The Idea of Order
I Can’t Breathe
It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
—Vladimir Putin, New York Times (September 11, 2013)
1. The First Death
This is a story about bodies and texts. Bodies and difference. Texts and difference. Bodies and violence. This is a story about texts and violence. This is a story about violence and reflection, difference and equivalence, universalism and parochialism, capitalism and cosmopolitanism and racism and war and peace, freedom and repression and language and justice and slavery and serfdom, rich and poor, North and South, America and Russia, France and Algeria, America and Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, Namibia, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Togo, Benin, The Gambia, Gabon, Congo and Angola and Ferguson and Staten Island and Baltimore and Cleveland and Oberlin and New Haven and Princeton and Moscow and Washington and Brooklyn and ontology and epistemology and aesthetics and ethics.
This is a story about many things, but it begins with a body. Maybe that means it’s a mystery, because mysteries always start with a body. But then so do wars, gospels, sacrifices, and autopsies—all stories that begin with a body and end with truth. This story doesn’t end with truth, though, so it’s probably not a mystery, or a war, or a gospel, a sacrifice, or an autopsy. Capitalism starts with a body, too, the laboring human body, and ends with profit—or revolution. This story doesn’t end with profit or revolution, though, but with sorrow and loss. So it’s probably not capitalism, either. I suppose if this story is anything, it might be philosophy, because it starts with a body and moves toward spirit. It starts with particulars and moves toward abstractions. It starts with confusion and moves toward understanding. I can’t claim it ever gets there—or anywhere near there, for that matter—but it struggles, moves, works, thinks, and tries, even if it moves in circles, even if it thinks in fragments and mistakes, even if it struggles in bits and pieces and gestures and failures.
So, without further ado: the bodies.
On August 19, 2014, an eighteen-year-old man was shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. His name was Michael Brown. He had, with a friend, shoplifted some Swisher Sweets from a corner store. The clerk at the store called the police and the police dispatcher sent out a description. Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, already in the neighborhood, stopped Brown and his friend on the street. Something happened between Wilson and Brown, some kind of scuffle that ended with Wilson drawing his pistol in his police SUV and firing two shots, one of which grazed Brown’s hand. Brown ran and Wilson followed, then Brown stopped and turned. Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson then pulled the trigger of his Sig Sauer P229 .40-caliber service automatic ten times. Six bullets hit Michael Brown, in the face, neck, chest, and right arm, killing him. Michael Brown may have had his hands up and he may have been saying “Don’t shoot.” He may have been moving toward Darren Wilson in a threatening manner. Eyewitness evidence is ambiguous. We do know that Michael Brown was unarmed, that he was more than thirty yards away from Wilson, and that he had just graduated high school. The police let his body bleed in the street for hours.
On Monday, November 24, 2014, a Ferguson grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown, a decision that provoked widespread outrage and days of protests throughout the United States.
About ten days later, on December 3, 2014, a New York grand jury decided not to indict New York Police Department officers in the death of Eric Garner, a grandfather and retired New York Parks & Recreation employee with diabetes and asthma. On July 17, Garner had been approached by two police officers for allegedly selling loosies, individual cigarettes, which is illegal in New York, though loosies are sold in many corner markets. I used to buy them sometimes when I lived in Crown Heights. Eric Garner told the police to stop harassing him, and in response they grabbed him and tried to handcuff him. Garner, a big man, brushed them off, so Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo wrapped his arm around Garner’s neck in an illegal hold, and, after a short struggle in which three other police helped take Garner down, choked him to death. Pantaleo’s supervisor stood by watching. We’ve all seen the video. We’ve all heard Eric Garner saying “I can’t breathe” while the police were killing him; we’ve all heard him begging for air. Another death, another body left lying in the street, surrounded by police. More outrage and protests.
In both cases the evidence clearly showed that excessive police force resulted in the death of a citizen, yet both ruling municipal grand juries declined to indict. These two egregiously unjust grand jury decisions in rapid succession refreshed recent memories of the Trayvon Martin case, in which a vigilante named George Zimmerman murdered a seventeen-year-old boy in cold blood, yet was acquitted by a Florida jury under Old West–style self-defense laws. The two unjust grand jury decisions tore open a wound in the American body politic, brought to national attention a systemic problem of murderously aggressive policing, and catalyzed an atmosphere of outrage, fear, and struggle. Something was happening. A profound, pain-stricken anger had been awakened. Protesting in the streets or watching Twitter, you could see it, you could feel it.
On a cold January morning a few weeks later, while protestors’ shouts of “I can’t breathe” and “No justice, no peace” still echoed in the streets of American cities, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi entered the Paris offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and started shooting. They found their way to the second-floor conference room, where the editors of the magazine were holding a meeting. Saïd and Chérif first sprayed indiscriminately, then executed deliberately. The two brothers killed twelve people that day: maintenance worker Frédéric Boisseau, psychoanalyst and columnist Elsa Cayat, editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier, editor Bernard Maris, copy editor Mustapha Ourrad, cartoonists Philippe Honoré, Jean Cabut, Bernard Verlhac, and Georges Wolinski, festival organizer Michel Renaud, and police officers Ahmed Merabet and Franck Brinsolaro. That same morning, a man named Amedy Coulibaly, suspected of working in collusion with the brothers, shot a jogger in a Paris suburb. The next day he shot and killed police officer Clarissa Jean-Philippe and wounded a street sweeper. On January 9, two days after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, police killed Saïd and Chérif Kouachi after a nine-hour siege. Elsewhere in Paris that day, Amedy Coulibaly entered a supermarket, killed four people, and took several others hostage. He was later killed by police when they stormed the grocery.
In Shakespeare the bodies tend to all pile up at the end. Think of Hamlet, King Lear, or Othello. A good tragedy builds inexorably toward a moment of spectacular violence, when all the ratcheting tension is finally discharged in bloody havoc. People often describe real deaths as tragic, real events as tragedies, including the many deaths just discussed, but at the risk of being pedantic I have to say that’s not quite right, though it is illustrative of something important that we’ll come back to later, the easy confusion in the human mind between fact and fiction, our tendency to rely unreflectively and even unconsciously on certain archetypical structures of narrative. But my point here is that, to be precise, tragedy is a genre of dramatic art, a communal ritual, a narrative form.
Tragedy is a kind of play, inherently artificial because it is made. When a typhoon hits the Philippines, destroys thousands of homes, and kills hundreds of people, that’s not a tragedy because it’s not a communal ritual but a natural event. When a lone psychotic goes into a suburban school and shoots a bunch of children, that’s not a tragedy either, for the same reason. It may be dramatic, theatrical, sorrowful, and horrific, which are some of what we often mean when we use the word tragic, but when we call such an event a tragedy we’re confusing an event with a kind of narrative form. We mistake history for aesthetics.
Tragedy, as any high school student knows, has its roots in ancient Greece. It began in the annual rituals celebrating the death and rebirth of the god of wine, Dionysus. A community would come together to drink and sing and watch a drama unfold. The drama usually ended with a body.
The word itself, tragōidia, or “goat song,” gives a clue to the deeper roots of this genre in collective ritual sacrifice. Tragedy is the song of the scapegoat, the sacrificial animal that bears the sins of the community and thereby, in its death or expulsion, expunges them. In coming together to witness, celebrate, and participate in collective bloodshed, the members of a community purge themselves of sin and avow their collective identity—a process Aristotle called catharsis. The story of Dionysus, the god in whose name the celebration was held, hints at even deeper, darker roots: the god’s dismemberment and rebirth suggests that the origins of tragedy lie not in animal sacrifice, but in human sacrifice—a body on an altar, a body torn to pieces. The body of a sacred offering. Whether the sacrifice is a scapegoat or a martyr turns out to be ambiguous. Both are totemic, both heroic, but one is expelled and the other raised up. Interpretation depends upon the specific social group and their values. Whether the story is a goat-song or a gospel depends on whether they see the sacrificial victim as different from them or the same. It all comes down to a question of identity.
This very aspect of the tragic sacrifice, the cathartic affirmation of collective identity, may be what the voices on the television or in the newspaper mean to imply when they describe an event as a tragedy. What they want to say is that we all come together over the dead. We are unified in their blood. But who are we? What collective is this? Are we the white police standing over Michael Brown and Eric Garner? Are we the black protestors marching in Ferguson, New York, Oakland, and Baltimore, shouting “Black lives matter”? Are we the European and American intellectuals and politicians avowing “Je suis Charlie”? Are we the French Algerians struggling every day against racism and Islamophobia, honoring the memory of those who died resisting more than 130 years of brutal colonial rule?
We are the world. But is there any we here at all?
2. Russian Reversal
Moscow is a low, wide city expanding in a series of rings out from the Kremlin and Red Square, spreading over some nine hundred square miles of land cleared in a cold northern forest, near where Arctic taiga blends into Sarmatic mixed forests. It’s a mistake to think Moscow is part of Europe: the city looks more like Saskatoon than it looks like Berlin, all monstrous boxes built up out of nothing as if to compensate for the puniness of the human animal in the immensity of so much space, and it feels and sounds like something else yet again. To visit Europe is to tour a giant mausoleum dedicated to centuries of war, rich with the booty of global empire: a cemetery turned into a shopping mall. Going to Moscow is like visiting a Turkish moon base built in the 1950s. Cyrillic script and Slavic phonemes mesh in the air with so many oo’s, shch’s, and ve’s, uncannily similar enough to a Latin alphabet to look both familiar and wrong, unbroken by any tourist-friendly English. Like its script, Moscow is at once familiar and strange. Russia and America are siblings in many ways, both countries of the twentieth century, both conquerors of vast spaces, both abstract and callous and massive and dangerous.
How much do we see each other, and how much do we just see negative mirror images of ourselves? The classic late–Cold War American joke about Russia, endlessly variable, was based on a simple reversal of subject and object: “In America, everyone watches television. In Soviet Russia, television watches you!” “In America, everyone drives a car. In Soviet Russia, a car drives you!” . . . “In Soviet Russia, the police call you!” . . . “In Soviet Russia, the party finds you!” . . . “In Soviet Russia, the law breaks you!” . . . “In Soviet Russia, the war wins you!”
My trip to Moscow seemed to be an exercise in such a reversal: I was going to give a paper at an American Studies conference at the Russian State University for the Humanities, which conference was on the topic “War in American Culture.” My paper would be about Wallace Stevens, James Jones, and the problem of the hero in American World War II literature, and it just so happened that the conference was scheduled the week after Victory Day, May 9, the holiday celebrating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany, perhaps the most important anniversary in modern Russian history.
The coincidence was serendipitous, as it seemed likely that the celebration would mark a historical footnote: leaders from Britain, France, and the US refused to attend the anniversary, rebuking President Vladimir Putin (and insulting the Russian people) for Russian military intervention in Ukraine, while NATO staged military exercises in Latvia and Estonia and the US deployed paratroopers to Kiev to train soldiers in Ukraine. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the only Western leader to break the boycott, though she skipped Victory Day proper and came a day late, to lay a wreath at Moscow’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. While Barack Obama and David Cameron turned their backs on Putin, India’s President Pranab Mukherjee and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping did not, meeting the Russian president in Moscow on May 9 with open arms, standing with him to watch the traditional parade of Russian soldiers, tanks, and missile launchers. Meanwhile, in the Black Sea, Russian and Chinese sailors trained together in a joint military exercise.
On May 7, 2015, two days before the big parade, I went to the State Museum of the Great Patriotic War, which is what Russians call World War II. The museum sits on the vast grounds of Park Pobedy (Victory Park), across the Moskva River from the old Arbat and the new business district with its hypermodern skyscrapers. A long promenade leads to a towering spire topped with a horn-blowing angel, who hovers high over a plaza framed on the west by the massive colonnaded arc of the museum proper, capped by a great dome. At the base of the spire there is a statue of Saint George slaying a dragon. As with most of Moscow, the scale is gargantuan and theatrical, at once imposing and absurd.
Halfway down the promenade, a line of old women and families shuffled through security checkpoints to wind into a small chapel dedicated to Saint George. Down the hill, a path leads to an outdoor museum of military hardware from the war, everything from T-34 tanks and Katyusha rocket launchers to the torn tail of a wrecked German Messerschmitt. Among the birches and lawns of the park around the museum, sculptures stand honoring the dead. There is a sculpture for the Allies, one for the Spanish Civil War, one for those missing in action. The most remarkable is Zurab Tsereteli’s sculpture dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, called Tragedy of Peoples: enormous naked men, women, and children, bald and emaciated, rise up out of or sink back into a falling line of stones. On one side is a pile of personal goods, shoes, a stuffed rabbit, eyeglasses, and so on.
It was a bright, clear, blue-skied sunny day. The park and the museum were packed, full of families, children in miniature World War II–era Soviet military uniforms, and old women, everyone wearing a black and orange Saint George’s ribbon commemorating the war, celebrating their collective unity and patriotism. Groups of students on field trips were led through the Museum’s dioramas illustrating the major battles of the war—the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Kursk, the Siege of Leningrad, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the Fall of Berlin. They stood in the Hall of Memory and Sorrow, where 2.6 million bronze pendants hang from the ceiling symbolizing the 20 to 40 million Russian dead. They looked carefully at the exhibits of weaponry, uniforms, and memorabilia from the war.
Over the next few days of celebration, I would see the same crowds all over the city, with the same enthusiasm, wearing the same orange-and-black Saint George’s ribbons. I stood in a surging, endless crowd near the Byelorusskiy train station watching the state military parade thunder down Tverskaya Street, swept up in the crowd’s ebullient cheering as armored personnel carriers and tanks rolled by. In the crowd, the red, white, and blue of the Russian flag flew alongside the red and gold Soviet banner. Families carried framed pictures of their dead grandfathers and grandmothers through the streets of the city.
In June 1941 German Panzers crossed the Brest-Litovsk line that had divided Poland in two since 1939, engaging ill-prepared Russian troops and advancing through them at an astonishing pace, replicating the speed and ferocity of Germany’s victories the previous year in the Battle of France. By the time winter hit, the German Army had rolled the Russians back more than six hundred miles along a thousand-mile-wide front from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Elements of the Fourth Panzer Army had reached the outskirts of Moscow, barely twenty miles from the Kremlin. Leningrad was under a siege that would last nine hundred days. Kiev, Odessa, Sevastopol, Kursk, Kharkov, Minsk, Smolensk, and Riga had all fallen to the Nazis, who now controlled the Slavic heartlands of Byelorussia and Ukraine. Over the winter the Russians counterattacked and took back small pockets of land here and there along the front, but when the 1942 spring thaw came, the Germans launched a new offensive, in the south, driving another three hundred miles to Stalingrad while simultaneously pushing southeast toward the oil fields of the Caucasus. That winter the tide turned, and Russian reinforcements began to push the Germans back. Over the next two years, the Russian Army killed its way back across the blood-soaked plains of Ukraine and Byelorussia, destroying the German Army and eventually sacking Berlin.
The scale of devastation on the Eastern Front boggles the mind. The Battle for Kursk, for example, was and remains the largest armored battle in history: 940,000 Germans with more than 3,000 tanks and supported by more than 2,000 aircraft faced 2.5 million Russians with more than 7,000 tanks supported by around 3,000 aircraft, in an area about the same size as West Virginia. In that battle alone, the Germans suffered 198,000 casualties (including wounded and MIA); the Russians, 863,000. By May 9, 1945, when the fighting was over, more than 30 million people had died on the Eastern Front, around 26 million of them citizens of the USSR, including around 15 million civilians. Russia suffered more, lost more, and killed more than any other nation in World War II. All told, the USSR had seen between 13 and 14 percent of its population killed—more than one person in ten.
How could anyone make sense of 26 million bodies? Is it a tragedy or a gospel?
To understand what those numbers mean, imagine a conquering army killing more than 43 million Americans as it burned its way across Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Kansas, and Missouri. By way of contrast, only 750,000 Americans died on both sides of the Civil War, out of a total US population of, at the time, some 31 million: a death rate of about 2 percent, which is very high but nowhere near Russia’s in World War II. Most Russians living today had at least one relative within two generations die in the war. To Russians, the war represents incalculable horror and destruction, and the Russian people’s greatest moment on the world stage: their stalwart defense of the Russian homeland. The Soviet Union was the primary force responsible for defeating Nazi Germany: without the Russians in the East butchering German soldiers by the thousands, D-Day would have been impossible. As a living memory of suffering, terror, and victory, World War II is for Russians a personal, visceral historical event—both tragedy and gospel—unlike any other.
Much of the war was fought in Ukraine. Today, while hawks in Washington, D.C. and the New York Times say that it’s Russian president Vladimir Putin who is aggressively pushing into Ukraine, Putin and most Russians see it differently. They see an expansionist NATO, led by the United States, the avowed enemy of Russia for most of the twentieth century, propping up and supporting an anti-Russian regime in Kiev. They see the US allying with Ukrainian fascists, the European Union working to separate Ukraine from Russia’s economic and political influence, and American politicians calling for military buildup all along Russia’s borders. They see this in a context of fourteen years of unilateral American military aggression in the Middle East, a global American campaign of torture and assassination, political instability throughout Central Asia, and a melting Arctic that promises to ignite a resource war over massive oil fields suspected to lie beneath the ice.
I heard the roar of the crowd wash over me on Tverskaya as strategic bombers flew overhead like death-metal condors. I heard the cheers drowned out by giant ICBM launchers rumbling past. These people were proud of their military strength, proud of their nuclear force, proud of their nation, their leader, and their history.
Later that day, after the military parade was over, I met a Russian poet and video artist named Kirill Adibekov beneath the statue The Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman, an eighty-foot-high stainless-steel monument to the Soviet proletariat built for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. The two figures in the monument, a muscular, hammer-wielding man and a powerfully built woman with a sickle, stand shoulder to shoulder, arms upraised, towering over a traffic intersection, blazing brilliant silver in the sun, striding confidently into a utopian future. Kirill sat beneath them, a thin artist with long, dark hair and a gentle smile. We walked from the statue through VDNKh, the Exhibition of Achievements of the People’s Economy, a massive Soviet-era expo and park in the north of Moscow celebrating the economic achievements of the far republics of the Soviet Union: Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Leningrad, Karelia, and the others. He pushed his bike along while we awkwardly weaved through the thick Victory Day crowds. Occasionally we would stop so I could photograph some oddity, like the riding field or the girl on high-tech suspension stilts. We paused for a while at a café beside a lake, which Kirill told me reminded him of the Crimea; we had beer and khachapuri, a Georgian hot cheese bread.
Along the way we talked about state censorship, politics, poetry, the Saint George’s ribbon, Russia’s current economic recession, and many other things. Kirill was glum about the political and economic prospects his country offered but happy in his work as an artist, connected to a lively art world that, though the artists within it couldn’t really come out in direct opposition to Putin’s regime, did offer an independent and vaguely countercultural attitude that didn’t seem all that different from the apolitical anti-authoritarianism of metropolitan hipsters and much contemporary American literature. He was saddened by how readily his fellow Russians seemed to accept the nationalist propaganda being broadcast on Russian television and websites, but he was philosophical about it. “You have to remember,” he said, “Russia was a slave state until the 1860s. I think sometimes that we’re still working our way out of that moment a hundred and fifty years ago.”
Toward the end of our talk, Kirill pointed out the entrance to VDNKh, an enormous arch, and told me that in the 1950s there had been a giant statue of Stalin between it and the first pavilion. The statue of Stalin had been to scale with the arch, Kirill said, to show that he was a leader on a vast scale, and to turn the entrance to VDNKh into a theater of his power. “So much of Moscow is theater,” he said, “the giant spaces, the great monuments—it’s all a set for a play.”
His comment about theater provoked a moment of realization: “That helps me make sense of this Gertrude Stein quote I’ve been puzzling over—I’m not sure where it’s from—where she says that Americans and Russians are alike because they are both abstract and cruel,” I said.1 “I understand what she means about America being abstract, but I’ve been trying to puzzle out how that relates to Russia. All these giant figures, they don’t seem abstract at all, at least not in the sense of abstract painting. But they are abstract, in a figural sense, like an allegory, or theater. They are the giant abstraction of a characteristic, of a character, the idea of a person rather than a person itself.”
“What’s more,” I went on, “what you said about Russia only ending slavery in the 1860s suggests another similarity with America, which reflects back into this problem of abstraction and theatricality, because America was also a slave state until the 1860s. The difference between Russia and America, though, is in the relation between the masters and the slaves. In America, the relationship was seen through race, a concept predicated on the idea of biological, physical difference, fundamentally blood. Skin color and phenotype were too variable to reliably mark racial identity, so it always came back to the idea of white blood and Negro blood. You can’t see blood, though, and it’s all red anyway. This epistemological instability at the heart of the American political order was a profound problem for the ruling class. How do you know who is ‘really’ white and ‘really’ black? We might imagine that ruling-class anxiety about this problem is part of what gave rise to American literary and cultural fixations on ‘realism,’ since the most terrifying and troubling question gnawing at the soul of the white ruling class is precisely the question of how you know what is real.”
I looked out across the motley Muscovites dressed for a holiday swirling around the massive architecture, almost all of them wearing their black-and-orange ribbons. “In Russia, on the other hand, the masters and the slaves are the same, from the same country, probably looking much the same, sharing a religion and a culture going back centuries. In Russia, there is no ontological fact separating the rulers and the ruled, but rather the ruling class must rely for its power on the performance of its role as the ruling class. This explains the performative anxiety of all this massive sculpture, but it also suggests a way of looking at the dramatic quality at work in Russian literature and culture, from Tolstoy to Nabokov. It also helps explain Putin, it seems to me, and the current impasse in American-Russian relations, in that Obama’s staff seem to take Putin for a player of realpolitik; they read him by asking themselves what he ‘really’ wants or ‘really’ plans to do, whereas Putin is in a position where he feels he has to perform tough leadership, perform the reconstitution of Russia as a world power, perform the thuggery and daring that has helped him gain power and earned the respect of his people and the fear of the world.”
“That’s very interesting,” Kirill said. “You know, of course, that the first actors in Russia were all serfs, right? They put on plays for the aristocracy.”
“Wow,” I said. “Like minstrelsy in the US. Blackface dramatizes and discharges ruling-class anxiety about the epistemological uncertainty at the heart of the political order. If race is just a performance, then there’s nothing holding up the dominance of white privilege. So race must be performed, under the gaze of a white audience, in order to ritually enact the very hierarchy the idea of its being a performance calls into question. Like in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. The ruling class has to play with the question of race in order to reassure itself that, at the end of the day, it retains the power to define reality.”
3. Gospel
More bodies. History is full of them. Some days it seems that’s all history is: piles of bodies, a gruesome wreckage of bones growing ever larger. Some have names. A few are remembered. Most are lost.
In 1781, the captain of a British slaving ship, gone off course on its way to Jamaica and rapidly running out of fresh water, ordered between 130 and 150 of the slaves it was carrying dumped overboard. I say dumped, but I must mean forced. Pushed. The crew must have had swords or guns and must have forced the slaves to jump into the ocean a few at a time. Maybe one at a time. Obviously, you couldn’t bring all hundred-some slaves on deck at once and force them into suicide. They would mutiny. No, it must have happened one by one.
The sailors go below into the stinking hold and unchain a slave, drag him up into the first fresh air he’s smelled in weeks. Imagine the taste of the salt air and the smell of the sea, the blinding fury of the Caribbean sun after days upon days of darkness and unwashed bodies and bilge, tight and close and hot. The sails crack overhead in the shifting wind while waves crash and split against the hull. You hear the angry calls of gulls. The rocking movement you’ve been blindly subjected to, the nauseating underwater dip and wobble, is transformed now into the brisk glide of the keel along the water. For a moment you savor the taste and feel of free air.
Then the sailors force you to the gunwale and, just as it dawns on you what’s happening, push you over. You probably don’t even have time to beg, though you might give a shout before you hit the water. Your hands tied, your body weakened by countless hours of immobility and days of bad food, you still can’t give up so you kick, kick desperately—you’ve probably never swum in the ocean before, certainly never in water so deep, bottomless, abyssal—and you call out, shouting to the men who threw you over, but they have turned away and gone below for the next. You realize that what you thought were the calls of gulls were actually the cries of other slaves: you can see three, maybe four, a line of shouting heads bobbing in the ship’s wake. Four, then three. Then two. When their legs give out, the ocean takes them. As the ship sails away, you see another dark-skinned body jerked to the gunwale and shoved unceremoniously over. You kick as long as you can, though you cannot imagine being rescued. You pray. You kick. You inhale salt water and feel the sun bake your eyes.
Aboard the Zong, known as the Zorg before a mishap painting turned the Dutch word for “care” into noise, the sailors keep working stoically, slave by slave. The job probably took all afternoon. Surely some struggled more than others, some not at all. We must be certain it was easier with the ones who didn’t, because they were easier to hate: disgust mingled with contempt kills the sympathy you might feel for those who fight, as you’re certain you would if you were in their situation. The sailors on the Zong were hard men—only rough and desperate men would risk the uprisings, disease, and other dangers of working on a slave ship—and they would have respected and sympathized with the fighters. Sailing men knew firsthand the taste of the lash. Most would have been impressed—kidnapped into service—at one time or another, and some were probably former slaves themselves. They would have identified with the resisters.
The Zong had set sail from Ghana with some 442 slaves on board, about twice as many as a ship its size would normally carry. The ship had been a Dutch slaver, captured by a British gunship during the fourth Anglo-Dutch war and sold to a syndicate based in Liverpool, and it was being steered by a former ship’s surgeon, one Luke Collingwood, in what was his first voyage as captain. But Collingwood fell ill during the voyage and command seems to have broken down. After making it across the Atlantic, the crew mistook Jamaica—their destination—for Hispaniola, and sailed three hundred miles out of the way. It was at this point that someone, possibly Collingwood, ordered a number of slaves dumped overboard, ostensibly because the ship was low on water. We know about this massacre because when the Zong finally made port, its owners filed an insurance claim seeking recompense for the value of the lost property, and the insurers refused to pay on the grounds that the loss was the fault of the captain.
The Zong was only one ship among many, one insurance case among many, though it has become historically important and was, at the time, a landmark ruling in the fight to abolish slavery in the United Kingdom. Historians estimate that anywhere from 9 to 12 million Africans were transported across the Middle Passage to the Americas between 1500 and 1900, and probably around 2 million of those died at sea. These raw numbers of bodies, however, like the 26 million Russian dead in World War II or the 6 million dead in the Shoah, are merely so much information. You can read them again and again every day and feel nothing, learn nothing. About 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year all over the globe, which means that in the past twenty-five years, since 1980, global deaths from automobile accidents must have passed 30 million. So what?
The question here is how we remember bodies and events. How we keep the dead alive, in stories, in art, in history. How we make meaning from death. The story of the Zong, like the story of the slave uprising on the Amistad or the one on the Tyral, which inspired Herman Melville’s story “Benito Cereno,” offers a compact, bounded narrative that we might recount easily enough, and which might serve as an allegory or synecdoche for the four-century-long horror of the transatlantic slave trade, or even as a story standing in for slavery as a whole. The treatment of the slaves onboard the Zong, dragged across the sea or dumped overboard as deemed necessary, illustrates the cruelty of treating humans as things. The court case deciding whether or not the ship’s insurers were required to pay the owners’ insurance claim illustrates the inhumanity and callousness of a legal system based in the abstraction of property. Indeed, the case suggests the absurdity and inhumanity of law as such. Where is the place for feeling in this abstruse, arcane language? Where are the voices of the Africans? Where are the spaces for compassion, or even for sympathy and respect? The names of the slaves on the Zong were not recorded and are not known. How could a legal system that doesn’t even recognize the names of the dead be in any way just or fair?
Yet all the same, even taking the case as it is, retelling the story involves telling it, which means making aesthetic and narrative choices. The lack of water could be emphasized, and the story could be told as an illustration of the hard ethical choices people are forced to make in difficult situations. If your ship is running out of fresh water, people are already dying, and you don’t have enough water to get your crew back to port, what do you do? How do you decide between letting your crew die, along with all three hundred-odd remaining slaves, and murdering one hundred fifty slaves to save the rest? Is it an economic calculation or a humanitarian one? The Zong could be told as a story about the necessary moral calculus of scarce resources in a dehumanizing economic system: it could be a story about capitalism. Or it could be a story about a foolish new captain and the pressures of command. It could be a story about the slave who was so terrified by the screams of the drowning men and women that he asked the sailors to starve them to death rather than throw them overboard. It could be a story about some of the slaves who jumped in suicidal defiance rather than let themselves be thrown. It could be a story about one of the sailors. It could be a story about one of the survivors. It could be a tragedy. It could be a gospel.
The documents that preserve the record of the event are material texts, already formed according to certain narratives (such as the British legal system, narratives of property, et cetera), but they are archaic and abstract and hence, for most of our contemporaries, alien, foreign, hard to understand and relate to. Making sense of Gregson v. Gilbert demands close reading, knowledge of historical context, some fluency with legal jargon, some fluency with eighteenth-century British speech, and a sympathetic imagination. Still, any college-educated American could probably read the report and have a basic understanding of the case, and most Americans with a high school degree or GED could probably work through it with a little help. It’s not a radically difficult document. But while the key narrative event—the throwing overboard of 150 slaves—stands out clearly and memorably, the train of events is vague, there are no distinct characters, the story does not flow, and the text does not sing. For some readers, that very vagueness provokes the imagination to fill in the gaps. Most, though, will be left wandering in a cloud of ignorance. The narrative doesn’t “perform.” The “through-line” is not clear.
Canadian lawyer and poet M. NourbeSe Philip took up Gregson v. Gilbert as the material for her book of conceptual poetry Zong!, which is, as Philip insists repeatedly in her explanatory essay at the end of her book, not a telling of the story, because the story cannot be told. Rather than tell the story, Philip takes the words of Gregson v. Gilbert apart and recombines them, sometimes whole, often broken, into gestures, phrases, Yoruba words, African names, page after page of scattered language. She compares her work to that of the Language poets, such as Charles Bernstein and Rae Armantrout, arguing that her poem questions “the assumed transparency of language and, therefore, employs similar strategies to reveal the hidden agendas of language.” As she explains, “The not-telling of this particular story is in the fragmentation and mutilation of the text, forcing the eye to track across the page in an attempt to wrest meaning from words gone astray.” Consider these lines, taken at random:
tunis for the bones the ruins of my
story their s & y ours
our story it hides
the secret that in the rift between
cain & abel there
rome founds her self on murder &
on death come strum the lute some
more for my late
soul sum sum sum sum i am
sum i am i am sum sum
of all ned
s story no more
than eleven when he ran a
way to sea not that far from the lisp
of ma
ma pa pa he too had
heard of a seam
of gold so
broad & so
wide in an age of lust what
are we
to do but lust
let
us wed then ruth
when the ship sets me d
own on land again and
be done i am a new
man sift the air for enemies
of my soul they are many sh h
hush can you not
hear the plea s we were deaf to
how to mend this i am
god s agent here on earth our rule is
just and we
must but to err so far
from reason it is a leaky tale i
recite it holds no water with
map and wind rose and lamp
to see them by we set
sail crates
of portginwinebeercider
& water there were2
There are two basic conceits to this kind of writing, and three basic reading practices for approaching it. The two primary conceits of conceptual writing such as this are, first, that the ideas structuring the work as a whole are more important than the formal construction of particular phrases, sentences, sections, et cetera, and, second, that aesthetic effects are more usually found in moments of contrast, juxtaposition, disjunction, unexpected repetition, and isolated fragments than in any sense of symmetry, suspense, coherence, wholeness, order, or measure. As Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman write in their theoretical manifesto, Notes on Conceptualisms, “Conceptual writing mediates between the written object (which may or may not be a text) and the meaning of the object by framing the writing as a figural object to be narrated.”3 According to Place and Fitterman, in conceptual writing “prosody shuttles between a micro attention to language and macro strategies of language, e.g., the use of source materials in reframing or mixing. The primary focus moves from production to post-production. This may involve a shift from the material of production to the mode of production, or the production of a mode.”4 What they mean is that while traditional “micro attention” strategies of close reading may be useful in particular instances, these should be balanced with a consistent attention to the work as a work in relation to its contexts—questions about who the language is for, what it is supposed to represent, who “owns” it, and how it circulates within culture.
With our sample from Zong!, for instance, we might track how the “u” phoneme/grapheme shifts from “ruin” to the close pairing “strum/lute” then to the ambivalent “sum,” in English the word sum meaning the result of addition, an accounting term, in Latin sum, pronounced “soom,” resounding back to “ruin” phonetically but looking like “strum” and meaning, of course, “I am,” then shifting through “lust,” “ruth,” “hush,” “just” and “must,” all terms resonating within a narrative of racialized slavery, the historical framework of the British legal system, and post-structuralist literary theory critical of the concept of narrative itself. At the same time, much of the work’s power, even in this moment of micro-reading, comes from attending to Zong!’s intervention as a work of language or conceptual poetry insisting on a moment of “reality” beyond language that language can never fully contain or inscribe (as Philip insists, the story cannot be told), yet constructed through the explicitly political transformation of nineteenth-century British legal language into affective representations of individual and collective suffering.
The best ways to read such a work are by skimming, free-associative close reading, and allegorical reading. Skimming provides a sense of linguistic atmosphere, a feeling of lexicon and grammar that offers a thin and mutable affective experience. Words never signify without affect, not only in their connotations but in their syntax, and skimming helps make that affective valence accessible across broad swaths of text. Free-associative close attention to specific phrases takes the text as a kind of machine for producing a reader’s own creative response, opening the text into a form of dialogue. Reading allegorically, on the other hand, means thinking about what the text means in relation to the world, and specifically what the text represents or speaks of in its coded ways. Place and Fitterman begin their manifesto with the declaration that “Conceptual writing is allegorical writing,” and define allegory as follows:
The standard features of allegory include extended metaphor, personification, parallel meanings, and narrative. Simple allegories use simple parallelisms, complex ones more profound. Other meanings exist in the allegorical “pre-text,” the cultural conditions within which the allegory is created. Allegorical writing is a writing of its time, saying slant what cannot be said directly, usually because of overtly repressive political regimes or the sacred nature of the message. In this sense, the allegory is dependent on its reader for completion (though it usually has a transparent or literal surface). Allegory typically depends heavily on figural or image-language; Angus Fletcher’s book Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode argues that this heightened sense of the visual results in stasis.5
Straight narrative reading (“reading for the story”) doesn’t work that well with such poetry, nor does formalist appreciation. Consider our sample from Zong! While the story of the Zong is marked by an allusion to the biblical tale of Cain and Abel and briefly elaborated through an individuated narrative (“ned / s story no more / than eleven when / he ran a / way to sea”), these narrative gestures scatter into the dispersed language of the poem and cannot be clearly reconstructed. There are no “characters” as such who might personify values or with whom we might sympathize. As well, many of the typical reading strategies taught in English courses—historicism, psychoanalytic reading, Marxist criticism, reading for race or gender—are often not very productive or helpful with language and conceptual poetry, because these strategies rely on formal qualities, hermeneutic depths, and thematic interests which such poetry typically disavows.
Poetry in the traditions of concrete, language, and conceptual poetics, whether the dense abstractions of J. H. Prynne or the typographic experiments of Christine Wertheim, are made within a tradition of “avant-garde”–coded art practice that takes an explicitly ideological position against three concepts fundamental to capitalist art, which is to say art as commodity production. Those fundamental concepts are identity, transmission, and pleasure. An art object as a commodity must be branded, it must be able to circulate, and it must have use value. Conversely, art objects in the modernist experimental tradition resist identity, resist circulation, and resist being entertaining or instrumental (a poem should not sell you a Coke). It is in doing just these things, of course, that they assert their value as art objects, as objects definitionally beyond the sphere of capitalist production and thus available for exploitation, thus inspiring capitalism’s future conquests by bodying forth the eternally promised desideratum of the always new. Art for art’s sake has always been capitalism’s spirit, even as its makers have always insisted that the role they are playing is capitalism’s conscience. But conceptualism knows this, and turns its own ideologies inside out with strategies that many people find difficult or disagreeable. While offering work that attacks the idea of individual identity, conceptual poets brand themselves as consumer objects. While offering work that resists reading and retransmission, they often make their work freely available. While eschewing instrumentality, they make deliberately didactic works that offer pointed ideological, political, and moral criticisms of contemporary society and art production. Beginning from the choice between aestheticized politics and politicized art offered by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the very choice we face every day in a social world wholly given over to the suicidal self-consumption of its own grotesque nihilism, certain practitioners of conceptualism have decided to insist once again that art is, necessarily, political.
Zong! is an interesting example of conceptual poetry for several reasons, not least because it operates at the intersection between Benjamin’s two choices. It is clearly politicized art, in that it manifests a critique of narrative power, institutional history, and the reproducibility of an event. At the same time, it is a work of aestheticized politics: by insisting on the traumatic unintelligibility of human sacrifice as an originary historical moment, Philip valorizes and calls into being a political community formed around that sacrifice. In Zong!, Philips works to keep alive a collective identity—a political identity—through the memorialization and consecration of the death of representative members. Hence her focus on constructing names for the murdered slaves out of Gregson v. Gilbert, names that were never recorded but which she writes into her text, e.g., “Bomani Yahya Modupe Jibowu Fayola.”6 Hence her otherwise inexplicable fictional attribution of the work’s origins to oral history: the cover of the book says the story was told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng, a name Philip has invented to invoke the authority of direct physical (genetic) transmission. As critic and scholar Evie Shockley wrote in the online poetry journal Jacket2, “Zong! enacts a critique, but also effects a catharsis or, more accurately, works through a problem that lies at the intersection of the emotions, the psyche, and the soul, if such a thing can be spoken of in the twenty-first century’s secular spaces.”7 It is precisely at this intersection of mind and body, word and thing, nation and sacrifice, history and blood, that Zong! does its work as tragōidia.
Or as Philip herself writes elsewhere (in an essay titled “Wor(l)ds Interrupted”):
is zong! perhaps a ritual work masquerading as a conceptual work mirroring the act of stripping away the spirit of the african mask or carving leaving only the form the work masquerading as something else while doing another kind of work this is how african spiritual and cultural practices have survived the hostile societies of the afrospora it is how certain indigenous cultural practices survive the present day christianization and islamicization in africa
there is very little space to speak of the ritual function of poetry particularly as it relates to a work like zong! it comes out of a particular historical moment that is the kya kya kya kari basin a moment that extends into the present is resonant am tempted to say redolent with aspects of ritual and spirit i think of zong! as doing a form of soul work for those who died unmourned i think of the impossibility of ever knowing what happened the impossibility of making whole that which has been rent asunder i think of writing in the face of the yawning chasm of oblivion that was the lot of africans . . .8
The key sentence here is: “I think of zong! as doing a form of soul work for those who died unmourned.” With this, the truth of Zong! is revealed: its effort to insist on the incomprehensibility of the event does not work against identity, but insists on the event’s ontological reality beyond language. Zong! does not critique the story of the Zong, but reconstructs it, honors it, consecrates it. It is not a “not-telling” at all, we realize. Zong! performs the truth of collective identity, specifically racial identity, by ritually reenacting a moment of violence as a sacred origin. It turns a murder into a sacrifice. It is a gospel.
4. Desecration
I woke the morning after Victory Day to find Moscow silent and seemingly empty, haunted now by the absences of the teeming crowds, late drunken celebrants, and uniform-clad kids who had filled the streets the day before, as the day before had been haunted by great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers seventy years dead. On my morning run, I weaved through unmanned metal detectors guarding entrances to vacant plazas. Back at the university dormitory where I was staying, the campus was deadly silent. I had dinner plans to meet a friend of a colleague, a German historian working on the question of how Ukrainians in the 1950s remembered World War II, and took advantage of the quiet morning to work on my presentation for the conference. In the afternoon, I went out to a nearby Coffee House, a Moscow chain, for a cappuccino, one of the few things I could reliably depend on being able to order without confusion.
While I sat outside in the glorious May sun sipping my foamed milk, I checked in on Facebook and scrolled through my Twitter feed. I soon found a string of tweets posting a story from the London Review of Books by Seymour Hersh. It was a story about a CIA coverup, Obama administration lies, the construction of narratives, and the need to define collective identity against an excluded other. It was a story about Osama bin Laden. It was a story about a body.
Hersh’s basic story was that the Obama administration constructed most of its narrative about the Osama bin Laden raid out of lies in order to obscure and efface the facts of the case. Hersh argues that what really happened in the Osama bin Laden raid was not at all like how it was portrayed. Whereas the government claimed to have found bin Laden through interrogation and spycraft, Hersh’s informants say bin Laden was being held by the Pakistani secret police in Abbottabad and someone connected with the Pakistani secret police told the US about this fact. Whereas the US government claimed to have sent a highly secretive special-operations team into hostile territory without the knowledge or permission of the Pakistani government, to capture bin Laden if possible or in the last resort to kill him, Hersh’s informants say that the US government worked in collusion with Pakistan’s, which made sure bin Laden was left unguarded the night of the raid, and that there was never any question of capture, that the American SEALs went in that night to commit state murder. Finally, whereas the US government claimed to have flown bin Laden’s body out to sea, where it was properly buried in accordance with Islamic ritual, Hersh’s informants say that in fact bin Laden was dumped unceremoniously out of a helicopter over the Hindu Kush mountains. According to Hersh’s story, the Obama administration made up its cover story on the fly to protect the Pakistani secret police and American-Pakistani relations and to glorify American spycraft and military heroism.
I read Seymour Hersh’s troubled and troubling account with wonder but no surprise, with skepticism about Hersh’s reliance on so few sources but no faith in the official narratives as they were told, and with a feeling of disappointment and dread that had become familiar over the past decade as revelation after revelation of US government torture, surveillance, assassination, bald-faced lies, illegal aggression, and bad faith exploded into the public sphere like so many canisters of toxic gas, spreading neither clarity nor accountability but only nausea, moral poison, and obscurity. I knew that like Wikileaks’s Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, Seymour Hersh would be pilloried in the mainstream press and probably targeted by the Obama administration, his report would be attacked ad hominem by media jackals questioning Hersh’s character, integrity, and sanity rather than dealing with the substantive issues raised, and the report would be dismissed as a scandalous mire of hearsay rather than taken seriously as a piece of investigative reporting by the same journalist who broke My Lai and Abu Ghraib. Hersh and his report would be derided, then forgotten, much like the other numerous revelations of government incompetence, skullduggery, and evil we’ve been granted since 9/11 and forgotten with a vengeance, since Hersh wasn’t only telling Americans a disagreeable truth (that our leaders and high officials are lying buffoons) but also taking away from us one of the few sacred symbols of national pride we had managed to salvage from more than a decade of frustrated military adventurism: the mutilated body of our superhuman enemy, Osama bin Laden.
I remember when the story broke that bin Laden had been killed. College students all over the country joined together to shoot off fireworks, sing patriotic songs, and wave American flags. Fans at sporting events burst into chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” Major broadcast networks interrupted their scheduled programs with live feeds of celebrants screaming and hooting in Times Square, near the ruins of the World Trade Center, and outside the White House. For a brief, blazing moment, a nation usually defined by bitter political feuding, racial strife, and brazen class inequality came together to celebrate its unity over the dead body of an Arab. Whether the moment was glorious or grotesque depends, I suppose, on your point of view. Ismail Haniyeh, for example, a senior leader of Hamas and at the time the elected prime minister of the Gaza Strip, told reporters: “We condemn the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior. We regard this as a continuation of the American policy based on oppression and the shedding of Muslim and Arab blood.”9
Whatever you thought about the war in Iraq, then coming to a close after eight years of mistakes, lies, profiteering, and blood, or the war in Afghanistan, a grim confusion then in the midst of an ambiguous drawdown, and whether or not you agreed that the appropriate response to the news was a crass display of idiotic jingoism, most Americans would agree that bin Laden’s death was a good thing, and most Americans would feel that his killing was a kind of justice putting paid the crime of the 9/11 attacks. As the mythology around the bin Laden killing was spun, spun, and glammed up by talking heads, government officials, cryptofascists, and Hollywood, the highly trained, prodigiously equipped and supported assassins sent in by the US to murder a crippled, diabetic, middle-aged man came to be portrayed more and more as stoic knights in holy armor, cyborg cowboy warriors fighting evil in the demonic shadows of the desert night. From the Riefenstahlish film Zero Dark Thirty to Lea Carpenter’s literary adoration of masculine power Eleven Days, American culture makers told and retold the moment’s narrative of American glory, a story of white techno-righteousness overcoming the brown-faced devil and his heathen legions.
For Seymour Hersh to then come along and say that bin Laden was trapped, unguarded, unarmed, and handed over to the SEALs for slaughter, for him to tell a story wherein it wasn’t American prowess that conquered the devil but rather the devil’s own weakness, for him to remind us that Osama bin Laden wasn’t a devil at all but a man, in a world of men and women, and that the men who killed him were only men as well, and for him to assert that we didn’t give our enemy a proper burial but treated him with the savagery and disrespect for human life that we insisted were the very essence of his character, the very qualities that distinguished him from us, well—Hersh was desecrating a holy truth.
Of course, that’s been Hersh’s mode. He’s a debaser, a desecrator, an enlightener, someone interested in piercing power’s veils of hypocrisy, illusion, and obfuscation to bring hidden truth into the purifying light of rational thought. He’s made a career out of exposing lies, unearthing conspiracies, and uncovering buried crimes. I’ve long admired Hersh’s work and thought of him as a hero, though serious questions have been laid against the credibility of some of his recent work. Hersh is a journalist and freethinker in the best tradition of critical enlightenment thought, one in a long line of muckrakers, whistleblowers, cynics, and gadflies.
The idea in this line is to demystify the sacred, dispel illusion, and increase understanding. Somehow the former two lead to the latter, though it’s not always clear how that happens. Nevertheless, it seems laudable to me, sapere aude and all that, and it forms the motivation for much of my own work, not least the paper I’d be delivering in Moscow on Tuesday, which was part of a longer project offering a critique of post-1945 American war culture. One of the main arguments of my project is that understanding war as trauma is a political act, in that trauma recuperates and glorifies nationalist military sacrifice under a language of psychopathology, elides structural and political realities by focusing on the experience of individuals rather than on social or systemic forces, and effaces enemy and civilian dead by substituting for their bleeding bodies the psychologically wounded soul of the trauma hero.
Understanding war as trauma is a relatively new way of thinking, available only since World War I and dominant in the United States only since the 1970s. The narrative of war as trauma took hold in the US because it helped solve ideological problems that had erupted in the 1960s between the ideal of American liberal democracy and the reality of American imperial power, and ease generational conflicts between those who’d won World War II and their children who’d inherited the postwar liberal order. Understanding war as trauma and focusing on the damaged souls of individual American soldiers allows us to ignore the reality of war as political policy and to ignore the effects our war policies have on those on whom they are imposed. It allows us to reconcile our idea of liberal American virtue, embodied by American soldiers who suffer psychological injury for the violence they are forced to commit, with the industrial violence by which America maintains its global political and economic hegemony. Our soldiers kill for us, and we demand that they suffer the blood guilt—in today’s language, PTSD—so that we don’t have to.
The talk I was to give on Tuesday focused on an earlier moment, before the idea of war as trauma had come to dominate American culture. In my paper for Tuesday, I compared Wallace Stevens’s World War II poetry with James Jones’s Proustian combat novel The Thin Red Line. What Stevens’s poems and Jones’s novel had in common was a serious concern with the problem of the individual nationalist hero in industrial warfare. In the traditional form of the sacrificial narrative, a hero dies for his community. A single name, a singular life, a unique body is sacrificed for an abstract ideal—in modern war, “the nation”—and the power of his sacrifice makes the ideal real. His blood has paid the price to consecrate national identity; the idea of the nation has become physically real in his body. One of the problems that arose with industrialized warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that the single hero, the singular life, the unique sacrificial body wasn’t unique at all, but horrifically multiple: industrialized war made a grotesque parody of the idea of sacrifice, sending millions of men to die in great putrescent piles of guts and limbs, over and over and over. Nevertheless, awards were still given, heroes still named, and nations still forged out of bloody bodies. How? And how could you reconcile that grotesque repetition with the idea of human dignity? And further yet, how could you accept that horrific process as the foundation of any kind of legitimate public order? James Jones and Wallace Stevens both made these questions a subject of their art, creating complex, difficult meditations on the problem, meditations that don’t ever quite settle, though they both manage to achieve their own moments of tense equanimity.
I was nervous, preparing my paper, about how my Russian audience would take it. Were my desecrations of the formal structure of nationalist sacrifice coming too soon on the heels of Victory Day? Were my efforts to rend the veil of military honor under even traumatic narratives too pointed a critique to keep from offending sacred Russian memories of their own historical traumas? Millions had just marched in the streets carrying pictures of the dead. On Saturday, the whole nation had turned out to honor the bodies of the fallen. On Tuesday, I was going to say that such honor was nothing more than political propaganda woven over the grotesque truth of the modern state. Would they boo? Would they hiss? Would they shout me down?
I needn’t have worried. The soft abstractions I spun fell harmlessly down on my audience like so many flakes of ash. My talk was about America, anyway, American war, American heroes, American empire, and the arc that red, white, and blue flag danced across the seminar room kept them focused on the specifics of the case rather than inviting thoughts about how it might have applied to Putin, Moscow, and Saint George. What’s more, these were scholars, academics, ideologues only when it served them, and what reason would they have had to rebuke me? No, the truth is that my desecrations fell on ears that were if not deaf at least disposed to be kindly, and I troubled no one, offended no one.
5. The Rising of the Dead
Four days after I came home from Russia, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs removed the poet Vanessa Place from their National Conference Los Angeles 2016 Subcommittee, in response to a petition circulated on the internet through Change.org (“Victories every day”) arguing that Place’s work was “at best, startlingly racially insensitive, and, at worst, racist,” and a robust shaming campaign on Twitter by an anonymous internet collective that calls itself the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo. On May 13, the Mongrel Coalition launched its campaign by tweeting: “VANESSA PLACE IS RACIST. DEFEND HER AND YOU ARE COMPLICIT. VP WORE BLACKFACE. VP TWEETS GONE WITH THE WIND. GO AHEAD, DEFEND HER.” The petition, which was not written by the Mongrel Coalition, followed a few days later.
The specific offensive work in question was a Twitter feed in which Vanessa Place was tweeting Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War romance, Gone with the Wind, line by line, 140 characters at a time. The AWP, one of the most important institutions in the United States involved in the cultural production of what we call literary fiction and poetry, claimed that they “believed in the freedom of expression,” and offered no judgment about whether they agreed that Place’s work was racist or not, but had decided to remove Place from their subcommittee in order to avoid controversy. In their words: “The group’s work must focus on the adjudication of the 1,800 submitted proposals, not upon the management of a controversy that has stirred strong objections and much ill-will toward AWP and the subcommittee. Perpetuating the controversy would not be fair to the many writers who have submitted the proposals.”10
The petition against Place’s work was written by a white poet named Timothy Volpert, who lives in Topeka, Kansas. The petition reproduces a screenshot of the Twitter feed in question, which features a production still of the actress Hattie McDaniel in her “Mammy” costume from the film Gone With the Wind and a backdrop banner with an archaic caricature of a black-faced woman. You can see from the screenshot that the feed had been running since 2009 and had produced 16,200 tweets. The complete petition reads:
We find it inappropriate that Vanessa Place is among those who will decide which panels will take place at AWP Los Angeles. We acknowledge Place’s right to exercise her creativity, but we find her work to be, at best, startlingly racially insensitive, and, at worst, racist. We do not believe it is right that she have a hand in deciding whether panels having to do with race and identity will be a part of next year’s AWP. Her recent work with “Gone with the Wind” re-inscribes that text’s racism—she does not abate it—in the flesh of every descendant of slaves. Indeed, she herself claims to be constructing “a slave block” with the work. AWP’s stated desire for inclusivity and diversity in the panel makeup requires an atmosphere of trust on the part of POC, LGBTQIA, and Disabled panel applicants, and Place’s racially insensitive, if not downright racist, projects violate that sense of trust. She furthers her career on the backs of Black ancestors—the hands that filled the master’s pockets now fill hers. We ask that you remove her from her position of authority over writers of color.
Thank you for the work you do. We trust you will make the right decision in this instance.11
It will be noticed at once that Volpert’s claim that Vanessa Place’s body of work is racist is based on one piece of evidence, “Gone with the Wind.” Volpert argues that Place’s whole oeuvre is “at best, startlingly racially insensitive,” and that her judgment as a professional artist is compromised. Volpert strongly implies that Place is herself “racially insensitive,” and also implies that if she were given the power to decide who should be on AWP panels, she would discriminate against writers of color and possibly even take advantage of them. These are heavy charges, and they have been made on the basis of one work of art, a work of art that Volpert interprets literally, ungenerously, mistakenly, hyperbolically, and out of context. Volpert describes Place’s Twitter feed as a “recent work of art,” but anyone can see from the image of the feed used in the petition itself that the work had been going on since 2009. Volpert says that the work “re-inscribes [Gone With the Wind’s] racism,” when it would be more accurate to say that the work reframes or remediates it, since Place is tweeting Margaret Mitchell’s novel, not “inscribing” it, but that’s beside the point because Volpert goes further to say that the work “re-inscribes [Gone With the Wind’s] racism . . . in the flesh of every descendent of slaves.” This is hyperbole, of course, a metaphoric expression. Vanessa Place has not written a single word “in the flesh” of anyone. What Volpert seems to want to say is that Vanessa Place’s repetition of Gone With the Wind is harmful, and he presents that idea of harm as a metaphor of physical violence that explicitly invokes the lash. Volpert’s broad stroke makes it impossible to judge whether Place’s work is really harmful or not, since he’s not making a serious claim about the world but a rhetorical gesture expressing a certain emotion. Volpert conflates Place’s Twitter feed with a similar work of the same title published in the poetry journal Drunken Boat in 2010 by quoting out of context a phrase from Place’s artist’s statement explaining that piece saying that she is “constructing ‘a slave block’ with the work,” which statement Volpert lets stand as a literalized metaphor that is expected, apparently, to speak for itself. He goes on to assert that Place “furthers her career on the backs of Black ancestors,” an assertion made without explanation or evidence.
Volpert doesn’t make a case building on a long trend in Vanessa Place’s work over her career. He doesn’t provide evidence of specific acts of racist discrimination that Place herself has committed. He doesn’t bother to try to understand what Place’s intent was with the Twitter feed he calls “racially insensitive.” He offers no sustained engagement with conceptual poetry, the problems of representing and reframing race in terms of intellectual property rights, or even what it means to remediate a historical text in a new context.
To take Volpert’s stance as he presents it, replicating any act of racism is itself racist (and moreover an act of physical violence). To take his tack, every text or image that represents slavery is as racist as slavery itself, and all representations of racism are equal, since all of it “re-inscribes . . . racism . . . in the flesh of every descendant of slaves.” If Volpert had his way, there would be no representations of slavery at all, ever, not literary, not historical, not factual, nothing, because for Volpert mimesis is repetition, and repetition is reenactment. By this logic, Volpert himself is as guilty of being “racially insensitive” as Place is: if the Twitter feed is as racist as the novel being tweeted, then Volpert’s “re-inscription” of Place’s Twitter feed is as racist as the feed. “Remove Vanessa Place from the AWP Los Angeles conference committee” is as racist as “Gone With the Wind” is as racist as Gone With the Wind is as racist as actual plantation slavery. It’s all the same.
Despite the patent absurdity of this position, the lack of real evidence for his claim, the manifest shoddiness of his argument, and its reliance on a strikingly ungenerous reading of a single work of art, Volpert’s petition was signed by more than 2,100 people, including well-known and respected poets. Volpert’s petition and the AWP’s decision to remove Place from its committee set off a firestorm of controversy within the teacup of American poetry, including flame wars between poets, bitter arguments on Facebook, and yet more hyperbole in response to Volpert’s, including Language poet Ron Silliman comparing the signers of Volpert’s petition to Spanish fascists, Nazis, and Saïd and Chérif Kouachi. He went so far as to call them an “online lynch mob.”
I was disturbed by the AWP’s decision to remove Place based on Volpert’s petition and angry with people I knew for supporting what looked to me like scapegoating. Vanessa Place’s Twitter feed was offensive and dull, certainly, but her work in general has been thoughtful and intelligent, even if often discomfiting and difficult. I’d been following her work for years with admiration. I had invited her to be part of a symposium on conceptual poetry and poetic freedom I had organized at Princeton University in 2013, where she sat on a panel with Timothy Donnelly, Kent Johnson, Jena Osman, and Mónica de la Torre. Place’s work is often emotionally difficult to read, because so much of it focuses on racial injustice and sexual violence; the challenge her work presents is substantial. Part of her gambit, as a conceptual poet who uses mainly found or appropriated texts, seems to be to turn the act of reframing into a painfully lucid steel mirror.
Her work had been, since before I had been following it, always presented within a clear theoretical and political approach. Place uses her work to attack the idea of the self, especially the lyric self, in part because, so she argues, behind the idea of the modern self lies the idea of property. She is a profoundly insightful critic of the role contemporary poetry plays in capitalism, and has made her work that of critiquing and, yes, desecrating what remains holy, sacrosanct, or metaphysically privileged around the idea of poetic production, poetic identity, and the voice.
As Place said in the address she delivered at Princeton:
It has become apparent to me that poetry is fundamental to capital, just as the humanities are desperately needed, though there is an obfuscation of the need through a stupid insistence on functionality. What is poetry/art for, et cetera, and while there is an easy answer about the utility of critique and interrogation, for plodding logic and pedantic insistency that science rewards less often than the humanities, there is a better, more transcendental, more obvious, response . . .
Poetry is what poetry is, and what poetry is has everything to do with the packaging of the imaginary libratory subject. It has to do with other soft-eyed dreams—that clouds mean, that representations are, that language matters, that at any moment there can be a pivot-point at which a terrible beauty may be born. Beauty, it could be noted, being the beast that is absolutely indifferent to the corpse before it. And that these things are as true as anything else. Or, more precisely, as tragically true as everything else.
The poetic subject is us, here, now, the point at which the false may be beautifully, horribly, real.
Or, to misquote Eric Hoffer, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Put another way, “I” is not a subject.
I is a racket.12
Place’s work with Gone With the Wind is also about property, as she explained after the AWP removed her from its committee: part of the point of the Twitter feed was to draw legal action from the notoriously litigious Margaret Mitchell estate, in the hopes of provoking a legal battle about who “owns” the racist language in Mitchell’s novel. Her work with Gone With the Wind is also about desecration. For, as a white author from Virginia, Place recognized that Mitchell’s novel was considered by many to be a sacred object. As she wrote in the artist’s statement that Volpert quoted from, describing a work of text published in Drunken Boat:
In May 2009, I was in Berlin, where the multifarious reminders of Nazism seemed more properly to be Germany’s historical focus, rather than the Holocaust. For the Holocaust was an event, a singular horror, whereas Nazism was the formal manifestation of anti-Semitism as sociopolitical philosophy and ethical/aesthetic modus operandi. Similarly, slavery is not the issue for the United States today as much as racism is as ever was and ever will be, at least historically. This piece—the gleaning of all passages in Gone With the Wind in which “nigger” features prominently (omitted are other racial epithets or denigrating enactments), then set in a block of text, a slave block—aims to remind white folks of their goings-on and ongoings. Self included, for there is personal guilt there as well, given my family is not just Caucasian American, but Southern, Virginian, as they say, “by the grace of God.” And God’s grace carries with it a certain responsibility for the error of blind loyalty (see, Abraham & Isaac). Too, GWTW is still a very much beloved bit of Americana (Molly Haskell recently published a book on Scarlett O’Hara as feminist icon, and last year’s Best Actress Oscar was announced to the soaring strains of “Tara’s Theme”), with very little attention paid to its blackface, or that its blackface is blackface. Or that, in such texts, characters are to people as people may be to property. So I have stolen Margaret Mitchell’s “niggers” and claim them as my own. In a funny way, I am replicating Huck Finn’s dilemma/conversion: to understand that keeping (not turning in runaway) Nigger Jim is stealing, for which one may well go to hell, and to do it anyway.13
The reference to Mark Twain—a great American desecrator if ever there was one—is pointed. In emulation of Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Place is positioning her work in terms of a critique not just of slavery but of the connections between private property and racism, with an awareness of its being trapped in the very system it’s trying to critique. In Twain’s novel, Huck Finn’s moral options with regard to Jim are circumscribed by the ridiculous horror of slave society, in which Jim is property. Huck can return Jim or he can steal him, but he cannot free him. Furthermore, stealing Jim means not only breaking the law for Huck, but accepting social ostracism and his soul’s damnation. Place positions herself in a similar double bind as Huck by stealing Margaret Mitchell’s racist language. Place can choose to ignore Mitchell’s racist novel, or she can steal it, but she cannot erase it. In effect, Place is dramatizing the intolerable position we’re all trapped in, the horrific idea of order we impose upon ourselves through the concept of racial discrimination. We can try to ignore it or we can claim our complicity, but we don’t know how to get outside of it. We cannot simply erase our own history.
Pointing out painful double binds has long been part of Place’s project. I suspect this is part of what makes her a figure of contention and fixation. For some time she took to appropriating Facebook posts by poets announcing publications or readings; recontextualized, the posts made a mockery of the writers’ adroitly performed “humblebrags” and exposed the self-promotion so fundamental to social media. For this, Place was rebuked and criticized. I am convinced as well that Place’s stark, intense, serious poetic persona grates on many poets today. Vanessa Place does not play nice, and the whole point of poetry today is that you play nice: you listen to other poets so they’ll listen to you, and around and around it goes. The problem is that while everybody can read and write poems, not everybody gets a job doing it. Poetry pretends to operate like a gift economy, but in fact it’s an industry, an industry whose product is poets—or, more precisely, paying MFA students.
Yet all this—the emotional, aesthetic, and moral complexity of Place’s work, her theoretical rigor and conceptual brilliance, her explicit and laudable efforts to desecrate shambolic notions of poetic identity, poetic voice, and poetic community, the affective reaction her persona provokes, even her being lumped in with Kenneth Goldsmith—none of this explains the explosive emotions ignited by Volpert’s petition, nor does it finally weigh in quite enough to make “Gone With the Wind” okay. I think only someone who deliberately ignored Vanessa Place’s exhaustive theoretical work could charge her with being “racially insensitive,” for she is nothing if not sensitive to the language used to construct race. Nevertheless, her work is also deliberately offensive. Even if the work shows a deep sensitivity to the language of race, “Gone With the Wind” is still racist.
So there’s that. What’s more, while I was disturbed by the AWP’s fear of scandal and angry at fellow writers for supporting a half-baked petition rebuking a poet for doing challenging work, I was also confused, because a few weeks earlier I had found myself supporting the other side of a similar issue. When Deborah Eisenberg and other writers at PEN America publicly disavowed their support for the PEN Gala at which the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo would be awarded the Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award, I thought their position was clear and unimpeachable. Never mind the disgust engendered by the opportunistic waving of je suis charlie placards, never mind the magazine’s own complex relationship to satire and French Catholicism, and never mind the fact that Charlie Hebdo were desecrators, critics, cynics, debasers committed to puncturing facile credences and upsetting conventions. There were serious problems with the idea of PEN American giving an award for courage in freedom of expression to Charlie Hebdo.
First, allowing desecrators to do their cynical work, which work is not only a cornerstone of democratic and egalitarian thought but also essential to fostering intellectual maturity and social enlightenment, is not the same as rewarding them for it. One can support extreme examples of free speech, satire, and even hate speech, without rewarding and honoring their speakers simply because they persist in being offensive. Second, all this shit happens in a context. The context for Place’s “Gone With the Wind” happens to be systemic oppression and racialized murder. The context for PEN America’s award to Charlie Hebdo was fourteen years of aggressive American military action against Islamic countries and peoples. Keith Gessen wrote what seemed to me one of the best explanations of how this worked in his piece in N+1 describing why he signed the letter protesting the PEN Gala:
When twelve staff members and friends of the satirical cartoon newspaper Charlie Hebdo were killed at their offices by Saïd and Chérif Kouachi this past January, several things happened. First, there was an outpouring of grief for the victims. There had been many other attacks on editors and writers in recent memory, but not at this scale and not with such brazenness. The brothers came in, announced that they were from al Qaeda, and started killing.
But in addition to the grief, in America at least there was something else: I would call it an attempt to assimilate the shootings to the ongoing American “war on terror.” My friend George Packer, writing at the New Yorker website, immediately warned against ascribing the killings by two second-generation Algerian Muslims to the failure of France to integrate people like them, or to the ongoing Western participation in wars in the Middle East. The culprit, Packer wrote, was none of these things, but rather militant modern Islam: “an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades.” It’s the same ideology, Packer wrote, “that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001.” And it was: the brothers had even pledged allegiance to al Qaeda. Packer’s language took one back to the days after the September 11 attacks, when Western politicians and intellectuals began gearing up for a long protracted war with “Islamic terror.” That war, obviously, continues.
When people in France, in their mourning, declared “Je suis Charlie,” they were expressing grief, an identification with the victims of horrific violence. But what were people expressing when they said “Je suis Charlie” in the US? It was a tragedy. But what did it mean to identify with those particular victims, at this particular time? I could be wrong, but it seemed to me that “Je suis Charlie” was a way for people to re-pledge their commitment to the War on Terror that had been announced by the United States in 2001.14
The Charlie Hebdo award scandal was a story about bodies, because the Charlie Hebdo shooting was a story about bodies. Whose bodies? Arabic bodies or French bodies? Arabic bodies or American bodies? Gone With the Wind is a story about bodies, because the Civil War is a story about bodies. Whose bodies? Black bodies or white bodies? Southern bodies or Yankee bodies? The story of the Baltimore riots is a story about bodies, because the stories of Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin are stories about bodies. Whose bodies? Desecrated bodies or sacred bodies? Bodies that matter or bodies that don’t?
The angry, mournful cry echoing out from the protests last winter was simple: Black lives matter. Black lives matter.
Black and white protestors came together over the dead bodies of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, doing what communities do over dead bodies, which is to make meaning. These bodies are sacred, they said, every time they chanted “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” or “I can’t breathe.” These bodies are sacred.
Formally, the act is homologous to other acts of sacrificial understanding and communion. The dead editors at Charlie Hebdo became the sacred embodiment of French nationalism or, as Keith Gessen suggested, the American war on terror: “Je suis Charlie.” The twenty-six million Russians killed in World War II became the sacred embodiment of the Russian state, a Saint George’s ribbon tying a country together. The three thousand people killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center became the sacred embodiment of the American nation: Remember 9/11. The anonymous soldier killed on the battlefield becomes the sacred embodiment of his nation’s spirit: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Structurally, the difference between a heroic sacrifice and a scapegoating is merely a matter of identification. In both cases it’s a story about a body, a ritual, a sacrifice: a tragōidia. In both cases a group of people come together in bloody communion. In both cases the murdered body becomes sacred, either totem or taboo, lifted up or cast out. The community says, “We are the same as the dead,” or the community says, “We are different from the dead.” Either way, the community becomes real in its relationship to the dead: this is a story about a body. “We” cheer the death of Osama bin Laden. “We” stand over Eric Garner as our brothers in blue choke him to death. “We” say, “Je Suis Charlie.” “We” lynch a nigger. “We” burn a witch. We decide who’s in, who’s out, who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s good, who’s evil, who lives, who dies. Typically, too, one follows hard upon the other, first the sacrifice, then the scapegoat, first the “Us,” then the “Them.”
I am constitutionally repelled by such acts of consecration. They make me want to be a debaser. I cannot believe in a nation or a peace that’s founded in blood. I refuse to believe that violence brings us together. I cannot accept that death justifies death, war justifies war, and hatred justifies hatred. I refuse to pick sides. I don’t want to eat the dead, wash myself in their blood, or claim their names. If I could, I would desecrate all these altars, tear down every veil, piss on every christ.
I admire the desecrators and cynics in history because they strike at idols of dogma and irrationality, because they strive to pierce through to reason and truth, because so often they stand alone and embattled against institutions, mobs, and blind adherence to tradition. But there’s something else at work, too, because every act of desecration—like every act of consecration—happens in a context. We reason and criticize in social contexts, and I don’t get to refuse mine. I don’t get to refuse to pick sides. All too often, however alone they might think they are, it turns out that the desecrators, debasers, and cynics stand not against but alongside the mighty. And it turns out that sometimes when they thought they were spitting on a false idol, they were desecrating the faith and hope of those who have been told again and again that their lives and dreams don’t matter.
When we think about Charlie Hebdo and Vanessa Place, we need to think about Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, Hattie McDaniel, and Michael Brown. When we think about 9/11, we need to think about Osama bin Laden and a hundred years of Western military and political intervention in the Middle East. When we think about the avant-garde’s critique of the Self, we need to think about the dead bodies dumped over the side of the Zong. And as we think, we might begin to realize that the sides we get to choose between are not enlightened desecrators and unenlightened mobs, but those with the power to name the sacred and those whose lives are spent fighting for that dignity.
Some lives matter more than others: that’s why protestors have to form a group called Black Lives Matter. Some lives matter more than others: that’s why French satirists desecrating Christianity is different from French satirists desecrating Islam. Some lives matter more than others: that’s why Russian propaganda valorizes the Russian dead and American propaganda, the American dead. Some lives matter more than others: that’s why US audiences flocked to watch American Sniper but have forgotten Abu Ghraib.
Some lives matter more than others because that’s how humans do politics, but can you, cynical reader, mon semblable, ma sœur, begrudge a people their right to insist on their dignity? Can you deny your own need for the sacred, your own deep thirst for an existence that’s more than mere matter? Can you truly tell me that you have not, in haunted moments, called upon the names of the dead?
Everything happens in a context. The context we live in now is one in which carbon waste from the richest countries is rapidly warming the planet, threatening infrastructure and agriculture around the world, destabilizing weather patterns, and raising sea levels to inundate coastal cities. As a species, we face our greatest collective threat. For decades, the only hope for humanity has been for all the peoples of the world to unite in common cause and limit our carbon emissions. The wealthiest need to give up their cheap energy, the poorest needs to give up their dreams of wealth, and our collective fate needs to be grounded in economic and environmental justice. That has not happened, and most likely never will. We remain as divided today as ever, and as environmental disaster endangers food and water resources, economic precarity narrows opportunities, and war spreads, each group insists on its exceptional difference: Sunni, Shiia, French, Algerian, Western, Islamic, American, Russian, the 99 percent, the 1 percent, White, Black . . .
Some lives matter more than others. That’s how we make collectives—identities—peoples—nations—wars. The bloody ritual of sacrifice and communion through which we manifest what “we” means won’t end until we learn to sacrifice ourselves first, in every case, for every brother and sister, every other Other. Those with wealth and power must scatter it. Those with privilege must dismantle it. Those caught in the complicity of repression must lay down their own bodies to end it. Those who suffer violence must turn the other cheek. The impossible demand for infinite compassion is our only hope, the only way we might be saved.
And when that bright day comes it will be the last day, and all the dead of every race, creed, gender, and nation will rise from their graves together as one, finally equal. [2015]