The Beginning of Violence

Hello there, friends. I know it’s been a while, although as of today, the site has officially launched, and is now viewable. But that seems like small news in the face of everything happening, amidst pandemic and the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and too many more. In experiencing novels and the written word, I cannot help but also experience life, and the despair that it can bring. This violence perpetuated by all levels of society against blackness did not start with Floyd, nor Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, Tamir Rice, or Eric Garner. It began when the first Africans were taken from their homes, friends, and families to the Americas. It began in the holds of those ships, when they first stumbled on land, as they were racialized and brutalized. That is when the violence began. To name any other point of origin for the beginning of this violence is to live in another world, a world that is not this one–that is, a world that can only be white.

Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, from the few chapters I was lucky enough to read in a class this past semester, puts these ideas into words better than I ever could. The central idea of her work comes from her title, encapsulated in the idea that we all still remain “in the wake” of slavery. Sharpe goes on to define “the wake” in several ways, such as the ripples behind a ship and the event hosted by the friends and family of the dead–which Sharpe utilizes in a forceful call to “defend the dead” (10). I think Sharpe’s work is essential reading to not only understand our present moment, but how we came to it, and what work (or what Sharpe calls “wake-work”) may be necessary to address the lingering problems of living in the wake. I’ll be picking up a copy from my local library as soon as I can, but I digress. What I want to draw attention to is Sharpe’s 4th chapter, entitled “The Weather”. There is one quote I keep returning to after the response to the protests, taken from Frantz Fanon’s Toward the African Revolution.

“We revolt simply because, for a variety of reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

That’s the reason for the protests right there. As Sharpe recounts, Eric Garner repeats 11 times this plea: “I can’t breathe.” It is, by now, an all too familiar plea. One may say that this is a particular case, one that cannot be linked to a communal experience. But Sharpe disagrees with her metaphor of “The Weather”, to say that we live in “the atmosphere of antiblackness” (112). To continue with Sharpe for a little longer…

“In the weather of the wake, one cannot trust, support, or condone the state’s application of something they call justice, but one can only hold one’s breath for so long…To explicate Fanon, it is not the specifics of one event, or set of events that are endless repeatable and repeated, but the totality of the environments in which we struggle; the machines in which we live; what I am calling the weather” (111).

We can think of this weather, or rather, the climate of violence environmentally as well. Look at the current issue of pollution. The toxins in our air and the excessive carbon dioxide are not generated in a vacuum. By specific policies, mandates, and willful ignorance on all of our parts, the situation has exacerbated and may continue to do so, to the point in which we can no longer breathe. There is no one thing causing pollution, and no one solution to remove it. Regardless, it makes it hard for us all to breathe. In the plural, we move from “I cannot breathe” to “We cannot breathe”. That is not to say that this “pollution” does not have disproportionate effects, because it clearly does. However, in order to form the coalition necessary to end this oppressive weather, the privileged must realize that “if one person cannot breathe, then we cannot breathe.” A quote from Jack Halberstam’s “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons”, focusing on Moten and Harney’s idea of the ‘undercommons’ explains this further.

“Racial hierarchies are not rational and ordered, they are chaotic and nonsensical and must be opposed by precisely all those who benefit in any way from them. Or as Moten puts it: “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly”…The coalition unites us in the recognition that we must change things or die. All of us” (Halberstam 10).

The current time feels like a moment becoming a movement. I don’t know for sure if a coalition is being formed, or whether all of these gestures by individuals, governments, and corporations are token recognitions and attempts to pander to us. But it at least appears that Black Lives Matter has gone global. I can’t help but be a little cynical and ask why now, of all times? And why did it take so long? For now, we have to wait and see. I do have some hope, however, in this strange thought. Perhaps, in the recognition of the beginning of racialized violence, we may be able to bring about its end.

Stay safe out there.

Mourning Toni Morrison

In the minutes before ENAM 3520: Major American Authors (Toni Morrison) started, I would open up my green notebook and imitate the sweeping font style depicted on the covers of Morrison’s books. Looking back, perhaps it was my feeble attempt to remind myself of the elegance of those books. These Vintage edition covers were simple, with the first letter of each novel larger than the rest, larger than life.

The Vintage cover of Morrison’s Beloved

Morrison’s passing came on me like a gust of wind. I was preparing to head back to college when the news came in, and it felt like I had lost something, like we had all just lost someone. The summer prior, my family had gone to the National Portrait Gallery, and there had been only two people I wanted to see: Barack and Michelle. And I did see them, despite the line, and it was wonderful, but that was not all that was there. Tucked in another room was Morrison.

Morrison at the National Portrait Gallery

I stood there regarding her for a time, reassured that she was there. In that English class I mentioned before, the professor would start with the same portrait of Morrison on the projected screen. She always seemed stern yet august in that picture, with her hands in those pockets. But then, in the National Portrait Gallery, I was reassured that in effect, she had been canonized. But Morrison needs no canonization from me, or from anyone else. Look at those book covers again. Under her name, it reads Winner of the Nobel Prize. In all of the fancy obituaries that I’m reading, after all, is that encompassing, brilliant quote of hers:

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

But I don’t want to end with that quote, as beautiful as it is. What is more interesting to me is something else. What are the demands that we as a society, put on black writers? What are those expectations? It’s a question that I, myself, as a writer, am constantly asking myself. But that’s another blog post for another time. But the question for today is how do I mourn the death of an author? It’s strange how reading an author’s books makes you feel as if you know them. But I never had the pleasure of meeting her. So what then do we do? Do we reread her works, scour the Internet and watch her interviews and statements? Do we create Benches by the Road to reflect as The Toni Morrison Society has done, even though each bench costs thousands of dollars? How do we mourn and remember?

I think part of the answer is not to center ourselves when remembering Morrison, to wish that she was still alive so that she could write more for us. Society already demands so much of our black writers, and they are all the more beautiful for continuing to write and make art. Perhaps it is time to simply let Morrison rest, and say: Thank you.

Hello there!

Welcome to Novel Experiences, a blog about experiencing novels and why we love them! My name is Ebenezer. Some of you may be friends of mine I’ve somewhat peacefully coerced into coming here, some of you may be complete strangers. Or perhaps there is no one here at all, and I am simply shouting into the wind…

The project of this blog is to write about my experiences and encounters with novels and the written word. I’ll talk about my own writing endeavors, and perhaps, we can discover something beautiful together.

Several blog posts should be coming up relatively soon. I think one of the first will be ‘Mourning Toni Morrison’ and I’ll talk about what I’m currently reading in subsequent pieces.

I’ll leave you with this refrain, stranger. In this oh-so lonely world, won’t you be my neighbor?