by Leila Taylor
This “phantasmatics of colors,” as Alain Badiou calls it, was legitimized by the pseudoscience of human biodiversity, which allowed the purveyors of the slave trade to treat Africans inhumanly because they were determined authoritatively to be not-quite-human. To sustain the cognitive dissonance required to buy and sell, and in the process, physically and psychology torture human begins, the nature of Blackness had to be genetically adapted for servitude. Blacks were believed to have a higher tolerance for pain (a myth that persists to this day), to need less sleep, and to lack the sentiment and ability to appreciate or create art. It was determined that Blacks felt less physically and emotionally, so one could beat them because they could take it, and work them from sunup to sundown because they didn’t require rest. To top it off, Black people lacked the emotional sensitivity and complexity that would suggest an interior life and a soul. The Black body “would not be slowed down or deterred by such human qualities as memory, longing, despair, or fear.”2 Less than an animal, the Black body was a machine.
Through the publications of biologists, anthropologists and social scientists, black became Black: a temperament, a pathology, an economic indicator, a quantifiable attribute, and a definable thing whose characteristics could shift and morph as needed. Black people are simultaneously lazy yet built for labor, childlike and in need of guidance but also violent and aggressive. The men are well endowed and the women sexually promiscuous. We like watermelon and fried chicken. We can sing and dance and excel in sports (except for swimming and skiing), but we don’t go camping. We go to church, but not psychotherapy. We like Tyler Perry movies and Moscato… The more specific the list of attributes, the more defined the characteristic, the lesser the humanity. The lesser the humanity, the easier it is to abuse, patrol, ignore, blame, exploit, or kill. But the identity that we call “Blackness” is ephemeral and subject to ever-shifting adjustments of performance. There is no One True Black, but the undefined are unpredictable and harder to control. The undefined are more frightening.
In the effort to define Blackness as a methodology of control, Blackness also had to become strange as a method for dehumanization. For imperialist Europe, the Dark Continent was about as strange as you could get. By the late 1800s, Victorian explorers and missionaries traveled to Africa with aims of Christian conversion and economic exploitation. The bright, white light of civilization would shine on these dark, heathen savages whether they liked it or not. This correlation between light and dark, day and night, civilization and savagery persisted.
The light-skinned house slave vs dark-skinned field slave hierarchy has never been fully expunged from our culture. Spike Lee’s School Daze takes place at a HBCU and centers around the conflict between the light skinned “wannabe white” sorority girls versus the dark skinned “jigaboo” Black activists. Back in the day, affluent Black churches, fraternities, clubs and social organizations used the Paper Bag Test as a caste system, separating the light elite from the darky riff-raff. If your skin was darker than a brown paper bag you were turned away at the door. The Blue Vein Test was another: the skin on your wrist should be light enough to show a blue vein — a painfully obvious nod to Anglo-Saxon Blue Blood affluence. These stringent practices may have died out in the 1950s, but in 2016, when actor Jesse Williams gave an impassioned speech about racism at the BET (Black Entertainment Television) Awards, people questioned his authority to speak on behalf of Black people because of his light skin and blue eyes. It was thought that his privilege as a biracial man afforded him the respect and attention a darker-skinned man would never have. And the truth of the matter is that it does.
Darky
One of the simplest and most effective ways to evoke dread is to be plunged into darkness. The monster in the void will always be more terrifying than the one we can see: the emptiness of the open door in the middle of the night, the edge of the woods where the trees melt into the dark, the walk down into the blackness at the bottom of the basement. Nothing good is ever at the bottom of the basement stairs. We don’t know what lurks in the shadows, and that void of unknowing is an uncomfortable space to inhabit. We are temporarily at a disadvantage and vulnerable to the thing we can’t see but that can see us.
In 1757, British philosopher Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, and in doing so laid out the blueprint for the gothic aesthetic. He defined, with extreme specificity, those qualities that evoke a “delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror.” Pointy things are scarier than smooth things, quick furtive eye movements are disturbing, long hallways of archways that seem to go on without end, vistas obscured by mist and fog, those things whose borders have no perceptible edge, whose scope we can’t see, are most frightening:
To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. [Night] adds to our dread.
Burke had quite a lot to say about darkness, which, he claims, is not the same as blackness. Darkness, he says, is uncertain, terrible, and gloomy. However, “blackness is but a partial darkness. Black bodies, reflecting none, or but a few rays, are but as so many vacant spaces dispersed among the objects we view.” Blackness is a piece of darkness in the midst of light, an absence of color among colors. To illustrate his point, he recalls the following anecdote (emphasis mine):
Mr. Cheselden has given us a very curious story of a boy, who had been born blind, and continued so until he was thirteen or fourteen years old; he was then couched for a cataract, by which operation he received his sight. Among many remarkable particulars that attended his first perceptions and judgments on visual objects, it gave him great uneasiness; and that sometime after, upon accidentally seeing a negro woman, he was struck with great horror at the sight. The horror, in this case, can scarcely be supposed to arise from any association. The boy appears by the account to have been particularly observing and sensible for one of his age; and therefore, it is probable, if the great uneasiness he felt at the first sight of black had arisen from its connexion with any other disagreeable ideas, he would have observed and mentioned it.
For Burke, the blackness of the Negro woman means she is both seen and unseen, a physical void, a material shadow. The project of dehumanization positions Blacks as something other than human and outside social recognition. To the non-Black boy, the Black woman is perceived as absence, a negation. Living, breathing, speaking nothingness. Blackness was not merely monstrous, it was phantasmagoric.
I prefer “Black” to “African American.” The later excludes others of the diaspora living in America and has connotations associated with the decedents of slaves brought here from Africa. Not all Black people were slaves and not all Black people in America came from Africa. There is also a formality to it that smacks of the classification efforts in the eighteenth century. While Black people have fought hard, and are still fighting, to be seen as American, the moniker rings false to me, like it’s trying too hard. Since the scientists of white supremacy decided that we had to be something else, since they had to become white in opposition to whatever it is that we are, the term kept shifting from the ones we were given to the ones we take for ourselves: nigger vs negro, African vs Afro-American, colored vs people of color. The one that remains through all the socio-political movements is “Black,” and it is the one I prefer most for all of the reasons why I love the color black. It’s clean and direct; there is nothing indecisive about black. Black is. It’s strong (like I hope to be) and a bit aloof (like I sometimes am). I prefer Black because black contains multitudes. Because it is everything and it is nothing.
WHEN DOVES CRY
You are standing on the site where enslaved people were warehoused.
— The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama
Like a lot of Black people, I tend to keloid. I was so excited to finally get my ears pierced when I was thirteen and
so dismayed to see the bumps that grew in their stead. A keloid is an overzealous scar that grows beyond the initial cut. In the process of healing, the scar extends the boundaries of the original wound, leaving a larger, more prominent and permanent trace that’s bigger than the original wound. The evidence of the injury becomes an object in and of itself — its own mark, with its own issues that never lets you forget. It just keeps healing and healing and healing…
I hate the word “heal.” It’s part of the language of memorials and mourning, but it’s too nice and passive, suggesting a gentle and natural repair. The phrase “open wound” is often used to describe the unresolved damage left from chattel slavery, and it’s one with gory undertones. Heal, wound — these are words of the body that imply a physical injury, sliced deep through to the epidermis and muscle and into the guts, the kind of visceral damage that festers if left open and raw. The healing process from the wounds of slavery is more of a keloid to me. The original cut might have healed over, but something bigger and more resilient took its place, something that, over time, mutated into its own creature.
If the formula for comedy is tragedy + time, the same can be said for the gothic. The romanticization of the past can only occur long after the damage — time enough for the effect of mourning to become an aestheticization of melancholy. In the eighteenth century, the wealthy decorated their land with fake remnants of medieval ruins, but the architectural folly is not so charming if the battering ram came crashing through your front door. The culture of death that inspired the goth(ic) aesthetic came out of the Middle Ages when the Black Death killed hundreds of millions of people across Europe and skulls and skeletons made their way into art and objects. The Hundred Years’ War killed millions more. When death becomes so much a part of the fabric of regular life it finds its way into the culture.
Dead Black bodies have always been part of the American visual landscape, from the postcards of lynchings to grainy police dashcam footage. Claudia Rankine writes, “The unarmed, slain black bodies in public spaces turn grief into our everyday feeling that something is wrong everywhere and all the time, even if locally things appear normal.” If Black lives in the twenty-first century have anything in common with Europeans of the 1400s, it is an intimate relationship with death.
Death holds an uncanny position of being simultaneously the most common and the most mysterious phenomena in the human experience. It is both repellant and enthralling, and the gothic is balanced on the sliver of space between the two. Death is the nexus from which the gothic and horror is formed: facing the dread and terror of dying, exploring the mystery of what comes after, the rituals performed in the aftermath and all of its accoutrement — what Carol Margaret Davison calls “necropoetics.” The secularization and rationalization of the Enlightenment meant that the surety of an afterlife in heaven was no longer so cut-and-dry, and so anxieties arose about death. This kind of doubt yearns for clarity and structure, and the monumentality of death requires a practice one can perform — and so mourning became “a more fraught process that would lend itself to melancholic excess.”
The key to humorism was balance. The “excess of introspection” and a “maudlin demeanor” could be spewed, excreted and drained from the body. But a little bit of introspection and sentimentality could do a body good. Ideally one would have just enough gloom goop or just enough sorrow in your spleen to write a poem or paint a foggy landscape. Too much and one could become pathologically stuck in misery without escape, metaphysically constipated. By the eighteenth century, however, humor theory was losing credibility, and melancholia (which would later become depression) was regarded more as an affectation affiliated with intelligence, sensitivity, and refinement. There was dignity in affecting a world-weary ennui, and a “necroculture” around death as formed among the Graveyard Poets and Gloomths with their persistent case of the morbs.1
The way mourning and melancholy looked was part of the gothic and the goth. An aesthetic was formed around the materiality and performance of mourning, and mournfulness took on the air of romanticism. There is a difference between the performative, theatricality of gothic melancholia and clinical depression. It is a Theda Bara pantomime of sadness and an exaggeration of emotion. It’s melancholy as camp.
Contemporized widow’s weeds, elegiac electronic music, skulls as accessories, and languishing over graves that have been chosen based on the design of the headstone and not the person underneath, are part and parcel of the goth aesthetic. But it’s not any kind of mourning; it’s an Anglo-Saxon kind of despair. It’s not the wailing cry and beating of breasts, or a celebratory processional; it is a silent mourning, one of slow moving gestures, a languishing culture, the back of a hand gently pressed to the forehead in pre-swoon, the cough into a gleaming white handkerchief revealing a bright red spot. Goth(ic) is a necrotic romanticism. It brings the spectacle of dread that is mourning, out of the context of the church, or graveyard, or funeral parlor and into the light of day. In his memoir, Bad Kid, David Crabb described seeing a group of goth kids when he was fourteen in his suburban Texas town: “Well, I’ll be,” my father sighed. “They look like superheroes going to a funeral.” As much as it is a fashion, a color, or a music genre, goth is a pose and a posture.
If you ever find yourself in Independence, Missouri, I recommend a stop at Leila’s Hair Museum (the name is purely coincidental). Located behind a beauty school in a strip mall, is a collection of hundreds of pieces of Victorian hair art, elaborate wreaths of intricately arranged hair as memorials to loved ones, including ones made from the members of the League of Women Voters from 1865. There are brooches with the locks of former beloveds and little scenes painted with trimmings of the hair of children who passed away too soon. Death decorated the walls of parlors, was encased in lockets, and woven into black-rimmed mourning rings worn by widows and widowers alike.
My mother is Black but has fair skin and straight hair and if you just glanced at her quickly you might mistake her for white. According to the Natural Hair Chart, my hair is a thick, kinky 4A and my mother’s is a thin, wavy 2C. One day when I was in high school, I received a package in the mail. There was either no return address or I didn’t recognize it, I don’t remember which. Inside the package was a plastic Ziplock bag with a long, thick, braid of dark brown hair inside. There was no note. I was convinced I had an enemy somewhere who was putting some kind of hex on me, but a few days later I got a letter in the mail from my grandmother saying that she was sending me a lock of my mother’s hair that had been saved from when she was a little girl. I’m not sure why she didn’t think to send the letter with the hair, but that’s neither here nor there. I still have it, a plastic baggie of my mother’s hair. I feel like I should do something with it, make a wreath of my own, while she’s still here.
Goths borrow bits and pieces from the uniform of mourning, creating their own forms from their own time, but they owe a debt of gratitude to Queen Victoria. After the death of her husband Prince Albert, she remained in full mourning gear for three years and a stylized system for mourning became de rigueur. The social rules of fashion and etiquette were entwined with the rituals of bereavement. This included heavy, black dresses, with veils made of black crêpe, special black caps and bonnets, and jewelry made of jet. Mourning stationery and pages printed with a black border, allowed for correspondence that indicated death without the need to say it. Mourning was made formulaic, predictable, and consumable, and with the help of cholera and typhoid, everyone was doing it. Time frames were established depending on the closeness of the relation, “deep” or “full” mourning transitioned to “half” mourning, in which clothes could be switched from black to grey or purple. The width of the black border on one’s correspondence narrowed the more time passed. We are accustomed to talking about mourning as a narrative, a linear process of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance, by which the acute pain fades into an endurable ache and the jet black eventually fades to grey.
If
mourning is procedural, melancholy is persistent. In mourning, the lost object is replaced by a new something or someone and that sorrow morphs, diminishes in intensity as something else comes in to help patch the hole. Melancholy, on the other hand, is a permanent state of mourning. Here, there is no replacement, no fade to grey, the lost object is absorbed into the self and we become simultaneously the mourner and the thing being mourned. We are the void we are missing. There is no start, no process, and no end. Melancholy wakes up in the middle of the story and just stays there. Melancholia is a kind of stasis of mourning with no subject, a negative space with no matching positive shape. With no place to go, with nothing to do, melancholy just “is.” The lost object doesn’t have to be a person. It can be a lost home, a lost language, a lost religion, a lost history. When that missing person, place, or thing is so far removed from its original form, so fractured and disseminated, when its existence is denied altogether, that lost object remains unknown and unattended and absorbed into the self and into the culture.