Two-Track Mind

In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the psychiatrist and critical theorist Frantz Fanon speaks to the chilling effect the white gaze has on Black people. When a child turns to Fanon and exclaims, “Look! A Negro!” the child fixes Black identity not only as an object but also one worthy of ridicule. Fanon’s individualism is erased, and he becomes a label over which he has no control. This essentialism of Black people and what Blackness signifies has, and has had, pernicious effects on all who can be categorized as Black.

For Fanon, the white gaze limits much of what is possible for Black life in an oppressive society. At the same time, Black people incorporate the white gaze into their own lived experiences and self-perceptions. Rather than capitulate to discourses that ultimately contort facts about the humanity of Black people into structures that perpetuate Black oppression, Fanon, among other attempts at wrestling his selfhood back, turns to the intangible, the rhythmic, and the poetic as strategies of resistance against anti-Black racism. Though poetry has its limitations—in his reading of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), Fanon lays bare how even an ally like the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre abandons Black poetics because it emphasizes race rather than the more “universal” idea of class—it remains an important tool for pushing against theorizations of Black inferiority; poetry, in its nimble ability to abandon form and traditional rules of language, opens up the terrain of what is possible for Blackness to do or to be. Fanon’s refusal to accept white conceptions of Blackness as determinants of the entirety of his selfhood becomes most effective through Césaire’s poetry and a poetics of Négritude that articulates and acknowledges the shared multiplicities within Blackness that comport with his self-understanding: “I feel in myself a soul as immense as the world,” Fanon writes, “truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit.”

In his first poetry collection, Telepathologies (2017), Cortney Lamar Charleston plays with what Blackness can mean during a cultural moment in which the white gaze fixes primarily on the deaths of Black people. In poems such as “Feeling Fucked Up” and “In Case I Still,” Charleston wonders about what is possible for the multiplicity of Blacknesses that want to simultaneously emerge out of, beside, and without the prevailing cultural narratives that imagine a natural connection between Blackness and death. In “How Do You Raise a Black Child?” Black life begins and ends with Black death. The short phrases constitute snippets of Black life:

Taking risks. Scratching lottery tickets.
Making big bets. On a basketball court. Inside a courtroom.
Poorly in the ever-pathological court of opinion.

These fragments ultimately push Black excellence, Black pleasure, Black joy, Black history, Black sound, and Black bodies into the void of death and the symbolics of abstraction. The fact of Blackness is not simply essentialism and limitation in that poem—it is debilitating and maddening.

In Charleston’s new collection, Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021), the estrangement the poet feels being Black in a world subtended by the circulation and proliferation of Black death turns inward, and he explores how such estrangement is possible within the Black community as well. By extending Fanon’s theorization of how Black people internalize white conceptions of Black inferiority, Charleston’s poems reflect on how his own complex orientation toward what Blackness is and what it ain’t produces an anxiety that irradiates outward no matter where he is.

Growing up in the 1990s in both the Black world of Chicago’s South Side and the white world of the city’s suburbs throws Charleston’s sense of self into crisis as he navigates what Black masculinity signifies inside and outside of Black community. More than simply occupying the interstitial space between these worlds—a spatial metaphor that often describes being unable to fit into either milieu—Charleston’s work theorizes a desire for difference in both social environments. It’s a desire predicated on a sense of self that still relies on a performance of rugged Black masculinity as it also internally divulges an authentic sense of self working through what capitulation to these stereotypes affords him.

In navigating what being for self rather than being for others means, Charleston, like Fanon, turns to psychoanalysis and poetics as ways to make sense of the crisis of subjectivity that occurs when forging an identity through the stultifying effects of stereotype. The title of the volume and the poems’ recurring motifs of mirrors, shadows, spirits, and doubles reflect both the struggles of growing up Black and the psychic toll of moving through social words that refuse to accept the totality of Charleston’s being. Though his poems often suggest a splitting of the self caused by perpetual exigencies of putting on various airs in various spaces, the collection leaves the matter of what can be done to recombine these selves into a unitary whole an open question.

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The relationship between psychoanalysis and race has often been tense. Hortense J. Spillers, a preeminent critic in the field of Black studies, once remarked, “Little or nothing in the intellectual history of African-Americans within the social and political context of the United States would suggest the effectiveness of a psychoanalytic discourse, revised or classical, in illuminating the problematic of ‘race’ on an intersubjective field of play.” Though Spillers goes on to describe how psychoanalysis actually could be useful in describing the protocols of race via a radical restructuring of its methods, the field’s insistence on a universal subject predicated on unraced, thus white, subjects makes the descriptive power of psychoanalysis within discourses of Blackness dubious at best. That said, Black writers from Nella Larsen to Ralph Ellison wielded psychoanalysis and attendant theories of trauma and melancholia to make claims about the depths of Black interiority and to prove to white audiences that such depths existed. Though work by Spillers and other literary critics such as Michelle Stephens and Badia Sahar Ahad excavates the extent to which psychoanalytic notions of repression, flesh, anxiety, and doubling permeate Black literature and performance in the 20th century, Black studies as a field has rarely taken psychoanalysis up as a complementary school of critique.

Doppelgangbanger, however, deploys psychoanalysis as if it never went out of style. The title, a reference to the concept of the double, or the doppelgänger, popularized by distinguished psychoanalysts such as Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan, forces readers to consider the ways in which the double crosses paths with W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous concept of double consciousness. Du Bois’s term refers to the Black experience as a splitting of selves, an estrangement from the self that forces Black people to see themselves through the lenses of others, a feeling of “[a] two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Du Bois emphasizes the strange character of this position, which denies Black folk the ability to feel safe or secure within the bounds of a nation that goes out of its way to demonstrate hatred. Freud speaks of the uncanny as the unsettling disquietude of the return of repressed childhood memories, and Du Bois’s double consciousness is uncanny in its ability to keep that which should be utterly familiar—the lived experience of being Black for Black people—quite strange. Double consciousness consistently keeps Black people riven by a nation they know far too well.

Charleston’s poems play with the peculiar nature of seeing the world through the veil of double consciousness and being double to fashion an atmosphere of unease that rarely lets up. The book’s first poem, “The Unauthorized Autobiography of Jung Thug,” initially places readers out of place. The poem is literally positioned outside the three numbered sections that make up the rest of the volume, and its speaker is unable to be his fullest, authentic Black self in any social context:

I can’t gunpoint when the life of this alter ego began though
the possibility can’t be dismissed it began at gunpoint in a way,
with an icy pressure against the temple, the mind splitting into two
tracks while a circus of peers clowned.

The poem introduces readers to two sides of a split personality. The mind bisects into a real self and an imagined self, both of which are life sustaining in different ways. The real self adorns a mask in the image of what Lacan called the “ideal-I,” an autonomous, ideal image of the self that does not comport with reality—nobody’s perfect. The alter ego is made possible by emulation and proximity, a performance of a performance that disposes of complexity for the easy affordances of a stereotype that the speaker has internalized. This routine is fragile (“I still shake when the wind blows”), and though it provides the speaker with enough social capital to quench some of his erotic desires, the intimacy derived from the performance is fleeting and spectral (“a tender touch in the moonlight goes only so far for a shadow”).

The performance, however, is not simply a strategy for obtaining sex or intimacy; it literally keeps the speaker alive as the unreconciled strivings within him are outwardly expressed through negativity and detachment. If masculinity is a structure of unfeeling, then the speaker dutifully casts aside public expressions of emotion in favor of protection by performing the role of a thug. In this way, the double takes on the roles of both the guardian angel and the harbinger of death. This performance guards against violence by bulwarking the soft carapace of the real speaker, compensating for a “baby-angled” and “perfectly round face” with a scowl “fixing [the mouth] in the position of silence like rusty nails.” The front is never permanent; much like a wig that’s not glued down properly, it is precarious and in peril of slipping with any errant move. Devised from fears about being properly understood, the shadow, the double, and the specter all coalesce into a front that is never secure precisely because the performer never quite settles into the role or learns his lines. The threadbare simplicity of the part makes for a clumsy production, despite his familiarity with what he needs to do and whom to emulate. The absolute hardness this persona requires is belied by the softness and smallness of the speaker’s physique, a constant source of his anxiety. When, in a later poem, he refers to himself as “more of a Malcolm X-Tra small,” his size modifies the persona he is trying to embody, making him less desirable not because of the power of his voice or ideals but because of his physical proportions.

The speaker’s actual Black masculinity, one that takes its wide-ranging cues from ’90s hip-hop, gangster movies, the Civil Rights Movement, video games, professional wrestling, the Black Church, Nas, and other influences, is simultaneously complicated and unsatisfactory in getting him what he desires. In “A Brief History of Violence,” the form of the poem makes clear how the thin description of a Black male figure flattens out the entropy of what Black masculinity actually is and can be. (Entropy here is not meant as a pejorative; it is simply a way of capturing the confluences, contradictions, and nonsense that make up every human.) One phrase meant to describe a Black child—“Boy, born covered in blood—[…] with bullet holes / for eyes”—is disrupted by an almost 400-word litany of exactly the multitudes beneath the violence that makes up his face. The thorough accounting of the complexities and contradictions that constitute the boy’s persona (“Boy blessed with baby fat still. Boy big-brothering sisters the / color of target-practice silhouettes, each a parent’s complexion, not / between. Boy: short. Short-tempered boy. Hoop-shooting boy: alone”) is made ancillary by being parenthetical, despite this full list nonetheless dominating the page. There’s violence in how Blackness, masculinity, and Black masculinity constrict a boy who spends his time reading James Baldwin rather than perfecting the waves in his hair or the boy who wears Timberland boots and velour or the boy who here—and in poems such as “Self-Portrait as a Chicken dinner”—prefers the power of the tongue and the pen to that of fists and guns.

The speaker of Charleston’s poems toggles between writing himself out of the most dangerous circumstances and finding language useless in the face of ongoing threats. In the second of three poems titled “Hip Hop Introspective,” language, that which can be used to describe the truth, is recognized as also being responsible for rumor, a form of description that can obfuscate as much as it can clarify. Rumor and pornography work in concert to alienate the speaker, who is simply looking for a good, fleshy time. The women he sees on the late-night erotic programming of BET present sex acts as unfulfilling encounters and women as point-of-sale terminals. These programs estrange him from the truths of sex so profoundly that even language becomes displeasing and awkward despite its constant presence as one of the few tools effectively wielded (“I feel / uncomfortable trying to grasp the supple parts / of languages romantic or explicit, don’t know / where to start from and still remain real”).

If sexual intimacy with women threatens the safety of the speaker’s Black performance, platonic intimacy with men proves similarly perilous, especially if not predicated on a particular performance of Black masculinity. In “Giving Dap,” dapping—a form of greeting, usually between Black men, that resembles something between a slap and a handshake—must be performed with just the right amount of roughness with hands that have just the right amount of roughness with a masculinity that has just the right amount of roughness. The speaker, who is compared to Tahj Mowery, the pipsqueak protagonist of the ’90s sitcom Smart Guy, remarks that love isn’t enough to render the friendships that the dap signifies as lasting beyond the time and space of a school lunch period: “I love me some black people, black girls, and I just / want them boys to love me back, to give me a pound of flesh and / bone on top of flesh and bone I have extended like a nail head.” For the speaker, love can be expressed only narrowly, with the callousness of a tradesman’s hands even for the child still in school.

Manual labor aside, these performances take work even if they blend only the gruffer aspects of Black masculinity that do not come as naturally to Charleston’s speaker as aesthetic pleasures do. In “Etymology of Gangsta,” this endeavor of being a Black man splits the subject into the boy touching himself in an act of boastful gesture and “the boy / in the mirror that is black but ain’t buck, his jaw literally / glass and needing to be freed of nerve, made to feel nada.” The boy in the real world practices saying the N-word with an -uh sound rather than an -er suffix so that the former more freely escapes his lips. He studies the posture of his contemporaries so his body will contort to a machismo that had been external and has to be incorporated into his unconscious. This is not to say that Black culture is foreign to the speaker of the poem—instead, it becomes clear that in the world he inhabits, his attachments to Blackness never seem to be enough. They are attenuated by his small body when Black masculinity is largesse; they are diminished by his formidable successes at school when Black masculinity is in the streets; they are mitigated by his lack of superstardom on a basketball court when both he and everyone else idolize Michael Jordan.

In the end, these poems hope for a flexible Blackness, a Blackness that needs only a love for Black people to be sustainable and to usher in wholeness. The overdetermination in the supposed natural link between Blackness and death that preoccupies Telepathologies manifests in Doppelgangbanger as anxiety about repudiating the images and narratives that help keep this affiliation alive. However, in “Still Life with the Color Orange,” an old friend announcing a same-sex relationship on Facebook opens up a new world. That world is real, governed by real laws of motion (“I have a brand new car that I rather like, / so smooth a ride that I can feel every bump in the road. That / brings me comfort, knowing the tires won’t let go of the asphalt / without a fight—some friction is healthy in any relationship”); real locations (“I notice the sun does shine as bright and hot here / as the rumors said it would, hangs on a bit longer than it did in / Philly even though the time is synonymous between here and / there”); and a real future, even if still undetermined (“I use the stereo / while driving, singing with the music in a citrus-timbre, thinking so / far ahead everything I see is in grayscale; I’m trying to follow the / directions to get there, make only the right turns. Make only right”). Frank Ocean, the queer artist of Channel ORANGE and Blonde fame, provides the poem’s speaker a horizon without a destination but a horizon nonetheless. As the speaker drives around on the hot winding roads of Atlanta (the city too busy to hate), the aimlessness of his travel gives him time to dwell on his love for his family that lives elsewhere, the pink hues of nightfall, and the “citrus-timbre” of his singing voice. The ability to linger over affect and aesthetics produces an optimism for the future that is often denied in Doppelgangbanger. Though that imagined future may be gray and distant, the embrace of sensorial exuberance rather than blunt masculinity, even for a moment, suggests that though the struggle for the self may be a net good, it can also be a beautiful journey.