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Tag: Colin Dayan

  • D. Gilson — From Haiti to Georgia, With Skulls and Scotch (Review of Colin Dayan’s In the Belly of Her Ghost)

    D. Gilson — From Haiti to Georgia, With Skulls and Scotch (Review of Colin Dayan’s In the Belly of Her Ghost)

    This review has been peer-reviewed by the b2o editorial board.

    a review of Colin Dayan, In the Ghost of her Belly (LARB 2019)

    by D. Gilson

    Death hung around my house. No way around fate, that’s what my mother told me.

    “Once something bad happens, it will happen again.”

    “My mother’s indifference dismantled my life,” Colin Dayan writes in her new memoir, for “out of the dust and confusion of my childhood, only the desire to escape emerges” (109). In the Belly of Her Ghost (LARB True Stories, 2018) is at turns a gentle meditation on escape and a violent exorcism of that constant, thrumming, haunting Oedipal yank, that tide that brings us back again and again to our mothers. Or, as Saeed Jones ends his own recent memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives (2019), “Our mothers are why we are here” (190). They are, he’s right. How could we, whether we want to or not, ever escape them?

    The market of mother-fixated memoirs bubbles over. These include those written by celebrities, such as Melissa Rivers’ The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and Manipulation (2015) and Wishful Drinking (2008) by Carrie Fisher. The seminal of the literary memoir itself has often been mother-obsessed, such as Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club (1995) and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle (2005). Also, gorgeous tomes that break with conventional form, such as the graphic Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama (2012) by Alison Bechdel, or the comic-reveling Running With Scissors (2002) from Augusten Burroughs. There are lyric meditations on mothers in prosody coming from poets, such as Saeed Jones’ aforementioned How We Fight for Our Lives (2019) and The Long Goodbye (2008) by Meghan O’Rourke. There are those memoirs penned by the children of famous literary mothers, like Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother (1994) by Linda Gray Sexton and I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This (2016) by Nadja Spiegelman. And this is all not to mention the glut of memoirs by mothers themselves.

    This list is hardly exhaustive, though even in its brevity, it begs the question: do we need another memoir about a mother, however extraordinary the circumstances between mother and child might have been. I might have been wont to answer, “Probably not,” but then Colin Dayan’s trailblazing memoir arrived in my mailbox, and I’ve been forced to reverse this impulsive answer completely. For Dayan’s slim memoir “doesn’t read like a conventional narrative,” Jane Tompkins explains in her Los Angeles Times review of the book, “It’s about a woman who tries to exorcise the ghost of her deceased mother through writing.” Tompkins is right; In the Belly of Her Ghost is an inherited reckoning. But I want to take the space offered by this longer review to talk about the book’s delightfully complicated existence. For “I know that I will never be free of the past,” Dayan chants, “that it will never quit feeding on the present” (79). Thank God we get to live in Dayan’s menacing, always-feeding, gorgeous, complicated present, a present that cannot shake off the past.

    Namely, I believe Colin Dayan’s In the Belly of Her Ghost generatively complicates four questions to which too many memoirs offer ready-made answers: 1) what is a mother? 2) what is a child? 3) what is race? and 4) what is the act of creative nonfiction-ing?

     

    I: What is a mother?

    “What has availed

    Or failed?

    Or will avail?

    —Robert Penn Warren, “Question and Answer”

    Penn Warren’s poem is not about mothers or mothering or being mothered. But the questions he asks offer us an interesting entry into considering how the mother functions as a narrative device. Many memoirs celebrate the triumphant mother, the one who has availed; mourn the disastrous mother, the one who has failed; or imagine alternative pasts or futures of the one who will avail. In the Belly of Her Ghost offers no simple progenitor for us to instantly recognize and digest. Instead, Dayan offers us a complex figure who defies our recognition, queers it, and makes us re-approach the mothers in our own lives and in the other texts we consume. Aren’t we all always, after all, consuming mothers one or another? Or perhaps, instead, we find ourselves being consumed?

    “Who was the sacrifice,” Dayan wonders, “my mother or me?” (43) The question comes early, but haunts the life, and afterlife, of the memoir, for sacrifice is always central to how Dayan and her mother relate, at times failing to relate, to one another. “As a child, I was in awe of the woman,” Dayan begins, “She laughed at me, screamed at me. She shunned me, but now, dead, she stays close. Sometimes she comes down the wall like a spider” (3). But who was this woman-cum-spider, and who is she still? The web of her identity confuses Dayan, and thus us, and draws one in. This mother was born in Haiti and could never, or would never, articulate her biracialness, though so much of her life was spent attempting to pass for white in public, while privately conjuring the songs of her childhood Caribbean home. Soon after this mother’s family immigrated to New York, she, aged 17, went on a date with man twenty years her senior. This man, “took her to the circus. He tried to teach her to ride horses and eat mussels” (7). Dayan never knows if her mother wanted to go with her father to the circus in the first place, but

    That same year, my mother traveled from Brooklyn to a honeymoon in Mexico. They traveled around for two years, then to Nashville and, finally, to Atlanta. The South must have seemed to her like a cross between Haiti and New York. ‘I would have been an actress,’ she told me. ‘Then I met your father.’ But she never stopped acting. She lived to be looked at. (8)

    By the time Dayan joined this cross-cultural family – her mother, a biracial Haitian immigrant, and her father, a Jewish immigrant from X – they were living in the cultural capital of the Jim Crow South. They were passing for white, or an acceptable shade of off-white, a type of sacrifice in and of itself that allowed them access to many, if not all, of Atlanta’s institutions. The family’s origin was thus muddled. For “in the south,” Dayan argues, “domesticity and chatter and ease are almost always accompanied by something gross. The sweetest memory depends on the shattered life of whatever is granted neither leisure nor mercy” (30).

    We are almost always seeking out our origins, often to our betterment, and often to our detriment. In August of 2019, The New York Times launched the 1619 Project in observation of the 400th anniversary of the first African slaves arriving to Point Comfort, Virginia; the project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” This is a worthwhile endeavor, to be sure. Conversely, in late 2018 Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren joined a swath of white Americans taking home DNA tests – such as Ancestry or 23andMe – in attempt to prove valid her claims of “authentic” Native American heritage; CNN reports that Stanford geneticist Carlos Bustamante, who analyzed Warren’s results, “places Warren’s Native American ancestor between six and 10 generations ago, with the report estimating eight generations.” Such focus on race’s chimerical and arbitrary nature is dangerous. Or to echo Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin, Jr., “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It… [dishonors] legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven.” On the one hand, our search for our very origin can be a productive act of cultural and artistic reckoning; and on the other, our search can lead us to the abyss of reinforcing the appropriative violence that is certainly one of our American heritages.

    Thankfully, Dayan’s In the Belly of Her Ghost does not become the former. And though it is certainly an origin story, the book succeeds, in part, because I believe Dayan is seeking not her origin, per se, but to understand, and to reckon with, the remaining ghost of her mother, or mothers, because, she writes, “the dead remain hidden in us. But from time to time they make themselves known” (127). I say mothers in the plural in the most literal sense possible. For yes, Dayan’s biological mother was the Haitian woman passing for white in Atlanta, the thwarted actress, the doll in a beaded gown who would pass by (and through) Dayan’s ear singing Sinatra or bits of songs in the haunting lilt of French Creole. But there was another mother in Dayan’s life, the one I find too few reviews of the book have given her due. This mother was the charged with keeping the household in order like a fine-tuned engine. This mother was a black woman named Lucille.

    “Only two people mattered to me, and they are still on my mind,” Dayan writes (31). One was Thomas, the family’s yardman. And the other? “Lucille, the woman who raised me,” Dayan admits, “and, I almost wrote, ‘the love of my life’” (31). Whereas Dayan’s biological mother was, in many ways, a ghostly figure moving violently through Dayan’s childhood, Lucille offered corollary: “Lucille gave me joy… She taught me the kind of dread that as also desire: the longing to go out of this world and know what can’t be seen” (33). The caricature of the black “mammie” is all-too alive and well in Southern literature; one need only look as far back as Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 book The Help, which became a star-studded film. But even if Lucille might become such a caricature in lesser hands, in Dayan’s thoughtful, careful prose she is the mother Dayan needed — not perfect, but not ghostly, which is to say, present.

    “Lucille told me bedtime stories,” (36) Dayan explains, and “she saved me from the Lord’s fury, even though she scared the living daylights out of me” (40). This both-and-ness, the story teller and the fear maker, existed holistically in the relationship between Lucille and Dayan, a mixture I suspect should exist between every mother and child, especially those of the American South. And lest we forget: though Lucille was black, it is clear Dayan was not exactly white, no matter how hard her biological mother tried to hide this fact. Lucille, thankfully to Dayan, did not try to hide this fact, but let the color of their lives pass over them as if it was a quilt not to be hidden away in the humid heat of Atlanta. Lucille “must have known my mother was not really white,” Dayan explains, “but it didn’t matter anyway, and she called me her baby. It was all confused.” The memoir relishes in that confusion – particularly of who is the mother, and of what race even means at every corner – and it is the better for relishing in that very space of perplexity.

    And as with her biological mother, Dayan continues to be haunted by Lucille, too, a haunting that places the woman less as family servant, and more as competing matriarch, even in her various reincarnations in the afterlife. “Lucille died,” Dayan writes, “My story begins. She was never gone, but stayed with me in the dirt or in the wind, surprising me just when I thought I had survived the night terrors… She came before me just as she told me she would” (39).

    It is perhaps easy to read both mothers as failing, and indeed, in many ways they “fail.” But they also persist, and as Jack Halberstam argues, “if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards” (2011: 3). Dayan’s matriarchal origins are so out-of-focus, they fail on the level of absolute knowledge; but is that a failure? Or instead, does the slippery nature of motherhood in In the Belly of Her Ghost offer us different, perhaps better, rewards? In short, yes, resoundedly yes. Or as Dayan’s mother tells her, “We’re in a hole. I cannot exactly catch onto the rope to get out without hurting you. So we’ll never find each other, but maybe there are other ways to make our lives mean something when words are dead” (139). In the Belly of Her Ghost offers us a completely unique and appropriately complex vocabulary to discuss mothers, mothering, and motherhood, a vocabulary we lack because the words are coming to us already dead, and the book, in its conjuring of the ghostly, brings them back to life. And as the slim volume centralizes the ghostliness of mothers, it also brings into question the existence of children.

     

    II: What is a child?

    “Between the dark and the daylight,

    When the night is beginning to lower,

    Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,

    That is known as the Children’s Hour.”

    —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Children’s Hour”

    Longfellow argues, oddly enough for the nineteenth century, that the night and all its mysteries belong to children. The night, that time full of mystery, yes, but also the unknown, and the unknown danger, and the unknown danger that you know is there and yet cannot name. In In the Belly of Her Ghost, Colin Dayan works in this lineage, queering the line between child and adult, daughter and mother at every turn.

    And what is Dayan’s childhood, or better said, how do we come to spiritually experience it? For as Longfellow argues, Dayan’s childhood is lived “between the dark and the daylight.” We know Dayan’s childhood is perpetual, as she is always haunted by both her mother and Lucille, despite how much she ages. And despite where she visits or lives — Philadelphia, New York, Paris, Haiti, Nashville — it is always and forever a Southern childhood of Atlanta. For Dayan, and thus for us, that Southerness is palpable; “pussy and possum,” she writes, almost prays, “that’s about as close as I can get to my sense of the South: sticky, hot, and unusually cruel” (24). The comparison to other great Southern memoirs — especially Dorothy Allison’s semi-autobiographical Bastard Out of Carolina—would be easy to make, given Dayan’s shared focus on the potential and often simultaneous beauty and cruelty of Southern childhoods in their specificity. But whereas Bastard and other memoirs of the Southern canon enlighten readers to that particular brand of Southern poverty, Dayan offers us a unique vision of childhood in the South that I’ve yet to experience: one where glamour is always on the edges.

    Glamour rests on the edges like the photographs that punctuate In the Belly of Her Ghost, photographs that, in essence, spawn the writing of the memoir itself, which originates with Dayan receiving her mother’s earthly possessions and sifting through them (almost like a spider, the creatures that also punctuate the memoir). One photograph shows Dayan and mother on the flagstone patio of their northeast Atlanta home. “We look uncomfortable,” Dayan writes, “caught in a pose that tries to appear natural when everything about it is strained” (110). Dayan is dressed in a ballerinas’ outfit, replete with tutu and tiara, a look we are led to believe was not her usual finery. But then there’s her mother, within whom, Dayan describes, a grace and “lightness takes shape, as my eye follows her legs, taut and lean under her tight skirt, up to the hip casually slung, to the right arm, with bangles on the wrist and a cigarette held loosely in her hand” (110). It’s the picture, quite literally, of mid-twentieth-century Southern metropolitan elegance. But of course, for both mother and daughter, that elegance comes at a cost of mysterious measure: “the eyes are strained,” Dayan continues describing her mother, “too much of the eyebrow is plucked, and the face, though beautiful, looks dead, the smile held too long” (110-111). The cost, I suspect, as is the cost in many passing narratives of the American South in particular, is the desire to both belong and to be. Or as Dayan’s father tells her earlier with a sigh, “it’s no good to be too strange in a country you love” (8).

    Lucille and Dayan’s mother are not the only ghosts we reckon with here. That child in the ballerina get up, or that same child frying chicken in the kitchen with Lucille, or singing “Dixie” in Mrs. Guptill’s fifth grade class, later to irritate her parents and Lucille by taking the side of Civil Rights activists, that child that is Dayan herself, we reckon with her ghost, too, even though Dayan makes clear that “I hate my own nostalgia, [for] it goes against the grain of everything I believe in” (69). But what do we have beyond our nostalgia in the very act of writing a memoir? How do we answer the question of the children we were, and in many ways, will always be? This perpetual child is complex, admittedly, or as Kathryn Bond Stockton contends, “what a child ‘is’ is a darkening question. The question of the child makes us climb into a cloud… leading us, in moments, to cloudiness and ghostliness surrounding children as figures in time” (2009: 2). In the Belly of the Ghost forces us to face this cloudiness, this ghostliness, however, and shows us that we are all, as Dayan models, children or figures fallen out of time.

    Dayan allows us to unpack, consider closely, and make altars of her mother’s things alongside her because she’s not only a child fallen out of time, but, as Dayan confesses, she always “longed for [Mother’s]things as if they might magically transform my childhood irrelevance” (140). We are allowed to journey with her in attempt to transform the very tropes of childhood in literature itself. We are led, all-too-often, to believe that childhood itself is something we grow out of and shed; what is the twisted moral of Peter Pan, after all, if not that we all, every last one of us, must grow up? In the Belly of Her Ghost offers the lingering ghostliness of childhood to which Bond Stockton alludes. It is as if, Dayan seems to be learning, and thus we alongside her, we are playing dress up with decaying clothes, and yet clothes that never leave us entirely. Such as a heavily beaded outfit of her mother’s Dayan finds in a box after her mother’s death. “Things, like ghosts, know what they want,” Dayan writes when she finds the “evening gown and jacket, covered in blue and white sequins… I remembered how it held her body in its weight and beauty. The dress was more alive than my mother’s smile” (141). But when Dayan gives the dress to Goodwill, the dress, her mother, her childhood, is not done with her: “I walked back to the garage. There on the floor lay a small sequined belt. I picked it up and held my mother’s tight little waist in my hand. It is not easy to tell a ghost story that is not meant to frighten” (141). Childhood, like the belt, like the act of playing dress up, wants us to return to it, to be haunted by it, however frightening that prospect might be.

    Here, Dayan revels in the ghostliness of her childhood. She continues to live it, to face it, to make more and more life out of it. In the Belly of Her Ghost is “an elegy with a covert manifesto of hope,” Andrea Luka Zimmerman writes. This revelry, of both elegy and hope for the child that was, and yet, remains, is a necessary performance that too many memoirs are unable or not willing to take on. For this mixed-race child of immigrants always and forever on the edges of glamour and ruin is story that needs to be told.

     

    III: What is race?

    “The poet invents heroic moments where the pale black ancestor stands up

    on behalf of the race… She can see silent spaces

    but not what they signify, graphite markings in a forester’s code.”

    —Elizabeth Alexander, “Race”

    For those of us in the American South, whether by birth or migration, by choice or by necessity, and whether white or black or otherwise, we know race is key, albeit unstable centrality of our identity. Likewise, Roderick A. Ferguson contends that when “analyzed in terms of subjectivity, race helps to locate the ways in which identities are constituted” (207). Races constituted as non-white, at the height of Jim Crow in the South, nonetheless, are particularly analyzed and re-analyzed, subject to a haunting that will follow the body from birth well beyond death. Colin Dayan’s search for the ghost of her family’s — and thus her own — race is perhaps the squeaky mechanism that she must oil again and again. The pulley that, no matter how much she greases it, will not turn smoothly. In this way, In the Belly of Her Ghost becomes both a narrative of passing and of diaspora.

    Dayan’s mother, at the bequest of her wealthy husband — a prominent business owner of Atlanta society, perhaps despite his Jewishness — publicly played down her Haitian identity. Thus, her passing as white became a timely desire for Southern ease in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Or as Dayan writes, “this denial of her history was not anything like a grab for white power and privilege, but rather a casual act performed in exchange for a lifestyle of luxury, which just happened to be white,” adding that “this false if stylish veneer killed her spirit and destroyed any chance for happiness” (9). Though it perhaps “destroyed any chance for happiness,” it provided afternoons of sitting with friends in fabulous dresses drinking cocktails and listening to Frank Sinatra. Nights at The Standard Club, an Atlanta golf course and dinner society. But on the flipside of her easy white life, Dayan’s mother had in her employ two distinctly black bodies: Lucille and Thomas. “I hear my mother ringing the bronze bell my father brought back from Czechoslovakia in 1946,” Dayan remembers, “In the morning when she awakened, she called for Lucille to bring her breakfast in bed” (32). So of course, the mother’s passing had a cost not only for herself, but also for those around her, her competing matriarch Lucille, who could never pass as white, especially. But what strikes me in In the Belly of Her Ghost now is the effect her mother’s passing had on Dayan herself.

    This young Dayan, who craved, I believe, consciously or not, to align herself with the non-white bodies surrounding her. The Freedom Riders on television. The lunch counter protesters downtown near her father’s store. The Birmingham preachers on the radio. And of course, her other mother, Lucille, with whom Dayan created a secret, exclusive, and magical world all of their own. For, as Dayan recalls, Lucille

    figured I was in the enviable position of being not too white or too black, which meant that I could find out more things about such people than she could. That’s how we lived: she told me secrets about how to win the fight and sent me out into the world not exactly like bait, but pretty close to it, like an expendable spy. We waited. Waited until I got old enough to be mostly on my own, and by that time, as she knew, I’d have learned my lesson about which kind of people to fear, when to hate, and when to brawl. (114)

    For what are spies if not those who can pass (and what are children if not expendable)? As odd as it may be to claim, part of the magic—that strange concoction of glamour and tragedy always on the edges—of Dayan’s childhood is her role as expendable spy, the one who watches the world around her burn, figurative like Sherman’s Atlanta, and wraps herself “in a bundle of quotations…amulets stored up against my mother’s hatred and what I feared was a curse put on me” (45). For despite living in a seemingly white household, those curses brought from Haiti were always within arm’s reach.

    Thus, that house was not only a house of passing, but a house, too, of diaspora. For as Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin argue, “diaspora offers an alternative ‘ground’ to that of the territorial state for the intricate and always contentious linkage between cultural identity and political organization” (10). If we think of the nuclear family as an analogue for the territorial state (and on the very micro level, the family surely is, especially a family like Dayan’s with its often warring factions), then cultural identity and political organization were always in flux, at war, and fluid in such a household containing a removed father, an always-acting mother, a set-in-her-ways alternative mother, and a ghostly child, all of whom were constituted of different races. It became a site of diaspora, though one difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain. As Dayan admits, “It is difficult to explain the kind of distortion that such incongruous mixing ushered into my life. I found myself a willing prey to such inconsistency, torn between a singular, sad fantasy of the South and the need to keep on walking on the wrong side of white devils. Either way, I remained haunted by the chimaera of whiteness” (73). Such unclear but persistent haunting marks a very contemporary form of diaspora, for as Brent Hayes Edwards explains, “seen through the lens of diaspora… traditional, even paradigmatic concerns… are thrown into question or rendered peripheral” (78). Whereas Dayan’s parents might have found themselves, as non-white immigrants themselves, aligned with the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights movements, they rejected their own diaspora. Dayan, however, even as a child, allowed herself to live in that place called Other, in alignment with Lucille, the mother she loved.

    And this diasporic life is not something that leaves Dayan as she ages. “Now that I’ve returned to the South,” she writes, having moved to Nashville to become the Robert Penn Warren Professor at Vanderbilt, “an old fear beckons. That’s why Lucille keeps coming back to me. The white men are still tall and proud and their eyes bold and fearless… Their gaze takes me to a place of comfort that I don’t understand” (115). She doesn’t understand that place is a return to the racial questions of her childhood, perhaps, though she concludes that it is “something that gives me a respite from sensing that I don’t belong, that I am not right in my skin… I have a hunch that it has a lot to do with terror. [Those white men] still do not like me” (116). I suspect she will never understand. But I also suspect that this non-understanding of racial being is, in large part, what produced In the Belly of Her Ghost, so in a way, I pray Dayan never reaches the fulfillment of knowing.

     

    IV: What is nonfiction-ing?

    “Most nonfiction writers will do well to cling to the ropes of simplicity and clarity.”

    —William Zinsser, On Writing Well

    For those of us who teach memoir and creative nonfiction more generally, we’ve likely invoked William Zinsser, that monarch of our genre, a duke, perhaps, many times. I certainly have, telling my students, especially in the beginning stages of their sequence of creative writing workshops, to always aim for simplicity and clarity. That it is of paramount importance that your read always, at any moment, understand what is happening. We are not wrong to do this. Young writers often need to focus on simplicity, particularly of sentence structure, and clarity, particularly as they are often wont to, at the learned age of 19 or 20, explore the deep mysteries of their lives upon the page. So on the one hand, we quote William Zinsser and move on to talk about “the best” ways to plot an essay. And though this is sound advice for the beginning writer, as soon as we cross that line from novice to whatever-it-is-we-are-calling-ourselves-who-toil-and-then-publish this murky genre called nonfiction, we often through this advice right out the window (a cliché I would likely tell one of my students to strike).

    Let me confess: there are moments within In the Belly of Her Ghost where I am utterly confused. “She answers me,” Dayan writes of her mother, long after her mother’s death, long after the professor is tucked into her Nashville home, “Still, in the morning, hanging by a thread at the edge of the window, she moves when I call her, ‘Hey, mother,’ with a lilt and depth that surprise me” (154). There is a photo of a spider, perhaps twisting in the light coming through that window by which she has built her web, that follows this paragraph. And where most writers would position the spider as a metaphor for their mother, Dayan believes the spider is her mother herself.

    This is a surprising move, but one that fills me, so unexpectedly, with an unbridled joy that I cannot adequately express. Within the world of academic creative writers, it is not sexy to admit to a spiritual practice, especially one that, like Dayan’s, is constituted by parts of Christianity and mysticism. Most of us, it seems, are atheists, perhaps agnostics, and our un-belief is legion within the Ivory Tower. But on a very guttural level, I find myself questioning my un-belief through reading and re-reading In the Belly of Her Ghost, for Dayan succeeds in making so beautiful the thing I thought I had lost: that the ghosts of our pasts can haunt us and in turn, comfort us, however oddly, and make us never truly alone. Which is, in a way, a path to which we might, as Dayan so superlatively demonstrates here, approach the act of creative nonfiction-ing itself.

    Dayan starts in failure, writing of her mother, and of her own writerly self:

    As a child, I was in awe of the woman. She laughed at me, screamed at me. She shunned me, but now, dead, she stays close. Sometimes she comes down the wall like a spider.

    For years I’ve been writing her story. Much of it remains incomplete, pages with titles like “The Lady with Camellias,” “A Daughter’s Lament,” or “Blues in the Night.” I tried in vain to forget her, but she has stayed around as close to me as my breath, hovering like dust hanging in the air. (3)

    But as we’ve already seen, failure has its own unique benefits. By starting in failure, we are forced, thankfully, to take the spiritual journey this slim memoir requires of us. Lucille told Dayan the year before she died that “you can find God in an outhouse hole” (39). I believe, and how strange it is to even use that verb in this sense, that you can find God in In the Belly of Her Ghost. The ghost story Dayan so fears she is writing only to fright has, in surprising ways a levity we offered in our position as readers, hovering above the photos and the appropriately scattered collection of memories, the talisman and the bits of song in Creole and English, the devil’s bargains and the lord’s surprises and grit of things described so clearly we can almost feel them rough against our thusly bared skin.

    Madison Smartt Bell writes of the memoir that “here for the first time [Dayan] turns her rigorous intellect toward her own life, onto her vexed relationship with her mother and subsequent suffering.” Smartt Bell is certainly not wrong, and he joins a chorus of reviewers and blurbers offering similar praise; but I’m thankful for the space this long review essay has provided me because I think most reviewers have overlooked the utter, strange, often funny joys that also underlie the book. The turning of motherhood, and childhood, and race, and the very act of memoir on its head, spinning us something new, a stunning web into which we find ourselves, luckily, caught.

     

    REFERENCES

    Boyarin, Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin. 2002. Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Dayan, Colin. 2018. In the Belly of Her Ghost. Los Angeles: LARB True Stories.

    Edwards, Brent Hayes. 2014. “Diaspora.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. 76-78. New York: New York University Press.

    Ferguson, Roderick A. 2014. “Race.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. 207-211. New York: New York University Press.

    Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Jones, Saeed. 2019. How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster.

    Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2009. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

  • Thinking the Permissible, or Speaking in Common

    Thinking the Permissible, or Speaking in Common

    _____

    In this paper written for the MLA roundtable “Toward an Academic Commons: Academic Freedom and Sites of Contested Speech,” Colin Dayan reflects on what happens when academic freedom is cornered and subsumed by the demands of “civility” and “rationality.”

    _____

    And these are knaves that brawl for better laws
    And cant of tyranny in stronger powers
    Who glut their vile unsatiated maws
    And freedoms birthright from the weak devour

    –John Clare, “To a Fallen Elm”

    Who gets to speak? “To speak,” Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks is to exist for the other. “To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.” To acquire a “civilizing language,” then, is to be an exile in your own land, however we define the terrain of personal significance and conviction.

    The “academic commons,” is something of an oxymoron, a paradox as heady as St. Paul’s encounter with the vexation of bodily resurrection. Must not a new definition of the body be coined? The crux of the matter lies in the spirit that is also the flesh, in something quite intangible, even insensate, but persistent and always quite thing-like.

    The call to the commons, to a “common ground,” or, as some would endorse “the common interests,” is to revel in what we as teachers and students share “in common.” But who is to say what the ground of the common, the commonplace or commonality is? As Morrison wrote in Beloved, “definitions are always in the hands of the definers.” To hold ideas in common is much like the call for consensus: whoever calls for this fellowship has a pretty good idea of what is or is not to be accepted or permissible as shared values. Or to put it more bluntly, these values are akin to holding certain “truths to be self-evident.” As Justice Taney made explicit in his opinion in Dred Scott: “we the people” was never meant to include that class of persons who carried the “indelible mark” of “degradation”:

    The men who framed this declaration were great men — high in literary acquirements, high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and how it would be understood by others, and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery.

    Which people, or persons, or members of the global Academy are excluded from the commons? Zones of exclusion mark off indelibly the lives that are cordoned off, trapped, demolished, bulldozed, expropriated, uprooted, by-passed.

    But for some of our colleagues, those of us who would bring these lives to light are guilty of “partisan politics,” “purges,” and “censorship,” even though there is absolutely no evidence of such practice or intent. Politics is never separate from scholarship. Thought, imagination, and learning is always enhanced by collision and conflict. In “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Theodore Adorno wrote, and I paraphrase, any poet who claims not to be political is in fact proclaiming a politics—and I would add—silencing others in a far more devious because subtle way.

    * * * * * * * * *

    Why should I speak? I’ve always been haunted by Gramsci’s warning that we are all “experts in legitimation” and by the savvy insight of Bourdieu and Passeron in Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture published in 1977, that we – no matter what we intend—can never shed that ermine robe of authority. An authority honed to say what needs to be taught and thought in the right, the tasteful, the distinctive and recognizable—the civil—way.

    But there is always a politics to the under-read and the critical background against which such silences are made. William Carlos Williams recognized the silencing generated by experts, the careening authority of the estimable critics. Before the formidable and raging Book 3 of Paterson, against the background of a library burning and books in flames, he scorned the “knowledgeable idiots, the university,/…../The outward masks of the special interests/that perpetuate the stasis and make it profitable.”
    He recognized how inextricable is the language, the craft, the tools of scholarship from the casual disregard, the everyday violence in the “corrupt cities.” So it was not artlessness that he wanted but something else, something he called “the foulness”—the kind of writing that threatened the moneyed and the privileged, the extensions of state-sanctioned racism and its sanguine exclusivity.

    The affront to the reasonable, the necessary, and the secure matters now more than ever. Reasonable consensus and civility: these words engage me, unsettled as I am by the prospect of divisions (not only of subject but also genre) that allow the continued dispossession of those creatures – human and non-human alike–who remain outside the circle of grace, delivered to subjection without recourse. How can we shed the mantle of civility, consensus, and rationality just long enough to question the claims of decency?

    How do we speak? When it comes to matters of civility and befouling, we need to question our role as teachers and scholars, as well the threats to our profession by a silencing that is racially driven though culturally masked. The remedy of culture always excuses or conceals the experience of racism. In this time of terror, in our complicity with “kill lists,” drone strikes, global dispossession, mass incarceration, and murders of black citizens on our streets, what are the choices offered us as academics?

    A cure for all kinds of threats, reasonableness has long been a way to extend persecution, civil death, and torture. But this rationality, like the theory that accompanies it, is tied to figurative power, and its metaphors can at any time become more insistent. What the anthropologist and historian, the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot, called the “explanatory power of culture” allowed the contexts for inequality and racism to continue. Indeed, they became harsher because hidden by the call for a common ground.

    Our embrace of the “commons” or “academic commons,” though well-intentioned, risks enabling the false ideal of “consensus” that always rears its ugly, if “reasonable” head just when social and racial stratification is at its worst. Against the fashionable cartography of the commons, or a search for common ground, stands the language of stigma, incarceration, control—and downright extermination. Should we not reclaim the singularity of lives that do not span borders, or more precisely, who never —at least not in this country—gained the right to have rights in common?

    Matters of terminology delimit privilege, just as they silence the disenfranchised, the invisible ones, who are always quite visible though objects of serene disregard. Our thought should be supple and ever watchful for the terms that perpetuate the very contexts of inequality—and specifically, racism. I’m grappling here with the push-and-pull of the call for the commons, always moderated and even reproduced by the humanitarian concern that is analogous to it, and hence always already closed to criticism. I learned from Trouillot—may he rest in peace—how the most benign of academic trends carried with it a strategy of extermination that always targets people of color, the poor or the powerless. He knew its eugenic violence even as he confronted its universalizing promise, what he called “totalitarian humanism” and the bugbears of academia: civility and compromise.

    * * * * * * * * *

    Retaliation hides behind a logic that is at once exclusionary and authoritarian. This policing of thought indulges in all manner of intolerant behavior. In the context of the de-hiring of a scholar like Salaita, we have sought in our conscience how to respond to coercion and threat found in the least likely of places—the university’s so-called “ivory tower.”

    Sickened by the civility-mongers’ pieties and the costs to scholars who dare to think hard and feel passionately, I recall Poe’s disdain for the oracles of “higher morality.” These “thinkers-that-they-think” used “civility”–and all such words for self-righteous sentiment–to destroy literary careers and exclude anyone who threatened the status quo. Such entrenched proclivities for what Poe condemned as “doggerel aesthetics” masked the ugly money-fundament to such cunning ideality. What has happened to Steven Salaita matters to us all, no matter our views or our assumed status in the groves of academe. The resilience of genuine academic freedom is that it ensures that these abuses, and the watchdog groups and alumni that abet them, are no longer hidden from the eyes of the world, immune to the prescriptive force of morality, beyond the judgment of society, masked by the appeal to “civility.”

  • “The Dog of the Poem: On William Carlos Williams’s Paterson” by Colin Dayan

    “The Dog of the Poem: On William Carlos Williams’s Paterson” by Colin Dayan

    boundary 2 is privileged to present a talk led by Colin Dayan from the Poetry and Poetics conference held at the University of Pittsburgh on November 14, 2014.

  • Colin Dayan Joins B2 Masthead…

    Colin Dayan Joins B2 Masthead…

    from Lecture flier

    The Editorial Collective happily welcomes Colin Dayan to our editorial board.

    Colin Dayan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.  She has held Guggenheim as well as other distinguished fellowships.

    Her areas of expertise include American literature, English and French Caribbean Literatures, Haitian historiography, and American legal scholarship. In 1977, she introduced the writings of René Depestre to the English-speaking world. She has published major books on Edgar Allan Poe and the colonial history of Haiti “from the composite perspectives of legal and religious texts, letters, fiction, and my own knowledge of the country.”  Her more recent books include The Story of Cruel and Unusual, a study of the legal and practical implications of the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution, and The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. Her journalism appears in The Boston Review and she can be heard on NPR.

    Colin’s latest article can be read here.

  • Colin Dayan Joins B2 Masthead . . .

    from Lecture flier

    The Editorial Collective happily welcomes Colin Dayan to our editorial board.

    Colin Dayan is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.  She has held Guggenheim as well as other distinguished fellowships.

    Her areas of expertise include American literature, English and French Caribbean Literatures, Haitian historiography, and American legal scholarship.  In 1977, she introduced the writings of René Depestre to the English-speaking world.  She has published major books on Edgar Allan Poe and the colonial history of Haiti “from the composite perspectives of legal and religious texts, letters, fiction, and my own knowledge of the country.”  Her more recent books include The Story of Cruel and Unusual, a study of the legal and practical implications of the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution, and The Law Is a White Dog:  How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons.  Her journalism appears in The Boston Review and she can be heard on NPR.  There is much more about her at colindayan.com.

  • Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Editor’s Note
    from Paul Bové
    _

    Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Tony Bogues, a member of the boundary 2 Collective, was in South Africa, watching the endless coverage of the news and of Mandela’s life. Bogues had met Mandela during his time with the Jamaican government of Michael Manley, and he has spent considerable time working in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, on questions of freedom, archives, African and African Diaspora intellectual history, and political thought.

    At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

    It seemed right that boundary 2 should take notice of Mandela and his influence. We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason to feel this attempt was a success.

  • Mandela's Reflections

    At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

    Nelson Mandela

    Editor’s Note from Paul Bové

    Preface by Anthony Bogues

    Mbu ya Ũrambu: Mbaara ya Cuito Cuanavale / The Cry of Hypocrisy: The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Discomforts by Hortense Spillers

    The Mandela Enigma by Wlad Godzich

    Mandela, Charisma, and Compromise by Joe Cleary

    Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters by Colin Dayan

    Or, The Whale by Jim Merod

    Malaysian Mandela by Masturah Alatas

    Mandela, Tunisia, and I by Mohamed-Salah Omri

    Nelson Mandela by Ruth Y. Y. Hung

    Mandela Memories: An African Prometheus by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Nelson Mandela: Decolonization, Apartheid, and the Politics of Moral Force by Anthony Bogues

    Mandela’s Wholeness, Perhaps Infinite by Dawn Lundy Martin

    [untitled] by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

    Mandela’s Gift by Sobia Saleem

  • Mandela's Reflections: Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters

    Israeli_Apartheid_Week_2009_posterMandela’s funeral was on December 15, the same day that final votes were cast for the American Studies Association resolution answering “the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott.” That resolution also “supports the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine and in support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.”

    Mandela’s service and burial took place at his home at Qunu, the village where he grew up in the Eastern Cape. In the heavy rain, with an interpreter signing nonsense, the booing of Jacob Zuma, and the stolid parade of dignitaries—except for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who refused to attend—the scene was set for the transformation of flesh into icon. It is not easy to strike at the mask, to dig behind the figure cultivated by political elites who have so much to gain from such mystification.

    • • • •
    After twenty-seven years in prison, Mandela was at last freed after continued black resistance and a successful boycott against apartheid South Africa. Ted Koppel hosted Mandela on June 21, 1990, just four months after his release, at City College of New York in Harlem for a conversation cast as a “Town Meeting with Nelson Mandela.” Broadcast on ABC’s Nightline, it commemorates, if that is the right word, Mandela’s first visit to the United States.

    Whereas politics usually demands a certain amount of playacting, if not outright dissimulation, the appearance of Mandela on this stage destroys any such pretense. His candor, resoluteness, and fierce intelligence are instructive for academics caught up in the morass of invective and abuse that has followed their support of the ASA resolution.

    The controversial sticking point, then as now, is the Palestinian struggle. The interview occurred during the First Intifada, an uprising against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories: the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. What is most striking in watching the interview now is the calm and restraint, even good humor, that Mandela maintains in what often seems Koppel’s deliberate staging of confrontation, his condescending attempt to question Mandela’s credibility, to trivialize his cause.

    Koppel turns to Mandela’s support for the Palestinians, particularly Arafat’s PLO, and questions what this means for his Jewish supporters. As if proud to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat, as if certain that the sounding of the word “Israel” in a town hall meeting will unsettle the gravitas of the man before him, Koppel introduces Ken Adelman. A neoconservative Republican political analyst at the Institute for Contemporary Studies and later a champion of the “war on terror” and the war on Iraq, he is the first to challenge Mandela.

    Adelman wonders how Gaddafi or Castro or Arafat can be Mandela’s “models of leaders of human rights” and admonishes, “You’ve met over the last six months three times with Yasser Arafat.” Mandela explains that political analysts make the mistake of thinking “that their enemies should be our enemies.” Then, without the slightest apprehension, he intones, “Yasser Arafat, Colonel Gaddafi, Fidel Castro support our struggle to the hilt.” His voice rises and deepens on that last word.

    Koppel prepares us for another question with a nod to those he calls “some distinguished guests” who are “very concerned.” Mandela acknowledges Henry Siegman, then executive director of the American Jewish Congress and now an outspoken critic of Israel. After reminding Mandela of the commitment of Jewish organizations to the struggle “against apartheid, against racism, against injustice in South Africa,” Siegman adds that he must “express profound disappointment” with the answer that Mandela gave to the previous question. It suggests, he adds, “a certain degree of amorality.”

    Mandela puts the record straight: “We are a liberation movement which is fully involved in a struggle to emancipate our people from tyranny.” He adds, “We have no time to be looking into the internal affairs of any country.” Later, he will trap Koppel in this expectation of a double standard. Why, he asks, should he be expected to be drawn into the internal affairs of countries such as Libya or Cuba but not in the internal affairs of the United States? With unerring precision, he then confronts the question of Palestine, the reach of Israel, and the meaning of resistance.

    Not interested in labels or easy dichotomies, Mandela has no trouble acknowledging the disproportionate representation of Jews in the South African liberation struggle or his closeness with them. Nor does he question the right of Israel to exist. But he gravely rejects Israel’s “right to take the territories they conquered from the Arab world, like the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank.”

    Finally, Koppel lectures Mandela about political expediency, warning him that he has said some “controversial things, not the kinds of things necessarily that a very political man says.” He suggests that he might have alienated some in this country who have “within their hands, within their power, either to continue sanctions against South Africa or to raise those sanctions, to lift them.” Mandela says he does not understand what he means. In an oblique reference to the Jewish lobby, Koppel hints at the “close alliance between the Jewish population and the black population, in the civil rights struggle. There is likely to be a rather negative reaction to some of the things that you have said.” Mandela comes forward without hesitation in words more analytical than polemical:

    It would be for us a grave mistake to consider our attitude towards Yasser Arafat on the basis of the interests of the Jewish community. We identify with the struggles of the Jewish people and their persecution right down the years. . . . But that does not mean to say that the enemies of Israel are our enemies. We refuse to take that position. You can call it unpolitical, or a moral question, but for anybody who changes his principles depending on whom he is dealing with, that is not a man who can lead a nation.

    For a moment, Mandela’s answer silences Koppel. In a sudden pause that lasts for quite a while, we view Mandela’s attentiveness to Koppel, so motionless, as if he had been turned to stone, and we realize that the game is over. Mandela remarks gently in a kind of serene and twinkling wonder: “I don’t know if I’ve paralyzed you.”

    The more obvious the attack, the more eloquent is Mandela’s response, the vivid display of what it means to think thought through without easy answers. This drama of veiled threat and selective questioning became in the presence of Mandela something utterly absolute in its appeal to all to understand what it might mean to commit to justice and equality—wherever these are found.

    Remember that Mandela remained on a terrorist list in the United States until 2008. It was not simply, as Koppel later reflected, that he had to take his friends where he found them, as if scraping the bottom of some bucket reserved for those who had no power. But rather, for Mandela, the struggle for rights and freedom from stigma and oppression mattered, to stand with, in Steve Biko’s words, “a legitimate place in the world.”

    The day after Mandela’s death, on December 6, in Ramallah, dozens of Palestinians were injured and one detained as Israeli forces used tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets to disperse crowds commemorating Mandela and protesting against the Israeli occupation. Mandela would have been pleased that the two acts, tribute and struggle, joined together in the place he knew so well.

    In these quiet days after the New Year, let us also know again the fact of apartheid and the memory of Mandela, whose portrait adorned posters in Gaza during a candlelight memorial on December 8. The posters read:

    APARTHEID: Wrong in South Africa
    Wrong in Palestine
    Free Palestine
    Boycott Israel

    -Colin Dayan

  • Summer 2014: Volume 41, Number 2

    Summer 2014: Volume 41, Number 2

    In Memoriam of Stuart McPhail Hall

    Each crisis provides an opportunity to shift the direction of popular thinking instead of simply mirroring the right’s populist touch or pursuing short-term opportunism. The left…must adopt a more courageous, innovative, “educative” and path-breaking strategic approach if they are to gain ground.
    –Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea, “Common-sense Neoliberalism”

    Summer 2014: Volume 41, Number 2

    home_cover

    Intervention / Mandela’s Reflections

    Editor’s Note from Paul Bové:
    …We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason to feel this attempt was a success.

    Preface by Anthony Bogues

    Mbu ya Ũrambu: Mbaara ya Cuito Cuanavale / The Cry of Hypocrisy: The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Discomforts by Hortense Spillers

    home_cover
    The Mandela Enigma by Wlad Godzich

    Mandela, Charisma, and Compromise by Joe Cleary

    Nelson Mandela on Nightline; or, How Palestine Matters by Colin Dayan

    Or, The Whale by Jim Merod

    Malaysian Mandela by Masturah Alatas

    Mandela, Tunisia, and I by Mohamed-Salah Omri

    Nelson Mandela by Ruth Y. Y. Hung

    home_cover

    Mandela Memories: An African Prometheus by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

    Nelson Mandela: Decolonization, Apartheid, and the Politics of Moral Force by Anthony Bogues

    Mandela’s Wholeness, Perhaps Infinite by Dawn Lundy Martin

    [untitled] by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

    Mandela’s Gift by Sobia Saleem





    _____

    Three Models of Emergency Politics by Bonnie Honig

    Democracy: An Unfinished Project by Susan Buck-Morss

    The Future of Reading? Memories and Thoughts toward a Genealogical Approach by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

    _____

    b2 Interview
    History Unabridged: An Interview with Stefan Collini with Jeffrey J. Williams

    _____

    Articles
    King Kong in America by Arif Dirlik

    How Global Capitalism Transforms Deng Xiaoping by Ruth Y. Y. Hung

    Is Dasein People? Heidegger According to Haugeland by Taylor Carman

    It’s Only the End of the World by Ben Conisbee Baer

    Passive Aggressive: Scalia and Garner on Interpretation by Andrew Koppelman