An Unknown Length of Rope: Or, How to Survive in Water if You Are Made of Paint

In “An Unknown Length of Rope: Or, How to Survive in Water if you are Made of Paint,” Divya Victor unsettles the relationship between black and brown bodies and the historical representations of them. I love all of what she does here, but I’m most excited by this animating idea that poetry can be a place to figure something out about the lie of the image and how that lie is a resonant one. How is one to know one’s self Resemblances. How does the poet make this thing outside of received notions of what brown and black bodies are or are not? They think they know us but they don’t know us. Unknowability. How to not get caught up in po-biz and institutional expectations? What we learn about Victor’s poetics is that in it, “identity is a borrowed thing,” and there’s a violence in the rendering of it. Her transnational exploration unearths the trafficking of the lie of racial representation and offers us ways of looking that rescript images that erase necks hung from ropes and black bodies thrown overboard into the mouths of sharks.

–Dawn Lundy Martin

***

This essay was written while making a manuscript called Kith—a book of poems which tries to understand how brownness and blackness are traded commodities on either side of the Atlantic. I did not know, when I began, how to ask the right questions about representing identity in diaspora without also, simultaneously, trading in bodies that I loved or pawning my own body for what/who it resembled. I did not know, also, how to speak of these resemblances (a certain breadth of a nose, a certain dusking of the armpit, a darkening and creased horizon of the knees and elbows when we stand tall) without also selling these skins and hides, these creases and teeth, these disastrously procured identities. I did not, and do not, know how to speak of catastrophe while keeping myself secured institutionally or on a market or in any community to which I tenuously belong. The market for the poem I wanted to write was, by default, already a chopping block; or the Ellis Island dock; or the white, mono-National American reader with his head slightly cocked. At all these sites, I saw the reader standing on dry land. I saw them looking at my quickly unmooring questions, patiently and benevolently. And then I saw them turning away because the answers did not include them. & yes, they do not. & yes, therefore the book must exist.

How? is the poet’s question. There was no safe passage between question and answer. Answering this requires risking everything one has come to understand as method, means, aesthetic comportment. Answering “How?” requires a tendency to migrate; to move away from what you know; to dispose of what you own. Answering “How?” requires abandoning what one has come to understand as community in order to separate, in order to be able to turn back to the crowd and not see oneself in it.  Answering “How?” is a way of practicing the dissolution of oaths to nations, snipping passports at the corners, nullifying a monolithic citizenry in any aesthetic state. Answering “How?” is to practice a certain kind of invisibility seriously: to be able to nix oneself off a market for poetry, off “poetry’s” institutional demands, off the methodological and aesthetic demands of genre.

This essay was one way of documenting how I learned that my book must exist in order for Kith to exist for me, in order for resemblance outside the bloodline to be given a face that I could look back at with my conscience. This essay is notational practice in how to write racial identity and how to develop poetic representations of the experience of migrants of color. It wants to mark how we import bodies from the ocean and how we, then, export the representations of these bodies back across the ocean. It wants to understand how the history of diaspora is an aesthetic production as well as a material, enfleshed, bloody one. It wants to know how to speak of catastrophe without trading in skins—that thing of pigment; that thing that is us.

*

What I know of the Atlantic is red. What I know of its wetness is blood.

This is a story of two boys, one shark, a length of rope, and many resemblances.

John Singleton Copley's oil painting, Watson and the Shark, is a visual report of an incident that did and did not take place.

First, the facts (as they say):

In 1779, Sir Brook Watson is a Tory 1st Baronet and Lord Mayor of London. But, well before that, he is just an orphan cabin boy in Cuba. At this moment in history, Havana is a roiling entrepôt for trading in human slaves. Watson is helping out his uncle whose mercantile trade shares the routes (and thus moral responsibilities for) the Middle Passage. One cloudy, peach-lit day, Watson is attacked by a shark while swimming in the warm waters of the Havana Harbor (1749). Watson loses his right leg to the shark’s attack.

Thirty years after the incident, when he turns forty-four, Watson commissions the American painter John Singleton Copley to memorialize this violent scene, this rescue of a man, and the loss of a limb. What interests me is not Watson losing a limb, even though Copley’s painting makes this its central problem. What interests me is the painting gaining a black actor during the drafting of the rescue. Of the nine actors in the rescue boat, one is black. But, he was not always black. His blackness arrives at the scene of this crisis somewhat belatedly, and yet precedes it.

How?

Brook Watson was fourteen years old when he was attacked by the shark. The body Copley loans to history, however, is not of a fourteen-year-old white child. The painted Watson’s thighs are muscular; the biceps svelte but swollen with effort; the gluteal curve is meaty, wet; the hamstrings plucked into action. Copley gives us a Watson that survives.  Copley paints for us a man too young to be the man who commissions Copley and too old to be the drowning boy. He gives us a body between the drowned and the saved—the body that can only be witnessed into existence.

How?

The white child rendered by Copley is the symmetrical inversion of a marble statue of the Borghese Gladiator, discovered in the early 1600s among the ruins of Emperor Nero’s seaside home. The gladiator is poised, legs apart, defending himself against a mounting attack with a shield long lost to the elements. In time, this Greco-Roman warrior would become a model for Copley’s vision of a British politician—Watson. But, this time around, the Borghese gladiator is on his back, reaching up. The arm that was once raised to shield a face becomes an arm reaching up to an empyrean God outside the frame. The head and body seem to send mixed messages: the mouth is agape, gasping, and desperate; the torso and legs are defiant, impossibly arched. Even in his drowning, Watson is modelled after a victorious, well-protected body.

In time, the Borghese Gladiator would also become a model for a specimen engraving of two identical and anonymous Aboriginal Australian men pointing a spear and a sword against white men outside the implied frame by the Australian artist Sydney Parkinson (1770-73). The lost shield, the reaching arm, the improbable weapons—in all cases, this gladiator is stripped and reassembled for his parts. As would warriors of other kinds—black men and women are used and displaced into confinement in representations they did not permit or are, as we now say, framed.

In this way, a man’s flesh and bone becomes another’s—an idea becomes an ideal—and in this way, the flesh and bone of other men become inscrutable, never translated except as deviations on this false original, this forgery. Which brings us to another kind of counterfeit countenance—a face that emerges out of another face. A face that survives another kind of erasure. A face that is a cicatrix. How do we face this face?

How?

Preliminary sketches show that the face of a black sailor throwing a towline into the infested waters to save young Watson used to be the face of a white sailor throwing a towline into the infested waters to save young Watson*. The black, white, and red chalk of the preliminary sketches show that Copley intended for all 9 actors to be white, including the sailor at the apex of the central tableaux. Somewhere in the drafting, the man became black. He became the apex of the figural triangle and the receded point of the moral triangle—a triangle drawn with three lines to connect a length of rope, a drowning man, and his God.

In Copley’s first entry of this painting to the Royal Academy in 1778, its title was: A boy attacked by a shark, and rescued by some seamen in a boat; founded on a fact which happened in the harbour of the Havannah.

So, that accounts for one boy. And it brings us to our next.

A critic describes finding the study of the young black man as an act of catching Copley “in his shirtsleeves, in the midst of things”—in the midst of what? We are told: in the midst of Copley encountering a black face in an act of “warm sympathy.” The critic concludes this “sympathy” given what he/we can observe of study’s lack of ornament, its immediacy, and its absence of elaboration. This critic also suggests that there are three unassailable elements “always present in distinguished portraiture” (in which cache he includes Copley’s Head of a Negro (Boy)): “a quality of eye—sharpness of observation; a quality of feeling—sympathy; and a quality of hand—style.” Whereas the eye and hand are formal means to excellence, here, “a quality of feeling— sympathy” is a moral one. This critic suggests that this personal quality is rare because “no man [artist] is elastic enough to be interested in very stranger that walks into his studio and asks to have his face painted.” Copley is an exception in his moral elasticity, perhaps. But, perhaps the man he has painted is not a stranger?  Perhaps he has not asked to be painted? Perhaps his blackness in the late 1770s or early 1780s expurgates him from the possibility of being a stranger in a white man’s household, from the possibility of asking to be painted. He cannot be a subject of this painting. But, as it is a study, he can be its object—he has been studied.  Copley’s “warm sympathy” is described again, by the artist’s son, when it was for sale:

“69. Head of favorite Negro. Very fine—introduced into the picture of ‘A Boy saved from Shark’ £ 11-11s”

A boy saved from Shark; A boy drowned in paint. The ‘favorite Negro’ was likely a “favorite family domestic”—and no, the critic never says the word—which may explain the boy’s reserve in expression and also the casualness of his displacement. It may explain the child’s surprise, the slowly eking smile and the uncertain, somewhat worried eye.

However, this explains, too, something about how identity is a borrowed thing—first rehearsed through close study and then displaced into new contexts. It explains how artists, like others, learn to mimic what they see and create resemblances as a way of procuring an illusion of a documented incident; of giving an impression of a personal experience.

Watson and the Shark is a benevolent ruse in skilled mimicry. Singleton had never visited Havana—he likely borrowed the horizon and the ship lines from contemporary prints by Canot and Dumford. He had never seen a shark dead or alive, but he likely studied a set of jaws disengaged from the cranium. He had never been part of a rescue in water, so he borrowed from Raphael’s Miracle of the Draught of the Fishes. He had never witnessed a man kill a giant beast, so he mimicked the muscular gesture and weaponry of St. George slaying the dragon*. This is also how history replicates itself until what little evidence we have of ourselves is also evidence of how unimaginable we must have been to those who painted us this way.

Which brings us back to Copley’s “favorite negro.” His face, now studied, steadied, and dried, must have moved from Copley’s home into other private homes until it showed up for auction—again and again. This face hangs now in Detroit, beside one of its three displacements—Copley’s three iterations of Watson and the Shark. The year is 1864, the year is 1928, the year is 1951. Copley had dragged a man out of his study and placed him is one of his own, at the scene of crisis—as the visual apex of the rescue of a white man.

How?

Does this displacement bear witness to Copley’s brush or his moral imagination—or, the bereavement of both? To his sympathy or to his appropriation? Perhaps he needed to fabricate a black body in the Caribbean and he owned one in Massachusetts he could use.  Or, perhaps this ‘favorite domestic’ of the Copley household was used as the unwitting emblem of the Watson Tory cabinet—a ‘favorite export’. Did Watson borrow a Colony slave to loan a point to British abolition?

& now the yellow harbor recedes as the foreground deepens into emerald pith

& here the rescue boat floats the midriff of the painting—a middle passage between shore and shark. The darkest man is just before dawn.

& here our black sailor precedes even himself in this scene of witness. The white man overboard, the black man in the craft. The year is 1749; the year is 1778.

& here, we are in the same boat. A pale, fleshy pink scarf muffles the line between beige tunic and black face. A pale, fleshy hand blots the line between the domestic laborer and imagined sailor. Clocks unwind, time turns tables.

& here his head is bent toward water, intent on the shocked and gaping face of the drowning man.

In the process, the black sailor loses his own neck—it becomes a casualty of visual perspective and moral concern—to the act of doubled witness. Whereas, our named victim, Watson, has his neck arched back, marble clavicles flanking a proud Adam’s apple—he stares back in horror from the sea into the sky. In this séance between civility and Christianity, the victim is the medium par excellence.

But what do we glance away from in order to watch this staring match? What else is drowned in this drowning?

& How?

Slave ships crossing the Atlantic often used African slaves as human bait—both alive and dead—to troll for sharks that would swarm the slave ship marauding for human remains. Slave ship captains counted on these swarms to terrorize both the slaves and the seamen. As Robert Hayden witnesses that history, he sees “sharks following the moans the fever and the dying”; he sees “horror” as the “compass rose.” Like many of us globalized brown walkers—us cosmopolitan; us non-resident so and so’s—the sharks too changed their migratory patterns and followed the slaves across the Atlantic, along a dotted line of corpse and carrion. And when the sharks came to our shores, what hairy legs did they sprout to walk among us? And what fins did we carve to swim beside them?

What I know of the Atlantic is red. What I know of its wetness is blood.

& here we have, instead, the Tory Watson—waving and drowning—like so many African children and women and men must have done before being drawn up from the ocean. Nothing more than a pair of heels tied with rope.

& here in Havana is the towline fed into the water by the black sailor, holding his gaze firm and the looped rope loose. His left wrist holds a limp elliptical, the size of a man's head. His other hand is extended, brotherly and forward to the deadly damp and, also, sideways to steady his own body against the waves.

& here in Boston, years ago, when Copley first called his ‘favorite negro’—he must have been pulled from—what was it—the polishing of silver, the heaving of logs, the cleaning of boots, the washing of soot from the irons, the lathering of suede, the stacking of luggage—and bid sit as duty—for his head—he must have been pulled from a line. Of duty. As favorite.

And, that accounts for the second boy. And it brings us to our third.

How?

How does one displace what one has learned of blackness at home; what one has studied of it—the calm replacement of a face, the patient re-coloration of a pair of hands—while rendering a catastrophe at sea? What other catastrophes might Copley have painted over with this face? How much seawater would it take to wash his hands of this? Salt. Linseed oil. Pigment. Soap.

When Copley’s Watson and the Shark was first exhibited in London, reviewers chaffed at how inert and paralyzed the black sailor appeared, how detached.

“Instead of being terrified, [he] ought, in our opinion, to be busy. He has     thrown a rope over to the boy. It is held, unsailorlike and he makes no use     of it”

He, they said, should have chosen better between keeping busy and being terrified.

He, they said, he had been given too much rope.

& did it—this black man’s face applied to a white sailor’s body—resemble something else black and idle? Something to be corrected into obedience; into a better use for a rope?

& how might they have used it?

List some uses for rope.

There are no formal statistics for the number of lynchings that took place in the United States before 1892. There is more than a century of undocumented and unnumbered lynchings between Copley’s painting of Watson and the Shark and the moment when the Tuskagee Institute begins its records. In 1959, when the Institute published the last and annual report, the number of deaths caused by lynching in the United States was 4,733. This included one from 1955, when “a Negro who was beaten, shot to death, and thrown into a river at Greenwood, Mississippi.”

Emmett Till was fourteen years old, too.

& here again, in the water, inches ahead of the shark's engorged and hungry mouth, is the floating end of the rope thrown by the black sailor—with the face of a nameless boy. The rope's end makes a casual loop, a pre-emptive halo around Watson’s head. It is a lifeline, an umbilicus not-yet-wrapped around a neck. A partial ampersand near Watson's head and neck is a conjunction that unties other conjectures between ropes and necks; waters, rivers, oceans, and Brooks. Where one ends and the other begins is a history of so many left arms towing the righteous rescues of the wrong bodies.

—D.V, Singapore, Singapore. April 2016

 

[Notes: I learned from the research of art historians and curators— J.V.S. Megaw, “Something Old, Something New: Further Notes on the Aborigines of the Sydney District as Represented by their Surviving Artefacts,  and as Depicted in Some Early European Representations” (Records of the Australian Museum Supplement 1993); E.P. Richardson’s notes in John Singleton Copley’s Head of a Negro in the Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts (Number 3 1952-1953); the staff writers for the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History (Prentice Hall 2005); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin 2007). I am also particularly indebted to the poetry of Robert Hayden, Middle Passage (Collected Poems 1985) and Douglas Kearney’s oeuvre, which helps me work through the fissure between the spectacle and the spectacular.]