Southern trees bearing strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the roots/Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant south/Them big bulging eyes and the twisted mouth/Scent of magnolia, clean and fresh/Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck/For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck/For the sun to rot, for the leaves to drop/Here is a strange and bitter crop

When Nina Simone sings, it is a lament for the South – a South that has allowed horror to root itself into the earth. One thousand, nine hundred and thirty reported lynchings is the total  – slavery and violence, man’s cruelty to man, is now part of the South’s geography. The poem describes it so poignantly how nature, unable to comprehend such violence, is forced to accommodate such horror – to stand as a witness, to do all that it can do to what is left of the violence – the dead body. Nature is the only force that can look at so sick, so dead a thing hanging on a tree, and consider it some “strange fruit”. It’s a consequence of ignorance – lynching is not part of nature’s vocabulary. We, who have various words for various kinds of violence are not like her. Nature calls it by what she knows; a fruit – so strange, so bitter, something that doesn’t fit. It will attend to it, regardless of it’s difference – absorb it into the earth, let the elements merge them into one – the rain will gather it, the crows will eat from it. To us readers, listeners – who know, who are cursed to know the reality, the truth, we are ashamed by the haunting simplicity and perhaps, innocence of the description of the bodies, and the horror in the juxtaposition. We have defiled so beautiful a world – so much so that the scent of magnolias can exist alongside the smell of burning flesh.

I read up on who wrote the song to understand the poem better. Abel Metropole, a Russian Jewish immigrant to the Bronx, was a literature teacher who saw, one day in the news, a picture. A lynching in Marion, Alabama, that picture of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, both teenagers, hanging off the branches of a wide tree, their necks snapped, their eyes closed. That picture. They were dragged from jail and murdered by a wild, white mob, who, all together, are in the picture, too. Metropole, I sense through his poem, was struck by the sight of those boys who were hung, saw how the trees were made to carry the burden, the weight, of their bodies, and so, wrote this poem. And now, I understand why. He chose nature as his vantage point to look at the sight because nature is the only humane element in the picture itself. 

The alternative are those who committed the violence. They are who I always focus on when I see the picture. What frightens me are those wild eyes, those smiling faces, who stand, relaxed, proud, below the hanging bodies, as though the sight is routine, as though they were captured strolling down the street. So lax, to casual, so matter of fact are they! What do they see? What do they think they’re doing? Men and women, together, they’re even wearing hats! One man points, resolute, at the figures above him, eyes dead into the camera, telling me, “This is who we are – this is we have done!” What is it you are trying to tell me, you – with your resolute finger? Why are you proud, you monster, you’re parading around death! To bear witness through poetry, I would not choose such figures as my vantage point.

Metropole is proof that men of heart, men who recognized the atrocity, existed at the time. His work is a profound act of empathy – that not only understands what kind of violence has been wrought, but seeks to tell it in a manner that adds beauty into the world – that depicts the lament, the moral outrage of the earth and those whose hearts are still in tune with it. Nina’s voice takes what Metropole created a step further – she turns it into a prayer, a mantra for healing, with her low, rich voice – a black woman’s voice, nature herself – deeply sorrowful, uncomprehending, but attending to her task. She sings to speak of the violence, but to also remind us that nature, that earth, is on the side of those who cannot comprehend the violence man creates, to heal those who are victims to it. 

Everywhere I see the battle for mastery that rages between classes, peoples, etc., reproducing
itself on an individual scale. Is the system flawless? Impossible to bypass?
On the basis of my desire, I imagine that other desires like mine exist. If my desire is
possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.

—Hélène Cixous, Sorties (1986)

My final essay will be centered on the philosophical and literary writings of eminent feminist, philosopher, and poet, Hélène Cixous, who called for a style of writing now known to all as écriture féminine. The gendered nature of the title may be misleading – the title only makes sense once one understands the logic of what this form of writing advocates. To sum up her ideas crudely, Cixous works against the privileged terms in the longstanding binary of male/female and its corresponding binaries of mind/body, civilization/nature, individual/collective, and writing/speech that are the backbone of western philosophy. She critiques, specifically, their inherent drive towards mastery and control, of the self, of nature, of communities, of the other. Instead, she advocates for a re-signification of the terms hitherto considered inferior – the body, or nature, community, orality – and demands that they enter discourse in order to formulate a new modes of thinking, reading and writing that transcends the logic that underpins inherently exclusive institutions in our present day: hyper-nationalism, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Majority of the decolonial thinkers we have read have grappled with their desires for mastery. From Gandhi to Fanon, we have seen thinkers wrestle with the question of how to reclaim control over themselves within a world that is set up and designed in the logic of the colonizer. As in Cixous’ quote above, what resonates in all their works is this horror, this frustration, “Is the system flawless? Impossible to bypass?” And to add, seldom do they recognize and acknowledge the plight of women who, under colonial domination or not, are regulated and controlled by patriarchy, foreign or local. I wish to demonstrate how Cixous’ model offers us a mode of thinking, reading, and writing, that trains us to unlearn our compulsive desire for self-mastery and control over others and nature, to disentangle ourselves from the ever present legacies of violence inherent in our mode of being in this patriarchial, capitalist, neocolonial age. Cixous seeks to create instead a “non-acquisitional space” where the self can explore the non-self, the other, in mutual respect, harmony and love. A space that is generous, that gives, that finds affirmation of the self in multiplicity and difference – not in homogeneity or control. It is a mode of being fundamentally at odds with the world – but for now, she demands that we begin articulating it, to have it enter discourse to slowly but surely steer our futures away from violence and destruction, away from our fantasies of invulnerability that cause us to hurt other humans, animals and the environment. Her writing is poetic, inherently poetic since it demands that the body enter into the written word. It is sense, feeling, that recognizes, that appreciates, that expands the range of possibilities of being and of reality, well before the mind categorizes, filters, structures, approves or condemns. Her poetic language, her language of the body, stretches the bounds hitherto permitted under the modernity’s reign of reason.

The passage I have referenced above almost reminds one of the manner in which Descartes uttered his famous phrase: “I think, therefore I am” – that self-centered, individual, introspective orientation that spawned philosophies that now have exhausted their productive potential. Cixous radically inverts this moment. She exclaims how it is on the basis of desire and a trust in others who feel the same way – the body and community – acknowledged, recognized, that she can imagine a world worth living in, living for. This desire must be given a voice to redeem, to reclaim what is left in the world for us to admire, to appreciate, to perpetuate, to bolster – those otherwise subordinate terms  – the body, the voice, nature and community – for they may save us all.

The form of my project will be an essay, most likely, but rife with references to poetry!

For this weeks blog, I have chosen to focus my attention on C.L.R. James’ preface of The Black Jacobins, to unpack his methodology. His work, the story of the successful slave rebellion of San Domingo, led by the revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, goes beyond a mere account of causality and event. Rather, it is an exercise of the imagination – a plunge into the world which made possible such a revolution, with an investigation of all the possibilities and alternate directions history could have taken accounted for. The journey is described in such detail, so richly, that it is almost cinematic.

What is truly distinctive, to me, is how unabashedly present C.L.R James is in his description and analysis. His account does not merely present multiple images and voices passively for us to make sense of. He directs our journey into the past – his work is a curated history told from the vantage point of the people with a drive so evident that his emotions are uncensored in his retelling. His work is no churning out of supposed objective, apolitical literature – if such a thing could exist. His loyalty is very evidently to the people, and he makes it apparent. He is their storyteller, deliberately emotionally charged, to tell a history complete with the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations that were part and parcel of the revolution. It comes as little surprise, then, to find out that he is a Marxist historian.

In his preface he argues that analysis is the science of history, and the telling of it, art. He clearly asserts that his telling of the revolution is shorn of the tranquility of Wordsworth’s definition of art, of poetry, as the overflow of emotion, recollected in tranquility:

“The violent conflicts of our age enable our practiced vision to see into the very bones of previous revolutions more easily than heretofore. For this very reason, it is impossible to to recollect historical emotions in that tranquility which a great English writer, too narrowly, associated with poetry alone. Tranquility today is either innate (the philistine) or to be acquired only by a deliberate doping of the personality. It was in the stillness of  seaside suburb that could be heard most clearly and insistently the booming of Franco’s heavy artillery, the rattle of Stalin’s firing squads and the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence. Such is our age and this book is of it, with something of the fever and the fret. Nor does the writer regret it”

He cannot feign objectivity. For those who feel the tremors of history today, there is no way to speak of it outside “the fever and the fret”. He writes as a black man from Cuba in the 80’s, and one imagines that his choice in writing a book on the history of the revolution of an island not so far from his own, is one that cannot be anything but interested. It reads as a very conscious immersion into the past with the aim to make sense of the present, both for himself and his readers. He writes to see where his people have succeeded in the past, and where they had failed, and how those in the present can learn from their example. This drive for context, for a deeper understanding of his place is evident in that his final chapter links Toussaint and the revolution to Cuba’s history and to Fidel Castro.

His method reflects this drive, his approach is not one of simply glorifying of romanticizing the revolution – this immersion must be productive, must be understood. Here is the science of this historical method. He remarks, disapprovingly, that it is routine practice for historians of the revolution to romanticize Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leading role. Though he concurs that “no single figure appeared on the historical stage more greatly gifted than this Negro”, and that his present work too will convince them of this fact – still:

“Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth…great men make history, but only as much as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and their realization, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true work of a historian”.

He uses, what is to me, a beautiful metaphor to describe his task:

“In a revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are meaningless chaos and lend themselves into infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came. The writer has sought not only to analyze, but to demonstrate in their movement, the economic forces of the age; their molding of society and politics, of men in the mass and individual men; the powerful reaction of these on their environment at one of those rare moments when society is at boiling point and therefore fluid”.

If I were more efficient in writing to save room to go into the text itself and put forward what his method looks like in practice, this would be a more thorough blog. I can, however, quickly mention my favorite technique he employs, particularly in his chapter on the slave trade titled The Property. He juxtaposes long, richly detailed account of lives of the Native Americans, or the black slaves, with empathy, with emotion, against a short and sharp ironic shift to how the colonizer responded to their misery, or how they justified it. It is here where his obvious partiality, his lack of objectivity, is most apparent. For example, in the very first paragraph, in describing the slave ships as so horrific that “the Africans fainted and died, the mortality in the “trucks” being over 20 per cent.” And yet, “outside in the harbor, waiting to empty the “trunks” as they filled, was the captain of the slave ship, with so clear a conscience that one of them, in the intervals of waiting to enrich British capitalism with the profits of another valuable cargo, enriched British religion by composing the hymn “How Sweet the Name of Jesus sounds!”  It’s laughable, it’s horrific. There is no question of accepting in context the white man’s prejudice – they are immediately condemned. He does this repeatedly, and it builds a tempo, an energy, a frustration that demands release. C.L.R. James has, in his first chapter, achieved his aims – to ensure your sympathies are with the suffering, and has made you eager to see how they resist. This first chapter very much exemplifies how the telling of history is indeed an art.