black body and the ether of history: autobiography as a larger project than the self
a talk by
Phanuel antwi
To start us off, I'd like to say that today I will present parts of another paper I worked on in which I thought I'd risk narrating my own journey with health *[the article had seven parts and Dr. Antwi didn't have time to present all of them]. Thus, we are going to be a bit autobiographical here. I'm thinking about the limits of autobiography and I am really quite aware of that. Particularly to talk about blood, bodies, and pain, it's so easy to become absorbed in them, and I'm going to warn us to kind of maybe listen against our own sense of empathy that the genre kind of draws from us. The reason why I am risking this is also because part of the abolitionist movement, particularly in the 19th and 18th centuries, those narratives turn to autobiography, and it was moving toward the project of abolition, so, I think about autobiography within that tradition of wanting to turn to the self for a larger project than the self.
I will begin with two epigraphs to frame this talk: 'The body is the place of captivity. The Black body is situated as a sign of particular cultural and political meanings in the Diaspora. They remain fixed in the ether of history. They leap onto the backs of the contemporary - they cleave not only to the collective and acquired memories of their descendants but also to the collective and acquired memories of the other" - Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return. The second epigraph comes from Joan Retallack's The Poethical Wager: "to stay warm and active and realistically messy".
One.
It is June 2014. I embark in a intra-continental journey. Something being foreclosed to me, I leave my home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to build a new one in Vancouver, British Columbia, because I am leaving my job in Halifax to take a new one in Vancouver. Because my research focuses on black cultural productions on the Atlantic, I have no desire to move, but I am forced into that desire. I traveled the 6,167 kilometers driving distance from Halifax to Vancouver by air. I make two academic pit stops on my way to Vancouver. The first stop is in Hamilton, Ontario, where I attend the "Indigenous Heritages of the Great Lakes New Perspectives, New Knowledges" conference, held at Woodland Cultural Centre. The second stop is in Montreal to study with the body politics work group which is part of the "MANIFEST! Choreographing Social Movements in the Americas", a conference organized by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. In other words, I work across the country on my way to my new job. I arrive in Vancouver on the day that my Halifax contract ends which is a day before my Vancouver contract commences on July 1st. I begin my job of finding a place to call home. As a global city, the rental market in Vancouver is competitive. Conjoin racial and rental discrimination to this competition and it takes me over a month to find a place of my own in a real state market predicated on land theft and other injustices of the past. When I find the place, still under renovation, in the West End of Vancouver, what forces me to live in that place finally, what forces me to move into an unfinished flat with freshly paitned walls, full with unemptied stack of boxes instead of to continue to live in the temporary home in False Creek, a home I have, for which I am indebted to a dear friend sister's, who was hosting me is problems mounting stairs* [00:05:04], problems climbing or ascending ladders. On my first night on what will become my new home, I sat in the bath filled with eucalyptus, herbs, and salt, holding on to this realization: 'for some of us, there's no places for us in the places we arrive. We start over all again'. My bones and achy joints are owed* [00:05:29] that salt water. At the end of August, a week before school starts, I began experiencing difficulties physically moving from space to space. I referred to this experience as difficult because walking to me is an embodied art of practicing freedom. As an enthusiastic walker, this pedestrian activity of freedom, of me putting my body into the rhythm of my environment, feeling the physics of my surroundings, saturated, increasing the [00:06:00]*, in an atmospheric antiblackness. Attuning myself to people passing me on foot, feeling the wind caress my face, all these sensations open up spaces of conversation in myself.
Growing up in Toronto, in my late teens and early 20s, I typically spent my birthday mornings at the Harbourfront, which is downtown by Lake Ontario. Walking the shores of the lake, imagining myself walking lockstep with black folks who walk across the border to freedom often meditating on my debt to the ancestors, the unpaid debt of actual freedom that was and remains old, and that was and is old to them, and the way this unpaid debt lives on in my own experience. I meditate on this and other freedom we now know as never anything other than a relation to the governors and the governed. The historical villains*[00:07:01] of this 19th-century wilful* [00:07:05] movement offers a choreography to relocation. Since all of my joints hurt badly since I moved to Vancouver and walking any distance is out of the question, I begin to feel cutoff from my new environment. I borrow from painkillers the ability to move in this new city. What a coincidence of rhythms. I move across the continent for a job only to experience difficulties moving my body with the energy and cheerfulness expected of me.
What is happening to me? Pounds drop off my body at the same time that I began doing my twice a week blood test, praying doctors will figure out the cause of this mysterious illness that has taken my body hostage. On one visit to a walk-in clinic, the attendant doctor wants to know who accompanied me and expresses surprise that I walked in by myself due to my temperature. After my battle with the thermometer and tongue depressor, the doctor and I head on an etiological road, which I learned has a lot to teach us the racialization of medicine. I began listing my symptoms. Headaches, fevers, shivers, running bowel, severe joint pains, and inflammation all over my body. My muscles, don't forget, they [00:08:27]* their own pain too. I actually link my constant fatigue to the fact that I vomited everything I eat, not to the fact that I am overworked, overextended, overtravelled. Funny I do not see fatigue as a deficit. I mean, balance of accounts which demand some borrowing just to make ends meet, just to keep going, especially since I know the accumulation of deficits becomes a debt.
After running through my own and what I know of my family's medical history, as a way for my doctor to discern what my symptoms might suggest, she asked: ''have you been elsewhere since your arrival?''. I tell her a week before all of this began I flew back to Ontario because I owed to my childhood friend to be a groomsman at his wedding. While there, I owed visits to my mother, and father, and younger sister in Toronto, with my other sister, and nephew, and niece in Scarborough, and spent the rest of my time in Ontario hanging out with 'the boys', the name we affectionately use to describe our motley crew of groomsman. She wanted to know whether I received an insect bite any time this summer. If I did, I assure her, that insect did not press memory on my skin. After 30 minutes of going through this ritual and of me growing paranoid and anxious, she goes on to the world health organization website to learn the outbreak of the chikungunya virus, also called chickvi* in the Caribean. She stops her online search, writes me up a prescription for painkillers, slips me a sheet of paper which had boxes for the lab, thus begin my weekly blood test.
It is now September. A day before I start to teach my first classes for my new job and I remain weak. Walking remains difficult. The pounds keep dropping. I continue to wake up with a fever that dampens my sheets. I struggle with focus, a skill I need not only in my job but also to make a good first impression on the job. My bowels, in the morning, on this particular day, are moving involuntarily. I vomited into this day and my washroom is busier than Pearson International Airport. It is good news. I am son and grandson to a line of nurses and midwives who in Ghana* schooled me on the values use of **[00:10:57]. In addition to this intergenerational debt, it's further good news: in the late afternoon of this day, the natural path, who a friend in town has been appealing to in my behalf, had a cancellation. She calls to say that if I make it to her office in an hour's time, she will see me. Delirious, unable to fully walk, and unsure of my bearings in this new city, I call on a different friend to help me get to my appointment on Commercial street. What is supposed to be a 40 minute consultation turns into a 90 minute treatment and because I encounter for the first time a healthcare practitioner not solely in pursuit of documentary proof of what is happening to me, or how to restore me to live as I used to live, but rather one who supplies me with a new map of living that wakes me to a self I wasn't aware of, to what might possibly be happening in my blood, in my flesh, to my bones, to me, I weep. Away from family, friends, and familiarity, I was faced with a prospect of doing a job that often creeps into all areas of one's life while barely being able to manage everyday tasks. I was faced with what I knew to be true but did not want to face about others' expectations of me. I was nervous about appearing as the **[00:12:23], that I deserve understanding or sympathy without the ** and hierarchy that benevolence produces.
Two.
In 'We are not all Jims: the Colour Line and Sadness in the University', an online post on the feminist blog Hook & Eye, Jade Ferguson "takes up the issue of race in the struggle against the corporatization of the university by examining the problem of the color line as the public feeling of sadness in the academy". Continuing, Ferguson writes, "my ongoing sense of alienation and disenfranchisement as a black scholar has made it impossible for any easy sense of belonging in the academy. The burden of this untenable resistance has created an inconsolable sadness that affects all levels of my everyday experience". Black sadness in the academy is, as Ann Cvetkovich writes, "a very very very very different kind of sadness. A complicated feeling. Even one that chronicles long histories of dispossession that are both geographic and psychic". Because too many analysis stop at the psyche and do not reach the manifestation of the psychic imprint on the flesh, bone, skin, nerves, muscles, bowels, etc., of the body itself, let me add Cvetkovich's analysis and suggest that the long histories of dispossession are not just psychic but also lived in and through the body. Cvetkovich's argument takes me to Katherine McKittrick's Plantations Futures, which argues that "the geographies of black dispossession provides opportunities to notice that the right to be human carries in it the history of racial encounters and innovative black diaspora practices that in fact spatializes acts of survival". Black sadness, something other, almost restricted in the academy, can open up a micro-climate of hope, and that phrase is from Cvetkovich - The microclimate of hope. This microclimate is not a home that keeps sadness at bay. Hope, when one finds it in black sadness, is frictive, it is not predicated on logics that insist to keep struggling, to keep alive. This reorientation positions hope in black sadness in the academy as a thorn, a sharp spine on the plant. As frictive, though, which the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] defines as "denoting a type of consonant made by the friction of breath in a narrow opening producing a turbulent airflow" bears hope to me to harbor debt. I am interested in hope in terms of the figure; hope harbors debt. This opens up opportunities to notice that hope denotes a type of consonant made by the friction of breath.
How, then, does a black scholar find an easy sense of belonging in the academy, when it is also the case that faculty of color are not hired at nearly the same frequency as white faculty members to join the system sociologists describe as academic caste system. This low frequency is amplified in many academic plans in many Canadian universities, for example, in their call for diversity. And yet, in the past decade, I have noticed a speed and urgency at which students of color, in the writing stage of their Ph.D., are being recruited by many universities. I was one of those. Some of us become their response to the demand that the landscape, the personscape* [00:16:19], the soundscape, of higher education need of change. As a person of color, one arrives at an institution indebted to it and carrying the burden for which white faculty are often not conscripted. In being recruited into the institutional life of the academy, our presence and the presence of our bodies becomes evidence of the university's diversity. Our presence, we need to remember Sara Ahmed's argument in 'On Being Included', that diversity work recruitment, in this case, becomes a sign that the university is diverse. I am a young faculty of color that has become that sign, our presence alone is a sign of the university's diversity and it does not matter what kind of experiences we have there, how welcoming or hostile the place is, what kinds of analysis we bring, just our presence is recruited as sign. And as signs of inclusion, we, to quote Ahmed, make the signs of exclusion disappear.
And yet, getting jobs, which at times feel like borrowing a job, whether as ** [00:17:32] or not, many of scholars of color feel lucky and indebted even that in this great academic job market recession, where the forecast for employment looks bleak, prompting many with PhDs to reconsider a career in the academy, a handful of us are borrowing tenure track jobs, and often we borrow these jobs with a handful of publications, making us appear as if we are defined the publisher ** [00:18:04] mantra we learned through the very useful guide books we get at the professionalization workshops grad-students attend. In the institutional climate of the university, then, the motion and emotion of Ferguson's sadness and affect call us to reflect in part on the new racialized conditions of emergent scholars in the Canadian academy. What often goes invisible in the polite world of bureaucratic culture, Cvetkovich astutely notes, add the casual forms of racism or lack of understanding that made this condition of so-called privilege one that is also pervaded by anxiety and stress.
Privilege comes, racism comes, stress comes, comes anxiety, positions the handful faculty of color as tokens, being viewed as a symbol of race rather than as an individual. I am struggling with this point... often converting our intellectual job into a character with racial currency, fermenting a contrastive separation of capital, we suggest that our racial capital trumps our intellectual one, if that's even... This uninterrogated conversion of race to capital, the assumption that black folks only get academic jobs because they are owed it by white guilt, and separation of intelligence from race, overlooks the histories that create this so-called preference now. The colonial, racial, as the Denise teaches us, the scientific dimensions, that created cognitive capital to their racial features of a racial body. This punitive equation gives preferential contracts to white folks and believes the literal and social death of the internal other. Which is to say, what is biopolitics for some, a form of disciplinary generative care, is necropolitics, a site of manage productive death for others. In addition to the normative scripts of biopolitics, unrecognized within this contrastive separation are the forms of non-contract labor, with our productive or reproductive loaded onto those preferred. In other words, attributing the hirement of a handful of faculty of color to racial capital - this is a phrase we get, 'oh you got this job because of that', it's secular, it also works on lines of gender, there's this attempt to diversify - is not a critique of the exploitation and oppression of the racism capitalism colonial nexus, I wish that's what they were trying to critique. What that tone about preference means to undermine the faculty of color again **[00:21:33] into the profession as a way of our ethnicity ends up underscoring a history of the racist imperialist and destructive violence that backbones the bourgeoisie institutions of the academy. One simply has to think of Audre Lorde's challenge to academics by referring to the university as the master's house or pay attention to ways some of the critiques of neoliberal devaluation of post-secondary education deployed a discourse of restruggle*, or to ways in which the embedding of market logic and corporate style management into the academy is likened by many faculty who describe management as overseers to the degraded conditions of a plantation economy.
With that rendered as metaphor or not, the discursive field has a significant impact on black scholars in the academy. (This is me turning to a very particular Canadian context here. I don't know how it plays out in the US context). In the territorial acknowledgments at events at Canadian universities - (for those of you who are not from Canada or don't know much about Canada, it has become almost, at every event, in the Canadian university, this thing, we do this acknowledgement of whose land we are on, it has become this symbolic sense of seeking welcome to the land, and it seems to almost, as we heard today about questions around dispossession and hospitality, we know the Derridian notion of hostipitality, when hospitality and hostility are fused, so that's a way that you see it happening, every event I go to you see that on operation and it almost empties out that gesture. But, and yet, at the very same time, there's this attempt to kind of have consciousness, so, you understand that) - we are reminded that these institutions exist on unceded indigenous lands and territories. What is less known and coming to know in a noncompetitive sense of attending to historical memory, what I am trying to do here is that, that conversation between blackness and indigeneity, particularly in Canada, is not happening, and so, in the attempt to kind of want to do it [make the conversation happen] appears or sounds like there is a competition and I am not interested in the competitive historical memory, that is not the kind of work I am doing here. While I am I am working through blackness in Canada, and that is the site of my thinking, it is not at all, it doesn't annex, in fact, everything that I am thinking through is being informed by, even as I am not talking about it, but otherwise it has become the practice that you are either doing this or that, and so I am not, I really wanna make it clear that is not in a competitive, this is a noncompetitive historical kind of memory I am trying to work through here.
What is less known are the ways colonial and racial violence, including slave economy, also founded these Canadians institutions. Lorena Gale's Angelique, a play that performs the history of slavery in Lower Canada - which is what we now know as Montreal - that Afua Cooper in their book 'The Hanging of Angelique', calls 'Canada's best-kept secret', attends to the structural enforce of plantation and enslavement from mid 17th century to the present. Gale's play foregrounds ways enslavement also had a lot to do with prestige of the slave owner and then representing themselves as wealthy and worldly. Importantly, Gale's work tunes us to ways enslavement allows slave owners and their families to escape domestic field and manufacturing labor. Escaping domestic labor seems to be a rich metaphor and may also help distinguish the methods of anti-black racism in the academy in Canada. For instance, our hires are constantly being made to add prestige to departments and also to allow them out of a certain kind of domestic labor of actually caring. Charmaine Nelson, for example, points to ways the founder of McGill University, James McGill, amass wealth from the slave trade in the Caribean, arguing that plantation wealth aided the flourishing of the university. This argument is very kind of common in US universities. It is not at all present in Canadian universities. The compound occupation of the land and occupation of the minds and bodies made the acquisition of black bodies in this case not redundant to the institution. Instead, our contemporary presence here begins to feel like a purchase, made to raise the total state value of the academy once again. Continuous rather than discontinuous or even their once said reconciliatory with the history of building the academy value through wealth from the plantation. Might this be what Katherine McKittrick refers to as plantations futures? When she writes "our future modes of being, if tied to the plantation and empire and violence, might not necessarily follow our late-modern necropolitics of the present into future-misery, wherein freedom is lifeless and racial terror is the act of realizing this freedom. Instead", she continues "our future modes of being might hinge on a decolonial poetics that reads black dispossession as a 'question mark'". Frantz Fanon understood being as practice of interrogation and responding when at the end of Black skin, White mask, he cries, ''oh my body make of me always a man who questions''.
Reading this address of temporal suspensions, an interruption that looks at the future to challenge the navigational habits of the body as black dispossession is to read the ark of the question mark as an interrogation that raises procedural rather than evaluative concerns, leading to the question: how does one work in the belly of a compound violence as a question mark? Is the question mark that Denise Ferreira da Silva and Paula Chakravartty mention in their essay "Unpayable Debt"? Thus, I wanted to ask: could the question not be about the unpayable debt?
Our ethnicities as our so-called racial capital take us inside an institutional culture grounded in a logic that believes change is embedded in the bellies of faculty of color rather than one with a logic that embodies change in the infrastructures of the university. The image of taking us in, numb, rendering us as part of the body politic of the institution, now, has an attendant imagery of as being swallowed up by the university. This image has the pneumonic function of recalling that drama of Jonah, the prophet whom at will swallows. Jonah's suffering recalls another sufferer, Gob. That biblical figure in the old testament who is afflicted with boils on his entire body. My recollection is not so much about the scriptural metaphor of Gob's affliction and whether he will curse God and die in the face of suffering, I recall it for two reasons; one, the parallel between Gob, the character, and Job, the academic employment, and two, its articulated ethical-theological quandary. Gob's description of the world as dappled and how these descriptions ask us to grapple with the ontological implications of being swallowed up into getting a job in an institution of power, equipped with technologies, including varying colonial discourses and rhetorics for othering bodies, emotions, precarities, vulnerabilities, and ultimately rendering insurgence and difference in that institution as part of their own series of aims and objectives. Here I am thinking with Roderick Ferguson on this question on the university and how it just absorbs these radical projects into its own medium.
Gob's sufferings are temptations from God to test his faithfulness. In Paradise Regained, John Milton refers to Gob as 'a just man of constant perseverance' and James, in his epistle, makes a reference to the patience of Gob. Gob being embodiment might perhaps be one many faculty of color are forced into ** [00:31:16], a kind of endless waiting for a God's debt to be repaid for suffering. But the debt is never repaid and the person with the job-Gob is left to go further and further into their own debt, suffering, so that the big debt, God's, the university's, never needs to be repaid. Gob's tale then is more than a repressive expression of God's trial on man's faith or of God's anger against the corrupt nature of the human. Rended as a theological and an ontological expression, the tale serves as a critique of ideology, and this is one of the moments actually when I agree with Zizek on something, he reads this book as a critique of ideology, which is of refusing to make suffering meaningful and through that refusal reminding us of an institution's power to ingest those who challenge it keeping in mind Jonah's suffeering and remembering that philologically will is derived from the hebrew word Leviathan, a word and allegory Thomas Hobbes uses to theorize social contracts and absolute sovereingty. Indexed into this institutions as the now preferred ones the discourse of swallowing swallows up at least two acknowledgments: of what is happening to us in them and of Christianity's participation in capitalism's structure of debt. I turned to the story of Gob as a way to mark faculty of color's entrance into jobs in the university as overwhelming as that of a smaller organism becoming part of a larger one, to mark the indigestibility of the black body, the particular black body that cannot be assimilated that is eventually regurgitated on shore. Regurgitated, but still in a state of debt that should never have been incurred to begin.
Three.
People of color, when hired, are swallowed up into an institution with a cultural preference for sameness. (This articulation of cultural preference for sameness has been borrowed from a Philomena Essed and Theo Goldberg, they think about how there's a sense of reproduction of, and hey use the language of cloning, the universities and departments want to clone themselves and so that's where they say cultural preference for sameness, is this cloning process that happens). To phrase it differently, the cultural preference for sameness in institutions produces a logic that imagines everyone it takes in to be the same. In the question and answer period of the black outdoors, a conversation between Fred Moten and Sadya Hartman, a writer an activist in the audience, wanting to think through "that jarring clash between what is told and what is", asked, "if you do believe in an outside and you are willing to fight for the outside, does that mean you just have to divert from truth? Or if truth-telling is thought a worthy labor, how do you overcome this yearning to be believed? Because you see the cycle over and over again, when someone is killed, but the police people is like but 'no, you are not telling the truth', I'm wondering, do we just keep doing that? Do we just keep fighting this exhaustive fight to say that it is truth and that you need to believe, or do we just say fuck it, I don't have a body?". Moten implicated Hartman in his response and responds with: "I mean, you know, we were good, we never got into trouble, we got good grades, you know, we went to so-called good schools, and the reward we got for being good for all that time was we got to spend all this time around people who were trying to kill us".
What does it mean for a black scholar to be good? And to spend all their time around people who try to kill us? The lyric chorus of Claudia Rankine's 'Citizen' voices out some of these swallowed up acknowledgments, highlighting the cost of feeling grateful to the now preferred one's narrative plot. For example, here is one one of the accounts of microaggression: standing outside the conference room, unseen by the two men waiting for the others to arrive, you hear one say to the other that being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation. Because you were spending those 2 hours around the roundtable that makes conversing easier you consider waiting a few minutes before entering the room. You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black tar street being swallowed by speed. He tells you that his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there. You think this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is some okay conversation to be having. Being a good colleague is not the same as being a good academic. Being a good black colleague means not disrupting racist conversations that pass because they are wrapped in humor. Humor makes racism possible in these academic settings because the recourse of the racist is 'surely you don't believe that I am being serious'. Thus, turning back on the black subject a question of the intelligence to read nuance although they have been reading nuance into a racist statement. There is injury to belonging, to be a good departmental citizen.
Rankine's poem demonstrates ways that we give form to our belonging differently. Faculty of color embodies institutional citizenship differently. Note the distinction in this quotations. The above is manufactured as raceless, grievance is recited against the under-represented, conversations occasion injury into our flesh. In Herman Melville Bartleby's, we see the perils of this logic when Bartleby, the recruited copyist refuses to reproduce the conditions of labor demanded by his employer. In the beginning of the narrative we meet Bartleby, described "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn", who lands a job as a scrivener in the law firm. The lawyer narrator tells us that ''after a few words touching his qualifications, I engaged him, glad to have among my corps of copyists a man of so singularly sedate an aspect, which I thought might operate beneficially upon the flighty temper of Turkey, and the fiery one of Nippers''. Sedation and mild mannerism are Bartleby's virtues. The lawyer narrator's enthusiasm for hiring Bartleby is due to the fact that his two other employees are each half bad. One is always drunk in the morning, the other in the afternoon, and they hate each other. There is something here that feels familiar about the racialized faculty member being forced into a kind of false neutrality. White professors get to be characters, get to be difficult, or willful, whereas faculty of color are expected to be persistently cheerful, neutral, easy-going, innofensive. Earlier, I pointed out that any revolutionary spirit displayed by faculty of color is co-opted for the benefit of the institution's own aims. Black faculty becomes useful to operate on the temper or tone of a department by bringing energy and often we hear this also with young faculty as a form to bring in energy. What is that energy? What is that energy then used for? Certainly, not to divert the course of the institutional shit - still thinking with Melville here - but to labor on behalf of its quest. Bartleby's desirability to the firm which aides him to do an extraordinary quantity of writing lies in his ability to work silently, mechanically, and palely. Preference, we learn here, is not only about qualifications. In it lies a promise of conversion, of converting affect and character, in other words, converting now preferred values into labor for the institution. Bartleby initially proves a most diligent copyist. However, on his third day of work, when called to proofread a short document and refusing to be a protector of the copy, replies "I would prefer not to". This polite refusal gets the lawyer-narrator to sit for a while in perfect silence, incredulous, wondering if his ears had deceived him. The rest of the narrative plots to persuade Bartleby to perform his duties, plots that he increasingly infuses. In a provocative mood, the lawyer-narrator ask him to check to see if there's any mail waiting at the post office. ''I would prefer not to. You will not? I prefer not''. By politingly refusing the check, Bartleby interrupts the disowned* violence of the institution. This is what I mean: I read Citizen and Bartleby, the Scrivener, not simply to relate each text dialogically, I want instead to highlight the injurious nature of our work. Rankine's text, for example, shows the social impossibility of resistance, or the social pressure on resistance. It would be almost social unacceptable for the speaker to correct DeMan and deliver a lecture on critical race theory or to go on about colonial dispossession. Melville's text shows the futility of resisting one's duties or as protest or not. Bartleby does lose his job but then starts refusing to move at all. Eventually, the employer enter into this strange relationship of obligation and care for Bartleby. He is locked into his own form of sympathy and paternalism. Though he fires Bartleby, Bartleby still will not leave the offices. The employer moves to new offices but still finds himself somehow beholding to Bartleby to the point of following Bartleby to jail.
My point here is that there is another chapter to Bartleby's story that might be equally interesting. It revolves around the way the employer, here the university, or certain aspects of it, feels a sense of care and responsibility to the Bartlebies, the racialized faculty who cannot or will not act productively. Yet, this care and responsibility are literally deadly. After all, you could, theoretically, go on sick leave now and many racialized faculty do end up having to do so, but it is a coercive care. It is not a transformative care that says, 'hey, this institution of which I am a part of is a site of your slow death. Therefore, we must destroy it and build something new together.' It rather says 'this institution is hard for all of us, too bad you can't hack it. Why don't you take a break and come back when you are ready to be exploited again on those terms?' Bartleby's resistance seems to me is a steadfast refusal to be exploited and leave. But he slowly withers away and eventually dies in jail. He is acted upon. From here, I'm thinking of proposing debt as the force that makes both of those contracts possible, the exploitation and the not leaving. Debt is embedded in the shape of both texts and my engagement with them. Rendering debt as a force that makes both of those contracts possible. Debt to others for being included in the conversation as we saw, to be included what one has to owe for that debt to be included in that office, debt, and gratitude to the institution for having a job.
Four.
Halifax is a nice, little, academic city, with five universities. Where neighbors hum a happy tune, saying 'good morning' and making comments like 'people aren't fake here'. As a Ph.D. candidate, I was excited to move there not only because of the job but also because of what I have learned about the city as a student of black histories in Canada. By myself, I move to the south end of Halifax onto Morris Street, in a downtown neighborhood which placed me in a short walking distance to work, to the hill the maroons from Jamaica built before relocating to Sierra Leone. I lived on a street that looked down to the waterfront, to the Atlantic Ocean. My backyard overlooked holy cross cemetery, where heroes of many colonial warfare, since the mid-1850s, lay resting in the city. In essence, I moved to a place, to a job that logically on paper was my dream job. I moved to a city where I was daily surrounded by, as we often are, the forces of colonial and national and transnational black histories. The very materials that shape the matters of my research in the black Atlantic. And yet, I had to leave the city by force, leave the job behind, constantly remind myself, as Anthony Paul Farley does in the Colorline of Capitalist Accumulation, that ''escape seems a physical impossibility if the market is the entire world. Escape seems a logical impossibility if there is no alternative. Escape seems unethical and antisocial if this is the best of all possible worlds". I had to escape or else be found resting in my backyard.
In Halifax, this black escape has a genealogy in the story of the black loyalists, who were promised a home in exchange for their allegiance to British crown during the American revolution by giving the worst lands and had to ensure and endure racist violence or violent racism such that million left for Sierra Leone. Here, is a financial scheme too where the loyalist went into debt for their passage with a promise to work in Africa to repay English investors. I enjoy roaming the skin of the past just as a much that Halifax, this colonial and racial violence takes residence on my skin. I didn't become aware of both of this encounters until the racial violence of the past rode into me one evening on my walk home from attending a talk in the north end of Halifax. A talk organized by the public library on how to tap trees and grow and pick mushrooms. The talk went on too long and I missed cooking dinner. I found myself a few meters away from the pizza joint a block from home when three white men in a white 2011 Toyota Camry drove into me onto the sidewalk. Making a quick footwork to distance myself from the car's touch, I interrogated them with my eyes. They, in turn, muffed up ''if you weren't so damn black we would see you''. My feet rushed into the pizza joint, [00:49:30] **. I changed my order into a takeaway and walked out of the joint in the opposite direction of my house, in the direction of the ocean, and called to chat with a friend in Montreal. Needing to remain safe and needing a distraction from the night, I didn't tell him I was thinking about how the places in which I, with my particular body, move to want me dead. A few nights before, as I was writing this section and trying to enter the details of that night, I called on a friend to remind me of what had happened because I didn't believe the details I was recalling. He, who has a good memory, said 'I don't remember that one as well as I do the one with a dog being set on you and you being accosted in the park'. Funny enough, I had forgotten those episodes. I called a different friend who had become a life support in Halifax after we attended the generative somatic and trauma training, a course that supports folks of color to transform trauma from our body with somatic awareness and embodiment processes, somatic skills build in and specialized somatic body work. In our conversation, she reminded me we met after this car episode. She wanted to know whether I reported it because the police report, she tells me, would have documentary proof, the details I need for this essay. I tell her I did not report it. This is why.
In 2006, during Labor Day weekend, my father helped me move from storage my stuff into my new flat on Charlton Street in Hamilton. I was beginning my Ph.D. on the department of English and Cultural Studies at Mcmaster University where I had just completed my MA thesis that tried to work through the kinds of mobilization that literary, cultural, and popular representation of black masculinities and gun violence in black cultural productions in Canada pose as unearned debt on us. I have stored my stuff in hold self-storage on Sherman street because I had managed to line up three house sitting gigs as a way not to pay summer rent. My father and I moved just about everything into the flat that long weekend. Because he did not want to lose me to the Ph.D. program too soon, my father claimed tiredness and suggested I go back with him to Toronto and that we could then return together to move the rest of my stuff early Tuesday morning before he went to work at 8h30. We emptied the storage unit on Tuesday morning and drove to the house only to learn the house was alive with stains of a break-in. Even to this day, I cannot easily retell what happened.
I started out with an intra-continental journey. Mine was not the road narrative that cross-country journey from coast to coast that is so central to the Canadian national imaginary of self-discovery. The cross-country journey for people of color muffs a tough geography. In this phrase, there is a line Rinaldo Walcott borrows, as a chapter title in 'Black Like Who?', from Dionne Brand's No Language is Neutral. That title from Brand is borrowed from a different Walcott, Derek, so I am also interested in thinking through a generative debt that is happening here between black scholars as I am also working through my own debt to these scholars as they are helping me to think through this autobiographical work. I explore what this generative debt with each other might be. I'm actually going to stop reading here. The road and the transitions can be so full of pain, revealing, borrowing Rinaldo Walcott's language, the racial geography of Canada. I then moved on to a story about walking after a talk in the north end of Halifax, intending to narrate a single instance of racial violence, one that results, as a result of being presumed not to belong in the south end of Halifax, that story led me to tell you about the friend I called, that one activated another story about the dog being released on me, that story with the dog has meaning because of a story that happened at the beginning of my PhD. One story leads to another, one story looks over its shoulder at another. Even though my aim is to tell you one incident of racial violence, the telling is shadowed by many other occurrences of racial violence making it impossible to share the impact of one without a domino effect. There is more to this compositional aesthetic, this repetition that the recurrence of traumatic memory. There is more here than a mere refusal to make a clean break from the past. Yet the aftertouch is always with us. It forms and shapes and reforms and reshapes and yet the transmission in my narration of the impossibility of black life in these places offer something we might call what Saidiya Hartman calls disenchantment. The realization that embedded in one's own embodied subjectivity are the multiple, the walked chains of anger, marking time, weighing down my bones, one experience going onto another in the inaugural and ongoing accumulation of violence that weakens my walking bones, the ongoing inaugural realization of living with a history of a black body overwritten by a narrow view of modernity, one that is always present in the surroundings and the institutions where I work. Thanks.
