Negrophobia

by Darius James

  Precedent for Negrophobia can also be found in the disturbing imagery of Ralph Bakshi’s 1975 animated film Coonskin, so controversial that screenings were smoke-bombed by civil rights activists. In the film, as in Dutchman, the ugly power of white supremacy is manifested in the persona of a beautiful and seductive white woman who sexually seduces black men only to brutally murder them. The Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver infamously inverted this erotic hierarchy in Soul on Ice, calling his rape of white women “an insurrectionary act”: “It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.”†

  Darius James wades into this highly loaded symbolic economy with Bubbles, who becomes involved in just about every taboo form of sex act that you can (or cannot) imagine. Unlike the white women who stand in for white supremacy in the work of Cleaver, Bakshi, or Baraka, however, Bubbles is neither a seductress nor a murderer. Rather she is a verb that unmasks (and personifies) the ugliness of the white woman as a sexualized symbol as she moves through the increasingly outrageous tableaus of American racism, playing the clichéd parts that she has historically been allocated with a vengeance.

  America’s racial obsession is both sexual and visual. In conversation with Kara Walker, James talks about this intertwining relationship between race, power, violence, repression, and visuality: “Race is not divorced from sexuality in the American imagination. Racism is rooted in the hypocrisy of puritanical sexuality. America’s first sex shows were plantation owners overseeing that their property bred right.”‡ Tellingly, significant portions of Negrophobia’s cinematic cuts occur in theaters and at film screenings. The continuous takes of overblown visual tableaus mimic an American obsession with viewing sensationalized, highly sexualized black bodies. At one point in the interview, James asks Walker, “Did you know Joel Chandler Harris would write his fiancée love letters in Uncle Remus dialect? It was how he showed his sexual side.” Of course, Joel Chandler Harris can be credited with singlehandedly popularizing—in his Brer Rabbit and Uncle Remus stories—many of the stereotypes around which Walker’s and James’s work revolves. Harris’s practice of occupying the imaginary of African Americans as a sexual and creative practice could be seen as the flip side to James’s exploration of African American reality primarily through the dreamscapes and sexualized fantasies of Bubbles.

  In That’s Blaxploitation!, James defends Ralph Bakshi’s use of racist imagery in Coonskin by insisting on the distinction between “the racist eye versus an eye for racism.” He writes, “Bakshi’s intention is clear—destroy racists with their own racism.” Later on, in a discussion that is perhaps more reflective of his own practice than Bakshi’s, James says, “Nowhere is it written Black people cannot take back the images of racism and use them as a weapon against those who oppress them. Racism is the madness of the Other and has nothing to do with how one chooses to define one’s self. Racism is a form of the Evil Eye . . . the best protection from the ‘evil eye’ is laughter.”

  —AMY ABUGO ONGIRI

  *Sun Ra, This Planet Is Doomed: The Science Fiction Poetry of Sun Ra (New York: Kicks Books, 2011), 136.

  †See Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968), 14.

  ‡See “I Hate Being Lion Fodder: An Interview/Conversation via Email Between Darius James and Kara Walker,” at https://db-artmag.de/archiv/02/e/magazin-interview-walker.html.

  PREFACE

  NEGROPHOBIA was first unleashed, unmuzzled, on an unsuspecting public twenty-six years ago by a now shuttered Carol Publishing under its Citadel Underground imprint. Since, it’s enjoyed its share of fervent true believers and “Let’s lynch that Redbone Negro!” detractors (including Bill Cosby, who, if my third cousin is to be believed, forbade his daughter from ever bringing that book into his house!*). It’s been taught in colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, and Europe by brilliant academics like the late Winston Napier, Bertram D. Ashe, Steve Shaverio, and our own Amy Abugo Ongiri. The reclusive Gayl Jones referenced it in her novel The Healing. Pirate editions were distributed in Germany among its cognoscenti. Once, after a reading in a SoHo art gallery, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen remarked, “He needs a rock band behind him.” There were unauthorized performances in France and it was extensively referenced by a multilingual hiphop group in Marseilles. Former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver laughed uproariously at an early draft and called it “politically incorrect.”† And Walter Mosley privately confessed his affection for the book at a fund-raiser for disposed Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It’s allowed me to tour extensively throughout the world and live comfortably in exotic locations. A major sequence in the book inspired the concert set-design for a mouse-eared Marilyn Manson album, The Golden Age of Grotesque. Its original cover hangs in the halls of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan. My face was splashed on the front of Screw magazine accompanied by two split-tongued, lizard-skinned floozies for no discernable reason. I gave a reading at a Milwaukee college located across the street from the candy factory that once employed Jeffrey Dahmer (where, apparently, he ate some of the students), and a member of the audience left the auditorium singing passages of the book Holy Roller–style. While reporting for Vibe magazine, I found a fan in Johnny Depp during a visit to the set of From Hell, and can vouch a copy of Negrophobia was shoved down the front of his pants during the film’s autopsy sequence. And, fittingly, I once read from its pages at the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Munich, the original site of the Degenerate Art exhibition (where my voice reverberated through its stone halls as if banishing a horde of ancient Nordic demons).

  Quite a life for a sheaf of paper.

  Meanwhile, as Negrophobia continued to delight, disgust, or fall out of print, greedheads gloated over the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall tumbled. The Soviet Union went kaputnik. And Rodney King’s head was bludgeoned into a regurgitated meat patty by a gang of club-happy cops. Said gang of LA’s finest was acquitted by an all-white jury of their peers, thus sparking a sequel in South Central of the Watts rebellion of 1965. In kind, a largely colored jury acquitted O. J. Simpson for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman due to a pair of ill-fitting gloves. In Oklahoma City, two patriots (with the possible assistance of an anonymous third) blew up an FBI office building with a truckload of combustible dung. The World Trade Center was blown up twice by irate individuals of Middle Eastern origin. (“We will destroy you from within without firing a single shot.”) And, as the country slid to a level of acute McCarthy-era paranoia, civil liberties eroded faster than the polar ice caps with the introduction of the American Patriot Act and the Office of Homeland Security. George W. Bush flat-out lied about weapons of mass destruction and marched the country into a bogus war in the Middle East, giving us the gift of “perpetual war for perpetual peace.”

  Then, surprise of surprises, a dusky, jug-eared politician of hotly debated birth was elected to the nation’s highest office. And Washington, DC, became—for a time—the real-world equivalent of Parliament’s Chocolate City. Unfortunately, the George Clinton–conducted celebration was short-lived. Tea Party poopers took umbrage with his umbra and stonewalled his efforts throughout two terms, even in the face of mass slaughter by a really scary Batman villain.‡ Despite this, the dusky prez left the White House by throwing a party rivaling any at the Hotel Theresa in its heyday.

  With staggering frequency, in the aftermath of a Florida jury’s galling George Zimmerman verdict, and the appearance of the one-man guerilla unit Christopher Dorner, unarmed black people were routinely shot and killed by police. And, just as routinely, those same cops were free to walk their merry way with little to no repercussions.

  The litany naming our dead reads like a night of insufferabl
e spoken word at the Hotep Café:

  Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Dontre Hamilton, John Crawford III, Ezell Ford, Laquan McDonald, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Antonio Martin, Jerame Reid, Renisha McBride, Oscar Grant, Charley Leundeu Keunang, Tony Robinson, Anthony Hill, Meagan Hockaday, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, William Chapman, Jonathan Sanders, Sandra Bland, Samuel DuBose, Jeremy Mc-Dole, Corey Jones, Jamar Clark, the Charleston Nine, Bruce Kelley Jr., Alton Sterling, Joseph Mann, Paul O’Neal, Korryn Gaines, Sylville Smith, Terence Crutcher, Keith Lamont Scott, Alfred Olango, Deborah Danner, Abdullahi “Abdi” Omar Mohamed, Philando Castile, Rumain Brisbon, Kajieme Powell, Dante Parker, Tyree Woodson, Victor White III, Yvette Smith, McKenzie Cochran, Jordan Baker, Andy Lopez, Miriam Carey, Jonathan Ferrell, Carlos Alcis, Larry Eugene Jackson Jr., Deion Fludd, Kimani Gray, Johnnie Kamahi Warren, Malissa Williams, Timothy Russell, Reynaldo Cuevas, Chavis Carter, Shantel Davis, Sharmel Edwards, Tamon Robinson, Ervin Jefferson, Kendrec McDade, Rekia Boyd, Shereese Francis, Wendell Allen, Nehemiah Dillard, Dante Price, Raymond Allen, Sgt. Manuel Loggins Jr., Ramarley Graham, Kenneth Chamberlain, Alonzo Ashley, Kenneth Harding, Raheim Brown, Reginald Doucet, Derrick Jones, Danroy Henry, Aiyana Jones, Steven Eugene Washington, Aaron Campbell, Kiwane Carrington, Victor Steen, Shem Walker, Tarika Wilson, Henry Glover, Ronald Madison, James Brisette, Timothy Stansbury, Alberta Spruill, Ousmane Zongo, Orlando Barlow, Prince Jones, Timothy Thomas, Ronald Beasley, Earl Murray, Patrick Dorismond, Malcolm Ferguson, Amadou Diallo, Tanisha Anderson, Phillip White, Kajuan Raye, Ritchie Harbison, Christopher Sowell, Terrence Sterling, Levonia Riggins, Alfred Toe, Kendrick Brown, Elisha Edward Kelley, John Paul Quintero, Autumn Steele, Leslie Sapp III, Loren Simpson, Artago Damon Howard, Michael Goebel, Marcus Golden, DeWayne Carr, Tiano Meton, Jessie Hernandez, Joshua Omar Garcia, Nicolas Leland Tewax, Ralph Willis, David Kassick, Jeremy Lett, Joaquin Hernandez, John Sawyer, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, Fletcher Ray Stewart, Jonathan Larry Harden.§

  Was this uptick in the murder of America’s black citizens an unforeseen consequence of CERN’s Hadron Collider experiments? And, suddenly, the United States was sucked into a vortex in the time-space continuum? Now we’re back in the days when lynching was a Sunday outing of eating cold chicken and bland potato salad while slicing souvenirs off a burnt cadaver?

  This is what bedlam in America looks like.

  But even in the most fevered of drug-addled hallucinations, or the most depraved of social conditions, who among us might’ve imagined twenty-six years into the future the United States would elect a gelatinous orange-hued glob of anal leakage to the oval office‖ who would turn the country into a freak show more grotesque than any depicted in these pages?¶

  •

  There really isn’t anything new I need to add. Negrophobia stands on its own. It speaks for itself. Like an adult. I mean, do you really need to know I first conceived of this novel in a West Village apartment, shortly after learning that the mother of my then girlfriend was a racist, and the narrative grew out of combining the two words “Negro” and “phobia”? Or that part of my research consisted of watching seven hours of cartoons banned from television? Or that Bubbles is partially based on a West Virginia cracka gal I knew in college and a black TV wrestler of the fifties and sixties? Do I really need to relay that kind of trivia?

  Nah. . . .

  Besides, if I did, Amy Ongiri wouldn’t have much to do (thank you, Amy).

  The only thing a new generation of readers might need to know is that this book is not a “safe space.” It’s loaded with “triggers,” and I hope Negrophobia gives you nightmares.

  •

  Negrophobia is rededicated to the memory of Brad Stewart. We lost him to a heroin overdose in 2008. Brad was a deeply sensitive man, quite hauntingly so, who looked at the world with open and vulnerable eyes. He was not only a huge fan of Negrophobia but the book also inspired many of his paintings. We planned a theatrical adaptation together. He was going to do production design. Brad was also a founding member of Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids under the name Gidget Gein. He played bass and wrote songs for Portrait of an American Family. I didn’t know this until six months into our relationship. He made this revelation after a confusing discussion about Marilyn Manson and Negrophobia (“What? You didn’t know? I played bass for Marilyn Manson”). However, I recognized Brad as a painter first and always thought of him as such. May his precious soul rest in peace.

  The cover photograph, All Cats Are Black in the Dark, was taken by Natasha Xavier. It’s not staged. It’s a spontaneous moment. Those are her thighs in the photo. Natasha is a professional photographer and transgressive fetish model in the United Kingdom. Her photographic eye is informed by the shadowy passageways of the arcane. As a worker of light, she subverts the expectations of the human gaze.

  •

  Since returning to the United States, the last twelve years of my life has sucked pretty much. Mostly, I’ve been coping with grief in varying forms while under the stress of maintaining a two-family house on a budget less than the salary of James Evans in Good Times. I’m not good with grief. Or money.**

  However, I’ve been fortunate enough to have some long-lasting and genuine friendships. They have been my grace.

  Jeri-Collette James, who still laughs at my jokes.

  Val Jeanty, Nathalie Guillaume, and Azizza—three women who leave no doubt Black Girl Magic is real. The two angelic Afro- Scandinavian warriors who greet me with love each morning: Linda “Lazer” Larson and Laura Ann Morrison.

  Upstate New York’s premiere public poet and exceptional friend, Norman Douglas. Afro-pop’s gonzo documentarian, Michael Gonzales. An illuminated spirit too radiant for his own light, Eric D. Clark. Berlin’s Saint of Perpetual Noise, Jon Evans. The closest I’ve ever known to a son, Aidan Douglas. And that last Brahmin of the Thuggee line, Nihar Oza.

  The wise and actively compassionate Jake-Ann Jones. The woman whose brain is as big as her ’fro, Diana McCarty. Sabbatha Bastet and her delightfully wicked tongue. Caryn Prescott, who simultaneously challenges and enlightens. Chanteuse of beauty and truth, Annie Bandez, and her horde of killer iguanas. Songbird of the Southern Californian beach, Vanessa “Birdy” Whitford. Hoodoo guardian and Chicago defender, Mina Wilson. The living flame of ancestral tradition, Dolores Arnold. Our clown princess of political commentary, Kanene Holder. Austin’s voluptuous response to a black readaption of Barbarella, Masani Negloria.

  Some of my bestest friends Ernst Weber, Mary Schiffer, Jahmal Henderson, Mike Golden, Bruce Huckabey, and Eric Henderson. The wise Jeff Goldberg and Fook! magazine. Noel Lawrence and Sammy-Gate. The promising light, Julian Xeer. My Vodun/Kali connection, Nandani Bharrat. Manson-look-alike Jimmy Smith. Tim Fielder who put it in perspective. The curmudgeonly and erudite Richard Reynolds. The always on-point Sasha Squire. Bubbles look-alike, Edy Poppy. Chaos-magic dad Brendan McCusker. My old and dear friend Michael Will. The exquisite Lucrecia Paz. And the funny-ass Eric May.

  Trusted confidant and wielder of needles Julie Wynn. The impish and original Nancy Waller. The infinitely wise Mary Hope Lee. The Conjurer Casanova Frankenstein and his elliptically swirling hypnogoggles. The inspirational Sarah Schulman. The cuz of cuzzins Tre Thomas. The funky German Florian Gray. The brave and adventurous Maressa Lippolis. The rockin’ cartoonist Rick Trembles. Rebecca Korbet for being. The gifted Marc Friedlander.

  The Girl Who Beats Up Nazis, Marie Holmen. Roger Trilling for many things. The good Reverend Nigga Daddy. The incisive Connie Wun. Barbara Seaman for showing me the writer’s life. Dan Levy who, despite years of the Grateful Dead hammering his eardrums, had the good taste to acquire Negrophobia in the first place. The fairy genius Jóhanna Ríkarðsdóttir. The supportive Stefan Ernsting. The marvelous Wendy Utlan of fiendish strings. Bill Shafer of the amazing Hyaena Gallery. The elegant bookman Ben McFall. Paul Beatty who dropped the dime. Zeena & Nikolas Schreck who taught the importance of spiritual practice. Monkeypaw Man Christopher Jon Alexander. The
talented and tasty Talese Harris. Josh Alan Friedman and his Black Cracker ghetto pass. And Steve Brower for graciously granting permission to use his original artwork as a detail in the current cover’s photograph.

  The maddeningly beautiful Sheila Jamison. A woman whose searing intelligence is balanced by her deeply empathetic heart, Emily Carter. My longtime friend, second set of editorial eyes, and otherworldly consultant, Jenny Seymore Montgomery. An antennae with a special conscience, Beth Moore Love. One of the stranger minds in modern comedy, Ted Mann. Confident, socialist collaborator, and extraordinary friend, Susanna Lang.

  Angelique Campbell, who is a both a surprise and a delight. Tony Medina, for holding it down. Elaine Greco, for her perception and patience. Justin Humphries, the witty biographer of my favorite movie villain, Dr. Phibes. Michelle Montserrat, for her unusual support. James Fitzgerald, who I’m sure can tell a raucous and ribald tale of dropping acid at a Mexican donkey show. My sensitive and esteemed cousin, Lonnie Moore. John Skipp, who asked first. Destiny McKeever, who lets the jelly bats fly. The RAF of American pop, Nicole Morier. Janet “I’ma sue dat honkie ass!” Ford. The brainy DJ Leo Zhao. Veronika Gerhard, Raum ist der Ort! And Ghazi Barakat, who—whenever I entered a room—shouted, “Here comes the Black Gestapo!”

  And the other fine folks who deserve my gratitude: Esther Kaplan, Lumpy Rock, Blair Breard, Vincent Mewanu, D. Scott Miller, Marco Villalobos, Claudia Basrawi, Penny Arcade, Thorsten Kloster, Chandra Shukla, Brad Fox, Jessica Armstrong, Mario Mentrup, Dennis Perrin, Alan K. Frishman, Margot Dunne, James Duck, Florence Washington, Dave Doyle, Sabine Strauch, Pretty Penny Pickup, Gilles Maurice, Slumberland, Penny Truex, Sonia Elizabeth Barret, David Lamignan Larsen, Ande Wanderer, St. Mark’s Bookshop, Gerald Jenkins, Maria Morais, Ray Raw, Sonia Zappata, Christina Wheeler, Amanda Sabine Strauch, Al Cabal, Colleen Wasner, Katherine Diefenbach, Robin Hoodoo, Christopher Glembotsky, Leticia Benson, Gary Ray, Ayana Jackson, Theonoe Lovell, Svetlana Jovanovic, Rick Van Valkenburg, Ann Taylor, Annie Harper, Ken Jordan, Nancy Collins, Blake Crawford, Astrid Velho, Joel Rose, Lamar Weaver, Judy McGuire, John Herasymiuk, Lo Gallucio, Henrich Dubel, Sophia Raphaeline, Andreas Strassmeir, Alan Oldman, Gary Roscoe Johnson, Bierimmel, Oliver Hardt, Piotr Skiba, Rahel Preisser, Boris van Berkum, Philip Henderson, Johnny Amentoph, Clarence Malone, Peter Dennett, Charlotte Jackson, Holly Van Voast, Victoria Looseleaf, Danielle Belton, Peter Krass, Imani Toliver, Beth Rubin, Niles Abel, and the soul of John Farriis.