Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context -- randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out "I swear to God!" is to be called insane, crass, crazy.
You don't know. You don't know what she means. You don't know what response she expects from you nor do you care. For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent. You both experience the cut, which she keeps insisting is a joke, a joke stuck in her throat, and like any other injury, you watch it rupture along its suddenly exposed suture.
Yes, and in your mail the apology note appears referring to "our mistake." Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion. This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning.
What did you say?
Not long ago you were in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.
For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler's remarks, you being to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.
Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world. She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever -- you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it. Your friend refuses to carry what doesn't belong to her.
You take in things you don't want all the time.... then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.
To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds.
The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.
The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.
Yes, and you do go to the gym and run in place, an entire hour running, just you and
your body running off each undesired desired encounter.
You can't drive yourself sane. You are not insane.
This is what it looks like. You know this is wrong. This is not what it looks like. You need to be quiet. This is wrong, You need to close your mouth now. This is what it looks like. Why are you talking if you haven't done anything wrong?
You are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.
The world out there insisting on this only half concerns you. What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only.
How to care for the injured body,
the kind of body that can't hold
the content it is living?
And where is the safest place when that place
must be someplace other than in the body?
The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much
to you --
What feels more than feeling? You are afraid there is something you are missing. Something obvious. A feeling that feelings might be irrelevant if they point to one's irrelevance pulls at you.
Do feelings lose their feeling if they speak to a lack of feeling? Can feelings be a hazard, a warning sign, a disturbance, distaste, the disgrace? Don't feel like you are mistaken. It's not that (Is it not that?) you are oversensitive or misunderstanding.
Every day your mouth opens and receives the kiss the world offers, which seals you shut though you are feeling sick to your stomach about the beginning of the feeling that was born from understanding and now stumbles around in you -- the go-along-to-get-along tongue pushing your tongue aside. Yes, and your mouth is full up and the feeling is still tottering --
And yes, I want to interrupt to tell him her us you me I don't know how to end what doesn't have an ending.
-- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
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