Rudolph P. Byrd

Dear Dr. Rudolph P. Byrd,

Scores of Brooklynites are marching on the busy street in front of my apartment. I’m watching from the window, hearing white people chant, “Whose streets? Our streets!” I’m happy to see the support for Black Lives Matter, but here in gentrified Brooklyn, I can’t help but find that funny. I recorded two minutes of it in the event that it’s useful if I ever write poems again. (Cataloging has been a habit of mine this month.) It’s times like these that I miss teaching, sitting with cohorts of first-year college students as their safe worlds are torn apart by conversations around race and privilege. But all of that makes me recall my own reckoning, the moment when I realized the extent to which the law functions to serve these white students more than myself. That was the fall of 2011, the year the State of Georgia executed Troy Davis. And about a month later, you died.

I sometimes think about Adrienne Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays, and who I would put in such a book, were I to write it. As a Black, gay, Southern artist, I want to practice intentional ways of memorializing people of influence. This is important for me, for the “people who led to my plays” are often those that will never have buildings or other monuments named in their honor. I imagine that some don’t even have headstones. I like to think of my writing, if not as a headstone, as an homage. Much of it is an homage to people like you who have shaped how I reimagine the world that has been given to me.

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Thomas Mann. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Arising by most accounts in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the novel of ideas reflects the challenge posed by the integration of externally developed concepts long before the arrival of conceptual art. Although the novel’s verbal medium would seem to make it intrinsically suited to the endeavor, the mission of presenting “ideas” seems to have pushed a genre famous for its versatility toward a surprisingly limited repertoire of techniques. These came to obtrude against a set of generic expectations—nondidactic representation; a dynamic, temporally complex relation between events and the representation of events; character development; verisimilitude—established only in wake of the novel’s separation from history and romance at the start of the nineteenth century. Compared to these and even older, ancient genres like drama and lyric, the novel is astonishingly young, which is perhaps why departures from its still only freshly consolidated conventions seem especially noticeable.

The techniques that stick out against the generic norms listed above appear across modern and postmodern texts with striking regularity. They are: direct speech by characters in the forms of dramatic dialogues or monologues (The Magic Mountain, Point Counter Point, Tomorrow’s Eve, Iola Leroy, Elizabeth Costello, Babel-17); overt narrators prone to didactic, ironic, or metafictional commentary (The Man without Qualities, Tristram Shandy, Elizabeth Costello); and flat allegorical characters (Faith and the Good Thing, The Man without Qualities, Against Nature, Moby-Dick). Also prevalent, to a lesser extent, are experimental formatting (Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy, Diary of a Bad Year); sudden, unexplained, narratively isolated outbreaks of magic in a predominantly realist frame (The Magic Mountain, Elizabeth Costello, Artful); and even a curious thematization of the “device” or gimmick as such (Tomorrow’s Eve, The Magic Mountain, Clear: A Transparent Novel).

Whether executed as science fiction, bildungsroman, or more recently, the satirical form Nicholas Dames calls the “theory novel,” the novel of ideas is “artful,” with all the equivocality this term brings. Willingness to court the accusation of relying on overly transparent stylistic devices is a consistent, perhaps even cohering feature of a notoriously unstable genre. Scholars have therefore obliquely acknowledged the novel of ideas’s predilection for contrivances. Claire De Obaldia’s groundbreaking study of the “essayistic novel which appropriates existing material,” for example, describes it as a “fundamentally ambivalent product,” confronting its authors with unusual “demands of literary integration.” For all of their “tremendous size,” the novels of ideas of Proust, Musil, and Broch are paradoxically “fragments,” sharing German Romanticism’s divided loyalties to a “uniquely self­ conscious intellect and an equally self­ conscious anti­-intellectualism.” Even in magisterial (if tellingly unfinished) works like The Man without Qualities, the inclusion of essayistic excerpts induces “a mutual interruption of theory and fiction,” a disruption of “narrative continuity and totalization” undermining the systematic spirit of the “conceptual” as much as the imaginative pleasures of mimesis. Read More

On Lorna Simpson and the Black imaginative practice of collage

Lorna Simpson, Walk with me, 2020 (© Lorna Simpson; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: James Wang)

“The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”

–Toni Morrison, Beloved

While the usual world order that we once knew has been halted by the COVID-19 global pandemic, Black people continue to be lynched. Two of them were recorded and shared for the world to witness. I wanted to protect my daughter from the harm of watching a Black man take his last breath, but the news looped these images around our living room. I reached over to cover my daughter’s eyes just as my mother used to during sex scenes in films, to shield me from the inevitable. She peeked through the crevices between my fingers, just as I had as a child. She climbed into my lap and we wept, silently. She wanted to know why they hate us so much and I wanted to know if the repetition would ever cease.

Since seeing Ahmaud Arbery murdered, each day after homeschool, my daughter and I meet on the living room floor with images that I’ve found and copied from my father’s photo albums as we quarantine at his home in Texas. There are the faces of my grandmother and her sisters in the country standing grounded and barefoot on dirt roads, my face as a girl racing against the Houston heat to consume a melting ice cream cone in nothing but my panties, moments of Black joy captured in faces that I do not know but recognize all the same. We cut these faces out and put them in the wild on mountaintops, in gardens where they exchange breath with the trees, and in the sky. Using faces of the past, my daughter and I become the architects of Black futures. The practice of collaging has carried me through this grief-heavy quarantine, a meditative motion on nights when I cannot sleep.

Lorna Simpson, Construction, 2020 (© Lorna Simpson; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; Photo: James Wang)

Collaging is a historical practice of Black imagination. It has helped us to envision unfathomable futures in the face of violence and uncertainty. It has been a creative way to love each other even though we haven’t been shown care, to express the depths of our experiences even when no one ever asked how we felt, to give evidence to all the things unseen. This is much like the work of Spiral, an art collective formed in the sixties, whose members included the recently departed Emma Amos and the late Romare Bearden. For Spiral, collaging served as visual representation of Black quotidian life. It deconstructed internalized white-supremacist stereotypes of Blackness, providing momentum to the civil rights movement.

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Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburo Oe. Murakami photo: © Elena Seibert.

I clearly remember the vivid colors of the two books—one red, the other green—that a high school classmate of mine was reading between periods. It was 1987 or 1988, and my new school was in a provincial city in Oita, Japan. This quiet, introspective classmate was one of the first handful of students from the city to be kind enough to talk to me. I was from a small fishing village that didn’t even have a bookstore, and having come from a junior high school with fewer than forty students, I was intimidated by how he already had clear taste in music and literature. I can’t remember if he mentioned—in his always nearly inaudible voice—the title of the two-volume novel or the author’s name. What I do remember is that he seemed engrossed in the book, and that less than a year later, his life was taken: his mother’s partner killed her before turning to the boy.

The next time I encountered those books was after I moved to Tokyo for university. I came across a large stack of them right by the entrance of one of the city’s largest bookstores. They were the two parts of Haruki Murakami’s novel Noruwei no mori (Norwegian Wood). I was already familiar with him as a master of short essays. My landlady had the bad (or good?) habit of reading books in the bathroom, and Murakami’s essays were among her favorites. One day, she handed me a collection she had finished. In these essays, he writes about literature and music and even cooking in such a natural way that it feels as though he’s addressing the reader personally. Something delightful and friendly in his style fascinated me (it’s a shame that those early essays of his haven’t been published in English). I couldn’t say how exactly, but I immediately felt that his style was different from other contemporary Japanese writers I had read. Probably because one of my professors (who was from Belgium) had translated it into French, A Wild Sheep Chase was the first of Murakami’s novels I read. And I soon found myself reading through them all. Read More

Gwendolyn Brooks, in a 1977 interview, describes an ongoing argument with her husband about the fate of a running Black child:

Once we were walking down a road and we saw a little Ghanaian boy. He was running and happy in the happy sunshine. My husband made a comment springing from an argument we had had the night before that lasted until four in the morning. He said, ‘Now look, see that little boy. That is a perfect picture of happy youth. So if you were writing a poem about him, why couldn’t you just let it go at that? Write a poem about running boy-happy, happy-running boy?’ […]

So I said if you wrote exhaustively about running boy and you noticed that the boy was black, you would have to go further than a celebration of blissful youth. You just might consider that when a black boy runs, maybe not in Ghana, but perhaps on the Chicago South Side, you’d have to remember a certain friend of my daughter’s in high school—beautiful boy, so smart, one of the honor students, and just an all-around fine fellow. He was running down an alley with a friend of his, just running and a policeman said ‘Halt!’ And before he could slow up his steps, he just shot him. Now that happens all the time in Chicago. There was all that promise in a little crumpled heap. Dead forever.

*

For every sorrow I write, also I press my forehead to the ground. Also I wash the feet of our beloveds, if only in my mind, in the waters of the petals of the flowers.

I cross my arms and bow to you.
I cross my arms in armor wishing you protection.

*

On August 23, 2014, I joined thousands to march for the life of Eric Garner and against the police who murdered him one month before. The blastocyst that would become my son was multiplying inside my darkest me unbeknownst to me.

Time moved through us. It is now 2020. Ramsey Orta, who filmed Garner’s death and bravely shared that record, is imprisoned on trumped-up charges and beaten by guards. Eric Garner’s eldest child, the activist Erica Garner, has passed at the age of twenty-seven from an enlarged heart after giving birth just three months before.

It is summer, then all the leaves are falling. My kids are two and four, then they are nearly three and nearly five. My son’s birthday, now I know, falls between the birthdays of young Ahmaud Arbery and the poet Kamau Brathwaite. I hear Gwendolyn Brooks: “You just might consider that when a black boy runs…” My partner and I teeter in that argument between Brooks and her husband, our own sight touched by both things: the happy in the happy sunshine and the policeman saying halt. We dance in the circle following both these men—Ahmaud Arbery, ever-becoming, and Kamau Brathwaite, the elder, who wrote in Elegguas:

How all this wd have been one kind of world. perhaps—no—certainly—
kindlier—you wd have been bourne happy into yr entitlement of silver hairs
and there wd have been no threat

My partner and I do not yet speak to our children about racism and such threats here looming. We speak of justice, diversity, fairness. The kids love the story of Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grew Up to Become Malcolm X. They read a little at first, then a little more. We give them the large brushstrokes of the burning house, but we talk for long about Malcolm’s brilliant family, their commitments and work, the ladybugs in the garden. In Mae Among the Stars, when the teacher dismisses Mae’s dream to become an astronaut, our son is shocked. “Why would a teacher say that to a child?” He asks this very question, out of what seems to us the blue, over several weeks, then months. We do not mention that the teacher is White. We do not mention that the people who burn Malcolm Little’s house are White.

My partner and I talk to other Black parents, including our own. We get advice, ask questions, work and think about how to nourish and fortify our children. It does not occur to us to talk to our kids about Whiteness just yet, but increasingly I think we must. For example, I am startled, in February, by my son’s White schoolmate who runs into the hall to announce to his parent that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed because of the color of his skin. These months later I am again startled by the very young White children who speak openly and, it seems, without fear about George Floyd’s murder.

We are on a Zoom call with my child’s class. One of his White classmates has gone to a march with her family, in the middle of a pandemic, to march for Black Lives. The power of this is not lost on me. I am moved by their family’s investment and risk, a risk I do not take. I study the child’s face. The baby still in her voice, her cheeks, the way she holds her mouth. She says, “George Floyd was killed because…” And I click the sound off. My youngest says, “I can’t hear, Mommy.” Just a second, I tell them both, just a second.

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Brianna Noble at a protest in Oakland (Photo: Shira Bezalel)

Bloody news from April laid me low—murders worse than senseless, purposeful slaughter of the sort my country seems to reserve for my people, black Americans. The murders hadn’t occurred in geographical or temporal proximity. They were in the Midwest, Upper South, and Deep South. One had been concealed for weeks, none of the perpetrators had been punished. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the needless loss of Sandra Bland, were themselves hard to stomach. Worse was their terrible inevitability, a never-ending history of carnage defined by Emmett Till’s nauseating sacrifice to white supremacy in 1955. An old anguish bound me to these most recent victims.

Then all across the country, Americans rose up for George Floyd, in Black Lives Matters protests against police brutality and Confederate statuary that spread to other countries, where multiracial protestors tore down emblems of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade. Insurgent masses filled the streets—city streets, suburban streets, little white country town streets, even roads in my outdoor tourist playground of the Adirondacks. The images of protest were glorious, and some took me by surprise by giving me pleasure.

From my hometown of Oakland, California, there came photographs of Brianna Noble on her huge, seventeen-hand horse, Dapper Dan, leading protesters and bearing a Black Lives Matter sign. Noble knew what she was doing, saying, “No one can ignore a black woman on top of a horse.” Her image reappeared nationally, internationally, as above the caption, “Aktivistin Noble bei einer Demonstration gegen Polizeigewalt in Oakland,” in Germany’s Der Spiegel news magazine.

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