Winter 2015 - Possession Issue - The Harvard Advocate

 When he called from Italy to tell us, he phrased it like this:



“You’re getting a stepmum!”



Even then, in the midst of the spasm of joy that followed, I remember thinking it was a strange choice of words. Not *I proposed to Sarah*, not *We are getting married*, but *You are getting a stepmum*, as if she were a toy we’d requested after seeing it in a TV commercial. There was, within it, the promise of newness, of a whole different person—yours to take home today!—which is, mind you, what people used to think actually happened when women got married.



And, to some extent, it is what happens. The next summer, in the somewhat inexplicable presence of a Catholic priest, we all said goodbye to Miss Wietzel and hello to Mrs. Seresin (a person my own mother, in her brief marriage to my father, never chose to become). More thrilling for my younger sister and me, though, was saying hello to our very own stepmum.



For a long time we had begged them to get married, not because marriage would really change anything, but because we’d wanted so badly to have that word, stepmum. To hold it and wield it in our hands. This is the kind of impulse that comes from growing up in a family like ours: lopsided, always requiring explanation. For four years we’d struggled to know what to call her, scavenging for some way to summarize what she meant to us and always coming up empty-handed. “Dad’s girlfriend” may have been accurate, but could not describe the person who knew the names of all my teachers, who accompanied me to grimy bathrooms in foreign countries, who was the first person I told when—secretive, shy, 11—I got my first period.



Not only that, it dislocated our connection by a degree. “My dad’s girlfriend” does not contain the undertone of ownership we all, on some level, crave in our relationships. My best friend, my fiancée, my roommate, my teacher, my stepmum—myriad bonds tied together by the same infantile word: mine, mine, mine.



“Do you like her?” people ask, often grimacing, picturing Cinderella.



What to say to this? She understands how to talk to people—to me—like no one else I’ve ever met. In sixth grade, my darkest hour, I would spend hours in my room playing loud and terrible R&B on my CD player and crying myself to sleep, and she loved me even then, even though I was objectively horrible. When people ask me if I like my stepmother, I want to say not “yes,” not even “YES!”—I want to tell them it’s a ridiculous question.



***



On the first night of the first trip we took together—a short and low-stakes weekend in the country—my sister Ruby grew suddenly flustered, turned to Sarah, and yelled:



“*You* can’t be Papa’s girlfriend. *I’m* his girlfriend!”



Ruby at that time was five years old and prone to wearing our dad’s baseball caps on her tiny head, where they resembled upended boats. None of this prevented her from seeing herself as competition for my stepmum, who was 23, 5’11”, and modelled for Tom Ford at Gucci— and, among these other advantages, not my father’s biological offspring (though a whole string of waiters over the years have assumed otherwise).



This episode is one of our family jokes. Today, when we laugh about it, it is with that particular ruthlessness of families, a laughter that promises catharsis from future conflict by confirming that our old traumas are truly dead and cold.



Sarah, on the other hand, has a relentless capacity for sympathy. One way in which she sticks out: She is never as thoroughly cruel as we are.



“You must have felt like I was stealing your dad.”



This is probably true. But it’s funny, how we talk like this––as if the people we love are things that can be stolen.



***



“I don’t know what’s happened to you. But remember: There’s no problem too big for Jesus.”



I had been nakedly sobbing for 13 subway stops when the elderly woman sitting opposite me decided to pat me lightly on the knee and tell me this.



“Thank you,” I sniffed. I more or less agreed. The imminent deadline of my senior year extended project—a play I’d written, for which I’d planned to compose an as-yet-unfinished score for solo cello—was likely not too big for Jesus. But it was indisputably too big for me, a fact I remembered immediately, the tears streaming again.



When I arrived at the house that, at this point, Sarah still shared with my dad, my face was swollen and twisted as a red balloon animal.



“Sit down,” she said. “Let’s sort this out.”



My parents—all three of them—are of the “hands-off” school of child-rearing. This is a fact for which I will always be grateful. I recently watched a documentary that chronicled the life of a bourgeois black kid in Brooklyn whose accomplished parents would circle and criticize him every night as he struggled to get through metric tons of private school homework. Watching with horror, I understood properly for the first time what people mean by “helicopter parent.” Seeing these two adults hover and hound and peck at their son, however, I could not help but feel a more accurate term might be “vulture”.



On the rare occasion that my own homework would lead me to sit morosely at our kitchen table and weep, my mother always provided the same, usually sage advice: “Just don’t do it.” My dad, connected to my academic life only in the third degree, never knew these moments even occurred. When he called from abroad and asked how school was going, it was never during those occasional blips when I couldn’t honestly tell him it was great.



Some days, though, I did need help.



  “Here’s a pen. Write down a list of everything you have to do.”



I obeyed. Once the list was complete, Sarah looked at it.



“Right. So now you have to do it.”



“I don’t know if I can.”



She shrugged, but not in an unkind way. No—this shrug was more like a gift.



“I mean, you just have to. That’s all there is to it.”



There is something beautiful about British pragmatism, a method of problem-solving guaranteed to cure even highly-advanced strains of emotional hysteria. Neither of my biological parents are British, but Sarah is, and though I generally feel rather estranged from the culture in which I grew up, at this moment I could have got down on my knees and kissed the Union Jack.



But it was more than just that. I needed my stepmum’s help at that moment because of how little she cared— how little she was capable of caring. Make no mistake: We have come to love one another unconditionally, a love grown from the ground up, the way a colossal oak tree blooms from the tiniest of seeds. Yet unlike a “real” mother, Sarah does not see an image of herself in me.



I used to think about this during parents’ evenings at school, which always reminded me of the first scene of *101 Dalmations*, in which Pongo watches dogs and owners who resemble each other in comic ways—the same sloping walk, the same fluffy hairstyle—parading together down the street. There was something in the eyes of the parents that betrayed a feeling that each triumph, each sting of embarrassment, belonged as much to them as to the child being discussed (hence the evening’s unfailing atmosphere of high drama).



Mothers and daughters are especially susceptible to this conflation of identities. I have a friend who starts dieting a few weeks before every vacation in order to make sure that, when she gets home, she’ll fit into her mother’s clothes. My relationship with my own mother has, thank God, never come close to resembling that one. Yet sometimes, in the middle of the simplest conversations, her eyes glisten—with tears of pride, concern, or simply the ferocity of maternal love.



Writing on pregnancy in *The Second Sex*, Simone de Beauvoir reflects: “[The mother] experiences it both as an enrichment and a mutilation; the fetus is part of her body, and it is a parasite exploiting her; she possesses it, and she is possessed by it.” It is from this intense reciprocity, this place of possession, that my mother’s tears flow. And it is for this same reason that, when I have spent 13 subway stops sobbing about a minor problem, I go to see my stepmum.



***



Since I’ve been in college, we’ve made a tradition of drinking bison-grass vodka at her kitchen table and talking until I miss the last train home to my mother’s apartment. This winter, when I call to arrange this, she says my half-sister, Marnie, has been sick with a consistent 109 temperature and they’ve all been trapped inside for a week.



I picture the three of them confined indoors: my half-brother crazed as a puppy to get outside again, my stepmum celebrating New Year’s Eve alone while Marnie sleeps in the room next door, her lungs rattling like little radiators. I tell Sarah I will make us dinner.



This is the kind of thing I relish about growing up: making promises like this, embarking on a special trip to the grocery store to buy fresh herbs and tahini, and refusing Sarah’s offer to pay me back. It’s a particularly adult way of showing love, a performance I’m still in the process of learning.



When I think about how families are supposed to love, my mind drifts to nouns: a good wife, a good parent, a



good daughter (that the nouns are skewed feminine should not require explanation). Such phrases litter our culture. *The Good Wife* is a popular CBS television show; Simone de Beauvoir herself called her first autobiography *Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter*. There is no such thing, however, as “The Good Stepdaughter”—not even “A Good Stepdaughter.” There is only me, insisting that Sarah sit still while I look for an ice-cream scoop, opening all the wrong drawers.



***



Often, when people talk about non-biological parents—step, adoptive, or otherwise—they speak in terms of a special connection that’s supposedly missing. I won’t deny such a connection exists. As a kid I was once involved in a horse-riding accident, and before my best friend’s mother (whose watch I’d been under) had a chance to let my family know, she got a call from my own mother, miles away.



“Sorry to be paranoid, but is Indiana alright? I just got a weird feeling.”



Regardless of the unconditional love that has over the years steadily blossomed between my stepmum and me, regardless of the fact that I consider her as much a parent as my own dad, I doubt she would ever experience this kind of cosmic tug. Here’s another example: When I was nine, I fell off a boat. Within seconds, my father, the only person capable of commanding the boat, jumped in after me. The look on his face is still frozen in my mind, and there is no way to describe it other than stupid: eyes round as coins, lips pursed single-mindedly.



All instinctive love is stupid, and without it, none of us—not one dumb, devoted mammal on God’s green earth—would survive. Yet its consequences can be disastrous. For just as one child was heroically saved that day (more so by her lifejacket than her father’s love, but that’s not how this story is told) the other was left stranded on a boat, yelping, accompanied only by a stepmother who didn’t know how to sail.



This story, too, has become a family joke, albeit one we approach with more caution. For years afterwards it remained charged with the potential to provoke an argument between my stepmum and my dad.



“It’s the *one* rule of sailing!” Sarah would cry in exasperation. “If you’re the only one who can sail, you don’t abandon the boat!”



After the birth of my half-sister, however, her anger subsided.



“I do get it now,” she tells me, a tinge of disgruntlement lingering in her voice. “It was still a terrible idea to jump in after you, but I get it, because I would probably do the same.”



What actually ended up happening was, while my dad and I bobbed fairly contentedly in the warm water, my stepmum and sister zoomed off toward the horizon, propelled by a suddenly violent wind. Sarah—25 at the time, only three years older than I am now—had no idea how to even begin slowing the boat, let alone turning it around. She didn’t even know the three-digit emergency number, the only means of contacting dry land. Meanwhile, the shoreline withdrew, and the wind swallowed my sister’s screams.



After an undetermined stretch of time—to my dad and me, minutes, for Ruby and Sarah, years—a yacht cruised by. Restraining her panic, my stepmum managed to communicate with the two experienced sailors aboard, slowly regain control of our boat, and eventually steer it back toward my father and me, who were still buoyed by our life- jackets and amusedly comparing our plight to the movie *Open Water*. With some fumbling, we climbed aboard— me first, then my father—into an emotional thunder- storm of relief, fading hysteria, and furious glances.



Not for the last time, my stepmum had rescued me. 

Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher. As a student of Louis Althusser, he coauthored the influential *Reading Capital*. His extensive writings have analyzed the nation-state, race, citizenship, identity and, most recently, the problem of political violence. Balibar is a visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. *The Harvard Advocate*’s Art Editor, Brad Bolman, sat down with Balibar on the occasion of his lecture, “Violence, Civility, and Politics Revisited,” at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center on November 5, 2014.



*I was wondering if you could speak about your work through the lens of possession. You often write about citizenship, which is a matter of being possessed by a nation or government, but also in terms of possessing rights, country and space.*





This year, Verso published* Identity and Difference: John Locke and The Invention of Consciousness*, a commentary on John Locke’s* An Essay on Human Understanding*. This essay is a classic, an absolutely fundamental reference for discussions about personal identity. I’ve always had, perhaps a very continental idea, that a philosopher’s metaphysics or epistemology and his politics and political philosophy must have very intimate and intrinsic relations. That’s the case for anybody from Plato to Spinoza. I found analogies between [Locke’s] theory of personal identity and his political theory, where individual liberty is famously based on the notion of self-ownership, which he called “propriety in one’s person.” So on one side, he has a basic notion of “possessive individualism.” And on the other side, a theory of autonomy and conscious identity where the only basis for an assignation of identity is the consciousness that an individual has that his thoughts, memories, etc. are really his and not somebody else’s.







*For Locke, then, individual identity is fundamentally a matter of asserting one’s control over one’s thoughts. How does he explain this process? *





How do I know that I am myself, and not you? That’s because my thoughts are *mine* and your thoughts are *not* mine. And I can also be sure that my thoughts are not yours, you are not owning my thoughts—owning is an extremely interesting category. On the other side, you have the idea that one’s individual, social and political autonomy comes from the fact that something is, so to speak, inalienable. So it’s “propriety in one’s person,” which Locke develops by using a formula that was central during the English Revolution, one by which English revolutionaries, including such radicals as the Levelers and so on, would claim they were independent from the state. It’s the formula that “propriety in one’s person” is one’s life, liberty, and estate, a very interesting formula which resonates with *habeas corpus* and a number of issues.





*Because in the latter example, at least, it is a matter of maintaining ownership of one’s own person against a sovereign power.*





Yes. And to continue with your theme of *Possession*, something interferes, so to speak, an extremely long and bizarre part of Locke’s chapter [which] is devoted to counterfactuals—cases in which the criterion that he proposes yields results that are counterintuitive from the point of view of what most people think to be the identity of a person. Cases in which there are multi- ple personalities or split identities, including an extraordinary passage which seems to directly anticipate and foreground [Robert Louis] Stevenson’s famous novel* Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*. It’s a question of somebody who does something—he calls the two personalities the Night-Man and the Day-Man, and the Day-Man, not by chance, is an honest man, while the Night-Man is a criminal—and the question is whether the night man, who has absolutely no memory of the crimes that were committed during the night by his alias, should be held responsible for these actions. The logical answer is no.





*Because they are different men to some degree. The parallel with Stevenson is fascinating.*





Then there are other cases which are more similar to problems of possession, precisely, or *invasion*, I would say, of one’s identity by somebody else’s thoughts or powers, which are not cases of *split* identity but cases, so to speak, of *fused* identities. So Locke invents a mythical example. He says, “What if I could find among my memories the thoughts of somebody who has lived centuries ago?” or “What if Plato?”—that’s wonderful because it seems to anticipate [Jacques] Derrida—





*And particularly his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,” perhaps also his use of “specters” and “haunting” to describe the function of speech and memory.*





Yes, of course. So he says, “What if Plato did not simply interpret or transmit Socrates’ thoughts, but actually had Socrates’ thoughts in his mind?” I find this extraordinary because, though I’m not superstitious myself, I think what we learn from psychoanalysis and other deep psychology theories, etc, is the fact that after all it’s not so easy to distinguish sometimes between your own thoughts and others that have been somehow adopted. So it appeared to me that Locke was a key figure to investigate in the classical era, and at a moment when philosophers of his kind are supposed to be pure rationalists, if you like, in fact a whole array of questions involving the two sides of this relationship: membership, on one side, or relationship to others; and possession, or property, or appropriation and belonging on the other side.





Now I’ve also reached the moment when I want to say something about not only individualism, but the construction of the abstract individual who is supposed to be the bearer, one would say, of rights—and that includes rights to possess and to acquire, in Marxist terminology, the bourgeois “Discourse of Modernity.” This combines two sides of the problem: Why is it necessary to be able to possess rights and things, but also knowledge, etc., to become a normal or a full member of the civic community? And how can we understand that the kind of legal and social normalcy or normative framework that was progressively built in Europe, and therefore in the world during the classical age, especially in England and France and the United States, has a very strict correlation between membership in a civic community, on the one hand, and being a bearer, being defined, I would say, as a universal person by one’s capacity to possess and acquire, again, not only things, but one’s self, one’s labor force, one’s knowledge?





*To be this subject that constantly seeks to possess and master both itself and everything around it. *





Of course this is fascinating in many respects: first, it involves that you accept very strong constraints, I would say, or logical axioms both concerning community and concerning individuality. And then it is also interesting because, as classical theorists knew, there are limits. At some point you reach a limit where it’s no longer reasonable to have this absolute right. Intellectual property is an obvious example. Philosophers like Kant and Fichte wrote seminal essays on how to define intellectual property and secure the rights of one individual over his thoughts, his work. What is it that you exactly own? What is it that ought to be protected? What is it that should not and could not be defined as an object of absolute individual appropriation without catastrophic consequences? Is it your thoughts? Is it your words? Is it your style when you write something? And so on. Where does it cease to be rational?





And of course these things are, today—I’m not an expert on that, but legal theorists and others are permanently concerned with it not only because new technologies profoundly modify the ways in which thoughts are shared but for that reason also invented or appropriated—subjectively, the relationship of individuals to their own ideas is changing rapidly. If you’re on a chat on your computer, there are words and ideas that flow permanently and circulate among different persons. It’s an incredible acceleration which in earlier times would take much more time and, so to speak, give you the time to identify with your thoughts, etc.





And then there are the pathological limits, I would say. It was of course on purpose that I used the formula that what classical philosophers and, in fact, the law itself characterized as this correlation between possessive individuality and civic membership is a sort of normalized vision or representation of the human. I’m not contesting that we need normalized forms, except they’re not exactly the same in all cultures and that’s an important point. What transgresses the limits of normality is, in some cases, not only as important or interesting as the normal itself, but it is also something where it’s not only a question of rights that individuals have, but it’s also a question of what kinds of constraints and, in some cases, *violent* constraints they’re subjected to and they can exert on each other.





*There was one moment in your lecture yesterday when you spoke about “cruelty” very close to the beginning. You mentioned the way it stretches or challenges the difference between subject and object and the form of “violence” that might exist between those two categories. The two examples that you gave of objects, and violence done to or by objects, were “Art” and the “Museum,” and I thought you were maybe referencing Steven Miller’s *War After Death—





It’s a beautiful book. It’s a wonderful book.





*I thought of the Buddhas— *





—of Bamiyan, yes.





*And so I wondered if you could develop this idea further, in terms of how you think about violence and the object in relation to art, and perhaps the museum, in particular, which I thought was an interesting example— *





Not only was it quick, but it was provocative and perhaps reached the limits of absurdity because I simplified [Miller’s] presentation enormously. Because his presentation involves some considerations on not only the question of death, but the way in which you apply the adjective “dead,” which could trace back to our previous discussion, and because the criterion of something being *living* or being *dead* suddenly plays a role in every discussion of possessing, appropriating, mastering, and so on. But of course “dead” has two different meanings in our languages: either it’s the result of the action of killing, so what is dead is what used to be alive, or dead means it’s not alive because it was never alive. So you say that this table was a *dead* object which apparently doesn’t mean the same thing as “I’m sorry you asked about my father’s health, but he’s dead.” You know?





Some things are dead because they died, but others are dead because they never lived. Now the interesting thing is that progressively you discover there are all sorts of important objects which are in a dubious or intermediary situation between these two poles. And we are used to saying “This is a metaphoric use of the term.” But first, again, if you move to another environment, things become rapidly, extremely different. So of course our rational—and I have to say Eurocentric and colonial—way of looking at things easily pushes into *superstition*, *fetishism*, etc. every idea that statues or objects are alive or dead. But we have our own fetishism, as Marx perfectly well knew and others explained.





*The “queer” agency and life granted to the commodity. *





And art finds itself in a strategic situation also because we think that art, I mean we speak of “live” performances, the fact that painting, writing, taking pictures, etc. are activities which either bring to life or create life, so to speak, or, on the contrary, kill, in a sense, their objects. That’s again metaphoric. In a famous passage the poet Mallarmé explained that the word, in a sense, kills the object. You see anthropologists today who pay great attention and respect to the idea very broadly shared and accepted among Native American Indians, for example, whose religious or cultural objects have been taken in one way or another and transformed into a museum object—that they have been *killed*. You can extend that and say they are in a cage, or have been killed, or have been held hostage.





And then, if you admit that life has a symbolic dimension and art is an essential discourse or practice to reveal that symbolic dimension, you no longer find it extraordinary or absurd to extend and take seriously such categories as imprisoning, or enclosing, or killing, etc. to cultural objects. There are moments in which we are all angry and we think that the museum is sordid—while it can be beautiful, it can be extremely refined and scholarly—but some artists would say, “My works were not made to be put in a room, in a museum. They were made to circulate.” Which in fact of course leads to another form of appropriation and possession. 

Ah remember walkin along Princes Street wi Spud, we both hate walkin along that hideous street, deadened by tourists and shoppers, the twin curses ay modern capitalism.

–Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting



There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.

–Pythagoras



Peacock Princess



The dancers hop around the stage, dressed in polyester costumes, accompanied by the music of electronic lutes. The women are uniformly attractive in their false eyelashes and youth. Most of the men look mediocre, but two tall chiseled fellows keep pushing their way to the front of the ensemble, aware that they’re the stars of the display.

Now the dancers flit their way backstage for a quick change. Soon they’re back, some in flower cuffs that radiate petals from their necks, others in imitations of Miao, Hani, or Dai ethnic dress, beaded, tasseled and zipped up. It’s a production of “The Peacock Princess,” a Dai folk tale that parallels “Swan Lake,” in the largest indoor auditorium in the town of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province.

The audience is overwhelmingly Han Chinese, and most of them are tourists. The town follows an official demographic policy of “three-three-three”: one-third Dai, one-third Han, and one-third other minorities. The province is known for having 25 of the People’s Republic of China’s 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. As tourism in China booms, however, more and more Han Chinese flock to so-called minority attractions to watch ensemble performances, tour ethnic villages, and eat and drink.

“Han run pretty much everything,” says a cab driver, a transplant from Jiangsu province. “The local people are too lazy.” After a moment, he reconsiders, “Well, not exactly. The Dai king is still a big shot around here. The government couldn’t build that new airport until he gave the go ahead.”

Indeed, the locals are far from complacent in this business. A tour of a traditional Dai village is often a classic fool’s gold scam. In this case, the gold is silver—a young woman brings a group of tourists into her family’s traditional Dai home, raised on wooden stilts, in an ostensible cultural exchange that ultimately turns into a marketing pitch for fake silver trinkets.

Not that tourists aren’t easily duped. At the end of her spiel, the woman brings out a black velvet-draped table hitherto hidden in a corner. She whips off the cloth to reveal gleaming silver bracelets, belts, cups, and bowls; a king’s ransom in ancient times. The tourists descend on the shiny things like magpies.

The Chinese tourism business is the business of spectacle. The production of “The Peacock Princess” imitates the most lavish of Broadway musicals or Disneyland shows, but without a multi-million dollar budget. It’s no Tchaikovsky ballet. Men in cartoon elephant suits pretend to play fake gourd flutes, while music emanates from speakers. The flute syncing is impressive, but when one player misses a beat, he smiles sheepishly at the front row and continues pretending. The show must go on.

Despite the peacock glitz and glitter of the production, certain movements emerge like jewels from sand. The dancer who plays the Peacock Princess is a slender, sickle-backed young woman. Her white dress billows from her body as she arcs around her prince in uncertain pirouettes. She circles toward him; their fingers nearly touch.



Bread Loaf Bus



A ubiquitous form of transportation in China, next to the classic motor scooter, is the bread loaf bus. Named for their shape, the vehicles are precariously top-heavy and so often tip over that their sale has been outlawed. Many buses, however, are still in service as tour vehicles. Prized for their large carrying capacity, the buses zoom cheerfully down mountain roads. I could swear I’ve seen their wheels leave the ground, but the passengers inside usually provide a heavy enough ballast against catastrophe.

Inside the bus, the tour guide, if he is a good one, is a combination of travel agent, marketing representative, and comedian. Our guide, the son of a Han father and Dai mother, quips trivia about the local culture. I wonder if he ever gets tired of repeating the same stories day after day, but he seems animated, if rehearsed. He’s a thin man with crooked teeth. When he walks down the bus to collect our ticket fares, golden rings slip and slide on his bony fingers.

“This is such a good deal,” he tells us. “If you had bought the tickets on your own, it would have cost two times as much.” We take him at his word.

The passengers in the bread loaf bus are a decent representation of the Chinese middle class. An older father tells us proudly that his children, a daughter and a son, are both enrolled in “international” schools in Shanghai. Two friends, women in their early thirties, trade iPhone photos on the WeChat social network. A family with an adult daughter hardly says a word the entire ride. Two families are accompanied by sets of grandparents.

The tickets in question afford entrance to a Dai Water Festival show. According to our guide, the Dai celebrate the New Year (in April by the Gregorian calendar) with a water fight from dawn to dusk. Capitalizing on this novelty, daily New Year’s Water Festivals have sprung up around the city. Before we make it to the show, we make an obligatory stop at a tourist-centered jewelry store, a common but unadvertised itinerary item on Chinese tour trips. For a commission, the tour guide drops his passengers off at a jewelry store in the middle of nowhere for an hour or so and “encourages” them to make purchases.

We eventually make it to the Water Festival, which takes place in a round amphitheater. Middle-aged local women splash water from a shallow circular pool onto giggling visitors, who stand all around the edges. At one point, a fully grown Asian elephant is brought out, flapping its ears at the arcs of sparkling water landing on its back. Like our tour guide, its feelings about all this are unreadable.

The festival is not one for those in search of authenticity, unless they can find it in the faces of the women selling plastic bags of dried coconut and papaya and sugarcane juice, or the peddlers weaving through the crowd, pressing flower and nut shell garlands into hands, for a price. This is the New Year, rehearsed and paid for, but perhaps no different from any other. Soon the water women are parading around the amphitheater, baptizing us with splashes from plastic bowls.



Mechanical Buddha



A gilt Buddha statue, 49 meters high, looms over Xishuangbanna. It’s the showpiece of the Mengle Great Buddhist Monastery, the largest Theravada Buddhist site in China. 300 monks pray at the monastery daily, but today not a one is to be seen. To reach the Buddha, we take 2,000 steps up a small mountain, interspersed with temple halls.

When we reach the temple at the feet of the Buddha, an angry old man bursts out its doors. He curses the tour guide, stuffs his feet into his shoes, and flies back down the mountain. We raise our eyebrows at his apparent irreverence and step over the threshold into the cool temple.

We soon discover the reason for the old man’s rage. A guide leads us clockwise around the temple, depositing us at successive stations like children at a craft fair. At each station, we are asked in solemn tones to buy commemorative candles, statuettes, or bracelets, items which become successively more costly as we rotate along the temple—all the better to reach nirvana. A woman tries to sell us a lotus-shaped candle for 25 yuan. When we don’t take the bait, she lowers the price to 15. We escape her clutches, and the eternal spiral, by stuffing a ten-yuan bill into a donation box.

Escape leads us to an observation deck, high above the city. From here, everything is a miniature kingdom. Bridges and cars are toys, and the river is a distant ribbon. The Buddha presides over a circular plot of land, a wasted area like some Tolkienesque fortress. Officials plan to one day turn it into a park.

As we descend from the deck, we enter into another hall, occupied by a statue of a sitting Buddha. Touring monks from Thailand snap cell phone pictures. Above them, large paintings depicting Siddhartha Gautama’s life encircle the hall. They start from the entrance and end behind the Buddha’s back, like a continuous comic strip.

The paintings are strange. The usual clouds and halos mingle with weird futuristic imaginings, some downright psychedelic. In one painting, the Buddha is flanked on his left by a metallic city full of steel-blue towers. On closer inspection, floating vehicles zoom between the buildings, and in the sky are what look like flying saucers. On his right is a misty, wooded glen: Between two columns of rocks issues a mysterious blue light.

Following the progression of the paintings, I walk behind the statue. There, in the darkness cast by the Buddha’s back, is a wall to ceiling painting of a demon. His eyes bulge from his red face. His tongue lolls, and horns sprout from his veiny head. I step back quickly, but in retrospect, maybe I should have paid more attention. For if the golden Buddha could hide a demon behind his back, there may very well be an accountant inside his belly.



Market Economy



Any good trip requires an inventory of the food consumed. The complimentary breakfast buffet, an industry standard in China, is vast enough to fill any intrepid belly. Staples include steamed buns and noodle bowls, as well as sliced white bread and pastries. Buffet trays of vegetables—bok choy and potatoes fried to an oily sheen —line a banquet table. A pot of bitter Arabica coffee and a kettle of Pu’er tea, both produced in Yunnan, are nods to the local flavor. The backdrop to all this is the main Xishuangbanna hotel, boasting marble floors and a diorama with real Land Rovers.

Another staple is the convenience shop, though not the chain markets familiar in the United States. Although these small shops sell much of the same goods, they are independent, manned by their owners who sit and fan themselves behind the cash register. The shops themselves are often little more than an alcove just off the street. The narrow shelves, cluttered or neat depending on the owner’s inclination, are stocked with items like mango creme Oreos and Pocky. Each has an ice cream freezer, crammed with mung bean popsicles and ice cream cups. In warm Xishuangbanna, the freezers are insulated with a thick cotton blanket to cut refrigeration costs.

The nocturnal sibling to these shops is the Jinghong night market, which winds under the bridge over the Mekong river. Here, anything imaginable is for sale, from electronics to nail decals to long underwear to real tattoos. But we’re really here for the food, which comprises an overwhelming majority of the market. Fruit juice vendors jostle for space with barbeque stands, which will grill anything imaginable: river eel, cuttlefish, fungus, potatoes, and more. The entire scene buzzes under hot fluorescent firefly lights rigged to generators.

If the night market and the convenience shop go hand in hand, then their natural antithesis must be Xishuangbanna’s only Walmart store, at the anchor of a busy intersection. Entering the store, however, the same variety of goods and foodstuffs are found for similar rock-bottom prices. The only major difference seems to be that the store is air-conditioned and the workers are uniformed in Walmart’s trademark blue.



Land Dam



The winding old road from Kunming (the capital of Yunnan province) to Xishuangbanna to the Yunnan Tropical Botanical Garden will be replaced within the year by a new highway, which will cut travel time in half. The bones of the highway are already laid down. They embrace Xishuangbanna like prehistoric ribs.

The electric zing of steel and concrete can be heard for some time when driving on the old road, but the sound is soon lost among the banana trees, which stretch out as far as the eye can see. The trees are not tall; these bananas are a short, fat variety that must be protected against the cold night air. Each banana is individually wrapped—they look like small sleeping bags dangling from the trees.

Not to be outdone, the rubber trees, like bent beggar men, are outfitted with one wooden bowl each, tied to the trunk to catch their precious sap. Hordes of these odd couples, these stout banana trees and slender rubber trees, march over the mountains. Tourists, rubber, and bananas, in their overrunning glory, are the three mighty pillars which hold up the region’s economy.

The mighty Mekong river shoots through Yunnan province before it curves through Laos, Thailand and Cambodia and reaches the South China Sea. An inflatable boat trip down the river reveals the full scope of the highway project. A series of latticed concrete beams hold back the mountains, which have been scooped away to make way for the road. Eventually vegetation will grow between the lattices, but for now they are bald and empty. The red earth of the mountain bulges through the gaps, as if threatening to burst through. River swallows scream at the sky, and farther down the river, the forest is thick as tree moss.

Our boat docks in a tiny bay. The boatman tells us to get off and take a break as he reels in a fishing net, cast earlier that day. We climb some steps to find construction in progress. In a flat clearing, space has been made for a sandy volleyball pit. Above, workers pour gravel into metal chutes, the sound like breaking glass or miniature avalanches. Thick stacks of bamboo are everywhere. Eventually, this clearing will become a riverside resort.

We snap photos and return to the boat. The boatman has finished reeling his net. “Nothing today,” he says. “But once I caught a fish that weighed a hundred pounds.” He casts out the net again. It whirls and wheels out over the water and sinks into the current. We get back on the inflatable boat, the engine sputters to a start, and we head back toward the city.



Earthly Mysteries and Celestial Spheres



Xishuangbanna marks my third trip with a Chinese tour group. The first was a journey through Qingdao in Shandong province, best known for German influences that culminated in the form of Tsingtao beer, and its official designation as China’s Most Livable City.

The second was through Hainan, an island in the southernmost tip of China. We were plied with coconuts and fried tofu, and stuffed to the gills with seafood. Our tour guide tried to con us a couple of times, bringing us to the wrong hotel and several jewelry stores.

In each of these tropical paradise destinations, there is one constant. Red-beaked seagulls migrate every year from Siberia to winter on the temperate coasts. Since 1985, tens of thousands have alighted each winter on Kunming’s Dianchi Lake, where the local people call them “the winter angels.”

Residents and tourists, gather each year at Dianchi to greet these familiar friends. Parents, who remember the first bold flocks, now bring their children. Carts along the lake sell fluffy loaves of French bread for a few cents per bag. The visitors toss pieces of bread into the sky. With steady precision, the gulls swoop and catch. The cool lake, which rivals Lake Ontario in size, shimmers and reflects their enigmatic flight.

How they found their way across the frigid miles to Kunming is a mystery, but generation after generation they come. They must be attuned to the magnetic stars, to the music of the celestial spheres; when they are startled by some invisible sign, they lift from the lake like spirits. They come, and they leave. Where they go once winter ends, no one knows. What remains only is the hope of their return.



 

1.



 



In the reign of George III, Captain James Cook, who was called captain out of necessity, he was a mere lieutenant before that, left England for that land mass in the Pacific Ocean called then Terra Australis Incognita, to observe the planet Venus as it traversed the space that stood between the Earth and the Sun. He sailed on a ship called the Endeavour and he took with him: botanists (Joseph Banks, who brought along Daniel Carlsson Solander, a disciple and former student of Linnaeus, who brought along his friend and fellow botanist Herman Sporing); artists (the painters William Hodges and Sydney Parkinson); and scientists, and it is in this way that the Second Age of European global domination begins. Cook and his crew left England in August, 1768. They stopped off in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where they noticed that there were no beggars on the streets. And if anyone told them that those former beggars now owned land and owned people to work that land, and so therefore had no need to be beggars anymore, I can so far find no record of this. 



 



2.



 



A Scottish geographer named Alexander Dalrymple was originally named captain of the Endeavour on this first voyage, but the First Lord of the Admiralty, a man named Edward Hawke, objected to Dalrymple because he was not a seaman, only a mere geographer. I note Edward Hawke because I grew up in a section of Antigua called Ovals, a term associated with cricket, a sport with rules said to embody the honorable character of the English people. This place is a neighborhood made up of five streets, and each street was named after an English maritime hero/criminal: Rodney, Nelson, Hawke, Hood, and Drake. Among my daily duties was to pick up our bottle of cow’s milk from a woman who lived on Hawke Street. We lived on Nelson Street, and this was only two streets away from Hawke, but for me the journey was full of dread, for I was afraid of dogs, and there was always a dog who would bark at me, and I imagined that the bark and the bite were the same; and there was also a house in which lived a beautiful girl, not so much older than me, who did live with her mother but had silenced her, so that her mother’s commands not to play calypso music very loud, and not to congregate with boys or men were completely ignored. Her name was Marie, and she frightened me, but not for very long: She ran away to Trinidad to be with The Mighty Sparrow, and we all knew the song by him, “I love the way you walk Marie, I love the way you talk Marie,” was about her. She lived on Hawke Street, I lived on Nelson Street. The Mighty Sparrow was of Trinidad, and Trinidad is a word of Spanish origin, a word born of the imagination of that other greater and earlier explorer, whose name does not appear in James Cook’s Journals, as far as I can tell.



 



3.



 



In Rio de Janeiro, the women are addicted to gallantry. Solander notes that in the evening, women appear at every window to present “nosegays” to the men they favor. 



But Solander knows flowers, and a nosegay is made up of flowers. What flowers made up these nosegays? He does not say. In any case the climate of Rio, which in August is not Summer, he finds okay. The soil, he notes, produces all the tropical fruits: oranges, lemons, limes, melons, mangoes, cocoa nuts. And then this: “The mines are rich, and lie a considerable way up the country. They were kept so private, that any person found upon the road which led to them, was hung upon the next tree, unless he could give a satisfactory account of the cause of his being in that situation. Near 40,000 (forty thousand) negroes are annually imported to dig in these mines, which are so pernicious to the human frame, and occasion so great a mortality amongst the poor wretches employed in them, that in the year 1766, 20,000 more were drafted from the town of Rio, to supply the deficiency of the former number. Who can read this without emotion!”  That was on August seventh.



 



4.



 



On the eighth, they left Rio and sailed on into the Pacific Ocean where nothing happened until the twenty-second, when they came upon a colony of water-dwelling mammals, grey in colour. On the twenty-third, they witnessed an eclipse of the moon, and the next morning, this: “a small white cloud appeared in the west, from which a train of fire issued, extending itself westerly; about two minutes after, we heard two distinct loud explosions, immediately succeeding each other, like those of cannon, after which the cloud disappeared.” 



 



(Right here I want to interject something: for the journal keeper, and this is Cook, the world is still familiar: he knows beggars and so the absence of beggars is interesting; women who are in a confined role and now women who are whores and borrowing the symbols that flag purity and worthiness; the contents of the mines being extracted by forced labour.)



 



5.



 



On the fourth of January, 1769, Cook’s crew mistook a fog bank for an island. On the fourteenth, they encountered a storm in the Strait of La Maire, but found shelter in a cove which Cook named St. Vincent’s Bay. Banks and Solander went ashore, and the journals recount: “having been on shore some hours, returned with more than a hundred different plants and flowers, hitherto unnoticed by the European botanists.”



 



6.



 



On April tenth: “looking out for the island to which they were destined, they saw land ahead. The next morning it appeared very high and mountainous, and it was known to be King George’s III’s Island, so named by Captain Wallis, but by the natives called Otaheite. The calms prevented the Endeavour from approaching it till the morning of the twelfth when, a breeze springing up, several canoes were making towards the ship. Each canoe had in it young plantains, and branches of trees, as tokens of peace and friendship; and they were handed up the sides of the ship by the people in one of the canoes, who made signals in a very expressive manner, intimating that they desired these emblems of pacification be placed in a conspicuous part of the ship; and they were accordingly stuck amongst the rigging, at which they testified their approbation. Their cargoes consisted of cocoa-nuts, bananas, breadfruit, apples, and figs, which were very acceptable to the crew, and were readily purchased.” (But how was this purchase made? There is no account of it.)



 



7.



 



Twenty days later: “Tomio came running to the tents and taking Mr. Banks by the arm, to whom they applied in all emergent cases, told him that Tubora Tumaida was dying, owing to something which had been given to him by the sailors, and prayed him to go instantly to him. Accordingly Mr. Banks went, and found the Indian very sick. He was told, that he had been vomiting, and had thrown up a leaf, which they said contained some of the poison he had taken. Upon examining the leaf, Mr. Banks found it to be nothing more than tobacco, which the Indian had begged of some of their people. He looked up to Mr. Banks while he was examining the leaf, as if he had not a moment to live. Mr. Banks,  now knowing his disorder, ordered him to drink cocoa-nut milk, which soon restored him to health, and he was as cheerful as ever.”



 



8.



 



On Tuesday the ninth of May: “The natives, after repeated attempts, finding themselves incapable of pronouncing the names of the English gentlemen, had recourse to new ones formed from their own language. Captain Cook was named Toote; Hicks, Hete; Gore, Toura; Solander, Tolano; Banks, Opane; Green, Treene; and so on for the greatest part of the ships crew.”



 



9.



 



On July fourth, Banks planted “a quantity of the seeds of water melons, oranges, lemons, limes, and other plants and trees which he had brought from Rio de Janiero. He gave these seeds to the Indians in great plenty, and planted many of them in the woods: some of the melon seeds which had been planted soon after his arrival, had already produced plants, which appeared to be in a very flourishing state.”



 



10.



 



On the ninth of July, when Captain Cook wished to leave, two of his men were missing. He held important native people hostage, demanding his men be freed. But the “Indians” did not have them. They were in the mountains, they had taken wives. When his men returned, they told him that the Indians were right, they wanted to stay there, and had hidden themselves, hoping he would leave without them. In the middle of all this, Cook’s note: “They have no European fruits, garden stuff, or pulse, nor grain of any species.” 



 



11.



 



Between the fifth of August and the fifteenth of August: “The island of Ohiteroa does not shoot up into high peaks, like the others which they visited, but is more level and uniform, and divided into small hillocks, some of which are covered with groves of trees; they saw no bread-fruit, and not many cocoa-nut trees, but great number of the tree called Etoa were planted all along the shore.”



 



12.



 



On the twenty-fifth of August, the adventurers from England celebrated being away from home for one year with Cheshire cheese and port, and the port would have come from Portugal or Spain, places they didn’t think much of, but which all the same contributed much to their intimate identity, their intimate mannerisms and posture, the people they were when no one cared to look. The journal records that the port was “as good as any they had ever drank in England.”



 



13.



 



Sometime around the twentieth of October: “Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander visited their houses, and were kindly received. Fish constituted their principal food at the time, and the root of a sort of fern served them for bread; which, when roasted upon a fire, and divested of its bark, was sweet and clammy; in taste not disagreeable, but unpleasant from its number of fibres. Vegetables were, doubtless, at other seasons plentiful. The women paint their faces red, which, so far from increasing, diminishes the very little beauty they have.” 



 



14.



 



On the morning of November third: “they gave the name of The Court of Aldermen to a number of small islands that lay contiguous. The chief, who governed the district from Cape Turnagain to this coast, was named Teratu.”



 



15.



 



On November eleventh: “oysters were procured in great abundance from a bed which had been discovered, and they proved exceedingly good. Next day the ship was visited by two canoes, with unknown Indians; after some invitation, they came on board, and trafficked without fraud. Captain Cook sailed from this bay, after taking possession of it in the name of the King of Great Britain on the fifteenth.” (For me, it’s rare to see that: taking possession in the name of a monarch of Great Britain.)



 



16.



 



On the eighteenth (still November), Cook, Banks and Solander go off to examine a bay where a river empties. They find trees that are tall and thick in trunk, trees they have never seen before. Cook calls the river Thames, “it being not unlike our river of the same name.” 



 



17.



 



William Bligh was born on the ninth of September, 1754. He joined the navy at 16. At 22, he was appointed master of the Resolution, one of the ships accompanying James Cook on his third and last voyage to the Pacific. After this, he was placed in command of ships that protected trade in the West Indies. In 1787, Joseph Banks commissioned him to go to Tahiti and collect plants of the breadfruit tree, which were to be taken to the West Indies and distributed among the many British-owned islands, where they would be grown as food for the enslaved African population. This journey was not a success. His crew mutinied, and threw him and the plants he had collected overboard. He did not sink to the bottom of the ocean, but the plants did. In an open boat that was about 20 feet long, and accompanied by some sailors loyal to him, he arrived in Timor six weeks later. In 1791, in a ship called Providence, he sailed again to Tahiti, to get some more of that same monoecious tree, and this time his efforts were successful. The men did not mutiny, but they did complain that he rationed their supply of water, all to make certain that not one plant would die. Bligh was eventually made governor of the prison colony that Australia had become, but eventually the prisoners, like his crew, mutinied against him. He was arrested and jailed in Sydney for more than a year. He returned to England in 1810 and died in 1817. He is buried in a churchyard in Lambeth, with his wife and two of his five children. In that same churchyard are buried the Tradescants, Father and Son. I once saw these graves while visiting an exhibition devoted to Gertrude Jykell. The church is now a museum devoted to the garden.



 



18.



 



The breadfruit belongs to the genus Artocarpus, and in that genus there are some 60 shrubs and trees. The genus in turn belongs in the Moraceae or mulberry family. The name Artocarpus comes from the Greek language: artos means bread, karpos means fruit. These plants were named so by Johann Reinhold Forster and J. George Adam Forster, father and son botanists who accompanied James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific. They were passengers aboard the Resolution.



 



19.



 



HMS Providence arrived in Kingstown, St. Vincent in early 1793 with many live breadfruit plants. By then, in St. Vincent as would be so in many other islands that were British-owned, a Botanic Garden had been established. In actuality, these places were not Botanic Gardens at all. They were primarily of economic importance, involved in the prosperity of the mother country. They were modeled on Kew Gardens, which was established by Joseph Banks, who became its first Director. (The second and third were the Hookers, father and son.) Some of this first collection of breadfruit plants was also sent to Jamaica, which was the largest British-owned island. 



 



20.



 



Near the end of the eighteenth century, there were many slaves in the West Indies. Certainly by then to say you were from the West Indies was to say you were black or of African descent. Europeans didn’t like living there. Most people who owned plantations paid other people to manage them. White people who lived in these places, where there were so many enslaved black people, were not considered really white people anymore: they were creole, the first meaning of that word. The word now can mean all sorts of things but it’s in that way it was first used: to designate a white person born and living in the black and enslaved world.



 



21.



 



Those many slaves had to eat food. And they had to have time to cultivate it. It isn’t hard to imagine the calculation: If an easy source of nourishment could be found for these people, they would produce more valuable goods instead of growing their own food. 



 



22.



 



The slaves never liked the breadfruit. They refused to eat it. With the exception of my mother, a woman who was born on the island of Dominica, I have never met anyone who liked the breadfruit. In particular, and especially, I have never met a child who liked the breadfruit. The breadfruit is said to be bland but there are other bland foods and they are not shunned. It is said to be starchy, but I can think of many other foods that are starchy and they are not shunned. 



 



23.



 



The breadfruit or Artocarpus altilis is a flowering tree in the family Moraceae. It is cultivated in a lot of places that are warm in climate all year round. It is native to the islands in the Pacific Ocean. It grows to an enormous height. Its leaves are large, thick and deeply incised. The plant yields a latex-like fluid that can be used in boat caulking. The fruits are seasonal, says a book I consulted about it, but I seem to remember it as always in season and readily available to my mother, who used to insist to me that it was of great nutritional value. The tree itself is of such generous height and breadth that it can be used as a shade tree, yet I have never seen such use made of it, even in a place as sun-drenched as the place where I grew up.



 



24.



 



My mother was born on the island of Dominica, and notice the way this is phrased: for of James Cook, I would say that he was born in a village, and that village would be in a country, not an island. An island is ephemeral, and yet James Cook was born on an island; but my mother was born on the island of Dominica, and she grew up there; she left when she was 16 years of age, taking passage in a boat that almost sunk when it ran into a hurricane in an area called the Guadeloupe Channel. She had quarreled with her family and did not see them again for 30 years. She continued her quarrel with them through letters, and those letters traveled through the postal arrangement that had been put in place by Anthony Trollope. When she was in her sixth decade of living, she began to return to Dominica and see the people who made up her understanding of the world before she knew men and children and other people. While there, she ate a breadfruit that to her had such extraordinary flavor, that she collected the seeds, and brought them back to Antigua. She planted the seeds just on the boundary of our yard, and from those seeds grew one tree of unusual height and of unusual beauty. Shortly before her son, my brother, died, there was a hurricane, one with a man’s name, and it was very destructive but we were spared, except that the breadfruit my mother had planted was destroyed. It fell down on her neighbor’s house, completely destroying it. Its loss was never spoken of with any sadness, it was just one of the many things that came from somewhere else and then disappeared into an even vaster somewhere else, which is nowhere nameable at all.



 



25.



 



If a want of food is signal of poverty, then as a child, I was never poor at all. I had an abundance of food, only all the food that was presented to me was food I didn’t like at all. I wanted food that had the names of food I had read in a book. I wanted food from far away. Once, I saw an advertisement in a magazine for beans: there were brown beans in a heap, saturated with brown sauce, and on the top of the heap was a piece of meat, glistening and large, which was pork, for underneath the image was a description of the dish, and it said it was pork and beans. I longed for it. No food my mother could cook came close to tasting the way the advertisement for pork and beans looked. I was an extremely tall and thin girl, and my mother was always making me foods that she thought I would like, and would also make me fat. Or stout. That was a compliment, a stout woman. One day she presented to me an unusual looking dish, something that looked in texture like potato, but was arranged in form like rice. I had never seen it before. In colour it looked like the breadfruit and knowing my mother, I refused it because I thought it was breadfruit. Again and again, she told me that it wasn’t breadfruit, that it was a new form of rice from England. I ate it, not with any enthusiasm, and all the time I kept saying that I was sure it was breadfruit. After I ate the meal of it, she said, yes, it was breadfruit and she told me how good it was for me. 



 



26.



 



Near the end of his third voyage, which was just as spectacular as the other two, regardless of the weather, interfering with views of the transit of Venus on the first outing, and treasured friends and colleagues dying before returning from the first outing, and all the rest, while trying to return to his beloved England, which is the seventeenth largest island in the world, Captain Cook was killed by some people who seemed to wish they had never set eyes on him in the first place. I am so sorry to say my belief that they boiled and ate him after capturing him is not supported by the facts.

  I found out I was a man when I was nine years old.



Next to a small woodpile deep in the mountains of Kobe, my grandfather grasped my hand and put a centipede on my wrist.



“Take it,” he said. If I hadn’t smiled at its 100 orange legs, if I had recoiled instead, then maybe ten years later I would have been on that plane from Logan Airport, running towards his hospital. But when the bug coiled, my arm calmed, and I cupped the centipede, feeling my palm warm. I asked if it was poisonous.



“Men are not afraid of bugs,” he said.



So I shed my girlhood for ten long summers, and sat in my dorm room at the age of twenty, getting ready to take a bath, as my grandfather went on dying.



 



 



“Catch a flight immediately after your test, then. He’s stable right now.” My mother’s voice echoed on the tiles. Her piano-teacher voice. “Are you sure?” I said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Call me if anything changes.”



 



 



I set my phone down, and walked to the bathroom to fill the bath with water and set the temperature to scalding, boil-a-lobster hot. I sat naked on the white cold tile floor. My ass numbed as I waited. This was part of being a man, being able to stand the heat. This was part of being the eldest of five granddaughters, and being the only son. I dug my feet into the water, my toes leaping from it without my consent. Soon my feet lost feeling and I inched my thighs in, clenching both sides of the bath for their cold support. I watched my body swell, pinked, my skin crying. I lathered. Every summer after Kobe, my mother used to try to scrape the tan off my skin, to expose the warm whiteness of woman. She would sweep my rail body with its lack of fat or breasts, her hard fingers pinching my chin left and right as she scuffed my neck. I was burned, tarnished. Eventually she taught herself Photoshop and used that to bleach my skin.



 



 



My mother was the only one who never accepted my manhood. But even she did not make a sound when my grandmother wrapped up my long thick hair and snipped right under my ear with her gray pearl-handed sewing scissors until the rest of my hair was the same length as my bangs. She was looking at her stomach, her chin from that angle crumpling in unexpected elderly folds.



She left the room as my grandmother told me to join my grandfather. He was cutting wood.



 



 



*** 



 



My grandfather liked simple things. He wore the same sweat-stained baseball hat on his head for 22 years, but he married a woman who likes to cover her long, white fingers with amethysts. A single flaw mars her hands: an index finger crooked at the first joint to the right, bent permanently in the angle at which she pinches her embroidery needle.



 



 



Their house is filled with dozens of tapestries of embroidered cloth, not Bible verses or proverbs but explosions of vicious color, fierce shrimp and fields of flowers and dancing children and red Noh masks and castles in Scotland. She started one every time my grandfather left for a business trip, and he framed each one once he got back. Tens of thousands of stitches formed neat silk bandages over clean white cotton.



 



 



A few years after he resigned from his job as the vice president of a metalworking company, he started learning Korean with a female Korean tutor. A few months later, my grandmother caught him trying to sneak out of the house with the second-floor air conditioner.



That was when my grandmother accused him—for the first time—of having an affair.



 



 



“It’s summer,” he said. “Her children need it, and they don’t have the money to buy one. No one was using ours, anyway.”



 



 



“I don’t accept that,” my grandmother said.



 



 



I knew instinctively that he was innocent. My instinct was supported by more than the childish belief in the faithfulness of grandparents, stronger by far than the belief in the faithfulness of parents. The idea was that if they had lasted for 50 years in the prime of their lives, they had basically mastered the art of overcoming anything that could break them apart. I knew because he once said that the man of the family could not be weak, because others were.



 



  *** 



 



In kabuki theatre, men who play women are called* onna gata*. *Gata* means mold, an example to follow. The delicate, settled gestures of kabuki men who play samurais’ wives, the lovelorn daughters of merchant families, or Yoshitsune’s mother are cast as the highest examples of form and motion for women to shadow. Successful kabuki actors are immortalized for their craft in “femininity,” and are often heralded as national treasures. Yet when women play men, they are called *otokoyaku*. *Yaku* means role, and connotes a kind of show. In the Takarazuka Revue—formed as an all-female counter movement to Kabuki 100 years ago—*otokoyaku* waltz on stage with four-inch heels, silver glitter eye shadow, and a seven-foot-tall feathered peacock tail harnessed to their backs. Their masculinity is an artificial interpretation, in which supposedly ideal male characteristics—constant declarations of love, chivalry, and honor—are acted out on stage. Audiences and fan groups are overwhelmingly women.



 



 



In the bath, I recall a page from a Takarazuka magazine that I used to subscribe to about a prominent Takarazuka actress. She had chain-smoked her voice to gravel from the age of fourteen, lowering it to the optimum male pitch, a feat made more impressive by the fact that she remained disgusted by smoke. She signed an agreement that detailed that when she married, or entered anything that could be taken as a sexual relationship—this included talking to anyone who was not a brother or a father in any personal or private setting—she would have to resign. She applied as an *otokoyaku*, cropped her hair, and watched Marlon Brando movies, absorbing male mannerisms. After 25 years of daily ballet training, singing lessons, and a grueling professional career on stage, she left the company to follow the musical troupe’s motto: “Takarazuka men become good wives and wise mothers.”



 



 



“At least I’m a woman,” I said one summer, following a dinner during which my grandfather had told one of his war stories. My mother was drying a kettle with my aunt and my grandmother. We had a little assembly line going on, and I was in charge of suds.



“Oh, are you one, now?” My mother took a white plate and raised it to the light. She then returned it to my basket, to wash again. “Tell me, exactly, how are you a woman?” My aunt laughed, and my cousins looked at me, washing carefully. 



 



  *** 



 



My grandfather used to go to the bathhouses with the workers from his father’s coal mine in Pyongyang and scrub their backs with soaped cloth just as roughly as they scrubbed his. He and his six younger sisters were born and raised outside of Japan as part of the colonization project in the Korean peninsula. My great-grandfather, along with ten other Japanese employees, oversaw hundreds of Korean workers, and sent coal for the war effort.



 



 



Near the company houses, there was a steam bathhouse, a tennis court, a swing set, and a makeshift baseball field. In winter he would skate on frozen rice paddies, and on his way home from the bathhouse, his wet towel would quickly harden into slabs of cloth ice. On sunny days, young Korean girls took turns swinging themselves high up into the air, their skirts flying in streaks of red. He took care not to watch.



 



 



My grandfather did not doubt that Japan would win the war. His father enlisted in the military, so my grandfather dreamed of joining the air force. Naturally, he skipped school with his friends most days to go to the aviation base, camouflaging planes with grass.



 



 



On August 15, 1945, my grandfather’s best friend told him that there was going to be a big announcement on the radio. My grandfather assumed that Japan was going to declare war on the Soviet Union. They gathered in the makeshift baseball field and stood to attention as the announcer told all citizens to rise.



 



 



At first, he did not understand the radio address. The radio waves were weak, the voice unsteady, using honorifics that were beyond his sixth-grade comprehension. The voice spoke soft and high, resembling that of his mother.



 



 



It was the voice of the emperor. He told them that the war was lost, that he had agreed to an unconditional surrender. That he was no longer god, but a man, just a man. They sat on the sand mound in the baseball field, and the swings were still, although the sun beat down on their necks. No one moved, but even the heavens were changing.



 



 



For a year, his family worked in the mines. Their belongings were taken and distributed among their former workers, or burned. They lived where they had housed the Koreans, where the red clay walls that invited the wind. The temperature dropped below -33 degrees Celsius. He carried pieces of heavy rail and lumber to the station and back in endless loops, tracing the steps and paths made by the friends who used to teach him Korean songs, laugh at his accent, and give him cigarettes while they all waited for his father to finish his turn in the bathhouse. These men now called him dirty, as he had teased them a year ago. One wore his father’s best coat.



 



By 1947, it was time to leave his homeland. It was past time. They had started to hear rumors of Japanese colonists killed by Soviet troops, by the Chinese, by the Koreans, all of whom were heading steadily south from the north. The Soviets were going to close the 38th parallel, and soon. His father started to make plans for the family to cross the parallel into American territory without him, before the border closed. His father would be forced to continue working in the Korean mines for a decade.



 



One day, my grandfather saw a blonde woman in a red dress standing with an officer on the station platform. She was tall, laughing, using her height to scan for someone in the crowd of troops. The officer’s chin dipped as he looked at her. My grandfather tried not to watch as he continued to walk on, hauling his rail to the mine where there was no color.



 



Each repatriate had a moment of realization that Japan had truly and irrevocably lost the war. For some, it was the radio address. For my great-grandmother, it was when she saw ashes instead of Tokyo. For my grandfather, it was seeing the blonde woman in the red dress, waiting on his station’s platform.



 



In the end, there was no safe way to cross the 38th parallel. My grandfather’s family and a few other Japanese families hired a boat to get to the south by sea, deciding to risk routine checks by Korean and Soviet troops who had prohibited any Japanese from crossing the border. When they got on the boat, his mother handed my grandfather the baby, his infant sister.



 



“Please take her,” she said. She then guided his sisters to the crates they would hide in for the five-day trip.



 



He carried his sister to his crate. He knew what this meant, what he had to do. What only he could do, because their father wasn’t with them anymore. When she cried. When Korean soldiers knocked on top of his crate, checking for warm bodies, listening for living sounds. He looked at his sister’s pink, cold nose pressed against his chest.



 



Her mouth was barely the size of his thumbs pressed together.



 



 



*** 



 



I got out of the bath and wrapped a towel slowly around my breasts. I fumbled in my dark room to my desk and took out a piece of notebook paper, folded in four, which I had stuck in my wallet. I hadn’t opened it since last summer, when my grandfather was in remission, when the steam was still curling in my hair and he had pushed a glass of orange juice towards me and told me to write down everything he said. On the paper were the names of a generation of men and women who left their childhood behind to raise a country out of ashes. And then there was me. I had finished my orange juice; my grandfather told me to go upstairs and sleep.



 



***



 



 



When I arrived, everyone was getting ready for the fu- neral, occupying the two rooms on the second floor of my



grandparents’ house: The women’s room and the men’s room. My room was full of strangers, except for my sister. She was looking in the mirror, tying up her hair. My sister, the daughter who knows before being told that she should divide her favorite type of cake into four, and that she should take the smallest piece.



“Why weren’t you here?” she said.



“What? I had a test, how could I know, dad told me I should stay in Boston.”



“You know he asked for you. He asked for you, he wouldn’t stop, he just sat there on the hospital bed connected to all these wires and asked why you weren’t there, kept on saying your name, like I wasn’t even there—”



My chin is almost on my chest, I feel so tired. Take it, take the centipede, its not poisonous; you just have to look at it carefully. Where did it go? You should’ve taken better care of it.



“I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I wanted to be there.”



“Try telling him that,” she said, and retied her ribbon. If only I were a girl who cried. I get up and leave the women’s room, to stand in the hallway between the two rooms. On the roof, the cicadas scream and call, and soon I am calm, but not quiet. 



 

I



Last October, I had this crazy stress dream. In it I’m face to face with Maya Deren, the author of a book I’m reading on Haiti. She’s gorgeous, which makes me nervous. “But you’re dead,” I say. It’s true: After only 44 short years her brain had hemorrhaged, in defiance of a new, improperly-prescribed medication. It was 1961, the same year my mother took her first steps.



I put a hand on her shoulder. Her bare skin is hot beneath the pads of my fingers, almost malleable, and I worry I will damage it, leaving sticky prints on her back. She might have been a sculpture in the works: still raw, still clay. I plunge my hand through her sternum, parting her ribs and holding the hot organs in my palm.



I learned about Maya Deren while trying to understand a foggy and confused memory from 2008. I was in Haiti with a friend whose family was involved with a local hospital. She and I were standing outside a small rural house. An adult pulled us aside and told us we weren’t allowed to tell anyone back home about what was about to happen. They wouldn’t like it, she said.



I don’t remember what happened next very well. In my mind it’s a montage of ringing bells, dark rooms, old picture frames and dirty glass bottles. A low creole voice assigning tasks, which our translator explains in a whisper. I imagine colored beads, playing cards, candles, alcohol. Did money change hands? The walls were very thin wood slats: The only difference between inside and outside was the shadow the tin roof cast over the room. Six months later, the infamous earthquake hit.



Sixty years earlier, Maya Deren had touched down in Port-au-Prince with no luggage and no company. At twenty-nine, she was already a legend of the American avant-garde, with two divorces under her belt, one still fresh.



She was there to gather footage for an ambitious experimental film on the ritual dances of Vodou, Haiti’s primary religion. Though politically unrecognized (and frequently repressed), Vodou’s rituals permeate nearly every corner of the country, melding with Catholic beliefs into an organic and persevering tradition. Deren was a newcomer in Haiti, and didn’t know that Vodou leaves no room for passive observation. To be present is to participate: She was yanked from the role of ethnographer, drawn into the religious life of her subjects.



Deren was possessed, at least seven or eight times, by a Vodou spirit or loa called Erzulie, the embodiment of love. Possession, in its most loose definition, is when a divinity or other external animating force takes over a body. The practice is central to Vodou, primarily occurring during energetic communal rituals, but is also common to cultures from the spirit discos of Melanesia to the shamanism of Native Americans to the Japanese folk misaki. Even Roman Catholic doctrine speaks of demons and exorcisms.



For us, possession is the exclusive domain of the horror movie industry. Something about relinquishing self-control rubs us the wrong way. Possession is sensationalized. I’m thinking of the 2002 live-action Scooby Doo movie: Everyone gets possessed at wild group rituals in an underground cave, and demons almost take over the world. Most Westerners just imagine this stuff is like a giant game of Ouija. It’s convenient to put the whole notion of possession in quotation marks, wagging bunny ears in the air like an entire culture is pretending, like the shamans of the world wink at each other when we’re not looking, in on the trick.



Deren’s direct experience put her in a unique position to translate the phenomenon of possession into familiar language. But this was a nearly impossible task: Vodou is experiential, hard to contain in pictures or words. She never finished her film, scared the footage would only further exoticize Vodou. Like Deren, I’m going to attempt to connect with ideas that have no place in our world, and inevitably I’m going to fail on some level.



The serviteur or practitioner of Vodou would not describe possession as unusual. It’s an integral part of ceremonies, a divine gift to the community. The soul or mind or consciousness—whatever you want to call a person’s animating force—leaves the body, forced out by a spirit which “mounts” the person as if she were a horse. The spirit, now materially present, can talk with the serviteurs and participate in rituals. No one can say where the person’s soul goes, but it’s definitely not controlling the body. The “horse” is not held accountable for things said or done during the possession; food she eats while possessed is not felt to have nourished her body. The experience is not discussed with her. She won’t even remember: after all, she was not present.



Toward the end of her stay in Haiti, Deren purchased a set of drums and commissioned a ritual to have them “baptized.” She was planning to film the rare and complicated ceremony, one which she had never seen and knew little about. From the drummers’ first beats, the spirit Erzulie installed herself in Deren’s head. She woke up to find the ceremony concluded: Erzulie, in Deren’s body, had performed the entire baptism herself.



II



The taxi leaves us in an austere residential neighborhood, half-an-hour from Cambridge. Unlabeled number 19 is squeezed between 15 and 25. The windows are dark.



We’re here to see a possession. It’s Saturday night, and part of the local Haitian community is throwing a party in honor of the divinity of death and fertility. My friend, who spent a year in Haiti, has been trying to get to know the local Haitian culture. She heard about the event from a local mambo, or priestess, who cordially invited us with one caveat: serviteurs aren’t blind to popular opinion. Make sure you have an open mind, she warned.



I’m doing my best. My half-Haitian roommate stopped me as I ran out the door this evening, frowning hard. For a generally disaffected Lana del Rey devotee, she looked more concerned than usual. “Don’t let yourself get too swept up,” she warned me. I asked her what she meant. “That shit is real,” she said, shaking her head.



I already feel like a cultural voyeur, seeing something I wasn’t meant to see. I spoke to my mom about Vodou while researching this piece: “Oh, I have an angle,” she said. “You should write about how they have Vodou because they don’t have science.” My mother is a science writer who occasionally gets hate mail from creationists. In my house, we found PubMed research papers on healthy habits for childhood development on our desks, and went to bed on time without argument. I was raised to discredit everything that didn’t come packaged with empirical proof.



We knock and are greeted by an unsmiling man in white robes, who informs us that the drummers have not yet arrived and deposits us on a couch. For two hours, we sink into the leather sofa, life moving around us. Girls in white dresses are bustling in the kitchen, which is now producing all manner of smells. A woman reclines in the corner with a disgruntled infant. The man who greeted us, who has added a baseball cap studded with skull-shaped rhinestones to his white robe ensemble, coos at the child. There are two more babies on the glass coffee table. A couple eerily reminiscent of American Gothic sits stiffly by the window. The flat-screen television blares Zoey 101 reruns on mute. I discover I’m sitting on someone’s bottle, full of warm baby formula.



This ceremony is in honor of Ghede, a loa who is master of life and death. He’s known to wear a top hat, request cigars and swallow great gulps of a fiery liquor no human can stand.



Imagine your grandmother. Think about her personal quirks, favorite recipe, strangely-shaped birthmarks, matronly wisdom, etc. Now stick all of this information onto a slide transparency, the sort grade school teachers use with clunky projectors. Do the same for your whole ancestry—for every member of every generation that worked and played to hand down their precious DNA to you. Stack your family’s dead in neat piles of slides. When you lift the stack to the light, common forms appear. These are the loa: archetypal personalities, a dynamic cast of distinctive characters representing timeless commonalities. They are your guides and your predecessors, your legacy, your spiritual inheritance, the summation of human learning at the time of your birth. As families encounter each other and cultures blend, the pantheons merge and change, loa appear, change, and disappear to fit the spiritual needs of the communities.



The loa are full of apparent contradictions. They are not gods, but divine intermediaries between the creator and mortals. They serve the people and are served by the people. They are “intelligences,” ways of understanding and appreciating the world inherited from one’s parents. As Maya Deren puts it, “the serviteur learns love and beauty in the presence and person of Erzulie, experiences the ways of power in the diverse aspects of Ogoun, [the warrior loa,] becomes familiar with the implications of death in the attitudes of Ghede.”



Around ten, we’re led downstairs. The basement, a cavern of groaning pipes, is thickly disguised in dense layers of crepe streamers and shiny purple fabrics. Belated Halloween decorations deck the walls. These are for Ghede, and they are definitely scarier in their new appropriation: Cut-out skulls sport three-dimensional neon eyes, and fist-sized furry plastic spiders dangle from the ceiling pipes. A table is laden with offerings: rum in all varieties, breads, cakes, hard candies, popcorn. We press ourselves into an alcove at the back of the room, treading lightly around symbols traced on the floor in powdered chalk, and wait. The serviteurs pile in—cousins, inlaws, and grandparents laughing racously with kids of all ages, quiet first-timers in ‘70s garb, the pale and well-postured couple from upstairs.



By 2 a.m., the ceremony is well underway. The basement is a wild jumble of bodies transfixed by the rhythm of the drums, which seem to realign the beating of your heart so your veins pulse with the beat. A quartet of long-robed initiates float to each of the four corners of the room, arms full of swords, instruments, and offerings, which they raise and lower and then pause, holding their breath, waiting for the beat. I hold mine too. It drops and they spin together in place—right, left, right. The drums push out the noises of suburbia like a barricade of sound, declaring this modest basement a sanctuary. I’m trying not to be self-conscious, hoping to imitate the intricate sway of the women in white dresses. After four hours, we’re still waiting on a possession, and I’m having doubts. loa are strongly tied to the land, the mountains and valleys infused with the spiritual energy of many generations. I wonder: can Ghede find this house, all the way up here in a Boston suburb, surrounded by the clutter and paraphenalia of American life, the discord of migration? This basement is caught between worlds, between Haiti and the States, between the divine and the mortal.



The drums stop. I look up: A man is seizing violently like an electrocuted cartoon character. He does not seem to have control of his body: He dangles from one leg to the other, swerving like a top off balance, but somehow remains on his feet. The crowd parts hurriedly, giving him space as he careens about in great waves of shuddering. And then his eyes are open—too open. His great round whites, dilated pupils, gaze wildly around the room, and then through the room. He careens through the crowd, gripping shoulders, mouthing giddy greetings, and then the drums are up again. He plants himself backwards on the smallest of wicker chairs and drags it with him, hobbling around the room in a wild, jittery dance. The man or god is magnetic, pulling people one by one from the crowd with the slightest gesture. They twirl and curtsy to the drums, then kneel before him. He presses his bare forehead to theirs, skull to skull, and, eyes wild, mouths words I cannot hear.



III



Deren describes the experience of being possessed as terrifying, internally violent, with every echelon of intensity you might expect from having your consciousness ripped from your body. The process is so brutal that the role of the houngan, or priest, is mediative: He “arbitrate[s] between the loa and the human self, which wrangle violently over possession of the bodies like two hands might fiercely compete for a single glove.”



I’m not attempting to glorify or fetishize the often harsh realities of Haitian life. So-called primitive spiritual practices are too often sketched as hindrances to Western improvements. Well-meaning NGO workers ask why the villager spends egregious amounts of money on rituals that are “non-essential,” and complain that she ignorantly goes to the houngan for medical care instead of the distant hospital where many of her family members have died. It’s not that simple: The serviteur divides illness into two categories—“natural,” for which they’ll seek Western medical assistance if possible, and “unnatural,” what we would call psychosomatic. For the latter, they’ll seek spiritual help, which is analogous to what the West calls mental health care.



The Western tendency is to think of spiritual beliefs, especially in the developing world, as an outdated tool, preventing society from advancing to premium efficiency. But Vodou is relentlessly practical: As Deren puts it, most serviteurs’ “immediate needs are too insistent… [Vodou] must serve as a practical methodology not as an irrational hope.” The mythologist extraordinaire Joseph Campbell documents this pragmatism: With agriculture, cultures rejected the old, individualistic hunter lifestyle, which prized and depended upon individual prowess. In their place, they adopted communal, ritual-based religions, which bound families and villages together for shared survival.



For Deren, possession begins here, with the transfixing unity of ritual. She is drawn by “some pulse whose authority transcends all of these creatures and so unites them.” In Vodou dances, each individual hears and responds to the beat separately and independently, turned in, but “moving in common to a shared sound, heard by each of them singly.” The experience overloads our carefully constructed models for handling beauty, and becomes all-consuming. Joining the dance, Deren feels acutely vulnerable: She, too, is capable of losing herself in ritual.



The music is drowning her, and her body will not listen. Her limbs stick to the ground, threatening to ignore the steps of the dance; her muscles contract and the drums beat inside her chest. She internally begs for rescue, for the ceremony to end: Why don’t they stop? she thinks. Then she is calm. She describes a sense of depersonalization, of watching herself dance, of watching the rest of the serviteurs retreat to a distance to watch her dance, of realizing with renewed terror that it is not herself she is watching.



Even for the remarkably articulate Deren, possession escapes description. She experiences what she calls a white darkness. The whiteness: a divine, blinding glory she cannot handle. The darkness: viscous, concentrated terror. It consumes her, and then there is nothing.



Deren describes Erzulie, the loa of love and beauty who possesses her, as the manifestation of the dream, as the “capacity to conceive beyond reality, to desire beyond adequacy, to create beyond need.” She is the loa of the unattainable, a reminder that perfection must remain out of reach, the embodiment of the necessary gap between human and divine. Erzulie is the symbol of the white darkness, so bright Deren cannot bear it. She is terrifying, illustrious, unsurmountable by the boldest stab at analysis.



IV



Anthropologists once earnestly endeavored to understand this so-called “epitome of Otherness.” Scholars sought medical explanations, casting possession as folk psychiatry dependent on the reduced consciousness of the trance state. It’s tempting. I keep hoping to find an article where researchers take an fMRI scan of a possessed person, but possession resists rational explanation. Pre-eminent possession scholar Janice Boddy suggests we flip the question on its head: Instead of asking “why them?” we ought to ask “why not us?”



Think about the last time you saw a magician. Maybe it was your kid brother’s seventh birthday party, where some guy split your friend in half and put him back together, and you can’t, for the life of you, get him to tell you how he did it. This is profoundly irritating: There’s a secret you don’t know, a trick you’re missing. The whole Western world is subject to analysis, to the process of breaking something down into smaller pieces so that it might be more easily digested. We parse texts into symbols, know the precise size and function of each cog in a wristwatch, study the respiratory system in order to feel a little kick of awe every time we inhale. This sort of analytical understanding, in Western culture, is prerequisite to complete appreciation. But to analyze is also to strip the object of analysis of its power over us. Vodou refuses to be divided and conquered: It is bigger than any individual, bigger than every ounce of logic a single person can muster.



Vodou is a different, subjective, and experiential way of knowing. There is no Archimedean point, no objective space safe from the subjectivities of rapture. Knowledge is not arrived at by analysis but through physical experience. What is known (the loa, and through them, the universe) and the knower exist in a dynamic and interdependent relationship, so intimate that that the knowledge literally possesses the knower. Have you ever known anything that intensely? Westerners value self-control, and so we work hard to maintain distance from experiences, afraid to be swept away. Museums and galleries remove art from the real experience of our day-to-day lives and isolate it in the idealized, austere world of the blank wall, filtering out any visceral provocation with white walls and cold distance. But distance, which they claim lets us see objective truth, shuts us out of the full aesthetic experience.



Musicologist Judith Becker claims the Western conception of the self not only prevents possession, but fosters mistrust of the entire practice. Possession requires permeable boundaries between self and environment. To quote Bourginon, “spirit possession is clearly dependent . . . on the possibility of separating the self into one or more elements.” Tellingly, we call ourselves individuals—a word which literally meant “indivisible” up until the 15th century. This is the difference: Westerners have indivisible, concrete insides—personal universes—and an external world analyzed into miniscule pieces. Vodou serviteurs share a single, collective universe and a multiplicity of fragmented selves. Of course Deren was afraid: She was literally splitting herself into pieces.



The serviteur experiences this quite literally: Illness, for him, is discord between the different parts of the self. Its converse, health, is harmony and connectedness with his environment. This is not abstraction: Vodou is immediate and experienced as real physical sensation. Deren explains that existential and emotional despair is channeled quite readily into bodily trauma; psychosomatic illness occurs with much higher frequency.



Deren repeatedly marvels at the physicality of the experience: Her body’s participation in the dance and the drums bridge the material world with that of the loa. Possession is dependent on your ability to engage with your surroundings, on how much of a response music and dance can provoke from your body. Westerners talk about the representative, symbolic, figurative, but serviteurs experience these things quite literally, probably with much more intensity.



Westerners identify not with their bodies, but with the executive branch of themselves that controls and reigns in their emotions, passions, and aesthetic experiences: the particular part of ourselves we must let go to allow a loa in. The Haitians call this the gros-bon-ange, a fusion of the soul, heart, and self. We compulsively and unconsciously hold so tight a grip on our gros-bon-ange that no spirit, if we could fit a divinity into our worldview, would dare attempt to wrench it from our grasp.



Haiti’s language has no word for our notion of belief: As Deren puts it, “a Haitian does not think of himself as ‘believing in’ something; he thinks it it so.” There is nothing to “believe in,” only practice and ritual, and these are indubitably real. You serve the spirits, so by extension, they exist.



Back in the Boston basement, the possession ends as it began. A metaphysical switch flicks, and the spirit is gone. “It was Agwe,” a canzo tells me in a hurried whisper. Agwe, loa of the sea, is supposedly important to a number of the house’s serviteurs. The man, spent, slumps against a white-clad initiate, who grips his shoulders firmly and tilts a bottle of water into his mouth.



We’re also exhausted. It’s time to go. I thank one of the canzos and tell her we’re leaving, and she frowns. “But you didn’t even get to talk to a spirit,” she says.



How far I am from Cambridge, I think. And then I take it back almost immediately. Do Erzulie, Ghede, Agwe, not appear in masked, subtle forms in our own worlds? I think of eating disorders, which Boddy calls “pathological forms of embodied aesthetics.” Anthropologists wonder about the psychological connections between spirit possession and our own pathologized version: multiple personality disorder. And what about falling in love? We aren’t exempt from the divine. But their calls are personal, whispers in our ears. We follow them alone, in our private universes.



Soon we won’t be the only ones. Possession is on the decline, threatened by what Boddy calls the “quiet revolution of capitalist reification.” Deren clarifies: Industrialization eliminates much of the need for cooperation, for the thick social networks co-dependent with spirit possession. In some ways, you could say the reductionists were right: Modern technology eliminates much of the practical need for Vodou. But they miss perhaps the most crucial function of all. Losing possession is losing wonder.



We flee the drums to sit upstairs with sleeping infants and a few canzo while we wait for our ride. Some of them, like Deren, have no Haitian ancestors, but stumbled upon the community and never left. I like to think I can empathize.



“Does it normally take this long for the loa to possess someone?” my friend asks. “Do they ever just not come at all?”



A canzo laughs. “They had better come,” he responds, “It’s their party.”



V



So here I am in the dream again, holding Maya Deren’s liver. “There is enough room in my skull,” I hear myself say. “I have gathered the parts of myself together and slid down into the cerebellum. You are free to inhabit my frontal lobe, my parietal lobe, my temporal lobe, my occipital lobe.”



She smiles, but I’m not sure she’s heard me. My voice is submerged in the whirring of the air conditioner, the mechanical tick of an analog clock, the smack of many pairs of shoes on many distant floors, every leaf crunched under my foot in the past 19 years. She reaches out a hand for her liver. I want to ask how she let go of herself enough to be possessed, how I could do it. After all of this, she’s still a mystery. Maybe it’s better that way.

The Widow



 



Snow is a notorious memory stimulator. Last Saturday, when we experienced what felt like winter weather for the first time in a long time, I was having dinner with a gay female friend who works mostly in Los Angeles. We were just catching up, and had yet to order, when my friend received a text from a woman friend, also gay, in Los Angeles. Whitney Houston was dead. There was nothing to say. We looked out the restaurant window, and the snow began to fall. So did the memories, not in droves, but in flakes. Whitney Houston’s alternately powerful and bland resonance for us was not inseparable from our queerness. Indeed, the gorgeous star who had been circumspect about her personal life until she married the already played out but seemingly indomitable teen performer, Bobby Brown, in 1992, was less the author of a touchingly open, gospel-trained voice trying to find meaning in frequently meaningless lyrics, than the beloved friend of a woman named Robyn Crawford, who had been Houston’s closest companion since the singer was sixteen years old. (Crawford was also Houston’s longtime executive assistant.) 

 

In the early 1980s, one sometimes saw Crawford in those places where women of color then gathered—the Duchess on Seventh Avenue South, say, or the Cubby Hole. In those small, self-protective-by-necessity worlds, everyone knew what everyone else did, and with whom, and Crawford was often spoken of in the same breath as the lovely Houston, who had modeled for Essence, and was the daughter of Cissy Houston, herself the cousin of Dionne Warwick. That was all we knew. But as Houston’s career overwhelmed her personality—every significant pop star suffers this fate; often they don’t live long enough to reverse the order—she was still “our” Whitney down there, near Christopher Street, in the West Village: a perforce closeted superstar who had to make a living because she knew gay didn’t pay. 

 

This was familiar to us, particularly when it came to those black female performers, ranging from Bessie Smith to Ethel Waters to Billie Holiday, who skipped over the gay parts of themselves, let alone their milieu, in order to be someone’s idea of femininity, but whose? Whitney Houston always looked like a “femme”: coiffed and sleek, a Jersey girl who could be tough, but she had an even butcher personal assistant who could deal, if it came to that. Houston grew up musically and otherwise in a black Baptist church, where sin hangs heavy in the air, and on the heart, and queerness is the last thing an intolerant population cleaving to Jesus and “correctness” wants to deal with. To be queer is to question if not sully black conservatism, with its rather complicated relationship to heterosexuality as the paradigm of “real” love, while homosexuality is viewed as a white-bred or “European” perversion. And black conservatism shuts its eyes to uncategorizable flowers. That Houston was able to walk in that field as long as she did is a testament to her strength in her difference. 

 

But the pop world is just as conventional as the black universe Houston grew up in; in both, appearances are considered deep because the world responds to the shallow. As Houston’s fame increased, and she was sanctified by marriage, she drove a wedge between the world she and Crawford inhabited together, becoming a martyr to heterosexuality. (At one point it was said that Houston would appear in a remake of A Star is Born, co-starring Bobby Brown. How much would the film have meant if it were about a female superstar who came out about her gay past without offing herself?) Still, Crawford, and what she symbolized, would not leave Houston alone. In 2002, Diane Sawyer interviewed the singer and her then husband in their Atlanta home. Sawyer asked about Crawford, and Whitney, looking double-crossed and angry, said to the camera, and presumably Crawford: “And I love ya. Get over it.” It’s interesting that Houston thought of the camera eye—her most consistent companion for decades before her death, and now forever—was Crawford, her no doubt most steadying love, and honest influence.



 



James Merrill



 



He was the first living poet I knew of who wove his queerness into the poem instead of making it the subject. The world was larger than whom he loved, and he showed it by writing about a world we could not see. His masterpiece, “The Changing Light at Sandover,” showed me what life was like on the other side of so-called reality. He lived in a sphere I was familiar with—the spirit world—but I had never known it effected others as it effected the obeah woman, dream book writers, and numbers runners, of my youth. And if he could do that, then it was our job—the young writer’s job—to “persevere,” a word he uses in this poem. Also, how could one limit one’s writing to flat facts? The soul was not a fact. It moved, changed shape, became something else. Once, sitting in Indochine with the photographer Darryl Turner many many years ago or just a moment ago, I saw James Merrill, dressed as one would imagine a poet would—in something lavender, or blue. Darryl encouraged me to tell JM how much I loved him, and to get his autograph, you never knew. I didn’t. I was crippled by my humility, and writerly insecurity, too, which can be a kind of arrogance: Why was I not him? How could one achieve that on one’s own? He had done it all. Months later James Merrill died of AIDS, and, with him, the fantasy that I would thank him after I had become more myself. I have since become—I hope—more myself, but I have yet to finish thanking him, and, so, here we are.



 

Last December, the artist Kara Walker delivered a lecture at Harvard on the subject of her latest piece: a 40-foot “sugar sphinx” with an exposed, puckering vulva and a face redolent of Aunt Jemima’s most minstrel days. Attendance was so high that even the overflow hall was packed to the brim. A month earlier, Hilton Als and Jamaica Kincaid had appeared in conversation at the Brattle Street Book Store to considerably less fanfare. The event in November was co-sponsored by The Harvard Book Store and the Advocate and focused on Als’ latest book, White Girls, which had just been released in paperback. All things considered, the talk was fairly well attended, with empty seats sprinkled only intermittently between audience members in parkas and pea coats, clutching ballpoints and Moleskines. Despite the availability of seats closer to the stage, I slid into a fuzzy velvet chair in the furthest corner of the last row—ringside for audience-watching.



Als read a brief excerpt from White Girls, and he and Kincaid perched on opposite ends of a small coffee table, quickly bowing into a discussion that touched on both of their writings, Als’ anxieties about his name forerunning his work, and the Solange-Jay Z elevator incident (at the time, Als messaged Kincaid, “this is what liquor and a tight wig will do to you”). Their conversation was jovial and relaxed—entirely uncorrupted by theatricality or literary pretense. I craned my neck in the back, regretting my choice of seat. Immediately before the question-and-answer segment, Kincaid squinted into the audience before her, knit her brow, and said, “You know, there are no black people here.”



A few perfunctory chuckles and thoughtful grunts followed, but there was mostly silence. Maybe three dark-skinned hands punctuated the otherwise still, white surface of the audience, waving to make their presence known. I couldn’t help but feel unsettled. Why had she gone and done that? What did it matter that we were an audience of almost uninterrupted white, scrutinizing the inner workings of two black artists in Obama’s America? Why the need to redefine our redefinition, meaning: why wasn’t Jamaica Kincaid content to just let us be a bunch of “uncolored” folks with a predilection for “colored” art?

In one of the essays contained within White Girls, Als calls upon us to wonder “what interests white editors (who constitute what we call Publishing) have in hiring a colored person to describe a [black person’s] life.” I won’t hazard a guess, but I doubt those interests include satisfying the desires of a market comprised mostly of other black people (in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a book talk boasting both Jamaica Kincaid and Hilton Als drew maybe four people of that demographic). As Colorlines noted back in May, the “overwhelming whiteness of black art” isn’t limited to literature. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 80 percent of museum visitors are white. In reviewing the NEA’s 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, The American Alliance of Museums concluded that “between 1992 and 2008, the gap between the percentage of white and non-white Americans who visit art museums grew steadily.” This is decidedly symptomatic— in twenty-first century America, the art gallery, the museum, and perhaps even the bookstore are all becoming increasingly white spaces.



My initial reaction to Kincaid’s question was indicative, I think, of the culture in which I live—one where the very contemplation of blackness is often misconstrued as an unprovoked affront to whiteness. Of course Kincaid did not mean to suggest something inherently amiss in white audiences partaking in the consumption of “black art” (all that essentializing bullshit aside). The more salient question, however, is if we can really hope that such a climate doesn’t do something to art, its production, and its reception. Do we, as a culture, gaze at this dark-skinned artistry with a whiteness, demanding that it palletize and yield up to us all those essential parts of the “black American experience”? Or is that art just handed over, delivered to the same culture whose earliest act was to widen the nose and inflate the lips and plump up the ass of the Negro, just to fully establish how Other s/he was? Most importantly, how does a society still susceptible to the malady of white supremacy even allow for the creation of black art that isn’t built to be seized by white audiences, even though, in many ways, it is?



* * *



Looking at “A Subtlety,” Walker’s sugar sphinx, you couldn’t help but wonder what master, if any, she served. With her mammy features and enormous bare ass, she should have been one of those explicits in cultural history: like Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, or like Saartije Baartman, the Khoikhoi woman infamously rechristened “Hottentot Venus” by nineteenth century slave traders and then propped up on makeshift stages across Europe so that white men could ogle her abnormally protruding buttocks and extended labia minora. But when Walker came to Harvard in December 2014 to deliver a lecture entitled “Sweet Talk,” a record-breaking 1,000 people RSVP’d, in part due to the highly public extent to which many in the mammy sphinx’s audience misunderstood—or just disregarded—her explicitness.



In the summer of 2014, Walker was commissioned by Creative Time to create a public artwork in order to commemorate the leveling of the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, a hulking, nightmare-capitalism fuck-you of a building that over its century-and-a-half of operation housed innumerable scores of black and brown “workers.” In addition to the mammy sphinx herself, this slave labor was called forth by Walker in the form of smaller, molasses-coated boys carrying oversized baskets. The piece was titled, in full, “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.”



The lecture in December was full of white people. I sat in front of two middle-aged female writers, one of whom was recreating the experience of beholding the sphinx to the other: “The whole place just smells of sugar and it’s almost like you were there at the time. And her back side was very…suggestive.”



“Of what?” her friend laughed.



To Walker’s credit, I have no doubt that this woman walked out of the lecture hall knowing exactly what the mammy sphinx’s multi-story backside meant to suggest. “Sweet Talk,” as the lecture was titled, took no prisoners. In detailing her arrival at the image of the sphinx, the sugar, and, of course, that blinding white vulva, Walker sped through a series of slides mostly depicting grotesque representations of blackness in American history. One especially potent image was a crude collage of a crouching, dark-skinned woman in full video-vixen form: fishnet tights, revealing lingerie, her ass tooted up seductively. Only, she was just half a woman. Most of her upper body had been carefully ripped away, the head of the Great Sphinx of Giza mounted in its place.



Walker initially turned down Creative Time’s proposal, but reconsidered after she became fascinated by the process of sugar refining, which she described as “dismantling darkness to create whiteness.” The procedure involves the application of high temperatures, immense pressure, and a variety of caustic compounds like phosphoric acid and calcium hydroxide. After the appropriate drying time, it yields not only purified white sugar, but also its darker, stickier counterpart—molasses. In many ways, that process mirrors one in early American culture described by Toni Morrison in her only work of literary criticism, entitled Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination. In it, Morrison embarks on a revisionist trek through American cultural history, using figures such as Poe and Melville to illustrate how white authors annexed susceptible black bodies for the purpose of their own self-exploration. By infusing into the black populace all that whiteness was not, Morrison holds that these New Worlders fashioned for themselves an identity surrogate—not unlike a photographic negative—that allowed them to probe the less savory cavities of their beings from a safe distance: “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not only to be born again, but to be born again in new clothes.”



The master’s new clothes obscured his lust, his fear of freedom, his yearning for civilization on civilization’s edge, but in order to give him cover, the slaves were stripped bare. In the creation of white American identity, their dark bodies were disfigured, drenched in sticky linguistic trickery, and wrung until they oozed dark gold. Morrison dubbed the result—this byproduct of whiteness, this distinctly American construction—the “Africanist presence.”



It is the specter of this presence that artists like Walker wrestle with to this day. Like the best of ghosts, it hides in plain sight, such as in the stock stereotypes of black females that it has produced and manically reiterated since this country’s inception (including the Jezebel, the mammy, the mad black woman, and many others). Throughout American history, the abuses of the specter and the stereotypes it engenders have sent a byproduct-people scrambling for dignity and reification, perhaps through countercultural outgrowths, perhaps through rosy, pre-colonial recollection, perhaps through coerced identity reconstruction. Ask the exalted phantom to paint for you a portrait of the “black American woman” and it will in no time yield something quite similar to that aforementioned collage—and, more dangerously, it will do so with a straight face.



* * *



Now re-encounter the Marvelous Sugar Baby. What can we say about her, this 40-foot daughter of the Africanist presence? Do we call her hideous? I hope so. Do we call her beautiful? We would be lying if we said she wasn’t. Is she dignified? Subjugated? I imagine that one would assume a position similar to her sphinxly one—low to the ground, ass up, neck craned—if a giant’s thumb were pressing down on one’s back from above. Still, who can deny the whispers of grandiosity and humanity that her iconic form breathed into the space?



But now behold the twentysomethings smiling for selfies in front of her backside. Behold what Nicholas Powers, a SUNY professor who wrote an op-ed entitled “Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit,” claimed that he saw: “a balding white father, posing with his son next to one of the boy statues, his arms folded across his chest ‘gangsta’ style as the mother took a photo.” It hurts—the giant naked stereotype presiding over the room, the smaller, attendant stereotypes peppered throughout, the heavily-white audience members posing for pictures in front of it all. It hurts, and in viewing it, you must wonder, just as Walker admitted during “Sweet Time” that she often does, “Whether I am enabling or critiquing.”



The Marvelous Sugar Baby exhibit became extremely divisive when the white gaze entered the space. What happened was it overtook the entire event. It immediately became clear to those who were paying attention that the piece was in desperate need of reclamation. I assume that’s what Powers was attempting to do when, after witnessing the aforementioned brazen shows of ignorance, he yelled, and then wrote an article about yelling, “You are recreating the very racism this art is supposed to critique!” I know that’s what a group of black New York City artists and art lovers were doing when they donned all white and distributed educational materials to the attendees, collectively calling themselves, “The Kara Walker Experience: WE ARE HERE.” Even the artist herself cast her hat in on this act of repossession, deploying a camera crew to film the audience interacting with the piece on its last day of exhibition. Walker instructed them to focus on black and brown visitors—essentially giving the mammy sphinx eyes of her own, an oppositional gaze, a way of staring right back.



* * *



The problematics that played out on the exaggerated stage of the Domino Sugar Refinery present themselves in subtler ways in the creation and reception of black artwork all over this country. In the same article about yelling in the sugar sphinx exhibition, Nicholas Powers skewered Walker and Creative Time for not foreseeing the firestorm that they would set off, asking, “What do you expect will happen if you put a giant sculpture of a nude black woman, as a Mammy no less, in a public space?” Powers’ frustration is rooted in his thwarted expectation of something that’s perhaps best described as a heightened version of Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” a state of mind capable of foresight in addition to double-vision. Not at all uncommon among critiques such as this, his disappointed incredulity illustrates the extraordinary intersection of pressures under which the black American artist must labor. As artists they must be creative and wide-thinking, as nonwhites they must be pacifying and non-confrontational, and as one of the few “outstanding negroes” invited to “the great cocktail party of the white man’s world” (as James Baldwin put it), they’d better not further fuck it up for the rest of us. Most of the critiques leveled at Kara Walker and other envelope-pushing black artists like her come from other black artists and critics who are wary of just how much can be fucked up at a cocktail party. In 1999, Betye Saar, legendary black artist and active opponent of Walker’s, said this: “I felt the work of Kara Walker was sort of revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children; that it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.”



But perhaps we could assuage these pressures if we could carve out a space, separate from the cocktail party, separate from that intersection of self-censorship, where black artists could have room to just create. It’s a wish that transcends both space and time for marginalized communities, one that was perhaps most famously articulated by Virginia Woolf in 1929. However, 54 years later, the black writer (can we now see why no black writer would desire this title?) Alice Walker took issue with Woolf’s assertion that in order to write her best fiction, a woman must have “a room of her own.” “What then,” asked Walker, “are we to make of Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who owned not even herself?” Walker held, controversially, that by necessitating the “room” as the place for female writers, Woolf erases the work, lived experiences, and gall of those who have no access to it.

In regards to black art in this nation, it seems that we need to dream like Virginia Woolf but think like Alice Walker. The room is what we must work toward, but waiting until its walls are raised in order to do the things that will make its construction possible amounts to quite a catch-22. How can we hope to carve out a safe space for the unmolested creativity of marginalized groups without first engaging in some painful exorcism—of the Africanist presence from the depths of literature, of racialized violence from our own history? And if art is not a tool afforded to us in the pursuit of bringing darkness to light (remember, the mammy sphinx was cast in blinding white, not molasses), then how do we even go about doing it?



And yet, massive stereotypes placed in gentrified Brooklyn have a potential for immense damage, especially when Woolf’s walls aren’t there to shield us from them (and them from us). The scores of black artists and critics who have censured Walker will understandably warn us about the dangers of trifling with racial typographies in order to deconstruct them. “Fire with fire,” they would say.



During the question-and-answer segment of “Sweet Talk,” a young woman asked, to much applause, if Walker thought that historically damaging images could be reclaimed, and if so, how she perceived her role in rearticulating them. Walker replied that in producing her work, she always envisioned that she was forming “a mercenary, counter-terrorism squad of you and me.”



As Kara Walker, WE ARE HERE, and even Nicholas Powers showed us, our best hope of repossessing black art is to give it eyes, a vision of its own to confront and challenge the privileged, assumption-riddled gazes of the culture in which it acts. Theirs is that “mercenary, counter-terrorism” work of education, conversation, and re-articulation—work that allows the piece to read the people. When the sugar sphinx gawked back, she was brilliant and senseless, inappropriate and thoroughly needed—and like the most deft of teachers, and artworks, she did not linger unnecessarily; in her final lesson, she descended back into nothingness, reminding us that though she could be seen, touched and even smelled, she was, by nature, unreal.



 

To live as others do should have been easier,



as easy as falling off the overhang



of a slippery cliff, with help from a log.



My tusks had been holding you up. I am sorry for it.



The most dangerous place in the world



is the world, or becomes the world



after you have to flee into it. Even the cap



of an acorn, or the wind-distributed promise



of a future accord, will do, since all families are



adoptive, or they are failed families, or they are both,



as wind chimes need the wind



to tell what they falsely believe to be “their own story”;



the echoes in that cavern must also do justice



to the last chipmunks on earth. They fell in love,



delighting the birthday party, who saw it all



last year (age median: eight and a half). We hold



their hypothetical findings at a distance



until we realize we are in there too,



in the freezing not-quite-



forever of an artificial-



butter-and-paste-scented theater, where everything rings



and nothing gets picked up, and you have to hunt



your own critters if you want critters, to get out



and then sneak back in with some help from that freaky invention



your sister called “fire.” And that’s why we never came home.

While I was not thrilled to be made a scapegoat I knew my 



role.  The summer was more or less bitter than the fall.  



Chairs creaked when angels sat in them.  The premise of



their argument also creaked.  Along towards winter, hearts



rose.  Something had gotten underway and was proceeding



under its own power down the wet street above the beach.



Motorbikes wove in and out.  Consciousness turned toward a 



drop of blood shed while adding one more stop to the line,



where thousands would never live.  I would never live there



too, but my perceptions were bent from the start.  I couldn’t



distinguish between identical worlds, nor did I understand



how to dilute my own past enough to make it drinkable.



Certain things that I read suggested this could be done by



developing the proper attitude toward what might in theory



transpire given sufficient passage of time.  But I don’t know



what that is.  Things continue on in endless space, my good



old captain said to me.  Meanwhile session one began by 



revoking the law against breaking promises.  Egregious 



examples were set out on a plain oak table overlaid with 



butcher paper.  Crayons were handed round and then 



deposited into a cylinder that appeared at the window. The



session turned strange when one of the examples lurched



through the room, calling the others names.  My right eye



became distracted at the very instant I knew that this may 



not really be the case.  So be it, lights flickered in the sky and 



tall white letters shone brightly, as we easily saw for 



ourselves. Out of them our futures could be foretold, and the



things that would one day exist could be seen hiding behind



the north wind.  There was nobility in these prospects, which



varied depending on the character of the grain being roasted.



Now was not the time that then was, but then no time was, in



the manner of speaking of it.  And although heavenly 



trumpets tendered three notes for each cake of phrase, I 



knew Satan’s Kingdom had a hand in this.  Therefore session



two called for a different approach.  I drew up a map that



showed us here, where the black dots are, with our 



destination being there, at the edge of the fir trees.  I traced a 



fibrous line between them and off we went.  Maybe it was too 



soon after death for things to have stabilized, because when I 



asked about staff reductions your face turned blue.  As we



floated along, a sense of futility followed us at a respectful



distance, occasionally stopping to rest or take notes.  The 



dark air grew thick, and our progress was stalled thanks to 



*Preternatural Stupendious Prodigious assistance by the *



*Devil given thereunto*.  A low theater crept up from the east.  



I presupposed its existence before analyzing it.  Many times 



I’d done the opposite and found myself carefully arranging 



shadows while the objects that supposedly cast them 



wandered off, pursuing whatever desires or whims were



uppermost in their thoughts, without any consideration for 



my efforts, save to ensure they were fruitless.  In fact this 



became something of a trend over the years, until I counted 



myself among those movable shadows, whose relative 



independence only affirmed their contingent, gratuitous



character.  So I assessed the current situation according to



what depth of conviction I could muster about the judgments 



to be made.  For example, was it sunrise or the middle of the 



night?  We were wide awake, certainly.  And there were birds 



singing.  But a sheet lay over the whole village.  Did it appear 



then, as it does now, that the same question could receive



thousands of different answers, and that we may as well have 



been consigned to the nether side of some unknown planet 



as to have been where we were?  This didn’t seem likely, or 



rather there was no need to exaggerate the case or its 



implications, even as the west wind swept through each



tentative disposition proposed.  What felt clear was the sense 



of a mental journey cut short by stupefaction––and by 



open-mouthed disbelief turned despairingly toward an 



empty corner of the room, which had suddenly enclosed us, 



as the dim light from a sconce revealed a single, round object 



at a distance of approximately five feet, either on the floor or 



hovering just above.  No additional details were available.  I 



called out to it; it called out to me.  Next door someone said 



“Wait for the Face Man to come.”  Whether I knew to whom 



this referred I can’t say.  How could such a problem be borne 



without the elusive gauge of poetry?  Was there any way this 



situation could have offered me a more refined sense for



what was lacking, as I struggled to humor it into giving a hint 



what the next step should be?  But there was no next step. 



Present and future were simply abandoned to the insensate 



devouring gorge.  Alternatively, the round object could have 



been a kind of poem, like Wyatt’s “In Æternum,” although



I’m adding that just now.  At the time I had no idea what it 



was or whether it mattered for me to know, or even whether 



its status as an object was worth confirming.  I did 



nevertheless try to confirm it.  I understood X to be true 



owing to reasons* a,b,c*, and *d*.  In reality, though, X was false, 



for those exact same reasons.  The next day I stood waiting



for a train.  Someone else was living inside me now, which 



changed the problem completely.

I had a blow-up raft I used to ride. Down to the summer sea. Dolphins swam beside. Twice saved someone from drowning.



 



Not me, but my bottle-nosed friends, by whom I was gently buffeted.  Dozed. The undertow could have its way with me. It never did. 



 



 



 



Someone pushed the throttle down on the great white yacht. The ocean seemed to flush like a toilet around me.



 



One great scoop of sand went down my pants each time. Scratched my butt like the surface of a home movie. Deep.



 



 



 



The raft has gone the way of the waterbed. The one hit wonder The Floaters sang “Float On.” Then floated on.



 



But me, I hit the waves on vinyl. “From Here to Eternity.” I should be harder now. The kind of plastic that doesn’t fade in the sun.

Wicked wienie wonce was woman whuut. That’s what you wrote in my yearbook. We were in bra and panties it was fright night alright.



 



Now don’t get your panties in a bunch, you’d say. I pictured carrots. Bugs Bunny munching scanties that were worn by Elmer Fudd.



 



But everything was a slasher flick with you. Or mutants. You wouldn’t see aliens. Devil flicks bored you. You screwed the devil you said



 



and he wasn’t any good. That’s a devil for you. Speak of the devil, saw the ex on a cross-town bus. I’d like to say he let himself go.



 



But no more than I. No more than Tallulah Bankhead had in Die, Die My Darling or Bette Davis in Burnt Offerings.



 



Which, by the way, you refused to see. And who could blame you? You said you’d seen enough trash. Swinging an axe.

Once the leaves had drained of chlorophyll,



sculpted themselves with rouge



 



and commissioned a warm light to gild them,



a few threw themselves down



 



to wash once more in this pooling



of a water most unlike rain. And you



 



cast yourself flat along the bodies



of the leaves, made yourself expansive



 



and did a wormy sort of work. Laying weight



on the film tension of water over concrete 



 



and gathering the leafscape to its boundaries.



Where else might you bathe except numb



 



in a place of your own making? The day, it went



in serial: finding a torpor so passive



 



as to ricochet: passion rises and falls on cue: crash



and recovery pass in quickstep: then and done.



 



So you’re in a new place, an unscripted space, here



neither around nor along plotline, you’re loose



 



and you’ve lost it. Far away someone



is patting you, this hand lets its weight



 



guide you gentle: far away 



there is a place where dreams grow



 



where they go round and quiet



and come down from the trees you’d left 



 



them in to find you and let you stroke



their new teeth. You will maybe never go there.



It is not a place where eyes go. 



 

I pick my gap-toothed cunt up off the floor.



I can feel it in my lap, trembling there



like a small insect. 



 



Oh cut the crap dear cunt, I tell it. 



The time it took the ocean to carve this valley,



that was one day in the life of a cunt.



 



Cunt of cordage and rigging, of shock



and sigh of wave. Then, yes—



with such strangeness it opens,



 



gives name to the sounds that rise early



at my window: wind and leaf



and leafblower and the opened husk 



 



of sun. The cunt could name mountains,



but its paper wings just beat and beat.

Meaning a vocalist who doesn’t sing



convulses his body instead



negative capability a cappella style



while wearing a brown horse head



rubber arms severed below the elbows



to hug himself as his guest



 



Meaning an egg imago



where would the Moor be without Iago



you wear leather and I slap on latex



 



A sunken relief that breaks the heart



an artifact that cracks its silhouette



in two on x-ray shot before repeat



technique to establish benignity



divinity publish anomaly as original lit

This is my body.



This is my body.



This is my body, help me hold it together. 



Help me hold it together.



Help me hold it in tight.



Keep me from writing another



tonight. You



 



dumb piece of shit. You



think I should think



*brevity* is the soul of wit?



Liar, lyre. Veins on fire.



Wrapped round my body like piano wire.



 



Oh I can’t count my fits 



or the rest of my bits. 



But it says on my lid



 



that I come complete



with scandals and beatz



and sublime, ravine-ous, Venusian conceits.



 



switch.



*Satan broke his mirror when I came to you.*



*I sent a list of everyone I wanna maim to you.*



*And it was hot. But if it’s all the same to you,*



*I’ve been put off by the feeling you’re a game to you.*



*I’d effuse jagged flesh, leave my fame to you,*



Wait.



Was that a sigh, you



depreciated fuck?



Are my lines going nowhere? Am I too



embarrassingly millenarian for 2014? I know I really should be scrubbing amnion’s tatters 



with *this*



till they shiiiine like the top of the Chrysler Building. Or



is it that I seem...



tame to you?



Render me bread:



I’ll pass the blame to you.



 



switch.



Oh, to be fecund,



roiling, vast.



I scan in Widener



and poetry class.



My skeleton’s shaking, 



possessed of an ass. 



*Enough* inked twice on my 



biomass.



In my unending quest



to break* with the past



* even, up, bad, ground,



   clean, and last



I am going to dearticulate the joint between my tongue and throat.



 



Comes break, on loping on long. Suds came armies on hot concrete: ticker feed. Ragged skinjob. 



You should



understand that you do non-trivial harm.



 



*Temet nosce.*



What art thou?



-- Fuck, shit, ass, balls, 



*ow, ow, ow.*

                        {the minstrel leaves the stage} 



 



 



 



Nice ax  



               



               I say.  



 



                           He says  



                                     



                                           “pyx



but I see how you could confuse that”



 



 



 



                                                             What else   



could I beg for but  



 



                                 pardon? 



                                            



                                               He tells me 



                                                             



                                                                   “there



is none not whilst I make water and libate;



buy me one of what you’re having; tell me



your ailings and next set I’ll slather the balm



across your brow”



 



           



 



                               I buy the spirit, but am fine, I tell him



 



my kids love their puppy, we all tussle.



                           



                                                               I’m guttered 



by this happiness.



 



                             He sings  



 



                                            “my psalmbook is a host 



of dogs baned and swole-up; of molars 



shattered by bruxing grief; you’re kindling”



                           



                                                                           He sings                                                 



“air out your eyes”



 



 



 



                                Is that a Hank, ’a Cash?



                         



 



  



“alms of such generous measure cannot be



guaranteed nor refunded ”



 



 



 



                                      You Catholic?



 



 



 



                                                              “i am catholic;  you know



i like your proximity and you can sure sit close;



this bar is dead yet I’m drinking left-handed!



come you; congregate with me around the mic”



 



 



 



Me?



 



 



 



        “you do you play?”



 



 



 



                                         I can’t play a thing. 



 



 



 



                                                                          “then you will



need a banjo; you’ll make of your right hand



a cup; strum; you could put your other hand



in your pocket; easy”



 



 



 



                                  But to keep such a pace? 



 



 



 



 



                                                                           “my heel



thuds and leadeth the way; though you peter out



though you rest, pick it back up; and whoa



therein’s dynamics; though you think I’ve lost stride 



the measure divides infinitely; though you lope behind 



you cannot drag the time it drags you along



a consecrated path a circle; we are bound



to overlap”



 



 



 



                   I’m slow of speech and tongue.  



Can’t you get someone else?



 



 



 



“no one is here; neon like moths tick



against tubes these lights so perpendicular



my silhouette glooms against the wall



and lurks; keep your face toward the signage,



mouth toward mic or voice and visage



you will bleed into the corner”



 



 



 



                                                   But I don’t know any words.



 



 



 



“save that line!  it is perfect for banter twixt



songs;  stutter;  be sheepish; the PA could sprawl



a mere hum across the crowded firmament



afterside this drop ceiling; play 



your self as a character; say it skutter tway;  



say Sewanee;  say right and reckon;



say Lawd; attribute weather to him; pluralize



his name, like They Lawds’s lightnin’ out;    



come Tulsa you’ll mumble the chorus; come



Joplin holler, Memphis sing



and Shreveport harmonize; come home



again we’ll blend our twang of breath;



but tonight, follow me; I’ll feed you the word”

No one alive knows what my body is feeling right now but 



there’s a way of working it out, and there’s someone who 



knows how to do that, except first we need to wait for the



right conditions, and in the meantime send our strength out



into the disabling humidity to sweat itself into as many drops



as required for oversight of the metropolis called nowhere. 



(When I say my body I refer to the one I had been renting



for many years until recently.) In the past everything was



divisible by two. People would wait behind a wooden fence



while a river of grass swept by. It was either noon or night,



never in between, and most objects tended to be either blue



or green. The sky was a huge lens through which the sun and



planets and stars were magnified. Stone towers would 



perpetually deteriorate, and streets would trail off aimlessly



to the south and east, into the sea. My concern back then 



was the amount of paperwork required to document all this. 



Each day I would create a small chart where I would insert



certain private symbols whose meanings I would guess at.



The sun would tilt on its head, trains would travel 



backwards, and I’d return home to my perch on the hillside,



beside an easel. Sitting up there, I often saw ships laden with



pine cones and red leaves to be applied to skulls of thinkers



in the grass, and these visions lent elasticity to my



temperament, allowing me to handle new events by calmly



outfoxing them. Complications did not fail to ensue. For



example, once as I was writing a poem similar to this one,



a small animal darted across the page. I say animal but note



 a human animal. Despite my training, these were my



immediate feelings: aggravation, annoyance, discomfort,



disgrace, a sense of oppression, destroyed happiness, 



inconvenience, indignation, insult, mortification, outrage,



vexation, wounded pride, mental anguish, humiliation &c.



Well, I think so then and I thought so still. Yet as of today



my eyes have learned to avoid what they project, and so I



follow their lead, focusing on an absent center, so to speak, 



taking that center to be the thing that one day will envelop



me, save that I know this to be false––a false idealization–– 



like a pen or pencil gripped tightly in the fist, stabbing the air



with signs that know no pretense outside of that which



makes them intelligible. Lights flash east of Opportunity



Rocks. Most of what remains gazes up at the hazy patch atop



the night sky, until certain spells leak down like assistants 



sent to make a task more difficult, plucking out spines of



light for dark illumination. Is this what I came here to see,



this thing that once lay beneath my feet, in vaults of 



equanimity, its soil exchanged for what I’d occupy, 



instinctively, in a drone of disappointment? Imagine that 



I’m speaking of the pain I’m feeling in such a way that you



feel it too; and yet I don’t feel anything. I’d love to be part of



what you’re part of, to enjoy some poignant dream as it sighs



in your ear. But I only feel a transcript of real pain. And yet. 



Try not to put it in words. Eventually I’ll know when



something has been left out. Is what necessary? I take a 



short trip through time to find someone whose wings have



grown sheer or at least impressively faint. I listen to dead



voices argue beyond what I can make out, their sentences



rolling to no other purpose than to coax remote things into



view, even though they fail to maintain interest, and serve



simply to punctuate the long night. Yes, amazing. For here



on earth seasons are careless of speech. And there’s no



recompense without injury. Nobody knows where they



stand.

In the United Federation of Planets 



pain 



  is not gone



 



In that Federation we still have memory   



  And it has not brought us down yet  



 



in the United Federation of Planets



                



we have abstracted away location



We know no place               



                   There is none. 



Where we once were, 



 



we have abstracted away language, 



   we have stripped off our zippers, 



we have found wisdom. 



 



 



And on the Starship



   swiftly a god         among men he walks consider                    it



   *walks*      commanding the ship voicewise    chainwise      anticipating



   counteraction, action the sweep of his stride.   This is Lt. Cmdr. Data. 



 



 



Let me remind you that he is trustworthy. Though gendered Data slick haired 



is stable. He is interface and rationale and execution. 



Let me remind you that we have beaten our televisions into agricultural implements. 



And to put *this* TV show in context: Let me remind you: Bursting forth 



like a time lapse flower: *Comes the knowledge that this kingdom will come to us.* 



We will abstract away hunger. There will be a season for every thing, 



time will turn each moment and bury it after. 



There will be a way through. There will be a number for every day, 



we will call to our gods still insistently but less urgently. 



We will hurt so much but pain will not be execrable. We will trust our machines to hold us, 



we will be able to afford to be careless of our genders, careless of our clothing, of our needs, 



we will perform the manners of the past and we will seek out new life and new civilizations 



and *walk* without location without appearance -- we will feel the counteraction 



swinging back to meet the action 



even as we are the action -- even unto the dusk aboard a starship, 



even through the night watch, the bent shoulders of hurting friends when we don’t know how to help them, 



even unto the return to Earth, the memory of what you were and the process by which you were changed, 



even unto the death of comrades children parents lovers, even forgiving, 



because if a MEASURABLE CHANGE has occurred then there is a beginning and an end, 



then somewhere somewhen we are certain of anything at all. 



 



 



                                                                When



                                            the cold dawn lurches over an alien world



                                I will lean my head on the chest of an android. Just for a moment.



          And then              we will see to the wounded.   



                              You may not know:



                   we have never been safe before.



    But in the 24th century morality will   burn



              like a warp core. 



 



 



How do you do it, Android? 



How, How to speak with steady voice, without pull to home or need for sex or need for anything to distract. 



How to follow rule, to stare economics down. 



How to find a path without place. 



How to insist upon what you don’t need, or want. 



How: an absurd ethics. How: search *as though* in need. 



How you changed everything, loose-limbed and striving 



    and clear-eyed ---- 



How can you live perfect, 



Data Why don’t you go to your quarters and just sit and stare?  



     Small wonder you have hoped to acquire our imperfections -- Data 



       your love



       is plain to see. 



  Lt. Cmdr. Data you have the bridge. 



Do us proud.

Those five boys—the drunk ones who knocked the living shit and thirty-seven pennies out of Riccardo Hernandez—they weren’t all football players. The news people latched onto the football thing when they rode into town in their white vans, logos on the sides and satellites hitched to the roofs. They aired long, weighty shots of the rebel flag painted on the back of Mr. Johnson’s tackle shop, and reported on the deadly incident between five football players and a Mexican immigrant in front of the city hall in Riddlescreak, Virginia. But Mr. Johnson’s was the only rebel flag in town, city hall was a block and a half over, and only two of the boys were football players. When he saw the coverage, my brother’s face flared ripe and red and he snatched the remote and cut off the TV. He said that there was an agenda if he ever saw one, and in spite of everything, I have to agree with him.

Straight vs. Crooked

“You know there are no straight lines in it? That’s what makes it perfect.”

*Learned Men give it as a most certain sign of Possession, when the afflicted Party can see and hear that which no one else can discern any thing of, and when they can discover secret things, past or future. *



–Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World







*All that, we call “to have loa.” *



–Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen 







Copp’s Hill Burying Ground is all that’s left of Copp’s Hill. When the rest was cut and carted off, the yard was left standing: a tall extrusion of coffins and soil held together by a stone wall. It is Boston’s second oldest cemetery, a place where the headstones lean at wild angles as though into centuries of accumulated wind. The time to visit is winter, when snow and sky blur in white darkness and erase the horizon. Begin at North Station, follow traffic down Causeway, then, one block before the ocean, turn up steep, narrow, crooked Hull Road. Climb the hill into what was called New Guinea, where the Africans of colonial Boston, slave and free, once lived and listened for spirits from home. The Puritans feared them—feared their medicine, which understood inoculation, feared their worship, which cloaked much older faiths, and feared their long, loud funerals, which wound for hours through the city streets. These funerals so unsettled Boston’s selectmen that, in order to contain them, they outlawed their winding processions and “heathenish” ringing of bells. Thinking of these people, walking in the wake of their wakes, hug the left sidewalk. Continue, until you reach the corner of the cemetery wall. The entrance is farther along, but stop here, halfway up the incline. Press your ear against the frosted stone; you are level with the tombs.



 



Some distance behind this wall, the bones of the Reverend Doctor Cotton Mather lie buried. The shrill mouthpiece of an absolute god, Mather was Harvard’s first public intellectual. I like to imagine I can still hear him, chatty like the corpses in Dostoevsky’s “Bobok.” Still preaching—reading, perhaps from his pamphlet The Negro Christianized, to Phillis Wheatley, America’s first black woman poet and Mather’s eternal neighbor. Or perhaps he is reading from the Wonders of the Invisible World, his defense of “spectral evidence” in the prosecution of Salem witchcraft. Like his god, Mather lived in jealous, violent fear of those who listened to voices other than his own. Yet they surrounded him in life, just as he now lies buried among them: people whose untranslatable gods and worlds, now forgotten, murmured under his eaves. They were Indians, Africans, and those among his own people possessed by their dances and spells. Cotton Mather was afraid of them. He flinched from their shadows—fearing, as he wrote, cruel “Buffetings from Evil Sprits.” He was convinced his neighbors did “The Work of Darkness”; that their daughters perverted “the Plastic Spirit of the World”; that his African slaves had “magical conversations with Devils.” Conversations from which he, Cotton Mather, was excluded. Voices, that he, Cotton Mather, could not hear.



 



This issue of The Harvard Advocate was inspired by these voices and those who heard them—by the possessor, the possessed, and the relationship that binds them. It was inspired by the idea that artistic creation is always a form of ventriloquism, a vast dialogue with other voices. These voices, which Bakhtin called polyphony and the Haitian *vodouisant* calls the *loa*, are the true wonders of the invisible world. *Possession* celebrates them, and invites your ear. We hope that with every turn of the page, the good Reverend will do a corresponding roll in his grave.