Peace,
Jamaine
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Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2011 3:00 PM
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Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Black gay man's reflections on torture and dictatorship
A Black gay man's reflections on torture and dictatorship
by Thomas Glave
Not long ago, a black gay man asked me why I write about topics
"different" than those that--according to him--other contemporary
black gay male writers typically address. Provoked, in turn I asked
him exactly what he meant. He responded that it seemed strange to him
that I appeared to be so interested in writing, in both fiction and
nonfiction, about politically repressive conditions (such as nations
suffering under despotic regimes) and, sometimes, torture. Why, he
asked, was I as a black gay man interested in "those things"?
His provocation, together with a persistent anxiety that I feel--
namely, the burden of historical memory--compels these reflections.
The anxiety is a peculiar sort of haunting: one that, after decades of
sometimes real horror, I can now acknowledge as my own difficult
relationship with historical memory, a painful weight with which I
believe most black people in the diaspora invariably struggle in one
way or another, whether fully acknowledged or not.
The man's question was a provocation altogether different from this
atavistic weight. It struck me as odd and--obviously--troubling for
several reasons: one, it seemed to presuppose that there were without
question certain topics about which, even or especially according to
some black gay men, black gay writers "should" write, to the exclusion
of others; two, a black gay writer expressing interest in geopolitics
and geopolitically-informed history appeared, at least to that reader,
strange, even anomalous--especially, perhaps, if the history and
geopolitics were located in certain Latin American or South Asian
nations; three, the question's assumption of "This is clearly who you
are, one of 'us'"--homosexual and recognizably "black," racially
marked by my skin color, hair, and features--did not make room for the
nuanced differences of my cultural identities from the speaker's: that
I am not and do not consider myself, for example, an African American,
but rather a Jamaican American, born in the US to Jamaican immigrant
parents, and thus "black," culturally speaking, in a distinctly
different way from his African American self-different with, I
imagined, assuredly different culturally informed interests.
On the most general level, the question within his question startled
me'. why show. imaginative interest in anyone who isn't a part of
"your" perceived group? This query I found the most problematic and
disturbing, for, among other things, it represented, for me, the most
vexing limitations of a particular type of identity politics--the sort
that can always lead easily to myopic single-issue political
approaches, such as the idea, expressed recently in The Advocate (a
"slick" LGBT/"queer" biweekly newsmagazine) by African American
lesbian Jasmyne Cannick, that LGBT rights should take precedence over
immigration issues, as if some of us were not simultaneously both LGBT
and--(but who would have thought it?)--immigrants. (1)
Besides, I thought, what black person of whatever sexual orientation
or gender, living in the US and possessed of good (historical) sense,
wouldn't make a connection between the systematized torture and
dictatorship historically imposed on black people's lives in this
country and throughout our diaspora, on the one hand, and the global
tortures and dictatorships sometimes more widely known, on the other
hand? By these latter, I mean to suggest, for example, Abu Ghraib; the
US Army's present-day abuses of the rights of Guantanamo Bay
prisoners; Saudi Arabian plutocracy informed by a hand-in-glove client
relationship with the US; Israel's consistent viciousness toward
Palestinians; and memories of Latin American and some African
dictatorships, among which Pinochet's in Chile, the late General Sani
Abacha's regime in Nigeria, South Africa s apartheid state, the
Rwandan Hutu supremacists' rampage and genocide, and the violence
visited on Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, and Guatemalan peasants, especially
those involved in insurgency, number among the most terrifying and
unforgettable. It is, of course, important to remember that the US,
the UK, and a few other "first world" nations (such as Belgium and
France, in the case of Rwanda) have had a pernicious hand somewhere
along the way in these nations' ultimately devastating affairs,
invariably enabled by the same supremacist ideology, and ultimately
machinery, that has made consistently possible the degradation and
decimation of black and other people of color, and the poor of all
colors, within the US.
I began by stating that these words, prompted by an unsettling
question, also emerged out of what I call a "haunting"--the abiding,
often unwelcome, but frequently welcome, presence of an historical
memory (as in the recollection of images and recountings of slavery's
violences visited for centuries on black people) that has long
weighted my dreams and waking hours. Although, as a bicultural person,
my consciousness has been partly shaped by the landscapes of Jamaica--
a place where lynchings, for example, did not occur as they did in the
US--I have never been able to get lynchings, of all the violences
enacted against black people, out of my mind. I am, quite literally,
haunted by them; I have pent innumerable hours over the rears leafing
through--gazing, transfixed, at--photographs of lynchings, in books
like Without Sanctuary: gazing, taking in what it is not possible to
take in without an indescribable twist in the gut: the rip there, the
coldness there. The coldness--real chill--always backed by the
stealthy horror of a "There but for the grace of God" intake of
breath. A sharp intake when one understands, as one must learn to
understand, that having descended from Jamaican slaves as opposed to,
say, African American or Brazilian blacks, remains one of the sheerest
accidents of history." a mere flicker beneath the eyelid of some 200-
or 300-year dead slave ship captain who, in the year of his Lord 1746
or 1803, received orders to dock his cargo (all of it, he hoped,
arrived in the New World alive and fit to work and breed to death) in
Kingston, instead of--that month--in Charleston. Is it because of my
constant re-summonings of this too-much-to-remember history, this too-
heavy-to-bear memory, that, for me, the words "torture" and
"dictatorship" so often feel so loaded, bear such resonance? Is this
why some comparisons strike me as so obvious? (2)
Comparisons, for example, between the postures and glee of the US
soldiers (including even a black soldier) who tortured Iraqi prisoners
at Abu Ghraib and the postures and frequent glee--or utterly
mesmerized, glassy stares--of those who, beneath the charred, neck-
stretched bodies of the blacks they'd lynched, pointed up at those
dangling forms, making sure later to take away what souvenirs they
might? (Singed hair, perhaps; testicles, maybe. A nipple here, a
finger there. Everything, even ashes, up for grabs beneath those
trees.)
My imaginative projects these days seek to make sense, for myself, out
of that black gay man's question--"Why do you care about all that, as
a black gay man? Why not just write about Beyonce Knowles, AIDS, the
(so-called) 'down-low,' and our relationships with white LGBT/'queer'
people and black heterosexuals?" My current writerly projects seek to
make sense out of--bring a new sort of order to, in the reflective
realm of a writer's imagination--the time of "skin, skin, and hot
blood" (Morrison's description in Beloved of the indescribability of
lynching) while making connections between those traumatic historical
realities and the sexualized, sometimes racialized realities
inevitably present in torture and often obscenely visible under
repressive political regimes. Across these terrains, much looms for a
writer to ponder: the relationships, for instance, between
masculinities enacted--performed--in torture and dictatorship
scenarios (the torturer exerting the force of masculinized absolute
power over his female or male victim with the most "dangerous" tool of
all, the electrical shock device or beating truncheon), and the highly
self-consciously performed, problematic masculinities in, for example,
queer male porno films (heard in lines such as "Yeah, suck that big
dick, you little faggot!"--or, as I watched some years ago, a deeply
racialized US porn film scene in which a white man, lying on his back,
literally screamed to a black man, whose first language audibly was
not English, that he wanted him to "fuck my white ass!"--to which the
black man shouted back, in a "dangerous" tone, "Yeah, I'm gone fuck
yo' white ass!"). Across these terrains, versions of Beauty and the
Beast revisited yet again; once more, a go-around with the white
damsel in (desired) distress.
Perhaps that man's question about my "different" topics, the life-long
heavy shadow of memory, and reflections like these, and more, will
finally lead me one night, one day, more fully, unflinchingly--
bravely--into passages like this one:
Down there, in that secret place,
they had forced him to eat excrement-well,
shit--of course. Forced
him and all the others, as they had
laughed. Laughed as they watched
him gag on the shit they had fed him.
But then, moving his lips over it slowly
on the billy club as they'd commanded,
forcing his tongue to welcome
it--welcome it whether days-old
and hardened or fresh-warm, sickeningly
moist and parasitic--well, none
of that was the worst; no, not even
when, more than once, the laughing,
uniformed men had forced the billy
club back into his throat and ground it
against the few back teeth he'd still
had at the time. The worst had been-well,
yes: the fear of being ripped open
again with the club; of being burned
inside and out, touched in that way
again by one of them; strung upside
down, hands manacled, face fully
immersed in the piss bucket from
where there could be no escape except
for the momentary gasps that thrashing
allowed. All at once he is drowning
once again, he cannot breathe, his
complete his-ness fully exposed but
not, down here, his own. He is where
all hands may partake of his his-ness,
all objects find their way in and out. In,
and out. (3)
Works Cited
Allen, James, Hilton Als, and Leon F. Litwack, eds. Without Sanctuary:
Lynching Photographs in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000.
Cannick, Jasmyne. "Gays First, Then Illegals." The Advocate Online 4
Apr. 2006. 14 July 2006 <http://www.advocate.com/exclusive detail
ektid28908.asp>.
Glave, Thomas. Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 2005. "We 55 Respectfully Disagree." The Advocate
Online 11 Apr. 2006. 14 July 2006 <http://www.advocate.com/exclusive
detail ektid29496.asp>.
Notes
(1.) See both Cannick and the "open letter" dissenting response to
Cannick's article, signed by 55 Advocate readers, "We 55 Respectfully
Disagree'.
(2.) See "Abu Ghraib: Fragments Against Forgetting" (Glave 207-21).
(3.) Glave, from fiction in progress.
Thomas Glave is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories and Words
to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent. These reflections, in slightly
different form and with a slightly different title, were first
delivered as a paper for a panel ('Sexual Topographies: Queer Reading,
American Contexts: A Roundtable Discussion") at the American
Literature Association conference, San Francisco, 27 May 2006.
Thomas Glave "A Black gay man's reflections on torture and
dictatorship". African American Review, Summer, 2006.
FindArticles.com. 21 Jul, 2011
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