I haven't stopped writing in the time since I've been out of New College, and that means something to me. We are the products of our situations and my situation is that I am the daughter of an alcoholic and I am learning over decadent Italian dinners and good generic gin just how it is that my grandmother is the mother of my mother. How they refuse to throw away books, art supplies, long past the time when they read or use either. How my grandmother did yoga every day of her youth. And these actions mean something, these things which are not given to us by incident. Thing which arise after and apart from the day shifts drinking Coca-Cola and the evenings eating Kraft --
My French teacher hates Godard.
I did not recently return from any exotic locale or any interesting discussion. I had been giving my thoughts away in the healthy appropriate way and it gave me nothing to write home about. Nonetheless I will write. Because home is here, in my head. I am losing it here but I am not going to lose it. In a classroom where skin is darkened more than just one hue, Kwasi Wiredu with his PhD. in philosophy from Oxford, B.A. from University of Ghana, pacing the front, voice a slow deep synthetic one, sounding all at once of polished glass tables in Victorian London and simultaneously of the jungle, not the way Herzog describes it but the way it really is -- peopled. The rainforests are peopled, sweaty Mbuti pygmies in straw tutus, bodies constellated in white circles of paint, being forced by the virtue of their situation to take temp jobs as loggers deforesting the forest which birthed them. A foreign tragedy, but the only really foreign quality is the setting. I myself have borrowed paintbrushes from my grandmother, painted on her canvas, my hands losing their circulated blood. Harish says I must paint through the mud, but days are so long here, and I am so distracted by the men in pageboy caps preaching the gospel outside my USF classroom, yelling and leaping, satyric, to us, over morning dew and artificially green grass. Jesus thinks we are all sorority sluts, us -- us fornicators and breast-fondlers and breast-fondlees. Sunglasses editing out our faces like porn stars. I am burdened with a Krsna telling me that I am a special soul, like I want his flattery, like I want the threat of reincarnation, all the cows I ate as a child growing human arms and chopping me into pieces. Rawls had his own doctrine of reincarnation, in a less whimsical form, and I don't know that I want that either. I also don't know that I don't. And just that -- I can't tell if it's the philosophy or the financial stability that is draining the color from my flesh. I am so pampered here, making good on what I was denied, what everyone else had and I was allegedly deprived of but what maybe I don't want.
The will to self-destruction is so strong yet, not asceticism but obliteration. And the feeling that I am missing something if I don't post on here, not wanting you to read it and compliment me but clearly begging for it anyway, just so I don't have to define the social sphere in which I dwell in terms of the place I'm at, in Tampa, which consists of being childlike following ducks or driven followed by ducklings. The lines between public and private -- something I've never delineated. Like in Ancient Athens. A Hegelian necessity for society. And society is Dr. Wiredu right now, a synthetic human being who by his very eccentricity in my own society makes clear the synthetic nature of any personality at all. It is simply that his is never recognized in the local media, culture. How his very voice is marked by the historical violence of his people. The British accent he uses so proudly a bloody reminder of incessant European colonization of Africa, as he describes disunity, degradation, and stunted growth. But the problem is not even simple disunity and degradation but also the failure to recognize such disunity. Africa is not one continent full of a single tribe called "the Africans." They are precisely not recognized as diverse in themselves when they all fall under the category of non-white, very non-white. My young sister watching childrens' Tarzan movies where instead of any representation of the actual human beings who populate Africa, she is presented with a British gorilla.
You owe your audience an orchestrated duet of apologies, please, applied like henna equally to the palms of all past and future oppressed peoples and oppressors, equally to young blonde children with pale flesh, Starburst candy after dinner, blue eyes. Don't lie. Like you are incapable of understanding how African-Americans today could feel justified in asking for reimbursement for the long ancestral hours in cotton plantations, slavery -- slavery is not gone categorically, but only decaying by degree of explicity.Slaves organizing civil war revolts by playing war drums to strangers, across plantations in the sun. Their hearts pounding, dropping bushels of cotton which puff in great heaves and running, full of hope older than imprisonment, chronologically prior by thousands of years, but still a hope that had become dustier than its fresh bloodshed, dustier than salt tears and dustier than the slow, dark yield to their suffering. In African thought the soul is in the blood, and in modern genetics blood type is determined by ancestor. The very thing that justifies my gratitude for not being a woman born in the Victorian age, or to a country who still practices female circumcision, keeps me entitled to the demand of empathy that cannot be a plea but a statement. Having entered myself into society, my identity has become swallowed irrevocably. And this society is silent, in its flouted indebtedness, to the bodies it demarcates with its language.
As a child, I contested this factory farm application of history written by technologically superior victors. This was of course indicated by my passionate interest in being appropriated by Native American culture, reading fables, wandering Floridian swamplands behind middle class housing lots, bloodlessly observing venomous snakes, sheltering myself from the rain by lean-to shelters built with my eleven-year old hands. Kant said that the only people less worthy of his respect than the Africans were the Native Americans. And is that simply because they lost the wars against Caucasian imperialism in such a more permanent way? Alexander: to the victors go the history books, I tell you this over and over, unborn paintings forming themselves in my half-forgotten dreams. Africa is being born as a false unity, and as a wound on the surface of the political globe, visible, uncomfortable to regard. Native America exists, then, in suffocated drug overdoses on the wet floors of Seminole Casino bathroom stalls, annual festivals marked by frybread and venison, people whose skin is tanned to leather either by their indigenous history or by their addiction to methamphetamines. The scientific names we give these races and their cultural products to cleave them from the threads of our empathic intentionality once we have deprived them of their humanity. An "indigenous" people, producing "ethnophilosophy," and providing us with the opportunity to be open-minded about a music that formed the very basis for modern rap, jazz, blues -- by studying "ethnomusicology." Etymologically, from the Greek word ethnos: the study of music made by pagans and heathens. How very generous of Uganda. Oh, I'm not racist: I celebrate MLK Day and intentionally befriend people who are black. It's there if you look for it, and if you look you see the jungle, decaying, but filled with no more fornication than the halls of Kappa Dee at the University of South Florida. Perhaps less.
It is not clear to me that the entire six billion of us have evolved from the same species of hominid. Can we, or need we, yet evolve into one? Our desires farmed into horizontal planes of mud, stamped by the roots of giant trees, held down by lightly stepping, lightly chained feet. Where we stave off the slavery of being hired to destroy our own forests by building leaf-huts above the trunks we will tomorrow incise. We have never met a Nigerian but will be depicted on American television as one and the same people, even homogenous with the people who set the prices of our indebtedness, so long as history of colonization and history of denying Egypt's possession of Egyptian civilization has sufficiently purpled our flesh. By the evening we know, we will never either of us meet the Mayans. We will only smoke marijuana joints rolled with flat leaves for our fatigue, humming rhythmic hymns to the concept of darkness as we press, otherwise burdened, nomadic and hushed, into its trees, singing: anything you bring us cannot be wrong.
