Citizen_An American Lyric
Page 4
The announcer patronizes the pickup truck, no hoodlums, “just teens,” no gang, “just a teen,” “with straggly blond hair,” “a slight blond man.” The pickup is human in this predictable way. Do you recognize yourself, Dedmon?
In the circulating photo you are looking down. Were you dreaming of this day all the days of your youth? In the daydream did the pickup take you home? Was it a pickup fueling the road to I ran that nigger over?
Baldwin says skin color cannot be more important than the human being. And was the pickup constructing or exploding whiteness out of you? You are so sorry. You are angry, an explosive anger, an effective one: I ran that nigger over.
James Craig Anderson is dead. The pickup truck is a figure of speech. It is as the crown standing in for the kingdom. Who told you it was a crown? Did we tell you the pickup was as good as home? You are so young, Dedmon. You were so young.
James Craig Anderson is dead. What ails you, Dedmon? What up? What’s up is James Craig Anderson is dead. So sorry. So angry, an imploding anger. It must let you go. It let you go.
December 4, 2006 / Jena Six
Script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas
As he walked across grass still green from summer walking out of the rain a step beyond into a piece of sky dry all day for him in this moment a shelter as he sat beneath the overhanging branches of the “white tree” surprising himself at the center of the school yard thinking of the slight give in the cushions of the counter seats he had read about in textbooks did the hardness of the ground cross the hardness of the seats in buses as he waited to be noticed listening to the lift and fall of the leaves above him?
As the boys walked across grass a darkening wave as dusk folded into night walking toward a dawn sun punching through the blackness as they noosed the rope looped around the overhanging branches of their tree surprising themselves at the center of the school yard thinking this is how they will learn the ropes did the hardness in the history books cross the hardness in their eyes all the eyes with that look without give did they give that look to the lift and fall of the leaves above them?
At the high school party the boy turned to the boys as boys do walking into a fist punching through the blackness as glass shattered light knocked conscious blunt breathing bruising the refusing boy surrounded by blows taking custody of his body bodying forth against a boyhood defining it by fighting through this body propelled forward and back bearing until the beer bottle shattered hardness bruising the refusal leveled without give.
When the boys turned the corner was inflammation in the air already forming knuckles as they pummeled the body being kicked and beaten until knocked unconscious his right eye closed shut blood refusing to clot flowing from both ears were they hearing their own breathing their own ears allowing their blows to take custody of this body fallen against the hardness of the concrete floor leveled without give?
Boys will be boys being boys feeling their capacity heaving butting heads righting their wrongs in the violence of aggravated adolescence charging forward in their way experiencing the position of positioning which is a position for only one kind of boy face it know it for the other boy for the other boys the fists the feet criminalized already are weapons already exploding the landscape and then the litigious hitting back is life imprisoned.
Stop-and-Frisk
Script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas
I knew whatever was in front of me was happening and then the police vehicle came to a screeching halt in front of me like they were setting up a blockade. Everywhere were flashes, a siren sounding and a stretched-out roar. Get on the ground. Get on the ground now. Then I just knew.
And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.
I left my client’s house knowing I would be pulled over. I knew. I just knew. I opened my briefcase on the passenger seat, just so they could see. Yes officer rolled around on my tongue, which grew out of a bell that could never ring because its emergency was a tolling I was meant to swallow.
In a landscape drawn from an ocean bed, you can’t drive yourself sane—so angry you are crying. You can’t drive yourself sane. This motion wears a guy out. Our motion is wearing you out and still you are not that guy.
Then flashes, a siren, a stretched-out roar—and you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.
Get on the ground. Get on the ground now. I must have been speeding. No, you weren’t speeding. I wasn’t speeding? You didn’t do anything wrong. Then why are you pulling me over? Why am I pulled over? Put your hands where they can be seen. Put your hands in the air. Put your hands up.
Then you are stretched out on the hood. Then cuffed. Get on the ground now.
Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn’t begin the same way, each time it begins it’s the same. Flashes, a siren, the stretched-out roar—
Maybe because home was a hood the officer could not afford, not that a reason was needed, I was pulled out of my vehicle a block from my door, handcuffed and pushed into the police vehicle’s backseat, the officer’s knee pressing into my collarbone, the officer’s warm breath vacating a face creased into the smile of its own private joke.
Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn’t begin the same way, each time it begins it’s the same.
Go ahead hit me motherfucker fled my lips and the officer did not need to hit me, the officer did not need anything from me except the look on my face on the drive across town. You can’t drive yourself sane. You are not insane. Our motion is wearing you out. You are not the guy.
This is what it looks like. You know this is wrong. This is not what it looks like. You need to be quiet. This is wrong. You need to close your mouth now. This is what it looks like. Why are you talking if you haven’t done anything wrong?
And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.
In a landscape drawn from an ocean bed, you can’t drive yourself sane—so angry you can’t drive yourself sane.
The charge the officer decided on was exhibition of speed. I was told, after the fingerprinting, to stand naked. I stood naked. It was only then I was instructed to dress, to leave, to walk all those miles back home.
And still you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.
LONG FORM BIRTH CERTIFICATE
And yes, the inaudible spreads across state lines.
Its call backing away from the face of America.
Bloodshot eyes calling on America
that can’t look forward for being called back.
America turned loose on America—
All living is listening for a throat to open—
The length of its silence shaping lives.
When he opened his mouth to speak, his speech was what was written in the silence,
the length of the silence becoming a living.
And what had been
“I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully
execute the office of President of the United States …”
becomes
“I do solemnly swear that I will execute
the office of President to the United States faithfully …”
August 4, 2011 / In Memory of Mark Duggan
Though this house in London has been remodeled, the stairs, despite being carpeted, creak. What was imagined as a silent retreat from the party seems to sound through the house. By the fifth step you decide to sit down and on the wall next to you is a torn passport photo of half a woman’s face blown up and framed as art. Where did you imagine you were going? you say aloud to her.
“The purpose of art,” James Baldwin wrote, “is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.” He might have been
channeling Dostoyevsky’s statement that “we have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know.”
Where can I imagine you have been?
A man, a novelist with the face of the English sky—full of weather, always in response, constantly shifting, clouding over only to clear briefly—stands before you, his head leaning against the same wall as the torn-up girl. You begin discussing the recent riots in Hackney. Despite what is being said you get lost in his face, his responsiveness bringing what reads as intimacy to his eyes. He says the riots were similar to the Rodney King–LA riots; however, he feels the UK media handled them very differently from the US media.
The Hackney riots began at the end of the summer of 2011 when Mark Duggan, a black man, a husband, a father, and a suspected drug dealer, was shot dead by officers from Scotland Yard’s Operation Trident (a special operations unit addressing gun crime in black communities). As the rioting and looting continued, government officials labeled the violent outbreak “opportunism” and “sheer criminality,” and the media picked up this language. Whatever the reason for the riots, images of the looters’ continued rampage eventually displaced the fact that an unarmed man was shot to death.
In the United States, Rodney King’s beating, caught on video, trumped all other images. If there had been a video of Duggan being executed, there might be less ambiguity around what started the riots, you hazard to say.
Will you write about Duggan? the man wants to know. Why don’t you? you ask. Me? he asks, looking slightly irritated.
How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?
A similar accumulation and release drove many Americans to respond to the Rodney King beating. Before it happened, it had happened and happened. As a black body in the States, your response was necessary if you were to hold on to the fiction that this was an event “wrongfully ordinary,” therefore a snafu within the ordinary.
Though the moment had occurred and occurred again with the deaths, beatings, and imprisonment of other random, unarmed black men, Rodney King’s beating somehow cut off the air supply in the US body politic by virtue of the excessive, blatant barrage of racism and compromised justice that followed on the heels of his beating. And though in this man’s body, the man made of English sky, grief exists for Duggan as a black man gunned down, there is not the urgency brought on by an overflow of compromises, deaths, and tempers specific to a profile woke to and gone to sleep to each day.
Arguably, there is no simultaneity between the English sky and the body being ordered to rest in peace. This difference, which has to do with “the war (the black body’s) presence has occasioned,” to quote Baldwin, makes all the difference. One could become acquainted with the inflammation that existed around Duggan’s body and it would be uncomfortable. Grief comes out of relationships to subjects over time and not to any subject in theory, you tell the English sky, to give him an out. The distance between you and him is thrown into relief: bodies moving through the same life differently. With your eyes wide open you consider what this man and you, two middle-aged artists, in a house worth more than a million pounds, share with Duggan. Mark Duggan, you are part of the misery. Apparently your new friend won’t write about Mark Duggan or the London riots; still you continue searching his face because there is something to find, an answer to question.
BLACK-BLANC-BEUR
October 10, 2006 / World Cup
Script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas
BLACK-BLANC-BEUR
Something is there before us that is neither the living person himself nor any sort of reality, neither the same as the one who is alive, nor another.
What is there is the absolute calm of what has found its place. (Maurice Blanchot)
Every day I think about where I came from and I am still proud to be who I am … (Zinedine Zidane)
Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorist, nigger. (Accounts of lip readers responding to the transcript of the World Cup.)
Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word. (Ralph Ellison)
The Algerian men, for their part, are a target of criticism for their European comrades.
Arise directly to the level of tragedy.
Notice too, illustrations of this kind of racial prejudice can be multiplied indefinitely.
Clearly, the Algerians who, in view of the intensity of the repression and the frenzied character of the oppression, thought they could answer the blows received without any serious problem of conscience. (Frantz Fanon)
BLACK-BLANC-BEUR
And there is no (Black) who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to varying effect, simple, naked, and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance … to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as the dust into which he himself has been and is being trampled; no black who has not had to make his own precarious adjustment … yet the adjustment must be made—rather it must be attempted. (James Baldwin)
Do you think two minutes from the end of a World Cup final, two minutes from the end of my career, I wanted to do that? (Zinedine Zidane)
Each decision gave rise to the same hesitations, produced the same despair.
No one is free.
For all that he is, people will say he remains for us an Arab. “You can’t get away from nature.” (Frantz Fanon)
BLACK-BLANC-BEUR
Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorist. (Accounts of lip readers responding to the transcript of the World Cup.)
Let him do his spite: My services which I have done … Shall out-tongue his complaints. (William Shakespeare)
When such things happen, he must grit his teeth, walk away a few steps, elude the passerby who draws attention to him, who gives other passersby the desire either to follow the example or to come to his defense. (Franz Fanon)
Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorist, nigger. (Accounts of lip readers responding to the transcript of the World Cup.)
That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it, knows … something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and indeed, no church—can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable.
This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words.
We hear, then we remember. (James Baldwin)
The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. (Homi Bhabha)
BLACK-BLANC-BEUR
But at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution … (Frederick Douglass)
What we have here is not the bringing to light of a character known and frequented a thousand times in the imagination or in stories.
It is the White Man who creates the black man. But it is the black man who creates.
This thing was there, we grasped it in the living motion. (Maurice Blanchot)
What he said “touched the deepest part of me.” (Zinedine Zidane)
The rebuttal assumes an original form.
This endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. (James Baldwin)
July 29–August 18, 2014 / Making Room
Script for Public Fiction at Hammer Museum
On the train the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available. And, in fact, there is one. Is the woman getting off at the next stop? No, she would rather stand all the way to Union Station.
The space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill. You step quickly over the
woman’s fear, a fear she shares. You let her have it.
The man doesn’t acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him, you imagine, it is more like breath than wonder; he has had to think about it so much you wouldn’t call it thought.
When another passenger leaves his seat and the standing woman sits, you glance over at the man. He is gazing out the window into what looks like darkness.
You sit next to the man on the train, bus, in the plane, waiting room, anywhere he could be forsaken. You put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside, within.
You don’t speak unless you are spoken to and your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you.