G-Clef
Patricia J. Williams
G-Clef
I teach a class in Law, Media, and Public Policy. I have a series of images I sometimes show my students with which I play a little game that I call “Caption That Photo.” Here’s one (Figure 1). Generally, the students look at this and see prayer, pleading, a turning to heaven, supplication.
Here’s another (Figure 2). This image too tends to be understood as a scene of supplication and evokes a modicum of sympathy. As a naked visual, there is a sense of desperation, urgency, massive need, an overlay of disaster.
Here’s a third image (Figure 3). It is hard to tell, but that thing in the air could be a box of rice being tossed from a ruin. Most of my students see in this unlabeled visual a bucket brigade for vital supplies, survivors excavating not only people from the rubble, but the stuff of life from collapsed stores.
All these pictures are actually taken from the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, as you may have already guessed. The actual titles, as you may also know, are “Looter” for figure 1,1 “Looters” for figure 2,2 and “Looters throw a box of goods …” for figure 3.3
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Figure 3.
What is interesting is that titles really shift perceptions; if I initially show these images with the captions, the students tend to see riots and lawlessness. So just the word “looter” seems to change the relationship to these figures as legal subjects as well as human beings. The captions redirect attention and channel sympathies quite effectively. So, indeed, upon closer inspection, we can see how frightened that bottle of water must be, how alarmed must be that suspended, airborne box of rice. Indeed, we begin to hear it calling out, “Help, help—I’m being stolen by the greedy undeserving! Rescue me, Uncle Ben, rescue me, the shrink-wrapped embodiment of ordered property relation in an ownership society!”
Hush now … Can you hear it? Yes, there, on the breeze … the sound of commodities crying?
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My subject is the status of that rice: the activity of rice, the intentionality of rice, the miserable, plaintive voice of a ripped-off sack of rice.
I guess another way of putting it is to say that I want to interrogate what gets animated and what does not. How did the humanities become a product rather than a relation? How did we become customers rather than citizens? I am worried about how things live in language and how we objectify in a way that is eventually translated in and into law. For us in the legal academy, the line between human and subhuman, or person and thing, is perpetually urgent, particularly in an era when the limits of incarceration, torture, human trafficking, medical experimentation, and the right to due process often turn on newly minted meanings of words like “enemy combatant,” “underclass,” “rational actor,” “terrorist,” or “illegal alien.”
And so we ask the ancient questions: What connection do historical taxonomies have to the contemporary perpetuation of sexual servitude, genocide, torture, disappearance, starvation? What disconnections? What about us is truly or essentially “inalienable”? Whom we consider a person as opposed to whom we label as less fully endowed—a corporation? a prisoner?—is a problem that informs some of the most urgent legal and political questions of our time.
All this underscores the large degree of ventriloquism at work in the construction of legal fictions of all sorts, such as standing, legal subjectivity, or personhood. If an egg is “a person” from the instant of fertilization (even in the absence of biological implantation),4 as asserted by the 2012 Republican Party platform,5 many of us recognize that it has been endowed by the same mechanisms by which we recognize a municipality or a university or a corporation as a person. When those Republican candidates who have signed the so-called Personhood Amendment invoke “life” in the extremely comprehensive way that they have—including not just fetuses or embryos but the very thought of pregnancy as an immanent theological concept—we might as well call this deployment: imaginary citizens united.
As with the reached-for water bottle or the box of rice, the eternal maternal sanctity of the revived/inspired neo-egg is posited as being in constant battle for its little preborn life with the big, overheated, slutty, sluttish, irrational decision-making moral disregard of a woman who would loot the storehouse of her womb and raid the shelves of innocence.
Consider the voyeuristic “imagineering” of the all-male county commissioners in New Hanover, North Carolina, who turned down funding for a family health clinic while intoning that “if these young women were responsible people and didn’t have the sex to begin with, we wouldn’t be in this situation.” This normalizes some pretty astounding reversals of regard, and makes invisible the hurtful invasiveness of measures like Virginia’s attempt to legislate vaginal probes to explore the uncharted geography of women’s bodies, to peer and poke around for separate life in there, in need of rescue. Gotta show the selfish thieving hot ungodly babymama enormous, wall-sized visuals of her blastodermic vesicles in case she cannot see, in case she does not know.
In the wake of horrific tragedies like Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Haiti, such an objectivizing gaze likewise renders invisible the immediacy of ruination and human need, and rather illuminates the bags of rice and canteens of water and stores of medicine as the exclusive repositories of our protective anxiety and fear. Surely there is a preborn innocent more worthy of their dispensation than these grimy overreachers.
So there is a lexical dimension to being a person in language and the law. It is not a simple matter of whether you are alive or dead. You live or die, you speak or vanish, depending on where you are in the grammatical structure of human events. We are surprised when that rice raises its voice in English, but perhaps we should not be, any more than we are unsurprised when looters are silenced by peacekeeper’s gunfire.
When one is a first-class citizen, one is protected by the Bill of Rights and the presumption of innocence and inherent inalienable worth. When one is deemed chattel or an object of private law or an exchange rate in contract, then one is horse-traded and subject to the volatilities of a stock market with only a speculative price that is ever negotiated by others. By the same token, inanimate things can be framed so that they come alive, and live busier, more active lives than flesh, than blood—again, like the corporations in Citizens United,6 or a worried sack of rice floating above the human chain of starving Haitians.
Think of how much the simple cotton hoodie has assumed agentive properties in relation to the figure of the so-called young black male. The haplessly guileless Geraldo Rivera captured that relation when he said, “The hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death” as George Zimmerman.7 That living hoodie speaks louder than the flash of deadly gunfire, louder than the figure of the stilled young man.8 Hence, when Congressman Bobby Rush traded his sober-as-an-undertaker’s suit jacket for the loose shroud of a grey hoodie, it did not matter that he was reading a biblical passage about justice and mercy from the book of Micah, chapter 6, verse 8—he and his haberdasheries were quickly hustled out of the chamber by Capitol guards.9 The interpolated vocality of that hoodie was so fiercely clamorous that it provoked an immediate clamping down of the codes of decorum that prohibited the wearing of hats as per congressional rule 17, clause 5.10
“The member is suspended,” intoned Gregg Harper, Republican from Mississippi, the impassive presiding officer.11
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Ultimately, this jurisprudential enterprise is centered on what it means to be a person in the eyes of the law—albeit in the figurative eyes of a blind goddess. The germ of this thematic is the Three-Fifths Compromise found in Article I of the Constitution, which apportioned representation by “adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” By virtue of the institution of slavery, the interrogation of personhood is thus necessarily concerned with race, but the rhetoric of the Constitution broadly engages conceptions of living subjects, legal persons, nonpersons, and personified things.
Perhaps it has always been thus, but the bounds of personhood are being redistricted according to invisible new rules. Americans fear they are in decline, losing ground. We all feel it because these are not the economic times they used to be, but the danger looms that some of us are treating rights as a zero sum game so that whites are being swallowed up by nonwhites, patriarchal order ruined by slovenly, unfaithful women, and money speaks louder than words.12
And … that hoodies, like burqas, have evolved in this moment of American culture as sites of anxiety and secrecy, as ciphers for honor and betrayal. They provide shelter from hostile gaze yet also the titillation of erotic revelation. They provide a curtain against the world yet speak simultaneously of oppression and indictment and taboo. They chart a tremulous line between person and personification, class and class warfare, animus and eros, between lives constrained by excessive overseeing and deaths made visible by stoning.
So we confront the fluid subjectivity of relation between the visuals of Emmett Till’s destroyed, pieced-together body and the smooth, unmarked expanse of Trayvon Martin’s nearly intact corpse (but for the tiny efficiencies of bullet address). In either event, the epitaph memorializes a turf-war, a cheap defense of utterly worthless imaginary ground cast as a battle unto death.
Coda
In her lovely essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman asks, “how does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom?”13
About three weeks after the earthquake, I met a woman at Logan Airport in Boston. She had just arrived from Port-au-Prince, and her story lingers in my mind. We were sitting on a bench waiting for a shuttle bus, and she wanted to talk. She really had to work at sparking that conversation for I was deep in thought and not especially receptive. So it began slowly: She asked about the weather, I answered in monosyllables. She inquired about the timing of the shuttle’s arrival, I gave her my copy of the schedule. She kept it going, however, offering small hints of engagement. She was on her way to stay with her son who lived in Rhode Island. “Mmmm,” I said. She had three grandchildren. “How nice,” I parried. Then she told me where she was coming from, and that she almost had not made it off the island amid all the chaos.
With that, she won my full attention. When I followed her hints and asked the pertinent questions, she fell open, a river of sorrow, a rush of souls, an avalanche of death. So many dead, so many died, she said over and over. She had just gone outside to cook for the family, she lit the fire in the charbonnière, the earth shifted, the buildings collapsed. She kept repeating the story: She had been sitting in her yard with the meat half-cooked, the earth shifted for an instant, the buildings collapsed. She told me the same story eight or nine times, each iteration with some new detail: She had seasoned the meat; the flowers were in bloom, her youngest daughter was doing her schoolwork. Then she looked over her shoulder, the earth moved, the house collapsed, and everybody died. All wiped out in the colossal rumbling of an instant.
Suddenly, the woman halted her terrible liturgy, and the story took a turn out of nowhere. “You know what happened,” she confided, lowering her voice. “The night before the earthquake there was a funeral for a nine-year-old girl. In the middle of the service, she sat up in her coffin and said ‘I’m too hot.’ Then she jumped out, ran around the church three times and into the night.”
With that, the woman fell silent. She did not speak another word until we parted.
“Here is a story,” my grandmother used to begin her best tales, “that is and isn’t true.” And that is how I came to hear this woman’s tale, this story straight from the book of the dead or the day of the dead, or, as my grandmother used to describe it, the night that has no eyes. Wombs and tombs tumbling open, the earth stalked by ghosts. For everything else she said that might have been accepted as factual, it was that supernatural image of the little girl rising from her coffin that brought home the horror and incalculable fear of the hellish night in Port-au-Prince—the bodies never found by families who remain nameless, the disorder that will bend and break an entire generation, the losses that will not be recorded nor find their way to collective address, into the consciousness we call history—all the incomprehensible reversals of logic and illogic, the quick and the moribund, the active and the passive.
Once I began to hear her story as parable, it had a perfect coherence: It pointed to the enormity of that hole in time when the laws of man and nature had turned upsidedown so that the dead became alive and the alive became dead, even as they were preparing to eat. That conjuration conveyed more vividly than all the political, media, and statistical accounts combined what she had encountered when she had gone out into the evening, and she had prepared the fire, and the meat was half-cooked, and the building collapsed.