Pressed

IHunger

Pain draws me in; I loathe pain. The scars she carried run almost parallel to the course of my own inner river — perhaps that is why I fell for her.

And yet I am listening to her across more than eighty years, across a foreign tongue and an entire ocean. In this dim, unaccountable fascination, how much is fellow-feeling, and how much is hunger? One after another, people have come to her to draw out whatever they needed. I have no standing to pretend I am the exception.

IIThe Mirror Ball and the War Dispatch

In the turbulent Shanghai of the 1930s, everything glittered. The melody of “When Will You Return?” drifted through the neon lanes; what people remembered were the gilded dance halls and the taxi-dancers singing tunes borrowed from abroad — the white legs flung high to the can-can, the peacock skirts too dazzling to look at, the long pink boas heaped at the throat.

While patriotic youths set the streets alight, ran through the city scattering leaflets, and cried out for freedom and revolt, the people in the dance halls believed, easily, that death could be beaten by glamour. So long as there was still wine in hand, gold flecks still scattering across the tabletops, the mirror ball still turning its smear of light, the shadow of occupation, of rule, of massacre could not descend upon this ground — leaving only the longing to be seen, the imitation of romantic love, the postures of power. War dispatches and dance-hall advertisements crowded onto the same page of the same newspaper, each a riddle no one could read, not even itself. Side by side, untroubled, leaving each other alone.¹

Time does not flow at an even rate. The past goes too fast — fast to the point of clamor, fast until the details blur — an eraser rubbed round and smooth, a small solid lump in the hand you can keep wearing down until it is lost or used up. The present, too, goes too fast: every second drips. Time is an ice cream melting in a hurry — you lift it to your mouth, lean in, lick up everything that can still be held, and what cannot be held falls to the floor, goes tacky on your hands. Light that cannot escape is sealed onto the two dimensions of the page, set before the eye, weighing no more than a glance.

A catchy dance tune can also be a caterpillar dangled before the eyes — letting the children of three successive powers sense, in their novelty, the danger in it, and pull a magnifying glass from their pockets to chase it down and burn it. The bewildered public: some cried out in fright, some froze, some screamed, some fell silent. But on the whole, everyone always had something they could not not say, and so spent an entire afternoon of their lives hunting for the words to describe the one instant in which they had glimpsed the shape of fate. They crossed out one rhetoric after another, on guard lest some offending notion run downhill and flood out of control.²

February 1939, the other side of the earth, a basement nightclub in Greenwich Village, New York. A Black palm touches a wall studded with tiny raised grains; that touch is, in itself, all a person can possess in this exact moment.

IIIFit to Be Shown

The waiters stopped moving and talking some time ago; the glasses have stood empty for a while now. Nothing is left in the room but one bright, scalding pin spot, fixed on the face of a twenty-three-year-old woman.³

She was talked onto the stage by white people, and the song, too, was first sung for white ears. Stranger, other, an eleven-armed mouthless monster out of a black hole — whatever she is, once the pain has been caught in layer upon layer of language and naming, once the stage has stripped away its uncontainable terror, it becomes enough to let people believe this is a thing of beauty, a thing fit to be shown.

She wore glittering diamond earrings and a silver dress that threw off light; she placed herself in the position she was permitted to occupy, and from it sang something so dangerous, so inflammatory, so directly political. More absurd still, her utterance was not always truly heard — people simply changed their line: that lavish, unabashed manner did not befit a middle-class Black woman's respectability. Jewels, fine food, and the sufferings of a life are not, in fact, in contradiction; but what matters is that she suffer forever. People need to see Sisyphus; they need a heavier emptiness to set against the emptiness inside themselves. This is how people answer their own fear — the icon is a rootless lily, suspended in the air. If the head is to wear a golden hood, then the belly must also bear a bleeding wound.

Abel Meeropol's original poem appeared in 1937 in a teachers'-union paper, when it was still called “Bitter Fruit.”⁴ Lynching here is a kind of weather — it falls on the Black body day after day, from a slanted past into a contorted present. The onlooker is forced to slow down inside the scene, to linger, to switch on every sense, and then forced to generate, behind a tangle of opinions too knotted to clarify, the thousands upon thousands of true emotional positions beneath them. We long so badly to set free an “untamable” thought — almost begging to let it return to the world, return to time, drift off with the current, as if it had only ever been a strand cut from flowing water — and to let it stall somewhere far and unseen. And so you wrack your mind until time pours down at your feet, until the woven threads soak your legs, and you mean to stand, only to find that life has long since grown too heavy.⁵

IVThe Fox and the Rabbit

Ng calls her singing “professional mourning”: with consummate craft, night after night, she performs the collective vulnerability of Black people, and through it educates her audience and stirs their political resolve.⁶ But in the room itself, mourning and consumption are one and the same gesture. The fox studies the bite marks on the rabbit's body, weeping even as it goes on eating the flesh. White audiences come for the moral shiver, Black audiences to claim the collective wound, the critics to harvest a coarse phrase, the scholars — Ng among them — to harvest theory. We mistake the ache of the bite mark for a rare understanding; but to understand is to tame, an exit from our own unease. In the song people see the wife, the sister, the mother of the lynched — everyone except her. As she said herself: “They don't remember the woman — they just remember the wreck.”⁷

She is a mirror, a soil, a vessel — every noun that begins with “she” and ends in someone else. Hence all the endless attempts to give her a shape; otherwise that last scene makes no sense: in 1959 she lay on her deathbed, booked for narcotics possession, handcuffed, a policeman posted at the door of her hospital room; on 17 July she died in that bed, forty-four years old, so young, the right age for an insincere sigh.⁸ We sigh the same way over the car in the corner, the endless ocean, the thin drifting heart aboard a magnificent liner. As if expression were a liquid, weightless, rising to the lips. We purse them lightly and suck it dry. Yet she doesn't matter.

When the song a singer sings outshines the light of the singer herself — is that not something to be wary of? Singing is the smallest burning, a fire kept inside the body. As if the smoke had drawn the flame down into her and let it hollow her out from within. The flame becomes a swarm of tiny insects, parasitic, gnawing through this suspended beam of wood as fast as it can, then boring through the windpipe into the body to breed, year upon year, wearing her down just slightly slower than she grows. Until the day she stops growing — and then all that is left is breathing, and extinction.

VThe Same Song

Billie never sang the same song twice. She lagged deliberately behind the beat, letting the suspense swell; she pared the song down to a few concentrated notes, with small but lethal adjustments of diction and phrasing, her body almost still.⁹ For twenty years she kept recasting it, and her possessiveness ran so deep that she resented every cover — deep enough that in her ghostwritten autobiography she claimed the song had been written for her, that she had even had a hand in making it, a claim scholars are still correcting today.¹⁰ If you cannot grasp how precious it is for a woman to own a single channel through which to convey pain, you cannot grasp her possessiveness, or her resentment.

I cannot peel my self away, and I do not want to see my own face on yours. Because I will be scalded — by glaring words, by groundless thoughts, by accusation, by the accidental and the inevitable. And yet, when I am truly scalded, I describe it as something else. The describing is a garment I could take off; but to take it off is to let every gaze land directly on the skin. Once a line is drawn, precisely, between sight and flesh, even the most casual movement tears at it.

This heat is a ghost biting at my back, furious as Medea. She is at once the child burned alive and the Heracles tearing off the robe with sinew and flesh still attached.

VIThe Same Eye

And to read women intertextually is far too easy. I need only take “she” as my pronoun, and almost any description I hang after it will hold — so long as the description carries pain, preferably broken, with a little futile beauty added on top. And then, before we have noticed anything at all, subjectivity has burned away beyond recall, down to a heap of ash, bleak and turbid, that you pinch and rub lightly between your fingers, the way you would crush a small insect: a tiny mercy, and a harmless cruelty.

I once doubted whether any of this truly had to do with the era, or what, in the end, it had to do with race. The disciplining of women is so durable: having escaped the burning of the flesh, what we are handed is the deepfake of 2020, the Nth Room, exploitation without end. The pain of scorching and the slow dismemberment of dignity seem forever entangled. It seems that as long as sex exists, woman is forever the object; even a prime minister, even a chairwoman, can in a blink become the center of an obscene product. The focal length of camera and eye stays trained, always, on the peaks of the body's mountain range. The pin spot of 1939 and the lens of today are the same eye.

Women try to work their lips a little, to “take mild exception” — the mild exception like a mouthful of spit squeezed from a dry mouth. And I cannot even call it a threat. How could you think that voicing a like or a dislike carried any menace? After all, the shooting made Warhol: the woman who fired and her SCUM Manifesto were both compressed into two footnotes in his myth.¹¹ A woman offers up an entire death as a threatening protest — she has understood this, she has accepted it. She no longer burns, yet she is still dry, still dangerously stacked there, a sign planted beside her with the paint not yet dry: flammable, no open flame.

VIIWhat Goes Around Comes Around

And so I need Doreen Garner.

Peel back this hide and, man or woman, what you find is the same red liquid, the same skin, fat, flesh, and tissue. When I tear this slab of flesh open, you too must feel it with me — so direct, so charged with revenge, so utterly head-on. Pop art cut women into the parts of a sexual object: the plump bare buttock, the narrow waist, the surging (what a disgusting word) breasts. Garner shatters that gaze, taking the erotic apart with the self-satisfied coldness of Western clinical medicine, and then sends the sensation of pain back the way it came.

In an interview she says she is not, in fact, at ease with gore. “It's not a desire that I naturally have, it's just what I have to do.”¹² That sense of vocation is of a piece with Billie Holiday's. Neither necessarily longs to bear or to re-stage pain, yet each, as if heeding an oracle, brings it to the front of the stage of her own accord. Billie hangs the lynched body in song; Garner carries the scene of medical violence back into the gallery. Both make looking unbearable.

Just as striking: Garner builds installations this gruesome, and yet the tissue, the vessels, the diseased growths are often made of Swarovski crystals, pearls, and tiny jeweled beads.¹³ Astonishing. Beauty has not disappeared; beauty is forced to cohabit with rot, with pain, with pustule, wound, and violence. They become a pathological overgrowth, become the truth inside the body that goes unseen and is lit up all the same.

Weaving is not women's innate labor; it is women's feeling for beauty. Garner wrests this “feminine” fine labor back out of submission. The beadwork, the suturing, the weaving, the ornamenting — crafts filed under women's handiwork — she turns into an aggressive form. She makes the wound glow and burn, forcing the viewer to admit: violence happened here, and you cannot walk away as though nothing had.

And so violence is seized back into her own hands. She once said that the statue of J. Marion Sims should be taken down, and that they should chop off its head and give it to her, to use as material for her next installation.¹⁴

Marvelous.

I cannot help thinking of the Mahābhārata, of Dushasana wrenching at Draupadi's hair, trying to strip her bare and shame her before the assembled court.¹⁵ The dark princess, in fury, unbound her hair and vowed never to dress it again until she could wash it in the blood that ran from Dushasana's chest, and so wash the humiliation away. Fourteen years later, on the field of Kurukshetra, she heard that deafening clash — metallic, and carrying metal's sweetness and its iron tang. When the body was torn open, the blood of vengeance poured down over her, ran into her collar, set her whole body itching, and she trembled and laughed and could not stop.

Hatred is delivered out of the imagination, and forges a dignity made new.

And yet I know what I am holding. The blood is already spilled; the blade is the surgeon’s own. We have forged no new weapon — only learned to take the old one by the other end. A dignity won back in his grammar is still spoken in his tongue; a self cut free with a borrowed knife is not yet free.

Perhaps there is no way out that we can make — perhaps that is the hidden canker that torments her, the one that makes her say: “I’m a Black woman horrified by these actions, and yet I have to show all these actions, so that it’s not a situation where people are able to overlook this information anymore.”¹⁶

Is it only time, then — the slower fire — that can burn the whole stage to the ground? The pin spot and the lens together, long after we are ash and past watching it go dark.

Only then do I give birth to myself.

VIIIDrawing the Curtain

The day was a surge of heat; mercifully it is now one in the morning, a light night breeze, quite cool. I sit by the window in a pair of shorts, typing, writing this essay.

Eighty years and an ocean lie between this window and theirs. The old verse promises the selfsame moon to those a thousand miles apart; and yet none of them has ever seen the others.

London on a Saturday is loud, and I live in a fairly quiet, middle-class neighborhood. The characters clamor outward like lines, stretching toward some far, directionless direction and folding back, until they have woven, in front of me, the rough draft of an I. All at once my ear catches the sound of men talking and laughing outside the window, and my hands stop on the keyboard. I stand — even though the motion will chase off the cat in my lap, the soft, lovely calico purring against me.

I quickly draw the curtain.