{"id":119978,"date":"2018-01-08T09:00:07","date_gmt":"2018-01-08T14:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=119978"},"modified":"2018-01-10T12:32:59","modified_gmt":"2018-01-10T17:32:59","slug":"revising-wasteland-black-antipastoral-end-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/08\/revising-wasteland-black-antipastoral-end-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Revising \u201cThe Waste Land\u201d: Black Antipastoral and the End of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Kea Tawana, The Ark <\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

In what I am calling the weather, anti-blackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies.\u00a0\u2014Christina Sharpe, The Weather\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

and
\nas I watch your arm\/your\u00a0brown arm
\njust before it moves
\nI know
\nall things are dear
\nthat disappear
\nall things are dear
\nthat disappear<\/p>\n

\u2014<\/em>June Jordan, \u201cOn a New Year\u2019s Eve\u201d<\/p>\n

{1}<\/p>\n

As of yet, there is no general consensus regarding the finer details of Kea Tawana\u2019s biography. According to an obituary published in the Times Herald-Record<\/em> immediately following her death on August 4, 2016, she was \u201cborn on a \u2026 reservation [and] ran away from home at the age of 12.\u201d But by Tawana\u2019s own account of things, the artist was born in Japan in 1935, moved to the United States with her father and two brothers when she was twelve\u00a0years old (her mother and sister, Tawana claimed, were killed by an air raid during World War II), and eventually settled in Newark, New Jersey. It was there, almost five decades later, that Kea Tawana would assemble her Ark.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

By all accounts, the Ark<\/em> project was a wonder to behold in person. The vessel stood over three stories high, spanned eighty-six feet in length, and was constructed from the ground up with wood and scrap metal Tawana gathered, without assistance, from various abandoned locales throughout the city. In his 1987 profile of Tawana\u2019s Ark<\/em>, Chip Brown of the Chicago Tribune<\/em> writes:<\/p>\n

The ark is an elegy to the lost communities of the Central Ward. Everything but tar paper and nails has been scavenged from the ruins of her environment. She has reused the lumber of demolished homes and bars, columns of churches, pieces of orphanages and synagogues \u2026 She figured an at-sea food storage capacity of 120 days and freshwater storage of 1,400 gallons. Her sketches called for a chapel, a library, a museum, a conservatory, a greenhouse, a bakery, a laundry, a sick bay, a stained-glass studio and metal shop. She anticipated a crew of a captain, a first officer, six seamen, a cook and two cats. She also envisioned that the ark would be able to mount a credible defense with an arsenal of six quartz pulsar lasers and four 2.5-inch rocket tubes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Kea Tawana was readying herself for war. And it was war that she found, though not the sort with rocket tubes or pulsar lasers. Tawana\u2019s fiercest battle would be waged between 1982 and 1987, against the elected representatives of the city of Newark tasked with the destruction of the Ark<\/em>. The Ark<\/em> was deemed to have violated zoning codes, and was seen as a blight on the city: its rugged, piecemeal exterior directly juxtaposed to the image of a streamlined, modern metropolis.<\/p>\n

The story could have ended right there, and almost certainly would have\u2014that is, with the state-sponsored disassembly of the Ark<\/em> in the first year of its existence\u2014if not for the generosity, and singular courage, of a local group of black parishioners: the membership of one Humanity Baptist Church. Indeed, as soon as news of the Ark<\/em>\u2019s imminent destruction went public, members of Humanity stepped in and offered the vacant lot next to their sanctuary as a resting place for it. And so, for the next several years, while Tawana battled the city over the right to keep her doomsday vessel intact, the Ark<\/em> remained on church property, safe, if only temporarily, from harm. Kea Tawana initially built the Ark<\/em>, she claimed, because there was quote \u201cno safe place on land.\u201d In some sense, it is this very idea\u2014 i.e., the ineluctable danger of everyday life within white civil society\u2014that not only animated this specific artistic and architectural project but also serves, we can imagine, as the condition of possibility for her particular, peculiar relation to the predominantly black membership of Humanity Baptist Church, as well as the largely black citizenry of Newark, a community that reacted, by all accounts, rather favorably to Tawana\u2019s project even as it was decried, and ultimately destroyed, by the whims of a state agency.<\/p>\n

What was it, exactly, that the black denizens of Newark envisioned when they gazed upon the Ark<\/em>? What version of the world or possible future? Further, how might we situate this project historically, given the long-standing tradition of artists across the African diaspora crafting arks of all kinds\u2014here I\u2019m thinking of Sun Ra\u2019s world-famous Arkestra, Marcus Garvey\u2019s Black Star Line, Romare Bearden\u2019s famous painting of Noah\u2019s Ark, as well as the speculative ark of Countee Cullen\u2019s The Lost Zoo<\/em>\u2014in response to a global order that depends upon their subjugation for its very coherence? Put somewhat differently, I wonder how we might approach the reception of Kea Tawana\u2019s Ark<\/em> in order to theorize the poetic, as well as the political, uses of a certain strain of black apocalypticism<\/em>. This is a mode of black thought that\u00a0is not only concerned with the world\u2019s end in the same register as the Martinican poet Aim\u00e9 Cesaire, one of the founders of the N\u00e9gritude movement, but grounds that concern in the rigorous study of the relationship between blackness and the world in another sense. That is to say, black study as planetary thinking. Black study as ecological thought at the edge of the known or knowable universe. Black study as a commitment to care for the earth<\/em>. In Camilo Vergara\u2019s 1987 New York Times<\/em>\u00a0opinion piece, \u201cWhy Newark\u2019s Ark Should Be Saved,\u201d he cites the observation of a six-year-old girl from Newark named Taisha, who is quoted as saying \u201cthe ark should be a monument, like the Statue of Liberty.\u201d My analysis is ultimately grounded in Taisha\u2019s insistence that the Ark\u2014<\/em>as opposed to any number of more traditional U.S. American symbols\u2014served as a steady, life-affirming reminder of the promises and unfettered possibilities of the black aesthetic tradition. Indeed, that the Ark<\/em> represents much of what truly belongs to black people in modernity: the water, the weather, the earth that is yet to come.<\/p>\n

{2}<\/p>\n

There is a distinctly ecological tenor to the image systems that black writers have used in imagining the end of the world. These writers call to the fore a vision of civil society in which gratuitous violence against black people is not aberrational but algorithmic<\/em>\u2014which is to say, inextricably bound up with the normative order of things\u2014and they provide a critical vocabulary through which we are able to imagine other, more ethical methods of organizing human and nonhuman life.<\/p>\n

Cesaire once wrote that \u201cthe only thing worth beginning is the end of the world.\u201d The antipastoral poetry produced by twenty-first-century black writers helps create a much larger context founded on this claim, and helps clarify the broader human vision of this cloud of witnesses, many of whom are attempting to craft what I would like to think of as a kind of black geopoetics. The Scottish poet and critic Kenneth White coined the term geopoetics<\/em>\u00a0in 1978, and defined it as \u201cconcerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a world.\u201d Black geopoetics is a poetics of ground, a poetry of mud, of earth, of the black planet Public Enemy claims we are all made to fear, even and especially those of us who stand to benefit from its arrival. What sort of poetics rises to the fore when home is defined by an ongoing antagonism? By what Colin Dayan and others have described as an existential experience marked, and marred, by civic death<\/em>, but also the myriad forms of life, of living<\/em>, that are energized within its field of reach?<\/p>\n

{3}<\/p>\n

The radical abolitionist dream of a more robust, rigorous language with which to think the ligaments linking freedom and enslavement, confinement and mobility, beast and overseer, extends throughout the black aesthetic tradition, and is especially visible in our current historical moment. The contemporary poet Phillip B. Williams\u2019s poem, \u201cMastery,\u201d (published in issue no.\u00a0223 of The Paris Review<\/em><\/a>)\u00a0is deeply concerned with such matters. The poem opens with regicide on its mind:<\/p>\n

The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,
\nI tried to rewrite \u201cThe Waste Land.\u201d The canon\u2019s reach
\ncasts ruinous light. The masters\u2019 pens breach
\nthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylon
\nrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?
\nIf I remember my own name, then I can ego
\nmy way through this crowd of shadows
\nthat cross the bridge of my back mid-bow.
\nI slept in the Fifth House of Modernism
\nbeneath stars that offered no light\u2014dust
\nfull of fear, my own dead skin encrusting
\nroom corners and my mind in a schism
\nbetween image and luck.<\/p>\n

Here, the juxtaposition of darkness and light occupy center stage. The way this particular conflict shows up throughout the poem recalls the\u00a0nineteenth-century poet James Monroe Whitfield\u2019s \u201cThe Misanthropist\u201d\u2014as it is similarly interested in just this kind of violent interplay between darkness and light\u2014although Williams\u2019s speaker casts the question as a conflict, in the first instance, over craft<\/em>, over mastery of language. It is nonetheless striking to observe the similarities in terms of how both writers approach this question of being-in-the-world<\/em> for the black (anti-)citizen, the black child, the black writer. The masters in question here each die a death that lacks finality or closure. Even from the grave, their influence delimits the choices that are available. Note the critical inversion of the light\/dark binary as it appears in these lines. Rather than offering wisdom or transcendental power, Williams describes the knowledge passed down by the masters as \u201cruinous.\u201d Still, it is this light that provides a path to walk by, this light that illuminates the set of signposts he might follow on his journey toward human community. This is one of the central conflicts of \u201cMastery,\u201d as well as within Williams\u2019s broader oeuvre. Understanding, as he does, this historical relationship between mastery of the Word and the Anthropological Machine that has been described in great detail by Giorgio Agamben and others, Williams\u2019s speaker evocatively locates his desire for the safeguards of mimesis, of echoing the forms and broader protocols handed down by Eliot, among other canonized white writers. The specter of this influence\u2014their ghosts lingering in his mind, upon his shoulder, beneath his tongue\u2014threatens to tear the page asunder.<\/p>\n

Williams\u2019s speaker strains against this influence through his invocation of other authorial traditions, other canons. One example is his use of the phrase \u201cthe bridge of my back\u201d\u2014which calls to mind the 1981 feminist anthology edited by Cherrie Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back.<\/em> This works to upset the domination. Movement is indeed possible, we are told, but only through recourse to the ancestors, the languages and lyric sensibilities that have always thrived at the underside of the modern world system. Though the speaker attempts to reconcile his dark body and the Eurocentric body of work he must learn in order to survive, the shadows of the darker tradition he calls home nonetheless remain attached to him, refusing to die in the wake of the Western canon\u2019s ruinous enlightenment. The speaker is at war with himself, with his sound colonial education, and names this conflict as a matter of cosmology. As part and parcel of a much larger, prolonged struggle between the acknowledged Living, and all those said to be dead or else animate objects without interior worlds:<\/p>\n

\u201cAway! Away! I wish the masters dead.\u201d To be freed
\nI tried to revise \u201cThe Waste Land\u201d but blacker,
\nwhere Margaret Garner speaks to Margaret Walker
\non a barge crossing the Mississippi River. I see
\nthe aftermath of this convenience, slow
\nin the river mud fondling the delay.
\nThey will make it across. They will pray.
\nThey will drown beneath what they know,<\/p>\n

that the living have undone so many
\nand the river\u2019s dark portion was the color
\nof a baby\u2019s dried blood, the neck wound dolorous
\nin its grin-shaped curve, another mangled
\nbridge into history.<\/p>\n

Williams makes an explicit turn toward the antipastoral here, invoking a river that refuses any symbolic association with a straightforward, observable telos (an arc or swift movement toward justice) or else the soothing music of a premodern idyll, and instead forces us to confront the legacies of brutality and exchange that mark such spaces. In the speculative historical vision painted by Williams, Margaret Garner\u2014the enslaved woman most widely known for killing her infant child rather than returning to bondage with her baby in tow, and whose story served as source material for Toni Morrison\u2019s Beloved<\/em>\u2014and Margaret Walker\u2014a poet who served as a central figure of the Chicago Black Renaissance\u2014somehow meet and exchange stories of what they have seen and survived.<\/p>\n

The river itself works as a reminder of what these women have loved, lost, seen, destroyed. And yet they continue to move along its currents, refusing to bow or break under the weight of history. Williams describes this survival as a kind of drowning, an ongoing conflict between the knowledge these women hold and a social order that refuses not only that knowledge but their very capacity to hold it, to know anything<\/em> worth knowing<\/em> or claim any rights it is bound to respect. He stages this entire encounter against the antipastoral, apocalyptic backdrop of a river the color of a black child\u2019s blood. In doing so, we imagine that he is calling upon the plagues in the Book of Exodus. The poem\u2019s setting is a fusion of both the first plague, the transformation of various bodies of water into blood, and the last, that is, the death of the firstborn. By the conclusion, the reader is left with no concrete sense of the words shared between these two women. In this way, Williams echoes Morrison directly: their story is not one to pass on.<\/p>\n

Midway through the poem, the river appears again in a rather dazzling moment of prosopopoeia, one that expands and expounds upon any number of the poem\u2019s central objects of interest:<\/p>\n

The river unfurls its god tongue
\nin Nigger Jim\u2019s voice. He speaks of rivers
\nas the river, soul grown deep into a river
\ncarving a country like an infant\u2019s throat.
\nThere are many ways to freedom, with a hymn\u2019s
\nlithe blade or a butcher knife. Even now the blood
\nthat runs through the river runs through my hand,
\nblack as a cock that caws for dawn hilt-to-hide till mum.<\/p>\n

Dawn does not know it cannot drown me.
\nSunrise gilds all water the same dull pageant
\nand I am water after all. Sun-rinsed,
\nmy skin coal-hisses, a conquered city, the first flame.
\nCall me Chicago, call me Lake Michigan.
\nI, an unnatural mirror for enlightenment,
\nspit back ash rivaling Pompeii. Relent
\nto whom, for what? Night will come again.<\/p>\n

And, only a single stanza later:<\/p>\n

This is the end of the world.
\nEven an ended world needs a mythology.
\nLike snow, like breath, like rust, like feet,
\nnight will come again and over a sobbing
\nwoman who has found her mother\u2019s grave
\nfor the first time and succumbed to elegy.
\nHer cries bleed over the dirt with a strange insistency.<\/p>\n

This, then, is how the world ends. With a mythology blurring the borders between black flesh and animate objects of all kinds: animals and rivers, darkness and dirt, monsters, corpses, coal. In a dizzying series of deft, allusive gestures, Williams summons a cohort of characters from across the literary landscape, repurposing their images toward radical ends: Morrison, Garner, Twain, Melville, Hughes. Each of these figures function as a critical component of the broader black antipastoral aesthetic that Williams maintains throughout \u201cMastery,\u201d one in which we are always already bound to the bodies held within the earth, and all the unfathomable darkness therein. The darkness that\u00a0refuses to be drowned by dawn. Williams\u2019s speaker is unkillable precisely because he refuses a dominant vision of the Human in favor of the ground, the dust, the water from which he came. Williams\u2019s mythology for the ended world begins in the dark and remains there. It ignores the call of daybreak, and chooses to linger in the spaces outside the ever-expanding reach of modernity\u2019s wartime instruments, its brutal, antiblack imagination. This work invites us into other practices of gathering, other modes of sociality and study, alongside nonhuman forms of life and death. It does not ask us to dream that a new world is on its way. Rather, it invites us to celebrate as if it has already arrived.<\/p>\n

In the universe fashioned by Williams, the hard distinction between the grave and the living landscape is softened, blurred, made hazy by the fact that antiblackness is the air itself. Through the harsh reality that his poem refracts, the poet grants us a new and more elaborate human vision, one wherein the world has already in some sense ended, or else is in the process, and black life can flourish. What appears as apocalypticism in Williams is also always and already, I think, a form of Afrofuturism, a willingness to take seriously the idea that any apocalypse is also, quite literally, a revelation<\/em>, or opening: one wherein black human beings can improvise a radically divergent way of sharing the planet. In this vein, it is as the old saints say. We are in the world but not of it<\/em>. We desire the end of the world because of a black love that demands such radical dreams. Because, as Henry Dumas states in his own timeless love song: \u201c[we] have to adore the mirror of the earth.\u201d So it is in the name of the black earth, the black shambling bear and favorite daughter of the universe, that these writers militate against the world, and dare to imagine the destruction of the parasitic, geopolitical norms that derogate their people at every turn. In no uncertain terms, this is a poetics of demolition. These are poems that kill. And set ablaze. And build.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dr. Joshua<\/span> Bennett<\/span> hails from Yonkers, New York. He is the author of <\/em>The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016) and <\/em>Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, which is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Bennett<\/span> holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in theater and performance studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in\u00a0<\/em>The American Poetry Review, the\u00a0<\/em>New York Times, <\/em>Poetry,\u00a0and elsewhere. He is currently a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.<\/em><\/p>\n

Phillip B. Williams poem\u00a0\u201cMastery\u201d was published in issue no. 223 (Winter 2017) of <\/a><\/em>T<\/a>he Paris Review<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In what I am calling the weather, anti-blackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies.\u00a0\u2014Christina Sharpe, The Weather\u00a0 and as I watch your arm\/your\u00a0brown arm just before it moves I know all things are dear that disappear all things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1351,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[32423,32420,32425,32426,32422,32424,24984,26394,28428,32421],"class_list":["post-119978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-cesaire","tag-cherrie-moraga","tag-colin-dayan","tag-countee-cullen","tag-james-monroe-whitfield","tag-kenneth-white","tag-marcus-garvey","tag-phillip-b-williams","tag-romare-bearden","tag-this-bridge-called-my-back"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBlack Antipastoral and the End of the World<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Contemporary black writers are imagining an apocalypse with a distinctly ecological tenor.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/08\/revising-wasteland-black-antipastoral-end-world\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Revising \u201cThe Waste Land\u201d: Black Antipastoral and the End of the World by Joshua Bennett\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 8, 2018 \u2013 In what I am calling the weather, anti-blackness is pervasive as climate. 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