Notes From the Interior

“… the Negro stereotype is really an image of the unorganized, irrational forces of American life, forces through which, by projecting them in forms of images of an easily dominated minority, the white individual seeks to be at home in the vast unknown world of America.”

    — Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity”

 

In “Everything I Know About Blackness I Learned from Donald Trump,” an early poem in Shane McCrae’s new collection, The Gilded Auction Block (2019), the Black speaker encounters his white countrymen in a state of hysterical teeth-gnashing and weeping. Their histrionics carry him down the river of their racial anxiety:

You right away began to wail   and weep
And gnash your teeth   my tears met yours in the ditch
America   they carry me downstream

A slave on the run from you   an Egyptian queen
And even in my dreams I’m in your dreams

McCrae prefaces the poem with Trump’s infamous statement that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” The president’s gaffe, which occurred during Black History Month in 2017, was so stupid that it bordered on sitcom slapstick. But that silliness masked more sinister implications. Debate about whether Trump knew that the abolitionist writer and activist Douglass had been dead for more than a century was ultimately immaterial; in the spirit of Roger Taney’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, Trump’s ignorance demonstrated that Black people have no history or personhood anti-Black racists are bound to respect. It didn’t matter whether Douglass was dead or alive, only that his figure could be usefully invoked in that moment.

This is the lesson on Blackness that McCrae’s speaker takes from Trump: as a Black man, he is linked insolubly to his white countrymen and reduced to an emanation of their anguished minds. Even his dreams seem extensions of their dreams; his attempts to outrun a relationship in which he is hopelessly entangled only enmesh him further.

Reading this poem, I couldn’t help but recall a scene in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), in which the young Quentin Compson, scion of a fallen southern family, wanders around Cambridge, Massachusetts. The deracinated southerner feels like a stranger in New England, torn from the people and objects that define his identity as a Mississippi patrician. Chief among those objects is the Negro. For Quentin, the “nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior, a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.” In the young southerner’s mind, Black people aren’t people so much as prosthetics by which whiteness comes to know itself through a negative relation—that is, by knowing what it is not. Quentin’s “nigger” is Western civilization’s debased mirror image, the figure Thomas Jefferson conjures in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) as whiteness’s abject opposite. But Quentin’s fate suggests that Blackness is more than an inversion. Without Black people such as Dilsey (the Compson family servant) to play the role of “nigger,” Quentin feels unmoored; stumbling through an agonizing fugue state, he drowns himself in the Charles River. Blackness comes to seem like white racial identity’s condition of possibility, the supposedly exogenous concept that grants whiteness its internal coherence as everything that isn’t black. In the absence of this obverse reflection, whiteness dissolves into incoherence.

McCrae has made a project of studying this obverse reflection and the anguish its absence causes. His deft lines adumbrate the Black body’s position as an object that white supremacy detests and whose hated status is necessary to secure white supremacy’s social order. McCrae’s previous collection, In the Language of My Captor (2017), a hybrid text that interweaves a lyric “memoir” with a collection of persona poems, approached the problem of the Black body in America as the problem of a nation conceived out of a contradictory and unwanted, but ultimately essential, intimacy with that body—or at least its distorted representation in the figure of the “nigger.” The book is centered in part on the story of Jim Limber, a mulatto slave whom Jefferson Davis adopted even as Davis fought to maintain slavery. In the Language of My Captor suggests that we can understand anti-Blackness only in relation to the bonds of a distorted and distorting intimacy through which white individuals understand their racial identity as the negation of everything Blackness represents in the West. Further, African Americans understand their own experience in terms of the vocabulary of abjection that subtends the “nigger” figure. In “Panopticon,” from In the Language of My Captor, an enslaved African looks out from the cage in which his captors display him:

And that’s my explanation   / I am
their honest mirror
I say   Whether you’re here
To see me   or to see the monkeys

You’re here to see yourselves

With Auction Block, McCrae extends his investigation into how white America’s collective need for a mirror hollows out the Black interior and turns Black people into vehicles for white self-expression. Divided into four sections, the book uses Trump’s presidency as the occasion to think through the subjection that results from this evacuation of Black interiority and the conflict that arises when Black subjectivity dares to assert itself. As with Terrance Hayes’s collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), Trump haunts the pages of this book. The president’s tongue-tied statements often preface these poems and provide the language through and against which Black subjectivity struggles into existence.

There are references throughout this book to the fractious events and personalities of 2017: the Republican “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act, the anti-immigrant Arizona sheriff (and failed Senate candidate) Joe Arpaio, and political activist Desiree Fairooz. Auction Block should not be mistaken as a book about the president, however, or even about the political moment he represents. Rather, this collection situates today’s nativist politics within a fear as old as the nation itself: the dread of Blackness that undergirds the American project and the struggle over Black interiority that emerges out of this fear.

Like Ralph Ellison before him, McCrae suggests that we cannot understand anti-Black racism outside the bonds of this intense psychological dependency, one so complete that white Americans cannot exist without reference to the Black slave over whom they wield a power whose contingency represents that power’s impotence. This reliance, once illuminated, torments the white individual. Quentin Compson’s suicide suggests that if the hated and demeaning “nigger” figure looms large in the white racial imaginary, it’s because the white American exists in a state of constant terror—at the idea of confronting what his reliance upon the Black body portends for white identity and also what might happen to that identity when Black people dare to reclaim their interiority and shun the figure of the “nigger.”

As the poet and critic Fred Moten writes, white regulatory violence emerges from this fear. It is terrorism deployed out of white people’s terror at Blackness. It’s also an anticipatory action to head off the violence that Black people embody simply by existing in opposition to the “nigger” figure upon which white identity relies. The Gilded Auction Block plunges readers into the terror at intimacy that underlies anti-Blackness.

***

Auction Block begins with language borrowed from Trump’s infantile excitement at addressing a crowd of Hurricane Harvey victims during his visit to storm-ravaged Corpus Christi in the summer of 2017. “What a crowd! What a turnout!” he exclaimed at hundreds of survivors. McCrae’s “The President Visits the Storm” bends those exclamations into portents of an extended disaster that goes beyond Hurricane Harvey:

America you’re what a turnout great
Crowd a great crowd big   smiles America
The hurricane is everywhere   but here an
Important man is talking here   Ameri-
ca the important president is talking

I’m struck by the way these lines stutter and churn, repeating and doubling back on themselves as if in convulsion. They convey the sense of a racially divided nation unsettled by the legacy of slavery and its originary violence. This is a violence whose scope the country has yet to recognize and that daily converts Black bodies into the sustenance upon which the national identity fattens itself. “[We] are   food   we are air,” McCrae’s speaker later croaks, and his broken language figures America as a nation sunk in the brutality that secures white subjectivity while fixing African Americans as the metaphors by which whiteness articulates itself. This arrangement generates an existential irony that results in recurring political crises. In these poems, America isn’t assailed just by these crises; America is the ongoing crisis of a racist ideology in conflict with itself.

McCrae’s poems speak to the fact that the Black body lies at the center of this crisis. In “Seawhere,” one of the book’s many personae reflects on his status as an “unnameable” presence in American life, a presence whose reliability depends upon never gaining a name outside of the one the nation bequeaths to him. “I am unnameable and so / I have no inner life no inner life / I recognize and so   I just don’t know,” the speaker intones, and if there’s no lack of Black faces to espy, that doesn’t mean that Black people are present. “The problem isn’t   that I don’t see faces / Like mine,” he continues, “it’s that   I don’t see inner lives / Like mine I mean the way   a person’s inner / Life is expressed   partly by the public spaces // Created by their culture …” Black interiority is nowhere to be found in the speaker’s America. It’s an interdicted concept that rarely finds representation.

This question of representation is of enormous importance. If these poems’ disparate personae—including a vengeful former slave, a witness to Trump’s inauguration, a sojourner through hell—are united by anything, it’s the state of interpellation by whiteness in which they exist. McCrae asks how Black subjects might begin to know themselves when the nation insists that there is nothing to know. In the face of unremitting violence against the threat of Black interiority, McCrae’s poems chart a map of an impossible subjectivity that demands that readers think of the nation anew. Most often, this map traces the trails the Black voice creates as it cuts through a hostile aesthetic history of black representation. By speaking in the language of the Western literary tradition—by, say, quoting and deforming T.S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages”—McCrae’s personae warp it to their own ends. The aesthetic realm is the space in which the Black body’s representation as the “nigger” begins to take shape, and McCrae’s poems inhabit this space to contest its representations of silent, dead, and debased “niggers.” They work the trap of the aesthetic language they have inherited.

McCrae’s investigation is an inquiry into the aesthetic as an engine of anti-Black violence. The Black body’s prominence in the literature and art of the Western canon gives us a sense of its necessity for white American psychology; by citing and quoting myriad instances in which Blackness anchors Western literary tropes, McCrae illuminates the strategies whiteness deploys to restrain Black subjectivity. In “The Role of the Negro in the Work of Art,” for example, McCrae cites Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages”:

Back    in “The Dry    Salvages” T.S. El-
iot describes   “the river with its car-
go of dead negroes,   cows and chicken coops”
Because the river is   like time Ameri-
ca a   “destroyer” and “preserver” and
Like time America it’s swollen with what
You eat   most   of the time   I don’t feel like
I’m getting clean   your rivers dribble in
Bright light   preserver and destroyer when
I am seen how   will I survive being seen

Here McCrae turns his attention to that most fundamental of American literary motifs: the river. If texts such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884) construed the Mississippi River as a space where civilization’s numbing effects give way to the freedom of the American frontier, they also maintained the river’s history as an instrument of distinctly American cruelty. After all, the river doubled as a main artery for the transportation of Black cargo during the slave trade. Eliot was a native Missourian familiar enough with this fact to speak of dead Negroes lying in watery graves. Still, “The Dry Salvages” can think of these slaves carried along and drowned in the Mississippi only as cargo, as mute as the cows and chickens with which they were equated; Eliot must speak for them, and even then, he only gestures toward their corpses. This, McCrae’s speaker suggests, is the role of the Negro in the American work of art: to be seen but not heard, a shadow haunting American literary tropes. This is a visibility that is also a tomb.

Again and again, The Gilded Auction Block surveys the Black interior by following the insurgent Black voice as it winds through a history of stultifying representation. In “The Brown Horse Ariel,” named in homage to Sylvia Plath’s classic poem “Ariel,” the lines “Nigger-eye/Berries” becomes the grounds on which McCrae imagines the flowering of a “Nigger-eye I,” and we see how Plath’s evocation of “Black sweet blood mouthfuls” indicates a violence that the poem is not fully aware of. In Lord Byron’s “So We’ll Go No More a Roving,” the romantic night through which Byron’s speaker strolls with a lover becomes a metaphor for the Black body that the slave master inhabits at his leisure. McCrae turns Byron’s poem into the occasion for a meditation on Blackness’s hypervisibility that makes it impossible to imagine a subjectivity that roams free from the body’s confines. “The master’s gaze and yoke we bear,” the speaker mourns, locating the equation between the white gaze and the subjection that accompanies it.

Yet what first seems another trap or ditch turns out, via aesthetic possibility, to be a space of agency for the Black body. McCrae takes care to note that he first encountered Byron’s poem via the music of George Walker, the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, who adapted the poem for song. McCrae’s poems dramatize the aesthetic process by which Black subjectivity pushes against the constraints of Western literary representation and displaces the “nigger” figure from its place of prominence. The book recalls what critic Houston Baker recognizes as a particularly African American literary technique: a mastery of Western literary forms that simultaneously shapes those forms in accordance with the pressure that the Black voice exerts upon them. When the Black voice speaks—as in “The Brown Horse Ariel”—it forces its audience to rethink the structures through which it makes itself heard.

As in In the Language of My Captor, however, Auction Block doesn’t want to reify Blackness. Rather, McCrae is interested in the ways that Black and white racial identities must overcome the poisonous intimacy between them. The book’s strangest and most fascinating poems are in a long piece titled “The Hell Poem,” in which McCrae descends into hell, sans Virgil. This section seems to come from another book, and it reveals that Auction Block’s greatest weakness might be an insistence on topicality that restrains McCrae’s surreal impulses. Detached from the need to address contemporary events, McCrae descends into a hell where “the Blacks and / Whites overflowed the objects they / Belonged to the objects   I had thought / Belonged to them …” McCrae’s descent signals an upheaval around settled racial identities, such that questions of what properly belongs to white and Black individuals start to look like the wrong questions to ask. The book suggests that rigid conceptions of race emanate out of narrow assumptions about how identities are formulated as separate from one another. One can’t help but think this idea emerges out of McCrae’s biography. The son of a white mother and a Black father, McCrae was raised by his white supremacist grandmother; his life is testament to the fact that such notions of separateness are rooted in the falsehoods that white supremacy generated to protect the autonomy of whiteness.

At the end of his journey through hell, McCrae is joined by a massive bird, which gets the final words of “The Hell Poem:”

                      My child you were   and serve
           A purpose   you are Hell
Its living walls   its rivers
You are each other’s flames

                       In life and in this life
           And you will find yourself
 Unchanged   but would you know
 Yourself if you weren’t burning

Freed from the obligation to encompass current affairs that mark the other sections, “The Hell Poem” asks readers to rethink questions of identity from the position of a terrifying intimacy—a terror we will have to embrace if we have any hope of surviving it.