heard me, “first of all, there might be a statute on that. I don’t know, I can’t say one way or the other. But you’re going to have to go through management, not me. They own this place now.” “Do you work for management?” “I don’t work for anyone,” he bristled, before launching into a long-­winded explanation. He had an arrangement with the property firm to help maintain the building. It sounded like light janitorial tasks. He swept the front entrance, he made sure no packages were left outside, he tidied up the sales model, et cetera. “Do you still live in the building?” “I live in The Fairview. Do you know where that is?” “Yeah, that’s not far from here.” “It’s just down the block.” Mr. B was uncommonly proud. “Never thought I’d end up there.” “I heard it’s really nice.” Fairview was an expensive senior living facility, one of the last in the neighborhood that advertised hotel-­ quality amenities. There was a well-­pruned courtyard and a restaurant on the first floor. Walking on a winter night, I once spotted,

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through gauze curtains, white-­gloved waiters moving from table to table, ladling soup from a cart. “Well, I sold this building for… a tidy sum, you might say.” Propriety prevented him from disclosing the exact amount. “I thought you’d be fully retired by now.” “And what would I do all day?” he said, suddenly indignant. “Watch TV?” I bit my tongue. That was literally all he did when he was the landlord: watch baseball in his office. He continued, “This building has been in my family for generations. I know it like the back of my hand, and you can’t buy that kind of knowledge. They know that. They’re the ones who keep asking me back!” Sharpened by his irritation, he zoomed in on me. “And now I’m going to have to ask you to leave, please.” “I’m going, Mr. B.” I had been holding the keys the entire time, keys he hadn’t accepted, and I put them in my bag. “It was nice to see you again.” He grunted in return, neither confirming nor denying. In the hallway, the janitor’s closet was open again. I didn’t peep inside this time. I went down the steps to the foyer, then through the front doors and down the streets of my old neighborhood. I went past the station where I used to catch the train to go to work and the new bus stop that accommodated an express line going directly downtown. I hadn’t even clocked the new shoe store or the fine jewelry shop. When you come into a big windfall, the impulse is to convert the money into material things. But I think the real trick is to convert money into time. I walked until I arrived back at my house, new construction that, according to our agent, accrues at a higher rate than most properties in the city. I punched in the security code, and when I opened the front door, the blast of air-­conditioning felt bracingly, refreshingly minty. In the foyer and living room, I negotiated the labyrinth of paintings and sculptures, silently accruing value day by day, hour by hour. Also accruing along the hallways were rare

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first editions entombed inside closed bookcases, titles I have never touched, let alone read. I climbed the staircase to the master suite, where I found my king-­sized bed dressed with sheets the color of pistachio ice cream. Even if I don’t know what to do with time anymore, I still want it. It is mine to waste. I smoothed out the pillowcase. I got underneath the covers. I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

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In Medias Res Percival Everett The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 105-117 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914445

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914445

fiction

In Medias Res Percival Everett

1969

T

… o feel the back of his head to know there was blood there. He could smell it. But he reached back anyway. He knew he was in the trunk of a car, but that was all he knew. He kicked a couple of times at the cover, then did what his training had taught him. He pushed and tore his way through the back seat into the car. Outside, he breathed fresh air, found his balance, and worked out the kinks in his body. It was dark everywhere. He was not where he had been. Even adjusted to the darkness, his eyes

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could pick up few details of the tracks on the dirt road he was standing next to. So he chose a direction, remembering what they used to say in the army. Do something—even if it’s wrong. After a mile or so, he came to a gravel road, no more identifiable that the dirt one, but certainly one he had never driven over. There were no signs. Again he chose a direction. He heard a vehicle approaching from behind. He didn’t turn to face it but kept walking. This was the rural South; he didn’t need to advertise the color of his skin. The pickup truck passed him, then skidded to a stop on the gravel. Mac stepped to the passenger door. The driver leaned over and cranked down the window. “Need a lift?” The driver was middle-­aged, with near-­white hair. “Where you trying to get to?” “Depends on where I am,” Mac said. “Boyce is up the road a spell,” the man said. “Boyce?” “Virginia. How lost are you?” “Pretty lost,” Mac said. “I’m trying to get to DC.” “Well, you headed in the right direction,” the man said, then laughed. “If you got time to walk around the globe.” “Shit.” “Get in. I’ll give you a lift.” Mac got in. The truck was clean inside. The man was clean. Mac could see in the glow of the dash lights that his overalls were new. “Thanks. I really appreciate this. Maybe in Boyce I can get a bus.” The man turned the truck around on the road. “What are you doing?” Mac asked. “Hell, I ain’t got nothing to do. Hour to Georgetown. I’ll take you there.” “Really, you don’t need to—” “Really, I do. You out here walking these roads by yourself like this, well, you could get yourself into a bit of trouble.” “Trouble?” The man just smiled.

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“I got you,” Mac said. “If you don’t mind me asking, how did you get way out here?” Mac stared momentarily out the window. “Somebody hit me on the head and dumped me out here.” The man whistled. “Want to me take you to the police in Purcellville? That’s the next town.” Before Mac could answer, the man said, “Naw, they’d just hang you.” He observed Mac’s reaction. “Just joking.” “That’s some joke.” The man nodded. “My name is Raymond.” “David,” Mac said. “Well, David, you’re damn lucky I came along.” Mac nodded. “Anybody could have picked you up.” “I suppose,” Mac said. “But you did.” “You live in Washington?” “Yes.” “Me, I live in Leesburg.” “What do you do in Leesburg?” Mac asked. “A little of this, a little of that. How about you?” Mac looked at his own clothes, his dress pants, his street shoes. “I’m an insurance adjuster.” “Rough business?” “Pardon?” “I mean, how often do you get hit on the head and dumped?” “Once a month.” Raymond laughed. “That’s good. You’re a funny fella.” “So, what, did you lowball some guy on his Eldorado?” Mac pretended to laugh with him. “Insurance is a rough game.” “Whoever dumped you out here sure doesn’t like you.” “Aside from the fact that they hit me real hard, why do you say that?” “You’re Negro. I’m right about that?” “Yeah.”

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“There’s this practice around here called lynching.” “I’ve heard of it.” “That’s good.” Raymond checked his mirrors. “You see where I’m going with this.” “Ray Charles could see where you’re going with this.” Raymond laughed loud, again. “He’s blind, right. That’s a good one. You need a sense of humor in this world.” They rode on mostly in silence. Mac checked outside his door frequently. Raymond stopped on the Virginia side of Key Bridge. “That there’s Georgetown.” “Thank you, Ray.” “That’s Raymond.” “Thanks, Raymond.” “You’re welcome.” Mac shut the door. “Y’all be careful now,” Raymond said through the half-­open window as he rolled away. Mac watched Raymond disappear into Virginia. He was at least glad Raymond hadn’t taken him to a lynching. He started the long walk across the bridge. it was morning by the time Mac stepped into his office at 16th and U. It was in his kitchen, though he preferred to say that the kitchen was in his office. A difference without a distinction that somehow mattered to him. On his heels entered his client, Fischer Price. “You look like shit,” Price said. “I feel like shit.” Mac sat at the table and rubbed the back of his head. “Those two guys you steered me to, well, they ain’t the ones.” “They do this to you?” “Yeah, but they didn’t kill me.” “You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Price said. “Jury’s out.” Mac got up and put fire under the kettle on the stove. “You might have to face it, counselor. Your client is guilty.”

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“She’s not, though.” “Walk me through it again.” “Tessa Hillman arrived home from the hospital at six-­thirty just like she did every Tuesday through Friday for the last six years. This time she found the front door open and the house torn apart. In the dining room she found her husband, Mitchell Hillman, in a pool of blood on the table. Two to the back of his head.” “Why was Mitch home? Did he work?” “Yeah, he serviced typewriters at a shop near Dupont Circle. Tessa says he was never home before seven. Neighbors corroborate.” “Any guns in the house?” Mac asked. “None. Apparently, Mitchell was terrified of guns.” “Turns out he was right to be.” Mac poured water for tea. “You want some?” Price shook his head. “They didn’t fight. They went to church. No children. Usual debt. Met in high school.” “From DC?” “Anacostia. Both of them.” “Last day at work?” Mac asked. “Came in late, left early. Nobody knows why. He took a machine with him. Shop owner said that was odd.” “A typewriter?” “A Remington Rand. Wait a second.” Price looked at his notebook. “That little notebook makes you look like a cop.” “Remington Rand, Model three-­eleven-­twenty-­eight.” “Oh, that one.” “Yeah, well, it’s a detail.” “Where’s this machine now?” “It was at his house, sitting on the coffee table just like it was any other Thursday. Still there.” “Why are the cops so set on the wife as the shooter?” “She’s poor, she’s black, and they don’t want to do their fucking jobs. How’s that? That and the insurance policy. Ten grand.”

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“Anybody at the house now?” “Nope. Police tape. Here’s the key.” “I’ll look around. I’ll take the typewriter back to the shop and see if I can find out who it belongs to. You know those two dudes, the ones that roughed me up and dumped me? Why’d you even put me on to them?” “They were hanging around the court after the arraignment. Seemed kind of strange. Certainly glad they didn’t kill you.” “I appreciate that.” “Good investigators are hard to find.” the Hillman house with the key Price had provided. A crew had done a sloppy job of cleaning the sloppier scene. Some of the rags used to smear the blood around had been left to fester and stink in a damp pile. The rooms had a metallic stench. He found the typewriter and opened the case. It looked like any typewriter, except that it was extremely clean. He closed it up and left. He drove to the typewriter shop to find that it was as much a pawn shop as anything. He stepped to the cage and asked for the manager. She was a fat white lady dressed in jeans and a lumberjack shirt. “What can I do for you, doll?” she said. Mac had never been called a doll before. It wasn’t bad. “I want to ask you about this typewriter,” he said. “It’s the one Mitchell Hillman took home with him the day he…” “Got his ass handed to him,” she said. “Yes.” “I thought it would be evidence for a while.” “Evidence is something you collect if you’re doing an investigation. Black corpse. Black spouse. Case solved.” “Sorry to hear that,” she said. “Not surprised, but sorry.” “I’m working for the wife’s lawyer. Anything about this machine I should know?” He set it on the counter. “Like who owns it.” mac let himself into

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“I wish I could tell you,” she said. “You mean you know and wish you could tell me or you don’t know and would tell if you could?” She replayed his words in her head. “The first one.” She lit a cigarette, offered Mac one. He waved it off, and she said, “Or the second. One day Mitch was just cleaning that machine up. I said, ‘Whose is that?’ He told me that a guy was paying him a hundred dollars to work on it.” Mac whistled. “To do what to it?” “Hell if I know. Tell you what: let’s see if it works.” That was a good idea, and Mac said as much. “By the way, my name is Mac.” “Cloris,” she said. She slid a sheet of paper onto the drum and gave it a couple of turns. “Turns smooth,” she said. “Mitch was good with these things.” When she tried to type, nothing happened. “The keys are frozen.” He turned the machine so he could try and had the same result. “It looks perfect,” he said. She took the typewriter off the bottom of the case and turned it over. “Well, looky here.” Mac looked. Shoved up under the carriage was a black envelope. He had to work hard to pry it free. “What’s in it?” Cloris asked. Mac looked back at the door. “Aren’t you going to open it?” “I’ve never seen a black envelope before,” Mac said. “Me, neither,” she said. “You gonna open it?” “Yeah.” Mac looked at it. He tried to work open the flap as smoothly as possible. “Remind me not to spend Christmas with you,” Cloris said. Inside was a small, torn sheet of white paper. There were numbers written on it. It was clearly the combination to a lock or safe. R’s and L’s. “That mean anything to you?” Mac asked.

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Cloris shook her head. “Won’t open my safe. Anything else?” There was another piece of paper, this one with a phone number. “Cloris, can I use your phone?” “Toll call?” She held her face serious and then laughed. “Here.” Mac dialed the number. “Rosen’s Jewelers.” He hung up. “What was it?” Cloris asked. “Western Union,” Mac said. “That’s weird,” she said. rosen’s was down in Georgetown. It was a high-­end shop, and Mac attracted a lot of attention by entering while black. The guard didn’t say anything but stood close to him. “May I help you,” a slight, well-­dressed man asked. “I’m not certain. Are you the manager?” He appeared offended by Mac’s question. “That would be Mr. Rosen,” he said. “Does Mr. Rosen know you?” “I’m certain he doesn’t.” “May I tell him what this is regarding?” “I wish I knew. You can tell him that I’m a private investigator. The kind that doesn’t carry a gun,” Mac said for the benefit of the armed guard standing even closer now. “Listen, I need to ask him one question, and then I’ll be gone.” Their conversation had commanded the attention of everyone in the store. Before the salesman could say whatever he was going to say, a shorter, wider man, one with more presence, showed up. “What is it, Snoots?” the man said. “‘Snoots’?” Mac said. “Mr. Rosen, this, this gentleman…” Mac broke in. “Mr. Rosen, just one question. Does this look familiar to you?” Mac showed him the combination. “Where did you get this?” “Do you recognize it?”

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“Where did you get it?” “Is there someplace we can talk?” Mac asked. “Snoots,” Rosen said. “Take care of the customers. We’ll be in the back.” Mac followed Rosen down a corridor into his private office. “Have a seat,” the man said. Mac sat on the long velvet sofa. “It’s your combination, isn’t it? Don’t worry, I’m not interested in robbing you.” “You don’t understand,” Rosen said. “That’s not the combination to my business safe. That’s my personal safe. The only thing in there is papers.” “What kind of papers?” “Why does that matter?” “A woman is being railroaded for murder, and I think it has something to do with this combination. For all I know the guy who got killed believed this was your business safe combination or somebody believed that or there’s something in your personal safe. Listen, I have no interest in causing you trouble. But this woman, my client. Think of her.” “How did you get it?” “It was hidden under a typewriter. Does mean anything to you?” “What was the man’s name?” “Mitchell Hillman.” “A colored man?” Rosen asked. “A Black man.” “Sorry, I didn’t mean.” “It’s okay. Black man. Black wife. What’s in your papers?” “Proof.” “Proof of what?” “Proof that someone is a Nazi war criminal. Someone you’ve seen on the news.” “How did Mitchell get ahold of your typewriter? Did you take it in to get serviced, and then he just happened to find the envelope? A Remington typewriter.”

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“I don’t know who you’re talking about. I don’t own a Remington typewriter. I don’t know any Mitchell.” “I found your combination and your telephone number in a black envelope stuffed into a Remington typewriter.” “I don’t know anything about that.” “Well, somebody had your combination. And a man named Mitchell got killed for it. At least I believe he was.” “I know nothing.” “Who’s the Nazi?” “You want to be dead, too?” He looked out the window. “I have to move my things.” “Why don’t you just change your combination?” Mac asked. “That safe doesn’t work that way.” Rosen became very nervous, started tapping his nails on the desk. He looked out the window into the alley. “Listen, this is scary business. The fact that I don’t know you is perfect.” He knelt and opened the cabinet behind him. He opened a small safe. “I want you to take these files.” “What?” Mac stood. “I need you to take these papers. Hide them. If anything happens to me, take them to this man.” He wrote on a pad. “He’s at the Post. Give the papers to him. Covertly. Do you know what that means?” “I know what it means.” “Promise me.” “I promise.” “I don’t know you, and that’s for the best. Put this under your jacket.” He handed Mac the files. “This is a lot of pages,” Mac said. “I don’t know if I can hide all of it on me.” “You have to. No one can see you leaving here with anything. Do you understand?” Mac nodded. He spread the material around his body under his jacket and started for the door. “Am I in danger?” he asked Rosen. “I’m afraid so.” Rosen followed Mac back onto the floor and signaled Snoots and the guard to let him pass.

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through the loose pages when Price came in through his back door into his kitchen. “It’s polite to knock,” Mac said. “Courtesy is overrated,” Price said. “What’s all this?” “It might be bullshit. It might be the answer to your client’s troubles.” “I’m listening.” “Hidden in that typewriter was a phone number and a safe combination.” He told him the whole story. “And so this Rosen, who I’d like to point out is scared shitless, gave me the contents of his safe. Maybe thinking that no one will look at a black private eye in a matter of international intrigue.” “That’s your story? This is why I’m paying you twenty bucks a day?” “Here’s a picture. Karl Linnas.” “Yeah?” “He was in charge of the Tartu concentration camp in Estonia. Killed twelve thousand people. He lined people up along a ditch and shot them.” “What’s this have to do with Tessa Hillman?” “Her husband had the info to put this guy away.” “Are you telling me we’re up against Nazis?” “If the swastika fits.” Price lit a filterless cigarette. “What do you want to do?” “Nazis in DC in nineteen-­sixty-­nine. It’s hard enough dealing with Whitey without dealing with Whitey’s Whitey.” Price got up and walked to the window, looked out. “I want to say I’m sorry I got you into this. But Tessa Hillman is still locked up.” “Yeah, I know.” The glass of the window broke. Price seemed to spin on his heel. He gave Mac a questioning look before he turned his eyes down to his chest. Mac watched as Price’s white shirt exploded red under his suit jacket. The spinning move stopped for a moment before Price collapsed to the floor. mac was reading

In Medias Res | 115

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In a second Mac was kneeling beside him, his hand instinctively seeking to apply pressure to the wound, but there was nothing to do. Mac muttered “Fuck fuck fuck” as he tossed himself into the wall and reached up to extinguish the light. He crawled down the hall to his bed and opened the drawer of his bedside table. He pulled out his old service .45, checked the clip, then pushed it back and racked one. He went back to the room with Price and slid along the wall to the window, looked out at the alley and at the windows across the way. He looked at Price and shook his head. Here he was with a corpse in his apartment and no idea who wanted him, Price, or both of them dead. He had a hole in his window, but no one outside seemed to notice or care. Why would they? This was black DC. White people in Arlington had to live with the sounds of passing DC-­9s; black people near Fourteenth and T had to contend with the sound of gunfire. You got used to either. He didn’t believe what he was considering. He was going to have to either dispose of Price’s body or put it on ice for later. Involving the police was clearly a one-­way ticket to a cell, perhaps adjacent to Tessa Hillman’s. That is, if he ever made it to a cell, given what had happened to Price. Mac rolled Price up in the carpet from his bedroom and waited. He sat in his kitchen, light off, away from the window, and stared at the burrito that was Price. Dealing with Nazis was above his pay grade, as the cops he’d met liked to say whenever they didn’t understand something. They said it a lot. For Tessa Hillman and everyone in his sections of northwest and southeast DC, proximity equaled guilt. The alley was completely quiet at two in the morning. Mac carried Price down the rickety stairs and stowed him in the back seat of his car. He put him on the floor. That was the best place for him in the event he got pulled over by police. People often made the mistake of putting bodies in the truck. Cops always looked in the trunk. Hell, the spare tire is in the trunk. Mac turned the key of the Olds Eighty-­Eight and was relieved when it roared. He headed down 16th Street, then cut west on P all

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the way to Georgetown. He drove across Key Bridge and then deep into Virginia woods, a place he had never imagined visiting. He pulled into a firebreak and pulled the carpeted Price out through the back door and even deeper into the forest, across a little creek and over a berm. He found his way back to the road. He tried to cover his tracks that led into the woods and then a sharp pain found the back of his head. The world went black. When Mac came to, he didn’t need…

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From Once Seen : Percival Everett's portraits Eugenia Bell The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 164-170 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914449

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914449

portfolio From Once Seen Percival Everett’s portraits

2014 short story “Tesseract,” the unnamed narrator, a painter, announces, “I favor referring to colors by name rather than by sample. I do not like charts depicting gradations of colors or hues.…They tell me nothing.” Naming is germane to these paintings by Everett, a selection from a show called Once Seen, which act as a companion to Everett’s 2021 novel The Trees. The works are titled after American lynching victims, such as James Pippin, who, according to The New York Times of June 27, 1867, was “hung to the limb of a small oak tree.” Leo Tse Wing was one of twenty-­three Chinese miners killed during the Rock Creek Massacre in Wyoming. Using oils, watercolors, and photographs, Everett collages these figures back into existence. His highly physical compositions— punctuated by turns with joyous or violent color—make fresh the damning facet of American history to which these men have been forever and unfairly yoked. in percival everett’s

—Eugenia Bell

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James Pippin, 2021.

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The Great Hanging of Gainesville, 2021.

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Leo Tse Wing, 2021.

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Elbert Williams, 2021.

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Orion Anderson, 2021.

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Wyatt Outlaw, 2021.

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The Emcee Inquisition, Revisited: An excerpt and annotation Dominique Morisseau The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 70-104 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914444

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914444

drama

The Emcee Inquisition, Revisited An excerpt and annotation Dominique Morisseau

I

wrote The Emcee Inquisition in 2009. It had a staged reading at the Page-­to-­Stage Festival in Washington, DC, in 2010, but the text has never been published. The play explores pervasive misogyny in hip-­hop (and in the mainstream intellectual sphere) through the story of a married couple. Naima, once a successful hip-­hop photographer, has had her career—and life— derailed by a sexual assault some years prior. Sharif, her husband, is a globally recognized hip-­hop emcee whose career may be on the verge of launching into the stratosphere. And Link, the professor of Hip-­Hop Studies who shows up at their home at the start of

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this excerpt, may be tied up in both of these trajectories. Drawing on tropes of horror movies and murder mysteries, the play enacts a sort of revenge fantasy for Naima before she ultimately questions what justice or healing can look like. I was moved to revisit the play now, more than a decade later, in light of the #MeToo movement and in light of female artists like Nicki Minaj, Doja Cat, Cardi B, and Megan Thee Stallion becoming more dominant on the hip-­hop charts. I was moved—as I was in 2009, when I wrote it—by the foremothers to their artistry, like Queen Latifah, Monie Love, MC Lyte, Salt-­N-­Pepa, Yo-­Yo, Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, and, of course, my personal favorite, Lauryn Hill, all of whom paid a hefty price, due to their gender and race, for creating something iconic in the hip-­hop continuum. Another inspiration for the play, one I still return to, is Pearl Cleage’s essay “Mad at Miles,” in which she interrogates our collective reverence—and her own—for Miles Davis’s music, even with the awareness of the abuses he committed against the woman in his life. Cleage’s work made me wonder: Should I also be mad at hip-­hop? This is an art form that I grew up on, that I love and have a lot of respect for—and yet I have felt betrayed and denigrated by its “misogynoir” culture. How do I love you and hold you accountable at the same time? This is something I continue to wrestle with today. In this play I am attempting to bring the culture to a reckoning for its treatment of Black womxn.

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setting : A cabin in the Poconos. Stormy winter night. Present. scene two

Lights up on the living room space of the cabin. Exposed wood decorates the background. Books lie on a coffee table. A fire burns in a modest fireplace. Stage right of the couch is a dining room table. A nice tablecloth adorns it, set with fancy dishes and wine glasses. The mood is set for a slammin’ meal. The Roots, “Act Too (Love Of My Life)” featuring Common plays. Naima enters with a bottle of wine and a bucket of ice. She sets it atop the table, straightens out the tablecloth, looks at her spread for a second. She remembers another detail. She dashes offstage, leaving the stage bare. Sharif enters. He is in his best George Clooney look: suit with unbuttoned shirt underneath, no tie, intentionally crumpled but suave. He goes to the window and peers through the curtain. Naima reenters with a different wine bottle. Headlights beam through the window. sharif

I see something.

naima

You see him?

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Sharif opens the door. Snow blows into the cabin. Seconds later, LINK rushes in. link

Oooo…Good God!

sharif

In here, Professor.

naima

You all right?

link

Cold enough to freeze your thoughts out there!

sharif link

That’s some serious wind!

God’s in a hell of a fury!

naima

Did you have trouble finding us?

Did I? I drove in circles for about a half hour before I finally ended back at the front of the complex.

link

sharif link

I tried calling you.

Dropped my phone in the snow. Think it’s damaged.

naima

Do you need to call someone?

Maybe later. But I’d just like to warm up for a minute, if that’s all right? link

sharif

Absolutely.

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Link wipes his feet at the door and starts to remove his coat. It’s nice and cozy by the fireplace. Come on in. I’ll take that for you. naima

link

Thank you, sister.

Naima takes Link’s coat. Link goes over by the fire and hovers over it to get warm. In an awkward moment, something draws Naima to smell the coat. One sniff and she is immediately affected. A bit thwarted. No one notices her. link

Thanks for having me over so late.

sharif link

Certainly. It’s an honor, sir.

Honor’s all mine. I’m a big fan of your work, brother Sharif.†

sharif

Professor Link, this is my wife, Naima.

naima

Nice to meet you, Professor.

link

Please call me Link. Both of you.

† When I wrote this play, Kendrick Lamar had not yet won the Pulitzer. He was the first hip-­hop artist to be awarded the prize, in 2018. In my mind, Sharif was the kind of artist that Kendrick would become—but even beyond. There’s talk of a Nobel. Sharif is grassroots but global in his reach and in his efforts. A true activist. In my era of hip-­hop, the ’90s, the artists I loved felt that their social consciousness would keep them forever under the cultural radar, subverting the system from outside. Here, I wanted Sharif to break that mold. And Professor Link is part of the elder generation who moved hip-­ hop into the realm of institutional scholarship. He’s on the Nobel Committee. Thus Link becomes a gateway for the Sharifs of the world to gain respect in academia and in the larger global political conversation. His name is a play on this. He is literally the link between Sharif and the next social level.

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I’ll go bring out some crackers and tea. We’ll have dinner once you get warmed up.

naima

link

Thank you, Mrs. Stanley. I appreciate that.

Naima exits into the kitchen. Link takes a look around the place. link

This is a nice cabin, brother.

sharif link

Belonged to my wife’s father. Left it to her when he passed.

Inheritance. A winter getaway. That’s all right.

It takes some getting used to. I’m all Brooklyn nowadays. These woods make a brother nervous sometimes. sharif

(laughing) I hear you, man. I hear you. I was a little nervous driving up here myself. Passing all those big trees. I thought—if I can speak off the record? (Sharif nods) I thought—this is some shit that’ll have my Black ass hanging from one of those leafless winter oaks out there.†

link

† I like a bit of foreshadowing. This line evokes the history of violence against the Black male body, i.e., lynching, castration, etc. Woods and other isolated spaces have been historic sites of harm to the Black male body. And that whole “Black people shouldn’t go into the woods” idea eventually made for a great horror movie, in Get Out in 2017. The irony is that at the center of this play is the harm that has been done to Naima’s Black female body; while the men have a great sense of their own fragility here, they seem less aware or concerned about hers. And then of course, a falling tree will eventually be the thing that traps Link here, in a scenario that makes him feel unsafe in his own body and forces him to face Naima’s Black female bodily harm.

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Word. I hear you. But the wife is kinda married to it. It means something to her… only bit of inheritance she got from her ol’ man. It’s not even up for discussion.

sharif

link

Never is with the wives, brother. Never is…

They laugh. Link looks at a stack of CDs sitting out on a shelf. He walks over to check them out. link

(to Sharif ) May I?

sharif

Please.

Link shuffles through the CDs. link

KRS. A must-­have.

sharif link

Eric B. and Rakim—okay.

sharif link

ABCs of real hip-­hop.

Tupac—not surprised.

sharif link

The basics.

Every album.

Who’s your favorite?

No favs. Just preferences. Depends on the day. Pac is up there. So is KRS.

sharif

Fugees. Brand Nubian. Arrested Development? Interesting. Anybody post-­’90s? link

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sharif

A select few. Not many.

(skimming the stack) Common. Nas. Mos Def. Talib. Dead Prez. Roots…prerequisites, hunh? link

sharif link

I don’t do most of the current stuff.†

No?

sharif

Makes me feel like I’m getting dumber just listening to it.

Brain shrinkage, hunh? (laughs) But don’t sleep on the education in it.

link

sharif

Say that again?

† I was much younger when I wrote this, and so was hip-­hop. Hip-­hop is now fifty years old, so back then, hip-­hop was a thirty-­six-­year-­old. And early-­middle-­aged hip-­hop had lost a lot of the edge that twenty-­five-­year-­ old hip-­hop had. As Mos Def has said, “So the next time you ask yourself where hip-­hop is going, ask yourself: Where am I going? How am I doing?” (Link paraphrases him later in the scene.) At that time, we (hip-­hop and society as a whole) were on some very disconnected bullshit. Capitalism in hip-­hop was at an all-­time high. Music was reflecting making money and spending money. The social consciousness of a younger hip-­hop had gotten severely watered down. The artists that Sharif mentions here—“the ABCs of real hip-­hop”—are the legends of the craft who maintained their social consciousness amidst a sea of temptation to do otherwise. Once hip-­hop had been commercialized, it became up to the executives to decide what direction hip-­hop would take in the mainstream. Now, at fifty, hip-­hop has been all over the map, from hyperconsciousness to hypercapitalism, apathy to activism. It has proven it can exist independently as well as commercially, and it is truly up to the individual artists themselves where they want hip-­hop to go next.

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It’s hard to be a counter-­voice to the chaos in the music if you don’t listen to it. Hear it. See what the people are saying. What they aren’t saying. That’s the serious issue with the hip-­hop elitists. These young people are telling you exactly where the problems in our communities are. They are pointing us to the illiteracy and the poverty mind and the apathy. If we don’t listen, how will we understand? link

What if you understand it too well? What if you’re tired of hearing laments on the same thing we’ve been rhyming about since the beginning of rhyme?

sharif

That’s the fault of the conditions. The fault of the times. Not the fault of the emcee.

link

No. The fault of the emcee is stepping right into our collective shit and wiping it back off on the rest of the hip-­hop nation.

sharif

As Brother Tupac said, “Maybe if we keep telling you how dirty something is, you’ll finally clean it up.”

link

sharif link

You think we should live with the shit?

sharif link

No.

Smell shit all day?

sharif link

Why does anybody else have to clean it up?

No.

Be a shit people?

sharif

No.

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link

Then?

sharif link

Hold on.

sharif link

I’m sorry?

This is a perfect beginning point.

sharif link

We should—

You mean the interview?

Let me just…

Link goes to his bag and pulls out a recorder. Sharif is mildly confused. Naima enters with a tray of cheese and crackers and tea. link

Mind if I record?

sharif

Are we starting the interview?

naima

Here’s some—

link

Just shit talking—

naima link

—tea and—

Literally…

naima

—crackers…

sharif

Do you want me to sit down?

link

I don’t want you to do anything but continue.

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naima

I’ll be back with dinner.

sharif

So…sort of informally, then?

link Exactly. I don’t want anything contrived. Just talking hip-­hop. That’s all I want to do tonight, Sharif. Just politic. naima

(to herself ) Okay…

sharif

Okay…

Naima realizes no one is listening to her and starts to leave. Link walks past her to set up the recorder. Naima inhales him and is again affected. She scowls at him and leaves. Link sets the recorder on the coffee table. link

Are you cool with this?

sharif link

(no) Sure.

So back to the shit.

I don’t think we should depend on other people to clean up our shit.

sharif

link

Ah…so hip-­hop has a dependency problem.

sharif

No not hip-­hop. Us. We do.

link However hip-­hop is doing, that’s how we’re doing. Isn’t that what Mos says? sharif OK. Then yes. We all have a dependency problem. We want

to emulate everything that’s wrong with the world so someone outside of us can be affected and do something about it? It’s bullshit. (catches himself ) Sorry.

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link

No apologies, brother. Speak free. It’s just a recording.

sharif link

Right…

So who cleans up the shit?

We do. We stop bathing in the disgrace of it all and wash ourselves off. Time gets wasted waiting on the rest of the non-­hip-­ hop world to give a damn. We stop using the rhyme to dump all the shit into, and we start using it to clean. The words be the soap… the actions behind the words be the water…

sharif

link

A cleansing.

We don’t just spill all of our shit in the streets. We street-­ clean. In the rhyme and in reality.

sharif

link

Lyrical street cleaners.

sharif

Word.

(smiling) “I’m like a street sweeper, green leaf breather / Like Greeks in Egypt, learnin’ somethin’ deep from their teachers.” link

sharif

(smiles) Nas. From “Nas Is Like.”

He extends his hand for Sharif to take. They shake. link

Touché.

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Link stops the recorder. Sharif looks at Link in surprise. sharif link

That’s not it…is it?

Why? Is that a problem?

Sharif looks at Link, puzzled. Link laughs. I’m just messing, brother. This was only a warm-­up. I like to get to the heart of things right away. Find out where your true passion is. That’s how I know what shape to give the interview. Figure out who you are from the jump. Then we can cut through the formalities and get real. Feel me? link

sharif

Sure. Sure.

Link looks at the crackers and tea as if they arrived by magic. He takes one and begins munching. He pours a cup of tea. link

You’ve got a lot of integrity.

Sharif shrugs. link Don’t shrug it off. Integrity matters. Especially in this industry. You don’t see a lot of it. sharif

I know.

I see why you’re the one to watch. Your global work, it’s impressive. While most of your colleagues are visiting other parts of the world to sell albums, you’re visiting the third world to make change. That’s progress.

link

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I did some study-­abroads in college. First place I went— Haiti. Been back at least seven times.

sharif

link Wyclef Jean is a roving ambassador to Haiti. You ever connect with him?

Worked for his org. Yéle Haiti. Did some local concerts. Haitian hip-­hop, now that’s something.

sharif

The international world is using hip-­hop to combat governments and overthrow regimes. You think you can get hip-­hop to do that over here?†

link

sharif link

I’m going to try, sir.

Just Link.

sharif

Link.

link Keep trying. It’s worth the effort. And when I publish this interview in our university’s journal, it will open up doors for you, brother. It will create an intellect out of you. You ready to be called that?

† I once saw a documentary called Slingshot Hip Hop about Palestinian hip-­hop artists who were trying to get to a hip-­hop concert under Israeli occupation; the checkpoints were making it harder for them to perform their rebel music. I started thinking about hip-­hop’s international power. I’m Haitian and had been following Wyclef’s work in Haiti. Today, many hip-­hop artists have international presence and reach, but we still seem disconnected from our capacity for true global impact. Tupac is celebrated in many countries as a real revolutionary figure. In the United States, capitalism has become the driving force in and out of the music. But hip-­hop’s origins are in the muck and mire, and in various international communities, the power of that hasn’t been taken for granted.

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sharif

I’m ready.

Folks may give you a hard time. Call you a hip-­hop elitist. You sure? link

sharif link

I’m ready.

All right, then…

Link leans back in the plush of the couch and munches crackers. He holds out the tray to Sharif. link

Cracker?

sharif Help yourself. Holding out for the pasta. Naima puts her foot in it.

Link pours a cup of tea and sips. link

That’s all right. (beat) How long you two been married?

sharif link

That’s a good start. Passed the trouble spot.

sharif link

Seven years.

What’s that?

The first two.

sharif

Is that what they say?

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link They don’t have to say a thing. I lived it. I know. My ex and I…

not even a year and a half. sharif

That’s rough.

link Yes, it is. I don’t wish divorce on anybody. Especially not when

you have kids—like me. sharif

No?

Except my worst enemies. And insurance company CEOs. And greedy bloodthirsty capitalists. May all of their hells be a series of endless litigations and divorce court proceedings. And may they, like I, have no pre-­nups. link

sharif link

Ouch. I’m hoping to never go to that hell.

I hope you don’t either, brother. (beat) She a hip-­hop fan?

sharif

Mostly.

Even better. I used to run with all kinds of emcees back in the day. Everybody’s dream: find a woman who loves hip-­hop. You’ll never make it otherwise.

link

sharif

That’s the truth.

I tried dating sisters in the game. It was a funny time then though.

link

sharif

How so?

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Emcees were just starting to make real dough at the time. The beginning of commercialization. At this same time, female emcees were hitting us with “Ladies First” and “Lyte as a Rock.” You had the socially conscious sisters on one end and the cling-­on women that were around to greet you after every show and fulfill any pleasure. I was new on the scene, like a refugee just off the boat. Before I went to school and got my degree, I got my first gig writing for Word Up! and Fresh! magazines.† link

sharif Man! Fresh! magazine! I used to read that in my bedroom with a flashlight. Like a covert rap spy.

Yeah. They had me backstage after all the concerts, doing interviews with all of the up-­and-­coming heads. EPMD. Kool Moe Dee. Kwamé. Dana Dane. K Justice.… I’ve seen them all. And I’ve seen some things go on backstage that you wouldn’t imagine. link

sharif

I bet.

link I’ve seen the women.… They…some of them, I mean…they were really accommodating, if you know what I’m saying. You might be backstage and see—

Naima enters with a dish of pasta and some serving utensils. Link stops. Sharif notices Naima.

† There are many things to say about this passage. It’s actually the heart and soul of the play for me. It represents the dismissal of women in hip-­hop as a whole and men deciding what women’s role in hip-­hop could or should be: the sidekick. The only girl in an all-­guy crew. The one the men wrote lyrics for. The vixen. It went on and on. The misogyny runs deep, and that was reflected not only in the content of the music but also the culture of the industry, from executives to producers to musicians to journalists. To be a woman in this field was to be the “other.”

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sharif

(quickly) Hey, baby.

naima

(dryly) Hey. Time to eat.

sharif

(overcompensating) Great.

naima

(dryly again) I’ll get the salad.

Sharif and Link stand and head to the dining room table. sharif

Sorry, I—

No, my mistake. Some things aren’t appropriate to talk about in a married couple’s home. I forgot myself.

link

Beat. Naima reenters with a bowl of salad. She carries a bottle of dressing under her arms. Sharif scurries to her aid. Link follows suit. sharif

Let me help you with that, babe.

naima

I got it.

link

Yes, Mrs. Stanley, let us take that off your hands.

naima

(sternly) I got it.

Sharif looks at Naima with a mild eyebrow raise at her curtness. She shakes it off. naima link

Shall we eat?

Absolutely. Smells delicious.

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They each dig in, fill their plates, and begin to eat as the scene plays out. Naima goes in on the wine first. She drinks with a deep-­rooted need. sharif Baby, Link was telling me that he used to write for Word Up!

and Fresh! magazine when he first got in the game. naima

Oh, yeah?

Naima studies Link. Her eyes bore holes through him. She drinks her wine with impressive quickness. Link pretends not to notice Naima’s glare. link

A long time ago.

Naima used to shoot for Ego Trip magazine before it went defunct.

sharif

link

Oh, yeah? You’re a photographer?

naima

I am. Used to have a real career at it before…

sharif

Photography’s how we met. Tell him, baby.†

naima

I don’t really—

† The backstory to this scene is that Naima was a hip-­hop photographer who was sexually assaulted by a hip-­hop artist and his friends, with multiple men in the room. Prior to the assault, she was beloved and respected and working regularly. Post-­assault, after speaking up against the artist, she was “blacklisted.” In the era of #MeToo, this kind of retaliation against women who stand up against abusers has been named and shared. “Believe Women” became a political notion. But when it comes to Black women, then and now, the concept of “believing women” is still rare, if not nonexistent. Black women are doubted in their stories of abuses of all kinds, and much research has been done to showcase the limited social empathy for Black women on the receiving end of abuse. Naima embodies this oppression.

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link I’d love to hear. I’m fascinated by couples that connect through

some aspect of the music. This dressing is on point, by the way. Is it original? naima link

Grandmother’s recipe.

Delicious.

Naima pours another glass of wine and sips. Sharif notices nervously, but moves on. sharif I was at the shoot for Brand Nubian. Naima was there taking

pics for the cover. I was just sort of hanging around in the background. Soaking up all of the magic. One of my boys was a PA for the shoot, and I casually snuck in with him. All of a sudden, this fine-­looking b-­girl type, around-­the-­way girl walks past me with a camera on her arm and starts ordering Lord Jamar around. I scope her. Hat to the back. Jeans—baggy. The kind of girl that drove me wild. Completely. link

So let me guess—you went for the digits.

I wanted them, no doubt. But I was intimidated. She was so confident with that camera. I felt small-­time. Unprofessional in comparison. I had to find an angle.

sharif

naima So instead, he fronts like he’s going to hire me. For his under-

ground album shoot, he says. Makes it sound so absolutely important. “I’m about that real hip-­hop, and I’m looking for someone who gets that to shoot my latest cover.” That’s what he says to me. In the first sentence. I’m looking at him like—who are you again? link

You didn’t know who he was?

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I’d seen him on the underground…but I wasn’t giving that up so he could start feeling himself. No…I just let him rap. Run fake game. That’s what I let him do. naima

sharif link

In hindsight, she probably thought I was sleazy.

In plain sight, the whole industry is sleazy.

naima

And how would you know?

Naima tilts her head accusingly at Link. He remains cool. link I’ve seen it all, Sister Naima. That’s all I’ll say at the dinner table. sharif So I go up to her. I give her a makeshift card. Something I write down on the back of somebody else’s card. naima

Richards and Richards Lawn Services. I remember.

sharif

She took the card.

naima

I took the card.

link

Unbelievable! What made you take it?

naima

I thought he was kind of cute.

sharif

Pathetic is what I was.

naima

“Cute” is a nice way of saying “pathetic.”

sharif

But when I call her, I don’t have the heart to keep up my

front. link

The illusion was too much for you, hunh?

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naima

So he blurts out—

naima

and sharif (together) “I have a confession!”

Link laughs. And I start rambling about how I’m a fraud and I’m wack and embarrassed that I didn’t have the courage to come at her on the real. And she’s silent for a minute on the phone. I’m thinking, It’s over. She’s going to hang up. But then she goes—

sharif

naima

(in all seriousness) “Who’s your favorite female emcee?”

I’m thinking, What? Is this a trick question? This is seriously the only thing she has to say to me after I tell her I lied and I really want to get with her?

sharif

link

So?

So I run through my list of female emcees in my head… trying to search for the dopest one. I’m torn. Lauryn Hill? Monie Love? The Queen? MC Lyte? For some reason, I knew my future with this woman depended on my answer. sharif

naima

It did.

sharif

So I say…really gravely…I say, “I don’t have one.”

link

Uh oh.

sharif link

Just like that. “I don’t have one.”

So she hung up on you.

sharif

Nope. She asked me out.

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link

Really?!

sharif

and naima (together) Really.

sharif Because I finish by saying to her, “You should just ask me who’s my favorite emcee.” link

Un hunh.

Because asking me who’s my favorite female emcee automatically puts female emcees on a lower level than the men. Just like when we say, “Who’s your favorite female ballplayer?” “Who’s your favorite female athlete?” But nobody asks, “Who’s your favorite male emcee?” They say, “Who’s your favorite emcee?” That’s it. An emcee is an emcee. Man or woman. The gift of words. Flow. Lyricism. Intelligence. It’s anybody’s game.† sharif

link

And those were the magic words. I see…

naima

“You see”? Tell us, what do you see, Professor?

Naima’s question is pointed. Sharif looks at her sharply. link

Please, call me Link.

naima

You were saying?

† Sharif’s thinking here is advanced for the time and not widely shared by his peers. This passage shows his capacity to be a righteous ally to his wife, even if there are times throughout the play where he falls short. Even today, most men I engage in a game of “Top 5”—where you name your top five emcees of all time—rarely, if ever, put women in their mix. My husband, like Sharif, is one of those rare few who does, and I wonder if he’s been influenced by me. While Sharif is speaking in “shoulds,” when he says, “It’s anybody’s game,” everyone in the scene and everyone in the culture knows that isn’t true. Then or now.

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link

Just interesting. That you say it’s anybody’s game.

naima link

Do you disagree?

Perhaps. I may challenge the accuracy of the idea.

sharif

Well, it was just my thinking at the—

naima

And what is inaccurate about it, exactly?

sharif

Naima.

Well, the statistics, foremost. Females in the rap industry don’t have much stake in the game. They control very little from the top to the bottom. Label owners. Distributors. ADRs. Mostly men. I don’t think it’s just “anybody’s game” at all. I think the rules of the game are very clearly defined.

link

naima

So you would you say that it’s a man’s game?

sharif

Naima.

link

I would.

sharif

In a way, I think Professor—I mean Link—has a valid—

And that doesn’t register as post-­1990s liberation pseudoconscious progressive hip-­hop sexism to you, Professor?

naima

link

Sexism?

Sexism. The concept of female oppression. The ideology that the woman is inferior and less socially relevant and less—

naima

link

I know what it—

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Valuable. The mentality behind all acts of violence and hate and systemic abuse against women. naima

sharif link

I understand what sexism is, sister. But I think females—†

naima link

You keep saying “females.” But we’re women.

I don’t doubt that.

naima link

Women.

Pardon me?

naima link

Naima, okay. I think he gets it.

Then call us that, please.

I was simply speaking of it the way you—

sharif Naima, he knows they’re women. Please. Eat some pasta. You’ve haven’t touched your meal. naima (to Sharif, sharply) I’m fine. (to Link) No one calls men “males.” Imagine how you would feel…if people went around calling you a Black “male.” Instead of a man. Or a professor. It’d be a little annoying, right?

† The thing with this exchange is that, on the surface, Link is speaking to the fact of sexism of the industry, not necessarily articulating his own truth. However, he uses charged language, like the word “females”— which Naima takes him to task for here. He is triggering her assault trauma. And there is something about him she instinctively doesn’t trust from the moment he enters their home. His smell agitates her (and brings back a sense memory, potentially placing him at the scene of her assault). She is agitated by this conversation—aggressive toward Link but I think also grappling with her own participation in that culture.

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link

Okay. Point taken.

sharif

Naima, chill. Give me the wine.

naima

Sharif, relax. We’re just talking. Wine, Professor?

link

I’m actually okay, thank you.

It’s Cabernet Sauvignon. Columbia Crest. Currently the world’s best. A friend of mine is a wine enthusiast. naima

sharif

Naima, baby—give me the wine.

naima

Sharif, I’m okay!

A loud THUD comes from outside. It startles everyone. They freeze for a moment. sharif link

What was—???

We better go see.

Sharif and Link run to the door and open it. A strong gust of wind blows more snow into the cabin. They both push out into the snow. Beat. Naima pours another glass of wine and sips slowly. Calculatingly. Beat. Sharif and Link rush back in and slam the door. link

Unbelievable! Goddamn unbelievable!

sharif That’s just…incredible. I’m just…I’m so sorry! We can call

someone! link

I have Triple A. May I use your phone?

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sharif

Of course. Baby, where’s my cell?

Bedroom. On the dresser. Sharif dashes off. Naima rises from her chair and faces Link inquisitively. naima

naima link

Is there a problem?

That big oak out there fell right on over.

naima

Oh no! The oak tree?

Naima runs over to the window. link

Right on top of my damn car!

Naima catches view of it from the window. naima

Oh, God!

Sharif returns with his cell. sharif

I’m not getting any service. Baby, where’s yours?

naima

In the kitchen. On the counter.

Sharif runs offstage the other way to the kitchen. naima

Unbelievable.

It’s not mine. That’s the good thing. I rented it to drive out to Penn State. But damn anyway. Damn damn. link

naima

It looks totaled.

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link

Completely.

naima

Do you have insurance?

Only because of the blizzard. Only tonight…I asked for total coverage. I must’ve had an instinct that the winds would wreak havoc tonight. I never buy total coverage. I find myself resisting the nickel-­and-­diming these rental companies try to take you through. I never play their game. Tonight, a voice told me not to chance it. Get the full coverage, I told myself. Subconsciously, I think I was expecting God’s fury. link

Sharif comes back in with Naima’s cell. He is flustered. sharif

All of a sudden we’re in a dead zone? This is ridiculous!

naima

You know service up here can be spotty.†

sharif

There’s a lodge up the path. About a ten-­minute walk.

It’s a blizzard out there! You’ll be blown into a ditch. Forget it. He’ll stay here tonight.

naima

sharif

I’m sure he didn’t plan to be here all night.

I didn’t plan a lot of things, Brother Sharif. God has a plan that I have nothing to do with. I’m going to take you up on the offer, if that’s all right.

link

† This part of the play is when I start really playing with genre and having a damn ball. In this horror story, just as Naima was made prey to the rapper who assaulted her, Link is about to be prey to Naima.

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Sharif looks at Naima hesitantly. sharif

Of course.

link I have a sister who lives in the next city over. In the morning, I’ll walk to that lodge and give her a call. She’ll come pick me up. Sorry to crash in on your…time… sharif link

No problem. None at all.

May I use your restroom?

naima

Down the hall.

She points offstage. Link exits. Sharif turns to Naima and speaks in a hush. sharif

What’s going on with you?

naima

What are you talking about?

sharif

You said you’d be okay. Isn’t that what you said?

naima

I am okay.

You practically called him a sexist fraud over dinner. Professor Link Williams. A sexist fraud. You think that’s okay?

sharif

naima Are you kidding me? It was just a friendly debate. Stimulating

conversation. That’s all. Naima, you know how important this interview is to me.… How important Professor Link is to the Nobel Committee. I need you to ease up with the third degree. sharif

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naima

It wasn’t a third degree. I know how to give the third degree.

sharif

Naima, I’m serious.

naima

Okay. I’m okay.

Link reenters. Sister Naima, I appreciate your hospitality. I hear this cabin is something really special to you.

link

naima

(forcing pleasantry) It is.

Well, Professor Link, I know it’s been a long night already. You drove up here after doing long lectures at Penn State. And now the blizzard and all this. I understand if you just want to turn in and continue the interview some other time. sharif

Perhaps in the morning? Over breakfast? While your sister is on her way? I’ll cook up something.

naima

Thank you for the offer. That sounds fair to me. It’ll give me time to assess some of our conversation tonight.

link

I’ll get you some linens for the couch. And I’ll bring out a little nightcap. After all you’ve been through this evening, a little herbal tea will help you sleep well. naima

link

That sounds all right. Thank you.

naima

I’ll be right back, baby.

Sharif mouths “thank you” to Naima. She blows him a kiss and exits. Link goes through his bag quietly and checks his toiletries.

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link (rummaging) I always carry a travel bag. All the guest lecturing

keeps me ready for the unexpected. Not a tree falling on my car… but still, the unexpected. sharif link

Uh…Professor…I mean…Link…

(still rummaging) Yeah? (in the bag) Toothbrush—bingo.

sharif

I’m…I want to apologize for my wife’s…um…

Link turns to look at Sharif. link

Oh. Yes.

sharif link

I’m sorry about the dinner convo…

Did I…say something? Trigger something?

sharif

Lots of things trigger Naima these days. It’s hard to tell…

Perhaps she heard me speaking on the women earlier. It was tactless. I won’t let it happen again.

link

sharif It’s just… certain things can make her a little…un­ comfortable…

Well, I’ll just keep my pseudoprogressive hip-­hop sexism to myself.

link

Sharif looks concerned. Link laughs. link

It’s okay, brother. I’m messing. No harm, no foul.

sharif

Good.

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link (laughing to himself ) In fact…if I start to say the wrong thing…

ever again…just say something to help me out. Something coded. A verse. I’ll catch on and shut my mouth. sharif

(slightly bemused) A verse? Like who?

link “No matter who the foe they must fall / Us against them all / I’m down to brawl. / If my homies call.” sharif

You’re serious?

No. (laughs) Just trying to lighten the mood. It’s okay, brother…really.

link

Naima reenters carrying sheets and a pillow. The men watch her silently. I’ll just sit these here. (She places them on a chair.) Be right back with that tea.

naima

Sharif smiles at Naima. sharif

Thanks, baby.

Naima disappears behind the kitchen door. link

You didn’t name the verse.

sharif link

You kidding? That’s so easy it shouldn’t even be necessary.

True. Or you could be bluffing.

Come on, now. Tupac, “If My Homie Calls.” That was like the anthem for me and my boys back in the day. Our theme song. Riding down the street in my homie’s ’54 Impala. sharif

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link

Whoa!

Swear it. Thing would clunk so loud it should’ve been embarrassing. But we’d just throw Pac on and blast it louder than the carburetor. Would piss off the entire neighborhood. But you know when you’re in your teens…everything you play is like your rebel song. So you crank up the sound to give a middle finger to the whole block.

sharif

Tell me about it. I’ve got “If My Homie Calls” on reserve. I could flow any part of the song. It’s like a boyhood anthem that doesn’t leave you. Ageless lyrics: “When you need a friend you can depend on me/ Call, if you need my assistance—”

link

sharif

“There’ll be no resistance—”

and link (together) I’ll be there in an instant Who am I to judge another brother Only on his cover? I’d be no different than the others H to the O to the M to the I to the E I’m down to the E N D Cause it’s a fall in no time at all I’m down for y’all, when my homies call† sharif

† I always thought of this song as an anthem to Black male brotherhood. I’ve heard many male-­identified friends of mine rap to this and get extremely hype together, and I love it. In this scene, the music helps to dissolve the tension of dinner as well as the status difference between Link and Sharif. What’s left is just two men who have found a way to feel seen and heard through these lyrics, this culture. Of course, it leaves no space for Naima, who’s left serving the tea (though we can guess that there may be more to this particular brew…). In this moment, we feel the joy in the music, but we’re left with a wish for a more expansive “brotherhood”—one that unifies us on a global level, with no further harm to women or people of other gender identities left in its wake.

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They laugh and fist pound each other…enjoying their shared history. Naima enters with a tray of tea. naima

Well you fellas look in good spirits.

sharif

Just a little ol’ school type reminiscing.

naima

Oh…really…

link

Thanks for the nightcap.

naima Be sure to drink up. It’s bedtime tea. My favorite. Soothing, right, Sharif? sharif

Absolutely. I’ll have some myself.

Sharif leans into the tea. Naima stops him. naima Let me fix it for you two. I know how to sweeten it just right.

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Black pain redux: A dramatic monologue Jasmine Lee-Jones The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 171-184 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914450

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914450

drama

black pain redux A dramatic monologue Jasmine Lee-­Jones

J

asmine lee-­ j ones’s groundbreaking plays bring the humor and dynamism of internet culture to the hallowed stages of the British theater. The following monologue, first performed by actor Paapa Essiedu at London’s Young Vic Theater during its fiftieth anniversary celebration in October 2020, bears the playwright’s signature combination of tenderness and ferocity, deftly interweaving narratives of personal and collective crisis. At the time of its writing, deaths from Covid-­19 had started rising again, theater artists were still largely out of work, and the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd had begun to ebb from the forefront of public discourse. When the Young Vic’s artistic director, Kwame Kwei-­Armah, approached Lee-­Jones to commission a short

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piece for the two-­day event, she was in the middle of what she describes as “the most deeply confusing and traumatic period” of her then twenty-­two-­year-­old life. Part cri de coeur, part confession, black pain redux serves as, in Lee-­Jones’s words, “a time machine to the past that makes us think critically about the present.” – the editors

“dear jasmine,”

“We just wanted to check in with you after the senseless killing of George Floyd. The events of this year have really awoken us to the global problem racism still presents and our need to play our part in ending it.” Okay. “We are committed to antiracism and stand in solidarity with you—” Paapa sits down. Might kiss his teeth. Indignant flick, pissed off. Doing that Black look that’s like: really? “and the movement against ending police brutality worldwide.” “We know it is not your responsibility to educate us but we want to know if there is anything we can do to do better.” I sort of feel sorry for well-­meaning white people I always feel the need to be extra nice to them I know this is rooted in the racist belief that if I am nice I will be protected or preferred somehow by said white people whilst still ensuring the supremacy and centering of said white people.

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This is indeed: fucked up. I’m Paapa by the way. Jasmine’s friend. (to Jasmine) I think we can say we’re friends right? Jasmine will probably nod. Paapa relaxes even more into his seated position. Legs are maybe spread. I’m gonna play Jasmine for a bit. So bear with. Paapa might get into character of Jaz—don’t know what that means. I am bedbound and bruised when I learn of your name A friend phones me crying that she simply cannot cope any longer And I say to her Can’t cope with what? And she says Everything that’s going on And I say I’m so sorry I have no idea what you’re talking about babe You see a day or perhaps two before I had deleted social media altogether Well deleted the apps You know them ones I wasn’t quite ready to deactivate completely but I was growing overwhelmed at the smorgasbord of information and opinion platformed by those platforms It all just felt too much to cope with Too much to contend with Another performance Another character to keep up with At a time when all that I had previously thought I knew about my character was unraveling like a loose thread on an overpriced Topshop dress not designed with my big black ass in mind

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It is then I hear your name for the first time Join the chorus of Google searches Get lost in the overgrown jungle of thinkpieces Articles Digital picket signs And black squares It is only in death I learn of your life. Two days before that I am lying in a hospital bed in Hammersmith wondering whether I should be alive Three hours before that I am lying on a bench in West London after taking about fifty painkillers trying to die As I lay there On that bench Realizing that this attempt was, well, just that—an attempt Not even close to being a success A failure perhaps of the most pitiful degree As I lay there On that bench something hits me Pause. No hits me Literally In the face It’s a football probably Some type of ball I don’t remember and then my head starts to throb I close my eyes and all the world goes black.

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i learn your name

You who didn’t choose You whose death was chosen for you Yet another needless name to adorn a needless placard Placards Fill hashtags And I am feeling rage I’m definitely feeling rage But I am loath to admit All I can think of is, Why him? Not the why him you think I’m thinking of Another why him. Why is it that this dead Black man…that this dead Black person… that this dead Black body in among allllllllllllll of them seems to be different? Why did it take this Black man’s bloodied corpse to trigger what I think should be the natural human response to a dead No murdered person’s body? Now don’t get me wrong I know we’ve seen this before The hoodies up for Trayvon The rallying for Michael Brown And some significant if lesser ripples for other names The Sandra Blands More recently Breonna Taylor And the many many other Black womxn and Black girls Cis Trans Some of whom remain nameless Whose pain doesn’t seem To sell or capture the masses as well But we haven’t seen it like this.

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Were the others just bullet fodder? Less consequential dominoes before the grand finale of this minstrel-­ inspired freakshow of white patriarchal dominance? This question shouldn’t be so significant Surely But if it shouldn’t be Why can’t I get it out of my head? Why was I less enraged by the violence The actual act of violence Than the question of why this kind of violence was being spotlighted now How it is reverberating through the minds of people in a way that seemingly no other bludgeoned Black body had before? I’ve already alluded to his maleness But There have been other cis Black men before George So why is it this time it seems to be affecting people differently Some people say it’s Covid people stopping people having more time to notice things in the world Giving people more time to scroll through socials and feel some­thing… Maybe? That feels too easy for me People have known about this before But chosen to ignore As we all do have done when we don’t want to look at something that’s ugly but true I keep saying people and I think when I say people I’m actually talking about white people I keep jokingly calling this renewed interest This moment, the #whiteguiltmatters movement

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But then I realize it’s capturing some Black people in a similar unprecedented way too. Black people who haven’t really spoken before are speaking. Black people with names. Black celebrities are talking. People with money. Fanbases. Why? We know it is not the first time we have not been able to breathe. The first time whiteness has used its knee to cut our oxygen off directly. I flinch when John Boyega remarks “I might not have a career after this but fuck that.” I get pissed that someone with a net worth of apparently $6 million is—albeit even for a second—centering himself and this supposed ultimate act of selfless sacrifice while there are others far less financially and societally secure who are and have been daily challenging the insidiously racist and anti-­Black practices in their workplace even before it was popular. I say this not to “bring a brother down,” but I just wonder: If you as a member of a marginalized community have slightly more security financially or slightly more privilege, however it may be, than most of the members of said community— shouldn’t you be using every second, every square inch of that space to center and platform the members of that marginalized group with the least privilege? I also keep asking my friends most of whom agree When have you seen a Black womxn in the public eye Who’s taken a similar stance Perhaps even more radical Even more informed, learned, insightful Being uplifted in the same regard as him Without being called crazy Or another ableist diminishing demeaning term? It seems we still like our martyrs like our martins our malcolms looking very cis masculine male. When I critique the words of people with the right intentions some of my friends say: Shouldn’t we be focused on changing the laws?

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Actual, pragmatic changes? But I don’t think this is just a case of our collective house having damaged drywall or a broken door. This house doesn’t need to be renovated. It needs to be detonated. It was built wrong to begin with. And the sooner we accept that, the better. The friend who originally phoned me is a dark-­skinned Black woman with a high-­powered position in a corporate fashion brand: an anomaly. Her workplace has integrated Black Lives Matter into their social media output because right now they know it is the most commercially savvy decision. Who would have thought having #BLM in your bio—a movement rooted in anti-­capitalist, anti-­ establishment, and anti-­exploitation practices—would be used to sell clothes? But I digress. I keep seeing posts Saying silence is violence Or More specifically White silence is violence This also makes me grimace At the amount of times I have felt violent toward white people when they aren’t silent and are assuming my point, talking over me, and making their un-­silent solidarity heard loud and clear. In the words of Drake “You can’t listen to me talk and go tell my story. It don’t work like that when you love somebody.” Have white people even listened and learned enough to speak?

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Have Black people been given enough space to speak? Are we skipping something?

about plants. Especially when I’m referring to how frustrated I get when people only talk about ending police brutality as if that alone will solve racism or structural inequality. If you keep pulling out a weed but don’t attack the root, it will always grow back—sometimes even stronger. I grow frustrated when people— mostly men—fail to acknowledge how police brutality is inherently tied to bruised toxic white masculinity and thus patriarchy. I urge people to see that ending police brutality will in fact mean ending all of the systems as we know them. What would that look like? A world not as we know it? i keep talking

Then I think maybe it’s even more insidious than weeds—more like a gas leak, or carbon monoxide infesting the house…so seemingly invisible and leaking for so long that we’ve all just accepted it’s there even though we’ve literally seen it kill people. Even though one day it might kill us. Back to my original question: Is this death this time different simply just because it is? Just the ball landing on the arbitrary roulette of circumstance? One of dem tings. You know. Shit happening. I mean shit does happen, doesn’t it? The first time I am touched in a sexual manner I am probably four or five years old. Sometimes I think it may have been two or three. Whatever the age, I was too young to remember the actual age I was. I didn’t consent. I couldn’t, of course. But because I didn’t actually outright say no for decades after I think I can’t call it what it is.

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For decades I tell myself this is just a thing that happens that no one talks about. It is only this year I start to think maybe the things that are happening that no one talks about are happening because no one talks about them. And when I say talk I mean…what do I mean? I mean fully talk. Not just decrying that awful thing that happened to someone over there. Those people. Them. But that thing that happened under my nose. At my workplace. In my home. I’ve come not to blame the person who did it or at least I’ve come to understand it in a different way despite not condoning it. Men— as well as people of all genders—are by and large conditioned to view vulnerable bodies as their property. For the person who did this to me I was not only fair game but I suspect on some level they believed this was a perfectly natural thing to do. They must have inhaled this monoxide from somewhere. And despite harm not necessarily being their intention, serious harm was the effect. I am nineteen when a man I care for deeply—at the time—tries to force himself onto me. This feeling: being a receptacle for someone else’s pleasure feels familiar but having blocked out the above from my head I can’t remember why it feels familiar. After I push him off of me, I laugh. Later on in the night I kiss him, try to please him. I hope he still likes me. Well, at least still finds me attractive. Well, at least still wants to have sex with me. Those things are all starting to blur into one and the same for me. I don’t tell anyone, not even my closest friends, for a few weeks after. I want to keep the way I saw him in my head before alive, and I fear saying what happened might kill him dead. The thing about both these examples is that the enactors of harm were not strangers or people who had never shown me care. But it’s

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this phenomenon of abuse—abuse intermingled with care—that is perhaps the most confusing and abusive of all. I grimace a little when a very high-­profile conscious rapper—one of my favorites actually—is accused of sexual assault in a YouTube video by an ex-­girlfriend. It seems ironic—funny almost—that this man I have viewed as practically perfect—my ideal—could have done such a thing. A good one. Not just a good one. A really good one. One who had been open about his own sexual abuse as a child. One who through his truth-telling had encouraged me to come clean to myself about my own. My internal jaw drops when I realize, listening to the story beat by beat, that he behaved in almost exactly the same way as the man I cared for who sexually assaulted me when I was nineteen— bar one detail: his ex-­girlfriend was asleep. Of course it is true. That he did it. That a man with admirable beautiful qualities can also do something abhorrent. We all can. When I confronted that man I cared for who had done it to me at nineteen voice shaking He said well Once you get that feeling Can you really control it? (genuine) Can you? My therapist at the time responds in a similar manner. When I tell her this story of intimacy morphing into force she comments: “Well it is his house.”

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His house His house A house where violence intermingles with tenderness and care A house where we all lock ourselves into our own rooms with our own private trauma and despair A house that’s meant to be a home? Now can you see what I mean about blowing up the house? I used to be scared of the dark. Monsters that might be lurking in it. Actually I still am. I’m definitely the girl who runs upstairs after turning all the lights off. Not wanting to get captured. Then the other day I started to think what if the reason I have never quite gotten over that fear of the monster is because there’s a monster in me? What does it take to ask for help when you are in so much pain you are inclined to inflict it on others? Are all monsters just cowards who were afraid to ask for help? I do know that fear paralyzes. Perhaps fear is the first monster we need to deal with. And perhaps the first monster we need to deal with is ourselves. I see that I as well as being a victim of harm have been complicit in cultures of harm in ways that I am still recognizing. This includes my main education, or actually miseducation, in sex coming from the consumption of free porn on those websites we all know that for the most part exploit and pirate the labor of sex workers And people who don’t even identify as sex workers and had no idea their act of intimacy would be shared Those who do not have control over their own images Those whose content, consent, bodies have been mercilessly, perpetually stolen for mass consumption. Images are powerful. They can stain and taint the mind

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convince us that things that are inherently harmful traumatizing transgressions of boundaries and consent are okay viable even desirable. Images are not consumed in vain. Let’s get back to the image of George. Back to the image of an officer’s knee on his neck. Did we need to see it to know it’s bad? To know it happened? Maybe the Greeks knew it best. That sometimes images are just excess. Too much. That words are enough. Are they? I am in the ambulance now roughly forty-five minutes after trying to end my life. The female paramedic has taken my blood and I’m on my way to Accident & Emergency. She begins to drive the ambulance truck. The other paramedic, a dude, decides that forty-five minutes after my suicide attempt is prime time to start up some small talk. “So what do you do?” I don’t want to answer but as I said I have this fucking thing in my head that wants to placate people, please them, particularly white people, even when I’m literally on the edge. “I—I’m a writer. Well, I act too. But I’m mainly a writer.” He asks what type of stuff and as we continue small-­talking I can’t deny that at my core even on the edge that is what I am. And I still

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believe in it. So much so that even as I lie on that bench, foil-­lined empty pill packets in hand, I wonder how one day I will tell this story. These stories. “We know it is not your responsibility to educate us but we want to know if there is anything we can do to do better.” After all of this I’m reminded of one thing: I hate the term “to turn a blind eye”—I think it’s ableist—so let’s just say looking away. To look away one must know there is something to look away from. How much longer can we look away from not only the bad thing The bad things But the bad things in ourselves? Even when Especially when looking away is the most popular thing to do?

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A writer and an artist on the alchemy of place Darran Anderson, Sapphire Goss The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 145-163 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914448

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914448

conversation

Darran Anderson and Sapphire Goss A writer and an artist on the alchemy of place

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rounded in a restricted and ghostly London during the pandemic, I yearned for physical escape. Unable even to return home, I spent countless hours, days even, seeking forms of astral projection to elsewhere, trawling through distant stations via Radio Garden, accounts of landmasses I would never visit in Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands (2009), the epic screenshots of the Agoraphobic Traveller’s Instagram account, and the autochromes of photographer Albert Kahn’s “Archives of the Planet” project. I can’t remember how I chanced upon the work of filmmaker Sapphire Goss. In a sense, it found me when I needed it, and her influence has seeped into books and other projects of mine ever since.

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Goss’s work shares the spirit of the Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety, who called cinema “magic in the service of dreams.” Each video of hers is a reinvention of cinema and a reminder of the magic inherent in the medium. Often working with analogue or even expired film and using homemade lenses to feature the repetitive textures of water, light, erosion, and other ecological materials and processes, Goss manages to create video art that is both wholly new and utterly infused with material history. A century of Hollywood, television, and now streaming has lulled us into a false sense of normalcy regarding moving pictures. Yet the closure of movie theaters during lockdown and the subsequent existential crisis of the industry might serve to remind us of how bizarre and multifarious this art form has always been. You enter a hall with no windows, mimicking the night, and sit with rows of strangers staring at a portal into the past to see places you’ve never been, and you temporarily forget where you are, in a kind of collective reverie. Goss’s haunted, often improvisational experiments in filmmaking remind me, over and over, of the wonders of the moving image. In August, I took the train down to Folkestone, on England’s southeast coast, where Goss lives and works. We talked in her studio and on the local pier. In one direction, white cliffs. In another, France dissolving in the mist. In a third, the distant, mirage-­ like Dungeness nuclear power stations, and somewhere in their shadow, alone on the shingle, the cottage and garden of the filmmaker Derek Jarman, who also believed that cinema was magic, elemental, and fertile. “When a story ends,” as Mambety noted, “or ‘falls into the ocean,’ as we say—it creates dreams.” —Darran Anderson

Maybe, having grown up at one of the world’s edges in Derry, in the north of Ireland—a city near the sea, on the lip of the continental shelf, part of Europe but facing America, a darran anderson

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hinterland always escaping whatever is left of the British Empire—I felt particularly drawn to the videos you’ve created on edgelands and shorelines. A lot of my work and time has been spent in the center of huge cities, but that interest originally comes, I think, from growing up on the periphery of a periphery. As enigmatic as your work is to me, there’s a recognition there, like a place I knew long ago or maybe dreamt of or wished I could visit. I like that ambiguity. Place seems to be crucial in your work. I’m thinking of the Finnish island of Örö in the Archipelago Sea, for example, where you created a number of projects in 2019. Many aspects of Örö, with its peculiar geology, supernatural aura, and sinister political history as a former military fortress, seem illustrative of your work in general. I read that the tsars used forced labor to build naval emplacements there in the early 1900s. Before that, it was uninhabited; the shepherds who worked on the island were too frightened to stay after sunset because the ghosts of Swedish soldiers were said to rise from the dead at night. You mentioned once, in the online diary you kept while on Örö, that you felt like you were at the edge of the world. If I am doing a project about a specific place, I start by just walking, looking, recording. I like to really explore a space in depth by repetitively gazing at the landscape through different physical lenses and frames, forming routines and rituals to observe tiny things. Örö is quite an intense place. It’s in the middle of nowhere, really geographically isolated. It’s a confined space, just several kilometers long. There’s only a certain amount of daylight. Over the course of a month, I became very conscious of how the island changed: the weather, the sky, the wind. I made quadrats—little confined plots in which to observe the changing light or growing vegetation—among other quasi-­scientific observational processes. I pinned out the four corners of the island, then visited each corner every day and took samples, with petri dishes, of materials—ice, sapphire goss

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plants, dirt, and so on—to use as filters in my camera lenses. This was the start of the weirdness. da I know that feeling. It’s funny to consider now, when we’re bombarded with images every day, but it felt like there was a scarcity of data before computers and mobile phones. It was as if your eyes were attuned to seeing the world in a different way. Heightened or degenerated, I’m not sure. I used to stare at the moss in our backyard and imagine it to be maps of imaginary continents. I would do stone rubbings of the walls. It was tragic, really, but I don’t think I’ve shaken off that sense of perspective from before the deluge. Years later, I’d be hiking or bouldering and there’d be moments, as close to Zen as I’ve felt, when I’d catch my breath and suddenly notice the grain of the surface in front of me; it would look like the topography of a planet no other human had ever seen. And I’d always be tempted to photograph it, which of course would make it just another image. You manage to retain that initial wonder, partly through physically incorporating it in your work. Can you explain that filtering method, in which the organic material of the place becomes part of the images you make of that place?

I work on film and use very old analogue cameras. I was using a lens with custom aperture plates made of old beer cans and other waste materials that I filtered the light through as I created the images. I also make custom filters out of foraged raw materials, which produce even stranger visual effects. This was the method I used for my film Rose Tinted Crushed Black (2021). I love using antique lenses to film landscapes. It’s like seeing the world through a new eye, like the light is being filtered through time itself. Since my time in Finland, I’ve begun making liquid lenses and prisms that can be filled with different water samples from the landscape—so I’m literally seeing through the eyes of nature. In Night Walk (1967) by the sci-­fi writer Bob Shaw, the sg

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protagonist builds a device that lets him see through other eyes, including those of animals. Shaw also pioneered a concept called “slow glass” in his 1966 story “Light of Other Days,” where light passes through the material so slowly that the glass itself becomes a kind of recording device, holding memories, showing scenes from the past. I feel like these lenses do the same thing; they’re conduits to other worlds and timescales. Every time I use a new one, it recalibrates my viewpoint and frame, making me see familiar objects in novel ways and notice new aspects of my environment. I’m interested in how analogue visual technologies—such as Claude glass, the tinted handheld mirrors favored by landscape painters in the late eighteenth century—can offer humans different kinds of vision, in an almost cyborgian sense. Shaw suffered from vision problems in later life, which I think makes his writing all the more poignant. I also have an eye condition, actually; when it flares up I can’t stand to look at light. It’s horrible living in that dimness, but luckily it only tends to happen once every two years or so. It’s called uveitis, part of a wider condition called ankylosing spondylitis. One of the symptoms is photophobia, ironically. The treatment dilates one eye and makes depth oddly rendered, like looking through a VR headset or stereoscope. I think of the experience of chronic pain and unstable vision as something that simultaneously anchors me to the physical and disconnects me from reality to the extent that I feel cut-­ and-­pasted onto myself, off-­kilter, decentered. Maybe this is why I am drawn to different lenses, eyes, viewpoints. I try to construct moving image and photography work that is beyond visual: tactile, sensory, material. Light and time as solid entities. The image exists, and the surface, and something else in between. da The uveitis is something I share, unfortunately. I wrote a manuscript on hedonism a while back, called Night Diving, about how nocturnal my life became when my vision was first impaired. It

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was quite a vampiric period of time, shunning the daylit hours, until I got it under relative control. But it’s always looming, especially as the autoimmune riddle behind it has never been solved. I’m grateful there are treatments, at least. I think the same condition pretty much blinded James Joyce, among others. I’m not sure the hedonism book will see the light of day, no pun intended. I hadn’t thought of it until now, but I wonder if that’s why my book Imaginary Cities (2015) begins with a prehistoric scene of cinema on the half-­light of a cave wall. It’s an intriguing idea, how vision itself impacts perspective, thought, identity, the inner world and the outer. I’m interested in the relationship between filmmakers and light, which is their primary source or even subject matter. I’m thinking of Terrence Malick shooting Days of Heaven (1978) during the magic or golden hour. Or Derek Jarman’s obsession with color as his vision began to fail when he was dying right near this same shoreline. This seems a location where the weather and light are always in flux and, unlike in cities, there’s space to actually witness it. Maybe there’s just a sense of potential escape on the coast. I think of that scene in The Beaches of Agnès (2009) when Agnes Varda says, “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” My granddad was a trawlerman in the North Atlantic and had to know the shoreline intimately for the sake of his livelihood and his lifespan, but though I’ve sailed and fished and swum there, the ocean remains a totally alien place to me. I know nothing of it, really, no matter how many maps of the ocean floor I consult. And I never knew that that phrase “the offing” refers to the shifting boundary where sea and sky meet. I wonder if the offing might itself represent a sort of cinema for you. I’m actually quite bored of being here, after six years. I moved here in 2017 for very practical reasons. My partner, the painter Matt James Healy, had moved here, and it was significantly cheaper than living in London. And a chunk of the town is owned by an sg

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Sapphire Goss, film stills from Revenants: Compound Horizons (2023).

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entrepreneur, Roger de Haan, who has set up subsidized artist studios. But following the inevitable pattern of these tides of gentrification, he is now building luxury apartments on the seafront. I was here through lockdown and made so much work. It’s been great, almost like an extended residency in a sense. But I think I’ve explored this part of the world through so many formats, perspectives, lenses, and viewpoints that I’m ready for something new. And remember, in these border towns, there’s often an undercurrent of defensiveness related to what we might call Brexiteer culture. It’s also a very physically unstable, very active place. One of the world’s living landslides. You can see the sea literally rising and falling here. Depending on the behavior of the ocean, you can see France—or not. You can see Dungeness and the Alabaster Coast— or not. The edge of the land might be misty, or obscured, or really sharp. I’m reading Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar (1983) at the moment, and I love that story where the title character is looking solely at one section of the sea and observing its patterns. I identify deeply with that impulse. Even on larger timescales, you can witness the land here continually shifting. I swim in the sea, and there are some great sunken-­ concrete World War II places I love. I believe there was a whole railway and pleasure resort nearby that fell into the ocean in the 1900s. Time just sweeps things away here. Your work always seems to venture beyond an anthropocentric view of existence and human timescales. You’re posing questions like, What is a moss’s history of the world? What is the memory of shingle? The consciousness of tree roots? I’m resistant to ask such questions, as the somewhat deprogrammed son of benevolent hippies, but that resistance tells me something. Why should we not have such thought experiments? We might begin to understand human consciousness more by determining what we’re not. There’s a value there, and entire other ways of looking at existence, and looking back at ourselves—take the sentient planet in Solaris (1972), for instance, or the implications regarding animal life in Under the da

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Skin (2013). We’re likely to eventually learn the hard way with AI and our treatment of the environment—not just lessons about hubris but about the shallowness of the mantras we trot out continually about empathy, autonomy, and so on, without examining the meaning, parameters and certainties of these things. The solipsism. Those tiny worlds your videos reveal remind me that there are completely different universes all around us, just as having dogs and cats remind me every day that different forms of consciousness exist. Even the essay documentaries I make don’t feature many people but rather drift through defamiliarized, depopulated spaces. I think a lot about the world before and after humans, about extinction, deep time, “long dyings,” etc. I’m interested in how different materials and ways of seeing shape culture, history, and memory, how imagery and narrative literally determine our understanding of the world. I love those layers of time in Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965), for example, where everything concertinas out from a fixed point and back again over and over, spooling from the beginning of the universe to the mundane contemporary, the cosmos to the daily commute. The mollusk secreting its shell somehow connects with the whole litany of creative acts through history. I also think a lot about a short story from 1858 called “The Diamond Lens” by Fitz James O’Brien, in which a man steals a diamond and makes the most powerful microscope in the world with it, one that allows him to see a whole universe in a droplet of water. When making videos, I also leave much of the process up to chance, which decenters the human vision even further. I’ve started using expired film, for example, mostly because it’s a lot cheaper; you can buy these old rolls and you can develop them in coffee and household materials. I use reels of film that are even older than me, that have just been sitting on people’s shelves. When you use expired film, you don’t know what is going to work, and you get thrillingly unexpected results. Right now, I’m trying to open a film canister that’s literally rusted shut. sg

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Sometimes landscapes also emerge purely from chemical chance. I’m finding that—like Palomar, perhaps—I’m filming the same handful of things over and over again: a horizon line, the sun and moon, clouds, light through dense foliage that looks like stars, trees that look like grabbing hands, endless footage of light on water in infinite patterns. I love that sense of pareidolia, which is the brain’s ability to see patterns, faces, and other familiar images where they don’t exist. The edges of the film reels form natural horizons; holes look like suns or moons; static and film grain bleeds into light on water; chemical stains form into clouds. I also let myself just walk around and feel transported. Different light on rain droplets. A branch in the wind. A particular quality of light. Those moments of transport demand to be documented. Do you walk around doing that too? da Constantly. It’s a kind of translation. In fact, I have to turn off being a writer, whatever that is, in my head when I go on walks. You have to turn the pseudo-­intellectual part off and instead just leave the shutter open. The best thoughts steal upon you. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, if I knew where the good stuff came from, I’d go there more often. Remaining receptive seems to be the key. There are tricks you learn, shortcuts, a craft of some description, but ultimately, I think of it like being a lighthouse keeper on a remote island with a vague awareness that some immense catastrophe has happened, and you leave the silent radio on in the hope of finding a transmission on the right frequency. It’s something you do, but more than that, it’s something that happens to you. Walking feels to me like a way of sifting through those radio waves, increasing your chances of hearing something. Plus, if I knew where these transmissions came from or understood any of the subjects I write about, I wouldn’t need to write. I keep wondering why people like us are so attracted to ruins— to the edges of the earth, these sites of ecological drama and decay. I went to Germany a few weeks ago for a wedding and ended up poking around inside a Nazi flak tower. Then I started to wonder:

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What’s wrong with me? I used to think the attraction to ruins was a morbid fascination with the darkness of the past, but now I’m starting to think perhaps it’s the opposite. Perhaps it’s actually a comfort, something that helps me orient myself in this vast ocean of time. Or maybe I feel some kind of misanthropic reassurance in thinking that all this too will one day be ruins—that the world will finally have its revenge on us. There’s something quite romantic about change, decay, return. My attraction to these themes is related to my affinity for analogue formats and materials that aren’t pristine. It’s not nostalgia. Rather, it’s about having another dimension, a way to physicalize the experience of time passing. Lately, I’ve been working with hand-­wound clockwork cameras, which have made me realize that cameras and clocks are in many ways the same thing. Cameras are timekeepers; they operate on frame rates and exposure times. There are cogs inside, things that tick and need repair. I suppose my work is always about making ephemeral things tactile and tangible: time, rays of light, a fleeting feeling. Light especially changes as you move through it; it can feel almost solid, slicing or dappling or liquid. I like what H. G. Wells calls “translucent unreality” in Door in the Wall (1911), this idea of different places and times all superimposing, moments of contact with another world. I like playing with the membranes between the real and the fantastic. sg

da Yet, however ethereal it might be, there is always a materiality to your work. You work in analogue formats; you’re surrounded here with rusted cans of celluloid and lens, relics in themselves. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that so much of the contemporary world is intangible; Instagram filters have become so prevalent, for example, that I’ve begun to sense an uncanny valley between the way people appear in digital formats and how they actually look in real life. Analogue film doesn’t simplify or beautify its subjects in

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that way. The grain suggests a kind of necessary friction, an aging, because there is still a physical object produced. I have a friend who built himself a little darkroom in a wooden box, where he develops tintypes. Something about having images on metal—especially portraits—makes them seem almost hyperreal. Every blemish is pronounced and satisfying, however unflattering. Whereas digital filters can result in portraits that are fundamentally inhuman, I think. It’s not even a still life; it’s inert. In some ways, my practice might be closer to using paint or sculpting than to digital filmmaking. And as an analogue photographer, you are a painter, in a very real way; when he makes his tintypes, your friend literally has to paint chemicals onto plates. Subjects of early photographic portraits would have to stay really still while their picture was being taken, because the exposure time was so long—a ritual similar to that of sitting for a painting. You’re right that, even when the subject of one of my films is something more abstract or ethereal, I’m always very connected to the physicality of the process. I feel a responsibility to maintain a link to the tangible world, even when I use digital footage or AI. And I’m very aware that film development involves chemical reactions on a molecular scale; silver atoms respond in specific ways to specific emulsions. It’s physical. It’s chemistry. At the same time, it’s also alchemy: there’s magic involved. I’m interested in creating art that flickers between the material and nonmaterial planes, in other words. I do have a romantic feeling about the sublime in my work. Have you heard of Thai memorial cinema? In Thailand, mourners sometimes practice “ritualistic projection” where they play films to no one but the spirits. I like that idea: films playing to no one in the dark. sg

da That ghostly quality of cinema and photography has been there from the start, hasn’t it? The ability to make an image that will outlive the person—to visit a place that has since been completely

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transformed—must have been terribly unsettling to people who had never seen photographs before. I definitely see echoes, in your work, of those mysterious early years of photography. Before photographs were used for things like reportage, there was the aesthetic movement of pictorialism: where photographers really did feel themselves to be closer to painters, using film to transmit a highly aestheticized, emotionally resonant image, full of veils and mists and gothic figures. “The camera cannot compete with brush and palette,” Edvard Munch claimed, “as long as it cannot be used in heaven and hell.” And some pictorialist photographers seemed to reply, “OK then, we’ll give you heaven and hell.” Which was impossible, of course, but something about the form itself made it uncanny, otherworldly. The advent of photography marked a fundamental shift in human culture. Suddenly, you’ve found a way to capture time itself. It must have been like flying for the first time, like suddenly seeing the world from above. Which can’t help but revolutionize the Renaissance idea of art where everything converges back to the viewer along a horizontal plane. There’s a passage I love in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980) about the quasi-­ metaphysical nature of photography, which begins, “From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of the star.” sg

da The invention of photography also meant that people really were seeing worlds they didn’t previously know existed. It doesn’t seem so inconceivable that, after discovering the light spectrum, they thought we might also be able to use film to discern the afterlife. The invisible was becoming visible; people didn’t yet know the parameters of that. Maybe we still don’t. Even today, seeing the world captured in a single frame has an unreality to it. A static

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image might still reveal things hidden to us by the continual cascade of time. Or at least, we want it to. Growing up, I had a single photograph of my long-­dead paternal grandfather in his youth. I used to focus on it, trying to get it telekinetically to move, to get his features to animate in even the slightest way. Writing about him in my book Inventory (2020) was just an extension of that. An attempt to briefly bring back the dead. To prove that the wall between this world and the next is permeable, which would be a way of defeating death and determinism and rewriting the rules of the universe, which children are prone to do as they are learning them. Do you know about Stooky Bill? He was a ventriloquist’s dummy and the subject of the first successful experiments in televised images. Quite a sinister sight. Given how bombarded and manipulated we are by images these days, I wonder if Stooky Bill’s terrifying face was an early warning sign about the medium. Some cultures, Aboriginal Australians for instance, have taboos about the reproduction of images of the dead, and even their naming. When you consider issues of manipulation, intrusion, personal sovereignty, they may be onto something. Even now, if you look at a fixed reproduction or frozen image of someone, you’re not really remembering the person how they were in life. Conversely, the Victorians would literally take pictures of dead people, in the hopes of conjuring up specters. They’d also use film to detect people’s auras. Then there were optograms, which were based on the belief that the eye of a dead person could record, like a camera, the last image it perceived. Detectives would photograph the eyes of murder victims and then try to use the images to identify their murderers. Given that these things were happening around the same time that x-­ray technology was being invented, it must not have seemed all that unrealistic. sg

I also often think of music when I watch your films, which flow like music over the viewer, always changing, operating beyond the limitations of language. Your practice is clearly informed by da

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literature and material history, and also by the biological and chemical sciences. I’m fascinated by the boundaries between artistic mediums and the translations that can occur between them. As much as I have a list of books that influenced Inventory—Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974), Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996), Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951)—it was the double meaning of the Joy Division album Closer (1980) that gave me the idea of writing a memoir set in a mirror-­world rather than the real one, and Terence Davies’s film The Long Day Closes (1993) that showed me the possibility of creating something gritty and true to life through the prism of memory, which turns everything into a kind of magic realism. What Werner Herzog calls “ecstatic truth” as opposed to “accountants’ truth.” I don’t find these wells to come back to drink from as easily in literature. sg My interest in video art actually began through music. I grew up

mostly in a village bang in the middle of Northampton, Bedford, and Milton Keynes: the triangle of banality. It was an unremarkable place, the usual crushing small-­town atmosphere. By my name you can probably ascertain that my parents were alternative. They were a bit too young to be hippies, but they were punks with esoteric lifestyles. As a child, I couldn’t fit in even when I wanted to. I always did that thing growing up of making up films in my head while looking out of windows, listening to music. I think everyone must do that, right? I vaguely wanted to make music videos from watching things like MTV, and I had seen video art installations by Steve McQueen, for example. But, aside from art teachers, no one I knew had creative jobs. I’d go see rock and indie acts like Godspeed You!, Black Emperor, Aphex Twin, the Fall—bands I’d learned about through NME, the British music magazine. Their shows would often involve these really amazing projections, sometimes with 16mm film. Music culture had an influence on me because it felt somehow achievable—if not immediately doable, then at least not so far away. I ended up getting a theory-­based degree in film, which involved very little

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actual filmmaking. Still, this robust knowledge of how moving images and cinema fundamentally work has inevitably permeated what I do. My dissertation was on experimental film—Stan Brakhage, Nam June Paik, Tarkovsky, and so on. da

And after that?

I got a technical job. Through a pub I worked at, I managed to get a contact at a TV post-­production house in Soho, was a runner for a bit, and then became a technician and editor’s assistant, working on all kinds of programs from The X Factor to Adam Curtis documentaries. Later, I was able to do this on a freelance basis, usually on night shifts, which I kept up for the next ten years or so. After that, I got a grant to do a masters in visual anthropology, where I studied to make documentaries in the style of Adam Curtis or Jonathan Meades or Patrick Keiller. It’s funny—my final grad school film couldn’t be more different from what I do now. It was a straight-­up observational documentary set in Bernard Manning’s Embassy Club. Alongside all this, I was also making videos and visuals for musicians by compositing archive, shooting through weird filters, and filming different textures and patterns around London. It felt like quite a natural way of working: interpreting the music and making visuals for it. I like doing that live as well, creating images in real time that are responsive to music and ambient sound. The video becomes a sort of instrument. Lately I’ve begun doing it the other way around, getting musicians to write soundtracks for me. But a lot of films have this problem now where they’re just sort of flooded with music in an attempt to make the images more palatable or easily interpretable, rather than leaving silence and gaps. I’d like to avoid that in my own work. sg

da I’m writing about nuclear tests in the Pacific as we speak, and I went to see Oppenheimer (2023) for some levity. Without getting

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into what I thought of the film, I’ll say that I think the music was doing an awful lot of heavy lifting. Flooded is definitely the word. Some works of art can’t help themselves but instruct us what to feel and when. One of the reasons I was drawn to your work more and more during lockdown was that it offered me a kind of escape—not an escape from “here” to “there” but rather to some third space. Your films were somewhere I could see but never visit. Like mirages or— sg

Fata Morgana?

da Exactly. This reminds me of the early conception of cinema that film doesn’t replicate the real world but shows us another place entirely. I was obsessed with the surrealists as a young man, as people tend to be, because of those dreamlike juxtapositions and the implication that comes with them, that the waking world is a pretense: that there’s a zone beyond it.

That reminds me again of the opening lines of your book Imaginary Cities: “Before there were films, there was cinema; the flickering shadow play of fire and motion on limestone cave walls.” Film is a storytelling otherworld, moving on the wall. It’s kind of an escape, but it shows you something real at the same time. Have you heard of the Russian painter Pavel Filonov? He hasn’t been shown much outside of Russia, and his paintings don’t really translate well to print or digital reproduction, so he’s not widely known. But I was lucky enough to see an exhibition of his in St. Petersburg around 2006 that has haunted me intermittently ever since. The room was in darkness with the paintings lit up. They were literally moving like fractals or optical illusions, so detailed and shimmering but somehow held together. Filonov talked about this idea of “universal flowering,” which has to do with the visible connection between the cellular and macroscopic levels of creation. I’m aiming for a similar process in my work: depicting places in art that also grow like a plant from the form of the place itself—its sg

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elements, chemicals, light particles. A speculative space where both things that are too small to see (molecular) and things that are too big to see (cosmic) can be made visible. da

Do you think you’re resistant to the idea of the singular?

sg In English culture, there’s a lot of very safe-­feeling text-­based work that says, “This is the meaning!” I try and resist the safety of one interpretation. I want each place I present to be represented polyphonically, rather than via a singular viewpoint—to be shifting and multifaceted instead of fixed within an auteur’s-­or god’s-­eye view. This prismatic, mosaic perspective is influenced by films like Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and Koyaanisqatsi (1982). It’s a political choice, but I also try to resist explicit messaging because the art can lose something. Art is trying to fulfill needs, to fill gaps in society. It has had to become a form of social change because of the failure of the actual government, the cutting of public funds and social resources. Art also gets co-­opted a lot by commerce; it can feed into place-­making, gentrification, and general stratification. There’s a prevalent, patronizing assumption that ordinary people will only “get it” if the artwork has an explicit message, but really most of us want the sublime. I like the idea of not explicitly telling people what to think. I want the opposite of that. At the same time, not knowing—not understanding—is difficult. People can feel stupid. One of my grandmothers had lots of art and photography equipment but had to help raise generations of children and so never had a chance to be creative beyond hobbies. The other could barely seem to express herself beyond stock phrases that became these family jokes. The men, on the other hand, were shut in, passive-­aggressive, and silent, barricaded into their own inexpressive worlds. Unremarkable, quiet, heavy sadness. So I like the idea of my work being mysterious and having multiple interpretations—the idea that it can reach people in ways that are beyond words. I also want to make the work for people who

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aren’t just myself: those other generations with fewer choices and less freedom. Maybe this is a reach, but I hope that by using these haunted, expired materials and obsolete technologies, I’m also sharing the collective memories that have permeated them somehow. Reaching out across time. Connecting to the past. da You explore memory a great deal in your work, which means there is always the possibility of melancholy about what has been lost and can’t be retrieved. At the same time, your curiosity about what surrounds you and how you might put it to practical use— even when it would seem to someone else to be junk—feels expansive and alive. Creativity seems to require some tension, I think, and in your work perhaps that tension exists between melancholy and wonder. The sadness of things and times lost combined with continual discovery, or rediscovery, or resurrection. As Tarkovsky put it, you’re sculpting in time.

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Material elements of some years of the artist's life or

fabric, wood, paint, and strings, and: material elements of some years of the artist's life or fabric, wood, paint, and strings (reprise)

Alexis Pauline Gumbs The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 47-51 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914442

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914442

poetry

material elements of some years of the artist’s life or fabric, wood, paint, and strings Alexis Pauline Gumbs

after “Clown Marionette” by Alma Thomas, circa 1935 matted hair my grandmothers pulled out in their sleep trees that held their backs well mixed watercolor tea and whale intestine * white paper i waxed and blackened with every crayon in the box popsicle sticks i collected the slow way the blue of candied teeth and fraying frizzy yarn * flannel clarinet reed hypercolor spiral plugged-­in phone * dayplanner covers stacked soles of platform shoes newspaper ink flatiron cord

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* the jeans i wore until they fell apart the floors of dorm room nights the printer acrylic of t-­shirt transfers the ropes that lift the windows * glued spines of books reclaimed church fan handles blood cheese * photocopied poems cheryll’s picture frame markers staining fingers yard grass * letters of invitation well-­maintained forest trails likes luggage tags * boarding passes tea stirrers honey the word yes * blanket sweatpants houseplant stems spice mix mask loops

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* most of the fabric is paper most of the wood is actually wood most of the paint is edible most of the string is still here

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poetry

material elements of some years of the artist’s life or fabric, wood, paint, and strings (reprise) Alexis Pauline Gumbs

amniotic water bone of daughter skin of caul and navel string mother’s kisses hair and nails father’s heat and bassinet mobile paradigm of play side screen door sugared milk velcro straps test scores leaves stickers lanyards and friendship bracelet thread pleated uniform blue monkey bar legs sweat the word only

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the written word after-­school activity nail polish a ride home the quotes printed on the wall the fall the spring cranberry juice and blackness generations meetings blog posts use brilliance podium publishing the word wow my love where we live chicken broth asking the fabric is validation the wood is what i lean on the paint is not sustainable the strings are what i need

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Still Life, and: She Dwells in Violet, and: April 2023 dg nanouk okpik The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 118-123 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914446

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914446

poetry

Still Life dg nanouk okpik

1.

A tempered steel knife piercing my throatbox, Splintered sand silt in my eyes rage itching, A crush of spindled yarn both cruxes can be settled But too many to untangle knot and frayed ends. At the unraveled present, here now. Here we go; Mukluked feet on my waist a rick-­rack ribbon. I trip and fall, fall and trip into slate-­blue quicksand, The taste of black licorice in my mouth A digger wasp burrowing into my flesh brown skin. It burns and stings like ice-­cold Coca-­Cola in my throat. 2.

In deep water, Abysmal blackened The edge of the road Potato chip bag, Cigarette butts, Beer bottles, Furrowed as a Prune moth flitters Past me, to gut-­edge Of the cliff ’s seaside, Marine green waters,

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Arsenic land up down, Some part of the surface Area: extending upward Mossed rocks and chill Water, warm. Everything Was damp hot, dimly lit, Crumbling silvers of topsoil. Dim and dank my mind, In an underpinning of a net. I purge and drink, purge. Sea bells on the ridgeway, Or is it the ridgeline? Mold And form and adorned with Sea bells, I hike down the hill. Back the shore of the black Lake water, floating on the Surface quarantined barrels, Sloshing uranium shards. 3.

Underfoot each grain a pebble of ash, incapable of being touched we’re not alone. Once a man set a fish trap on the Susitna River catching many he jarred it sold it in the general store on every corner of every rez. Then the man set his wolf trap, we all know, impending doomed and death. He set it right and placed seal fat in the clasp snap punctures the stomach lining of the wolf (again). The fur I cut to make a full ruff on my atiguluk parka. In the background, silence.

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poetry

She Dwells in Violet dg nanouk okpik

Brother, listen, she places a hat with whale bone toggles, Walrus effigies and two small fish carvings on her head. To one side of the brow line made of spruce wood, or Was it willow? She had forgotten. Is a wooden mask. But she did so with a long gut roar so deep she brings up the bellow bowels of being human. She braids her hair. She clips animal carvings on her hat that day of fresh seaweed the smell of salt and clay. Deep purple rain drizzles and sashays to her wayside, I help her see an elusive red fox in the sand fields of lupine, A candle sways shadows of shadows as dim night light, she collects in the crab pots large Dungeness. She sets fire. Brother, she/I bring souvenirs for the spirits. Grab what they need leave the rest behind. At home, up the smoke hole went thoughts and prayers nourished by gleaming globed candlelight, she prays. In her room on the shelves sit her handmade dolls. One doll’s thin neck flimsy lops to the side.

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Gather to the center of the floor, her dolls watching us. She always loved the dolls the most and never lied to them. The dolls looking at us playing cards. Rummy. The dolls thirsty, beg for some water. She gives it to them. As an offering, she kneels in mindfulness of the other. Her mind can control her world if needed. It’s needed. She makes these tight words, and the day dwindles into red. She sits beside and behind the curtain only to reveal herself. Brother, scratch and pick, flinch and nail, jump and run, understand sand flea skin comes with scab and itch. Brother, the blues at the same time with the steel guitar, Twangs through the halls and rooms, nightmares and dreams. The dolls now asleep on the shelf above her bed snoring. Serene as a blue heron stalking the bog lakes, on one leg. The midnight sun in a polar eclipse at the dawning of day, she finds a down blanket, wraps it around her shoulders, she makes shelter from the horizon sky. She’s mindful of the domesticated reindeer they want to run with caribou, their cousins across the taiga tussocks and grass mounds which pepper the tundra, heading to the sea at sundown. Darkness spewing in feels fierce and relentless as a raven caws in the cold, she rests but still thinking of safety, restless. She awakens, her eyes measure a pup in a dream state A marmot pup scurries across the land like an arctic rat.

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She fried service berry doughnuts over the firs in a cast-­iron pan. She eats and craves red meat wild caught from the open range. The old sickness of blue silhouettes hanging on her, she dwells in violets as a lightning bug cedars with the fig.

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poetry

April 2023 dg nanouk okpik

In times of trouble I go back to the land. Unlock the snow crystals’ color A closed socket made of flint Illuminates Seward Pennsylvania Beach ridges disappear like walls Of a melting igloo as embankments Keep permafrost frozen under Roadways in the wake of black ashen Trails. Lights grew dim on a string Where snow settles. I hold my mirror Up to look for dust moons which Grew dim from the blue/purple haze Touch the fifth dimension, drink the Soundwaves of throat singing. Thread the gutted fish. Weave the innards back.

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Life in the Algorithm: Two new books on the culture of the web

Anna Shechtman The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 187-202 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914451

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914451

books

Life in the Algorithm Two new books on the culture of the web Anna Shechtman

I

quite powerful. I won’t pretend to know how it works—my understanding is that they don’t know either, which is a clever alibi. I hear that it’s a specter haunting our world. In fact, I hear that it knows that specters haunt worlds (but only at the start of an essay), which could be another way of saying that it has an uncanny grasp of cliché. It’s something like a meta-­ specter, really, haunting our hauntings. It’s apparently there, even if you can’t see it, lurking behind incipient fascism, pervasive misogyny, drone warfare, and denialism of all kinds. “I need the algorithm,” Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg said to Andrew Garfield’s Eduardo Saverin with the determination of an addict. The Algorithm. Never has something—some agent—had such a determining force on human actions and desires, at least since the discovery of the libido or the invention of the printing press or the belief in God. t’s said to be

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And yet, it’s only an equation. Or, per the dictionary, “a procedure or set of rules used in calculation and problem solving.” But as it passed from Eisenberg’s mouth to Garfield’s ear—The Algorithm, I need it—it was so much more. When The Social Network was released in 2010, the Algorithm was the procedure or set of rules that turned teenagers into creators and millionaires into billionaires, solving problems but also generating them. And since then, it’s only become more impressive. Of course, there is no such thing as “The Algorithm” or even “the Facebook algorithm”—nor “the TikTok algorithm,” which is said to be better. It’s both a synecdoche and a hypostatization, like if I called my car “my wheels” and then insisted they were reinventing everything. The Algorithm—sometimes short for algorithmic recommendations, sometimes a stand-­in for social media or the internet in toto—does seem to know what I want to see, if not exactly what I want to know. It’s easy to get the impression that it knows everything, but also only what I’ve told it. It homogenizes, and it silos. It’s the commons, but with gatekeepers. There’s never been anything like it! But it’s really just an extension of Enlightenment rationalism. It’s all there in Leibniz. None of this is strictly true, but it’s all become truism. If only there were some method of thinking—some procedure or set of rules used in calculation and problem solving—that could help us work through these contradictions. what all this computing has done to our lives, it is tempting to fall into forms of technological determinism—a slur lobbed at those who have described complex cultural conditions as the result of technological invention. The internet has made the world a global village. Social media is making teenagers suicidal. The verb “to make” is doing just as much theoretical work as the technologies themselves in these crude examples, which endow hardware and software with more agency than their developers and users. At its most flagrant, technological determinism relies on an anti-­dialectical algorithm: add computing to culture, and culture

when trying to compute

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changes as a result. This would be a useful formula if only “computing” and “culture” weren’t constantly moving targets, deeply entangled but irreducible to each other. Where does computing end and culture begin? After all, there would be no Facebook without Zuckerberg and Saverin, without Harvard and its servers, its Houses and their databases—to say nothing of the staff that makes it all run; without, for that matter, Eisenberg and Garfield, the cult of white male American nerdery and its fantasy of revenge; without bandwidth and fiber-­optic micro cable, venture capital and patents, legislators and workarounds, data storage and content moderation, Foxconn and its wage slavery, and so on and so on. As much as technological determinism offers to simplify a staggeringly complex network of relations and capital, it is not altogether simple. It may not count for much as media theory, but it does account for something: for the feeling that some force of nature has, with a whoosh and a bang, disrupted norms of cultural production and distribution; for the feeling that we users—now also addicts—have had no say in the disruption of these norms but have to adapt to them. Oftentimes our jobs depend on them. Sometimes we have been nudged into them. (The Algorithm is good at nudging.) Mostly we have just wanted to keep up with what is sometimes called “the social” as it migrated online. We have been delighted by the convenience of connection and overtaxed by the work of keeping up. We feel plugged in and self-­estranged. We want recognition and fear surveillance; now even the richest and whitest of us are experiencing the insecurity of not being able to control the terms by which we “feel seen.” It is tempting to describe this brave new world—governed by tech moguls, if not by The Algorithm per se—as a brand-­new culture. Call it Algorithmic Culture. Many people do. More than its near-­ cognates Internet Culture or Network Culture, Algorithmic Culture seems particularly disposed to the seductions of technological determinism. Predictive by nature and anthropomorphic by design, algorithmic recommendation systems draw strategic attention to the agency of their operations over

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that of the humans who have been populating their datasets. We feed them inputs, sure, but it is no coincidence that their outputs are “feeds” too, making it hard to know who—or what—is feasting on whom. The phrase Algorithmic Culture was first used in academic circles by media theorist Alexander R. Galloway in 2006, but his book, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, left it undefined. It never appears after the title page. In his new book, Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet, media studies professor Ted Striphas army crawls his way through intellectual history into a definition, drawing the long wake of the word algorithm (from ninth-­century Baghdad to the nineteenth century’s Royal Asiatic Society) into proximity with that of culture (from Matthew Arnold to Clifford Geertz). One gets the sense from Striphas that, like backward-­ facing magnets, these words have circled each other, at least since the 1960s, unable to quite connect until Netflix’s algorithmic systems started recommending movies (in 2000) and Twitter first started asking its subscribers “What are you doing?” and posting the answers online (in 2006). Until, in other words, some version of “culture” became “content.” Ultimately, Striphas does offer a formal, two-­part definition of Algorithmic Culture, highly flexible and impeccably dialectical: First, as the use of computational processes to sort, classify, and prioritize people, places, objects and ideas; and second, as the repertoires of thought, conduct, expression, and feeling that flow from and back into those processes. Algorithmic systems reflect and shape the inputs of human agents, with something like technology mediating something like ideology, and vice versa. This sounds right, but it doesn’t capture that feeling—floating somewhere between mania and motion sickness— that everything has changed. Everything from dating to policing, from shopping to electoral politics. It’s a feeling that is bound to accelerate as artificial intelligence gets better at approximating

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human labor (physical, intellectual, emotional). It’s that tech-­ determinism feeling. by Kyle Chayka and Taylor Lorenz try to account for the contours and texture of Algorithmic Culture, broadly and narrowly defined, with Chayka most persistently working to capture the feeling of waning agency in the face of computation, which he calls “algorithmic anxiety.” Both writers have been active observers of life online from their posts at legacy media institutions, The New Yorker and The Washington Post, respectively. Chayka’s book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, has a strongly articulated thesis: algorithms have made culture homogeneous, repetitive, less interesting, and therefore less rewarding to consumers. The result is a “frictionless” experience of culture in which convenience and profit outpace discretion and taste. It is pretty clear what Chayka means by algorithms: the processes by which some bit of online content “goes viral” or is given weighted priority over other bits of content on privately owned, publicly traded web applications. The anxiety that algorithms visit upon Chayka—and which he identifies as a cultural condition—is a fundamentally humanistic one. Why should any of us trust a black box to define our tastes? One could argue that taste has always been a black box and that having it has always depended less on liking the right things than on aligning oneself with the right people. But even though Chayka spends a chapter on theories of taste that passes through Pierre Bourdieu, he does not seem to believe this. Instead, Filterworld elaborates an ethics of personal taste that is peer-­to-­peer networked, not informed by Twitter feeds or For You Pages, demography or capital. Over six chapters, Chayka interviews artists and curators whose work he understands to have been distorted or displaced by algorithmic recommendation systems: writers who try to “game” The Algorithm, pandering to its logic of “likeability” to get their work more widely read; musicians who resent that an outlier in their discography—a parody pop song—blew up on Spotify, seeing in the two new books

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app’s popularity feedback loops a portent of cultural fascism. For Chayka, “algorithmic” is not merely a mock aesthetic category or a new way of calling things commercial or insipid (“did a bot write this?”). Instead, he warns that algorithmic recommendation systems are actively shaping contemporary aesthetics and diminishing cultural production in a way that is different, not just in scale but in kind, from the age-­old logics of commercialism. If it is mostly clear what Chayka means by algorithms, it can be hard to know what he means by culture. What exactly is being “flattened” and filtered into uniformity? Mostly Chayka means cultural artifacts—songs, movies, essays, tweets—which may explain why he frequently refers to “pieces of culture,” in the manner of “pieces of content.” At other times, culture refers to systems of valuation (we defer to “algorithmic taste”); sometimes it is more like an ecosystem or ambiance (we live an “algorithmic life,” held in “algorithmic space,” subject to “algorithmic government”). All of this is culture—or, at least, all of it is the terrain of Cultural Studies, as defined by one of the field’s founding fathers, Raymond Williams (who, it should probably be said, was a vocal and sophisticated opponent of technological determinism). But has all of it really been flattened, or made “frictionless,” by algorithms? The argument is so big that counter-­examples glare between the gaps of its sprawling surface area. Take fiction. Chayka writes, “Young writers often find ways to cultivate public presences online even before they enter MFA programs, on Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok. They subject their voices to the force of social media flattening.” What could this mean? Did young writers—say, before 2006—have autonomous voices, independent of social norms, economic imperatives, and technologies of production? Can’t MFA programs be called a homogenizing force on U.S. fiction? (They famously have been.) And is “the force of social media” on authorial voice so singular? Does social media have a house style? Is it the same across all tech platforms and publics? The reader could get into the weeds with Chayka about any number of his claims about algorithmic flatness,

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but there are more pressing questions to ask, like: what does this idea of Algorithmic Culture as totalizing and oppressive do? Whose interests is it serving? In pursuit of an answer, we might start by looking at Chayka’s vocabulary, which offers an echo—with a nineteen-­ year time lag—of that other book about flatness and the internet, Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat, a triumphalist account of web-­ induced globalization and free trade. Both authors picture the internet as a “frictionless” surface on which capital and culture can skate from China and India to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, but for Friedman, flatness implies not cultural banality but equal opportunity. Friedman is a self-­proclaimed technological determinist (“guilty as charged,” he wrote in The World Is Flat, thumb-­nosing italics included). For him, frictionlessness is inherent to web-­based commerce and constitutes its primary virtue. It welcomes new markets into a global economy, levels playing fields, increases competition and transnational collaboration—all as a result of open-­source software and outsourced labor. Friedman’s valuations and objects of inquiry differ from Chayka’s; in Filterworld, algorithmic frictionlessness is an aesthetic scourge, making coffee shops in Bucharest look like coffee shops in Bushwick and the songs recommended by Spotify all sound like “ambient synth washes.” But their diagnosis is the same: the world is flat. First the economy, then the culture, now all algorithmicized. For Friedman, “the biggest source of friction” interrupting The Algorithm’s world-­flattening is national and religious identity. He writes: The more the flattening forces reduce friction and barriers, the sharper the challenge they will pose to the nation-­state and to the particular cultures, values, national identities, democratic traditions, and bonds of restraint that have historically provided some protection and cushioning for workers and communities. Which do we keep and which do we let melt away into the air so we can all collaborate more easily?

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It’s a leading question. Friedman takes for granted a culture of deregulation, melting away state protection for “workers and communities” since the thaw of the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, the state actors who might introduce friction into The Algorithm’s slip-­’n-­slide economy remain just as “airy” as the “flattening forces” that have eclipsed them in his narrative. Chayka values the friction of cultural particularity, not because it impedes capital’s flow, as Friedman seems to bemoan, but as a pledge of aesthetic value: friction is that uphill effort required to record a favorite episode on VHS tape or to discover a favorite band from a friend instead of an Apple Music playlist. Seeking out friction rewards what Chayka calls “the organic development of culture,” not “flatness and sameness, the aesthetics that are the most transmissible across the networks of digital platforms.” Here cultural complexity seems correlated to file density, as if eclecticism would jam the servers and break the internet. For this reason, Chayka’s book (in which flat is bad and friction is good) might appear to offer a rebuke of sorts to Friedman’s (in which flat is good and friction is bad). But their shared technological determinism leads the writers to compatible, compatibly degraded political visions. Theirs is a political arena with such limited scope as to be essentially external to the workings of the internet and the production of capital, financial and cultural. Whatever culture is to Chayka—whether individual “pieces” or dominant aesthetics—it seems to exist outside of politics, which is why it can be said to grow “organically” or to be debased by a technological invention, rather than by the social and institutional forces guiding its development and distribution. This is not to say that Chayka completely excludes politics from view. In fact, he spends forty pages describing various legislative efforts in the United States and the European Union to regulate social media platforms and enforce algorithmic transparency. But because his sense of aesthetics and technology is so divorced from the political and social contexts of their emergence, he is unequipped to intervene meaningfully in this terrain. The best

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he can do is throw up his hands—like Friedman does above—and declare, “a law can force a platform to ban problematic content, but it can’t make Spotify recommend more challenging or creatively interesting playlist of music.” Ultimately, Chayka’s recommendation for fleshing out the flatness of Algorithmic Culture is to reinvest human agency into the narrative he has crafted to eliminate it. He calls for a return to human curators, not algorithmic ones: go to MoMA, subscribe to the Criterion Collection (for art house movies) or Idagio (for classical music). He suggests identifying the DJ of a song that YouTube recommends to you, after which you can “pay them a tip for their cultural curation” or “buy a digital copy of one of the songs or albums that are included.” In other words, be more active consumers. There is a strong strand of cultural conservatism that runs through Chayka’s recommendations—one that sees social forces as degrading to mass culture and yet exogenous to high culture. It is a conservatism that is strikingly compatible with Friedman’s neoliberalism, since neither proposes any real speedbumps to capital in the name of regulation or good taste. it is a strange impulse to consider one’s own Twitter feed or For You Page “flat,” “generic,” or “impersonal.” Algorithmic recommendation systems are, if literally nothing else, personalized. This is not to say that they do not regress into genre categories: Netflix “knows” that I like “Critically Acclaimed LGBTQ+ Movies”; Twitter “knows” that I waste my time on petty disputes between academics and pictures of cats in bodegas; Instagram often tries to sell me bras for small-­breasted women. There is some genre of person—call it a demographic—coming into focus here that, when reproduced for my convenience online, can often anticipate what I want to watch, share, and buy. It invariably feels reductive—such is the nature of genre constraints—which is perhaps to say that it feels “flattening.” But I would not call it impersonal any more than I would call any form of advertising impersonal. What is unique about predictive algorithmic recommendation systems is that they

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are rebranding demography as subjectivity—and a coherent, consistent form of subjectivity at that. This page is For You (as you have been), not For Someone Like You (as you seem to be), nor even For Someone You Might Be (if only you buy this product). To imagine one’s recommendations as wholesale “generic,” rather than generic to one’s demographic, is a step stranger. It may be a tacit acknowledgment of one’s own claim to cultural dominance—the world might look flat if you are looking at it from above—or a concession to one’s own frictionless passage through space, online and off. A U.S. passport, white skin, straightness, cis-­ masculinity: it is easy enough to attach these characteristics to the internet itself, along with its cultural output. Most histories of the internet do, aligning The Algorithm with its most famous founders and profiteers: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and so on and so on. What’s most remarkable about Taylor Lorenz’s new book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, is that these men go mostly unnamed. Rather than taking the familiar narrative of web-­induced uniformity for granted, Lorenz disarticulates it by shifting our focus. In her finely reported social history of social media, she gives algorithmic systems and their engineers little credit for the current state of online culture. Other names surface instead: Heather Armstrong, Kirsten “Kiki” Ostrenga, Julia Allison, Bree Avery, Aliza Litch, Cates Holderness, Liz Eswein, Amber Venz, Olivia Palermo, Emma Chamberlain, and Charli and Dixie D’Amelio. The purported thesis of Extremely Online is that social media platforms have become entertainment industries. The companies whose founders envisioned their apps as portals for online “friendship” have had to redirect their resources to the content creator economy, building out their platforms to prioritize “entertainment” over “connection.” The many naysayers who complained, “I don’t want to know what my friends are eating for breakfast,” when Facebook unveiled its “status update” feature in 2006, have been

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partially vindicated. As it turns out, people do want to know—and watch—what some people are eating for breakfast: call them influencers, online personalities, or scammers. Their preferred title is “creator.” And some of them get paid millions of dollars a year to eat their breakfasts online. Lorenz establishes this “war” between rival social media business models early on in Extremely Online. She maps them onto U.S. cities and major platforms: Silicon Valley is the home of the Facebook model, in which apps promote friends’ connections; New York and Los Angeles produced the Myspace model, in which apps host creators’ music, dances, confessionals, and skits. That the Myspace model has won this war will come to many as a surprise, since the company lost its own battle against Facebook in the mid-­aughts. But this internecine internet feud is eclipsed, in Lorenz’s reporting, by a shadow thesis of which she seems largely unaware: that the engine for this corporate revolution—this rerouting of business models and marketing campaigns from “connection” to “content creation”—has consistently been white women. White women producers (as mommy bloggers, Myspace scene queens, bedroom vloggers, and Instagram influencers); white women marketers (as pioneers of sponsored content, brand ambassadorships, and affiliate marketing programs); and white women as consumers have all fueled the content creator economy, boosting its supply and demand. Enter: Heather Armstrong, Kirsten “Kiki” Ostrenga, Julia Allison, Bree Avery, Aliza Litch, Cates Holderness, Liz Eswein, Amber Venz, Olivia Palermo, Emma Chamberlain, and Charli and Dixie D’Amelio. Lorenz’s history begins with Armstrong, a mother of two in Salt Lake City who registered the domain name Dooce.com in 2001. A Mormon-­raised web developer, Armstrong was fired from her job in 2002, after her employer learned that she had been blogging about her coworkers alongside posts about postpartum depression, breastfeeding, and the misogyny of the LDS Church. Newly the matriarch of a single-­income family, Armstrong began running

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ads on her highly trafficked site in 2004 to compensate for her lost salary. The result, as Lorenz describes it, was “a tidal wave of backlash” from readers. Armstrong was exploiting the intimacy she had developed with them, coopting the unpaid work of mothering (and mommy blogging) for an income. In Lorenz’s telling, these familiar attacks on a “relatable” white woman were just the growing pangs of the content creator economy. Lorenz credits Armstrong as its trailblazer, developing some of the first sponsored content—like when Verizon subsidized her home office renovation—and some of the earliest affiliate marketing programs, which offer creators commissions for the products they recommend. By 2005, Armstrong’s site had become so profitable that her husband quit his job, becoming her manager and effectively the first “Instagram boyfriend” several years before Instagram existed. Lorenz also credits mommy bloggers in general, and Armstrong in particular, with inspiring changes to the Federal Trade Commission’s disclosure guidelines in 2008, requiring bloggers to announce when they are being compensated for product promotion. In April 2017, the FTC doubled down on its enforcement of these guidelines, during what Lorenz calls “peak Instagram,” when some creators—led by the Kardashian sisters—were drawing hundreds of thousands of dollars per sponsored post, without ever signaling that their “content” was in fact advertising. Lorenz demonstrates how contrary to Instagram’s mission statement this high-­profit posting was—and how influential white women, historically positioned to enter their girl boss eras, were to its “peak” economy. Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s founders, didn’t include devices for monetizing content in their earliest versions of the app: there were no ads for sale and no tools for paid promotions built into its design. They were following the model of Facebook and Twitter, which prioritized community over growth— at least at the beginning. But Systrom was also “strongly against” advertising, Lorenz reports, not wanting Instagram’s “wall of beautiful images” to become “a billboard.”

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Lorenz highlights two white women, Liz Eswein and Amber Venz, who built Instagram empires by helping brands “find a side door” to advertising on the app. Eswein’s company, Mobile Media Lab (founded in 2012), was an early influencer agency, connecting users with high follower counts to brands for campaigns. Venz’s company, LIKEtoKNOW.it (founded in 2011), developed an affiliate program for influencers. In 2013, Instagram executives, submitting to the terms of the economy already thriving on their platform, began selling their own ads. In 2018, they began allowing businesses to add product links. And in 2021, they added their own “native affiliate marketing tool,” allowing creators to earn commissions from sales, cutting out Venz’s middleman organization, which is now valued at more than $2 billion. If, for many users, Instagram’s aesthetic has been dominated by white women clichés—avocados, pumpkin spice latte art, and any of the other tropes featured in Bo Burnham’s 2021 parody song “White Woman’s Instagram”—this is not because of The Algorithm’s will to flatness. It may be because white women have been directing the flow of capital through the app since its founding. Of course, not all creators are white women. One begins to get the sense, throughout Extremely Online, that just as Chayka’s eulogy for friction is circumscribed by his own cultural positioning, Lorenz’s reporting may be overdetermined by her own For You Page. She never calls attention to the attention she gives white women in her narrative. Even so, Lorenz’s version of algorithmic myopia is less analytically limiting than Chayka’s; her narrow view reveals far more. No, not all creators are white women—but the richest ones do tend to be. “Black mothers and mothers representing other marginalized identities were not granted the most lucrative brand deals” in the early mommy blog ecosystem, Lorenz writes. “This bias went well beyond blogs and would become an even bigger concern as social media became more visual.” The Algorithm did not invent anti-­Blackness, nor even algorithmic racism. Lorenz has a stubborn resistance to abstraction, and she rarely connects her anecdotes to the social forces that helped to

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shape them, sacrificing interpretation at the altar of the fact. But as she describes the individuals and institutions that have shaped the culture of social media (partner programs, content houses, multichannel networks, the FTC), you begin to intuit the reciprocal mediation of new technology and existing ideology. The platform that Armstrong used was new; the digital tools that Eswein and Venz developed were new too. But the convergence of actors and factors that shaped their development and use are as old as mass-­market advertising itself. Mothers control up to 85 percent of household spending in the United States, and white women have been the face of this market and its targeted consumers since the nineteenth century. Algorithmic recommendation systems are changing things; targeted advertising is no doubt offering companies finer tools with which to capture “niche” demographics and hawk products For You. But the fine line between aspiration and relatability that has always fueled the American entertainment and advertising industries—and that has always been most available to white Americans for toeing— remains their stimulus for sales. of patriarchy and the privileges of white supremacy—between the conflicting imperatives of aspiration and relatability—these highly public white women can fall into forms of depression and anxiety that are, among other things, highly salable. Armstrong sold it, giving her readers unfettered access to her mental illness (including a long history of alcoholism) until her suicide earlier this year. The D’Amelio sisters—TikTok sensations whose bedroom dancing during the pandemic resulted in a combined 208 million followers and deals with Amazon, Prada, Hulu, and Dunkin’ Donuts—are selling it now. The first season of their Hulu show devoted hours to Charli’s anxiety and Dixie’s suicidal ideation. (The Algorithm, Eisenberg said to Garfield, like Mephistopheles whispering into Faust’s ear, I need it.) In 2021, Frances Haugan, now known as the Facebook whistleblower, reported to Congress that the multi-­ billion-­ dollar

caught between the privations

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corporation where she worked had been sitting on studies revealing the harmful effects of its apps on teenagers, especially teenage girls. Among teens who reported suicidal ideation, 13 percent of British users and 6 percent of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one study reported. And roughly 32 percent of teenage girls said that “when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.” In February of 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report stating that 57 percent of teenage girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021, up from 36 percent in 2011. Thirty percent of girls in ninth through twelfth grade said that they “seriously contemplated suicide,” also up from 19 percent a decade earlier. Marketing is not new, nor is its deleterious effect on young women’s self-­image. To acknowledge this historical continuity is not to undermine the above statistics. Technological determinism may be a logical fallacy, but it is not an affective one: the feeling of lost agency—and even lost hope—in Algorithmic Culture appears to be quite real. Although the CDC report made no mention of social media as the causative agent of these dire trends—perhaps the global pandemic, the yawning income gap, and looming climate disaster played a role?—it has been widely cited as the motivation for Utah’s two new social media regulation bills, the first of their kind. Brad Wilcox, director of something called the Institute for Family Studies, seems to be the source of this campaign, connecting the CDC report to the demand for Utah’s legislation. The state’s governor, Spencer Cox, has retweeted Wilcox and linked to his writing about the CDC report in his own essay in National Review. The bills, which Cox signed into law last March, are the only real impediment to growth that any U.S. legislative body has placed in front of tech companies. Despite the best efforts of Lina M. Khan, Biden’s FTC chair, to break up their monopolies, the burden of negotiating social media misinformation, hate speech, and unregulated data sharing remains in the hands of American consumers. We have to be our own curators, as Chayka would have it, and our own safety nets.

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All of us, that is, except Utah’s teens. Cox’s legislation requires parental consent for minors’ social media accounts, gives parents access to those accounts, and creates a default “curfew” on social media access at 10:30 p.m. It limits direct messaging to minors, restricts their accounts from search results, and bans companies from collecting data from them and advertising to them. More, the laws, which will go into effect in March 2024, prohibit social media companies from using unnamed “addictive design features” and impose a $250,000 fine “for each violation” plus a $250,000 penalty “per child for those exposed to an addictive feature.” No one knows how Utah intends to enact or enforce these various prohibitions, fines, and penalties, nor even if they are legal. We do know that teenage girls—mostly teenage white girls, as Utah is 87 percent white—are meant to be protected by them. Some have heralded the laws as victories for parents’ rights, a dog whistle for culture warriors on the right, using children as the technology for the programmatic rollback of civil rights. Others see the laws as an infringement of children’s privacy and free speech. Some, more modestly, are just relieved that someone, somewhere, is doing something. It’s a dangerous wager, a true devil’s bargain, placing political hope in the hands of paternalists acting on behalf of white girls. It’s dangerous but familiar. This is Algorithmic Culture, for us, as we have been: updating American norms, phobias, incentives, and risks—and staying the same.

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Contributors

The Yale Review, Volume 111, Number 4, Winter 2023, pp. 203-204 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tyr.2023.a914452

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/914452

Contributors

darran anderson is the author of the books Imaginary Cities and Inventory. He was born and raised in the north of Ireland and lives in London.

is a British artist who works with hybrid moving image and photographic processes. Her work has been shown widely in exhibitions, performances, and events globally. She currently lives and works in Folkestone, UK. sapphire goss

percival everett is the award-­winning author of thirty-­four books of fiction and poetry, among them Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, The Trees, and Telephone. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles with his family. michael kelleher

is the program director of the Windham

Campbell Prizes. is the author of the plays seven methods of killing kylie jenner and Curious.

jasmine lee-­j ones

ling ma is the author of the novel Severance and the story collection Bliss Montage. Her books have received the Kirkus Prize, Whiting Award, Story Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among others. She lives in Chicago.

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greil marcus is the author of many books, including Mystery Train:

Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music and Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs. With Werner Sollors, he is the editor of A New Literary History of America. is a dramatist whose work includes the critically acclaimed three-­play cycle The Detroit Project (Detroit ’67, Paradise Blue, and Skeleton Crew). Her many accolades include two Obie Awards, a Drama Desk Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son. dominique morisseau

dg nanouk okpik is Inupiaq, Inuit from the north slope in Alaska. Okpik resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

is a queer Black feminist love evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. Alexis is the author of several books including the forthcoming biography Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. alexis pauline gumbs

is a Klarman Fellow at Cornell University and author of The Riddles of the Sphinx, about the history of the crossword puzzle and the sexual politics of wordplay. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Slate, and Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is an editor-­at-­large. anna shechtman

is a historian and Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her books include Colour Bar, Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, Spies in the Congo, and White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Colonization of Africa. susan williams

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