Staring at the Abyss

I'm in the midst of drafting my series -- almost done with installment fifteen, and then we're onto the finale (wait, what?). I will still, of course, be editing for a while (no, trust me...), so still being in "research mode" isn't inappropriate.

I've read a lot of history, politics, science writing, as well as sci-fi and fantasy, but lately my reading has delved into what we might term the dystopian side of things -- and I refer to the non-fiction. Is there anything more dystopian than chattel slavery? I mean, other than settler-colonialism?

Perhaps modernity itself.

I picked up Simon Gikandi's Slavery and the Culture of Taste in January, and it was only a coincidence that I finished it in February aka Black History Month. It was without a doubt the most difficult book I have ever read. I've whined at length about how hard it was to get through Edward Said's Orientalism, and no small part of that was the sometimes obtuse academic language, and the liberal use of French passages...which I don't speak. That book was easier to read than Slavery and the Culture of Taste. (Stamped from the Beginning was easier to read.) 

 

Not for the faint of heart, but everyone should read it

As I've gotten older, reading about slavery and what it really was has gotten more difficult. It's an increase in empathy in general, but it's also -- and this is a good thing -- other Brown and Black people getting more concerted media attention when they talk about historical experiences and the continuing ramifications. A couple of authors have made oblique references here and there that have stopped me cold, but I could go on trying to understand the shape of history. (And they have shown up in the most unexpected places; take a look at Michael Twitty's The Cooking Gene.) Not with this book.

I have never read anything that so completely described the psychological and psychic displacement that wasn't just attendant to slavery but that made slavery possible. African bodies needed to be transformed from people into objects for the benefit of the slave holders, who, like everyone everywhere, told themselves stories about how good they were, but even though slaves miraculously held onto their sense of themselves as selves and not things, the processes of being displaced, stripped, packed into small spaces as if they were animals, being deprived of privacy, being branded, being regularly, sadistically abused, losing their names, losing their sense of time, and being subject to losing their communities and families at any point traumatized them. As they would anybody. I cried several times while reading the descriptions of these processes, and the only thing that kept me reading was the feeling that I could not do anything to right those wrongs unless I understood it. That is perhaps the most earnest thing I've ever written in this space, and I mean it.

What terrified me was Gikandi's explanation of how the affected psychological and sociological processes work, and how easy it would be to break anyone from anywhere if you did those things to them. I wasn't under any delusions that there was something particularly vulnerable about African captives, but looking out at the world and seeing a planet filled with people that could be as easily broken if as sadistically treated -- and knowing that I was one of them...isn't that part of the horror of dystopian fiction?

(It strikes me how much the dominant community has suffered for ignoring the plight of the people they oppressed. The psychic displacement that African slaves suffered from is not substantially unrelated to what we have seen in other totalitarian civilizations, whether it's the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or Communist China. We can't, probably, expect most people to assert their previous identities in the same ways when Big Brother is watching with increasingly sophisticated surveillance, but those of us who aren't being tormented should be a little less surprised that simply changing governments and material conditions doesn't magically undo years of psychological and sociological damage.)

Spoiler alert, in case you needed one: miraculously, slaves did not by and large break. They not only established relationships and communities, they kept their senses of self, even if they had to redefine that in a hostile setting. They were hyper-aware that they were the negative by which their "owners" and those communities defined themselves -- much as, per Said, Europe couldn't exist without The Oriental Other -- but their psyches stayed intact by asserting their own history (or remembered fragments of it) in whatever spaces were available, whether it was as dance, art, and ritual or in the provision grounds they used to feed themselves. As time went on, many communities also explicitly thumbed their noses not at the stereotypes they were subjected to but the "manners" their owners pretended to. They used performance to mock performance and thereby establish their own identities.

If I'm honest, I picked up this book because I was interested in the concept of "taste", which is coming up more in other books I've read (Culture and Imperialism, Fearing the Black Body, Women in the Picture). I was not disappointed by Gikandi's insights. Intertwined with Taste is Performance, and modern civilization would not exist without it. Before modernity, what many European cultures needed to perform was Goodness, for God and for our communities, but modernity required the performance of Happiness. Keeping in mind the maxim that the medium is the message and eventually comes to alter it, I would say happiness is more suited to performance than goodness, and for that reason has stuck with us for so long. 

And why shouldn't we be happy when we have everything...underwritten by the exploitation of others? It's really not a new insight -- people understood even when they didn't want to that their wealth was coming off of slavery -- and it has been haunting modern civilization since the beginning. As much as people tried to get around it by strictly defining "We" and by desperately trying to convince themselves that other people weren't just that, we never entirely lost sight that our system is based on varying degrees of haves and have nots. Just as we needed to perform Goodness to convince everyone that we were destined for heaven, we need to perform Happiness to convince everyone that we are destined for success and therefore trustworthy with opportunity. 

Fear of damnation is still the real driver.

We read history to understand our present moment, and this was no exception. I continue to seek to understand the emptiness and hypocrisy that can characterize our culture. I know I'm not the only one, and I presume other people will understand when I say that sometimes it feels as if the abyss is looking back at me. Perhaps that is why I really wanted to finish this book -- millions of people have climbed out of the abyss after they were shoved into it. If they can survive, so can we. But only if we acknowledge them as Us first.

Deb in the City