A Black Poetics: Against Mastery

Dawn Lundy Martin

1. Against the Comfort of the Foreclosed, Adornment

To imagine the black body is to imagine the creative is to imagine discom-

fort. What is more disruptive to the American fantasy of itself than this black
or brown body, that lurks and hulks, the one that opens and spills, that is
uncontained and uncontainable, unbreakable/brutal and just as fragile, the
one that threatens the imaginary fabric that weaves us all together? But
what is a black body if we can imagine it outside of this context and imag-
ine instead the person? Is the person possible given the set of constraints
and restraints, batterings and eliminations that threaten its existence? The
black body is turned into object-not-person the moment it enters the social
sphere, the moment the preperson has an encounter with the “public.”
But what does that mean? When is that? I think about babies, little brown
babies, newly born and mostly covered, held close to someone’s chest
or tucked inside of a stroller. They do not yet know themselves as beings,
according to Jacques Lacan, cannot yet recognize themselves as indepen-
dent from the mother, have not yet incorporated eternal lack in the psyche

boundary 2 44:3 (2017)"DOI 10.1215/01903659-3898154"© 2017 by Duke University Press

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/44/3/159/499170/BOU44_3_08Martin_Fpp.pdf

by UNIV CA IRVINE user
on 12 September 2018
 160"boundary 2 / August 2017

or glimpsed the soul-splicing void. For the black body, one must recognize
one’s self as a self, and then one is forced to recognize one’s self as a black
self, an overdetermined subjectivity subject to being as overinterrogated
as it is overwritten. Whenever this happens—that recognition of the black
overdetermined self—it is also the moment of the impossible. This is one
anchor for my thinking about impossibility in the experience of the black
material body as it encounters the world.

The impossible as a fissure in one’s existence. The way this thing we call
“race” is a kind of pathology that we have no alternative but to embrace. My
mother, who is in her eighties, claims she has never experienced a single
moment of racism (Martin 2015: 11). I know that this is impossible, as she
grew up in the Jim Crow South. My father, dead now, who also grew up
in the Jim Crow South, hated other black people, especially recent immi-
grants. He thought people from the Caribbean, who had recently moved
into our neighborhood, were ruining it. My father was not a man of privi-
lege. He was undereducated, working class, dark skinned, and also insular,
meaning he seemed to never reflect. He never talked about the past, about
his growing up, except once he mentioned working in “the fields” as a boy
of five or six. What am I when I am a self-subjugating body? Do I have
agency? Am I making something, or am I reiterating some entrenched idea
of myself? While my parents, however sociopathic in the relationship to
black identity, seemed to need to distance themselves from the black body,
from blackness (and why wouldn’t they?—the object is so disparaged), I
was keenly aware of what we as a culture were beginning to call “differ-
ence.” I embraced the impossible object, the body that is my container and
what we call “black.” But I felt distance from any knowing about the black
self, beyond its impossibility. What is being black, besides an impossible
location for selfhood?

The black body enters social space. First, recognition of “blackness” in the
encounter with another. That first moment when, as Claudia Rankine says,
one is “rendered hypervisible” by, in this case, the awareness of one’s black-
ness as perceived through the eyes of another. “We suffer,” says Rankine,
“from the condition of being addressable” (2014: 49). But in this encounter
with the social, there might not be a verbal address. The addressability is
made possible by the body itself. The black body has to negotiate what’s
being “imposed” and “recognized” without language, which makes for, of
course, an inevitable slippage between perception and projection. It itches

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/44/3/159/499170/BOU44_3_08Martin_Fpp.pdf

by UNIV CA IRVINE user
on 12 September 2018
 Martin / A Black Poetics"161

in this gap. But this gap is also productive of black social life, constructed
in part because of the tension inside of this slippage and certainly in rela-
tion to it.

Is this moment of discomfort also a moment of creation, and of innovation?

Can it be that from the second the black body enters social sphere, is per-
ceived as “black,” incorporating into the self that which an other sees, that
this is also the first instance of radical self-creation?

What kind of speech could possibly attend to the melancholia of the racially
marked body, perennially trying to gather itself, make itself whole and true,
despite every effort to obliterate it, make it stab itself in its own eye? Impos-
sibility, especially given its irreconcilability, its discomfort, might be in fact
what compels or calls forth the creative. This is the condition of making.
From a place of not knowing.

2. The Greatest Pleasure Lies in Versatility

It’s never either, this or that. Or, I’m not that way.

You want me to talk about a poem? I’ll talk about a poem.

And, then she said, and I quote, “And the

mystery/magic/duende (going back to the
unknown) exists within versatility.”

We burst into the scene defying expectation and they say we are animals.
And we are animals, of a sort, lighting up cities with rage and tigers around
our necks. And when they say we are animals and that there are better
ways to express discontent, the burning continues. Black rage is a trope,
and to inhabit it is to resist the trope’s mastery. A hurt fractured inside of a
regular thing.

Poetics that is attention. Poetics that is as much breaking as it is making.

The inverse of hermeneutics as it resists interpretation in favor of some-
thing less sure, something more unstable. I’m jumping on top of a police car
on fire. I’m ecstatic. My hearts burns with ecstasy in my sadness.

The room, once white and filled with only the prospect of making (a discom-
fort only the makers know), is neither this nor that. The streets once paved
are now dirt and gravel, dust.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/44/3/159/499170/BOU44_3_08Martin_Fpp.pdf

by UNIV CA IRVINE user
on 12 September 2018
 162"boundary 2 / August 2017

3. The Art Object Speaking Is Poetics

I believe in mastery only insofar as the object allows for its domination.
What about “the slave,” you might ask? Are you saying that “the slave”
allows for its own domination? What about the contingencies of play, I say
in response, of madness, of art? To master is to become bored, anyway.
How do you even get off on it anymore? Punish harder. Punish with increas-
ingly precise rigor. But to be the work of art itself, resulting from the mas-
ter’s desire to master and its boring gore, that’s to be the catalyst for meta-
morphosis of material, however painful it is to be a catalyst.

Matthew Goulish invites us to allow the work of art to change us as out-

siders, as potential critics (2000: 44–45). A key to the creative enterprise
itself is to revel in the flaw of most things, including, or especially, ourselves.
From birth, the black or brown person, in particular, lives inside of the beau-
tifully imperfect fissure compelled by the relation between perception and
projection. “There are, then, successful ways of not knowing one’s self,”
says Giorgio Agamben, “and beauty is one of them” (2011: 113). The inte-
gration of another’s perception of one’s self might have the look and texture
of mastery, but only insofar as the object allows for its domination.

Proposition: Only in the space of discomfort can we be truly creativity.

When we are most comfortable, most “in the zone,” feeling the thing that
we are doing as if running strong down a clear path, we are in the space of
making that is opposite to what I think of as the creative, generative space
of making. This strong-run feeling is a good feeling. We are, as artists, in
the mode and practice of “mastery.” What we produce often feels familiar,
mostly “finished.” In poetry we like to say, when the poem is produced via
this mode of production, that the poem “came to us.” There it is, a little gem.

But again, this might be the place where one is least creative, when we’re
like, Aw, I killed it. “Mastery” is an attempt to dominate the artwork, to
weaken it. It is lording our skills over the artwork. If we were to live in that
space of always getting it exactly right, we might not be so interested in
the process. Many of us prefer it to hurt a little. Creativity, in fact, is most
acutely engaged when we are in that place, we are least familiar, when
we have reached the end of what we already know; it’s strongest in the
uncomfortable space of “not knowing.” The in-between spaces that gather
between knowing. This is true to me, in both the making of something and

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/44/3/159/499170/BOU44_3_08Martin_Fpp.pdf

by UNIV CA IRVINE user
on 12 September 2018
 Martin / A Black Poetics"163

in the experience of a work of art. This thing we call blackness, then, or

the racially marked body, as it shifts in resistance to being mastered, as it
attempts to “master” itself in that impossible space of the overdetermined
and overanalyzed, is central to thinking through an opposition, or, perhaps,
a space dimensionally outside of the perfectly crafted gem.

References
Agamben, Giorgio. 2011. Nudities. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Goulish, Matthew. 2000. 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance. New York:
Routledge.
Martin, Dawn Lundy. 2015. “Weary Oracle.” Harper’s Magazine, March.
Rankine, Claudia. 2014. Citizen. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article-pdf/44/3/159/499170/BOU44_3_08Martin_Fpp.pdf

by UNIV CA IRVINE user
on 12 September 2018