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On our discussion of aestheticizing pain and horrific oppression, I read Rickey Laurentiis’s “Boy with Thorn” for my Experimental African American poetry last semester. The same question about aesthticizing and writing of slavery and absues with lyrical language came up with this work also

On our discussion about difficulty in class, I was thinking of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, also about TRC and South Africa but in a more “traditional” form. I was wondering how this narrative differs from Krog’s

Also I was heavily reminded of this book (and Fanon) when we were assigned “White Material” as well. (Meant to post that week but never got to it...)

“In 1991, Bernth Lindfors—himself probably the most prolific interviewer of African writers—devised an "arithmetical scheme for measuring the literary stature of writers from anglophone Africa"—a subtle and elegant metric to which he gave the subtle and elegant name "Famous African Reputation Test," or F.A.R.T.”

http://post45.research.yale.edu/2014/10/african-writers-in-a-new-world-an-introduction/

just thinking more about Krog and ethics of representation...

"Testifiers have expressed anger that their testimonies appear (often unacknowledged) in...Country of my Skull. Some feel they revealed more than they wanted to at the public hearings from which Krog draws their testimonies (103)"

(Source: Ross, Fiona. 205. "Codes and Dignity: Thinking about Ethics in Relation to Research on Violence." Journal of the Anthropology of Southern Africa 28(3-4): 99-107.)

Also, considering Krog as poet:

"No poetry should come forth from this. May my hand fall off if I write this” (Krog 6).

How does her promise to not make poetry line up with the beauty of her language? Is it possible for her to make a promise like this? Why promise what you could never keep?

just thinking more about property and shantytowns and what chamoiseau leaves us with. re: complaints, yelling, constant resistance as key--this is why formal property titling fails to be a solution. it’s like the college forming a committee whenever students have grievances, institutionalizing those demands in order to control, dilute, often (though some do do good work) claim action in order to prolong inaction.

there’s a line in Texaco about how the slaves actively resisting on plantations are the real sites of strength/action/change, more so than the marrons. i wish i could find the quote! anyway, the dwellers of Texaco are similarly (though ofc totally differently) fighting to stay a PART of City, rather than fleeing into the hills. (why does chamoiseau not seem to really like marrons? or are the people getting called marrons not the true marrons?)

also, a Williams prof (Neil Roberts) wrote this book called Freedom as Marronage that I just found on someone’s intro psci syllabus. Roberts defines a creolized freedom that is "perpetual, unfinished, and rooted in acts of flight" (181) (source: http://newbooksnetwork.com/neil-roberts-freedom-as-marronage-u-of-chicago-press-2015/). Acts of flight, like rebuilding your home when the state keeps coming back to take it down. This looks like a cool piece of text for final paper explorations too...

The page that was blank to begin with is now crossed from top to bottom with tiny black characters -- letters, words, commas, exclamation marks -- and it's because of them the page is said to be legible. But a kind of uneasiness, a feeling close to nausea, an irresolution that stays my hand -- these make me wonder: do these black marks add up to reality? the white of the paper is an artifice that's replaced the translucency of parchment and the ochre surface of clay tablets; but the ochre and the translucency and the whiteness may all possess more reality than the signs that mar them.

Jean Genet, opening to Prisoner of Love, page 5.

In case you wanted to be hit over the head with it.

good job fam

“Anxious, irritable, frowning eyebrows, a ferocious face to tame misfortune, I was a sight to see: I walked as if hacking my way through thickets. My clothes were different: head caught in curlpapers, a madras dress, bare feet, a scarf around the waist to hold my stomach. My pace was decisive, because you had to be decisive, walk decisively, move forward decisively to leave the hesitation in the dust. . . My voice could cut like a machete blow. It was hard for anyone to look me in the eyes because war would stare back -- and their eyelids would drop.” (Chamoiseau, Texaco, 273)

Beyoncé, Lemonade

A piece for flute, violin, cello and piano inspired by Borges’ “The Circular Ruins.”

found at mass moca, annotation “violence against blacks in the south”

still from Beyonce’s visual album/film Lemonade

ALERT, E JANE WROTE SOMETHING ELSE COOL. and there’s a new website/publication, comptemptorary, on race, femininity, and politics in the art world!

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Dictee” is an experimental work of poetry. It begins with the name of the Nine muses and the women structure the work by defining the sections. I thought this kind of related to the appropriation of “The Odyssey” in Cesaire’s work (so many weeks ago)

[William S.] Rubin's writing is an act of transgression. He sees in Lam only what is in his own eyes: colorless or white artists. For Lam to have achieved the status of unique individual, he would have had to successfully adapt to the conditions of imprisonment (the aesthetic standards of a fixed tradition) Rubin and others both construct and watch over. To enter this prison, which takes the alluring form of museums, art history textbooks, galleries, and magazine, an individual must suppress his cultural differences and become a colorless ghost. The bind every hybrid American artist finds themself in is this: should they try and deal with the constantly changing polymorphous conditions effecting identity, tradition, and reality? Or should they assimilate into the mainstream art world by focusing on approved of aesthetic issues? Lam's response to this bind sets an important precedent. Instead of assimilating, Lam infiltrates the syntactical rules of 'the exploiters' with his own specific language. He becomes, as he says, 'a Trojan horse.'

John Yau, “Please Wait By the Coatroom”

Made me think of how Desani chose to write in the style of British dictionaries.

And the artist Yau was writing about is Wifredo Lam, who was friends with Aime Cesaire.

This essay also talks about how Rubin is influenced by Greenberg who in turn was influenced by Clive Bell. (Yay! for classes relating)

To say we have reached the end of history is to assert: you who we would not let speak or write before ( you weren't modern enough) cannot speak or write now (you failed your postmodern driver's license because you didn't adjust to the change in signs). It is a stamp of approval. This is censorship in the name of what is right. I do not wish to be right; being right means doing what is correct. In East Berlin, a man sitting in the Cafe Kyril (that's Lyric spelled backwards) said to me: Our system is dead. And yours is dying. Why should we accept it? Should I have said: Because you can trade in your state-manufactured Trabi for a new Mercedes or Renault, Honda or Ford? We live in a dying system full of dying forms. Why continue them? Why continue inhabiting the old suits and dresses worn by others? Why assimilate? Why pass yourself off? The poem begins and ends in words, in the worlds and words that make up this world. There may be some disagreement over what they all mean. There may be gaps and fissures. They have been known to turn against the way they were used. Words and those in this world. Why be afraid of that?

John Yau, “Between the Forest and Its Trees”

edges found in middle

Returned to this Sara Ahmed essay on “Feminist Aunties” while I was trying to process what didn’t make sense to me about Jeff Nunokawa’s self-describedly banal subject of the middle/mixed. For Nunokawa it seems important that the middle is mixed and that the mixed is middle: as in, middle class middle America is mixed race, and mixed in its cultural interests (nothing “fancy,” but a range of political and aesthetic possibilities); mixed race Americans are “middle,” perhaps typical, and so central to America.

Ahmed: “The contours of mixed-race spaces are not so smooth in the face of how things arrive. Already there are arrivals that are unexpected, creating rough edges in the contours of this world. Its like you can see the creases, which then means that the cover fails to cover, fails in the act of providing a covering. So objects and bodies disturb this picture, creating disorientation in how things are arranged.”

Then she says, of discussions of complexion and “mixed” varietals, “Color wasn’t just something added, like a tan adorning a white skin, as it redirected my attention to the skin, to how the surfaces of bodies as well as objects are shaped by histories of contact.”

Maybe this is what is ugly to me about Nunokawa’s version of the middle/mixed: though it is supposedly about the encounter of “mixed” orientations into a kind of middle, "middle/mixed” smooths over all of those edges into a nostalgia for a melting pot. He wants edges to exist there; he wants this middle to be mixed and so full of diverse characters and orientations-- wants them to be hashing it out, probably. But he simultaneously desires “middle,” as pleasant, nostalgic, universal.

This is at least not how I have experienced mixed orientations. Which is probably why this Ahmed essay is such a comfort...

Bo-Jangles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U4ww-MmAY4

“It is the lack of symmetry which makes Negro dancing so difficult for white dancers to learn. The abrupt and unexpected changes. The frequent change of key and time are evidences of this quality in music. (Note the St. Louis Blues.) The dancing of the justly famous Bo-Jangles and Snake Hips are excellent examples.” -- Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression”

Looked up Bo-Jangles and Snake Hips on Youtube to see what Hurston meant. Snake Hips’ dancing is especially interesting and unlike anything I’d seen before.

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