Hieroglyphics and Afropessimism
This piece is from a presentation given for Dr. Frank Wilderson’s seminar on Afropessimism. The piece is based on the article “Speaking the Hieroglyph” by Dr. Selamawit Terrefe. There is a link to a playlist located directly below this line of text. The audience is meant to listen to the first 4 minutes of the first song before the spoken part of the presentation begins. As I speak, the music is meant to play quietly in the background.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7Mdmd58QAXL7Fm5FOyNBrc?si=MnRjL-BIQO6b8v_wd_ApoA
We begin at the spectacle and the spectacular. The spectacular further reduces the frame of the spectacle, singeing the flesh of black bodies provisionally gendered as male, whilst the dark continent of black female flesh forecloses the possibility of horizon, as the lines which would in theory delineate its borders submerge into the abyss. I won’t rehearse the violent scenes because there is no escape from the violated seens. I say this following Terrefe, who asks, “Has the black female imago experienced an erasure, or something more insidious?” Something more insidious. Something more insidious. Something. More. Insidious….
In a context where the act of looking is inextricable from an act of violence, looking upon black female flesh is to develop a process of reading that which is without translation. To read without translation is to reject the ruse of analogy while accepting the necessity of grappling with the “monstrosity of a female with the potential to name.” And what is this text produced through the totalizing violence of ungendering? A text for living and for dying. This hieroglyphics of the flesh is what has the vultures laughing as they suspend their feasting descent until the death of the bodies follows the death of the disembodied. What does it mean to say that our eyes betray us, despite our best practices of discipline, or transformation, or liberation? Black female flesh, black female imago, black woman, daemonic angel of our dreams who has “yet been allowed to die.”
What are we to make of and with black female flesh in order to intervene in the reinscription of the black female imago as the mule of the earth, as the harbor for aggressivity without the burning light of provisional spectrality? Why does she desire gratuitous freedom? I take offense to it. It disturbs me. It unsettles me. The audacity. The pain. The revelation. The interminable vibration of belly — partus sequitur ventrum. And what do we make of this aporia between Marriott and Spillers? This “primary site of irreconciliation: whether or not the violence of Black relationality — the Black psyche — reflects its impossibility.” A depravity such as this, cared for by the ship’s hole, is the “bizarre axiological ground” which may give birth to the foreclosure of the horizon between life and death.
Speaking the Hieroglyph is quite the subtle and clever title. Subtle because of the provocations — scattered throughout the piece — about the discongruities, perhaps even incommensurability, between the black and speech. Between the black woman and representation. The sensorious delirium conjured by hieroglyphics, an amalgamation of the visual, tactile, and auditory. Terrefe is enacting a scandal — how to stage, or better yet wage, an intramural conversation under extramural gaze? Which is to say under conditions of war. What shall I tell my children who are black? To speak the hieroglyph right in their pretty little faces? And what happens when we substitute Freud’s dreamscape rebus for the hieroglyphics of the flesh? Would we then realize, following Moten perhaps, that the unconscious is structured not like a language, but like a music? This unconscious theme from the middle of the night which must “live with hatred as our most intimate possession.”
We fail if we slippage between bios and mythos, between the fiction of an always-already black female body and the figure of the black female imago. More doubling, why why why so much doubling? To drain, negate, and empty both the phallus and chalice, in the Name of the absented father and black woman-as-rival. ’Til death will we meet.
Keywords:
Oedipal complex
Identification
Desire
Interior intersubjectivity
Discussion Questions:
Can we talk about Spillers’ “hermeneutic of flesh”?
How do Marriot, Spillers, and Terrefe read Fanon?
What tools are available to excavate the unconscious?
