In My Defense, Monsters: Notes on Black Poetic Grotesqueries, Composite Humanity, and Freedoms of the Horrific, Part 3

I’m repeatedly tailing the slippage between pronouns in Childish Gambino’s “Boogieman,” the third track on his 2016 funk foray, Awaken, My Love!, and arguably the first track in the album’s central suite that lyrically engages elements of horror—particularly monstrous, creeping pursuits. The evil cackle weaving in and out of the track shouts out to Vincent Price’s cameo in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

With a gun in your hand,
I’m the Boogieman.

If you point a gun
at my rising son,
know we’re not the one.
But in the bounds of your mind
we have done the crime.

Boogieman,
you’ve got to help us—can you?

Yes, I can.

In a way, “we” who are “not the one” is as much a plural selfhood as a collective flattening into singularity. The one encompasses both “my rising son” and me. And are we the Boogieman? By choice or by doom? If the Boogieman arises in our place “in the bounds of your mind,” in the cage inside which we are a separate cage in which you set yourself loose, why beg for its help? Except that, if the delusion is imminent, the Boogieman is irresistible—we become it whether we want to or not, It Comes As Us, It Decomposes Us—is its help then self-help? Can I repurpose that which possesses me from who is obsessed with me to become what expresses me?

*

For a couple of years now, I’ve been troubling my art with the question: If I were truly what they claim to imagine I am, what would happen to them? What would I actually be?

There’s that video clip of Nina Simone, contorting and cobra-bent over a microphone, calling out to the crowd, “Are you ready, Black people?” How their cheers of “Yeah!” gradually dwindle in volume once she asks, “Are you ready to kill, if necessary?” Her solitary reptilian gestures as the voiceover describes her blacklisting…

Moor Mother, in the chorus of “Deadbeat Protest,” rails, “Tryna save my Black life / by fetishizing my dead life. / Fuck, / get away from me.” Except where those expressions help to normalize the appearance of various forms of Black suffering, Black people are profusely discouraged from or otherwise reviled and removed for expressing morbid or violent fantasies. Danez Smith generates the majority of their poem “say it with your whole black mouth” simply in the absence of their speaker’s liberty to say the thing:

… i can’t say
without my name being added to a list
 
what my mother fears i will say
 
                       what she wishes to say herself
 
i came here to say
 
i can’t bring myself to write it down

It is an unparalleled (and, I’d argue, maliciously intentional) constriction of catharsis and creativity, given the standard of such expressions proliferating in white-male-dominated art forms, including heavy metal music and horror film, where regularly coagulate narratives and cultures that are largely and brazenly dishonest about—or purely irreverent of—their dependence on endless reiterations of Morrison’s “dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.” Horror—which I’d qualify as that mode that best abrades superstructural façades, degrades the social fabric and the sanctity of the flesh, and standardizes the repulsive—is a terrain of Black consciousness.

*

I’m sitting inside a coffin in Portland’s Lovecraft Bar, breathing machinated fog, watching black-decked white people dance to music that I do enjoy while overhead stare the plasticized icons of slashers and classic monster films that I also enjoy, and I’m thinking about the text of goth cultures—not just the novels and the lyrics and the scripts and the Baudelaire poems, but the imagery and the thought and the language that structures them—and how it figures that some deviance from the predominating white fantasies are required to read, comprehend, speak, and manipulate its codes. I’m watching them dance and thinking about how their BDSM practices make recreation of the maiming and mutilations immortalized into the skins and figurations of Black people. I’m looking at a sculpture of the Facehugger from Alien and thinking about how the Xenomorph was a stealthy, black, anti-colonialist force shaped in the image of Elegba and born of a form of viral miscegenation, and also was a Nigerian in a monster suit. I’m glancing at a man drinking dark liquor in a dark two-piece, seated on a stool in a dim crimson corner, and I’m thinking about how romantic melancholia, ostracism, and self-destruction could be if they weren’t systematically my birthright. I’m taking in all the neon green occult symbols and thinking about how much continual noise and mystique and sex and personality they’ve made of the imperial encounter with the savage other and its folk religions. I’m turning back to look my friend in his face, our only two Black faces, and I’m thinking about what belongs to us—this text belongs to us, is made of us—and how much horrific inhumanity our blood has been subject and object of in order to be here as we witness this microculture’s stunted dub-over of our psychosocial odysseys, and I’m realizing that I’m not reactionary; I just want my shit back.

*

I want to correct the silence (my sometime own) / the ignorance (my own, too) / the denial surrounding the abundant experiments in monster-mythopoeic and horror-cinematographic poetries helmed by Black poets—not to illuminate some novel aesthetic matter, but to find transformative motion in fanging and clawing out of the sagging doghouse of good-human empathetics and ego, and to revisit monstrosity and horror as preexisting and coexisting modes for getting beyond the representational limitations and affective failures of the human subject.

In her poem “Versal,” francine j. harris designs a macabre set. The speaker commences a litany of what the wood, “the warn” of wood, the sidebank, and the black meadow are not, and yet, in listing these absences, activates their eerie, teeming presence: “a negro with tree,” “a strangler clutch,” “a fruiting body of fungus,” “a cowhide stripped,” “a loner type,” “a sleeper cell,” “a jumpy trigger,” “thug among us,” “a rush gang,” “watching through windows,” “sniper squatting,” “the sound of stream driveby.” In this setting of lurking and shape-shifting violences, “a black girl is standing on it, over a river, rocking.” (And here is the slight specter of James Merrill’s “Lorelei,” in which Merrill strands the figure of a black girl among the symbolic and—perhaps, to Merrill—innocuous “stones of kin and friend.” She sits behind the addressee, as though to inherit some knowledge, some vision or visibility, “the golden vagueness / Forever about to clear” once the addressee’s “stone is in place.”) Harris’s black girl isn’t a passive prop; she centers the poem’s dictive play and gives semantic dimension to its images.

The speaker’s litany turns affirmative, and the landscape changes slightly:

                                                             The wood
is an eager, a Negus among us, a runner like eagle
            a brown sighting, root system gathered in growl
of curl, of amassed vein feed. Say it with us.
            The wood is a falcon, a clean stretch of might.

Suddenly a plurality emerges: “Say it with us.” A communal consciousness is at work, it seems—a body behind this conjuring, according that the litany is uttered indeed and the setting spoken into existence, as is its transformation into this “eager” hunting. I hear Brooks’s “Sermon on the Warpland”: “Say that the River turns, and turn the River.” Where before it was subject to its shadows of not-being, to its boogieman risks of lynching, sexual predation, and vigilante terrorism, Harris’s setting is now tethered to active self-representation. The collective, somewhere, says so; you’re invited. “The dark bark is humming. Night stretched.” As the poem draws to its close, its darkness draws itself up into actor. And a Black girl is standing in it: active, autonomous, possibly conjuring it herself. In the poem’s land of lurk, she is the last thing standing, I think, not as any resilience archetype but as the emissary of umbra—the one for whom the night blows.

Night finds “N and I” animal, or in anima, at the center of Douglas Kearney’s “Manesology.” Hounded by the Problem that “they” call the speaker to speak on from home (“after Charlottesville but before it, too, shit,” goes the epigraph), they are also hounding per se.

Night of it, N and I
misgave it as ours,
making ruck in the rented house,
nicked and dug at it that night,
               thus us
               as all the while reckoning us
               as tearing at what’s ours
until we sat jostled, settled
just as how we “supposed to”—
though what we then chose to
was kiss a while.

The two nick and dig and tear and then settle back into more recognizable act of intimacy, though their ruck-making is no less intimate. Soon after, they work the problem of “nerves down / to a faint rattle of chains.” The poem sutures the speaker and N tighter to a horror simultaneous with desire in the house as the Problem continues to invite inside its ghosts and the couple become a different ghastly sound against the invasion:

If I spoke from my home
would I say how we fucked,
drowning knocking and moaning
with moaning, knocking? Phone ringing
like poltergeists wrecking a pantry,
gnawing the fog of their tongues
and their hangnails, so hungry
for skin, for blood, and dark skulls to hant.

Their response to the haunting is a corporeal counter-haunt in which they exchange vulnerability, engrossed in their own permeation of each other, while “shut to it, bones ours, / minds crackling with us / was someone’s problem, their problem.”

Both “Versal” and “Manesology” disturb (as should any worthwhile horror art) conventional perceptions of the mundane—here, the pastoral and domestic subgenres of poetry. They deploy horror tropes—the dark woods and the haunted house, respectively—in order to provide the context within which grotesquery facilitates the expanded, extra-human volition of their Black subjects. Blackness in these poems is less the condition subjected to horror or the fetish object that emanates it than the strategy by which concepts of horror are revised. I find this resonates with Robin Coste Lewis’s offering that Blackness is to hold horror and the sublime in the same experience, though I want add to this idea the possibility that Blackness refuses the sublimation of horror, and vice versa.

*

If you look closely, there’s this moment where the whole crew is pulling back, except for Yaphet Kotto, who’s pushing forward with a knife in his hand. I always felt that that moment, where the baby version of the alien and Yaphet Kotto are facing each other, is a moment of recognition. This was the brother who couldn’t be reasoned with; the brother who said, ‘No, I come to rape and pillage and procreate with you whether you want to or not.’ It’s a sort of primordial vision of Black people in a way.

—Arthur Jafa, “I Was That Alien”

The marginal as the peripheral. The monstrous as the very precipice of the imaginable. What do you imagine that personhood forecloses and then are appalled by its beastly appearance? Ai’s Cruelty exists. Where are you hiding Baraka’s “Black Dada Nihilismus”?