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The Reading List: Kindred by Octavia Butler–Graphic Novel Adaptation by Damian Duffy and John Jennings

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by Todne Thomas

“History is not the past. It is the present.  We carry our history. We are our history.”  – James Baldwin [1]

Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred Adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings

This month I’m reading the graphic novel version of Kindred adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings.  Originally a novel written by the African American science fiction author Octavia Butler, Kindred tells the story of Edana, an African American protagonist who involuntarily time travels between the present and the plantation era and is forced to save her own life and intervene in the lives of her ancestors.  In particular, Edana (or Dana) is catapulted to the past to save the life of her white plantation-owning ancestor Rufus Weylin and to shape the fates of her enslaved black progenitors Alice, Hagar, and Joe.

In this visual adaptation, Dana’s story emerges out of the black and white print of fiction into the colored hues of the graphic.  The life Dana shares with her white husband Kevin are colored in warm creams and ambers.  The palette of plantation time is more variegated and intense and increasingly consumes their regular sepia-colored present as Dana’s trips to the past last longer for days and weeks.  Blues and greens evoke nature, greenery, crops, and the coolness of river water and the day sky. Evening purples and candle-light yellows color scenes of domesticity and fugitive flight.  The color contrast between Edana and Kevin softened in the context of a domestic comfort (for which they also had to fight) are transferred into scenes that belie no ambiguity signaling the thickness of the color line that bracket white versus black experiences. All the myriad hues of the plantation scenery together attest to the multiple forms of violence and vulnerabilities of plantation life that were experienced by enslaved populations.  The scenes of physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse, of forced separations and the lived conditions of white supremacist terrorism experienced by Dana and the enslaved come off the pages via the frequent pace of their occurrence. They are many.  They are undeniable, especially now because of their visuality.

Though Dana is a time traveler, her passage between a sepia present and a colored past, do not leave her unscathed.  Dana is not merely a witness to plantation violence.  She intervenes in the lives of plantation residents—the plantation-owning Weylins (and Rufus in particular) but most often in the lives of her black ancestors—by advocating for the enslaved and trying to prevent acts of violence, providing medical assistance to the injured, by teaching young enslaved children to read, and even sustaining physical injuries for actions that are interpreted by plantation authorities as insolence.  Edana is beaten and whipped.  She returns with a swollen black eye after being beaten during an early journey in which she nearly escapes rape by a slave patroller.  She carries the scars from a brutal beating by a plantation overseer on her back during another passage home.  During her last voyage from the past, Dana kills Rufus Weylin after he attempts to rape her, but is so quickly transported that her arm—lodged against a wall—is left behind. As spoken by Edana in the Prologue scene that opens the novel, “I lost an arm on my last trip home.” Thus, Edana’s body bears the literal marks of her confrontation with history, however supernaturally mediated.  The traumas of a slave past/present are indelibly imprinted on her form.  But more than that, Edana’s experiences with slavery dramatically changes her visage.  Adeptly depicted in the visual novel, Dana’s demeanor alters.  The increasing occurrence of resident facial expressions—stone cast face, down turned eyes, and suppressed rage—tell their own tale of enslavement; a silent story of slavery as a process that can never truly be heritable, but must be experienced, witnessed, embodied, and broadcasted via the dimming of eye lights, the slumping of shoulders that broadcast resignation.

And yet for all of Edana’s changes, somehow over the course of his coming of age, Rufus changes very little.  The Weylin heir’s childish demeanor and behavior both remain.  The same petulant squinting of the eyes is matched by an enduring pattern of impetuous behavior.  Rufus pursues his own desires and interests for power, sex, and money with almost no concern for the human costs borne by others that result from those choices.  The reliance of him and his infirmed mother (who must eventually be carried) on the bondspeople they exploit illustrate the stunting infantilizations that accompanied planter privilege.  The impetuously furrowed brow of Rufus, the repetition of one-dimensional scripts that evoke, dictate, and predict pseudo-familial care on the part of slaves remain.  Here, James Baldwin’s words in The Fire Next Time hold relevance.

This past, the Negro’s past; of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that if often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible—this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful.  I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.[2]

From Baldwin’s purview, the underside of the struggle for humanity engendered in African Americans’ resistance to the abjection of blackness is the stasis of white supremacist privilege, missed opportunities for humanistic engagement, communion, and growth.  For all of interventions Edana made, sometimes hurtling unwittingly across time-space continuums, to save Rufus’ life over the years, Rufus cannot manage to see Edana as kin, her labor as love, her body as her own.  And because of this, this refusal of humanity, Rufus cannot be saved.  Edana is a time traveler, a prophet, a healer, a teacher, even a heroine, but ultimately, Edana is not a savior.  Not for lack of capacity, but because white supremacist plantocracy, for all of its imprints on slave bodies also indelible scars the characters of white beneficiaries, it is irredeemable.  Neither grace nor forgiveness is available for such a non-recognition of humanity.

And, this is the truly revolutionary part of Butler’s Kindred to me as a scholar of religion and race. The novel does not present a resolution or transcendence of the experiences of the slave past, but rather a complex embodied memory that holds a solidarity for some ancestors and a rejection for those who fail to recognize their shared humanity with their descendants.  Genealogy is excised, exorcised even.  Anti-black violence is not absolved. In the midst of an activist context shaped by Black Lives Matter, and its queer women of color leadership’s call for a valuation of black lives and the black life matter of black bodies, this non-forgiveness for the violation of black bodies is profound.  To not forgive, to not give up one’s body/sexuality for white supremacy, to defend one’s body (even from an ancestor) illustrates a thick love for self and black enfleshment in the midst of processes that threaten to commoditize and dehumanize black people.  In his contemplation of black intellectual writing in the Age of Ferguson, Julius B. Fleming, Jr. asks, “What can you do when you study the shattering of your own flesh, when you teach the historical destruction of that flesh, write about it, present on it, find it tucked away in the recesses of archives the world over?”[3] For me, Butler’s Edana and Duffy and Jennings’ graphic adaptation of Kindred provides an answer through their depictions of Edana, a political and spiritual ancestress, a sankofa archetype that calls for an immanent engagement with the past in the present.  More broadly, these conjoined works offer us conceptual and visual portals to excavate black history, to come face-to-face with our nation’s past, our physical and political resemblance to our ancestors in times that are mutually imprinted by anti-black violence and shaped by the metaphysics of fugitivity and freedom movements.

 

 

[1] James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, film, directed by Raoul Peck, (2017; New York: Magnolia Pictures).

[2] James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 98-99.

[3] Julius B. Fleming, Jr., “Shattering Black Flesh: Black Intellectual Writing in the Age of Ferguson,” American Literary History 28 (2016): 832.

The Religion of Prince

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The Religion of Prince by Todne Thomas
4/22/16
 
“Dearly Beloved,
We are gathered here today
to get through this thing
called life.” – “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince
 
On April 21, 2016, music icon Prince Rogers Nelson died at the age of 57. A creative genius, disciplined musician, charismatic performer, and prolific songwriter who fused rock, R&B, soul, and funk, Prince engineered a career that spanned four decades. Prince is widely lauded for his considerable musical talent. Prince is also notorious for his public performance of an overtly sensual sexuality that defined gender conventions. Prince’s concerts and music were vital contemplative spaces that illustrated the socially constructed character of gender and sexuality as well as the myriad embodied and performative hybridities that gender and sexuality can entail. For Prince to debut an overtly gender-transgressing sexuality in the 1980s as an African American man was incredibly significant. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the emergence of Neoconservatism and the Christian Right that attributed black poverty in the United States to black cultural deficiencies and a pathologized rather than institutional racism. Family values, and more specifically a corrective heteropatriarchy, were proposed as a way to end what was a perceived to be an onslaught of black welfare queens, absentee dads, and broken families. Prince’s performance of an embodied black sexuality that did not conform to a hypermasculinized black masculinity or a respectable black patriarchy was a defiant rejection of the intersectional hegemonies that sought to discipline black sexuality. Even amidst the controversial perspectives voiced by Prince after he became a Jehovah’s Witness in 2011 that have been associated with anti-gay and anti-bisexual rhetoric (which in their own right merit analysis), the transgressive legacy of Prince’s career remains. His music and performance contained not only a confident pulse and an arrogant swagger but also a soulful rebuke of the constriction of sexuality—a counter-church if you will with “Purple Rain” as a hymn that airs the ambivalences, contradictions, and challenges that shape the affective and material contexts of black intimacies.
 
In addition to the ways in which Prince’s music located itself against the grain of conservative religio-political formation that constituted and demoralized blackness as nonheteronormative, is the aesthetics of Prince’s music and its religious and spiritual implications. In Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering by Rosemarie Freeney Harding, Harding writes of the broad registers of an indigenous black folk religion.
 
The meaning of religion for Black folks, they insist, is in the heart of our history, our trauma and our hope. It is what makes us indigenous to this place, to modernity. As [Charles] Long puts it, Black religion is the way have oriented ourselves—over the centuries in these Americas and extending back before our arrival on these shores—to “mash out a meaning” of life in the midst of tremendous suffering and pain. Religion, in this sense, is not simply a doctrine of faith or the methods and practices of church; rather, it is all the ways we remind ourselves of who we really are, in spite of who the temporal powers may say we are….Black religion then, is not only in the music, the drama, the communion, and the interpretation of text within the walls of the physical church; it is also in the orientation of Black people to so-called secular culture. Black religion is Otis Redding and D’Angelo as much as Mahalia Jackson and Mary Mary; it is hip-hop as holy dance; and root work as much as the laying on of hands. [Harding 2015, 118].
 
Black religion then constitutes an interpretive grid by which black people make sense of their place in the world, construct meaningful, hopeful, and even sensuous identities for themselves against hegemonic colonial narratives that confine blackness to abjection or the underside of morality and power. Whether in the moan of a woman rocked by the Holy Spirit or the ecstasy of a sexual moan sung by Prince followed by a pronouncement in “D.M.S.R.,” “Girl it ain’t no sin to strip down to your underwear,” both embodied performances aid a “beloved” in “get[ting] through this thing called life.” The throaty screams of Prince’s singing catapulted in tenor tones somewhere into a universe of the future is call for a radical immanence. In a time in which #BlackLivesMatter activists invoke black matter, bodies, and immediacy, in a way that I argue unseats a hegemonic Christian emphasis of ascetic suppression of the body and emphasis of a future messianic salvation, Prince is a priest of a black religion of here and now, of a this-lifeness that beckons us to contemplate how we love, inhabit, and move our flesh.

Some Wonder Why and Why Still: Reflections on the Charleston, SC Church Shooting

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Todne Thomas Chipumuro

Cariari, Costa Rica

6/18/15

Yesterday, I arrived in Costa Rica to prepare for a writer’s retreat that I will attend for the next five days. As I checked my social media feed over my morning coffee, I was alarmed to discover that a white gunman shot and killed nine black Bible study attendees last night at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina last night. The young white man (who is now being identified as 21-year old Dylan Storm Roof)[1] allegedly sat in on the service before nearly an hour before he voiced racist anti-black rhetoric and murdered the three men and six women present[2]. Shocked into reality, my unexamined idea that my writing retreat here could also double as a respite from the onslaught of news about anti-black violence in the United States and the anti-black citizenship discourses and Haitian deportations proposed by the Dominican Republic has quickly dissipated. Black lives here and there are being devalued by the state and its citizens. Blackness, though somehow being called into question by the scandal of racial shapeshifters, still remains an alibi for white supremacist dehumanization, expulsion, social and literal death.

 

The current tragedy being weathered by the membership of Emanuel AME Church and the broader Charleston community is significant for a number of reasons. As I alluded to above, it evokes a broader conversation about the virulent anti-black racism that is presently being enacted upon black bodies, visualized by technological innovations, and circulated for broader conversation and consumption. Such violence has been a steady testament to the racism that structures carceral govermentality including policing practices and has also initiated meditations on black humanity, the valuation of black lives, the in/visibility of violence against black women and black transgender people, and black theodicy—a theological contemplation about the reasons for black pain and suffering best expressed by a Charleston pastor during a prayer vigil last night, “The question is God: why? Somebody here tonight needs to know.[3]”

 

Nonetheless, the shooting at Emanuel AME is tentatively being classified as a hate crime and is being represented by police representatives and local political figures as a heinous and grievous act, a moral tone not often attributed to the killings of African Americans by police on the part of the mainstream criminal justice establishment. Moreover, the shooting took place within the institution of the church often stably understood as the private sphere, not the public domain of the street, or the contested public/private spaces of the streets and pools of gated communities involved in Sanford, FL or McKinney, TX. The shooting of African Americans within the sanctified, private grounds of the church presumably signals a different kind of targeting, a hateful intentionality that is perhaps not associated with the other instances of anti-black violence we are witnessing in the news. Dylan Roof emerges as a “proper racist” that can be castigated by the broader body politic, a black-and-white case study of hatred that does not speak to the collective ambivalences, cognitive racial biases, and racial anxieties of post-racial racism.   Nonetheless, I would advise caution in divorcing the Charleston shooting from the broader context of anti-black violence that we are witnessing and experiencing; of decontextualizing this as an individual civilian crime; of making this an issue of the private sphere that is divorced from contemporary contemplations of the state. In the poignant conversation “Do Black Lives Matter?: Robin D.G. Kelley and Fred Moten in conversation,” Moten observes that the shooting of Mike Brown illustrates a broader impulse of white settler colonialism and the white supremacist heteropatriarchal state: the execution of black social life which is defined as an insurgent sociality.[4] It is that sociality, signified by black youth like Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and the gathering of the slain members of Emanuel AME, that is othered, harassed, and surveilled by the state, state employees, and civilians who deputize themselves as protectors of white supremacist capitalism.

 

From a historical perspective, the shooting at Emanuel AME is also important because of the particular history of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination and of the historical role of black churches more broadly. Emanuel AME is shaped by a genealogy of African American Christian protest. The AME Church is the first black-organized religious denomination in the United States. Dating back to 1816, the AME denomination was organized by the former slave Richard Allen and his contemporaries who were disaffected with the racial marginalization they experienced in the predominately white St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, PA.[5] An extension of a critical African American institutional and religious complex that sought to create spaces of sanctuary (like the Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia organized in 1793) in which people of African descent could worship, rebel, and nourish their full humanity, the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston was founded in 1816 as well during the early days of the AME denomination. A black southern church with its own rich history that has been heavily shaped by the white supremacist plantation complex and governance, Emanuel AME Church was burned during the events and controversy surrounding the Denmark Vesey slave revolt in 1822—a revolt that was shaped by a radical anti-racist emancipatory view of Christianity. The church was soon rebuilt. Services however were forced underground when all local black churches were outlawed in 1834. The membership of Emanuel AME has thus inherited a tradition of struggle and endurance.

 

More broadly, black churches like Emanuel AME with its own denominational history of fostering Afro-Christian critique and institutional self-determination and other southern black churches were shaped by the moral critique fostered by the Civil Rights movement in the mid-twentieth century. It was during these times in which the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL (a key site for civil rights activism) was bombed by white supremacists in 1963 killing four African American girls. The Black Church, then, in a popular white supremacist consciousness emerged as a threat, a site of insurgency, and a strategic node for terrorism. The interplay between black churches and black protest in the times of slavery and the Civil Rights movement has generated a black civic religiosity, embodied in the senatorial career of the recently deceased Emanuel AME pastor Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Therefore, a normative reading of Emanuel AME as distinct and safely ensconced in the private sphere, of the black church solely as a space of black worship and sanctuary divorced from the state, and of the perpetrator as a civilian acting individually divorced from the state must be re-contextualized within a broader context of racist governmenality and Afro-Christian struggle.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/18/dylann-storm-roof-charleston-church-shooting-suspect_n_7612232.html

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-church-shooting.html

[3] http://www.wsj.com/articles/shooting-erupts-at-historic-black-church-in-charleston-south-carolina-1434601669

[4] https://vimeo.com/116111740

[5]http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CDQQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnationalhumanitiescenter.org%2Fpds%2Fmaai%2Fcommunity%2Ftext3%2Fallenmethodism.pdf&ei=j_aCVeVehMWCBL-ugKgG&usg=AFQjCNEJ9jdNR-QNA93mHTA9K3JOrD86Dw&sig2=fChkVmD1Yaf6jT6rQP00FA&bvm=bv.96041959,d.eXY

The Zombie as Ethical Guardian: An Aperitif Before Consumption?

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by Todne Thomas Chipumuro

It’s Halloween season. The crisp fall air pairs with the final scenes of colorful foliage. Children are giddy with the prospects of receiving candy in exchange for their cute or frightening frocks. College students appear to be just as excited as they whisper about weekend plans and costume choices with their classmates. Amongst the bevy of options they contemplate and discuss are the supernatural cast of characters that include vampires, witches, fairies, werewolves, and zombies.

Within a contemporary U.S. socio-cultural milieu, zombies often appear in films as a destructive horde singularly focused on cannibalizing humans who are often left to survive amidst the ruins of shattered societies. From the ravenous, rotting corpses that terrorize remnant communities on The Walking Dead and World War Z, to the virally-infected hosts that horrify humans in I Am Legend, Resident Evil, and 28 Days Later, to the disenchanted but awkwardly well-meaning zombies of Warm Bodies, zombies have become more than fixtures of the silver screen. Zombies and the forms of apocalypse they foretell have become their own genre of U.S. popular culture that illustrate the disasters that can be wrought by an over-zealous bio-industrial military complex, capitalist overconsumption, and, I would argue, the dystopia of economic recession. Not just a cinematic fixture, the zombie emerges as a symbol of danger, lifelessness, ugliness, and contagion that has been mobilized to describe economics, modernity, Jesus, and even pumpkins. More broadly, the zombie emerges as a figure that exists beyond the boundaries of life and humanity. Animated but not alive, consumptive but never satiated, the zombie symbolizes liminality in perpetuity—the social condition of being caught betwixt and between states of existence, the alienations of capitalism, and the limbo of postmodernity.

Far from a contemporary creation, the zombie of the U.S. popular culture landscape descends from two predecessors: the zombie produced through a U.S. imperial and racial imaginary during the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) and the zonbi of Vodou religious culture. The U.S. popular cultural zombie emerged as a bricolage of foreign travelogues, folklore accounts, and U.S. military accounts of Vodou religious practice shaped by unexamined imperialist beliefs in Haitian racial and religious primitivism. If Vodou (a syncretic religion generated by enslaved Africans’ creative combinations of traditional African religious practices and Catholic ritual ways and iconography) became mobilized as evidence of Haitian social degeneracy and incapacities for self-governance, the zombie became a symbolic lynchpin in the argument for U.S. military and economic intervention.

Translated from the pages of foreign accounts into the emerging horror genre of Hollywood with the film White Zombie (1932), the zombie emerged as a “postcolonial sub-subaltern monster” that terrorized white western audiences with the prospects of being “dominated, subjugated, and effectively ‘colonized’ by a native pagan” (Bishop 2008: 141-142). The zombie, then, first entered U.S. popular culture as a symbol of racial and imperial anxieties about Western dominance and postcolonial retribution. The zombie imagery popularized by Romero’s famous film Night of the Living Dead (1968) is set in a different decade but reflects related socio-political constructs about racial otherness and societal decay.

The zonbi of Vodou religious culture provocatively speaks to another set of historical and ethical concerns. For Vodou practitioners, the zonbi symbolizes the ways in which the stakeholders of the French plantation regime attempted to reduce enslaved persons to the value of the labor produced by their bodies. If, as aptly worded by Martinican intellectual Aime Cesaire in Discourse on Colonialism, “colonization = thingification,” the zonbi (a laboring body devoid of agency whose sole purpose is to minister to the desires and whims of the bokor/sorcerer who resurrected him/her) becomes a powerful illustration of the dehumanization and commoditization of slavery.

In the postcolonial society made possible by a successful Haitian revolution against the French, the zonbi continued to reflect exploitative social dynamics through its association with the torture and silencing of dissidents and everyday individuals during a Duvalier regime that was imagined as an ensorcelling dictatorship. Aside from the zonbi’s reflection of the exploitative evacuation of human agency by colonial and postcolonial stakeholders, a number of theories abound about the socio-cultural and ethno-botanical constructions of the zonbi. One such reading outlines the zonbi as an embodied form of punishment against individuals who grossly violate community ethics. As described by anthropologist Elizabeth McAlister:

One extreme and rare form of punishment these societies can hand down to a criminal is to be made into a zonbi zo kadav, whereby his spirit is extracted from his body and his body is sold into modern-day slavery to cut cane on a sugar plantation….The body is then left as a religious and social corpse” (2012: 469-470).

The zonbi created as a community response to malignant individualism is just as stringent as it is allegedly final. While such a process of zonbification raises important questions about vigilantism, power, representation, and agency, I would also contend that the zonbi of Vodou religious culture can be understood as a symbolic guardian of an ethics of reciprocity. The zonbi’s plight across a variety of Haitian contexts and imaginations thus speaks not only to an indemnification of overconsumption but of communities interested in making interventions to prevent social cataclysm. Thus, the zonbi emerges as an individual objectified figure constituted by a broader narrative of community agency. As argued by Christopher Moreman and Cory Rushton in their cross-cultural study of zombie appropriation, “In many respects it looks as though the Haitian zombie is a thing of the past, permanently eclipsed by the success of Romero’s cannibals” (2011: 5). But what if we take a moment to place the zonbi in its proper context? To do so would be to partake of an aperitif—to study our understandings of community, the ethics of social relationship, and the legacy and contemporary dimensions of U.S. socio-political engagements rather than robotically consuming an appropriated icon.

 

Works Cited

Bishop, Kyle

2008      The Sub-Subaltern Monster: Imperialist Hegemony and the Cinematic Voodoo Zombie. Journal of American Culture 31(2): 141-152

Cesaire, Aime

2000[1972] Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Moreman, Christopher and Rushton, Cory, eds.

2011       Race, Oppression, and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition

McAlister, Elizabeth

2012        Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and Religion of Zombies. Anthropological Quarterly 85(2): 457-486.