#47: M. NourbeSe Philip & Catherine Liu
Hello friends. The last few weeks have been more of the same mostly. I read, I go to the theater to catch a movie, I dread my job, and I wait for the routine to eventually let in even more time for reading. Adi Ophir’s The Order of Evils has proved to be an absolutely monstruous book and I am barely halfway done with it.
On Monday, the moon passed directly in front of the sun overhead for nearly 200 million people. In the 3 minutes where the moon totally eclipsed the sun, I laid silently in the grass, in the moon’s shadow, staring at the dark disc crowned in solar flares. The momentary synchronicity of the sun and moon, a single eclipse in the 139th Saros series which started in the year 1501 and will end in the year 2750, extends us backwards and forwards in time to all those that shared or will share the inherently confounding experience of a day interrupted briefly by night and flattens the distinction we’ve created between us and the animals that sound out, rush to their beds, or breach the water they live in to get a closer look at the magnificent corona.
Or perhaps you feel, like some others, that the eclipse is a little underwhelming. But the eclipse is responsible for the first computer and without the pursuit of astrology, physics and math would have lacked the catalyst that made the fields what they are today. Without the eclipse, you might not be holding that phone in your hand right now and mechanized asymmetrical warfare might not be killing countless people every single day.
I can’t stomach to read or write about Israel’s two-week siege on Al-Shifa hospital or the murdering of aid workers fighting against Israel’s starvation strategy. Hospitals should never be a battleground. I’d point interested readers back to Jasbir Puar’s Right to Maim which I read in December. Back then, I thought that this siege was going to revolve less around debilitation, but Puar’s analysis remains devastatingly relevant after the 6-month mark. Fariha Roisin also wrote forcefully and eloquently about the events of the last few weeks in a recent Substack post. Now, with Iran’s recent involvement, it becomes harder to see a way out and the future looks bleaker than ever.
I’m now going to talk to you about some books that I read while taking breaks from The Order of Evils.
Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip
In November 1781, the crew of the slave ship Zong ran out of water and massacred at least 130 Africans bound for slavery in the “New World” by throwing them overboard. Following standard practice at the time, the company operating the ship had taken out an insurance claim on their “cargo” and, after the massacre, they made a claim to recoup their financial losses. The impact of the massacre and its resulting court cases were massive for the abolitionist movement of the time and still remain important to those who ask “who counts as human?” or seek more broadly to understand the ties of the “New World,” capitalism, the law, and racism.
If you’d like to learn more about the Zong massacre, I remember that Christina Sharpe writes about it in her incredible In The Wake, M. NourbeSe Philip writes about it in an essay at the end of this volume of poetry, and the Wikipedia page is also informative.
In Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip’s response to the massacre, the author pulls heavily from the remaining legal documents to create a vocabulary that gives language and breath back into the victims of the massacre. The words bubble up from the bottom of the page. In an essay at the end of the book, Philip writes about the dehumanizing power of law:
In its potent ability to decree that what is is not, as in a human ceasing to be and becoming an object, a thing or chattel, the law approaches the realm of magic and religion… Like a magic wand the law erases all ties — linguistic, societal, cultural, familial, parental, and spiritual; it strips the African down to the basic common denominator of man, woman, or child, albeit sometimes meagre. Without a history, name, or culture. In life but without life.
Poetry, Philips’ poetry, is an undoing of the dehumanizing spell cast by law.
Quoting from Zong! is a difficult task, since the form is just as crucial as the linguistic content, but if I may try to recreate a particularly haunting moment:
e there w as fren zy th
ere was e vil there was a
men a nd a ve there was me
a & cul pa t he
re was gr ieve & wo e
si n th ere w as
no
is e of neg roes oh th
e no is e there wa
s pro fit the re was
loss there was ga
in t heir loss
Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu
The other day I was pretty pissed off at my boss. He’s wildly incompetent and a horrible team leader. He’s uninvolved during the development of anything we work on at the office, but he’s a master of inserting himself right at the finish line. In the Zoom room, in front of a crowd of other public health professionals that you’ve both been meeting with for nearly a year, he will tell you everything that is wrong with your work. His critiques don’t make sense because he hasn’t actually been involved in the development of your project and doesn’t understand the goals of the work, but that doesn’t matter. The other people in the Zoom room will send you private messages apologizing for your boss’s bizarre behavior and that’s nice, but it doesn’t make you feel any less annoyed at this ridiculous man you have to listen to if you want to continue receiving your paychecks or possibly improving the health of the people who live in your city.
I thought that this book might prove therapeutic as I wonder why this man has any power over me or why the organization of the city’s public health workforce is so intensely hierarchical and business oriented. It wasn’t. The Professional Managerial Class (PMC) was a term developed in the 1970’s to understand the growth of the yuppie that was neither proletarian nor bourgeoise. In the 2010s and in this book, it mostly just refers to well-educated liberal voters. Think of people who liked Elizabeth Warren, Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden so much that they desecrated their Volvo with a corny election sticker.
So this book, a brief polemic, turned out to be a kind of mediocre rant about elite liberals that fear the word populism. Some of Liu’s points I was fully on board with. I’ll always align myself more with the angry, disenfranchised MAGA voter than the college-educated Biden voter who views the rural poor as their political enemy. But on the other hand, Liu’s rejection of elitism is entirely dogmatic in a way that classically pisses me off. Embracing populism does not mean that you must burn your Deleuze and Guattari, reject post-structuralism, and praise Alan Sokal.
Liu’s obsession with objective truth through “historical materialism” leads her to write a tirade against the New York Times’ 1619 Project. The Project’s thesis is that America began when the first slave ship landed here is ardently (and to me, boringly) rejected by Liu as completely ahistorical. It’s easy to claim that it’s ahistorical and win. “America was founded on July 4, 1776.” Wow, way to dig into the archive!
However, there’s also value in tracing the beginning of the American project back to slavery to understand the intersections of race and capitalism. But Liu also rejects intersectionality as a liberalism not in sync with real socialism. To Liu, this whole revisionist history is a scheme by the liberal elite. To me, this idea is at worst conspiratorial and at best boring or lazy. I’m not even really trying to defend the 1619 Project. I meant to read it, but I never got around to it. But her critique just sucks.
Liu makes a lot of other strong arguments about the importance of class struggle, but I honestly don’t care to defend someone who spends so much time conflating elitism with post-structural philosophy. Of course, demographically, she’s not wrong. However, I’m of the opinion that one can draw lots of value from post-structuralism, intersectionalism, and ‘revisionist’ history without becoming a member of some elite class that can’t algin itself with the betrayed subaltern who reactionarily vote for the reviled DoNaLd TrUmP.
It’s easy to find a pdf online of this little book and the analyses of Harper Lee and the Marquis de Sade are worth your time, especially if you love the former and hate the latter and are open to changing your mind.
1990s Spanish film is so weird. I saw someone else online write about La Madre Muerta or The Dead Mother that “the word ‘problematic’ breaks and scatters on the hull of Spanish cinema like a squirt gun fired at a naval destroyer.” I don’t know what to say about this movie. Magical realism always leaves me nonverbal. It’s worth a watch if you’re feeling freaky.
Edward Yang! A Brighter Summer’s Day! THE film about alienated youth, violence, struggling migrant families, the state, masculinity, and the way men fail the women they know. It is the greatest movie ever made.
Kaneto Shindo’s pervy Onibaba is a Japanese horror film about jealousy, lust, and betrayal that extends past the limitations of genre.
Edward Yang! A Confucian Confusion might actually be my new favorite Edward Yang. A Brighter Summer Day is his best, but this flick embraces the absolute chaos and spiritual emptiness of capitalism. I have always wondered if anybody has ever been brave enough to try to adapt the work of William Gaddis into film, and Edward Yang gets incredibly close here, even if it’s purely coincidental. For reference, William Gaddis’ JR is what I might say is my favorite book if you asked me anytime in the last 3 years. It’s how I started this livejournal.
Art College 1994 is a lazy animated flick about slackers in art school as Western media and thought begins to seep into China. What happens when the inheritors of centuries of traditional art encounter Marcel Duchamp’s urinal?
Cinema’s greatest nonconsensual kiss. Patrick Tam was Wong Kar-wai’s mentor. The inheritance of direction, design, and cinematography is clear. However, although My Heart is That Eternal Rose is a neon drenched visual masterpiece, it’s not even close to a Wong Kar-wai. This is Hong Kong’s Die Hard and it’s even more ridiculous and silly.