In My Defense, Monsters: Notes on Black Poetic Grotesqueries, Composite Humanity, and Freedoms of the Horrific, Part 2

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up.

—Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me”

Around the time that I played and replayed for myself Crime Mob’s “Knuck If You Buck” while watching a viral video of a buck kicking a rifle out of the arms of a white man in camouflage hunting gear and repeatedly stamping on him, I first encountered the work of multimedia visual artist Shanequa Gay through a feature of her oil paintings from FAIR GAME, published in Union Station Magazine. On wide wood panels of graded silhouettes with active horizons, Gay’s paintings often depict a busy environment of blue deer and people figured variously bestial-realistic, anthropomorphic, and zoomorphic. In FAIR GAME, these figures are leaping and sprinting and braced in pandemonium, at times fleeing an unpictured assailant over barbed-wire fences, at times fleeing or in open conflict with armed police officers, at times in open conflict with other armed deer-people. Many of the figures lie dead or dying. Some are headless, hooved, and waving assault rifles. Later works in this project feature Black women and antlered children with brown skin and distinct facial features, hysterical or solemn in mourning over and under the blue figures. Trees, telephone poles, hunters, and onlookers regularly haunt the backgrounds. Two FAIR GAME diptychs, Dual Citizen and Wildlife (An Ode to Tamir Rice), seem to find their outward-facing subjects mid-metamorphosis; with their heads half-deer and half-human, the transformations happen questionably toward either form.

In its unfolding subtleties, I find most engaging about FAIR GAME that human and beast perform on a level field, that all subjects deer and person and hybrid intervene in the frame and sometimes share the same perils. I bring to Gay’s work my questions about Black people’s positions in empire-driven environmental and social terrorism—or what qualifies distinctions between the two—and her hazy, smog-yellow skies and clear evocations of three-fifths legislation and chattel discourage me from leaving those concerns behind. These paintings thoroughly bend toward troubling difference and borders. In a syntax of viewer attention, it is typical for Gay’s flat-color perspective arrangements to place in the well-tinted background—distant from the immediate focus—some anxious scene, some aimed firearm and its unsuspecting target. I’ve come to anticipate my complicit spectating in the dangers lurking in the FAIR GAME paintings, and to experience relief or suspicion when I don’t find them.

Gay’s more recent works lean further into a mythopoeia of monstrosity. With an expanded palette of brilliant reds and greens, such pieces as Mythological Kneegrows relocate Gay’s hybrid figures from indeterminate plains and highways to the yards of familiar cottages and low-hanging vegetation—settings that, with their odd chickens and a broke-down 80s sedan, remind me of localities in the small towns of the Southeastern U.S.; settings that sound like “Spottieottiedopalicious.” The figures themselves have become more mutated, colored, clothed, and widely emotive. Their composite forms increasingly heterogeneous, they interact with each other, without police or hunter interference, in scenes of ritual, discipline, celebration, combinations thereof and otherwise. More than the mutable shapes of hunted game, what sprints helter-skelter in Gay’s art is animal vulnerability, the dispersing and humbling of gloried civility, and the breakdown of over-determined representation. There is here an incentive to reconsider humanity as a restrictive project and an obstruction to Black expressive freedom, and to decenter it.

I Come As Us, a 2018 installation at the Sumter County Art Gallery in South Carolina, features four figures tall enough to touch the ceiling, wearing ten-foot-long regal dresses and an assortment of geometric, eyeless, black animal heads that stare down into the faces of viewers. Gay describes these four “Devouts” as “a group of aggrandized beings, who mourn, pray, and wage war on behalf of those in the margins,” echoing CM Burroughs’s conjuring of an inhuman / superhuman, counterviolent proxy. The synecdochic exchange in I Come As Us also recalls to me a familiar desire for absorptive union, to collapse the hyper-idiosyncratic “I” into the plural personal pronoun that, like Burroughs’s Godzilla, is more malleable in its allegiances and less manageable by categorical signifiers. But the exchange is bilateral: the collective of the four Devouts signified by “us” are visually differentiated by their individual animal heads and their colors and patterns of dress; they stand in almost as epithetical foci, as in patron saints or pantheon deities, whose specializations are likewise manifested desires of the lone subject, expressed in the singular personal “I.” In appearance, the Devouts suggest a pre-colonial, ancestral, sentinel body. I Come As Us, then, works as a semantic and physical representation of a sense of ancestral pluralism within Black selfhood—a sense allowed little to no space for articulation among Eurocentric ideals of individualism and rationalism.

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What do we do with we? I return to Dawn Lundy Martin’s Lit Hub interview:

I’ve long played with the stable subjectivity of the speaking “I” and the other pronouns—“she” “it”—that seem to, in more traditional literatures, feel comfortable inhabiting themselves. But, in my thinking about the world, and the feeling of selfhood, this is not the case in my actual body, be it in the actual or symbolic historical. I am as much standing outside of myself looking at this thing called my “self” (a “we”) as I am self projected onto me by a stranger in the flower shop in East Hampton.

For Martin, the “feeling of selfhood” is the feeling of plurality. The “we” in the “I” is perhaps informed by the sensation of objecthood, and to a further degree by the objectifier’s projection of otherness, of deviance. The stranger in the flower shop might split Martin’s selfhood along the axes of “Black” “lesbian” “East Hampton flower shopper,” perhaps constructing an axial incoherence, to say nothing of Martin’s other physical presentations, including expression and posture and speaking accent. I think here of a phrase from her book DISCIPLINE, arriving “where the other meats the self. Meat-flesh.” The incoherence—or, rather, a stranger’s want for a coherent representation—is a matter of consumption.

“We” is the spacious vehicle of Claude McKay’s 1919 poem “If We Must Die.” For some readers, “we” is also the poem’s problem, due to its lack of a consistent, “specific racial marker,” as Al Filreis discusses with Herman Beavers, Salamishah Tillet, and Kathy Lou Schultz on the podcast PoemTalk, wherein Tillet’s concluding remarks resonate: “The experiences of Black people in the diaspora can be the universal experience.” This, after the group has debated the Shakespearean sonnet’s propriety as the form for McKay’s protest poem, and Schultz has pointed out that colonialism and migration situated the form correctly within the poet’s available repertoire. I think that neither the sonnet nor “we” are individual crises for the poem; rather that, taken together, they make problems of each other.

Is the sonnet the most humanizing poetic form in the English literary tradition? I’ve said so, and maybe I still believe so. It is learned as a form concerned with argument or reasoning (the notorious distinguishing faculty of the species), conventionally deployed to structure the rhetorical contents of resolving a problem or problematizing a resolution. It may have been one thing had McKay begun “If we must die, then let us hound the dogs,” but then the poem would require transformative philosophy to arrive at its valorizing counterviolence by appealing to a sense of chivalry: “O let us nobly die,” “brave,” “like men.”

Following “then even the monsters we defy / Shall be constrained to honor us though dead,” McKay delivers the most metrically constrained quatrain of the poem. There’s no formal unraveling from the sonnet’s civility, no shrugging out of it, but more so a settling into it, falling in line, almost simulating the way “we” might assemble into phalanx or murmuration or cartoon beehive to “deal one death blow.” And, despite its position, there’s little approximation at the final couplet of a volta or turn or mutation; “If we must die, let it not be like hogs” (L1) shares a rhyme of rationale with “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack” (L13); the resolution is forthright and upright. For McKay, order here is honorable, and why not want honor if “before us lies the open grave?” The poem asks “What though,” as in “What does it matter?”

On one hand, I could say, the humanizing sonnet does exactly what McKay wants it to do while, on the other hand, McKay ignores a few of the sonnet’s requests—for a change of argument, foremost. McKay insists on the common humanity of his “kinsmen” and their moral superiority over the monstrous foe. His “I,” the implied orator of this morale boost, takes for granted the messiness of “we,” particularly in the un-messed third quatrain where apostrophe directly invokes the collective.

Is this sonnet form, then, an imposition where it carries the anticipation of a transformation? Is it, like Paul Dunbar’s mask, the tepid, innocuous veil behind which rage and raving and mess plot? Or is it the inevitable form for McKay’s sentiment if the content centers Afro-diasporic virtue and humanism within constraints mackled by the ectoplasm of white European reasoning and romance? Whatever the case, the poem ends in the insinuation that “we” ought to die quite as we lived: if not penned like hogs, still penned in the confines of singular collectivism—this time, self-imposed. I think that to read “If We Must Die” strictly as a sonnet thwarts its rebellious ambition in that, while it problematizes the formal criteria, it does so through an address suited to any reader who thinks themself a man dogged by an inhuman enemy, and by sacrificing the individual expressive capacities and formal variance of a mass group of peoples whose human designation is historically unstable. More clearly, it seems to me that “If We Must Die” risks faltering when sociohistorical literacy is applied to both the form and the content; that it succeeds best when one is privileged over the other. Yes, the sonnet belongs as much to McKay as to anyone, but in its doubling down in humanity, in its stand-up-and-be-a-man-in-a-sonnet-suit, I can hear my uncle muttering sad dominions from the rasp of the patriarchal throat.

I can anticipate some Q&A retort here that I’m emaciating McKay’s poem (and others) with a binary thinking, or that I’m somehow imposing the limits Carl Phillips, at the conclusion of his essay “Boon and Burden,” accords that “the best readers” remove in favor of “the broader human condition.” This would be, arguably, a myopic reading of Phillips, whose central concern, as I read it, is for the multifaceted self as a composite of particulars; as well as it would be a shoring up of the flawed conceit of human being of which, again, African diasporic experiences of existence tend to remain external. I am proposing that the human condition is the imposed limitation, given that its capacity for Black existence is always only retroactive and always only as expansive as the predetermined boundaries of the abolitionist gaze. I take Tillet’s notion of a Black universality as a perspective wherefrom we may begin to account for those conditions that the human, whatever our efforts at redefining and capacitating it, continually fails to represent. The cultivation of a more nuanced readership and criticism includes, for me, an inquiry into how craft accommodates the expressed negotiation of the human persuasion and the construct of selfhood as they do and do not intersect Black life. 

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I am an “I” inside and outside of “we.” What if my blood is through with honor? What if I must be one thing and several others—a “we” across the boundaries of “I”—some of which are cowards, a couple bloodthirsty mongrels, one a recovering humanist, and a dwindling handful of self-proclaimed innocents? Presence accordions I and we, expands and compresses Black subjectivity simultaneously into the representative and the eccentric—the Gorgon in general and Medusa specifically, all appalling eyes and head full of sucking teeth. As Gwendolyn Brooks writes in In the Mecca, “Gang / is a bunch of ones and a singlicity.”

The feeling of selfhood as blur, as the “unfold[ed] blackery” of a raven wing in Phillips’s “Lighting the Lamps”; or as Poe’s consort, as a thing self-aware and seeking audience but misunderstood as a myth resonating its one utterance. I see the vaulting atmosphere of ravens in flight in Masahisa Fukase’s twilights, a galaxy of glare and croak and gang gang, and still read in it the sublimely gargantuan solitude of his own small life. —I feel most Black when I experience loneliness among Black people.