#r.eads

[deathlonging]

I destroyed white baby dolls. But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls. The indifference with which I could have axed them was shaken only by my desire to do so. To discover what eluded me: the secret of the magic they weaved on others. What made people look at them and say, “Awwwww,” but not for me? The eye slide of black women as they approached them on the street, and the possessive gentleness of their touch as they handled them. If I pinched them, their eyes—unlike the crazed glint of the baby doll’s eyes—would fold in pain, and their cry would not be the sound of an icebox door, but a fascinating cry of pain. When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that the change was adjustment without improvement.

toni morrison, the bluest eye

[deathlonging]

Our astonishment was short-lived, for it gave way to a curious kind of defensive shame; we were embarrassed for Pecola, hurt for her, and finally we just felt sorry for her. Our sorrow drove out all thoughts of the new bicycle. And I believe our sorrow was the more intense because nobody else seemed to share it. They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story. But we listened for the one who would say, “Poor little girl,” or, “Poor baby,” but there was only head-wagging where those words should have been. We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils. I thought about the baby that everybody wanted dead, and saw it very clearly. It was in a dark, wet place, its head covered with great O’s of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin. No synthetic yellow bangs suspended over marble-blue eyes, no pinched nose and bowline mouth. More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals. And Frieda must have felt the same thing. We did not think of the fact that Pecola was not married; lots of girls had babies who were not married. And we did not dwell on the fact that the baby’s father was Pecola’s father too; the process of having a baby by any male was incomprehensible to us—at least she knew her father. We thought only of this overwhelming hatred for the unborn baby. We remembered Mrs. Breedlove knocking Pecola down and soothing the pink tears of the frozen doll baby that sounded like the door of our icebox. We remembered the knuckled eyes of schoolchildren under the gaze of Meringue Pie and the eyes of these same children when they looked at Pecola. Or maybe we didn’t remember; we just knew. We had defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody, considered all speech a code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful analysis; we had become headstrong, devious and arrogant. Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very good attention to ourselves. Our limitations were not known to us—not then. Our only handicap was our size; people gave us orders because they were bigger and stronger. So it was with confidence, strengthened by pity and pride, that we decided to change the course of events and alter a human life.

toni morrison, the bluest eye

[deathlonging]

“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.” “Can other people see it?” asked Denver. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over—over and done with—it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what.” Denver picked at her fingernails. “If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.” Sethe looked right in Denver’s face. “Nothing ever does,” she said.

toni morrison, beloved

[deathlonging]

The “labor question” did not revolve around absolute but relative shortages of labor. This observation carries several analytical consequences. First, it sheds light on the British planters’ strategy for expanding production by driving down labor costs—or, “fighting the battle out”—a constant feature of the Assam plantation system [...] Many historians have expressed skepticism over just how sharp the labor shortage really was, suggesting instead that the planters were simply being cheap. Second, as scholars of the global history of plantations have pointed out, “the concept ‘labour shortage’ possesses a specific politico-ideological meaning.” It justified coercive and unfree work conditions by making the free mobility of workers seem aberrant and lacking (“short”) while making the employment of wage labor appear normative and natural. The Assam Company’s problem was not the physical absence of labor but rather the absence of social conditions that would compel locals to sign up for low-paying jobs. This latter question—namely, the historically specific conditions of a developed market for free labor presupposed in theories of political economy—would continue to rear its head in Assam throughout the rest of the century.

andrew b. liu, tea war: a history of capitalism in china and india

[deathlonging]

The initial response of the state and international agencies to the HIV needs of sex workers in Sonagachi harnessed the kind of governmental technologies described by Chatterjee. Sex workers were designated a statistically risky population, and the multiple needs of women living in Sonagachi were whittled down to their HIV-related health needs, mostly because as promiscuous carriers of disease, they represented the kind of "dangerous class" that had the potential to arrest the modernizing initiatives of civil society. HIV scholars based in Western institutions were complicit in this campaign. Trained in tropical medicine and epidemiological perspectives, we arrived in India to arrest the movement of pathogens and educate the object of our research in the use of safe-sex practices. But a strange thing happened on the way to Sonagachi: we became part of a process of collective identity formation that preempted our initial initiative. On the first day that I met Bharati De, the sex worker who heads Durbar, she turned to me in front of my English-speaking research colleagues from the United States and said in Bengali, "HIV is a boon for us. Without it, you people would never be interested in the lives of sex workers like us." Durbar has strategically utilized single-issue governmentality initiatives to introduce into the conversation the complex circumstances of life as a sex worker, profoundly transforming the discourse of HIV intervention in the process.

toorjo ghose, politicizing political society: mobilization among sex workers in sonagachi, india

[deathlonging]

what did everyone think of buffalo hunter hunter. my favorite scene was the confrontation right before good stab's final confession obviously but i think second place is when he crawled out of the ice w one of his hands snapped in half the whole thing evokes classic vampire-return imagery. and his sire put him there. the grave that isn't !

[deathlonging]

stephen graham jones, buffalo hunter hunter

[deathlonging]

“I can’t stand it when you look at my teeth,” she told Annelise one afternoon, the two of them alone on the top floor of the building. “Why? You don’t like them?” she asked, walking in a straight line along the edge of the abyss. “I really like your little rat teeth.” Her head, in the cabin, felt like it had when her imaginary-friend-Martín gnawed at the closet with his white ferret teeth. “Your Topo Gigio teeth.” “Your Bugs Bunny teeth.” From her insides, her family revealed the history of their blood: a goblin brother, a brother with backward feet, a brother albino as death, a brother walking against his footsteps, moving backward, because the story of siblinghood begins with a murder, according to Annelise: “The Bible says so, and in that book, everyone is scared.” But the adults didn’t know Annelise read the Bible as a book of fears. “Do you want to be my sister?” she asked when they were eight and slept under the bed in each other’s arms. “Yes, I want to be your sister.” The adults didn’t know, either, that when they went to church, she and Annelise were acting out the cult of the White God, the mother-God-of-the-wandering-womb, and that they furtively caressed each other’s knees. “You’re my little sister, my ñañita, my equal.” The White God made them laugh at their mothers: at their fallen tits in Victoria’s Secret bras, their anti-wrinkle creams made for prune-faces, their phosphorescent hair dyes, because the nature of daughters, says the creed, is to jump on the mother, tongue gripped tight in their hands; to survive the jaw to become the jaw; to take the place of the monster—that is, the place of the mother-God who initiated them into the world of desire. That’s what a sister was: an ally against the origin.

monica ojeda, jawbone