I recently read an essay on Michael Brown. I struggled to read it. I had a hard time making my eyes focus on the words, a hard time retaining the meaning of the words my eyes passed over. I finished reading it, at last, and felt unsettled. The next morning–the middle of the night, really–I woke up and my back had seized up. This had never happened before. In a critique of Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon argues that “the black man suffers in his body quite differently than the white man.” Some would relate this to some of Fanon’s comments in the same essay about ontology. I think he’s telling us something the shape of the social, but also about mechanisms of somaticization beyond race as an epidermalization of imputed difference.
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To get at that requires rethinking empathy. Saidiya Hartman’s famous critique of empathy, in part, goes like this: the abolitionist writes to his brother that imagining himself or his nuclear family subject to the capricious whims of an enslaver, and especially imagining their cries of pain, fills him with justifiable wrath and indignance. Yet, the object of his sympathy becomes himself rather than the people who are actually subject to such cruel treatment. “Moreover,” she continues, “by exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and
feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations of chattel slavery. In other words, the ease of Rankin’s empathic identification is as much due to his good intentions and heartfelt opposition to slavery as to the fungibility of the captive body” (19).
There is, I think, another consequence: Rankin’s ability to empathize requires considering the Other as formally a narcissistic mirror of the self. That means empathy only extends as far as he can imagine how he might feel under similar circumstances. The wrath or outrage he would allow himself becomes in effect a limit of acceptable intensity and response to what the enslaved person endures. Experiences beyond what he can imagine, or responses beyond what he has determined to be reasonable are therefore unreasonable, and will be policed accordingly. “Policed” is not (just) a metaphor.
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“This is how you are a citizen,” Claudia Rankine writes. “Come on. Let it go” (151). I am not particularly interested in the category of citizenship, but I think Rankine is telling us something the limits of empathy. About the necessary, constitutive limits of empathy as serves the project of putatively multiracial democracy where the forgetting machine actively churns, day after day, emitting the low hum of erasing and distorting the past.
(Brief aside: The operation of what Aimé Césaire called the “forgetting machine” allows people to fix their mouths to say that enslaved people gained important skills. Those skills, anyone who has read Frederick Douglass will know, increased the material value of enslaved people who might be allowed to “hire out” their labor but generally not allowed to retain the profit. And the portions they did keep allowed them to buy some of life’s necessaries the enslaver didn’t provide. Or were saved in order to exchange for the manumission of family members. Many people born enslaved died enslaved. A whole war was fought to perpetuate slavery. Many people who outlived slavery did not get to use their trade skills after emancipation. These are facts. They are not in general dispute. We remember as an active attempt to forestall the forgetting imposed upon us.)
Come on. Let it go.
My question is this: where does it, the weight of what must be remembered but is so difficult to face, go? The statistics of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease; the statistics of those made vulnerable to premature death who do die and their generally uncounted survivors, are too close to the statistics of slavery itself. The statistics of the unliving, allowing better calculation of the length of a productive life.
Maybe the better question is what happens to those same people when they can’t let it go, or when letting it go allows it to enter the bloodstream, the joints, the sinews? Allows it to occupy an untended corner of consciousness and produces seemingly unrelated symptoms? When it manifests as pain, fatigue, dis-ease that seems excessive to others who consciously or otherwise withdraw? What happens to tenderness, love, care?
(The distortion of these, in interracial and intramural contexts also count as an afterlife of slavery. Not Black love as Black wealth but also the legacy of thin love, loves that slowly suffocate like piano wire. The epidemic of loneliness or lovelessness bell hooks identifies but does not link to slavery.) What happens to those who ignore or minimize the burdens they carry so that their pain doesn’t inconvenience others around them?
If I let it go, who’s going to take the weight?
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I stretched and tended to my back. I took ibuprofen and went back to sleep. I’ve been having nightmares about Michael Brown and murderous policing again. If you are Black and reading this, take some extra time today to love yourself, to be gentle to yourself and others. Try to desire something beyond recognition or inclusion. Those will leave you for dead just to have the story of how righteous the person is who survives and mourns.
In Pursuit of Sacred Words 