Categories
Violence and Nonviolence

Motionless in White: Slaughterhouse

From the outset of his famous essay Towards the Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin ([1921] 2021) asks the question “whether violence in general, as a principle, is moral, even as a means to just ends” (39). In The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler (2020) attempts to answer this question. They argue that what state violence really expresses is an unequal distribution of the grievable (Ibid., 77). This distribution is discursively constituted through legal systems and reproduced through state violence. In order to escape this, they argue that a nonviolent approach is necessary. Similarly, in their song Slaughterhouse, Motionless in White delineate unequal degrees of grievability. However, they see violence as a necessary means to overturn this distribution. In this short paper, I aim to reflect on both approaches, as well as their benefits and shortcomings.

In seeking to establish a politics of nonviolence, Butler argues that violence and inequality are mutually constitutive and thus always presuppose one another. Therefore, any movement towards a politics of nonviolence, must be a project towards radical egalitarianism (Butler 2020, 25-26). For this, they invoke the concept of ‘grievability.’ Not all lives, Butler proclaims, are attributed an equal sense of grievability. Those lives that will be grieved when lost are signified as grievable, while those that are not compose the ‘ungrievable’ (Ibid., 77-78). Butler poses that the legal codification of this biopolitical distribution of the (un)grievable is violence. Using the example of police killing innocent black citizens, Butler claims that this violence precedes the act of the murder itself. It is ingrained in the socio-political and legal apparatus of our sociality (Ibid., 84-85). The project towards a situation in which all lives are equally grievable must, therefore, always be a project of suspending legal violence.

The question remains how this suspension can be effectuated. Slaughterhouse by the metalcore band Motionless in White and Bryan Garris (2022) offers one potential answer to this question. Slaughterhouse is a call for an anti-capitalist revolution from the perspective of the subjugated. “Break down the wall again”, screams Garris as Slaughterhouse commences (Ibid.). A similar sentiment to Butler’s distribution of the grievable underlies the song: the lives of the lower classes are degraded and deemed ungrievable, equated to pigs in a slaughterhouse, and “packaged up and sold for scraps”, while the rich “auction off our backs to buy your crown” (Ibid.). The ungrievable populations live their lives in a Hobbesian state of nature, in which the capitalists “sit back as we collapse, left to fight over scraps” (Ibid.). Similar to Butler, Motionless argue that to transform this distribution of the ungrievable, an overturn is necessary. However, the approach here is strictly violent. Exemplified by the song’s warlike drums, belligerent vocals, macabre vocabulary, and ominous background melody, Motionless and Garris pose that the only way to escape the condition of ungrievability is to “Flip the script and oppress the oppressors”, to “Kill ’em all, kill ’em all, no successors” (Ibid.). Phrased differently, a rupturing of the legal order requires, for Motionless and Garris, an ultimate ‘divine’ form of de-posing violence (Benjamin [1921] 2021, 60).

Additionally, Slaughterhouse expresses a sentiment close to that of Frantz Fanon. Violent oppression, Fanon notes, “will only yield when confronted with greater violence” (Fanon 2001, 48). However, besides instrumental in altering material conditions, violence serves a second function. Because of the total self-alienation and psychological inferiority complex violent domination established in the oppressed subject, counter-violence not only changes material conditions, but liberates the subject from this inferiority complex. From the ashes of violent revolt, the individual is formed, the subject created. Violence serves not only as a means to material liberation, but also to psychological emancipation (Blackey 1974, 193). Slaughterhouse expresses this cathartic element of violence by its very existence. Motionless and Garris’ violent assertion of individuality is in itself a means to escape this inferiority complex. It is thus not only a plea for transforming material conditions, but an expression of subjectivity just as much.

For Butler, however, a violent revolution is ineffective. Instead, Benjamin’s notion of divine violence should be interpreted as an essentially nonviolent suspension of legal violence (Butler 2020, 89-90). Invoking Étienne Balibar’s analysis of Hobbes, Butler poses that any form of anti-violence must be nonviolent. Otherwise, the suspension of state violence will only be an oscillation – a double violence (Ibid. 95-96). Additionally, my contention is that a redistribution of the grievable, as Slaughterhouse forcefully proposes, does not lead to radical egalitarianism. Rather, it simply transfigures the hierarchy and categorisation of the grievable and ungrievable. Consequently, what we end up with is a different distribution of the grievable, which ultimately yields the same result.

In this short paper I have offered a brief reflection of two positions regarding the overturn of legal violence. Using Judith Butler’s concept of grievability, I have illustrated how state violence and social inequality are mutually constitutive. Any project to end state violence must therefore presuppose radical egalitarianism. With the example of Slaughterhouse by Motionless in White and Bryan Garris, I have showcased one possible – violent – means through with the legal order can be overturned. However, such a violent project entirely waives any hope of radical egalitarianism. It only leads to a double violence, and a different distribution of grievability, not its eradication. As such, it must be concluded that a violent overturn of the legal system cannot be the path to end state violence.

Giovanni Prins

References

Benjamin, Walter. [1921] 2021. Toward the Critique of Violence: A Critical Edition. Edited by Peter Fenves and Julia Ng. Stanford University Press.
Blackey, Robert. 1974. “Fanon and Cabral: a Contrast in Theories of Revolution for Africa.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 12, no. 2: 191-209.
Butler, Judith. 2020. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. London: Verso.
Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. London: Penguin Books.

Categories
Violence and Nonviolence

Gorillaz, Fatoumata Diawara: Désolé

For the theme of nonviolence, I think with Judith Butler’s idea of “the oscillation of frameworks within which naming practices take place.” (Butler 2020, 139) This is an idea drawn from their interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s idea of non-violence, violence, and the importance of language translation. According to Butler’s interpretation, acts of translation between different frameworks can lead to forms of non-violence such as conflict resolution (Butler 2020, 127). Butler specifically focuses on racialized practices of naming certain acts violent and others non-violent. The oscillating frameworks help us in identifying these naming practices by showing how violence is circumscribed (Butler 2020, 136).

I wish to see which questions the idea of oscillating frameworks might pose to the song ‘Désolé’ by Gorillaz and Fatoumata Diawara (2020), and, in turn, which questions the song might pose Butler’s text. Hence, this contribution to the mixtape itself constitutes a form of oscillation of frameworks of sound and text. This line of reasoning is not one of resolving its oscillations. Instead, I aim to set the stage for an ongoing reciprocal problematization between the frameworks of Butler and ‘Désolé’.

‘Désolé’ is trilingual and is sung in Bambara, English, and French. Thus, three linguistic-cultural frameworks are brought together through the song’s oscillations. In researching this song, I was trying to find a good translation of the non-English parts, and I stumbled across a post on Reddit titled ”MYSTERY: What is Fatoumata is saying in Désolé??? (Can help with Bambara translation?)” (anon4913 2021). The post’s author expressed many of my frustrations in finding a proper translation for the parts sung in Bambara. It is significantly harder to find translations of Bambara than French and English. This is despite it being spoken by an estimated 15,9 million people worldwide (“Bambara – Worldwide Distribution” n.d.). Though not the official language, it is the most widespread language of Mali. French is the official language which is only spoken by 6,4 percent of Mali’s population (“Mali: Country Data and Statistics” n.d.).

While this is only a brief demographic sketch, it speaks to Butler’s etymological considerations of ’demographics’ as the graphic means of rendering populations grievable or not (Butler 2020, 104). The Bambara-speaking population might be rendered ungrievable relative to the French-speaking population of Mali. In this regard, the song poses the question and the problem of what a ’sorry’, a ’désolé’, means in the context of the (un)grievable. How do sorries traverse across multiple frameworks and how is this traversal impacted by a lack of grievability? How do sorries traverse the boundary between the grievable and the ungrievable and help destabilize that barrier? Low practically, it is harder for me to find the translations for the phrases in Bambara than those in French. Hence, the context implied by the song’s trilinguality announces an oscillation that is not just a problem of conveying an understanding from one language to another. It is also an oscillation that may very well be densely layered with colonialism.

However, I also believe the song hints at a way of approaching the conflicts generated and revealed by oscillating frameworks. As the Reddit post shows, the very act of listening and trying to navigate the oscillations of the song’s frameworks can create a drive to go beyond your framework and actively engage in processes of translation. The song simultaneously places you in and pushes you into these oscillations. One might speculate that the song’s multilinguality carries with it a tension that helps enable this drive in the listener. That tension is both an asset to the song and an integral part of what makes the song work. Perhaps the fact that it is experiencable as a piece of music gives the song an added potential for containing the oscillations without resolving them. If the frameworks were to be completely translated into Bambara, English or French, the song stops being the same. Just like how the synthesizer that is no longer oscillating produces no sound.

Consequently, another question posed by ”Désolé” is whether oscillations of frameworks are inherently valuable by virtue of the oscillations’ potential to open one up to other frameworks. That is, whether the oscillations have an inherent value besides Butler’s analytic and ethical motivation to use them in figuring out how violence is circumscribed. In Butler’s interpretation of Walter Benjamin, they are making arguments that might fit such a line of reasoning. And, understood as translations, then the oscillations always run the risk of appropriating each other’s frameworks (Butler 2000, 36). How is this avoidable? Perhaps through the act of translation’s “counter-colonialist possibility” as Butler phrases it in their dialogue with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek (Butler 2000, 37). While these reflections indicate future oscillations between Butler and the song ‘Désolé’, the scope of this mixtape contribution prevents and dampens, for now, the oscillations of any such further dialogue from continuing.

Lukas Hjulmann Seidler

Categories
Racial Violence and Representation

Sons of Kemet ft. Joshua Idehen: Field Negus

For the theme of racialised violence, I chose the song ‘Field Negus’ by Sons of Kemet (ft. Joshua Idehen). I must admit that I found it very difficult to write this contribution for the mixtape. Not only because the readings were difficult, but because the song I have chosen screams difficulty. It screams at the position of me, the specific author of this text, who has chosen this song. What is my position? My position is that of a white man writing about ”Blackness – the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line” (Moten 2003, 1). As I am writing this text, I am in a city built on slavery, doing my readings in one of the former buildings of the Dutch East India Company. This is the company that was one of the main actors in the Dutch slave trade. Given that the song concerns slavery and racism, in many ways, I am occupying the position of the ’you’ addressed in this song. Joshua Idehen sings with distorted affect accompanied by noisy horns and percussion that have no clear structure, no clear rhythm:

Thank you for refusing me that inch
Because now I do now recognise your yardstick
The scales have toppled
The curtains have collapsed
The blonde baboon’s arse is bare in the open
And I am a field n* now
I do not want your equality
It was never yours to give me
And even then it was too minor, too little, too late (Sons of Kemet and Idehen 2021)

This song does not only concern an abolishment of slavery, it also concerns an abolishment of that against which freedom and slavery is measured and defined in the first place. This is the ‘yardstick’ and the ‘scales’ that Idehen sings about. The lyrics also concern the positionality of the ‘you’ that defines an ‘equality’ that ‘was never yours to give me’. Thus, the song critiques both the measurement of freedom and the position of the ‘you’ who sets the conditions for emancipation. These critiques resonate with Saidiya Hartman’s problematization of any clear, simple annulment of slavery. Any actual freedoms after the 13th amendment did not neatly follow from an increase in legal (white Western man’s) freedoms. Slavery instead transformed and took on new forms (Hartman 1997, 10). As Hartman also contends, the very meaning of emancipation must thus be reconsidered, the “yardstick” of this freedom recognised, and its “curtains” collapsed.

The tension between the instrumentation and Idehen’s singing/shouting/chanting screams the difficulty of the process of ’writing about’ from a specific perspective before I even started typing these words. It thus functions as the sort of irruption that Fred Moten writes about, that is “an irruption of phonic substance that cuts and augments meaning with a phonographic, rematerializing inscription.” (Moten 2003, 14) It irrupts the meaning of ’itself as analyzable’ by virtue of how it unsettles the non-innocent position of the analyser. This makes this analysis of what the song might be about necessarily parenthetic to the forceful, tense unsettling of the song (this to such an extent that I had initially written half this part of the mixtape in parentheses, something I only altered when I realized how difficult it makes the reading experience).

The ‘Negus’ in the song’s title is an Ethiopian term for a monarch. The song could then be seen as a process of recontextualizing the Negus’ ’Field’ as that which is no longer defined on the terms of the ’you’ addressed in the song, but instead ruled over by the regent ’we’ of the song. However, this position that is being rematerialized upon hearing the audio of the song, is not a position that is mine to define. I believe that the song performs a scream to us as academics and makes analysis parenthetic to the act of stepping away, an act that questions our positions. This is what Moten means by the appositional encounter; that the sound questions positionality by forcing us to step away from our positions (Moten 2003, 21). Where does this encounter take us? I will end this part of the mixtape with a quote from Moten. The appositional encountering is

a nondetermining invitation to the new and continually unprecedented performative, historical, philosophical, democratic, communist arrangements that are the only authentic ones. (Moten 2003, 22)

Lukas Hjulmann Seidler

Categories
Racial Violence and Representation

Ella Fitzgerald: Mack the Knife

Arguably the best example of the power of music is the role jazz has played in the civil rights movement in the United States. As María Diego Vicente (2022) argues, jazz has had a trifold purpose in the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s: catharsis, self-identification, and emancipation (12-17). However, the importance of ‘black music’ has not been left undisputed. Frantz Fanon – a famous critic of jazz – argues that jazz music reduces black identity to an essential sameness. Fanon poses that it disregards particular lived experiences. My aim is to amend this problem through the lens of Fred Moten’s theory on black performance. In what follows, I will explore how improvisational jazz – exemplified by Ella Fitzgerald’s performance of Mack the Knife – plays a crucial role in identity formation and emancipation, thereby being an aid rather than a hindrance to social movements.    

To grasp Frantz Fanon’s critique on jazz, one must first understand his hostility to Leopold Senghor’s negritude movement. In an attempt to battle colonialism and its inherent racism, the negritude movement attempts to establish a collective black identity. As Senghor (1974) puts it, ‘the word negritude expresses the same for the whole range of values of civilisation of all black peoples in the world’ (270). As such, it is a metaphor that refers to a common ‘rhythm’ of blackness, which is expressed in art, literature, and (jazz) music (Ibid., 270-271).

Fanon, however, starkly opposes such a theory. By reducing black identity to a collective rhythmic sensibility, grounded in a mythical shared past, one wholly neglects the particularity of specific cultures, or even individuals. As Fanon declares, black people “of Chicago only resemble the Nigerians or the Tanganyikans in so far as they were all defined in relation to the whites” (Fanon 2001, 173-174). By subscribing to the notion of a shared sense of negritude, one negates the lived experience of the black person. This is precisely what he accuses jazz of as well. Fanon seeks to challenge the romantic idea of a fundamental black identity that is so prominent in jazz music. Ultimately, he poses that the performance of jazz only serves to reproduce the inferiority of the black/colonial subject. By lamenting on “the curse of his race, and the racial hatred of the white men”, the jazz musician only reproduces the colonial power dynamic (Ibid., 195-196).

While Fanon’s critique seems to be unambiguous, Jeremy Lane (2012) has argued that Fanon’s feud is not with jazz, but rather with its connection to the negritude movement. What is needed, then, is an uncoupling of jazz and the conception of a shared blackness. I propose that such an uncoupling is provided by Fred Moten’s theory of black performance, and in particular the importance he ascribes to improvisational jazz. Echoing Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, Moten poses that identity is performatively constructed and reconstructed. Moreover, he attributes such productive power in particular to ‘phonic matter’ – i.e., voice, music, sound (Moten 2003, 6-7). Such phonic substance contains the productive and disruptive power to radically (re)articulate black identity. This is especially the case in improvisational jazz, for it is ‘a highly localized movement of syncopation, a Village disruption of the spacetime continuum’, which ‘marks the assertion, rather than negation, of radical blackness on the one hand, and totality on the other’ (Ibid., 153). Of such a case, I take Ella Fitzgerald’s (1960) rendition of Mack the Knife to be a prime example.

In February 1960, Ella Fitzgerald went on to put on a live performance that would remain forever enshrined in the history of music, and jazz in particular. Declaring that she would be the first woman to sing it, she commences her version of Mack the Knife. Comfortably, Fitzgerald works her way through the first two verses. Around the third verse, the music speeds up, and she starts to mix in some ad-libs. But it is only when the fourth verse arrives that Fitzgerald – effortlessly, it may be added – sings to us: “Oh what’s the next chorus, to this song, now. This is the one, now I don’t know” (Fitzgerald 1960). From this point onward, the song is entirely improvised. It is in this moment, as Moten would have it, that Fitzgerald radically asserts her own identity through the performance. Her acknowledgement that “We’re making a wreck, what a wreck of Mack the Knife” only serves to accentuate this by emphasising the authenticity of her performance. This is further illustrated once we reach the antepenultimate verse, in which Fitzgerald opens one of her famous scat choruses. Bringing the point home, she declares: “You won’t recognize it, it’s a surprise hit. This tune, called Mack the Knife. And so, we leave you, in Berlin town. Yes, we’ve swung old Mack, we’ve swung old Mack in town.” (Fitzgerald 1960).

Ultimately, Fitzgerald’s performance serves as the perfect counter-example to Fanon’s claim that jazz is reductionistic and defeatist. Improvisational jazz performances such as these showcase the individuality, as well as the liberatory capacity jazz can have. In particular, the fact that Fitzgerald covers an old song, but transforms it beyond recognition, illustrates the emancipatory capability of improvisational performance. In no way does Fitzgerald resemble the desperate and beat-down jazz musician Fanon so despises. Quite the opposite. Fitzgerald’s performance radiates joy and freedom throughout.

In this short essay, I have explored the role of jazz in emancipatory movements. Frantz Fanon has criticised jazz for being an expression of negritude, thereby negating the manifold of particularities that black experiences carry with them, as well as reinforcing colonial power dynamics. I have attempted to show, drawing from Fred Moten, how improvisational jazz escapes this problem. Phonic matter, such as music, contains the capacity to radically disrupt and create identities anew. I have proposed Ella Fitzgerald’s famous rendition of Mack the Knife to be exemplary of such a case.

Giovanni Prins

References

Diego Vicente, María. 2022. “Black Music In African-American Fiction: Catharsis, Identity And Emancipation.” Master thesis., Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. London: Penguin Books.
Lane, Jeremy F. 2012. “Leaving the South: Frantz Fanon, Modern Jazz and the Rejection of Négritude.” In American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South, edited by Martin Munro and Celia Britton, 129-146. Liverpool University Press.
Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Senghor, Léopold S. 1974. “Negritude.” Indian Literature 17, no. 1/2: 269-273.

Categories
Racial Violence and Representation

Childish Gambino: This Is America

How can the experience of African American people be represented? How does one approach that kind of task without trivializing the violence and suffering? Hartman’s answer is to abstain from representation altogether, as in her opinion, it has the risk of turning into a morbid spectacle for curious voyeurs. Moten, instead, believes that sound has the power to successfully convey such a message. In his book In the Break, he brings the example of the free jazz performance titled Protest, from Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Oscar Brown Jr., that through the use of screams and manic drumming, moves <<in a trajectory and toward a location that is remote from – if not in excess of or inaccessible to – words>>.

The song This Is America, by Childish Gambino – as the title may suggest – is a musical representation of the United States. In just four minutes it manages to delve into themes of discrimination, gun violence, social turmoil, consumerism, police brutality, and much more. However, maybe even more interesting than the themes themselves, is how Gambino manages to portray them so accurately.

Looking at how the song’s sections are divided, we start to notice that it doesn’t really follow an orthodox structure. Instead, two very different sections alternate between themselves. The first one is a sort of gospel inspired choir. The second one, instead, is a very grimy hip-hop/trap beat. Also, there isn’t really any transition between the two, creating a very jarring switch every time they alternate – almost sounding like someone abruptly stopped the song you were listening to, just to play something from a completely different genre. This bold composition choice would normally create an unpleasant listening experience (and might also be considered a result of poor songwriting), but here, instead, it manages to strengthen Gambino’s message. The sudden change from the upbeat-gospel section to the abrasive hip-hop one perfectly portrays the erratic nature of violence in the U.S., where tragedy can strike at any time.

An analysis of this song wouldn’t be complete, however, without mentioning its official video. The audio and video are so synergistic to each other that calling This Is America a song may not do it justice. It is equal parts a visual and musical performance. Gambino dances, acts, kills, mocks. The different sections are accompanied by complex choreographies and stunts, and each time the song switches between them the visual component matches the brutality implied in the music and lyrics, creating a captivating and yet eerie multimedial experience for the viewers.

Where Moten sees African American music as a vessel for the representation of blackness, Childish Gambino takes it a step further, using two very different types of music – both originated from black culture – to represent something that is maybe even more elusive: the zeitgeist of a nation. Whether this attempt was successful, is beyond the scope of this short essay. What cannot be denied, however, is the success and positive reception that the song received, which at the least demonstrates that its message resonated with people. That is not a bad result, for a song that was literally designed to be unpleasant to listen to.

Edoardo Chen

Bibliography

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hartman, Sadiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection; Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Categories
Racial Violence and Representation

Pharoah Sanders: You’ve Got To Have Freedom

Introducing jazz vocalist Abbey Lincoln’s self narrative, Fred Moten writes, “[w]here shriek turns speech turns song—remote from the impossible comfort of origin—lies the trace of our descent.”[1] I can’t help but think of where shriek turns speech turns song as a most apt description of the beginning of Pharoah Sanders’ You’ve Got to Have Freedom, leading me to consider the piece as an example of what Moten calls black performance.

In the first second of You’ve Got to Have Freedom, Sanders’ overblown, screaming tone stands alone [shriek]—he then repeats the initial phrase, giving a semantic structure to his performance [speech]—and then the band comes in behind him [song]. After taking a short 8-bar respite from screaming, Sanders reappears with an amazingly rich and dark tone, only to return to the overblown phrase from the beginning. The music here seems to fill in the gaps of Moten’s writing, making clear the role of the sonic in his work; after hearing Pharaoh Sanders blow, it feels more-than-obvious to conclude that his playing contains echoes of Aunt Hester’s scream. Thus, I’m more interested in the limits to Moten’s argument: as he suggests, the primal shriek echoes in the music of James Brown, and Albert Ayler, whose sound is comparable to Pharoah’s (the link between them is nontrivial, note Ayler’s oft-quoted, “Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost”), it’s easy to make the connection between echoes of the scream and an overblown horn, and from there to other sorts of screams in black performance, but how can the echo appear in other musical textures? [2], [3]

Maybe this echo fixation misses the point, though. On You’ve Got to Have Freedom, does the rhythm section echo the scream as well? They certainly add layers of tension to the performance, giving supplemental context to Sanders’ playing, and in a way, they mediate how we hear and receive the scream. But, I think to reduce all jazz performance to echoes of Aunt Hester’s scream is to see the expression of jazz as something repressive, and to miss the ultimate goal of Moten’s project. He aims beyond representation, recreation, repression of the primal scene to ask: “is there a way to subject this unavoidable model of subjection to a radical breakdown?”[4] Thus, the screaming saxophone tone is not a mere representation, but that very breakdown. “If we return again and again to a certain passion, a passionate response to a passionate utterance, horn-voice-horn over percussion, a protest, an objection, it is because it is more than another violent scene of subjection too terrible to pass on; it is the ongoing performance, the prefigurative scene of a (re)appropriation—the deconstruction and reconstruction, the improvisational recording and revaluation—of value, of the theory of value, of the theories of value.”[5] Pharoah’s playing, obviously pure power, does not work to recreate the primal scene of subjection, but exists in the break, breaking from subjection, redirecting the excess of the scene towards something other than repression, to fight that repression. It records, rewrites over previous theories of value, as an outpouring of passion, repetition put in motion by repression that is somehow not the return of the repressed. To rephrase this paradox in Moten’s words, “[t]hat black radicalism cannot be understood within the particular context of its genesis is true; it cannot be understood outside that context either.”[6] In line with this thought, one cannot truly be free from their past, yet they aren’t permanently tethered to it either; like Sanders they can repeatedly perform in the break, for the break, iterating towards freedom.

Pat LeGates

[1] Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 22.
[2] Moten, 22.
[3] Frank Kofsky, “Liner Notes to Albert Ayler’s ‘Love Cry,’” 1968, https://www.discogs.com/release/515103-Albert-Ayler-Love-Cry/image/SW1hZ2U6MzUwMDM1Njc=.
[4] Moten, 5.
[5] Moten, 14.
[6] Moten, 24.

Categories
Violence and Nonviolence

Missy Higgins: Oh Canada

‘But the body of Alan being laid upon the sand / Tell me how do you live with that?’
– Missy Higgins (2016)

The heart wrenching photograph of the death of the two-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi shifted the attention of the contemporary refugee crisis. Seeing the lifeless body washed ashore moved the public opinion on a fulcrum of grief.

The song Oh Canada of Missy Higgins tries to express this grief through the story of Alan Kurdi. Kurdi’s family fled from the war in Syria and dreamed of making new life in Canada, but due to misfortune most of the family drowned in the Mediterranean sea. The chorus of the song alludes to the dreams of the Kurdi family to reach Canada, sung from the perspective of the father:

Oh Canada, if you can hear me now
Won’t you open up your arms towards the sea?
Oh Canada, if you can help me out
All I ever wanted was a safe place for my family

Higgins states that the song isn’t only about Canada, but any country where refugees seek asylum. Australia for example, has strict refugee laws, going as far to send boats of refugees back (King 2016). Higgins didn’t want to criticize or preach; she just wanted to make sense of her emotions and spread awareness about the way in which other countries deal with refugees, which is explored in the outro:
There’s a million ways to justify your fear
There’s a million ways to measure out your worth
But the body of Alan being laid upon the sand
Tell me how do you live with that?

Notably, there is no strong rhyme between the words ‘sand’ and ‘that’. Higgins is willing to make the last lines less concise to ask the question how countries can live with their xenophobic policies.

This xenophobia towards the migrant is explored in Butler’s chapter ‘The Ethics and Politics of Nonviolence’, were they state that this fear comes from the desire to keep Europe ‘white’ and ‘pure’ (Butler 2020). Violence against migrants is justified on the basis of fear for refugees: ‘the violence is state violence, fueled by racism and paranoia, and directed against the migrant population’ (Butler 2020). More importantly, every individual has a certain ‘grievability’, a reasonable basis for how much someone is grieved or mourned. As they state: ‘The thousands of migrants who have lost their lives in the Mediterranean’, just as the life of Alan Kurdi, ‘are precisely lives that are not deemed worthy of safeguarding.’ (Butler 2020). Thus, Alan Kurdi’s life was ungrievable from the start.

But how does Butler’s view coincide with Higgins song? Thousands of listeners grieved Alan and his family. When listening to this harrowing song, even I broke down in tears, especially with the lyric:

I’m not losing everything I love tonight

Of course Alan is grieved by certain people and communities, but only thinking in terms of grieving individuals would make the concept of grievability loss its critical edge. According to Butler, ‘all lives are equally grievable’ (2020, 148). To use the term grievability is to criticize the language of ‘inequality’ deeply rooted in hegemonic discourse. We need a displacement of language to get rid of the cold and rationalist language of inequality. This displacement is useful to criticize the corrupted system that determine which lives are not worthy of grieving. The song Oh Canada can help to spread awareness about refugee policies of countries, and to make lives like that of Alan Kurdi grievable in the future, so that this sort of violence may never happen again.

Brenno Mulder

References

Butler, Judith. 2020. ‘The Ethics and Politics of Nonviolence.’ In The Force of Nonviolence, 103-150. London/New York: Verso.
King, Robin Levinson. 2016. ‘Australian singer Missy Higgins pens song “Oh Canada” in memory of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi.’ Toronto Star, February 19, 2016.   https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2016/02/19/australian-singer-missy-higgins-pens-song-oh-canada-in-memory-of-syrian-toddler-alan-kurdi.html.

Categories
Racial Violence and Representation

Sam Cooke: A Change Is Gonna Come

The song “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke illustrates parts of Saidya Hartman’s interpretation of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave as she sets out in the introduction of her book Terror, Slavery, and the Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America. In the introduction, she explains difficulties in representing black suffering and the violence that comes with it. Cooke’s song shows us how black suffering can be represented in a musical context.

The first chapter of Fredrick Douglass’ book immediately made me think of Sam Cooke’s song. I was already very familiar with the song, so when I read the sentence “I was born […]” in Douglass’ book, Cooke’s voice took over the sound of the narrative in my mind.[1] Hartman interprets this sentence as an establishment of the central place of violence in the making of a slave. The making of a slave and “I was born” should both be seen as ‘original generative acts’.[2] The same can be stated about Cooke’s song: he directly sets the tone for a discussion of the immediateness of racism by starting with “I was born by the river, in a little tent”.[3] Just like in Douglass’ book the sentence represents the immediate state of being a slave. Both Cooke and Douglass were born into violence because they were black. The difference here is that Douglass was born as a slave in the Nineteenth century, and Cooke was born in a society that forbids slavery but is still segregated.

However, Cooke’s and Douglass’ representations of black suffering also differ a lot from each other, especially when we consider Hartman’s argument about the ethics of representing black suffering: she states that the line between witness and spectator is vague in the case of representations of black suffering. By ‘witnesses’ she means those who “confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts”. By ‘spectators’ she means “voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance”. She argues that we should therefore refrain from representing black suffering.[4]  

While describing forms of violence that are perpetrated against black people, Cooke keeps repeating that “a change is gonna come”. With this he points towards a current state of affairs in society that is violent towards black people, and this should and will change. He does not give a description of bodily harm inflicted on black people, but rather gives examples of other types of aggression, such as segregation. For example, he does not sing about police violence, but about doing the same activities as a white man but being treated as less when he sings “I go to the movie; And I go downtown; Somebody keep telling me; Don’t hang around”.[5] With this, Cooke also addresses the discrepancy of the captive being both property and a person that Hartman is interested in without explicitly describing bodily harm.[6] Cooke had the right of going to the movies, but his experience of it would still be violent and not equal to a white man’s experience. He may have briefly felt like a person with full rights when going to the movies, but he was still captive in a racist society. Cooke’s account of violence towards black people is thus less of a ‘spectacle’ than Douglass’ account, and he shows us how black suffering can be represented without spectacularising it.

It would be far-fetched to conclude from this that Cooke’s song makes a witness out of the listener, but since much of the songs power lies in its subtlety, it would be safe to state that listeners of Cooke’s song cannot be qualified as Hartman’s notion of spectators. This is also because the song is more activist and future-oriented than descriptive: the listener can imagine what needs to be changed. Cooke apparently did not feel the need to extensively describe black suffering, he merely observes a situation that needs to change, and in doing so he exposes the violence and suffering without providing a spectacular violent image that Hartman disapproves of so much.          

Doortje Kok

[1] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, Chapter 1 (Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 15-20, p. 15.
[2] Saidiya Hartman, “Introduction”, Scenes of Subjection. Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 3-14, pp. 3-4.
[3] Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come”, album: Ain’t That Good News (1964).
[4] Hartman, “Introduction”, pp. 3-5.
[5] Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come”.
[6] Hartman, “Introduction”, p. 5.

Categories
Violence and Nonviolence

Bad Religion: Hello Cruel World

For this week’s entry into the playlist, I present Hello Cruel World by Bad religion. The song involves the point of view character pleading that the world recognizes his suffering. The nature and content of the suffering is never expounded, allowing us to interject our own understandings. I believe we can thus read the lyrics though Judith Butler’s framing of redressing inequality in terms of grievability.

The first chorus begins:

Hello cruel world
Do you know that you’re killing me?
I don’t mind, but I could use a little sympathy
I’ve been blind as a fool can be
My dear cruel world
Do you ever think about me?

The lyrics are rather straightforward, the perspective character is pleading with the world to recognize and sympathize with his suffering. He’s so resigned to his suffering, that he doesn’t even plead for a change to his condition, rather that it merely be seen. I think we can interpret this outside of a simple call for empathy, which as Butler articulates, can center a more self-serving interpretation of recognition. Moving away from this, to see a population as grievable is to value them outside of their relation to oneself but as entities that have value in of themself.

“If and when a population is grievable, they can be acknowledged as a living population whose death would be grieved if that life were lost, meaning that such loss would be unacceptable, and even wrong—an occasion of shock and outrage.”

This concept can even be extended to include land and non-human animals, whose moral value is so often obscured by the limitations concepts of empathy naturally provide. The loss of say, an species of primate, can be framed in the grievable loss of a unique member of earths community.

Daniel Lazcano

Categories
Racial Violence and Representation

Common: Letter to the Free

For this week’s song I’d like to present you with Common’s: Letter to the Free. This song was written for the 2016 Netflix documentary 13th by director Ava DuVernay. The song and the documentary attempt to draw a throughline between slavery and the modern American prison industrial complex by discussing the history from the end of slavery via the 13th amendment and how the United States transitioned towards mass incarceration of black people through the black codes and mass disenfranchisement. I believe this song, especially the first two lines of the first verse, can be used to understand the difficulty of representation of the lost voices of the enslaved. It can provide us a lens for which we can contextualize Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten’s writings on the representation of and spectacle of black suffering. Specifically, to quote Hartman: “At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator”.

Let’s begin with the very first two lines of the song:

Southern leaves, southern trees we hung from
Barren souls, heroic songs unsung

Common is leading with explicit imagery of the quotidian acts of violence inflicted on enslaved black peoples, following it with what might be seen as a call for recognition of the lives of the enslaved whose stories go unheard. The second lyric is of interest as I believe it ties directly to Hartman’s writings on the impossibility of slave representation. This desire for the recognition of the enslaved cuts towards the dialectical struggle between recognition and normalization of violence. It is the case, that through the repressive instruments of white supremacy and slavery, the historical record may be unable to singularly convey the barbarism of slavery and its institutions. How then do we critically interrogate the historical narrative while not inversely reinforcing its authority? How can we represent the “consciousness of the subaltern” outside of the ‘dominant representation of the elites”? From what I understand Hartman thinks this issue can’t necessarily be resolved. The conditions of the slave left them destitute, illiterate, and powerless long after their legal “emancipation”. Our historical record is necessarily laundered through the lens of those who had the capacity to speak. The closest we can get are those former slaves able to get an education and later articulate their experience. But as I understand it, the point Hartman is making is that this necessarily alters the perspective, those within slave conditions were barred from speech, robbed of their ability to tell their story outside of laundering it through a capable entity. To quote Hartman:

“Accordingly, this examination of the cultural practices of the dominate is possible only because of the accounts provided by literate black autobiographers, white amanuenses, plantation journals and documents, newspaper accounts, missionary tracts, travel writing, amateur ethnographies, government reports, et cetera. Because these documents are “not free from barbarism,” I have tried to read them against the grain in order to write a different account: of the past, while realizing the limits imposed by employing these sources, the impossibility of fully recovering the experience of the enslaved and the emancipated, and the risk of reinforcing the authority of these documents even as I try to use them for contrary purposes.”

Common’s lyric “Barren souls, heroic songs unsung” now reads less as a call for recognition, and more a lamenting of those whose song can’t ever be sung. We are left then as spectator, unable to elucidate the suffering of the slave whose voice has been robbed through centuries of violence.

To briefly cover the rest of the song, Common continues in the rest of the verse explicating the transition from chattel slavery to sharecropping and eventually to the modern prison industrial complex and convict leasing.

Forgive them Father they know this knot is undone
Tied with the rope that my grandmother died
Pride of the pilgrims affect lives of millions
Since slave days separating, fathers from children
Institution ain’t just a building
But a method, of having black and brown bodies fill them
We ain’t seen as human beings with feelings
Will the U.S. ever be us? Lord willing!
For now we know, the new Jim Crow
They stop, search and arrest our souls
Police and policies patrol philosophies of control
A cruel hand taking hold
We let go to free them so we can free us
America’s moment to come to Jesus

A clear line from slavery to the modern institutions of policing and incarceration is drawn by Common. We can see here the referenced “elusive emancipation and travestied freedom” by Hartman.

Lastly, a comment on the chorus:

Freedom (Freedom)Freedom come (Freedom come)
Hold on (Hold on)
Won’t be long (Won’t be long)

The chorus is clearly meant to emulate the tone and cadence of slave songs such as Wade in the Water (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxZ4H-gq_lc), chanting the desire for eventual emancipation from the repressive systems of white supremacy.

Daniel Lazcano