No force could shield Serena Williams “from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court.” Questionable calls by umpires, punishments for alleged violations of tennis rules, and biased press coverage fuel the rage that bursts out in strings of profanity. All “the boos, the criticisms that she has made ugly the game of tennis—through her looks as well as her behavior”—contribute to frustrations and more angry outbursts, earning Williams further opprobrium. When a “newly contained Serena” emerges, Rankine wonders if the athlete has decided “that the less that is communicated the better” and whether “this ambiguity could also be diagnosed as dissociation”: Serena Williams “has had to split herself off from herself and create different personae.”17 She has entered the domain signified by “you.” Hurston’s view at the start of the twentieth century that she could be a color-changing chameleon contrasts with Rankine’s belief in the twenty-first century that “what happens to you doesn’t belong to you”: “You nothing. // You nobody. // You.”18
A number of Rankine’s predecessors in the eighties and nineties were less pessimistic as they weighed racial injustice against Hurston’s vision of a world in which all people could experience themselves as cosmically raceless or brilliantly colorful. When the performance artist Adrian Piper participated in white social events where she was presumed to be white, she handed a printed card to anyone who made a prejudiced comment:
I am black.
I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. . . .
I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.19
Piper began this performance, which she called My Calling (Card), in 1986, three years after Toni Morrison produced “Recitatif,” a story with ambiguous markers that made readers conscious of the arbitrariness of racial labels.20 In 1997, Morrison’s novel Paradise also kept matters of race indeterminate. She “wanted the readers to wonder about the race of those girls until those readers understood that their race didn’t matter.”21 Like the legal thinker Patricia J. Williams, Morrison attributed sexism’s and racism’s persistence to a persistent “habit” of thinking that could be countered “if only we could imagine” breaking it,22 as did the extraordinarily talented actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith.
During the nineties, Anna Deavere Smith conducted interviews with participants in racially charged conflicts and then replicated their words, mannerisms, and appearances in two dramatic one-woman shows: Fires in the Mirror (1992), about the 1991 Crown Heights riots, and Twilight: L.A. (1994), about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. “If only a man can speak for a man, a woman for a woman, a Black person for all Black people,” Smith believes, “then we, once again, inhibit the spirit of theater.”23
The actress is a chameleon; for instance, in Fires in the Mirror she plays Al Sharpton and Angela Davis as well as Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Rabbi Joseph Spielman. She has said about the antiracists and the racists she performs, “I come to love” them, which may be why she has refrained from impersonating the politician she calls our “Narcissist-in-Chief.”24 Smith’s incarnations emphasize the links between people who do not feel connected. This connectedness—so evident to the drama’s spectators, so invisible to the dramatized participants—promoted xenophilia, an antidote to the xenophobia expressed by many of her characters. Whether Smith played white or Black, Asian or Latino, female or male characters, her imaginative identification was fully evident.
Less optimistic, the visual artist Kara Walker—especially in her hit installation of murals, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b’tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994)—captured the interracial violence that Rankine deplores. Walker’s scenes of perversity in the antebellum South were displayed in the most genteel of art forms, the silhouette. Unlike the multicultural Harlem Renaissance rendered by Faith Ringgold in the story quilts of her French Collection (1990–97), the past depicted by Kara Walker featured Black figures against a stark white wall engaged in the pornographic rituals of the sexual politics first critiqued by Kate Millett and Andrea Dworkin: cartoon pickaninnies and Jezebels and bucks voluptuously assaulting and assaulted by cartoon plantation masters and mistresses (who, of course, are also black silhouettes).25
In 2019, Kara Walker’s huge sculpture Fons Americanus—riffing on the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace—arose in the Tate Modern. As the artist has explained, the work is a meditation on the intersection of America, Britain, and Africa in “the Black Atlantic”—the sea crisscrossed by slave ships for several centuries. Some three million visitors poured into the museum to admire the parodic details of this installation, which featured “Queen Vicky” at the top, along with drowning Black children, rebellious Black captains, a tree trunk adorned with a noose, and waters gushing over all. But though Walker had hoped to find another home for the piece when its term at the Tate was up, it was dismantled in early April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down galleries around the world. Still, it has been amply documented and can be seen on the internet, along with Walker’s shrewd commentary on it.26
THE BROKEN EARTH OF N. K. JEMISIN
Walker’s and Rankine’s bleak view of sexual and racial relations is shared by a major science fiction writer of the early twenty-first century. But while Walker looked back in anger at the Civil War, N. K. Jemisin looks forward in horror at a resurgence of slavery during the end times. Each volume in her Broken Earth trilogy won the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Novel, in 2016, 2017, and 2018—a feat never before accomplished by any writer. Jemisin describes the destruction of the environment on a planet suffering climate changes far worse than global warming. In her postapocalyptic dystopia, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have long ago buried an advanced civilization—perhaps ours—and the survivors live on one broken continent, called the Stillness. Amid remnants of a wrecked culture, they subsist on a devastated planet intermittently wracked by convulsions.
The psychology degree Jemisin earned at Tulane University and the masters of education she received from the University of Maryland, as well as her work in counseling, undoubtedly shaped her insights into the traumas triggered by a shattered Earth and a grotesque slave system. She was watching the police abusing protesters in Ferguson when she began the trilogy, which depicts the Stills of the Stillness ruling over enslaved “orogenes,” a race endowed with the ability to mitigate the geological disasters to which the earth is subject.27 They are instruments or tools for human beings, not considered human themselves.
The powers of the orogenes—often called “roggas,” a derogatory label—are needed to protect against seismic upheavals, but those very powers make them feared, since they can obliterate anyone or anything in their path. They are therefore either killed as soon as their powers are recognized or used as tools (sometimes weapons) by Guardians of the state, after rigorous training and testing. Like the pioneering African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler, to whom she has paid tribute, Jemisin grapples with the racial, sexual, and ecological nightmares confronting humanity.28
Three intertwined narratives enable Jemisin to analyze slavery in The Fifth Season. Essun’s story is told in the second-person present: an orogene mother discovers that her husband has killed their son (who inadvertently displayed his orogenic nature) and goes in quest of the daughter her husband has abducted. Damaya’s story is told in the third-person past: a child newly discovered to be an orogene is removed from her home to the Fulcrum, a training station, where she is indoctrinated to become a mere instrument in the service of the state. Syenite’s story is told in the third-person present: embarked on a daunting mission, a highly trained orogene realizes that she is expected to become a breeder of future orogenes whose lives will be wrecked by the uses to which they will be put.
In vivid and often violent scenes, Jemisin explores the griefs that accrue as all three negotiate between a dehumani
zing system and stubborn efforts to maintain life, limb, and a shred of autonomy on a ruined planet. Only at the end of this first novel of the Broken Earth trilogy, when we discover that the three female characters—the mother, the schoolgirl, the weaponized slave—are the same woman at different stages of development, does the novel reconfigure itself as a powerful tale of survival at great cost. And through this revelation, Jemisin illuminates the book’s dedication: “For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question.”29
The Broken Earth trilogy issues a warning about slavery and about an environment so chaotic that human life is constantly under assault from natural disasters. While ecofeminists analyzed the destruction of the ecosystem portrayed in Jemisin’s fiction,30 such literary women as Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Barbara Kingsolver, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Margaret Atwood sought to cultivate reverence for the natural world or to raise awareness of the possibility of global pandemics. The current U.S. poet laureate, Joy Harjo, a Creek Indian and student of First Nation history, frequently calls on a spirit world to heal the wounds of women, tribal cultures, and the earth.31
Quite a few feminist activists have also begun to tackle the threat of global warming in multiple media.32 Mining a tradition pioneered by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring (1962), Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015, predicted the disappearance of 20–50 percent of living species by the end of the twenty-first century. Kolbert hopes that humans can be forward-thinking and altruistic: “Time and time again, people have demonstrated that they care about what Rachel Carson called ‘the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures,’ and that they’re willing to make sacrifices on those creatures’ behalf.”33 Similarly, Rebecca Solnit, arguing that we must keep moving toward “a vision of a world in which everything is connected,” draws on the words of Ursula K. Le Guin: “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”34
PATRICIA LOCKWOOD SENDS UP THE CHURCH AND THE FAMILY ROMANCE
But can any power be resisted and changed? In a secular, postmodern world, how does the patriarchy of the church continue to operate—and how does it shape the patriarchy of the family? This question, which inspired many feminists to critique the masculinism not only of Catholicism but of all institutionalized religions,35 shapes Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy (2017), a coming-of-age story that records the evolution of a young poet whose real-life father was an honest-to-God Catholic Father. Her book, as one enthusiastic reviewer commented, gives “ ‘confessional memoir’ a new layer of meaning”; and as another critic noted, it is often “brilliantly silly.”36 A surrealist poet who gained fame on the internet with tweets she called “Sexts” (e.g., “A ghost teasingly takes off his sheet. Underneath he is so sexy that everyone screams out loud”) and with a ferocious “Rape Joke” (“The rape joke it wore a goatee”), Lockwood couldn’t have invented the family that she traces in Priestdaddy.37
How could someone have a “priestdaddy”? Not because a local confessor seduced one of his confessees, who then gave illicit birth to his child, but because this particular Father was once stationed in a submarine where he converted to Lutheranism and became a minister after watching The Exorcist more than seventy times; then, “tired of [Protestant] grape juice” and wanting wine, he converted all over again to Catholicism and became a priest.38 But because throughout all these conversions Greg Lockwood already had a wife and children, only a special dispensation from the Vatican could enable his ordination—at which, the author tells us, she wore an itchy dress.
In its ambivalent focus on a peculiarly problematic father, Priestdaddy has much in common with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. But while Bechdel’s father is enigmatic because of the dissonance between his role as paterfamilias and his closeted sexuality, Lockwood’s father is odd because of the dissonance between his churlish behavior as a private paterfamilias and his public role as a theological Pater. Around the house, he is almost always dressed in nothing but boxer shorts while listening simultaneously to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, shouting “Hoo-eee” at televised games, cooking himself lavish servings of bacon or hamburger, and strumming on his expensive collection of guitars—a collection so pricey (one once belonged to Paul McCartney) that he can’t find the money to send his daughters to college. In public, sporting his white clerical collar, he sponsors anti-abortion protests, hosts seminarians, and tends to the rites of baptism, marriage, and death.
How can one man be both a thuggish daddy and a pastoral Daddy? This is a question that lurks behind the hilarious façade that Lockwood erects in her book, which often seems to be a giddy analysis of every aspect of patriarchy: male privilege, male self-indulgence, male authority, male childishness, male selfishness, and, yes, male misogyny. Though Greg Lockwood adores his energetic wife, his children seem to exist mostly as props in an ongoing fleshly/spiritual game of “Father knows best.” And his daughter knows that the church he serves is colluding in multiple cover-ups of dank sexual secrets.
Is Lockwood’s memoir an extended iteration of Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”?39 In the center of the book, this seems to be the case. At 16, she tells us, she thought “the house seemed made of screaming, and I roamed it looking for a cell of silence . . . in that thunderous and warlike score.” Such feelings, she adds, drove her to take “a hundred Tylenol” and end up in a mental ward not unlike the one where Plath’s Esther Greenwood lands. There, when her father first visits (and not in the role of Father), he sardonically says, “I just want to thank you for ruining our anniversary.” 40 But then, just as there is a difference between Greg Lockwood and Bechdel’s poignant father, so too there is a difference between him and Plath’s mythic “man in black with a Meinkampf look.” 41
For one thing, at the age of 19 Patricia Lockwood has the luck to meet and marry a kinder, gentler man than any of these fathers. For another, she acknowledges that for his parishioners Father Lockwood’s living room (where his children weren’t allowed) was a space where they went to discuss loss and fear: “Sunday after Sunday in our living room sat the unthinkable and spoke to my father.” And, too, though her father “lounged horizontal at home, and sent us up and down the stairs to fetch for him,” when “the call came at three in the morning, he was up and out the door without the smallest sigh or protest, to serve the unthinkable, to read the ritual words to it, to plump the pillow under its head. His Last Rites kit sat on the stairs just by the front door.”42
So is Greg Lockwood redeemable, despite his awful politics, bad behavior, and misogyny? A “lapsed” Catholic,43 his daughter nonetheless respects his commitment to what is, on the one hand, a patriarchal ceremonial role, and, on the other hand, at least for some a comforting ceremonial role. Half-naked, he is a bully or a solipsist. Attired in Catholic black with white collar, he struggles to do what is best for those who have put their trust—their faith—in him. Nonetheless, his daughter concludes her memoir by taking her mother on a sentimental journey to Key West, where they ignore the Hemingway lookalikes who patrol the streets of the tropical town and picnic on the beach. “Oh, it was so fun,” the mother whispers when Lockwood and her husband leave her back in Kansas with the father about whom she has said, “He is who he is and that’s all he’s ever gonna be.”44 Should we say the same thing, we wonder as we close the book, about the patriarchy outlined by church and state?
HEADLINING FEMINISM: FROM REBECCA SOLNIT TO BEYONCÉ
“What is patriarchy,” N. K. Jemisin asked in a New York Times book review, “but a con being run on all genders, whispering to both victims and beneficiaries that any suffering they experience is for their own good?”45 Jemisin’s Otherworldly column for the New York Times—in which she reviewed fantasy and science fiction between 2016 and early 2019—points to the ways in which feminists have established themselves in journalism. Although the Times did not accept the usage “Ms.” until 1986, in the past few
years it has hired a growing number of female columnists and promoted all sorts of feminist ventures, most notably the In Her Words biweekly newsletter and Overlooked No More, a series of obituaries whose subjects had been disregarded at the time of their death because of editorial racist or sexist biases. In other words, the evolution of the Times reflects the growing impact and visibility of feminism in American culture today.
After earning a master’s degree in journalism, Rebecca Solnit, who grew up “in a house full of male violence,” has made such violence “a public issue” in writings about a world “full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wished to harm me for no reason other than my gender.”46 After her essay “Men Explain Things to Me” was posted online in 2008, “hundreds of university women shared their stories of being patronized, belittled, talked over, and more” on the website “Academic Men Explain Things to Me.”
“The term ‘mansplaining’ was coined soon after the piece appeared, and . . . my essay, along with all the men who embodied the idea, apparently inspired it.” 47 The origins of the coinage bropriate—to steal or appropriate the words or ideas of women—remain murkier. Manspreading appeared in the context of online complaints about men taking up excessive public space on New York City subways by spreading their legs.48
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