THE BLACK CAUCASIAN
In
one of his finest Hebraic moments, the Jewish American writer Norman Mailer
produced a sexy Freudian "reading " of the United States of America
under the title "The White Negro."
That was 1957 when the seductiveness of the black/white binary was
seldom challenged. Mailer's essay
transcends its overt topicality under the influence of our current Trump/Clinton
obsessions, our suspending disbelief that a paragon or a paradox might be
elected President. The image of the
White Negro is an undistorted mirroring of the Black Caucasian, albeit one that
troubles sleep.
Despite
the absence of genuine proof, one suspects Mailer had an epiphany regarding the
future that is now. What he saw as he
pondered the "psychopathic brilliance" of American democracy was the
inevitability of people's being incarcerated in the fate of living "with
death from adolescence to premature senescence" as they tremble "with
the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one's power for new kinds of
perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and
imprison one's energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people's
habits, other people's defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy
self-destroying rage." At present, rage is unmuzzled.
One
has no real proof that Mailer ever analyzed The
Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. DuBois.
Nevertheless, it is fair to suspect that he echoed DuBois in his
function as a rhetor, truly absorbing DuBois' idea of what measures the ways of
the world. In the heterotopia (Foucault's daemonic notion) of the prison,
Mailer's essay endures as a valuable pre-future lesson. In panoptical 2016, one empowers oneself by
learning what Mailer insisted on teaching.
From
the imperfect hindsight of 2016, one can read "The White Negro" as a
fine example of how engaged American writers indict themselves in the act of
writing and sentence themselves to infamy.
If this point is too miniscule to be detected by the naked ear, one
hears it loud and clear in the 24/7 palaver of mediated infotainment, in excessive contemplation of
what lurks in Swamp Clinton-Trump.
Something is slithering to be born on November 8, 2016. Even incarcerated children have the smarts to grasp that probability.
In
the ears of American memory, Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock" has
come home to roost, and all the inmates in American cells (spaces of
totalitarian freedom) do know now what Mailer as the epitome of the Black
Caucasian knew in 1957: "a stench of fear has come out of every pore of
American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve." Sixty years after Mailer wrote, the phrase
"failure of nerve" is less than apt, for the American people are robustly exercising their nerves with alacrity
and glee. After re-reading what a Black
Caucasian lectured on in 1957, all the prisoners might do well to say
"Ashe" in solidarity with my African American ancestors who never
confused Moses with Christ, who never taken in by facile hipsters political and
non-political who disguised themselves
as women and men of integrity.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. August
11, 2016
No comments:
Post a Comment