Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Archiving Black Diasporas

2022; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/crnewcentrevi.22.3.0057

1539-6630

Franca Bernabei,

Cinema and Media Studies

The three Black women thinkers and authors whose images I have selected for this essay deploy the portraits of young Black girls, taken in diverse contexts and times, as the medium for enacting a form of countervisuality that “seeks to resituate the terms on which reality is to be understood” (Mirzoeff 2011, 28) and envision (image) a different history of the present. In “speaking for” and “about” (ibid., xv) silenced or subaltern histories, African American Saidiya Hartman, Canadian/American Myriam J. A. Chancy, and Canadian Dionne Brand, born respectively in the United States, Haiti, and Trinidad,1 make explicit a radical theoria (in the etymological sense of viewing as spectator) aimed at rethinking the way we see the world while recording and evaluating what is seen as a memento of what is not seen. In the process, the act of looking acquires a hermeneutical function: It becomes an act of interpretation and interpenetration that involves intimacy and distance, implication and explication, and looking and being looked at (Didi-Huberman 2006, 35, 43). In their works the iconic resonance of the “sight of blackness” (Neary 2017, 52)—as extracted from either official or personal archives and visually reproduced in the text or evoked by figurative language—is pondered, lingered over, and queried through a dynamic strategy that shakes up the “static taxonomy” (Smith 2014, 3) and the privileged topology and nomology of the white Euro-American “patriarchive” (Derrida 1996 4).The centrality of photography—one of the earliest manifestations of the “frenzy of the visible”2 that exploded at the end of the nineteenth century—(Mirzoeff 2011, xv) might seem less relevant nowadays, if one considers the extent to which cultural and performance studies have been increasingly concerned with creating and exploring new archives of visual materials (Mirzoeff 2016, 13). And yet, thanks to their intersectional ontology, photographic images are still crucial as a way of looking at and thinking about the world. They can be studied, in fact, as “document et objet de rêve, comme oeuvre et objet de passage, monument et objet de montage, non-savoir et objet de science” (document and dream object, as work and transitory object, monument and object of montage, nonknowledge and object of science) (Didi-Huberman 2006, 15, 14). Furthermore, in spite of or exactly because of their “stillness,” photographic images can be attributed or denied an evidentiary nature, can be considered an archive in their own right (Mirzoeff 2011, xv), independent from a verbal one. Also, they can be considered a textual rather than a visual object—or, anyway, an object that proves the inextricability of visual discourse and textual visuality (Neary 2017, 8).While the by now canonic studies of the nature of the photograph by Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and John Berger are still enlightening, more recent trends in the field of visual culture have explored not so much the ontology of the visual image as the link between practices of looking and the dominant structures of authority that underlie them. Thus, from a comparative decolonial framework, Nicholas Mirzoeff sets the visible against the notion of visuality—the “ineluctable” visualizing of history enacted by an Anglo-Celtic imperial imaginary—and counters it with the “right to look” and the right “to be seen” as a claim to autonomy and the key to a democratic politics (Mirzoeff 2011). Accordingly, looking is considered a social performance of race and gender that produces not only racialized/gendered objects for view but also racialized/gendered viewers. In this way the visible, or what is and can be seen, is produced and controlled by a dominant gaze and a dominant mode of looking that not only engender a dominant vision of the world but also operate through strategies of visual containment (Smith 2014, 1–3).The repertoire, Diana Taylor explains, works in tandem with the archive. But insofar as it represents the enactment of embodied memory, it allows for individual agency in line with its etymological meaning of “a treasury, an inventory,” referring also to “the finder, discoverer,” and meaning “to find out” (2003, 20). The above-mentioned authors’ insights into the depth of photographic surfaces—which contain and reflect the sedimentations of coloniality, racism, and racial thinking deposited in the surface of our times3—decisively embody contingent practices of looking that make of a single image the scenario of multiple, shifting acts of viewing and pose a series of questions: What did the photographer see in/of the Black object standing in front of their camera? What did that object see in their turn? What does the author as spectator see in that particular form of objectification/subjectification? What do we (as readers of the written text and viewers of the image it “furnishes forth” (Turner, quoted in Taylor 2003, 3) see when we look at this contested/contesting scenario? And most importantly, who are/is we? What and whose histories does that “we” include and exclude from their sight?4In “A Note on Method,” which introduces her recent book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman maintains that “Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor” (2019, xiii). Hartman's work is a counternarrative that “elaborates, augments, transposes, and breaks open archival documents [in order to] illuminate the radical imagination and everyday anarchy of ordinary colored girls, which has not only been overlooked, but is nearly unimaginable” (2019, xiv) at the turn of the twentieth century. The book unfolds as a series of portraits that attends to the “beautiful experiments—to make living an art—undertaken by those often described as promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward” (2019, xiv). It is supported by a series of photographs, drawn from various public libraries and special collections research centers. These pictures portray particular locations (a tenement house, street scenes, slums and their interiors in cities like New York and Philadelphia) and a conspicuous number of young Black women belonging to what the author defines in the introductory “cast of characters” as “the chorus.” These photographs are not always commented upon, but they become, anyway, part of the printed text insofar as their interpolation solicits the readers to evaluate their evidentiary relevance to the understanding of the author's project. A photograph, argues Susan Sontag, “is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask” (1990, 154).In other words, a girl, a woman like that, once existed or once was seen or looked at, in a particular time, in a particular situation (Barthes 1980, 83; Berger 2013, 18). For Hartman, word and image cooperate in shaping what she prefers to call an “album”: “The album assembled here is an archive of the exorbitant, a dream book for existing otherwise” (2019, xv). As such, this archive is marked by the “errantry” it describes (xiv)5 and offers an alternative legibility to the bureaucratic language of the official captions: “The caption seems to amplify the image, to detail what resides within its frame, but instead the caption produces what appears. It subsumes the image to the text” (20). Conversely, Hartman's mode of “close narration [. . .] places the voice of narrator and character in inseparable relation, so that the vision, language, and rhythms of the wayward shape and arrange the text” (xiii–xiv). Photography, the “art of quotation,” translates the world into its own half-language (Berger 2013, 82, 98). By doing so, it complements and fleshes out the language of the narrator. The narrator's language in turn gives voice to what she has seen in those images and that was waiting for a future legibility. Thus Hartman's counternarrative is also a form of countervisuality. The inextricability of visual discourse and textual visuality inhabits the intimate dimension of the young women's lives, captures “the rich landscape of black social life” and the “beautiful struggle to survive” outside of the “visual clichés of damnation and salvation” (xiii, 19).Hartman inaugurates her composite “archive of the exorbitant” with a particular portrait that stands out from the other images of the “chorus” and yet is meant to represent and anticipate all of those that follow. This inaugural photograph is “small enough to be cradled in the palm of your hand” (24), shot by Thomas Eakins, the famous American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator, who introduced the camera to the American art studio. Its caption reads: African American girl nude, reclining on couch, ca.1882.6 If the albumen print is small, Hartman reduces its size even more by presenting only a section of it. The part of the picture that we see shows the torso of a young Black girl, a child actually, posed on a horsehair sofa, facing the camera, with her arms, as Hartman writes, “tucked tight against her torso like clipped wings” (29). The whole picture, instead, looms over the previous two pages as a faint but ineluctable watermark or palimpsestic visual layer that underlies and interacts with the printed text—so that, in obfuscating the view of the girl's nudity that should not be seen, it makes more transparent the violence of its imposition.In point of fact, Hartman makes clear that this is a “compelled image” (24), an image intended to classify, isolate, and differentiate. She puzzles over the photographer's intentions in taking a picture that is neither simply art nor science nor pornography. In effect, it defies any effort to classify it. While Eakins was involved in behavioral and sexual scandals implicating white girls, this nameless, unrecorded and unclaimed African American girl, simply and brutally identified as “item number 308,” was not included in the list. Her “minor figure,” an insignificant appendix to the great man's career, was overlooked. Hartman, however, has looked and re-looked at her image, while hypothetically conjuring the girl's response to the construction of her pose, the circumstances that led her to that studio, and the effects of that event on her life. In her imaginative visitation, Hartman has detected the multiple, intersecting layers of temporality that weigh that image down.A photograph is mute. According to Barthes, the only time it manifests is the time of the pose. The young girl's pose retains and remembers if, as Berger argues, the past (of that once living body) is given a living context, if the living take that past upon themselves—if they incorporate it into social and political memory (2013, 57). In order to position a photograph back into that context we have to respect the laws of memory and construct a radial system around it, since “memory works radially, that is to say with an enormous number of associations all leading to the same event” (59). Hartman's memory, her memory of/in history (Didi-Huberman 2006, 28), provides the small albumen print with its own continuity, its own not original but “narrated time” (Berger 2013, 60), and its own simultaneous radial associations. It connects the violence of the auction block with the “necessary and routine violence [that] defined the afterlife of slavery and documented the reach of the plantation into the ghetto” (29).Slavery, then, is the foundational event that has opened the way to the reiterated occurrences of its afterlife. It is as well the source of a chain of “afterimages” that preceded this photo and “that would follow in its wake” (25).7 Hartman is referring to images that “coerced the black poor into visibility as a condition of policing and charity, making those bound to appear suffer the burden of representation [. . .] These photographs extended an optic of visibility and surveillance that had its origins in slavery and the administered logic of the plantation” (21).8 The spectator keeps looking at this “cold image” as a countervisual strategy aimed at resisting the optics that led to its making. What the image makes “apparent” is “what can be taken and what can be done under the guise of science and observation” (27) while the interiority of that appearance remains hidden. The elusive image of that young body “just” reveals, in Shawn Michelle Smith's words, that “race and gender intersect and inform one another in the performance and power of the ‘gaze’” (2014, 2). But as Hartman notes, the real challenge is another: “How does one make this violence visible when it secures the enjoyment, sovereignty, and bodily integrity of man and master?” (2019, 7).Visuality, meaning here the visualizing of history, is not the visible; rather, “it is twice ineluctable, unavoidable, inevitable” (Mirzoeff 2011, xiii). How do we describe what is not visible but ineluctably present? How do we show that gap in/of knowledge that alludes to the pressure of the invisible on the visible (Guerra 2020, 13)—in this case, the hypervisibility of the Black female body? Hartman's counternarrative represents the attempt to “annotate” the figure and “compelled” figuration of this body. She seeks to offer a “shield” that might protect it and provide “a barricade to deflect the gaze and cloak what had been exposed” (Hartman 2019, 26). As Michele Guerra reminds us, the word “object” comes from the Latin obicere, to put forward, to present, and also to expose to a danger, to abandon to something (2020, 20). Photography does not furnish a reverse shot. Thus there is no way to see what that exposed, vulnerable object (the young Black girl) really sees; there is no way to suture the sense (the meaning and direction) of that look.And yet, Hartman succeeds in deflecting the photographer's ineluctable, dominant gaze and its objectfication of (young) female Blackness by concentrating not only on the pose that he has fabricated as an intention of reading (Barthes 1980, 79) but also on the gaze of the object as it is arrested in that pose. She claims the responsibility to look into the pose and through/with the young girl's eyes in order to envisage a “latent image capable of articulating another kind of existence, a runaway image that conveys the riot inside” (Hartman 2019, 30). If the girl's body is exposed, she argues, it actually witholds everything (27), and its “rigidity betrays the salacious reclining posture” (25). Concurrently, “the girl's flat steely-eyed glare is hardly an invitation to look [. . .]. Her direct gaze at the camera is not a solicitation of the viewer, an appeal for recognition, or a look predicated on mutuality” (25).The look that does not look, writes Barthes, is withheld by some interiority (1980a, 111). The portrait of the other, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, constitutes the stage of both an opposite and a complementary dynamics in which the exteriorization of the other (its traits brought forth) overlaps with its retreat into itself. The other who is portrayed (por-traited) retreats into its very manifestation. Hence, Hartman's search for the girl's latent image has to face a double process of the other's retreat into her alterity: a retreat that re-veals, not unveils, the mystery of this alterity (Nancy 2014, 28–29). However, if the other retreats into the abyss of its portrait, it is in its viewer that the “sound” of this retreat resonates (Nancy 31). Borrowing from Audre Lorde, Harman identifies this sound as a “symphony of anger” (Hartman 2019, 29). And she hears it and listens to it as both a memento that, again in Lorde's words, “we were never meant to survive, and yet we are still here” (29–30) and the omen of the “potential history of a black girl that might proceed along other tracks” (30). Thus, the alterity of the portrait retains its mystery; the look that does not look is withheld by an impenetrable interiority. And yet, the spectator is drawn into the uncontainable ontology of this mystery and is empowered to draw out a latent image: to “image” other possible runaway, wayward lives that failed to appear, that eluded the frame and remained fugitive, refusing the “burden of representation” and “the terms of visibility imposed on them” (Hartman 2019, 19, 21, 18).In the conclusion of Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women, the first book-length study in English focused on Haitian women's literature (1997), Myriam J. A. Chancy explains why a particular photograph, personally taken, appears on the book's front cover. The camera's operator, as Barthes would say, vividly recollects and makes explicit to the reader the genesis of that picture: the moment in time and place—the spatiotemporal conjunction—when the circumstances converged to make that particular choice an event. The readers are solicited to participate in this “advent/ure” by the narrative's use of the present tense by means of which this past experience is recounted. Chancy the photographer is standing “on a dust road in the hills above Pétion-Ville before a wall of colors as magnificent as a rainbow” (1997, 165), and while she brings the camera up to her eye with the intent to catch the bunch of bananas hanging above the display of unframed paintings, an unexpected appearance enters the frame of her picture: And there she is: Solange. Can it be? her? My only angel? There she is: walking across my field of vision, in her Sunday dress, all frills and light as air, dignified. The sound of metal folding upon metal: the shutter sounds the magnificent stopping of time. She has quickly walked away, quietly, like only angels can. (165)Solange is the protagonist of the “story” that Chancy recounts at the very beginning of the Introduction (“Let Me Tell You a Story”) and that she keeps retelling, in different versions, at the beginning of each of the following chapters. This story is the red thread and the leading inspiration of her critical project. “Only true in spirit” (1997, 3) was inspired by stories told by Chancy's father, as well as by the account of Paul Farmer—an American medical anthropologist, physician, and activist, recently deceased, who devoted his life to advocating for global health equity and building community health networks in Haiti and other underdeveloped countries—about the death of Roseline Vaval. This eleven-year-old girl was killed by the army in 1990 while she was reading a book of Haitian history—a death “that became the catalyst for grassroot uprisings throughout the provinces” (4). In Chancy's rereading of Farmer's account,9 this girl, envisioned as “looking for images of herself in her history book,” is “a symbol of Haitian girlhood, spent in dreams, lived in the imagination, and extinguished before croissance” (3, 5).The identification of the little girl in the picture with the fictive—but real—Solange, Chancy explains, will be made only later, after a process of recognition that will enable the operator-become-spectator-interpreter of her own picture to “name” the anonymous appearance and give her a narrative reason. What at first strikes the spectator, instead, is the supreme contingency “of a photo that registers what took place only once” (Barthes 1980, 6), the serendipitous crossing of two paths that that very “only once” made possible, and the silence of the trace left on the surface of the photo as a consequence of that crossing. As Chancy recounts, Later, when I will look at this picture, before I have even begun to imagine Solange, I will realize that whoever she is (or was, or can be) will never be told. Her story is her own. But here, her path and mine have crossed: our stories have intersected. And in this frame, she lives, without beginning and without end. She is forever stilled in this photograph. (165)Then a second, “unforeseen” event intersects with the intentionality, “the acquisitive mood” (Sontag 1990, 3) of the photographer who decides how a picture should look and arbitrarily delimits its borders. It takes place when, shooting out of a moving car, Chancy wants to capture the dissent expressed by the anti-American graffiti that has captured her attention. On this occasion, her camera registers the passing of a woman, “a grown woman, head down, walking past bright red graffiti painted on brick walls in Port-au-Prince” (166). A woman she had not seen “walk through the frame,” a frame she “had not constructed at the moment the shutter clicked shut and open” (166). Her immediate reaction is to wonder at the woman, at the bent of her head, at what she might think of those anti-American slogans. Only later will she connect these two discontinuous, irrepeatable events (literally, ad/vents) and give them and the traces the two women have left in passing, a context of readability. This context will then allow her to insert them in the continuum of her critical study—as a feminist Haitian-born woman—of the literary production of Haitian women writers. A study that is meant to show “the connection between history and story-telling, between Haitian women's lives and the ways in which narrative enables Haitian women to preserve those lives” (5). Chancy elaborates further: It is when I put these pictures side by side that I see these two moments in time—a girl and a woman, walking—frame a story in themselves: a story of silence: a story of their untold lives, of so many forgotten women in Haiti who survive on a daily basis the oppressions the world has seen fit to lay across their shoulders [. . .] perhaps they are both Solange: prototypical of all the Haitian women: living beyond the history books that will not acknowledge them: creating light from the ashes of invisibility: living beyond sight. At least, this is my secret hope: this is what I think silently to myself, this is the sum of my (in)sight as I attempt to bring her/their story to light. (166)Paradoxically, but perhaps not so much so, the very muteness of the two images bespeaks what Chancy the historian/storyteller is “looking for,” and their arrested, “stilled” passing is revitalized and set again in motion by the conceptual montage that she has constructed as a reader of her own visual archive.10 If the ambiguity of photography lies in the “shock of discontinuity” (Berger 2013, 62) between the moment recorded and the moment of looking, it is also true that the synchronic coherence of these disjointed temporalities instigates ideas. “An instant photographed,” Berger argues, “can only acquire meaning in so far as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future” (2013, 64). Although photographic images do not narrate, they enable Chancy the spectator to perform her own narration, to look for the possibility of a further meaning and access the (theoretical) language that queries the coherence—the visual affinities—of their half-language. The material and imaginative montage of the two (or one?) Solanges, “a long quotation from appearances” (Berger 2013, 97), provides a conceptual reason for their having (tres)passed the limits of the studium—the cultural construction, as Barthes has taught us, of the object photographed (the colorful wall of paintings, as expression of Haitian creativity; the anti-American graffiti, as a sign or symptom of the neocolonial domination of the island).Chancy's two photographs are not portraits in the strict sense. The two (one?) Solanges do not offer their faces to the camera; they are not posing and are not conscious of their transformation into images. They are simply passing through, and that passing, registered and stilled by the shutter clicking “shut and open,” lays bare the friction between the spectacle of social performance rehearsed daily in the social sphere of the street and the invisible truth of these two silent actors (Taylor 2003, 3). Their appearing, the appearing of their appearance, represents an unexpected gift, an excess of value that overturns the relationship between foregound and background and fills up the whole picture. And this gift informs the look of its viewer as the necessary addition, the supplement of sight that supplies the scene with what is missing “and in this way is already inscribed within that to which it is added” (Bernasconi 2016, 3). It is a supplement that explicates (makes explicit) the notion of “culture lacune,” namely, the methodological lens employed by Chancy the scholar to analyze the novels chosen for her study.Chancy argues that “in each of them, absence is palpable in the form of marginalization. But from this marginalization emerges a sense of a women's culture that defines itself through its silencing” (16–17). If Haitian women represent the ultimate lacune in Haitian society, “they are the absence that completes the whole,” and Haitian women writers “describe a culture within a culture, one that embraces its own silencing even as it contests it” (17). By reflecting upon these novels, Chancy has come to understand her own position as a French-speaking woman of African descent raised in an Anglophone context: Insofar as she has felt hampered in her ability to access her Haitiennité, she herself has been “operating out of a culture lacune” (16). In turn, by reflecting upon her photographs she captures the irrefutability of that absent presence or present absence she is denouncing, that “hole” that is still burning under the ashes of invisibility. Indeed, knowing how to look at an image, writes Didi-Huberman, means being able to discern where it burns, where the ashes have not cooled off (2006, 33).Photography's etymological meaning is “light writing,” but also “writing with light” (Scianna 2017, 17). The semantic chain light/sight/insight/visibility/invisibility/presence/absence established by Chancy in the critical reelaboration of her visual experience evokes both the role of light in the formation of an image (a chemical process) and the operator's will to make of that process the means to “write with light” and “bring to light” a particular aspect of the real. The real, according to Didi-Huberman, is before the camera, but when the photographer focuses their look toward it, the real implicates that look in such a way that the space of the image is produced in an unconscious way. In other words, the taking of a picture is as unconscious as the temporality that prompts the operator to click open and shut the shooting device here and now.11 Solange, Chancy reflects, “is not real: she exists in my unconscious. Solange is too real: she exists in your mind and your heart. Solange is [. . .] our moral conscience” (1997, 166).Barthes's conceptualization of the spectrum envisages the photographer's referent as both spectacle and return of the dead (1980, 11). Solange is twice “dead,” both as historical subject (the little girl who inspired Chancy's story) and insofar as she (the little girl who crossed paths with Chancy) is now visible only as a trace. Nevertheless, her image or imago stays, as the secret sign or symptom of a crisis that has not been pacified (Didi-Huberman 2006, 33)—a sign “framed” by Chancy's enactment of a multimodal scenario that interlocks the visible and the sayable and makes of the visual the affective and epistemological nexus of a reading practice that aims at establishing its own, alternative rather than oppositional, critical paradigms.As Janet Neary reminds us, images and iconography alone do not constitute the visual (2017, 8). And Shawn Michelle Smith points out how literature itself can be understood as a form of visual culture in which readers learn to see as they watch characters looking at one another (2014, 6). In the case of Hartman and Chancy, the visibility of the photographs discussed above, even if it is reproduced in the form of the image of an image (Sontag 1990, 5), “authenticates” the trajectory of the original spectator's reiterated acts of looking. The reader, in this case white, is allowed to assess the relationship between what appears and what is said about that appearance and can evaluate what appears at the subjective level while simultaneously empathizing—albeit vicariously—with the emotional upheaval determined by the affective proximity that connects the (Black) viewer/narrator to the (Black) object of her viewing. This process of interpellation, implication, and recognition, this specific form of “regard,” can only be their own.Dionne Brand's essay An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading (2020) deploys this intimate form of viewing and re-viewing “in relation” as the methodological lens through which she unfolds her scathing denunciation of colonial epistemic violence. Although her critique is mostly concerned with English literary texts, it is introduced by and concludes with the analysis of a photograph—either extracted from a family album or from her own memory archive—that she does not show. In this instance the verbal medium constitutes the exclusive mediation between that image and the reader and is fully responsible for bringing forth that “secondary” image, or image twice removed from the scene of its recording, that is offered in the text. Thus, the interest for Brand's readers lies not so much in the object described, but in the description that the author/essayist makes of it and the relationship they can establish between her descriptive exercise and her seeing (Magli 2016, 22). In other words, while “we” (that part of the we who belongs to the once claimed and acclaimed Euro-American “center” of modernity) are solicited to imagine an image that is looked at and “seen” through a decentering optics, we are doubly engaged in an act of