Ugly
One of the most influential postmodern feminist writers, Kathy Acker explodes the politics of gender, sexuality, and genre in a series of experimental texts that have revolutionized narrative prose. Her technique of appropriation—pastiching pornography with autobiography, contemporary politics with traditional fiction, and psychoanalytic explorations with textual détournements—undermines narrative representation while creating new possibilities. At once excessive and subversive, Acker’s writings expand the sphere of the (un)speakable, after de Sade, the French surrealists, and Georges Bataille, but from the perspective of a radical feminism. “Ugly” is a futuristic narrative of human cruelty, misery, and revolutionary unrest set in a hypothetical present—an imagined, alternative Paris of the 1980s erupting with racial and class violence, anticipating historical events that would take place, two decades later, with the revolt of the banlieux. Her text presents a radical critique of colonialism, class, and capital using techniques of narrative defamiliarization. In both method and content, Acker’s work was an important precedent for writers of her generation such as Dodie Bellamy, Dennis Cooper, Carla Harryman, Kevin Killian, and Chris Tysh, while her influence continues with emerging writers such as Renee Gladman, Rob Halpern, and Tisa Bryant. Kathy Acker died on 30 November 1997.
In the face of suicide, in the face of those living corpses who are trying to drag us into their own suicides, in the faces of those old men, there seem to be two strategies:
One is a pure act of will. To bang one’s head against a wall, preferably a red brick wall, until either the red brick wall or the world, which seems unbearable and inescapable, breaks open. The Algerians in Paris had banged their heads against walls for years, on the street. Finally their heads opened into blood.
The second strategy wasn’t exactly one of will. The heads, being broken, gave up. Gave up in the face of the unopposable suicide of the owning class. Gave up in the face of the nothingness of the owning class. Because, for the Algerians, the world of humans was creepy disgusting horrible nauseous shit-filled exacerbating revolting, humans not revolting, green smelling of dead rats which were decaying and, in endless decay, covered in, like a royal blanket of flowers, purple herpes pustules which had riveted and cracked into fissures either to the body’s blood or to the earth’s blood, pale green and pale pink liquid minerals in the bottoms of one-thousand-feet-diameter strip mines in Arizona. Blood of the earth leaks into death. A chicken whose head had been cut off ran around like a chicken without a head. Because the head of a person who’d just been guillotined, lying on the earth, for five minutes remembered what had just happened to its head and body. Because in almost every nation political torture was a common practice so there was nowhere to which to run. Because most of the nations’ governments are right wing and the right wing owns values and meanings: the Algerians, in their carnivals, embraced nonsense, such as Voodoo, and noise.
The Caribbean English slave-owners in the nineteenth century had injected a chemical similar to formic acid, taken from two members of the stinging nettle family, into the already broken skins of their recalcitrant slaves. Ants crawl ceaselessly under the top layer of skin. And forced their unwilling servants to eat Jamaican “dumbcane” whose leaves, as if they were actually tiny slivers of glass, irritating the larynx and causing local swelling, made breathing difficult and speaking impossible. Unwilling to speak means unable to speak.
When Mackandal had been a child, a cane mill shaft, running over his right arm, had crushed his arm to its shoulder. With every force he had the tiny child pulled the mangled fragments out of the machine. Delirious he remembered something—Africa—many kinds of animals easily running, loping, over rolling hills—him running alongside of and as fast as these animals who accepted him as their friend, without effort. He remembered all that he couldn’t name. From then on, the child did not name. Not until. He wanted to unite his people and drive out the white Parisian owners. Once he knew unity, he would begin to name. Until then, his words were the words of hate. Mackandal was an orator, in the opinion even of Mitterrand, equal in his eloquence to the French politicians and intellectuals, and different only in superior vigor. Though one-armed from the childhood accident, he was fearless and had a fortitude which he had and could preserve in the midst of the crudest tortures.
“In the beginning of the world,” Mackandal once explained, “there was a living person. Because a person has to be living before he or she can be a corpse. The white people believe that death is prior to life.
“In the beginning, in his or her beginning, this living person is both physical and mental, body and spirit. The body must touch or cross the spirit to be alive. Touching they mirror each other. A living person, then, is a pair of twins.
“In the beginning, the twins are children. Children are the first ones. I’m a child,” Mackandal explained himself. His brown hair was sticking so straight out of each angle of his head that it seemed to be a wig.
“After a while, my children,” Mackandal also wore a top hat and was as thin as anyone’s shadow, “it was no longer the beginning. The two children had aged and died. There existed two corpses.
“After another while, the people who came after and after remembered the first children. Those first two beings were now two loa.
“I, then, or you, or he or she or even it, is five: body, spirit, living, dead, and memory or god. The whites make death because they separate death and life.” Obviously this black, like horses dogs cats and some wild animals, judged a human not by the skin’s colors but by how she or he behaved.
From 1981 to 1985, for five years, Mackandal built up his organization. But revolutions usually begin by terrorism. His followers poisoned both whites and their own disobedient members. But this wasn’t enough terror to start a revolution in such a bourgeois city.
Most of Mackandal’s followers were Algerians, and even other Black Africans, who hadn’t been content only to hover in the shadows corners alleyways of the city like tamed animals who had once been animals of prey, who were not content only to be alive by dying, slowly. Being godless this trash had only itself to turn to. Being ambitious vengeful burning with pride fierce as any blood-stained beast these remnants of oral history sought more than their own survivals. They sought revenge for the past and paradise for the future. They lived in camps in the squalor of the northernmost sections of Paris or in the crime-infested eastern areas. If you could call it living.
The Parisian and the French government desired simply to exterminate the Algerian trash, the terrorists, the gypsies. The urban sections inhabited by Algerians were literally areas of plague to the Parisians who knew how to speak properly. The French authorities murdered pregnant women. They made every Algerian they could locate carry a computerized identity card. As a result, one rebellion, for instance, that took place over a vast city block, part of which was a deserted parking lot, in the south, lasted a hundred years until every Parisian deserted the zone altogether.
As a result of this urban rather than political situation, by 1985 city ordinances prohibited all blacks from going anywhere at night unless accompanied by a white and carrying a special governmental ordinance. Even in broad daylight three or more blacks who talked together or even stood together without at least an equal number of whites were considered to be a terrorist cadre and subject to penal disciplines up to death. Night searches in the slums, the gypsy camps, would have been frequent if the flics, as bourgeois as all other Parisians, hadn’t preferred the warmth of their own Parisian couscous to a possible knife in the groin. Whenever a flic caught an Algerian with a weapon, such as a pencil, the flic was rewarded and the Algerian punished in some manner that was always very public. But there were too many Algerians, blacks, in the slums, the shadows, the alleyways, the deserted Metro stations: by 1985 an official police report states that “security was now nonexistent” for whites in Paris. It was unwise for whites to act.
Not only did Mackandal’s direct followers steal on Metro lines, from the apartments not only of the rich, not … Mackandal himself walked through the city of the whites as freely as he pleased. Whoever was of the disenfranchised the unsatisfied the poor those so wallowing in misery they were almost mindless, what the white call “zombie,” followed him and did not know why. Not knowing was their only possible way. Just how many of the urban semi-inhabitants—semi because only partly alive—chose to follow this desperate man and this desperate path cannot be known. We have wallowed in non-knowledge for not long enough.
Since it is easy enough to kill, terrorism, unlike conventional rebellion, cannot be stopped. Mackandal grew sick of thievery, pillaging, arson. When a person arises from that poverty which is death and can begin and begins to dream, these dreams echo the only world that has been known or death. Soon such dreams of negation are not enough. Mackandal no longer was interested in petty violence: he dreamed of paradise, a land without whites. He determined to get rid of every white.
The Algerian women who had been forcibly sterilized by the French. The street-cleaners. Etc. Everywhere, in the shadows where they couldn’t be seen because they were too low and black, Mackandal’s followers learned the fastest ways to poison whites. Mackandal especially concentrated on those who labored as servants: he taught them about herbs, the puffer fish and the scaly toad. From old women who lived alone in basements and in the outskirts of the city under used-up and left-over McDonald’s stands, Mackandal himself learned how to regulate the human body with natural chemicals. A person who eats even a small amount of the tetrodotoxin of the puffer fish or fugu feels pale, dizzy, and nauseous. Insects seem to be crawling just beneath the skin. The body seems to float. Drool drops out of the mouth while sweat runs out of the pores—the body is deserting the body—the head is aching and almost no temperature exists. Material is cold. All is ice. Nausea; vomiting; diarrhea; the eyes are fixed; it is almost not possible to breathe; muscles twitch then stop, paralyzed. Unable to move you. Eyes are glass you. The soul lies in the eyes. The mental faculties remain acute until shortly before death; sometimes death does not occur. Many many herbs. In time, like ink on a blotter, poison seeped into the lives of the whites. Poison entered the apartments of the bourgeoisie. There is a way to stop guns and bombs. There’s no way to stop poison which runs like water. The whites had industrialized polluted the city for purposes of their economic profit to such an extent that even clean water was scarce. They had to have servants just to get them water and these servants, taught by Mackandal, put poison in the water.
One day Mackandal arranged for the poisoning of every upper-middle- and upper-class apartment in Paris. The old man didn’t need to suicide. While, due to their beloved, almost worshipped, victuals, the white Parisians writhed around, bands of Algerians and other blacks appeared out of their shadows and alleyways.
In the meantime, Spanish sailors, longtime anarchists, had flowed in from the ports near Paris, via the Seine, in orgies of general hooliganism and destruction. Pale blue and pink condom boxes cluttered up the brown river. Diseased and non-diseased sperm flowed down the Champs-Elysées. Empty needles lay under bushes north of the Ted Lapidus on the rue du Four. Drunk with animal blood and whatever else they had been pouring into their mouths, these sailors, black white and other, who couldn’t speak a word of French, began breaking into shops, taking whatever merchandise they could stuff in their mouths pockets pants and assholes. As soon as they realized this merchandise meant nothing to them (except for the contents of the pharmaceutical cabinets), they trashed the stores. Soon the hardy men, though inured to longer days of boredom, grew tired of this game.
They joined the Algerians, their brothers, who were breaking into flats of the rich. The whites were already trembling from fear, nausea, and diarrhea. A few of them managed, hands raised over heads, to shove themselves against wall-papered walls. The blacks no longer backed off. The few sailors who had been doomed to remain on their ships, at the western edge of the city on the filthy river, from the far distance saw this city: Algerians, blacks swarming everywhere: dogs nudging over garbage cans with their cold black noses. The flames of cigars and lit candles overflowing the churches falling on this mass of garbage ignited it, starting thousands of tiny fires which finally had to grow. The whole city was in flames. In the middle, a very tall very thin black man stood. Finally the winds, instead of fanning fires, swirled the dead ashes which used to be a city.
A group of white soldiers in the American Embassy, off the corner of the Louvre, when the looting had started, had held three innocent Algerian boys and one girl who had entered the Embassy out of curiosity up to one wall with machine guns. The soldiers acted exactly as they had been trained. First they asked the blacks the name of their leader. There was no reply.
“If you don’t tell us what we want to know, we’re going to kill one of you.”
The Algerian boys were between the ages of twelve and eighteen and the girl was six. They looked at each other. None of them said a word.
Doing his duty, a soldier, a lieutenant, twisted one of the Algerian boy’s arms behind his back until the cracking of a bone could be heard. “Watch,” the American lieutenant told the other three Algerians. The lieutenant’s other hand, grabbing the boy’s chin, yanked it up and back while his knee kept the lower spine straight. When the boy’s growing black eyes fell straight into the lieutenant’s face, the lieutenant’s face registered no emotion. He simply increased the pressure of his double pull until the young neck cracked. The boy still wasn’t dead. Blood fell out of the left side of his mouth.
Finally the youth said more than blood to the American. “Kill me.” The American had already killed him.
When another soldier started playing with one of the youngest boy’s balls, the girl tried to protect her friend by biting at the soldier’s hands. The soldier kicked her head. She lay lifeless on the expensive marble floor.
“Who’s your leader? Do you want all of you to die?” the soldier who had the authority asked the two boys.
“Don’t tell them anything. Never tell Americans anything cause all they know how to do is kill,” the oldest boy instructed the youngest.
From the floor the girl watched another death.
All the soldiers turned to the remaining boy. The girl watched them turn to the remaining boy. She watched them emotionlessly, sexuallessly, without caring, torture him to the point they realized they could not get information out of him then murder him. She perceived these men were not humans.
One man grabbed her by her hair. “Slut.” The word surprised her. She wasn’t sure what they were talking about.
“Do you see what’s happened to your little friends? Don’t you want to grow up?”
“Yes,” she said. They were adults.
“Do you know how much pain your friends felt?”
All she knew was that the world, totality was terror. She screamed out Mackandal’s name, all the other names of leaders which she could remember, and then they killed her.
Such betrayals or rather such hideous perceptions of the totality of terror, of the fact that there is nothing else in this world but terror, happened so often that finally the whites who were left had Mackandal in their grasp.
They didn’t bother to speak to the Algerian leader. They hit him over the head, handcuffed him to a steel post inside some room in the same embassy, which by now was almost deserted. The lieutenant who had killed the first boy took out his cigarette lighter. He was going to burn Mackandal to death in reprisal for the lack of respect the Algerians had shown to the Americans. With this, the whites seemed to have regained the city.
As the first flames lit up the bottoms of his pants and socks, being more inflammable than his shoes, Mackandal whose guiding spirit, surprisingly, was Erzulie, the spirit of love, that is not of fertility, but of that which longs beyond reality infinitely, of all unrealizable desire, screamed so awfully the soldiers who were burning him thought they were in the presence of a victim of madness. His body began to shake, not in spasms, but regularly, not as if from flames, but as if possessed. He tried to tear his wrists from the handcuffs. A small section of a corner of that room had been decimated by a bomb. With a single almost invisible spasm the black leader in flames succeeded in wrenching himself out of his handcuffs. Before the dumbed Americans could react, still burning he was half-way across the room and through the hole.
It was not known what happened to Mackandal. Poisonings of whites continued: finally the Algerians won Paris. Except that more than a third of the city was now ash.
I had escaped from the rich old man, from his seemingly causeless desire to murder me, to this. I wondered whether I wanted to return to the old man. They always say that money equals safety, though I’m not sure who “they” are or about whose safety they’re speaking.
It used to be that men wandered over the earth in order to perceive new phenomena and to understand. I was a wanderer like them, only I was wandering through nothing. Once I had had enough of working for bosses. Now I had had enough of nothing.
PUBLICATION: Postmodern? (1987), 7:46–51.
KEYWORDS: New Narrative; postmodernism; politics; race.
LINKS: Kathy Acker, “‘Culture doesn’t account …’” (PJ 7); Bruce Boone, “Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations” (PJ 4); William McPheron, “Remaking Narrative” (PJ 7); Robert Glück, “His Heart Is a Lute Held Up: Poe and Bataille” (Guide; PJ 2); Steve McCaffery, “And Who Remembers Bobby Sands?” (PJ 5); Harryette Mullen, “Miscegenated Texts and Media Cyborgs: Technologies of Body and Soul” (Guide; PJ 9); Bernard Noël, “Poetry and Experience” (PJ 3); Andrew Ross, “The Oxygen of Publicity” (PJ 6); Leslie Scalapino, “War/Poverty/Writing” (PJ 10); Barrett Watten, “Social Space in ‘Direct Address’” (PJ 8); Ellen Zweig, “Feminism and Formalism” (PJ 4).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bodies of Work: Essays (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1996); Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker, ed. Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper (New York: Grove, 2002); Politics (New York: Papyrus, 1972); The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses (San Diego: Community Congress, 1973); Ripoff Red: Girl Detective (San Francisco: pvt. ptd., 1973); I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining (San Francisco: Empty Elevator Shaft, 1974); The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (New York: TVRT, 1975); Kathy Goes to Haiti (Toronto: Rumor, 1978); Great Expectations (New York: Grove, 1982); Blood and Guts in High School (New York: Grove, 1984); My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini (London: Pan, 1984); Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (New York: Grove, 1986); Empire of the Senseless (New York: Grove, 1988); In Memoriam to Identity (New York: Grove, 1990); Hannibal Lecter, My Father (New York: Semiotext[e], 1991); My Mother: Demonology, a Novel (New York: Pantheon, 1993); Pussy, King of the Pirates (New York: Grove, 1996); Eurydice in the Underworld (London: Arcadia, 1997).