Feel Free

by Zadie Smith

  This same point is made again, more fiercely, in one of the final scenes. Chris is standing in that dark wood again, covered in blood; on the ground before him lies a far more badly wounded Rose. A police car is approaching. Chris eyes it with something like resigned dread. As it happens, he is the victim in this gruesome tableau, but neither Chris nor anyone else in the cinema expects that to count for a goddamn thing. (“You’re really in for it now, you poor motherfucker,” said someone behind me. These days, a cop is apparently a more frightening prospect than a lobotomy-performing cult.) But then the car door opens and something unexpected happens: it is not the dreaded white cop after all but a concerned friend, Rod Williams (Lil Rel Howery), the charming and paranoid brother who warned Chris, at the very start, not to go stay with a load of white folks in a wood. Rod—who happens to work for the TSA—surveys the bloody scene and does not immediately assume that Chris is the perp. A collective gasp of delight bursts over the cinema, but in this final reversal the joke’s on us. How, in 2017, are we still in a world where the idea of presuming a black man innocent before he is proved guilty is the material of comic fantasy?

  These are the type of self-contained, ironic, politically charged sketches at which Peele has long excelled. But there’s a deeper seam in Get Out that’s mined through visual symbol rather than situational comedy. I will not easily forget those lengthy close-ups of suffering black faces; suffering, but trapped behind masks, like so many cinematic analogues of the arguments of Frantz Fanon. Chris himself, and the white family’s maid, and the white family’s handyman, and that young, lobotomized beau of an old white lady—all frozen in attitudes of trauma, shock, bland servility, or wearing a chillingly fixed grin. In each case, the eyes register an internal desperation. Get me out! The oppressed. The cannibalized. The living dead. When a single tear or a dribble of blood ran down these masks, we were to understand that this was a sign that there was still somebody in there. Somebody human. Someone who had the potential to be whole.

  As the movie progresses we learn what’s going on: black people aren’t being murdered or destroyed up here in the woods, they’re being used. A white grandmother’s brain is now in her black maid’s body. An old blind white gallerist hopes to place his brain in Chris’s cranium and thus see with the young black photographer’s eyes, be in his young black skin. Remnants of the black “host” remain in these operations—but not enough to make a person. Peele has found a concrete metaphor for the ultimate unspoken fear: that to be oppressed is not so much to be hated as obscenely loved. Disgust and passion are intertwined. Our antipathies are simultaneously a record of our desires, our sublimated wishes, our deepest envies. The capacity to give birth; the capacity to make food from one’s body; perceived intellectual, physical or sexual superiority; perceived intimacy with the natural world, animals and plants; perceived self-sufficiency in a faith, or in a community. There are few qualities in others we cannot transform into a form of fear and loathing in ourselves. In the documentary I Am Not Your Negro, which came out in late 2016, James Baldwin gets to the heart of it:

  What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.

  But there is an important difference between the invented nigger of 1962, and the invented African-American of 2017: the disgust has mostly fallen away. We were declared beautiful back in 1962 but it has only recently been discovered that we are so. In the liberal circles depicted in Get Out everything that was once reviled—our eyes, our skin, our backsides, our noses, our arms, our legs, our breasts, and of course our hair—is now openly envied and celebrated and aestheticized and deployed in secondary images to sell stuff. As Chris himself notes, black is cool now. To be clear, the life of the black citizen in America is no more envied or desired today than it was back in 1962. Her schools are still avoided and her housing is still sub-standard and her neighborhood still feared and her personal and professional outcomes remain disproportionally linked to her zip code. But her physical self is no longer reviled. If she is a child and comes up for adoption, many a white family will be delighted to have her, and if she happens to be in your social class and social circle, she is very welcome to come to the party; in fact, it’s not really a party unless she does come. No one will call her the N-word on national television, least of all a black intellectual. (The Baldwin quote is from a television interview.) For liberals the word is interdicted and unsayable. But in place of the old disgust comes a new kind of cannibalism. The white people in Get Out want to get inside the black experience: they want to wear it like a skin and walk around in it. The modern word for this is “appropriation.” There is an argument that there are many things that are “ours” that must not be touched or even looked at sideways, including (but not limited to) our voices, our personal style, our hair, our cultural products, our history, and perhaps more than anything else, our pain and sorrows. A people from whom much has been stolen is understandably protective of its possessions, especially the ineffable kind. In these debates my mind always turns to a line of Nabokov, a writer for whom arrival in America meant the loss of pretty much everything, including a language: “Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?”

  Two weeks after watching Get Out, I stand with my children in front of Open Casket, Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, the black teenager who in 1955 was beaten and lynched after being accused of flirting with a white woman. They do not know what they are looking at and are too young for me to explain. Before I came, I had read the widely circulated letter to the curators of the Whitney Biennial objecting to their inclusion of this painting in the show: “I am writing to ask you to remove Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket and with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum . . . because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun, though the practice has been normalized for a long time.” I knew, from reading about this debate, that in fact the painting has never been for sale, so I focused instead on the other prong of the argument—an artist’s right to a particular subject: “The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.”

  I want to follow the letter very precisely, along its own logic, in which natural rights are replaced with racial ones. I will apply it personally. If I was an artist, and if I could paint—could the subject matter be mine? I am biracial. I have Afro-hair, my skin is brown, I am identified, by others and by myself, as a black woman. And so, by the logic of the letter—if I understood it correctly—this question of subject matter, in my case, would not come up, as it would not come up for the author of the letter, Hannah Black, who also happens to be, like me, biracial, and brown. Neither of us is American, but the author appears to speak confidently in defense of the African-American experience, so I, like her, will assume a transnational unity. I will assume that Emmett Till, if I could paint, could be my subject, too.

  Now I want to inch a step further. I turn from the painting to my children. Their beloved father is white, I am biracial, so by the old racial logic of America, they are “quadroons.” Could they take black suffering as a subject of their art, should they ever make any? Their grandmother is “black as the ace of spades,” as the British used to say; their mother is what the French still call café au lait. They themselves are sort of yellowy. When exactly does black suffering cease to be their concern? Their grandmother—raised on a post-colonial island, in extreme poverty, and descended from slaves—knew black suffering intimately. But her grandchildren look white. Are they? If they are, shouldn’t white people like my children conc
ern themselves with the suffering of Emmett Till? Is making art a form of concern? Does it matter which form the concern takes? Could they be painters of occasional black subjects (Dana Schutz paints many different subjects)? Or must their concern take a different form: civil-rights law, state-school teaching. If they ignore the warnings of the letter and take black suffering as their subject in a work of art, what should be the consequence? If their work of art turns out to be a not especially distinguished expression or engagement with their supposed concern—must their painting be removed from wherever it hangs? Must it be destroyed? To what purpose?

  Often I look at my children and remember that “quadroons”—green-eyed, yellow-haired people, like my children—must have been standing on those auction blocks with their café au lait mothers and dark-skinned grandmothers. And I think, too, of how they would have had many opportunities to “pass,” to sneak out and be lost in the white majority, not visibly connected to black suffering and so able to walk through town, marry white, lighten up the race again. To be biracial in America at that time was almost always to have been the issue of rape. It was in a literal sense to live with the enemy within, and have your physical being exist as an expression of the oppression of your people. Perhaps this trace of shame and inner conflict has never entirely left the biracial experience.

  To be biracial at any time is complex. Speaking for myself, I know that racially charged historical moments, like this one, can increase the ever-present torsion within my experience until it feels like something’s got to give. You start to yearn for absolute clarity: personal, genetic, political. I stood in front of the Dana Schutz and thought how cathartic it would be if this picture filled me with rage. But the painting never got that deep into me, neither as representation nor appropriation. I think of it as a questionably successful example of both, but the letter condemning it will not contend with its relative success or failure, the letter lives in a binary world in which the painting is either facilely celebrated as proof of the autonomy of art, or condemned to the philistine art-bonfire. The first option, as the letter rightly argues, is more often than not hoary old white privilege dressed up as aesthetic theory, but the second is—let’s face it—the province of Nazis and censorious evangelicals. Art is a traffic in symbols and images, it has never been politically or historically neutral, and I do not find discussions on appropriation and representation to be in any way trivial. Each individual example has to be thought through, and we have every right to include such considerations in our evaluations of art (and also to point out the often dubious neutrality of supposedly pure aesthetic criteria). But when arguments of appropriation are linked to a racial essentialism no more sophisticated than the antebellum miscegenation laws, well, then we head quickly into absurdity. Is Hannah Black black enough to write this letter? Are my children too white to engage with black suffering? How black is black enough? Does an “octoroon” still count?

  When I look at Open Casket the truth is I don’t feel very much. I tried to transfer to this painting—or even to Dana Schutz—some of that same cold fury that is sparked by looking at the historical photograph of Emmett Till, whose mother insisted he have an open casket at his funeral, or when considering the crimes of Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who falsely accused him of flirting with her, but nothing I saw in that canvas could provoke such an emotion. It’s an abstraction without much intensity, and there’s a clear caution in the brushstrokes around the eyes: she’s gone in only so far. Yet the anxious aporia in the upper face is countered by the area around the mouth, where the canvas roils, coming toward us three-dimensionally, like a swelling—the flesh garroted, twisted, striped—as if something is pushing from behind the death mask, trying to get out. That did move me. What’s harder to see is why this picture was singled out. In the very next gallery there hangs a painting by a white artist, Eric Fischl, A Visit to/A Visit from/ the Island, in which rich white holidaymakers on a beach are juxtaposed with desperate black Haitian boat people washed up on the sand, some dead, some half naked, writhing, suffering. Painted in 1983, by an artist now in his late sixties, it is presumably for sale, yet remains unmentioned in a letter whose main effect has been to divert attention from everything else in the show. Henry Taylor, Deana Lawson, Lyle Ashton Harris and Cauleen Smith are just a few of the artists of color presently lighting up the Whitney in a thrilling biennial that goes deep into black experience, illuminating its joys and suffering both. Looking at their work, I realized I resent the implication that black pain is so raw and so unprocessed—and black art practice so vulnerable and invisible—that a single painting by a white woman can radically influence it one way or another. Nor do I need to convince myself of my own blackness by drawing a line between somebody else’s supposed fraudulence and the fears I have concerning my own (thus evincing an unfortunate tendency toward overcompensation that it must be admitted is not unknown among us biracial folks). No. The viewer is not a fraud. Neither is the painter. The truth is that this painting and I are simply not in profound communication. This is always a risk in art. The solution remains as it has always been. Get out (of the gallery) or deeper in (to the argument). Write a screed against it. Critique the hell out of it. Tear it to shreds in your review or paint another painting in response. But “remove” it? “Destroy” it? I think instead I will turn from this painting, not offended, not especially shocked or moved, nor even terribly engaged by it, and walk with my children to another part of the gallery. We have been warned not to get under each other’s skin, to keep our distance. But Jordan Peele’s horror-fantasy—in which we are inside each other’s skins and intimately involved in each other’s suffering—is neither a horror nor a fantasy. It is a fact of our experience. The real fantasy is that we can get out of each other’s way, mark a clean cut between black and white, a final cathartic separation between us and them. For the many of us in loving, mixed families this is the true impossibility. There are people online who seem astounded that Get Out is written and directed by a man with a white wife and a white mother, a man who will soon have—depending on how the unpredictable phenotype lottery goes—a white-appearing child. But this is the history of race in America. Families can become black then white then black again within a few generations. And when they are not genetically mixed they live in a mixed reality at the national level if no other. There is no getting out of our intertwined history.

  But in this moment of resurgent black consciousness, God knows it feels good—therapeutic!—to mark a clear separation from white America, the better to speak in the collective voice. We will not be moved. We can’t breathe. We will not be executed for traffic violations or for wearing hooded tops. We will no longer tolerate sub-standard schools, housing and health care. Get Out—as evidenced by its huge box-office ratings—is the right film for this moment. It is the opposite of post-black, or post-racial. It reveals race as the fundamental American lens through which everything is seen. That part, to my mind, is right on the money. But the “us” and “them”? That’s a cheaper gag. Whether they like it or not, Americans are one people. (And the binary of black and white is only one part of this nation’s infinitely variegated racial composition.) Lobotomies are the cleanest cut; real life is messier. I can’t wait for Peele—with his abundant gifts, black-nerd smarts, comprehensive cinematic fandom and complex personal experience—to go deeper in, and out the other side.

  ON THE BOOKSHELF

  CRASH BY J. G. BALLARD

  I met J. G. Ballard once—it was a car crash. We were sailing down the Thames in the middle of the night, I don’t remember why. A British Council thing, maybe? The boat was full of young British writers, many of them drunk, and a few had begun hurling a stack of cheap conference chairs over the hull into the water. I was twenty-three, had only been a young British writer for a couple of months, and can recall being very anxious about those chairs: I was not the type to rock the boat. I was too amazed to be on the boat. (Though it was no pleasure barge, more like a Tr
avelodge afloat, with an interior that put you in mind of a Shepperton semi-detached. A Ballardian boat. Everything brown and gray with accents of Tube-seat orange.) I slunk away from the chair-hurlers and walked straight into Ballard. That moon of a face, the shiny tonsure, the lank side-curtains of hair—ghost of a defrocked priest. An agonizing ten-minute conversation followed in which we two seemed put on earth to vivify that colloquial English phrase “cross purposes.” Every book I championed he hated. Every film he admired I’d never seen. (We didn’t dare move on to the visual arts.) The only thing we seemed to have in common was King’s College, but as I cheerily bored him with an account of all the lovely books I’d read for my finals, I could see that moon face curdling with disgust. In the end, he stopped speaking to me altogether, leaned against a hollow Doric column and simply stared.