The Studia must be reinvented as a higher order of human knowledge, able to provide an “outer view” which takes the human rather than any one of its variations as Subject . . . to attain to the position of an external observer, at once inside/outside the figural domain of our order.
—Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism”
As a result of rallies we got courses in “black literature” and “black history” and a special black adviser for black students and a black cultural center, a rotting white washed house on the nether edge of campus.
—David Bradley, “Black and American, 1982”
There comes a time when the only thing that one can do is admit defeat. Standing at the tail end of a Black Studies movement established as part of the articulation of anti-segregationist, anticolonialist African and African American political and cultural insurgencies, one is made painfully aware of a sort of necessary and inevitable social and professional marginalization structuring the everyday existence of the so-called black scholar. The broadly imagined ethical outlines of even the most valued projects of black intellectualism continue as ornamental, overly moralistic, never quite fully valid aspects of the industry/government/education complex that we decorously name the American academy. Accommodated in ever more brightly colored, if distantly placed and institutionally vulnerable, houses, the black, African, Africana scholastic project has only the most limited means by which it might affect a sort of inchoate articulation. When times are good and the funding secure, the history, thought, and culture of the peoples of the African diaspora might be taken as a sort of reiteration of the central conceits of American and European cultural and intellectual orthodoxy. A single red/brown/yellow/blue face appearing intermittently in recruitment brochures or faculty lounges boastfully reminds us of the meritocratic liberalism that presumably underwrites the basic structures of our most cherished educational and intellectual institutions. More impressive still, the scholar of Black Studies might make great use of an apparently never too tired for service “plus one” account of black subjectivity in which the most traditional ideas of universalism, cosmopolitanism, and Western humanism are presumably broadened and deepened through the indication that some representative black individual “was there.” And when times are lean and narratives of scarcity rub harshly against notions of open-minded largesse, one might enact again and yet again a sort of hysterically ineffectual theatrical rebellion, identifying the many always easy to uncover moments of racialist hostility and insensitivity that are among the most profoundly resilient aspects of American and European society.
Still, regardless of the modes of attack and address, only the most limited consideration of Africa and the African diaspora can be discerned in the best-supported and most cherished precincts of the humanities and human sciences. There is so little awareness of the broad ideological structures on which the various practices of professional humanists are established that it becomes difficult to imagine that we might either critique or redirect basic modes of research and study. Broach the topic of lists, fields, and curricula with the most generous of colleagues, and you will very likely be met with a hand-wringing and apologetic, if firmly conventional, story of limited resources, fixed traditions, bureaucratic obstacles, and the rigid expectations of a harshly disciplining market. At the moment of challenge, humanistic studies are imagined to exist not so much as a complex of ideologies, discourses, and institutions with an identifiable and relatively short history, but instead as an impossibly distant force, almost metaphysical in nature, that we are able to approach with only the most unstable of intellectual prosthetics.
The crisis of humanism is first and foremost a failure of the political and ethical imaginaries that stabilize the labor that one presumably does as a practitioner of the humanities and human sciences. It is the ever more vertiginous social reality confronting intellectuals who approach their work through a sort of willed ignorance of the ideological organization of the Studia. As I have suggested, the philosophical and ethical arrangements of humanism become much clearer once one appropriates the historical understandings given us by Michel Foucault and amplified by Sylvia Wynter, once we recognize that not only are the conceptual and instrumental arrangements that we use to teach, research, write, and publish decidedly new phenomena, but are also inextricably tied up with the violent extraction of value and labor. In a sense, then, we in the United States are lucky to have so little opportunity to cover over the absolutely intimate relationship between universities, colonization, and enslavement. Step onto the campus of one of the country’s great sites of learning, and you are quite likely stepping onto a plantation, an institution in which the expression of so-called high culture was—and is—fueled by the literal entrapment and internment of Africans and their descendants.1 Those gates and guards through and by which we pass are not simple adornments, but instead absolutely necessary safeguards within a set of protocols designed to distinguish (African) chaos from (European) order. The disciplinary structures most commonly associated with the humanities operate first and foremost to yoke the “free-floating” energy of the untidy (Negro) to a process by which a disembodied universalist (white) order might be named. The trick, of course, is to accomplish this particular procedure without seeming to do so. There is good reason that there has been so little discussion of the relationship between the history of Atlantic slavery and the development of the disciplines. That procedure would invite consideration of the rather uncanny overlap of these institutions’ developmental timelines, coming to maturity as they did in the nineteenth century and fracturing in the twentieth. Even more to the point, a truly historicist and anti–white supremacist examination of the history of the humanities and human sciences would necessarily have to take into account not only the fact that the descendants of the enslaved and the colonized continue to do the unseen, unwanted, irrational work of the university, dumping trash cans, cleaning toilets, and preparing meals, but also that the scholars whom they service incessantly, even manically, reiterate a set of intellectual protocols built precisely on never noting that their cleverness and disinterestedness are often themselves examples of brittle misunderstanding(s) of the conditions of their own labor.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Black Studies should be so studiously ignored as it stands mocking and mocked at the plantation’s edge. Fascinating in its vulgarity and decrepitude, the rotting whitewashed house seems to point in two directions at once, naming a desiccated past while demanding a certain horrified attention in the present. Wynter writes,
It is within the same governing laws of figuration and its internal logic that the Black Culture Center was proscribed to exist on the nether edge of the campus. It functioned as the target stimuli of aversion, with respect to the Euroamerican order of the center of the campus, which is then enabled to function as the object stimuli of desire. The relation, functioning dually at empirical and valorizing levels, if stably kept in phase, ensures the stable production of the same shared endogenous waveshapes, in Black students as well as Whites—the same normative seeing/valuing, avoiding/devaluing behaviors. Hence the paradox that, after the turbulence of the 1960s and the 1970s the Black Culture Centers in their nether-edge-of-the campus place function to enable the recycling (in cultural rather than racial terms) of the Order/Chaos dynamics of the system-ensemble.2
Here I take some solace in the conditional nature of Wynter’s most damning observation. If the fraught relations between Black Studies and the “Euroamerican order of the center” are stably kept in phase, then we condemn ourselves to the reiteration of those normative behaviors and modes of thought established in the crucibles of enslavement and colonization. The very presence of the shabby house at the edge of campus remarks the possibility of rupture within these systems. It suggests modes of knowledge and articulation that if not elegant are at least not so wholly and innocently disconnected from the means of their own replication as to exist in a sort of creative stasis, operating like the disciplined, defeated professor of literature whose tepid passions never quite reach the level of either offense—or brilliance.
While I knowingly, even lovingly, embrace the disorder that is Black Studies, I cannot bring myself to celebrate that embrace. Sitting here on the ugly side of campus, collecting my thoughts in rooms that though not obviously rotting are nonetheless likely to be swept away come the next great wind, I know that my efforts must be read as at once marginal and suspect. I “have every interest in challenging an order of figuration” that programs my own negation (Wynter, “The Ceremony,” 49). Yet mine is not a blameless opposition. I do not naïvely celebrate the obvious fraying of the humanist project. Nor do I yearn for an easy reorganization of priorities, the moving of the white house to the center. Instead I am seeking, however haltingly, the reinvention of the Studia in a manner that would allow for the articulation of a fully universal humanism and the dismantling of the deeply embedded white supremacy that so firmly establishes American and European intellectualism. In doing so, however, I must by necessity recognize the Black Studies apparatus itself as having been established within the order/chaos ideological nexus that lies at the heart of the humanities and human sciences. Thus in the necessarily radical practices of disarticulation that one hopes will soon and very soon take up our attention and our energies, it is quite unclear whether the rotting house will survive.
What this means practically is that, like many others before me, I have attempted to utilize methods developed in the particular context of African American Studies to address texts and contexts outside traditions that hold fast in North Carolina and New York. I am interested less in identity than process. As a consequence, I have found it relatively easy to shift my focus from “black” America to “white” Spain. What I am most earnestly attempting to achieve, however, is not simply an easy acknowledgment of the historical and cultural overlaps between Spain and African America, but instead something akin to a new hermeneutics, a new mode of reading that is at once diagnostic, corrosive, and reparative. I shift my gaze back and forth between my two interlocutors, the black and the Latin, the American and the European, because I am thrilled by the possibilities inherent in their inarticulateness, the ways neither can be fully or comfortably housed within the Man/human, Man/anthropophorous animal nexus. It is the clumsiness of the African American/Spanish pairing that most intrigues me. I suspect that the necessary tentativeness of the theoretical and critical apparatus that one must create in order to maintain the combinations that are at the center of this book is itself a necessary procedure for the intellectual interested in finding a new ceremony that might allow us to gain “the outer view,” to rid ourselves of the mediocrity of thought and action that stands so ostentatiously and ignobly at the very heart of the humanist enterprise.
All that matters now is to keep thinking the unthinkable and writing the unprintable and maybe I can break through this motherfucking race barrier that keeps us niggers suffocated.
—Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity
Late in 1964 the African American novelist Chester Himes traveled through Spain and north Africa with his life partner, Lesley Packard, stopping long enough in Alicante to buy a piece of land at Moraira-Teulada, where the couple would eventually build a house, Casa Griot, named for their much-loved Siamese cat. By September 1968, they had begun in earnest the process of moving permanently to Spain. Chester and Lesley married there in 1978 and lived on the peninsula until they both died, Chester in 1984 and Lesley in 2010. Though Himes’s name is almost synonymous with the history of those African American artists and intellectuals who settled in France, particularly Paris, presumably to escape the more severe forms of racist violence that they might encounter in the United States, Himes spent more than sixteen years in Spain after having passed a decade further north. Five of his late works were published while he resided in Moraira-Teulada: the novels Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), Black on Black (1973), and A Case of Rape (1980), and two fascinating volumes of autobiography: The Quality of Hurt (1973) and My Life of Absurdity (1976).3 Another novel, Pinktoes, was published in 1967, a year before the couple’s permanent move to Moraira-Teulada. Perhaps even more importantly, early in 1954, fourteen years before finally settling permanently in Spain, Himes arrived on the island of Mallorca, escaping with his lover, a woman he refers to in the memoir as Alva Trent, from the relentless cold and the astoundingly bold racism of 1950s London. The two carried with them the defeat of not having been able to publish the work that they had written together, The Golden Chalice, a fact that Himes attributed to the American publishing industry’s hostility to the couple’s interracial status. In revolt, Himes decided to publish a novel that played right along the cutting edge of white fantasies about black sexuality and black/white sexual congress. “I’ll give them something to hate me for,” he wrote. “I’ll give them a book, because this is the kind of thing they can really hate me for.”4 The result was Himes’s extremely provocative, woefully underexamined fifth novel, The End of a Primitive.5
Building upon the arguments of the cultural critic Jodi Melamed, I would suggest that The End of a Primitive was not so much a bridge between the naturalist aesthetic that dominated Himes’s early works and the farcical, hard-bitten nature of the crime novels for which he is justly famous, but instead a culmination of the author’s ongoing attempts to engage his audience through deployment of a set of disarticulations, modes of address and representation designed to occupy so fully the racialist/white supremacist common sense as to make plain the many structural cleavages, the absurdities, that hold it together.6 Himes understood and reiterated the very spatial metaphors, the images of enclosure, darkness, physical deprivation, and shrinking that have been so successfully—and successively—utilized in African American literary and cultural practice. He allowed himself to dwell in the half light, the stench, the damp, the cold, and the heat of the hold long enough to push beyond aesthetic and ideological constraints established by what he understood to be a wholly hypocritical literary/critical apparatus. He pressed forcefully in the novel against the Man/human binary not by reiterating the typical Afro-American call for inclusion in the so-called human family, but instead by embracing the charge of bestiality, allowing the name calling embedded in the phrase “black beast” to overwhelm his narrative, to make evident the profoundly anti-human vulgarity that lies at the heart of the common sense of white liberal respectability.
I will state again that I am not interested in the production of a more equitable, racially liberal, and diverse humanities project. I agree with Cary Wolfe that the purported pluralism that is so loudly trumpeted by humanism’s many disciples ultimately works to strengthen the basic ideological structures supporting white supremacy and capitalist exploitation.7 Instead, I call for a radical Black Studies and an invigorated Critical Archive Studies as parts of broad-based efforts to disrupt the Man/anthropophorous animal binary. I am eager to move beyond the knee-jerk fear that the black might be called animal or beastly. Indeed, to subscribe to the idea that men, no matter the hue of their skin, stand above animals is simply to retreat to slightly less noxious articulations of humanism’s structuring conceits.
Much of what fascinates me about Himes was that his escape to Spain represented not simply an attempt to avoid the harsher varieties of anti-black violence, but also an effort to seek new modes of subjectivity in which the black intellectual might finally give up on the untenable/unthinkable project of taming and mortifying his own flesh. He did so through self-conscious reference to Spain’s marginal status in what one might call euphemistically the “European imagination.” The peninsula represented for Himes the very cursed promise of eccentricity implied in David Bradley and Sylvia Wynter’s images of the rotting white house. His open disdain for the country in which he was able to establish the only stable home he had ever had was itself an emblem of the focus and resiliency necessary for an intellectual who understood that, though he might achieve fame and even some measure of prosperity, the means of his survival were not simply inadequate but toxic. Himes’s biographer James Sallis reports that the author hated Spain. He found it to be equally as racist as the American South but not nearly as efficient. In letters written late in life, Himes offered a steady stream of anti-Spanish invective, describing the country as a tomb and a trap. In a note dated July 29, 1975, to his agent, Roslyn Targ, wife of his editor at Putnam, William Targ, he lamented that, as he would be dead within a month, his first priority must necessarily be the completion of his second autobiography, My Life of Absurdity. Writing feverishly from his home in Moraira-Teulada, he carped that he was “almost totally helpless” and that Lesley had “lost interest in keeping me alive.” Spain, notwithstanding the cheerful sunshine and great beauty of Alicante, had become a snare. “I cannot get out of Spain,” he droned. “I would not trouble you with this if it were not deadly serious. I cannot get any help from any one. Please think of me with charity.”8 Himes repeated his apparent desperation the following year on July 17, 1976, writing that Lesley had “taken total care of me for the past ten or more years and . . . and it is hard on her because I HATE SPAIN.”9
What strikes one when reading Himes’s complaints about his life on the Costa del Sol, complaints that he stridently restated from at least 1968 onward, is not simply the fact that he wrote from locations that many would consider paradisiacal, but also that he remained thoroughly productive during this period. Though he claimed to Roslyn Targ in the summers of 1975 and 1976 that he was on the verge of death, he did not, in fact, die until some eight years later, after having published two splendid autobiographies. Whatever other deficits Spain may have had, it had become for Himes a sort of metaphor for the strange, indeed vertiginous, reality he faced as an artist whose physical and mental abilities were declining while he nonetheless began to achieve both financial comfort and something akin to canonical stature. In his 1976 letter to Targ, he listed the assets that he was eager to leave to Lesley: $44,000 deposited in Credit Suisse, $1,700 deposited in Barclays, $10,000 on deposit in Morgan’s Paris, a furnished house with swimming pool on two plots of land in Moraira, another empty plot nearby, and two little cars. He then closed by again reiterating his loathing for the country. In a postscript, Lesley entreats the Targs to visit them in Alicante, noting that filled with trees and sea breezes, the garden was particularly pretty:
There are days when we have lots of fun playing our cassettes and sitting around the pool. Also Mike and Sarah are over here very often. They have both had a very successful show together in Altea and sell reasonably well. An American collector bought 12 of his drawings. Not so bad!! (Chester Himes letter to Mrs. Roslyn Targ, July 17, 1976)
It is clear that Himes found it exceedingly difficult to reconcile long-established sensibilities and sensitivities with the process by which his talent—and his life—had been monetized, the ways his rather famously desperate efforts at both security and self-expression had been actualized not in New York nor even Paris, but on the very edge of the Iberian Peninsula. Though he did not often reflect upon the matter, Himes had settled rather surprisingly close to the African continent. He rested more or less comfortably at a location not at all distant from the slaving stations of centuries past. He had taken up residence at the plantation’s edge. Sitting with an adoring wife by the refreshing pool of a lovely home, the pages of an unfinished autobiography ready at hand, he had come to know the uncanny comfort that one might achieve while attempting to resist the forgetting and self-deception that are the blood price of an ill-fitting respectability.
The desperate vertigo evinced in Himes’s letters to Targ echoes the very strange state of affairs that led him to Mallorca in the winter of 1954. He had met his lover Alva Trent Van Olden Barneveldt a little less than a year earlier as the two traveled onboard the Ile de France toward Europe and the renewed lives that they hoped to find there. When Trent met Himes in one of the corridors of the ship, her first words were, “Don’t leave me! Please don’t leave me!” She then apologized for her strange behavior, stating that the ship provoked severe attacks of claustrophobia (Himes, The Quality of Hurt, 153).10 Feeling sorry for her and acting on his awkward sense of chivalry, Himes helped her to her cabin, then rushed above deck to vomit over the railing. Just out of a disastrous—and spectacularly abusive—relationship with Vandi Haygood, the woman on whom the character Kriss in The End of a Primitive is based, Chester felt strangely attracted to Alva. Their quickly developing affair represented a sort of minimalist carnival of boundary crossings. Meeting inside a tightly sealed tube of metal vainly/valiantly pulling itself across the Atlantic, they retreated, however ineffectually, from the sterility and severity of the nation that had handled them both so roughly. They were intensely aware of the breeching game they performed. Alva was just as comfortable stealthily making her way to the third-class cabins as Chester was to the first. Her dazing story of betrayal and defeat demonstrated a woman as ready as any to renounce the privileges of race and class.
Born to a prominent Philadelphia family, Alva met her Dutch husband just before the Second World War while she was an exchange student in Bonn. Giving birth to four girls in quick succession, she attempted to escape with them to the United States when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and her husband became a collaborator, working as the dental surgeon for the staff at the Maastricht headquarters. Successful in getting only three of the children out of the country, she returned to her husband, eventually suffering a string of nervous breakdowns before retreating again to the United States and divorcing him. But, as the divorce was not recognized by the Dutch government, she had no obvious legal right to the girls, whom she had left behind. In April 1953 she booked passage aboard the Ile de France, hoping to meet her husband and convince him to allow their children to come back with her. In a close, ill-lit hallway punctuated by rows of tightly sealed doors, she met a seasick novelist and ex-convict, Chester Himes.
There was something surprisingly elegant about Chester and Alva’s retreat to Mallorca. The island, located off Spain’s northeast coast, had been one of the last redoubts of Republican resistance. In the interim between the war and Himes’s first visit it had become, along with the other islands of the Baleares, a retreat for artists, radicals, and homosexuals seeking a place in which they might live more or less unnoticed by the Falangist government in Madrid. By the time Himes made his own clumsy approach, Mallorca had long since ceased to be a site of open conflict. Its quaint villages were destined to become locations for the most sublime tourism, touching emblems of Spain’s industrial retardation. Chester and Alva found themselves at the lip of a sort of gilded pit. Himes, defeated and in retreat from the realities of American racism and anti-intellectualism; Alva, abandoned and damaged, frantic to establish an alternative to the hubris and humiliation of white bourgeois domesticity—the two could hope for no more than the slow sink into regret and dissipation that was the island’s ultimate gift.
And yet there can be rather strange surprises for those of us forced to the plantation’s edge. One becomes increasingly aware that the horror and dis-ease that presumably define the half-life begrudgingly offered to the repudiated and disavowed are themselves reflections of the shocking instability of the logics underwriting the Man/human binarism. Soon after Alva married her husband, they went to a Paris hotel, where he desperately attempted to consummate their marriage. Later describing the scene to Chester, she explained that as her husband’s penis was too large, she was unreceptive to his advances. Frustrated, he forced her to undergo an operation at the hands of his medical school friends in order to rectify the problem. He booked a separate room, keeping her alone, only coming for daily sex visits. The exercise was a success, but Alva would later complain, “You know, my husband made me pregnant five times but never made me an orgasm” (Himes, The Quality of Hurt, 161). The legitimacy of the children whom the couple produced was a thing established upon a level of force and coercion not distinct from that which passes between master and slave. There was a deficit of pleasure. In the place of intimacy, violence stood; instead of dripping lust, respectability persisted. The father smiling brightly at precious daughters sees in their cheerful faces evidence of his own throbbing rupture. His great success is that he has escaped the vulgar and illogical (re)productive possibilities of human flesh. He has retreated from the carnivalesque world of animals, slaves, and prostitutes and into a realm of ordered largesse in which, thanks to the ministrations of those skilled medical school friends, his daughters have been both born physically and reborn socially without suffering the taint of their mother’s beastlike hysteria. If Man and human must come together, awkward and unacknowledged, in the production of progeny, they certainly cannot be expected always to get along. The joy of self-reiteration might be cunningly disrupted by the mechanics of the animal body, the relative size and shape of a never quite to be trusted penis.
Much of my attraction to Himes turns on the fact that he was so obviously self-aware and self-conscious about the hysterical forms of propriety that rigidly structure much within humanism, including much of the Black Studies enterprise itself. With each jerk of his pen, Himes meant to overturn useless models of respectability in favor of iconoclastic forms that continually remind one of soiled flesh, a none too distant prehistory in which our ancestors inhabited their hordes with their faces covered in shit. As much in The End of a Primitive as his autobiographies, Himes seemed most anxious to find a means by which not so much to mend the Man/human, Man/animal break as to demonstrate its artificiality. In both their composition and their coupling, Chester and Alva attempted to find a hermeneutics that might allow them to bring meaning to their suffering. Their creative practice was decidedly ceremonial. Out of the ashes of their abandoned project, The Golden Chalice, Chester sought to disavow the common sense of the Studia, producing in The End of a Primitive a work designed to soothe its author as well as to alert its readers to processional alternatives in the structures of their lives that might prove slightly less caustic to human animality than the brittle racialism and woman hating that so suffuse Western humanism.
Rising early, drugging himself with coffee and Dexamyl, then retreating to his writing desk in the garden of one of the small houses he shared with Alva, Chester found unexpected solace in his craft.
I wrote slowly, savoring each word, sometimes taking an hour to fashion one sentence to my liking. Sometimes leaning back in my seat and laughing hysterically at the sentence I had fashioned, getting as much satisfaction from the creation of this book as from an exquisite act of love. That was the first time in my life I enjoyed writing; before I had always written from compulsion. But I enjoyed writing The End of a Primitive . . . for once I was almost doing what I wanted to with a story, without being influenced by the imagined reactions of editors, publishers, critics, readers, or anyone. By then I had reduced myself to the fundamental writer, and nothing else mattered. I wonder if I could have written like that if I had been a successful writer, or even living in a more pleasant house. But one can write under such conditions for only a very limited time; in fact under such conditions one writes with the driving inspiration to get the hell out. (Himes, The Quality of Hurt, 302)
With every turn of phrase, Himes revels in the nonproductive nature of his writing. He reaches toward a classical conception of human subjectivity in which there is no easy distinction between hours of fashioning, hysterical laughter, acts of love, and the “driving inspiration to get the hell out.” The effect is an almost religious revelry in which each word scratched onto the page carries exact meaning, a phenomenological weight unequal to the reactions of editors, publishers, critics, or readers. The ceremony of the writing desk is a thing that exists in itself for itself. It is a process not dissimilar from the discursive possibilities available to the unsold slave as he retreats to the relative comfort of his cell. What one sounds at such moments is an expression of a humanity temporarily relieved from rigorously scripted performance techniques designed to reiterate and obscure the viciously exploitative capitalist exchanges that establish anthropophorous animality and then yoke its possibilities to those of Man. The slave may express, but never transcribe, the unthinkable and the unprintable. Much of the value of the whitewashed house at the edge of campus, the value of Himes’s retreat to Spain, is that the sublingual soundings of humans not yet become Men might be contained there and referred to later if profit can be made.
These same structures of thought and feeling are feverishly repeated in The End of a Primitive. The novel follows forty-eight hours in the lives of two characters: Jesse Robinson, an out-of-luck black novelist deeply embittered by the limitations imposed on his talent and craft; and Kristina (Kriss) Cummings, a forty-something white divorcée and employee of the India Institute, an organization modeled in part on the famed Rosenwald Fund, the liberal foundation that underwrote African American intellectual life through direct grants to individuals such as Gordon Parks, Elizabeth Catlett, Claude McKay, Charles Drew, Augusta Savage, Katherine Dunham, Ralph Ellison, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Chester Himes. The work is provocatively autobiographical, representing Himes’s earlier affair with Vandi Haygood, former acting director of fellowships for the Rosenwald Fund, a position that she took over from her husband, William C. Haygood, while he served in the army during the Second World War.11 All of these details are meticulously reproduced in The End of a Primitive, as is the fact that Himes and Haygood had had an earlier tryst in Chicago.
What truly startles, however, what unnerves the reader who has followed the long arc of Himes’s career, is how ruthless and un-glossed Himes’s prose is as he describes his interactions with Haygood in The Quality of Hurt and then repeats the structure of these actions in The End of a Primitive.
When she went to Chicago to visit some old lover after telling me she was going to Washington, D.C., on business, I hurt her seriously. Physically, I mean. I began slapping her when she admitted the truth and all the hurts of my life seemed to come up into me and I went into a trance and kept on slapping her compulsively until suddenly the sight of her swollen face jarred me back to sanity. (Himes, The Quality of Hurt, 136)
He sat on the side of the bed with his back to the dead body. . . . “You finally did it, son,” he said. . . . End product of the impact of Americanization one Jesse Robinson—black man. Your answer, son. You’ve been searching for it. BLACK MAN KILLS WHITE WOMAN. All the proof you need now. Absolutely incontrovertible behaviorism of a male human being. Most human of all behavior. Human beings only species of animal life where males are known to kill their females. Proof beyond all doubt. Jesse Robinson joins the human race. Good article for the Post: he joined The Human Race. All good solid American Post readers will know exactly what you mean: were a nigger but killed a white woman and became a human being. (Himes, The End of a Primitive, 205)
There are three rudely suggestive claims that Himes makes in these passages that bear repeating. First, he equates status as a human (Man) as indistinguishable from the abuse, exploitation, and murder of one’s human partners. Jesse was once a nigger, but he “killed a white woman and became a human being.” Second, in Himes’s own attack on Vandi Haygood, he claims to have gone into a trance, a state regularly described in both The Quality of Hurt and The End of a Primitive. Part of what makes systematic violence possible is the ability to deny the killing rage that motivates it. Though fierce aggression is a key element in the reproduction of the main structures of our social, cultural, and philosophical practices, it can never (should never) be acknowledged as such. Finally, and perhaps most disturbing of all, the hands doing all that slapping and extinguishing of life are not pink but brown. It seems that the modern black subject is not only just as capable of anti-human viciousness as his white counterpart, but also much like brown-skinned African American soldiers taking aim at brown-skinned Filipinos, there is a distinct need for such action. The African American is never more of a Man than when, walking away from dazed bellicosity, he finds his lover’s face bloodied and bruised.
One might see very well then the necessity of Sylvia Wynter’s call for a new ceremony, one in which there is no longer any need for such acts of hostility. In heeding this claim, however, we ought to be perfectly aware of the stakes. (Black) Manhood is given meaningful structure precisely through negative reference to black flesh. It is not the beast that attacks his beloved, but Man. Himes’s literal defacing of Vandi Haygood, Alva’s husband’s efficiently medicalized attacks on his wife’s virginity, Jesse’s eventual murder of his lover, Kriss—all of these are acts of Man(ly) aggression, “the most human of all behavior.” What must have been profoundly stressful for Himes writing in the middle of the twentieth century, just as the country was decidedly changing its constitutional narratives such that some blacks might achieve a bracketed Manhood status, was that the unthinkable and unprintable realities, the very realities that Himes so desperately attempted to name, were those which resisted the violence of Manhood by referring to a repressed (black) animality.
Of course what I felt then as an ape I can represent now only in human terms.
—Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy”
Animal imagery is so omnipresent in The End of a Primitive as to form a sort of static background. Jesse lives in a rooming house dominated by gay men. In his relentlessly homophobic descriptions he is ever careful to remind his readers of their animal attributes. His flatmates are all birdmen. The youngest of them has beautiful “doe eyes.” In the main hall of the apartment there is “a stuffed owl which appears so shockingly lifelike in such natural surroundings that Jesse often wondered how the birdmen would dare venture from their nests” (Himes, The End of a Primitive, 39–40). For her part, Kriss is not above the most vulgar articulations of white fantasies of black bestiality. “If we still owned slaves I’d pay a year’s wages for you,” she tells Jesse after many hours of drinking and unrelieved sexual tension. “I’d keep you in my bedroom for a pet and give you a gold collar and nameplate” (165). And as Jesse himself becomes more and more desperately drunk, he continuously references black humanity’s kinship with apes. Irritated when Kriss tells him that an old lover is coming over for drinks, he goads her by suggesting that she search for more partners “in the jungle,” adding that should the stock of humans not prove adequate, “there are the apes” (181). Continuing the joke later in the evening, he announces that he is “going to write the biography of the great white ape who rules all the black apes in the jungle.” He completes the ill-conceived joke with the claim that “Of course the title will be, Gone with the Apes” (183). Finally deflecting the criticism of the other guests, he answers that he’d “been an ape too long to change now—feeling mighty uncomfortable as a human being” (188).
There is an obvious arrangement of irritated and outraged play on display here. Instead of retreating behind more palatable narratives of black cultural retardation, Himes restates the simplest of racial slurs. The black’s inferiority can never be overcome, as, unlike the white, he cannot settle the knotty problem of his bestiality, the cunning of his animal flesh. Repeating the most solidly established forms of racialism, he represents the black/animal as a being not yet become an actor. Instead, it exists as an elemental actuality outside history and culture that can be discerned with only the most peculiar of discursive and technological strategies. The black/animal must remain “outside,” “on the edge,” as it is from this position that it becomes available as the most necessary, most potent prosthetic within the Manhood arsenal.
At once amused and enraged by the limitations put on his life and career by this particular structure of thought and feeling, Jesse pens a very brief, very clumsy, and very funny short story both to distract himself and to make visible the dominant ideological structures of Euro-American racialism.
The nigger woke, sat up, scratched at the lice, stood up, farted, pissed, crapped, gargled, harked, spat, sat down, ate a dishpan of stewed chitterlings, drank a gallon of lightning, hated the white folks for an hour, went out and stole some chickens, raped a white woman, got lynched by a mob, scratched his kinky head and said, “Boss ah’s tahd uh gittin’ lynched. Ah’s so weary kain keep mah eyes open,” and the Boss said, “Go on home an’ sleep, nigger, that’s all you niggers is good for.” So he went back to his shanty, stealing a watermelon on the way, ate the watermelon rind and all, lay down on his pallet, blinked, yawned and went to sleep hating the white folks. (63)
The humor that fuels this story is built around the bluntness of the racialist common sense, the steadiness and sobriety of the white supremacist archive. The nigger is a fundamental and rudimentary creature. It has no particular motivations and cannot be said to desire. Instead it exists as pure repetition. It wakes, eats, drinks, rapes, steals, gets lynched, and hates white people in a timeless process punctuated only by the occasional interventions of the Boss. Its dumbness is absolute. If it forms ideas larger than a confused hating of (white) Man, this remains impossible to discern, as the philosophical structures available within the Studia are blind to the possibilities of animal thought. That said, I want to make it plainly clear that what I am after here is not a retreat from notions of black bestiality. Instead what interests me are the possibilities inherent in fully inhabiting the ideological contradictions that support the “necessary” distinction between Man and animal.
Jacques Derrida makes a similar claim as he comments on the discomfort of being watched by his cat as he stands naked in the bath, a discomfort made stranger still by the fact that the cat is itself naked, though, in Derrida’s figuration, not nude.
There is no nudity “in nature.” There is only the sentiment, the affect, the (conscious or unconscious) experience of existing in nakedness. Because it is naked, without existing in nakedness, the animal neither feels nor sees itself naked. And therefore it isn’t naked. At least that is what is thought. For man it would be the opposite, and clothing derives from technics. We would therefore have to think shame and technicity together, as the same “subject.” And evil and history, and work, and so many other things that go along with it. Man would be the only one to have invented a garment to cover his sex. He would be a man only to the extent that he was able to be naked, that is to say, to be ashamed, to know himself to be ashamed because he is no longer naked. And knowing himself would mean knowing himself to be ashamed. On the other hand, because the animal is naked without consciousness of being naked, it is thought that modesty remains as foreign to it as does immodesty. As does the knowledge of self that is involved in that.12
I would like to remain focused for a moment on the shame/technicity nexus that Derrida describes. Specifically, I suggest that the only way that such an idea can be said to have any logical stability is if we admit a rather surprisingly limited idea of human technique. Shame is understood as a form that is counterpoised to an ill-defined nature, that thing which is separate, that stands aloof from the discursive. The problem, however, is that ever so difficult to read cat. Being but not existing within its nakedness, it is established as a thing that stands wholly opposite to Man. Yet the descriptions that Derrida utilizes represent it as hopelessly implicated within human technicity. Its domestication is the ticket that allows its privileged admission into Derrida’s bathroom. One imagines a collar, a bell, well-groomed fur, and manicured claws all testifying to centuries of Man’s manipulation. Its function is precisely to reflect the very self-consciousness that is so much on display in Derrida’s prose. It has been produced to provoke human self-reflection, to help operationalize the mechanics of shame. Moreover, one would be well advised to remember that we have no actual access to Felis catus here, but instead a representation of the same.
Only very recently can there be said to be any general disarticulation of the notion of the African and the black as warped or uncooked versions of the human animal. At the core of so-called Western humanism one finds an impressively resilient will to maintain racialist practices and procedures that reiterate the anthropophorous animal/Man binary. To cease to do so would so clarify the connections between slavery, colonization, and white supremacy in the articulation of the humanities and human sciences as to risk even further eroding their already decidedly weak claims to social relevancy. The expected response to this claim is to call foul, to point to the black’s embrace of order, the snugly fit nature of his shamefully pulled on clothes. Such procedures have helped us gain hard-won positions in the still proliferating whitewashed houses dotting the nether edges of American campuses. What I believe to be a much more interesting—and perhaps more efficacious—move, however, what I hope might get us closer to the new ceremony for which Wynter calls, would be to refuse these old techniques, to give up on our constant efforts to have black Manhood and black respectability recognized. Instead, as a first move in the production of a post-humanist Black Studies project, we should recognize that the human/animal, order/chaos binary is such a desperate gambit that not only can it no longer be particularly useful in the articulation of anticolonialist, anti–white supremacist intellectual insurgency, but also it is clearly inadequate for the work of naming and projecting advanced notions of human subjectivity.
Man is not a singular reality, but instead a technique of the human. The preciousness with which so many approach the humanities and human sciences is itself an emblem of the fragility of the Manhood trope. Having lost hold of the fact that the hu(Man)ities are but extensions of a set of aesthetic/prosthetic procedures designed to compensate for an original wounding, that tearing and incapacitation that Octavio Paz claims attended the human species’ development from the commonality of apes with their faces bent toward the ground to the isolation of an individuated and isolated bipedal collection of (non)animals, we confuse the all too shallow conceits of the Studia for original, incontrovertible truth. In this way our imaginative faculties become increasingly dull, our ethics remarkably cynical.13
I am supported in my claims by Franz Kafka’s impressively underappreciated short story “A Report to an Academy.” Published in 1917, the account presents the details of Red Peter, a speaking ape who appears before a scientific association to give the details of his capture and transformation from ape to “human.” The work relentlessly undermines notions of Man’s nobility and instead precisely graphs the humanization process on a grid marked by domination, submission, diminution, and leveling. “To give up on being stubborn was the supreme commandment I laid upon myself,” Peter testifies to the Academy. “Free ape as I was, I submitted myself to that yoke.”14
That Kafka so stubbornly plots Red Peter’s story along the familiar narrative outlines of slavery and colonization has the effect of not only naming the vulgarity of the Euro-American history of conquest, but also of making plain the ways that the humanities and human sciences (the Academy) are themselves first and foremost systems of domination and suppression. Red Peter’s status as a near human is built upon the relinquishment of his stubbornness. In order to appear as a valued guest before the Academy, one must be wholly willing to place one’s neck inside the trap. In the process, however, Peter loses access to those modes of discernment and articulation that have not been vetted within the Academy’s disciplinary procedures. That is the point. While practitioners of the humanities and human sciences are ever eager to demonstrate the often impressive advances in knowledge achieved within their various procedures, they remain largely unconcerned with the striking amount of knowledge that is not so much ignored by their disciplinary structures as repressed. Red Peter’s narrative sounds thin, expected, almost banal to the contemporary reader. There is very little that is intimate about the history that he recounts. Instead, what he achieves is the expression of the wholly expected set of narrative protocols that attends any ape’s movement from the bestial to the human. “I belong to the Gold Coast,” he announces. “For the story of my capture I must depend on the evidence of others” (Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” 246).
What Peter names, of course, is nothing more fanciful than double consciousness. Articulation is an exercise in forgetting. Red Peter’s access to the singularity of his existence has been canceled in favor of a complex discursive technique that allows him to project a finely wrought simulacrum of his former self. As a consequence, he harbors no resentment about what was done, noting good-naturedly that he has “drunk many a bottle of good red wine” with the leader of the expedition that shot and captured him (246). The only alternative records of the original assault are the very wounds to Peter’s flesh. His name is Red Peter and not simply Peter, the name of another performing ape of his generation, because he carries a “large, naked, red scar” on his cheek, persistent emblem of the bullet to the face he received on the day of his capture (246). A second bullet hit him below the hip, giving him a permanent limp and the rather unsettling habit of taking down his trousers in polite company in order to show his guests the entry point. Any symbolization of the very real and quite recent violence underwriting the studied disinterestedness of the Academy is to be avoided. It is not so much that by demonstrating his scar Red Peter risks offering a glimpse of ape genitals, but instead that this action reveals a competing narrative, an alternative discursive mode, an archive of flesh that might prove the lie of the Academy’s monopolization of (human) knowledge.
Peter was transferred from the Gold Coast to Europe by ship—in his case, the Hagenbeck steamer—where after the ordeal of his wounding and capture, he woke to find himself in a steel and wood contraption so low and narrow that he was forced to squat with “knees bent and trembling all the time,” while the bars of the cage cut into the “flesh behind” (246). Trapped below deck, his body treated as a hindrance, a thing to be jettisoned in the acquisition of Manhood, he was forced to take up the most complex of modern tasks. He approached his own ape flesh as an object distinct from his personhood. The anthropophorous animal must be made and remade, born and reborn. Not only must we imagine this strange form, but we must also constantly gird ourselves against fully recognizing how splendidly ludicrous this imaginative structure actually is. Sneeringly distinguishing between the enlightened concept of liberty and the “way out” that he sought as he squatted trembling in his cell onboard the Hagenbeck, Peter speaks of the strange representations of freedom that so delight contemporary Europeans:
In variety theaters I have often watched, before my turn came on, a couple of acrobats performing on trapezes high in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked to and fro, they sprang into the air, they floated into each other’s arms, one hung by the hair from the teeth of the other. “And that too is human freedom,” I thought, “self-controlled movement.” What a mockery of holy Mother Nature! Were the apes to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter. (249)
The human freedom that presumably floats above one’s head in an old-fashioned circus tent is itself a profoundly naïve aestheticization of the body’s domination, a desperate reaction against the spontaneity, disloyalty, and uncertainty that accompany our aloof and treacherous flesh. More vulgar still, the spectacle that Peter describes does an obviously sloppy job of occluding the distinction between freedom and a sort of comfortable acquiescence. Like Himes, dissatisfied by the side of his pool in Moraira, Red Peter has given up all connection to the ideal in order to access the possible. “I deliberately do not use the word ‘freedom,’” he informs the Academy (249). Instead he opts for a simple and infinitely practical “way out.” He wishes to exit that cage, walk above deck, and avoid the worst aspects of his capture and debasement. Eventually coming to understand that there was no escape for him, but instead only progressively more comfortable forms of incarceration, he made a choice between two available options: the zoo or the stage. “I said to myself: do your utmost to get on the variety stage; the Zoological Garden means only a new cage; once there, you are done for” (253).
I wish to read Red Peter’s entrance onto the stage, his willingness to present himself as a stylishly attired and comfortably housed freak, in direct relation to the activities of scholars of the African diaspora sitting (squatting?) more or less comfortably in offices at the plantation’s edge. Moreover, the irritated tone that travels with this simple pairing ought to be taken as evidence of my fear that the price for achieving positions at either margin or center is often a passivity and dulling of our critical sensibilities that seriously limit our creativity and negatively add to the continued erosion of the coherence and utility of the humanities and human sciences. As with the constantly inebriated characters in The End of a Primitive, we are only able to enact and reenact base forms of viciousness in the absence of sober reflection. Worse still, we often seem to have forgotten that we are drunk. Tellingly, Kafka suggests that the attainment of that signal element of human exceptionality, speech, is itself an extension of the human animal’s ability to quite effectively drug itself. Even after achieving the doubled self-consciousness that allowed him to repress the will of a free ape living in the Gold Coast and substitute in its stead the complex wounding of its avatar, “Red Peter,” the creature left crouching in that cage, the being seeking desperately for some way out, found it exceedingly difficult to master two of the most common behaviors of the human animal: speech and the consumption of alcohol.
Peter had been given diligent instruction in both speaking and drinking by a sailor who recognized in the captive the possibility of human consciousness. Instead of readily responding, however, the ape perceived the man’s vocalizations as nothing more than incessant grunting and the bottles of alcohol that he offered as revolting poison to be hurled immediately from the lips in shock and rage. The trick, however, was again to give up on the precision that is implied by the term “freedom” and instead to accept the dulling and reduction of animal possibility that mark the “way out.”
I took hold of a schnapps bottle that had been carelessly left standing before my cage, uncorked it in the best style, while the company began to watch me with mounting attention, set it to my lips without hesitation, with no grimace, like a professional drinker, with rolling eyes and full throat, actually and truly drank it empty; then threw the bottle away, not this time in despair but as an artistic performer; forgot indeed, to rub my belly; but instead of that, because I could not help it, because my senses were reeling, called a brief and unmistakable “Hallo!” (252–53)
Where Kafka and Himes meet is in the unyielding manner in which they point to the many intricate and intimate modes of violence that help to establish the fiction of a humanity that exists outside nature, and also in their insistence that our most basic discursive modes do not represent advances over our “animal natures,” but instead retreats from the basic realities of our species being. Eloquence, at least the eloquence celebrated by the academicians examining Red Peter, is a factor of intoxication, proof of the senses reeling. Speech is the device that helps to stanch the wounds left when consciousness has been ripped from the ape’s body. “The Negro” in the cell, the shack, the white house is itself an attempt at suturing. It is the always half-slurred aestheticization of the viciousness that underwrites our most cherished projects of philosophy and criticism. As a consequence, its elementary mumblings are always inchoate, if also somehow surprisingly attractive.
Kafka’s genius in “A Report to an Academy” is made more apparent still when we consider that by transplanting Red Peter from Africa to Europe on the Hagenbeck, he focused his readers’ attention squarely on the figure of his contemporary Carl Hagenbeck, a German impresario in the mold of P. T. Barnum, who from the 1870s forward produced ethnic shows featuring Nubians, Inuits, Patagonians, Sioux, Samoans, Somalis, Maasai, and many other exotic individuals to awestruck audiences in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, England, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Italy, the Netherlands, and Argentina. The fact that Hagenbeck was also an importer of unusual animals, providing stock to Barnum himself, should be enough to alert you to Kafka’s keen awareness of the lack of distinction between the anthropological and the zoological. Hagenbeck regularly donated objects that he collected for his shows to ethnological museums and eventually became a member of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory. More telling still, he was concerned both as entrepreneur and anthropologist with controlling the risk posed by the possibility that his exotics might directly communicate with the audiences that arrived to view them.15 As Hilke Thode-Arora writes, “To guarantee the smooth running of the show, he preferred most of his performers (with the exception of a few translators) to be unable to speak a European language, fearing that contact with the spectators might stir them up, inciting revolt or conflict” (Thode-Arora, “Hagenbeck’s European Tours,” 169). The intemperate fear that Thode-Arora reports is one and the same with the shock that one might receive upon discovering not so much that the primitive might, if given enough opportunity and motivation, indeed speak, but also that the very fact of its iteration demonstrates the flimsiness of the fiction of “Man.” A single “Hello” from a prepossessing Somali both proves the lie of European superiority and makes plain the paths of violence and bloodshed that allow the loquacious meeting of Man and anthropophorous animal to take place.
This allows us to understand even more clearly the joke of Himes’s using images of apes attempting not to echo tinny rhetorics of (un)freedom in The End of a Primitive. In addition to Jesse’s drunken comments about Kriss’s sexual appetites and his own subhuman social status, Himes creates a splendidly clever narrative device that efficiently paces the novel while allowing for delicious critique of the ideology of Man. Kriss’s favorite television program is one in which a newscaster interviews a talking chimpanzee who predicts current events. What is fascinating about this maneuver is that while it obviously recalls the history of African Americans in U.S. broadcasting, a history that reveals the freakish conceptions of human subjectivity that underwrite American-style white supremacy, it also actively resists both Derrida’s clumsy articulation of animal presence as but a reflection of human subjectivity and Kafka’s pessimistic representation of an animal subjectivity that remarks itself only through techniques designed to suppress all forms of knowledge that do not reiterate the dominance of Man.
The chimpanzee that appears and reappears in The End of a Primitive is at once critical and aloof. Its presence is a continual reminder of the fact that, notwithstanding the rhetoric of Man’s absolute dominance, there are many locations in the physical and social worlds that can never be fully noted by and within the techniques available to us within the Studia.
“On November 4, 1952, Republican nominee for President, five-star General of the Army, Dwight D. Eisenhower, will be elected President of the United States by an overwhelming landslide of 442 electoral votes and a popular vote of 33,938,285, the largest popular vote in the history of your Republic, thereby giving Senator McCarthy a mandate to rid the nation of its mentality,” the chimpanzee stated with extreme boredom. After all, this would bear no effect on chimpanzees—chimpanzees didn’t think. (Himes, The End of a Primitive, 24)
The work that Himes accomplishes here is something altogether distinct from the repetition of the usual complaint that whites conceive of blacks as some lesser species of animal, a conceit only barely relieved by the depressingly common liberal claim that black individuals and communities are not biologically deficient, but instead simply culturally and socially underdeveloped. Instead the giggling, jeering critique that Himes offers is one in which he suggests that especially at those moments of absolute certainty, the anthropophorous animal continues in its semi-wild state. It is impossible to integrate a nonthinking animal into Man’s most precious discursive structures, nearly impossible to explain what establishes the boredom of a beast whose articulation is nothing more than autonomic recall of the most basic forms of human iteration.
Throughout this book I have argued that practitioners of Black Studies should not only actively pursue the discovery of new archives, but also approach the materials they encounter with radically imaginative forms of critique. While I sometimes covet the comforts that one might find at the plantation’s center, I am also painfully aware that the work of decolonization, the difficult task of confronting and dismantling the structural and ideological legacies of white supremacy and capitalism, are retarded precisely to the extent that we embrace and repeat structures of thought that allow for unexamined articulations of a clear distinction between Man and animal. Part of what so attracts me to this image of a talking and bored chimpanzee is that Himes loads it with questions of limitation and compromise that are absolutely necessary to our understanding of how humanists might begin to articulate something more than the most cynical, stunned, and defensive arguments for their relevancy. Ever contained within the limitations of an only half-watched television set, the chimpanzee is articulate only to the extent that it warps the modes of presentation available to it. Moreover, the presence of this “character” demonstrates a hopefulness within Himes’s aesthetic, a belief that one might gain something powerful and provocative by paying attention to the dumb beast’s vocalizations. After all, unthinking, bored, and aloof or not, this chimpanzee does not simply report the news, he predicts it.
Belying the often casual modes in which they are presented, animal interlocutors can represent unforgiving articulations of the ways that practices of colonization, enslavement, incarceration, and internment rebound upon “innocent” Americans and Europeans, whose discursive and ideological structures consistently prove inadequate for the project of preparing them for the everyday repetition of violence and repression that is perhaps the most obvious legacy of both Atlantic slavery and Western humanism.
“On July 1 responsible officials of the United States will charge that slave labor exists in Russia on a scope unknown in the history of man.” . . . “On September 8 a woman named Bella V. Dodd will testify before a Senate Internal Security subcommittee in New York that there are fifteen hundred Communist party members teaching in schools throughout the nation.” . . . “On May 21 fascist Spain will be admitted to UNESCO.” . . . “On October 16 U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson will urge the U.N. to continue to fight in Korea as long as is necessary to stop aggression and restore peace and security.” . . . “On November 8 police will fire on black rioters in Kimberly, South Africa killing fourteen and wounding thirty-nine. African blacks will be protesting against government segregation policies of African blacks in Africa. . . . Police will shoot into a mob of ungrateful African blacks, impressing them with white man’s goodwill toward African blacks who respect white man’s rule in Africa,” the chimpanzee concluded, yawning with an air of extreme boredom. After all, no one was shooting down chimpanzees. (Himes, The End of a Primitive, 90–91)
Slave labor in Russia, denunciations of communists, the embrace of fascists, the continued violation of the Koreas, and the murdering of black Africans exist for Himes in a singular and indivisible ideological and discursive field that I suspect is still extremely difficult for many of us either to discern or comprehend. The disinterestedness of the chimpanzee, his yawning announcement of yet another tragic loss of black “human” life, models for Himes’s readers the inability to move beyond consideration of strictly defined precincts of European and American culture, an inability that—no matter how clumsy or limited—often stands in for what is often referred to as cosmopolitanism. At the same time, the chimpanzee has the decency to at least depart from liberal obfuscation and deflection. As a consequence, his predictions are delivered with a clarity and precision that allow for something more than the repetition of the Studia’s dominant techniques.
Half high on coffee and sedatives in his Mallorca garden, Himes took delicious pleasure in the composition of these tongue-in-cheek representations of animal articulation. Living as an exile unable to conform to either the complexities of white supremacy or the banalities of anti-intellectualism, Himes—like Kafka before him—embraced the comforts offered by the expression of the absurd. Though he did not achieve “freedom” per se, he was able to erect a discursive apparatus supple enough to articulate in one breath the commonplaces of woman hating, anti-black racism, and the all too easy normalization of (Spanish) fascism. Like a chimp hurling its feces at pink, hairless faces bobbling behind heavy glass, Himes knows and announces the constant threat of violence that he is under, yet he does not make the mistake of assuming that the bloodthirstiness of his captors is a demonstration of either impressive intellect or advanced culture.
Placing into the ape’s mouth a joke about the U.S. government’s role in the stabilization of Franco’s government, the castaway writer attempted a domestication of the rhetorics of statecraft and geopolitics that might allow his readers to understand that they need no special vocabulary to discern the order of things, but instead simple good sense—the humility and composure passed down from their enslaved ancestors—in order to see the masters resplendent in their nakedness and yet not laugh.
Chimpanzee: There was great poverty in Spain and the Franco government couldn’t get a penny from the U.S. and they had a grave beggar-problem similar to your Negro-problem which had to be solved, besides which Franco’s uniforms were getting somewhat frayed. So the Generalissimo met with his ministers to see what could be done about these problems, especially about the problem of his uniforms. After a week’s deliberation, the ministers suddenly struck upon a foolproof solution. In a body, they rushed to the palace and demanded an immediate audience with the Generalissimo.
—“What’s the answer, boys?” he asked.
—“Declare war on the U.S.!” they chorused exultantly.
Generalissimo Franco considered the suggestion. He thought of the prosperity in post-war Japan and Germany. It seemed to be a flawless solution. But he was assailed by one grave doubt.
“But what if I win?” he asked. (Himes, The End of a Primitive, 201)
One imagines Himes alone in his garden, head back, eyes closed, cackling laughter spewing from a wide open mouth as he relishes the profundity of the humor on display in this brief passage. The punch line turns on the fact that not only could Franco win, he did. The burning, anti-fascist sentiment that motivated two generations of (black) intellectuals and led many to initiate intimate, even lifelong, associations with Spain and the Spanish people proved inadequate to the task of stopping the Falangists in their paths. Himes’s very presence on lovely and demoralized Mallorca proved that fascist thought and politics could be quite easily normalized within the complex of liberal institutions that structure European and American society.
The real joke, however, was the fact that part of Franco’s genius was his ability to recognize that ruthless exploitation and violence have always been stunningly successful social—and cultural—gambits. The success of the Falangist campaign could come as a surprise only to those individuals whose humanity had not recently been called into question. Having started his military career fighting against Moroccan insurgents, Franco was fully cognizant of how shock troops and heavy bombing might both scatter militants and demoralize the general population. Much of the horror of the great European wars was established by the shock suffered by persons previously treated as Men upon realizing that the violence methodically meted out to the enslaved and the colonized could be used just as effectively against them. Like Red Peter drunk on cheap schnapps, many Europeans and Americans were—and are—surprisingly slow to understand that the boundaries of violence are infinitely flexible. The mechanics of slave society are regularly applied against populations of pink-skinned individuals whether they can decipher the phenomenology of the whip’s sting or not.
I call for a recalibration of Himes’s status as a sort of half-canonized African American writer. We need desperately to consider the whole of Himes’s oeuvre and not simply his rightly celebrated crime novels. Even more to the point, Himes’s deployment of marginal characters—animals, homosexuals, prisoners, criminals, detectives, and a dizzying assortment of lost individuals such as Kriss Cummings and Alva Trent—should not be taken as simple evidence of the author’s desire to demonstrate a colorfully evocative demimonde, but instead as an effort to resist normative ideologies of order. The blind spots and silences of dominant modes of thought and address are made spectacularly apparent through the deployment of absurdist elements that reveal the even more absurd structures of violence and naïveté that underwrite so much within the Studia. Though Himes rightfully lamented the difficulty he faced as an immensely talented black artist attempting to support himself and gain audience, it would be incorrect to assume that this state of affairs can wholly account for his career-long deployment of marginal characters and outrageous situations.
Early in The End of a Primitive, Jesse overhears one of his gay flatmates (he of the great doe eyes) lamenting, “I feel so unnecessary!” (41). An easy reading of this statement would be that Himes is allowing his character to lament the profound redundancy faced by a creature as odd and useless as a black gay man living in 1950s Manhattan. What I suspect Himes was actually after, however, was a simple articulation of the fact that the lack of solidity and depth that the character bemoans is an essential element within the structures of Western humanism. To the extent that one is a well-articulated citizen of the United States, Spain, and that crop of countries that we deign to consider peers, we are all redundant. Himes laments not so much primitivity as the compromises required of those who achieve status as modern and human. Jesse is fully actualized as an American and a cosmopolitan at precisely the moment that he kills Kriss. Drugged, defeated, and naïve, the ape gains its Manhood through a loss of substance and good common sense. One begins to understand very clearly why it took nearly thirty-five years for the unexpurgated version of Himes’s fine novel to be published. At a moment when liberal society in the United States wanted nothing more than to integrate Negroes into something approximating the American mainstream, Himes presented them with a work in which the conceits of the center (that fashionable apartment on Gramercy Park where Jesse gained his majority by plunging a kitchen knife deep into his lover’s drunken body) were revealed to be remarkably unappealing. Failed novelist and defeated black that he was, Jesse was so much better as a primitive than he was as a Man. For Himes, the benefits of “entering the human race,” the comforts of a fine villa in Moraira-Teulada, came at far too high a price. Instead, the castaway author relishing the brilliance of the light tripping across the Mediterranean and satisfied with the charms of a vanquished and discarded white woman decided to hedge his bets, to resist a least for a bit the beguiling pleasures of New York and Paris and to tarry a bit longer on the plantation’s edge.