Dead and alive, p.14
Dead and Alive, page 14
Home was the place where you had no home, or none that could be considered brave or free. Home was a racialized system so obsessively applied, so totalizing, that even in wartime it had to be exported wholesale! What is most extraordinary about Black Manhattan, to the reader of today, is how much rage and despair must have had to be swallowed to write it at all.
Johnson, alongside his fellow black Victorian, Frederick Douglass, walked a long, tough, but ultimately hopeful road, and yet died before much of what he hoped for came to pass. His paragraph-long obituary for Douglass, who died in 1895 – as the dream of Reconstruction died and Jim Crow rose from its ashes – is one of the few moments Johnson allows for the possibility that the arc of the moral universe rarely bends towards justice in one man’s lifetime:
Douglass died, probably, a disappointed man. He had lived to see many of the highest hopes for his race fall to the ground. He was a philosopher, but there were many things he saw come to pass which he hardly could have accepted with resignation. He had seen the Negro disenfranchised and all the guarantees of equal citizenship fought for and laid down for him in the fundamental law of the land flouted. He had seen the race made the victim of new hatreds and brutalities not equalled under some phases of slavery. He had the knowledge that in the ten years before his death more than two thousand of his fellows had been lynched and tortured and burned at the stake.
Johnson died in 1938. The road of progress and disappointment, progress and disappointment, continued. Continues.
What Do We Want History to Do to Us? On Kara Walker
Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is having the air squeezed out of her by a larger, black woman, who wears a kerchief around her head. To an American audience, I imagine, this black woman could easily read as ‘Mammy’. To a viewer from the wider diaspora – to a black Briton, say – she is perhaps less likely to invoke the stereotypical placidity of ‘Mammy’, hewing closer to the fury of her mythological opposite, the legendary Nanny of the Maroons: escaped slave, leader of peoples. Her hand is held up forcefully, indicating the direction in which she is determined to go, but the rope between her and the white woman is pulled taut: both struggle under its constriction. And in this drama of opposing forces, through this brutal dialectic, aspects of each woman’s anatomy are grotesquely eroticized by her adversary: buttocks for the black woman, breasts for her white counterpart. Which raises the question: Who tied this constricting rope? A third party? And, if the struggle continues, will the white woman eventually be extinguished? Will the black woman be free? That is, if the white woman is on the verge of extinguishment at all. Maybe she’s on the verge of something else entirely: definition. That’s why we cinch waists, isn’t it? To achieve definition?
The two women are traced in Kara Walker’s familiar, cartoonish line, which seems to combine in a single gesture the comic brevity of Charles Schulz, the polemical pamphleteering of William Hogarth, and the oneiric revelations of Francisco Goya and Otto Dix. The drawing was made, according to Walker, in ‘1994ish…when I was 24ish’, which is to say at the very beginning of her career, when her drawings were still largely unknown, and few people knew or could guess at the busy chalk portraits that lurked on the other side of the newly famous – and soon-to-be notorious – paper cut-outs. The sentence underneath the image reads: what I want history to do to me. Its meaning is unsettling and unsettled, existing in a grey zone between artist’s statement, perverse confession and ambivalent desire. The sentence pulls in two directions, giving no slack, tense like the rope. And just as the eye finds no comfortable place to rest in the image – passing from figure to figure seeking resolution, desiring a satisfying end to a story so strikingly begun – so the sentence is partial and in unresolved motion, referring upward to the image, which only then refers us back down to the words, in endless, discomfiting cycle.
What might I want history to do to me? I might want history to reduce my historical antagonist – and increase me. I might ask it to urgently remind me why I’m moving forward, away from history. Or speak to me always of our intimate relation, of the ties that bind – and indelibly link – my history and me. I could want history to tell me that my future is tied to my past, whether I want it to be or not. Or ask it to promise me that my future will be revenge upon my past. Or warn me that the past is not erased by this revenge. Or suggest to me that brutal oppression implicates the oppressors, who are in turn brutalized by their own acts of oppression. Or argue that an oppressor can believe herself to be an oppressor only within a system in which she herself has been oppressed. I might want history to show me that slaves and masters are bound at the hip. That they internalize each other. That we hate what we most desire. That we desire what we most hate. That we create oppositions – black white male female fat thin beautiful ugly virgin whore – in order to provide definition to ourselves by contrast. I might want history to convince me that although some identities are chosen, many others are forced. Or that no identities are chosen. Or that all identities are chosen. That I feed history. That history feeds me. That we starve each other. All of these things. None of them. All of them in an unholy mix of the true and the false…
What I want history to do to me predates Kara Walker’s forays into public art by many years,[*1] yet in it we can find the problems with which all public art – all monuments, all visual interventions into our public space – must ultimately wrestle. What do we want our public art to do? The official answer is, usually, ‘memorialize’. We want our monuments to help us commemorate what has passed: our glories, our sufferings. Yet if you grow up, as Walker did, in the shadow of Stone Mountain, Georgia’s monumental tribute to the ‘heroes of the Confederacy’ – carved into the sheer rock and looming over the majority-black population – you will have many questions. Monument to whom? To what? To whose history? To which memories? Public art claiming to represent our collective memory is just as often a work of historical erasure and political manipulation. It is just as often the violent inscription of myth over truth, a form of ‘over-writing’ – one story overlaid and thus obscuring another – modelled in three dimensions. In the United States, we speak of this. Discussions of power and erasure as they relate to monuments are by now well under way. The astonishing, ongoing absence of public markers of the slave trade, for example – of landing sites and auction blocks, of lynchings and massacres – is a matter of frequent public discussion, debate and (partial) correction, albeit four hundred years after the first enslaved peoples landed on American shores. In the UK, meanwhile, we have to speak not simply of erasure but of something closer to perfect oblivion. It is no exaggeration to say that the only thing I ever learned about slavery during my British education was that ‘we’ ended it. Even more extraordinary to me now is how many second-generation Caribbean kids in the UK grew up, in the 1970s and 1980s, with the bizarre notion that our families were somehow native to ‘the islands’, had always been there, even as we pored over the history of ‘American slavery’.[*2]
The schools were silent; the streets deceptive. The streets were full of monuments to the glorious, imperial, wealthy past, and no explanation whatsoever of the roots and sources of that empire-building wealth. The English side of my own family lived in Brighton, but when we visited I had no clue that those gorgeous Georgian rows of houses, glistening white, had slave sugar as their foundation. ‘What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.’ This ancient piece of Periclean common sense gets short shrift in England, where grand monuments to imagined past glories are far preferred to (usually much less glorious) accounts of historical reality. Between official memory and the subjective experience of millions, then, there was a chasm. Take, for example, the Victoria Memorial, that marble white magnificence in front of Buckingham Palace, with which Walker’s latest piece of public art, Fons Americanus, a huge fountain installed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, is evidently in discussion. As with so many British monuments, what appears to be an act of public storytelling is as least as much about silence as narrative. The self-conceived values of empire are confidently displayed, in the forms of classical figures embodying Peace, Progress, Manufacture and Agriculture (represented by a woman in peasant dress with a sickle and a sheaf of corn; more to the point would be a black woman holding a stalk of sugar cane with a kerchief round her head). Cherubs abound, and mermaids and mermen – symbolizing the nation’s nautical domination – but there is of course no representation of the peoples thus subdued by this famed maritime strength; and no tourist standing before this memorial would have any idea that a portion of the money used to build it was in fact raised by West African tribes, who sent goods to be sold, the proceeds of which went to the memorial’s fund. (The people of New Zealand, who also contributed to the fund, are acknowledged in an inscription upon the base.) How did these West African goods get to London? On the ships of Alfred Lewis Jones – the subject of a few monuments himself – an eminent Victorian shipowner and businessman, remembered, in England, as the ‘Uncrowned King of West Africa’ for his myriad business interests on those shores. In the Congo, meanwhile, he made his mark as Liverpool’s consular representative of King Leopold II of Belgium, and therefore as an apologist and enabler of one of the most brutal colonial enterprises in history, the infamous regime that established the common practice of limb removal by machete. (An abject fact that never fails to come to mind whenever I see Walker’s cut-outs of black hands, severed from their bodies, bouncing around a white wall, or falling out of a traditional Mousgoum hut, like a return of the repressed…)
Anyway, into this strange national historical amnesia enters Kara Walker. What lessons can she have taken from her American public art experiences? In the process of making her truly monumental A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, she began, as she often does, with free association, mining both her own mind and our collective consciousness for the many sweet and sour resonances of sugar: ‘Starting with sugar and molasses, and molasses is a byproduct of the sugar processing.’ And then asking herself: ‘What other byproducts are there?’ Walker’s historical researches are never superficial, and her art practice has always included an almost equal amount of reading and writing, from which the visuals emerge. Researching sugar, she found herself once again neck-deep in blood and horror. Slave labour, colonization, land seizure, extractive capitalism, the exploitation of women and children, and then, later, the global cultivation of sugar addiction, a public health catastrophe that can be said to affect most profoundly the black and the poor. ‘And I got to the end and I was like Ruins!…Ruins!…And I couldn’t just produce ruins.’
What is the correct response to a ruinous history? What, if anything, is the artist’s ‘duty’ here? Should ruins always and everywhere be ‘reclaimed’? Should ruins be consciously rebuilt into something ‘positive’? If not the representation of ruins, then what? Walker:
Up until that point I had been thinking of finger-wagging doom-laden things about the history of slavery and sugar and America. It didn’t take into account what people wanted to look at. When I came up with the idea and made it, it reminded me of wanting to do the cut-outs, that sense of giving people something they wanted to look at, working with their attention span in a way.[*3]
Walker’s particular mode of engaging with our attention spans – her visual and conceptual provocations – have often caused furore, first from the generation above her, now not infrequently from the generation below. For when it comes to the ruins of history, Walker neither simply represents nor reclaims. Instead she eroticizes, aestheticizes, fetishizes and dramatizes. With the consequence that she is accused of an unnecessary or inappropriate cultivation of the grotesque, of a prurient interest: ‘salaciousness’. As if Walker’s manner of aestheticizing ruin, so that our attention may be kept upon it, was a unique scandal in the history of art (or, at least, as if no black woman artist had a right to take up the tools Walker assumes as her inheritance and her right).
But this mode of relating to the ruins of the past is hardly without precedent. Approaching Walker’s Sugar Baby that summer in Brooklyn, first one passed a series of melting child figures, dripping molasses, holding in their arms or on their backs the kind of baskets field labourers use. They looked like those heartbreaking child ‘blackamoors’ you spot in the corners of eighteenth-century paintings, carrying sweet delights for the pleasure of Milady. (Though to me they were the very picture of the Liberian child labourers I once saw tapping rubber out of the trees, intended for the American tyre market.) But there was an older echo, too: in their arrangement, lining the path to the main event – to the Sugar Baby herself – they recalled the Stations of the Cross, one of the most familiar sequences in Western art, the culmination of which is the crucified Christ. Like Walker’s Sugar Baby, he is usually oversized, at the back of a long room, and we approach him, as we approached her, as a figure of worship, a subject of pity, of mournful contemplation, of sadomasochistic erotic interest, not to mention as the embodiment of an infamous historical crime.[*4]
All over Europe, in church after church, we encounter the same fascinating admixture of the sexual, the sadistic and the sacred. The real scandal in the Domino factory, perhaps, was the identity of the object thus occupying our attention: not white and male but black and female.
If we had to choose an ur-Walker image – the one that comes to mind when we think of the artist – it would be Slavery! Slavery! (1997), shown in her blockbuster gallery show My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love in 2007–2008. The images themselves – violent, scatological, sexual, hateful, loving – exist in an unholy mix, like the show’s title. They are given no hierarchy, moral or otherwise. All elements are presented simultaneously.
It was this early work that famously prompted the older artist Betye Saar to label the young Walker ‘a black artist who obviously hated being black’, whose work was for the ‘amusement and the investment of the white art establishment’.[*5]
Two statements that represent a terrific double bind – a rope thrown by one black woman to constrict another, that surely ends up constricting them both. (In 2019 MoMA, certainly a temple of the ‘white art establishment’, bought forty-two drawings by Saar and celebrated her with a hugely successful solo show.) Such condemnations amount to an all-too-familiar injunction, directed at minority artists perennially and in all mediums. Your success, runs the argument, can only mean you are ‘playing up to’ or ‘displaying our dirty laundry in front of’ the majority audience. (The implication being: What else could account for it? Itself a sly depredation.) Under this logic, you are either unconsciously giving ‘them’ what they want (self-hatred) or you are consciously doing so (self-and-community-betrayal). That the black artist might be following their own nose – pursuing their own preoccupations and obsessions – is here given no credence. The white viewer, in these debates, is really the only thing on a black artist’s mind. More recently, the injunction has taken on a new flavour: now work is condemned for being insufficiently empowering, stuck in a regressive negative, neglecting to provide, for a black audience, some necessary form of ‘self-care’, which is considered especially vital now, during this desperate political moment. But uplift is not the only role of black art. It is possible to both admire the witty and righteous reclaiming of caricatures – like that of Saar’s excellent own The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), as well as the more recent, idealized, ‘positive’ black stereotypes of queenly black women presented by Simone Leigh – and still urgently desire to stand enclosed in a Walker diorama (which, in my experience, includes few ‘amused’ viewers, white or otherwise).
Walker operates on the premise that when you make history truly visible, both your own and that of your people or nation, there exists a challenge to show all of it, the unholy mix, the conscious knowledge and the subconscious reaction, the traumatic history and the trauma it has created, the unprocessed and the un-processable. If you manage this it will be, by definition, de trop. But then again, too much for whom? The very idea that Slavery! Slavery! is an exaggerated or extreme or unnecessarily salacious image is to me strange, given the history through which it consciously tumbles.
Consider, for example, the case of one Thomas Thistlewood. Thistlewood was from Lincolnshire, England. He died in 1786, forty-seven years before Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833. There are no monuments to him in England, but he is notorious, among Jamaicans, for his 14,000-page diary, documenting his time as a plantation owner on our island. A lower middle-class man, he was an autodidact, and the recto pages of his diary are filled with a meticulous account of his enlightened interest in medicine, horticulture, religion, political theory and much else. The other half – the verso pages – records the 3,852 acts of sex he had with his slaves, and the regular vicious punishments he doled out to them, baroque in their sadism and perversion. Once, after a particular slave had run away and been caught, Thistlewood gave him ‘a mod[erate whipping], pickled him well, made Hector [another slave] shit in his mouth, immediately put in gag whilst his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours’. Apparently pleased with this novel punishment, he repeated it on many others. Often he flogged slaves and then ‘wash’d and rubb’d [them] in salt pickle, lime juice & bird pepper’. To punish the aforementioned Hector for losing a hoe, he whipped him and then ‘made New Negroe Joe piss in his eyes & mouth’. In addition to forcing men, women and children into the back-breaking work of cutting sugar cane, sometimes he used a by-product of sugar for the purposes of torture: ‘Put him in the Bilboes both feet; gagged him; locked his hands together; rubbed him with Molasses and exposed him naked to the flys all day, and to the mosquitoes all night.’[*6]
