Ruminations on violence. Hate yourself Do you hate yourself? I…
By: The Trans Napoleon
Tags: Sociology

Ruminations on violence

My thoughts are consumed by death: my own, my friends, my comrades, my humans. The night brings with it the uptick in energy I get from the comfortable roll of a jacket and basketball shorts to tap away mindlessly and endlessly at my well worn keyboard and drown my emotional weight in the validation I get from the process of posting. The prevailing undercurrent no matter where I manage to turn is my inability to come to terms with anything that bothers me. Closing my eyes brings forth the segment of the night dominated by horror. A set of images continually blast through my head as lights pierce through the darkness, instantly and intensely; visions of a bombed out school bus in Yemen, someone close about to make an attempt on their own life or any other scene all too visceral.

These would stir me to wake in the middle of the night and only later began to follow me to waking world. It was driving to a fast food joint for that late night fix of bullshit that I first noticed it. A business with flags near the sidewalk had me start to be pulled into panic, I couldn’t understand why at first, vision tighter, breathing tighter, grip tighter, and a draping flag that I knew was there from driving by in the daylight innumerous times and yet I knew that was a person. They were going to kill themselves, I was going to kill them. The panic stayed with me for the whole drive back to my apartment empty handed. I couldn’t believe it was something that actually happened to me, I thought I must have been making it up to myself in some weird ploy for attention from myself. Maybe I’d put too much of myself in others, maybe I thought worrying about everyone else would let me forget how much I hate me, maybe it was both. My motivation had been crushed. I stopped attending all courses where I didn’t have a relationship to keep my accountable. The visions and nightmares twisted and shifted, eventually the burned and mangled body of an innocent man lynched in Dallas would be the preeminent visage to cross my addled mind at during the dark hours. Ruminating on my own fault in spectacles of death I came to W.E.B. DuBois’s magnum opus Darkwater for a course.

Darkwater, Clear Mind — Musings on DuBois and my mental state

It hardly feels fair to box W.E.B. Dubois into any one box after I’ve finished Darkwater. Seemingly every discipline of letters is within his reach and mastery: fiction, history, humour, sociology, philosophy, theology, and poetry are all deftly on display in a tour de force. Darkwater is not a work that speaks but a work that screams to the world to pay attention, to learn and to grow. I find myself continually bereft of the pen in Dubois’s shadow; each subsection speaks so loudly in and of itself that my breath cannot help but to be cut short in the wake. I have simultaneously an overabundance of thought and an incomparability of meaning upon bearing witness to the herculean feats of the pen they would pull off.

Jesus Christ In Texas from Darkwater spoke directly to the feelings I had running through my brain, the intersection between the great forgiver of sins and the brutality of death raced without abatement throughout my 2019 so far. It is brutal to read the story of the messiah in Waco knowing the conclusion that awaits you.

Invariably understanding the horror of Jesus Christ In Texas requires a bit of knowledge about and around the evil vile mob executions that plagued America from the the end of reconstruction to the early 60s (some would now say they’re supplanted with police violence). I’ve twice borne witness to parts of Without Sanctuary compiled by James Allen, an edited collection of lynching postcards and memorabilia from the era. It is impossible to not weep as you flip through the pages. Common practice was to make sure the event was not only public but recorded and joyous for the population who did the murder. Not only would the denizens of Waco lynch Jesus, they would do it with a smile and picture to remember the event.

While the level of violence and hatred on display in every postcard collected is horrific, perhaps most troubling is the composition of the audiences. In many of the photos there are children of primary schooling age, no more than 7 or 8, gleefully absorbing the hell on the shoulder of their father. I found myself fixated on a particular postcard from Dallas. A few of those buildings in the background stand to this day, the old red courthouse off in the distance, no justice to be had under its visage. Some of those photos date to the 1960s, putting them at about the age of my own parents. If they had been in Waco instead of Salamanca or Ocotlan would they too have hung Jesus; had a glint in the eye and their sunday best on? Those kids are still alive, and in turn their kids are recent university graduates or young labourers. They work, live and continue their dominion over people of colour. What about them, would they pose for a postcard again?

DuBois gives his response as an unqualified yes later in Darkwater via the short story The Comet. The things that supposedly will bring us arm in arm with our fellow man still cannot supersede the entrenched system of racism. In turn the various possible syncretic moments of the past 99 years have not quelled the churn of the beast. When I look into the faces of certain people when they hear of another death by police brutality or the idea that black lives matter I don’t just see them, I see the pictures, I see the faces with wry smiles and the pornographic spectacle of black death they embody, faces of grandparents, a scant 60 or 70 years removed. These things happened within living memory and the framing that perpetuates them continues to live and thrive.