by Dionne Brand
My critics, like that deplorable man who writes for the newspapers, will say that I am describing a world that they don’t recognize. Well, patently that is true. I’m describing a world that I am forced to live in and they aren’t. I’m describing a world that is constructed through their unseeing. I refer here, as evidence, to the time I was asked by a daily newspaper to write for their series about the birth of the city two hundred years ago. It was Josie Ligna who gave my name to the editor she knew at the daily. Naturally, I wrote of the poverty of the city, the shelters that were underfunded; I said that the fact that we need shelters at all is the travesty. A columnist at the paper decided to chastise me in the next issue for telling a lie about the city, and for only highlighting the grim and ignoring the progress. He was dissatisfied that immigrants who no longer expressed the values of the former colonists had overrun the city. He eulogized on the loss of certain principles—really, certain stereotypes—of the hardworking and the puritan. Christ, this city is full of dreadful people. I couldn’t ignore him. I sent a letter to the editor, a letter longer than the essay I’d written, lambasting and parodying his upstanding colonists/settlers who had suddenly been overrun by the colonized and the ungrateful. Were I of a violent type, I would wish that sort of person to be assassinated. He is proof of how quickly the system can galvanize itself to counter even the slightest uptake of air by the oppressed. He’s the embodiment of a gag.
I suspect now that Josie Ligna had recommended me knowing that I would be attacked, and not at all because—as she said—she felt that “other” voices should be heard. She’d become known as a public intellectual and was called upon to pontificate on all matters urban. I was flattered by her recommendation at the time, and here’s my weakness, again. For all my alertness, I’m vain. I should’ve told Josie Ligna to do it herself. After all, doesn’t she live in the same city that I do? Isn’t she implicated, doesn’t she feel the discomfort as I do? If indeed we want the same world, I needn’t be the one to speak as if I possess a special legitimacy. She needs to say how the injustices affect her. In this way I was vulnerable to this viper’s attack. I don’t mind, though, and I’m not afraid of defending my ideas. Naturally, a possible source of income was prematurely cut off because of my relentless attack on the columnist. I’d hoped that the editor would solicit more pieces from me, but he took offence at my rightful repudiation of the idiot. He published an edited version of my letter, leaving out the most salient points about gravestones needing to be cut from lead to keep down the stench of the dreadful civilization the columnist represented.
A variety of fantasies are worked out in the colonized bodies in each of the paintings of Benjamin-Constant and Delacroix….“the force in the real world of the unconscious dreams of nation,” Jacqueline Rose writes in her work on Bessie Head’s A Question of Power. I would elaborate, the all-too-conscious dreams of Empire, not to say the realities of empire are at work in Benjamin-Constant and Delacroix. Scholars have remarked in a cursory fashion on the statements of these two. “How pitiful it is to see how you live, how enjoyable to paint it,” said Benjamin-Constant. “If I have won no victories for my country, at least I can paint for it,” said Delacroix. Well then, with what joy indeed did they set about the task of impressing themselves on the project of conquest in their work, we must ask. And we must answer with every fibre. With every fibre we must tell the truth of their artistic exploits. Instead we praise the realgar, exalt the verdigris, remark on the brush strokes of the carbon black. What Benjamin-Constant and Delacroix make visible is that project of conquest and colonization. In both their statements, the former following the latter by some forty years or so, we read the imperial, the patriotic and the libidinal, the abjection. Their apologists have muted these political statements and, worse, they have elided these statements into the rhetoric of art for art’s sake. A term we must abhor and eviscerate. These painters were well aware of their ambitions’ outcomes. Their desires coincided with a vision of the world that they set out to commit to canvas. More than “introducing the inhabitants of North Africa to Western painting,” as one scholar equivocates, these paintings introduce the inhabitants of North Africa to the gaze of abjection. Moreover the paintings curate the object(ification) of those bodies; their thingification or fetishization.*12
When I’ve gathered all of my ideas, when I’ve brought them into being fully, the manuscript will be about seven hundred pages or so. That is, when I’ve crystallized all the material lying here in my rooms. Notwithstanding, there will still be at least twenty-one hundred pages of notes remaining for later work. But I feel that the committee won’t be able to assess that length of a work, and despite the temptation to overwhelm them, I must draw back and get through this now. I feel the urgency of the moment—and circumstance has already forced me to delay. Selah and Yara and Odalys no longer account for my tardiness; at least I can no longer blame them. I mean, I never blamed them per se—after all, one has to live one’s life. But my life was never meant to be tied up. No, I despise this description. If it had worked out with any of them—But what can we mean by “worked out”?—if I’d managed not to disappoint them, or they me…Well, these propositions are neither here nor there. I live a life of the mind—or I flatter myself that I do. Even if it only amounts to self-involvement, it would seem as if I’m happy living this way.
Odalys always said that I lived too much in my head. She said I had no body, she said that I walked around her place like a floating brain. Teoria, she called me. One would have thought that she would’ve kept me, then, as part of her occult accoutrement. I never hear from Odalys and I never pass by Affinity Street without trepidation. I don’t dare knock on Odalys’ door in case her Nkisi answers. There’s little that I fear more than that nail-ridden figure that blocked my way in and out of Odalys’ rooms. I return to Odalys here because recently she’s been in my dreams and I can’t help but think this isn’t coincidence. Odalys does not appear by accident, not even in dreams. Some would think that my attention to this aspect of Odalys leaves me open to charges of superstition, or belies my much vaunted commitment to dialectical materialism. They would be wrong on both fronts. I’m not in the least bit superstitious. Odalys put ideas out in the air and these ideas are taken up and enacted. Odalys, in this way, is like any politician or preacher—the force of those ideas enacted became the fact of those ideas. If Odalys could walk backwards without damage, and if Odalys could find me and know from my face that I was wasting my light, then Odalys’ way had a legitimacy. Whether I believe in Odalys’ spiritism or not, her apprehension was correct. I’ll always love Odalys for that moment of recognition. The emotional facts between us are as important as the social or political facts. So when I remember Odalys, I remember that day when she saw me. Though I hope her presence in my dreams is not meaningful. She’s appeared there far too frequently of late. I hope that Odalys isn’t trying to make a comeback.
In this chapter, I will foreground the effects and confusions of the enactments of race, class, and sex passing in Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha.” As this chapter engages the ways that Stein produces meaning through the use of variously (en)coded and re-racinated black and white, female, and feminized bodies, I will also situate the problems involved in reading ethnographically as, I argue, that Stein uses black bodies and approximated linguistic styles, simplifying the characters and their behaviours in ways that are largely reducible to assumed racial traits. In a letter to Mabel Weeks, Stein wrote, “I am afraid that I can never write the Great American Novel. I don’t know how to sell on a margin or to do anything with shorts and longs, so I have to content myself with —— [here Stein used a racial epithet I will not repeat] and servant girls and the foreign population generally.”
In order to write the displaced but distinctly “American” novel, Stein must first write herself out by reworking and displacing lesbianism, Jewishness, and familial estrangement onto other bodies. “Melanctha” is the trace that Stein leaves behind precisel
y so that we can locate her as analogously other. It is what she declared she must expunge in order to write the great American novel; to complete her self-transformation she also writes her way to whiteness. For Stein, blackface is a way to work out questions of “taboo sexuality” and representational parricide—it is a representational medium that allows her to displace these problematics onto black people. In other words, she uses blackface to get from black people the “stuff” of nothingness: the medium of transformation. Indeed, the effect of “Melanctha” is decidedly not the undoing of naturalist narrative about black people, but the inscription of a different (racialist) narrative, or different narrativizations, within what remains a largely naturalist paradigm. “Melanctha,” though, is read by audiences that continue, one might say in order to continue, to confer upon Stein ethnographic authenticity. This despite knowledge that in the context of Stein’s world, “Melanctha” is both a production of and productive of her style and her working through personal dilemmas and literary styles—it is, within her own “semiotics,” an anti-naturalist attempt. At the same time her representations of black people are persistently viewed as accurate and perceptive—in short, as naturalistically, ethnographically authentic.*13
I must pull this thesis together “irregardless,” as my father says. All my life I’ve sat at an angle observing the back and forth of other people’s lives. I dare say I sit at this angle toward my own life. I must get up from these rooms of mine and get going with life. Life is not lying down in a litter of paper. I’ve got so much more to do. I have sufficient material for a lifetime of theory. The work energizes me. Always. Each time I return to it, I’m opened up anew to just how much it’s become necessary to any future living. Not simply for my own small life but for the lives of others. I anticipate overturning sclerotic structures of thinking with the completion of this work.
[A]nd while I recognize that certain radical theorists of diaspora (like Gilroy, Davies, Hall, and Walcott) have attempted to problematize these sorts of passionate attachments through the very idea of diaspora, I maintain throughout this chapter that diasporic discourses generally rely on powerful notions of “homeland” and ethnicity/race….My argument in this section is essentially that Xavier Simon’s novel(s) indicates but ultimately overwhelms the discourse of diaspora because it consciously subverts and abandons the object that manages to endure uncritically in many diasporic discourses: the “homeland” from which one is exiled.
The oceanic is the site of an unutterable trauma;…the oceanic also, with its unpredictable currents and intensities, evokes the stream-of-consciousness techniques that Xavier Simon frequently uses in her writings. Finally, as Spillers acutely notes in psycho-social terms, the oceanic is a liminal zone, where existing social and symbolic orders are in abeyance; in the space of the oceanic. From this liminal space, radically new inscriptions of body and sexuality can be explored….Along these lines, it is crucial to note that…stereotypical depictions of a racialized or gendered body are notably absent in the novel; and, in contrast, depictions of the revolutionary energies of the body are almost always accompanied by the rupture or displacement of docile or domesticated bodies.*14
I think of Selah and Yara and Odalys now, not as hindrances, not even as transit points to myself or as the lessons of my life—but as the life itself, the theory of my life. They and I are not made of nothingness. They’ve gone on in their own narratives. I’ve gone on in mine. I must sit in the knowledge of them; we remain adjacent. They’ve given me, in part, material for a lifetime of theory, but I can’t live in the prosthetic. They are not my arms, not my body, nor my head, not even my imagination—they escape and exceed me and I’m left with me.
I have every feeling that I’ll acquire a post at a university and the funding to continue my work. I would even settle for a college. Come to think of it, a college would be much better. That’s where I’ll be of the most help. I must gather my ideas. I must sit in the knowledge of my possibilities and impossibilities. The pleasures of returning to the page and the work take me over. I will inhabit the fullness within the limits. It’s a logic I can live with. Here we go then, Teoria.
*1 Sharpe/Teoria
*2 ibid
*3 Barthes
*4 Saffioti
*5 Wynter
*6 Fanon
*7 Teoria
*8 Sharpe/ Teoria
*9 Sharpe/Teoria
*10 Teoria
*11 Teoria
*12 Teoria
*13 Sharpe/Teoria
*14 Chariandy/Teoria
First, as a starting point…*
* All subsequent references to this text will be made parenthetically. This raises questions about what is “consensual” and how consent is always complicated by class, race and sex. There has been a court battle over ownership of the piece. I do not yet know who has won the case. See Coco Fusco, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance,” English Is Broken Here (1995). As filmmaker Charlene Gilbert pointed out in conversation with me, the things that signify otherness in the video are derived from…
I must say here without equivocation…*
* RWW/Teoria.
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) and Looking Awry (1991) seem to enter western scholarship as a way to think politics, culture and cultural products in new and exciting ways. Žižek’s insightful readings of Marxism, European critical theory, psychoanalysis and Hitchcock offered us an exciting intellectual exercise in cultural study that was both similar to and exceeded what we were calling cultural studies at the time. I even used his phrase “nation enjoyment” from Looking Awry to coin the term “nation thing” as a way to speak to what diaspora as a concept allowed Black people to get at beyond national concerns.
Žižek so quickly became a darling of the western academic elite that it is difficult to pinpoint the moment where his incisive critique turned to caricature of himself. I like to think that too many forums with Judith Butler did him in. The decline was fast and now it seems totally complete. Asked to comment on all sorts of things, Žižek’s scholarly trajectory is a parable for not saying, “No, I can’t.” His ideas on race, identity and gender in the last years have betrayed an intellectual cul de sac, a man unable to think outside of the masculine scholarly frame of the all-knowing intellectual. His contributions can now be read as a parody of what he does not know, and what he shoved into what he once knew, but with no synthesis, only condescending ignorance. His newspaper columns bear this point out most forcefully and sadly.
Regarding my father…*
* Not much has been said here about my father except that which reflects my utter resentment of him. When that started, I have explained only tangentially. He was not always who he became, I am told. None of us are who we become. For most of my childhood he was a distant and domineering figure. You will say all fathers are. I only place this note here to say that he may not have been adequately represented in my account, since my knowledge of him is based on extant references that are not sufficient to lay out his psychologies. I am therefore only left with my resentments and my brief readings of his life in reference to me. In passing, I will say that he and my mother met in Sheffield, where he was doing a mechanical engineering degree and my mother was staying with a relative who worked at the Sheffield hospital until she could make her own way. Apparently they met on a bus and that was that. I invoke them here in this thesis neither as narrative, nor as trauma, but as epistemology.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Theory is a work of fiction.
Teoria’s thesis is indebted to the academic works of David Chariandy, Joan Gibson, Leslie Sanders, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott. In fact, in most cases the protagonist, Teoria, has used their works liberally, going so far as to intimate co-authorship in the footnote citations. The author thanks these generous relatives for the indulgence. Thank you to Greg Hollingshead for a first reading.
Profound gratitude to my editor Lynn Henry, for all the ways.
Thank you
to Sarah Chalfant and Alba Ziegler-Bailey of The Wylie Agency for all the means.
DIONNE BRAND’s literary credentials are legion. Her book of poetry, Ossuaries, won the Griffin Poetry Prize; her nine other volumes of poetry include winners of the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her novel In Another Place, Not Here was selected as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book by the Globe and Mail; At the Full and Change of the Moon was selected a Best Book by the Los Angeles Times and What We All Long For won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, Brand was awarded the prestigious Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the world of books and writing, and was Toronto’s Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2012. In 2017, she was inducted to the Order of Canada. Brand is a Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto.
