The Sovereignty

of Quiet
!
Frontispiece. Whitfield Lovell, Kin VII (Scent of Magnolia), 2008. Conte crayon on
paper with attached wreath. 30 !22 1⁄2 ! 3 inches. Courtesy of the artist and DC
Moore Gallery, New York, N.Y.
The Sovereignty
of Quiet
!
Beyond Resistance in
Black Culture

kevin quashie

rutgers university press

new brunswick, new jersey, and london
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Quashie, Kevin Everod.

The sovereignty of quiet : beyond resistance in Black culture / Kevin Quashie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8135-5309-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-5310-8
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8135-5311-5 (e-book)
1. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism—
Theory, etc. 2. African Americans—Intellectual life. 3. African Americans—Race
identity. 4. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 5. Group identity in literature.
I. Title.
PS508.N3Q83 2012
810.9"896073—dc23
2011035602

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Library.

Copyright © 2012 by Kevin Quashie

All rights reserved

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 Contents

Introduction: Why Quiet 1

1 Publicness, Silence, and the Sovereignty
of the Interior 11
2 Not Double Consciousness but the Consciousness
of Surrender 27
3 Maud Martha and the Practice of Paying
Attention 47
4 Quiet, Vulnerability, and Nationalism 73
5 The Capacities of Waiting, the Expressiveness
of Prayer 103
Conclusion: To Be One 119

Acknowledgments 135
Permissions 137
Notes 139
Bibliography 169
Index 187

v
The Sovereignty
of Quiet
!
 !

Introduction
why quiet

The story of this moment has been told many times: It is the 1968 Olympics
in a volatile Mexico City, and two male athletes, both black Americans,
make an emblematic gesture during the medal ceremony for the 200-meter
race. One of them, Tommie Smith, has won the race while the other,
John Carlos, placed third. As the U.S. national anthem plays, both men
punctuate the space above their heads with their black-gloved fists, Smith
raising his right hand, Carlos his left. Their salute is a black power sign that
protests racism and poverty, and counters the anthem and its embracing
nationalism. The third man on the podium, standing to their right, is
Peter Norman, a white Australian who won the silver medal; Norman
doesn’t elevate his fist but wears an OPHR (Olympic Project for Human
Rights) pin in solidarity with Smith’s and Carlos’s protest.
The power of this moment is in its celebrated details—the clenched fists,
the black gloves, the shoeless feet—details that confirm the resoluteness of
the action. Since that day, commentators have memorialized the public
assertiveness of Smith’s and Carlos’s gestures. Their paired bodies have
become a precise sign of a restless decade and especially of black resistance.
But look again, closely, at the pictures from that day and you can see some-
thing more than the certainty of public assertiveness. See, for example, how
the severity of Smith’s salute is balanced by the yielding of Carlos’s raised
arm. And then notice how the sharpness of their gesture is complemented

1
Figure 1. Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Peter Norman, 1968 Mexico City
Olympics. Courtesy of AP Photo/File.
introduction 3

by one telling detail: that their heads are bowed as if in prayer, that Smith,
in fact, has his eyes closed. The effect of their bowed heads is to suggest inti-
macy, and it is a reminder that this very public protest is also intimate.
There is a sublime balance between their intentional political gesture and
this sense of inwardness, a sublimity that is often barely acknowledged.
In truth, the beauty of the protest is enhanced by noting the intimacy, in read-
ing Smith and Carlos not only as soldiers in a larger war against oppression
but also as two people in a moment of deep spirituality, in prayer, as vul-
nerable as they are aggressive, as pensive as they are solidly righteous. In this
reading, what is compelling is their humanity on display, the unexpected
glimpse we get of the inner dimensions of their public bravery.1
And yet this interior quality of Smith’s and Carlos’s protest is rarely dis-
cussed, even as their gesture has earned a long life as one of the most iconic
moments of resistance of the twentieth century. Why is this so? There is cer-
tainly no question that their action was an intentional and public demon-
stration, the most significant of the OPHR’s attempt to organize athletes
toward a boycott of the Games. And still, what is moving about seeing them
is as much the quality of graceful, lithe surrender in their posture as it is the
awareness of the politics that are at stake. Like many other moments from
the civil rights movement, their protest is an exquisite balance of what is
public and what is intimate. How is it, then, that the intimacy of their fists-
in-protest can be overlooked or deferred in our reading, such that the
breadth of this moment is commented on only for its publicity? How is it
that they are largely icons of resistance, and that vulnerability and interior-
ity are not among all the things we are encouraged to read on their image?2

This book explores what a concept of quiet could mean to how we think
about black culture. The exploration is a shift in how we commonly under-
stand blackness, which is often described as expressive, dramatic, or loud.
These qualities inherently reflect the equivalence between resistance and
blackness. Resistance is, in fact, the dominant expectation we have of black
culture. Indeed, this expectation is so widely familiar that it does not
require explanation or qualification; it is practically unconscious.
These assumptions are noticeable in the ways that blackness serves as an
emblem of social ailment and progress. In an essay from his 1957 collection
4 the sovereignty of quiet

White Man Listen!, Richard Wright captures this sentiment, noting that
“The Negro is America’s metaphor” (109). Wright’s comment might be
hyperbolic, but it also summarizes the exceptional role that black experi-
ence has played in American social consciousness: Blackness here is not a
term of intimacy or human vagary but of publicness. One result of
this dynamic is a quality of self-consciousness in black literature, a hyper-
awareness of a reader whose presence—whether critical or sympathetic—
shapes what is expressed. Such self-consciousness is an example of the
concept of doubleness that has become the preeminent trope of black
cultural studies. The result is that black culture is celebrated for the exem-
plary ways it employs doubleness as well as for its capacity to manipulate
social opinion and challenge racism.
This is the politics of representation, where black subjectivity exists for
its social and political meaningfulness rather than as a marker of the human
individuality of the person who is black. As an identity, blackness is always
supposed to tell us something about race or racism, or about America, or
violence and struggle and triumph or poverty and hopefulness. The deter-
mination to see blackness only through a social public lens, as if there were
no inner life, is racist—it comes from the language of racial superiority and
is a practice intended to dehumanize black people. But it has also been
adopted by black culture, especially in terms of nationalism, but also more
generally: it creeps into the consciousness of the black subject, especially the
artist, as the imperative to represent. Such expectation is part of the inclina-
tion to understand black culture through a lens of resistance, and it practi-
cally thwarts other ways of reading. All of this suggests that the common
frameworks for thinking about blackness are limited.
Resistance is hard to argue against, since it has been so essential to every
black freedom movement. And yet resistance is too broad a term—it is too
clunky and vague and imprecise to be a catch-all for a whole range of behav-
iors and ambitions. It is not nuanced enough to characterize the totality of
black culture or expression. Resistance exists, for sure, and deserves to be
named and studied. And still, sometimes, when the term “resistance” is
used, what is being described is something finer. There is an instructive
example of this tension in Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom: Enslaved
Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, a compelling work
on the lives of black women during slavery. As Camp’s title suggests, the
introduction 5

frame for the book is resistance, the ways that black women’s everyday lives
(“private, concealed, and even intimate worlds” [3]) constitute a defiance of
the vagaries of enslavement. Like Deborah Gray White and others before
her, Camp notices how black women’s acts of resistance appear in day-to-
day activities as much as (if not more than) in formal planned rebellions or
revolts. And yet even Camp realizes that the meaning of black women’s
everyday lives was not shaped entirely by their engagement with and resist-
ance to the institution of slavery—that black women and men who were
enslaved grew gardens and decorated their living spaces and organized par-
ties in the woods (the chapter “The Intoxication of Pleasurable Amusement:
Secret Parties and the Politics of the Body” is beautifully imagined and
written). The point here is not to dismiss the intensity and vulgarity of slav-
ery’s violence on black people, but instead to restore a broader picture of
the humanity of the people who were enslaved. Under Camp’s careful eye,
these women’s everyday lives are brought into fuller relief, and even if
Camp reads these lives as moments of resistance, their aliveness jumps out
beyond that equation to offer something more.3
The case for quiet is, implicitly, an argument against the limits of black-
ness as a concept; as such, this book exists alongside many others that have
questioned the boundaries of racial identity. These include recent scholarly
work by Robert Reid-Pharr, Paul Gilroy, Thomas Holt, Michelle Wright,
Gene Andrew Jarrett, Kenneth Warren, Kimberly Nichele Brown, Hazel
Carby, Trey Ellis, Thelma Golden, and especially David Lionel Smith,
whose essay “What Is Black Culture?” is dazzling and indispensible. There is
also a large body of work by black women scholars, especially since the
1970s, that has posed consistent challenges to the singularity of race. The
specific concern about the dominance of resistance as a framework, how-
ever, is exposed by black artists who have always struggled with the politics
of representation. From Zadie Smith, Afaa M. Weaver, and Rita Dove, to
Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison, the black artist
lives within the crosshairs of publicness and, if she or he is to produce
meaningful work, has to construct a consciousness that exists beyond the
expectation of resistance. Inspired by these artists, this argument for quiet
aims to give up resistance as a framework in search of what is lost in its all-
encompassing reach.4
Resistance, yes, but other capacities too. Like quiet.
6 the sovereignty of quiet

The idea of quiet is compelling because the term is not fancy—it is an

everyday word—but it is also conceptual. Quiet is often used interchange-
ably with silence or stillness, but the notion of quiet in the pages that follow
is neither motionless nor without sound. Quiet, instead, is a metaphor for
the full range of one’s inner life—one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulner-
abilities, fears. The inner life is not apolitical or without social value, but
neither is it determined entirely by publicness. In fact, the interior—
dynamic and ravishing—is a stay against the dominance of the social world;
it has its own sovereignty. It is hard to see, even harder to describe, but no
less potent in its ineffability. Quiet.
In humanity, quiet is inevitable, essential. It is a simple, beautiful part of
what it means to be alive. It is already there, if one is looking to understand
it. An aesthetic of quiet is not incompatible with black culture, but to notice
and understand it requires a shift in how we read, what we look for, and
what we expect, even what we remain open to. It requires paying attention
in a different way.
This point about how we read is especially relevant to the image in the
frontispiece, Whitfield Lovell’s KIN VII (Scent of Magnolia). Lovell is a giant
in contemporary art, a 2007 MacArthur fellow whose work has been show-
cased at the Smithsonian, the Whitney, the MOMA, and in various other
locations in the United States and abroad. His most well-known exhibits,
Whispers from the Walls and Sanctuary, consist of a series of tableaux and
full-room installations that display the daily lives of anonymous African
Americans. In these installations, charcoal drawings of posed studio photo-
graphs found at flea markets or town archives (largely from the 1900s to the
1940s) are paired with various objects (boxing gloves, a knife, barbed wire,
a bucket). The drawings are made on pieces of wood—parts of fences or
walls—and seem to bring domestic scenes to life. More recently, in a stun-
ning collection entitled Kin, Lovell has continued drawing portraits of
anonymous black people, though this time on paper; these figures are made
from identification photographs (headshots from passports or mug shots,
for example) and are often paired with an object. Critics note the dignity of
Lovell’s figures, which is a tribute to his skill in drawing: His portraits
render their subjects in terrific clarity (the intensity in the eyes, the defined
neck and cheek, the textured quality of the hair). His use of shadow is
astute, and the result is images of people who look like people—not
introduction 7

symbols of a discourse of racism, but people in the everyday, wary and

resolute, alive. They look familiar to us even if it is rare to see black faces
represented in such a studied, elegant way.
But the dignity is related also to the pairing of image and artifact, the
clean juxtaposition of locating each near the other without abrasion or
overlap. This doesn’t really create a sense of doubleness because the portrait
is intended to be prominent; still proximity is contagion, and the artifact
insinuates itself on the portrait. In KIN VII (Scent of Magnolia), the cloth
wreath becomes part of the male figure’s body, marking the place where one
might expect a shirt collar, a piece of jewelry, the outline of a chest.
Localized and domesticated, the wreath’s randomness becomes specific to
this bold beautiful black face.
And the subject is clarified by the artifact: Are these flowers from his
room, a private and unusual explosion of color? The flowers he gave to a
date or the ones he brought to a funeral? A sign of his desire to visit all the
world’s spectacular gardens? We might pick up the title’s reference to Billie
Holiday’s thick voice on “Strange Fruit” (“scent of magnolia sweet and
fresh/the sudden smell of burning flesh”) which might lead to a more omi-
nous reading—his killed body marked by a wreath—but it is unsatisfying to
be so singular and definitive with this image. Because of the flowers, he can
be a subject more than an emblem; we can wonder if he loved pink and
purple tones, without ignoring the possibility of racist violence. Whatever
the story, the flowers are a surprise that interrupt the dominant narratives
that might be ascribed to the profile of a black man of that age.
The foreboding is there to be read in some of the objects in Lovell’s
work—chains, barbed wire, targets, rope—which is as it would be, often is,
for a black person in the United States. And still, foreboding is only part of
one’s life story, and it should not overwhelm how we think of the breadth of
humanity. Lovell seems to aim for a balance between the social or public
meaning of a person or object, and its intimacy, its human relevance.
Where his earlier work created tableaux using full-bodied figures, the aes-
thetic of juxtaposition in these more recent pieces is what evokes narrative,
as if we are seeing the unfolding of a scene of human life, as if more and
more of the image will manifest if you look long enough. (This is especially
true of Lovell’s drawings that lack a corresponding artifact.) The key is to let
the unexpected be possible.
8 the sovereignty of quiet

We might want to read a narrative of resistance on KIN VII (Scent of

Magnolia), but there is something else there: a ravishing quiet.
Quiet is antithetical to how we think about black culture, and by exten-
sion, black people. So much of the discourse of racial blackness imagines
black people as public subjects with identities formed and articulated and
resisted in public. Such blackness is dramatic, symbolic, never for its own
vagary, always representative and engaged with how it is imagined publicly.
These characterizations are the legacy of racism and they become the com-
mon way we understand and represent blackness; literally they become a
lingua franca. The idea of quiet, then, can shift attention to what is interior.
This shift can feel like a kind of heresy if the interior is thought of as apolit-
ical or inexpressive, which it is not: one’s inner life is raucous and full of
expression, especially if we distinguish the term “expressive” from the
notion of public. Indeed the interior could be understood as the source of
human action—that anything we do is shaped by the range of desires and
capacities of our inner life.
This is the agency in Lovell’s piece, the way that what is implied is a full
range of human life: that we don’t know the subject just by looking at him
or noticing the artifact; that his life is wide-open and possible; that his life is
more than familiar characterizations of victimization by or triumph over
racism. For sure, the threat and violence of racism is one story, as is the
grace and necessity of the fight. But what else is there to black humanity,
this piece seems to ask. The question is an invitation to imagine an inner life
of the broadest terrain.
It is remarkable for a black artist working with black subjects (and in a
visual medium) to restore humanity without being apolitical. It is remark-
able, also, to make the argument that Lovell makes so well with his work—
that what is black is at once particular and universal, familiar and
unknowable.
This is challenging territory to navigate, given the importance of resist-
ance and protest to black culture. But the intent here is not to disregard
these terms, but to ask what else—what else can we say about black culture,
what other frameworks might help to illuminate aspects of the work pro-
duced by black writers and thinkers? How can quiet, as a frame for reading
black culture, expose life that is not already determined by narratives of the
social world? After all, all living is political—every human action means
introduction 9

something—but all living is not in protest; to assume such is to disregard

the richness of life.
In humanity, quiet is inevitable, essential. It is a simple beautiful part of
what it means to be alive. It is already there, if one is looking to understand it.
There are many books on black expressiveness and resistance; there
will be—and should be—many more. This, however, is not one of them.
This book is about quiet.

The first chapter explores the way that public expressiveness has become the
dominant framework for understanding texts or moments in black culture.
Specifically, the chapter considers the concept of doubleness through a
close reading of W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, Paul
Laurence Dunbar’s characterization in “We Wear the Mask,” and Zora
Neale Hurston’s representation of signifying in Their Eyes Were Watching
God. In noticing the limits of these idioms, the chapter offers quiet as a
metaphor for the interior and as a more capable expressiveness. In making
this case, the chapter distinguishes between quiet and silence, and discusses
Let Your Motto Be Resistance, the inaugural exhibit at the National
Museum of African American History and Culture; it also revisits the image
of Smith and Carlos.
At the heart of the second chapter is the concept of quiet as surrender—
the idea that human subjectivity is not tethered to fighting the social world,
but instead could be imagined as the agency to be had in surrendering to the
wildness of one’s inner life. The discussion here uses Marita Bonner’s little-
known essay from 1925, “On Being Young, a Woman and Colored,” a poetic
1,679-word treatise that serves as a counterpoint to Du Bois’s famous idiom:
not a consciousness that is irrevocably doubled, but one of surrender.
The third chapter considers this consciousness of surrender through
Gwendolyn Brooks’s slim novel Maud Martha. The chapter wonders what
quiet looks like in an everyday life, and engages these questions: How does
interiority inform interactions with other people? How does the quiet
subject negotiate moments of subjection and power? What is the action
that quiet motivates, or how does it shape behavior? Simply, what does a
quiet life look like? The chapter also studies Rita Dove’s “Daystar” from
Thomas and Beulah.
10 the sovereignty of quiet

The fourth chapter moves away from the consideration of quiet through
constructs of individuality, as in the second and third chapters, and won-
ders if quiet is possible in collectivity. Necessarily, the chapter looks at
nationalism and its centrality to black culture, as well as its perils to a notion
of interiority. Thinking through representations of the civil rights move-
ment, especially James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the chapter tries to
understand how the terms of quiet—surrender, interiority, and especially
vulnerability—can be meaningful to collectivity. In this exploration, the
chapter revisits Elizabeth Alexander’s reading of her inaugural poem,
“Praise Song for the Day,” and engages Alice Walker’s definition of
“womanism” and Marlon Riggs’s documentary on black identity, Black
Is . . . Black Ain’t.
The last two chapters are closely connected in that they take on quiet’s
expressiveness. In the fifth chapter, the concepts of prayer and waiting are
used to expose expressiveness that is not public and that is not only urgent.
The chapter also considers the importance of form to understanding the
figurative capacities of language. Key texts here are poems by Natasha
Trethewey and Dionne Brand, and Lorna Simpson’s visual piece Waterbearer.
The concluding chapter relates quiet to the notion of “oneness,” the energy
of the inner life that constitutes a person’s being. Conceptually, quiet is the
subjectivity of the “one” and is equivalent to wandering. This case is made
by reading two key scenes from Toni Morrison’s Sula as well as the title
poem from Ruth Ellen Kocher’s When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering.
Finally, the chapter considers the particular contributions that black
women have made to the ideas that inform quiet, and offers brief snapshots
of other examples and dimensions of quiet that are not explored in this
book. The chapter closes with a reconsideration of the ineffability and
essentiality of quiet.
Inevitable, essential, sovereign; expressive and lush; a little foreign to
our thinking on black culture, but there all the while: quiet.
 chapter 2

Not Double Consciousness

but the Consciousness
of Surrender

In an 1892 essay, Anna Julia Cooper noted that black people “are the
great American fact, the one objective reality on which scholars sharpened
their wits, at which orators and statesmen fired their eloquence” (136).1
At the heart of Cooper’s comment is the idea of black publicness, the
reality of race as a concept formed and sustained in public discourse. Black
people can be “the great American fact” because their presence as racial
subjects influences and reflects the country’s ambition; as a group, black
people are essential figures in the national narrative. This equation of
blackness and publicness shapes our understanding of black culture as a
whole, and the notion of resistance in particular. And yet, as argued in
the previous chapter, resistance is too limited an idiom to adequately
characterize black humanity. Which leaves the question, is it possible to
engage the public discourse of black identity beyond the imperative of
resistance? What might it look like to write about race and identity in the
context of an aesthetic of quiet, to write about race using the capacities of
the interior?

Of all the qualities that could characterize an aesthetic of quiet, it is the

idea of surrender that is most compelling. In common usage, “surrender”
is a passive term, the counterpart to being conquered, dominated, or

27
28 the sovereignty of quiet

defeated, which is how we would think of it given the prevalence of war. But
surrender can also be expressive and active, as in some religious uses or in
the surrender to love: It is a deliberate giving up to another, the simultane-
ous practice of yielding and falling toward what is deep and largely
unknowable. Though surrender is not only a conscious process, it does
require a certain faith in one’s human capacity. As a term that suggests
bounty and unsureness as well as a quality of inwardness, surrender is an
apt synonym for quiet.2
The consideration of surrender brings us back to the shortcoming of
Du Bois’s double consciousness, and to another writer, Marita Bonner,
whose description of black consciousness uses a rhetoric of surrender as a
means for engaging the inevitable fact of black publicness. Bonner is not well
known today, but she was a celebrated writer in the Harlem Renaissance.
Born and raised in New England, she received an undergraduate degree
from Radcliffe College in 1922, and though she never lived in Harlem, she
was a force in its artistic explosion. Like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale
Hurston, and Nella Larsen, Bonner gained early recognition for her writing,
winning The Crisis magazine’s short fiction competition in 1924 for the
story “The Hands.” She went on to publish three plays as well as at least
twenty short stories and essays, the last coming in 1941. She died in 1971,
having spent the latter years of her life as a high school teacher, mother, and
Christian Scientist.
Her best known essay is the brilliant “On Being Young, a Woman, and
Colored,” published in The Crisis in December 1925, when she was still an
up-and-coming writer. The essay is brief—only 1,679 words—but still
manages to offer a thoughtful meditation on the consciousness of the black
woman in a new era. The title is audacious and bold in its philosophical
posture, and in this regard, Bonner’s piece parallels Du Bois’s first chapter
of Souls, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” In fact, Du Bois himself was editor of
The Crisis at the time Bonner’s essay was published, and he must have been
taken with this young woman writer whose learned prose seemed to reflect
his own dreams about black intellectualism.3
Hence Bonner and Du Bois are contemporaries, which makes her dis-
tinct consideration of black consciousness an interesting read. Like
Du Bois, Bonner’s essay addresses the aspirations that a young educated
black person—in her case, a woman—might have: the desire to be free and
the consciousness of surrender 29

to revel in both the thrills of the modern world and the spoils of her educa-
tion and youth. The essay begins with this eclectic flourish:

You start out after you have gone from kindergarten to sheepskin covered
with sundry Latin phrases.
At least you know what you want life to give you. A career as fixed and
as calmly brilliant as the North Star. The one real thing that money buys.
Time. Time to do things. A house that can be as delectably out of order
and as easily put in order as the doll-house of “playing-house” days. And
of course, a husband you can look up to without looking down on yourself.
Somehow you feel like a kitten in a sunny catnip field that sees sleek,
plump brown field mice and yellow baby chicks sitting coyly, side by side,
under each leaf. A desire to dash three or four ways seizes you. (3)

This opening introduces the idea of a young woman poised to build a life
rich in freedom and describes this ambition as a conflict between the
demands of the exterior world on one hand, and the willfulness of the self ’s
desire on the other. While the first sentence speaks to the exterior world,
represented here via education, the next sentence turns immediately to the
interior: “At least you know what you want life to give you.” The use of “at
least” implies that something is amiss, that there is a disconnect between the
aspirations that education is supposed to inspire and the yearnings of one’s
inner life. It is almost as if before the meditation gets too far, the narrator
puts a governor on the expectations of the social world. Notice, for
example, how the description of career, house, and husband is rendered
in whimsical language that is about excitement and agency—intimate lan-
guage. The passage is remarkable for how much it privileges the interior.
For sure, Bonner’s narrative recognizes the encroachment of the world out-
side, represented in the rules of gender and domesticity that prepare young
girls for the limits of womanhood. But these expectations are tempered by
the exuberance of the interior, which is characterized as wild, predatory,
and boundless; indeed, even the potentially sexist connotation of “a kitten
in a catnip field” is transformed into an idiom of female interiority, as a
desire to dash wherever pleasure may be found.
Bonner’s meditation on black female consciousness starts, then, from a
position that recognizes, even reveres, the interior above all else. This rever-
ence is emphasized by the rhetorical intimacy that is created by the direct
30 the sovereignty of quiet

address of the essay, the use of the second person. It is as if the essay were a
letter of advice from one woman to another, or even a diary entry as a
woman speaks to herself about herself in the most private of ways. The
speaker never names her addressee, and there is no explicit salutation to
substantiate that this essay is a letter, but the direct address certainly
assumes a kind of familiarity and suggests a manner of engagement that is
consonant with the nature of letters. The intimacy here is essential to how
Bonner is able to manage what is essentially a description of double
consciousness—the conflict between one’s interior and the world outside—
differently from Du Bois. That is, because the narrator’s comments are
housed in the intimacy of direct address, the ideas have an aura of privacy,
as if they are precious exchanges between speaker and reader. Instead of
rehearsing familiar historical or sociological facts about black people and/or
women’s oppression—the facts of black publicness—the essay reads like it
is exploring the quirky, energetic musings of a beloved.4
This is not to imply that the essay is apolitical or ignores the challenges
of racism and sexism that may be presumed from its title; in fact, the oppo-
site is true in Bonner’s nimble engagement of the racial and gendered
expectations that impose on the freedom that a young black woman might
imagine for herself. The speaker moves easily between the assumptions of
cultural nationalism (“All your life you have heard of the debt you owe
‘Your People’ because you have managed to have things they have not
largely had”) and the prejudices of patriarchy and white supremacy as
she outlines the limits—rather than the possibilities—of the modern world.
She warns the reader that her ambitions are likely to be shunted aside by the
intersecting nature of racism and sexism. But in Bonner’s language, even
the warning is engaging stuff:

You hear that up at New York this is to be seen; that, to be heard.

You decide the next train will take you there.
You decide that next second that that train will not take you, nor the
next—nor the next for some time to come.
For you know that—being a woman—you cannot twice a month or
twice a year, for that matter, break away to see or hear anything in a city
that is supposed to see and hear too much.
That’s being a woman. A woman of any color. (4–5)
the consciousness of surrender 31

The effectiveness of Bonner’s prose is not only its brevity, but the way the
short sentences mimic the quick progression from excitement to disap-
pointment. In having each sentence stand as a paragraph, Bonner recreates
the landscape of the speaker’s thinking, a kind of stream-of-consciousness
as the mind flits from one thing to another. It is a dramatic and poetic
presentation of the speaker’s most intimate thoughts.
The consequence of Bonner’s syntax is that her argument about racism
and sexism—essentially, an argument about the facts of black publicness—
is embedded in interiority. In the whimsy of its examples, the essay avoids
the language and posture of resistance, and the consciousness it describes
acknowledges but is not overdetermined by the exterior world. Unlike
Du Bois’s chapter, which is in a tussle with the white world from the
first sentence, Bonner’s essay begins by establishing the potency and
meaningfulness of the interior.
Key to Bonner’s rhetoric of interiority is her willingness to question the
usefulness of race as a social category, a willingness that implicitly demotes
the equation of race and publicness from the singular place it holds in
how we understand black subjectivity. This is a delicate undertaking, not
only because of the broad impact of race in black life but also because of the
race-conscious era in which Bonner is writing. For this young woman
writer to suggest that the terms of racial publicness were anything other
than paramount might be perceived as naïvety at best, heresy at worst. But
Bonner’s intellectual skill is up to the challenge: In an early example, the
narrator addresses residential segregation, though rather than use this as a
moment to recite sociological or legal data, the narrator instead considers
how the conversation around living among “one’s own” reflects the heavy
burden of racial identity imposed both from within and from outside of
the race:

And one day you find yourself entangled—enmeshed—pinioned in the

seaweed of a Black Ghetto.
Not a Ghetto, placid like the Strasse that flows, outwardly unper-
turbed and calm in a stream of religious belief, but a peculiar group.
Cut off, flung together, shoved aside in a bundle because of color and
with no more in common.
Unless color is, after all, the real bond. (3–4)
32 the sovereignty of quiet

The diction here is exquisite as the narrator notices a distinction between a

community of people whose relationship is “unperturbed” and “calm” and
shaped by their shared beliefs; and a community “flung” together on the
basis of nothing but color. The sarcastic tag, “Unless color is, after all, the
real bond,” accentuates the point that she has made—that color alone is
not sufficient to determine humanity or kinship; certainly, color does not
equate to desire and ambition and interior subjectivity. The narrator
suggests that the idea of racial difference, which is produced by a racist
discourse, is adopted by black cultural nationalism, and that both the racist
and the nationalist conventions impinge on freedom. At the heart of this
critique is her longing to experience a world, “where you can marvel at new
marbles and bronzes and flat colors that will make men forget that things
exist in a flesh more often than in spirit. Where you can sink your body in a
cushioned seat and sink your soul at the same time into a section of life set
before you on the boards for a few hours” (4). It is a lush and human desire
the narrator has for herself and for the reader to whom she imparts this
advice, a desire that is not merely a naïve rejection of the realities of social
inequity but one that holds firm to the right to be human. In moving
beyond the social and political implications of the body toward a celebra-
tion of spirit and feeling, Bonner’s essay makes a plea for interiority: not a
consciousness that is doubled and encumbered, but a consciousness that is
free, full of wander and wonder, where surrender—not resistance—is
an ethic.5
It is important to notice that this argument for a consciousness of the
interior is built on an intersectional analysis of identity. That is, unlike
Du Bois’s double consciousness which accepts race as the singular and defin-
itive aspect of black life, Bonner’s idiom of consciousness engages both race
and gender, and also implicitly addresses age and class. In her narrator’s
worldview, the struggle for subjectivity is broader than just a contestation
with whiteness, and her arguments challenge racism and cultural national-
ism (“shoved aside in a bundle because of color and with no more in
common . . . [as if] color is, after all, the real bond” [4]) as well as patriarchy
and sexism (“For you know that—being a woman—you cannot . . . break
away . . . That’s being a woman. A woman of any color” [5]). Indeed given
her gender, the narrator could not merely articulate, uncritically, the tenets
of cultural nationalism, just as, given her race, she could not only engage
the consciousness of surrender 33

sexism and patriarchy. She must consider all these and in doing so, her
argument recognizes the limits of identity politics and moves closer to the
larger issue of humanity that is always at stake.6
This commitment to what is human is not an easy achievement, and
even Bonner’s poised narrator falls into a moment of ranting, cataloguing
her frustrations with the resilience of the “old . . . outgrown and worthless”
stereotypes that affect black women. In response, the narrator exclaims
“Every part of you becomes bitter.” When white friends “who have never
had to draw breath in a Jim-Crow train” counsel her to be more under-
standing, the narrator’s anger is especially clear: “You long to explode and
hurt everything white; friendly; unfriendly” (6). Here, the speaker imagines,
even embraces, what she has been cautioning against—letting the exterior
world encroach on one’s interior, orienting one’s self against the world
since it is seemingly already and always against you.
But the moment does not hold and in the very next sentence the speaker
reminds the reader that “you know that you cannot live with a chip on your
shoulder even if you can manage a smile around your eyes” (6). This is a
warning against internalizing the dynamics of oppression, and the phrasing
is reminiscent of Du Bois’s response to the unasked question, how does
it feel to be problem—to smile or nod or say nothing, even as his blood
boils inside. For Du Bois, this suppressed frustration is the “prison-house”
that corrupts the youthful agency of his peers, who give into “tasteless
sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale work about them . . . or wasted
in a bitter cry” (Du Bois, Souls, 10). (Notably both writers describe the
experience as being tasteless: Bonner writes that “Everything you touch or
taste now is like the flesh of an unripe persimmon” [5]). By and large,
Du Bois’s notion of consciousness accepts racial blackness as a prison house
of struggle that is internalized. Bonner’s interior consciousness, however, is
explicit in its refusal of such imprisonment:

But you know that you cannot live with a chip on your shoulder . . .
For chips make you bend your body to balance them. And once you
bend, you lose your poise, your balance, and the chip gets into you.
The real you. You get hard.
. . . And many things in you can ossify . . . (6; third and fourth ellipses
in original)
34 the sovereignty of quiet

This is a gentle caution about the futility and danger of fighting against the
exterior world and having one’s whole selfhood shaped—hardened—by
the imperative of resisting ignorance and insults. For Bonner’s narrator, the
solution is not to privilege racial identity and community; the problem itself
is gender and race as social categories, the way they can undermine one’s
humanity when they are embraced as sites of resistance.
It is surrender that Bonner’s speaker values, since surrender evidences
the agency and wildness of the inner life and is at least as human and as
sustaining as any act of protest. At the end of the essay, the speaker says
as much in a closing flourish that must be quoted at length:

You see clearly—off there is Infinity—Understanding. Standing alone,

waiting for someone to really want her.
But she is so far out there is no way to snatch at her and really drag
her in.
So—being a woman—you can wait.
You must sit quietly without a chip. Not sodden—and weighted as if
your feet were cast in the iron of your soul. Not wasting strength in ener-
vating gestures as if two hundred years of bonds and whips had really
tricked you into nervous uncertainty.
But quiet; quiet. Like Buddha—who, brown like I am—sat entirely at
ease, entirely sure of himself; motionless and knowing, a thousand years
before that white man knew there was so very much difference between
feet and hands.
Motionless on the outside. But inside?
Silent.
Still. . . “Perhaps Buddha is a woman.”
So you too. Still; quiet; with a smile, ever so slight, at the eyes so that Life
will flow into and not by you. And you can gather, as it passes, the essences,
the overtones, the tints, the shadows; draw understanding into your self.
And then you can, when Time is ripe, swoop to your feet—at your full
height—at a single gesture.
Ready to go where?
Why . . . Wherever God motions. (7–8; ellipses in original)

This breathlessness is an argument for the pleasures and agency of the

interior. The subjectivity the speaker offers is that of the black woman as an
the consciousness of surrender 35

infinity of understanding, poised in her knowing and beyond reach or sight

of the public’s limited imagination. She is sure of herself, at ease, aware,
in the full consciousness of her voluptuous interior rather than choked by
a consciousness in persistent conflict with the world and its expectations.
In this closing passage, the narrator is deliberately engaging the sexist
idea of the feminine interior—the image of a woman in her sitting room,
silent, in waiting while the world happens around her and decides who and
how she can be. Bonner’s speaker reforms this notion of waiting, first in
claiming it as a woman’s particular condition and agency (“So—being a
woman—you can wait”), and then by arguing that waiting is a location of
intelligence and insight. This second argument is achieved by the speaker’s
suggestion that the black woman, in her waiting, refuses to waste “strength”
learning the boundaries put in place by the ideologies of white supremacy,
male patriarchy, or black cultural nationalism. Instead, she has an insight
older and deeper and wilder than these. Her waiting looks, as it would to
a casual eye, as if it has no motion and no intellect, as if it was provincial,
but she knows differently: She, this woman who is also black, waits like
Buddha. She is not merely oppressed from the outside but is also humble
and knowing from the vastness within. In this context, waiting is not
passivity but instead is patience, the thoughtful attentiveness of one who is
wise. Waiting is the surrender to the interior. The narrator goes one step
further in suggesting that it is women, and in particular black women, who
realize this consciousness of surrender through their consideration of the
futility of publicness.
In describing this consciousness, Bonner uses the word “quiet” as well as
“silent.” As noted in the previous chapter, the two terms are sometimes
used synonymously, though the idea of quiet as the expressiveness of the
interior is distinct from the general connotation of silence as an absence.
Bonner’s “silent” seems interchangeable with the notion of quiet, especially
when the narrator asserts that the motionlessness on the outside is not
reflective of the activity of the inner life. In keeping with the idea of quiet,
the silence here is not performative, not a withholding, but instead is an
expressiveness that is not entirely legible in a discourse of publicness.7
Also key to Bonner’s description of a consciousness of surrender is the
notion of Buddha as a metaphor for the idealized black woman. Buddha is
an icon of thoughtfulness, a man whose quiet changed the world as we
36 the sovereignty of quiet

know it, and in this regard he is representative of a subjectivity of surrender.

Bonner’s argument makes the case that the concept of being a “woman” is
also emblematic of surrender, that a woman’s categorical agency is her
capacity to wait . . . as if the word “woman” literally means one who waits
with knowing grace. It is in this sense that phrase “Perhaps Buddha is a
woman” makes full sense, since Buddha’s exemplary mindfulness is com-
patible with Bonner’s notion of woman. Indeed, the narrator’s identifica-
tion with Buddha, which transgresses racial, gendered, national, and historical
boundaries, is in keeping with the overall argument about the futility of
identity. Buddha could be a woman, a black one even, since to be a woman
is a habit of consciousness and a practice of a kind of human wisdom.
Bonner’s use of identity here is ambivalent and, in its concluding moment,
the essay embraces a selfhood that is found in an icon of spirituality
(Buddha) and in a practice (waiting). Importantly, neither of these is a cat-
egory of identity; instead, they represent a state of being and a habit of self.8
If the end of the essay is a grace note on waiting, it is also a rejection of
publicness. The very form of the essay—poetic and wandering and
elliptical—is askew from the argumentative or polemical rhetoric one
might expect. Bonner doesn’t offer a call to arms or a private rant; she
doesn’t present her narrator as bothered and bothersome. In this way, the
essay does not entirely fulfill its title, in that it does not set forth grievances
to elicit guilt or pity. The refusal of the public moment is striking especially
because the essay remains feisty and critical. That is, Bonner’s speaker does
not back down from the challenges of a racist and sexist culture. But neither
does she take up the gauntlet as it is thrown down or fight in the terms that
are outlined. Rather than an essay of resistance, Bonner offers a slim, poetic
essay, a letter really, that describes subjectivity as a surrender to the interior.
In doing so, she constructs the black subject as possessing a consciousness
of imagination rather than a consciousness that is doubled. Her essay does
not plea for freedom but instead suggests that the freedom worth having
is already always present: the freedom of being, innately and complicatedly,
a human being.9

That Bonner’s essay so staunchly avoids using the first person, except
for one brief clause at the end (“brown like I am”), is an important feature
the consciousness of surrender 37

of its quiet. In fact, this choice of narrative voice is notable because it is

contrary to the conventions of the essay genre, for although essays usually
speak to readers implicitly—that is, there is always a sense of direct address
of the reader—it is the use of the first person that generally gives an essay
its rhetorical power. Why, then, would Bonner avoid first-person speech
so explicitly, especially in an essay that seems so autobiographical and so
personal? Why would she adopt a point of view that sidesteps the power
to be had in speaking autobiographically?
The answers might lie in the discourse of autobiography itself, as well as
in the kinds of cultural agency first-person narratives can offer black and
female subjects. Among the assumptions of autobiography is the expecta-
tion of truth and representativeness—that the first-person narrative not
only speaks for its narrator but speaks of his or her condition representa-
tionally, iconically. This dynamic is especially true for marginalized subjects
writing about a topic related to their social identity; for such a writer, the
first-person moment is “a public way of declaring oneself free, of redefining
freedom and then assigning it to oneself in defiance of one’s bonds to the
past or to the social, political, and sometimes even moral exigencies of the
present” (Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, xi). This is how William Andrews
describes the convention of first-person voice in his important work on
slave narratives, and his description makes clear the anxieties and expecta-
tions that are likely to follow any black writer working in the genre. By
avoiding the first person, Bonner bypasses the presumption that the narra-
tor is a representation either of herself or of her social group. Her use of
direct address allows her to avoid being the autobiographical subject on
display as an act of resistance or defiance.10
Had Bonner spoken of her own experiences more directly, the essay
would have fallen into the kind of public struggle over identity that she her-
self seems to abhor. It is helpful to remember that the essay was published
in 1925, following the suffrage movement and the continued migration of
African Americans to northern cities; it is also an era characterized by the
literary and social activism of the Harlem Renaissance. Hence the public
conversation about women and black people was at a feverish pitch, and
discussions of race and/or gender were combative and often pivoted on
the issue of representativeness and authenticity. These conversations are
antithetical to the idea of interiority, and Bonner avoids them by utilizing
38 the sovereignty of quiet

the second-person voice to create an insulating intimacy between narrator

and reader.
In fact, Bonner’s use of the second person is exceptional for the way it
imagines the reader. Here the reader becomes the protagonist, and there-
fore she is committed by (and committed to?) the intimacy of the conversa-
tion. The construct of the essay assumes closeness between the narrator and
every reader, any reader, which helps to bracket the noise of public dis-
course, since the exchange is between just the two (narrator and reader).
This is all seduction, and the reader is, literally, made to surrender. It also
allows Bonner to take certain liberties; for example, she imposes on the
reader a set of desires and frustrations without regard for who the particu-
lar reader might be. This imposition is based in the assumption of
intimacy—as in, I know who you are and what you want—but might also
be a way for Bonner to imply that her arguments are, at the end, universal:
Every human being knows, to some degree, what it is to want to move
without restriction and what it is to encounter the limitations of the social
world. The intimacy here is the perfect context for having a quiet exchange
about race, gender, and power. Largely because of the direct address, the
essay reads as an intense but affectionate conversation of understanding
and encouragement, letter-like in its coziness and caution: for example,
“You long to explode and hurt everything white; friendly; unfriendly. But
you know that you cannot live with a chip on your shoulder” (6). There is a
certain tenderness here, the sense that the narrator knows and cares for
the reader. In avoiding rhetorical buzzwords in favor of whimsical poetic
phrases (kitten in a catnip field; plump brown field mice and yellow baby
chicks), Bonner sustains the notion that this conversation is on a different
register.
The use of the second person is further notable because it does not rein-
force the narrator’s sense of authority or increase distance between her and
the reader. Indeed, the closeness between the narrator and the reader seems
to facilitate the agency of the narrator to make direct reference to herself
near the end of the essay. It is as if, in being shielded from becoming the
representative of black femininity and establishing a kind of bond with the
reader, the narrator is safe to come into subjectivity. When she says “Like
Buddha—who brown like I am—sat entirely at ease, entirely sure of him-
self,” the narrator slips herself into the very possibility and wonder of the
the consciousness of surrender 39

interior that she has been arguing for. Like her protagonist, the narrator too
is poised to go wherever she can imagine. It is a lovely moment of connec-
tion, where the reader and narrator—and ultimately, Bonner herself, since
the narrator speaks also for her—become bonded through the practice
of surrender. If one is inclined to interpret Bonner’s interior consciousness
as self-indulgent, this connection between narrator and reader suggests
otherwise.11
Imbedded in this consideration of Bonner’s use of the second person and
negotiation of publicness is the question of audience that is so critical in
black culture. That is, because of the public dimensions of both race as an
identity and writing as a profession, a black writer who writes about race is
often forced to confront a generic but daunting inquiry: To whom and for
whom are you speaking? In regard to this question, a writer experiences a
kind of double consciousness where he or she is expected to represent but
also transcend race. This ambivalence of representation and transcendence
means that the writer has to balance at least three expectations: that she
would speak to and about black people, challenge a dominant white audi-
ence, as well as stand as evidence of black excellence. Bonner effectively
avoids this dilemma of audience by speaking to and about her protagonist,
who is ultimately herself. This solipsism—the speaking to the self about the
self—makes the subject and object of the essay synonymous, and thereby
displaces the audience as a factor. Indeed, the dilemma of audience is
undermined further by the essay’s refusal to approach race as if it has
to be singularly preeminent in a black person’s humanity.12 The connection
between audience and publicness is an important part of the difference
between Bonner’s rhetorical approach and Du Bois’s. Though both are
writing about racial consciousness, Du Bois’s position as narrator in the
first chapter of Souls seems to be shaped definitively by public discourse, by
how he is interpellated. The term “interpellation” has been advanced by the
theorist Louis Althusser as a way to describe the dynamic of subjectivity.
For Althusser, the modern subject is “hailed” or commanded into subjec-
tivity via social discourses. (He famously gives the example of a policeman
calling out to a person on the street “Hey you there,” where the second-
person invocation literally arrests the person and makes him capable of
being engaged as a social subject.) What is useful about Althusser’s idea
of interpellation is the way it explains subjectivity as a social event, as an
40 the sovereignty of quiet

experience of being legible and identifiable; subjectivity here is the location

of a public and exterior consciousness. But Althusser also suggests that
interpellation provides agency, since it is in being named in ideology that
the individual comes into being as a subject. Literally, it is in being sub-
jected that one becomes a subject.13 Althusser’s notion is Foucaldian in its
recognition of the dialectical nature of power and it works well with
Du Bois’s conceptualization of double consciousness: When Du Bois opens
his chapter with the unasked question, how does it feel to be a problem,
he acknowledges that the black subject is interpellated via an ideology of
negation and inferiority. Though Du Bois the narrator refuses to answer
the question, it still serves as the foundation of his anger, resentment, and
resolve. This unasked question is a saluation, as is the moment when the
young white girl refuses his card—they are the coordinates for his theoriza-
tion of black subjectivity as doubled.14
This is quite different from Bonner’s engagement of consciousness,
which articulates a subjectivity that seems to extend beyond interpellation.
That is, in privileging the interior and avoiding the question of audience,
Bonner turns the conversation about her subjectivity as inward as possible,
as if she is hailed only by her own interior. When the essay cautions against
becoming hardened or wearing a chip, it is discarding the subjectivities that
are possible via a racialized discourse. Instead, the narrator encourages the
protagonist to wait in quiet, ready to go wherever. The essay imagines a
human subject called into being not by a social discourse, but by desire,
ambition, dreams, by one’s affinity to the “essences, the overtones, the tints,
the shadows” of life as one takes it in. Bonner’s is a deliberate conceptual-
ization of subjectivity as being called from within.
The grand fault of Du Bois’s double consciousness is that it is tethered to
the notions that publicness projects onto the racialized subject. As Hortense
Spillers writes, double consciousness is about “the specular and the
spectacular—the sensation of looking at oneself and of imagining oneself
being looked at through the eyes of the other/another [which] is precisely
performative in what it demands of a participant on the other end of the
gaze” (Black, White, and in Color, 397). What Spillers captures is the anxiety
of publicness that is at the heart of Du Bois’s idiom. Here, the doubleness
of black subjectivity is constituted by resistance, and the imperative of
black culture is to engage public discourse to counter the racism created by
the consciousness of surrender 41

public discourse. In this way, double consciousness is riddled with the

terms of publicness. Bonner’s consciousness of surrender is something
else, for though it is engaged with the idioms of publicness, it privileges
the interior; indeed, it luxuriates in the wild possibilities that the interior
offers. These possibilities are not all positive, nor are they without social
relevance, as we shall see later on. And still, it is a remarkably different way
to orient one’s self––surrender as an alternative to the anxiety of double
consciousness.
Perhaps the defining difference between Bonner’s and Du Bois’s idioms
of consciousness is in their faithfulness to the politics of identity. In The
Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois sets out to mobilize race in a way that will serve
black political needs. As such, he not only embraces race but also works to
articulate—even celebrate—racial differences. For Du Bois, race is a “meta-
language,” a towering doubled-discourse that requires an awareness of what
is exterior to the subject himself.15 Bonner’s consciousness of surrender, on
the other hand, seems to work to undermine the meaningfulness of race (in
its intersectionality and its critique of cultural nationalism). Indeed, if there
is an identity that her narrator seems to engage, it is the notion of a woman’s
particular capacity. But even here, Bonner’s idiomatic use of “being a
woman” seems intent to evade essentialism: Starting with the stereotype
of women as the second and fairer sex, of women as passive and domestic
beings—notions which are already racialized—Bonner fashions a notion of
waiting as wisdom and agency. This is her subjectivity of the interior and it
is not necessarily exclusive to women, since Buddha himself is referenced as
an icon of a consciousness of waiting. Bonner’s finessing of the politics of
identity is terrific because it refuses to ignore the impact of race and gender
but also refuses to give up humanity in the face of stereotypes or the effort
to fight them.16 Whereas Du Bois sees liberation in the idioms of publicness
and wants to rehabilitate notions of blackness to this end, Bonner wants to
surpass not only racial stereotypes but the dynamics of race itself. And one
could argue that with the surrender she proclaims at the end of her essay,
she achieves exactly that.

So much of Bonner’s consciousness of surrender is related to the concept of

imagination. The act of imagining is the practice and willingness to dream,
42 the sovereignty of quiet

speculate, or wonder, and it helps us to move beyond the limits of reality.

Imagination is the landscape of such dreaming, what educator Harold Rugg
describes as a place and process of magic that is also a particular human
capacity (Imagination, xii). In this latter context, imagination is an interior-
ity, an aspect of inner life that constitutes an essential agency of being
human.
The concept of imagination is useful in thinking about the balance
Bonner tries to strike between the politics of identity and the wild vagary of
inner life. Implicit in Bonner’s arguments is the idea that the main goal of
cultural nationalism—freedom for black people—cannot be achieved with-
out a consideration of the interior. In his book Freedom Dreams: The Black
Radical Imagination, the historian Robin Kelley seems to understand how
essential dreaming is to achievement of social change—that there is an
important need for the whimsy of and surrender to the imaginative interior.
Early on, Kelley notices that his mother

has a tendency to dream out loud. I think it has something to do with her
regular morning meditation. In the quiet darkness of her bedroom her
third eye opens into a new world, a beautiful light-filled place as peaceful
as her state of mind. She never had to utter a word to describe her inner
peace; like morning sunlight, it radiated out to everyone in her presence. (1)

This description of seeing with a third eye is emblematic of possibility, of

the invention of a world that happens in the interior. But Kelley is clear that
the “bliss” of his mother’s imagining, though otherworldly, was not bereft
of political reality: “Her other two eyes never let her forget where we lived.
The cops, drug dealers, social workers, the rusty tapwater . . . were constant
reminders that our world began and ended in a battered Harlem/
Washington Heights tenement apartment” (1). And still, the imagination’s
agency doesn’t merely have to succumb to the reality of the exterior world.
Its fancifulness engages the overtones of the world outside, but then invents
its own habitat:

Yet she would not allow us to live as victims . . . So with her eyes wide
open my mother dreamed and dreamed some more, describing what life
could be for us . . . She dreamed of land, a spacious house, fresh air,
organic food, and endless meadows without boundaries, free of evil and
the consciousness of surrender 43

violence, free of toxins . . . free of poverty, racism, and sexism . . . just

free. She never talked about how we might create such a world, nor had
she connected her vision to any political ideology. But she convinced my
siblings and me that change is possible (1–2).

There is good balance in Kelley’s description between an awareness of the

exterior world, and a self authorized by an agency that extends beyond that
world. His mother’s vision is political and is shaped by social realities, but it
also is her own vision of possibility. This is an example of imagination as
“a means . . . of mediating between the domestic and that which lies at
and beyond the limits of knowledge” (Lively, Masks, 2). Indeed, Kelley’s
characterization of his mother’s consciousness highlights imagination
as the capacity to call one’s world into being; it is imagining as an act of
deliberateness and self-making.17
As a discourse, imagination has played a notable role in black cultural
history, evident by the popularity of literary magical realism as well as the
general colorfulness that characterizes black cultural aesthetics. This imagi-
nativeness is related to the contemplative tradition noted earlier, and can be
seen in iconic examples of enslaved peoples singing spirituals about far-off
lands and experiences of freedom, or in the inventiveness of quilts, or in
culinary adaptiveness. Some scholars have even argued that imagination is
relevant to the achievement of a positive sense of racial identity, especially
in terms of the capacity to envision blackness outside of the binary logic of
racism, where it is aberrant and inhuman.18
The meaningfulness of imagination to Bonner’s consciousness of sur-
render is evident in the way her argument is built on hypothesizing and fan-
ciful metaphors; the prose itself is also populated with ellipses, as if to imply
the spontaneity of invention. But it is the relationship between the reader
and narrator, formed via the direct address, that most reflects the quality of
imagination. The intimacy between narrator and reader is hypothetical,
and through it the narrator presumes to speak for the reader’s desires.
Moreover, the essay’s end is an imagined sequence that includes Wisdom,
Infinity, and Understanding as classical goddesses, and concludes with a
magical invocation to flight. Bonner’s narrator is able to balance social real-
ities with the vision of her imagination, and when she cautions the reader
against “wasting strength in enervating gestures as if two hundred years of
44 the sovereignty of quiet

bonds and whips had really tricked you into nervous uncertainty” (7), it
sounds a lot like Kelley’s comment on his mother. The narrator is well
aware of the legacy of slavery, but this does not override the vision of her
third, creative eye. She dwells in possibility and conjures up a world where
Buddha waits with the agency of a black woman, where waiting is a state of
knowing and grace. The narrator’s consciousness of surrender and her
capacity to envision her subjectivity different from the exigencies of the
outer world, is an engagement of imagination. In this way, imagination is
“consciousness as a sphere of freedom” (Collins, Black Feminist Thought,
103), rather than consciousness as deficit or imposed doubleness.19 And
there is a lovely synchronicity between the instruction of the narrator at the
close of the essay and the lesson Kelley remembers from his mother’s
dreaming: “She simply wanted us to live through our third eyes, to see life
as possibility” (2).
The notion of imagination helps us to remember the scope and breadth
of the interior, for although the interior is, tautologically, interior, it is not
small; like imagination, the interior is boundless. Such breadth is noted in
Bonner’s essay when the narrator warns against misreading motionlessness
or silence, and projects onto her reader a cosmos of an identity: “So you too.
Still; quiet; with a smile, ever so slight, at the eyes so that Life will flow into
and not by you. And you can gather, as it passes, the essences, the overtones,
the tints, the shadows; draw understanding to yourself” (7). Here the narra-
tor envisions the reader as the watcher of life, the perceiver, one who takes
in all its wonders and horrors. One who is in the world, but also of it, and
then, beyond it: “And then you can, when Time is ripe, swoop to your feet—
at your full height—at a single gesture. Ready to go where? Why . . . Wherever
God motions” (8). In this characterization, the quiet subject is active
and embodied, full of agency and capacity; the diction, especially “ripe,”
“swoop,” “full height” and “single gesture,” implies preparedness but also
potency. The interior, this practice of waiting and stillness, is a vision of a
human being ready to move divinely. Bonner’s final characterization dis-
turbs all of the ways that waiting and interiority get rendered as merely
domestic, or feminine, or enfeebled. Instead, waiting is without limit and
is truly cosmopolitan. It is also important that the essay does not end in
triumph, as if the reader or narrator has overcome the exterior world. No,
since this articulation of the interior is quiet, it ends in possibility rather
the consciousness of surrender 45

than achievement. There is no triumph to be had, especially since the self

is not calibrated against an external measurement. There is just the work
of being complicatedly human. And in this work, the compass for subjec-
tivity is the interior. Even Bonner’s construction of the reader to reflect the
narrator’s ambition and anxieties––that manipulation of direct address––
contributes to this sense of self-ordination. For the narrator, there is no
other measure but herself, for as flawed as this might be, it is a better
compass than to give in to what is exterior. She, this person who is black and
female, measures herself by herself, by her capacity for quiet; she surrenders
to her interior as a location of agency. “My intimacy is in silence” (81),
Trinh T. Minha writes in her elegant Woman, Native, Other, and indeed the
narrator’s intimacy, her awareness of herself, happens in the quiet of her
interior and her imagination. This interior self-measure is an articulation of
what it is to be sovereign.20

The quiet subject is a subject who surrenders, a subject whose conscious-

ness is not only shaped by struggle but also by revelry, possibility, the wild-
ness of the inner life. Quiet is not a performance or a withholding; instead,
it is an expressiveness that is not necessarily legible, at least not in a world
that privileges public expressiveness. Neither is quiet about resistance.
It is surrender, a giving into, a falling into self. The outer world cannot be
avoided or ignored, but one does not only have to yield to its vagaries.
One can be quiet.21
 chapter 5

The Capacities of Waiting,

the Expressiveness of Prayer

If we go back to the image of Smith and Carlos on the podium in 1968, it is

evident that quiet is a call to rethink expressiveness. That is, rather than
imagine expressiveness as public and dramatic, the argument for quiet asks
about expressiveness that is shaped by the vagaries of the inner life. Such
expressiveness is not necessarily articulate—it isn’t always publicly legible,
and can be random and multiple in ways that makes it hard to codify sin-
gularly. And yet reconsidering expressiveness is important, given the high
premium that publicness carries in black culture. So, what can a notion of
quiet do for how we understand expressiveness? Specifically, what are the
qualities that characterize quiet expressiveness?
These questions are related to larger discussions about the nature of
language. Modern linguists have argued varyingly about how language
works, but it is the study of poetry that most exposes the tension between
the literal and figurative aspects of language. The concept of figurative lan-
guage “has always involved a contrast with the ‘proper’ meaning of a word,
its supposed rightful meaning, the idea which comes directly to mind when
the word is used,” literary theorist Thomas McLaughlin asserts (“Figurative
Language,” 81). What McLaughlin is trying to make clear is the balance
between the expectation of language as a vehicle for expressing shared
notions and the almost inherent multiplicity in the meaning of words.
Figurative language is language as an inexact medium, abundant at the

103
104 the sovereignty of quiet

same time that it approximates precision; it is language that resembles the

wild copiousness of the interior.1
These ideas about language are relevant to thinking about expressiveness
and black culture. For one, McLaughlin’s distinction between proper and
figurative meaning makes reference to the fact that communication presup-
poses a listener, invoking the issue of audience negotiation that is readily
apparent in black expressiveness. Furthermore, the acknowledgment of
language’s figurative capacities is heightened by the particular role that
language has played as a tool of black oppression and liberation. As Keith
Byerman notes, “language . . . has always been a source of power in black
life, and its ramifications continue to be explored in black literature. A
recurrent theme is the conflict between those who use words to constrict,
objectify, and dehumanize, and those who insist on the ambiguous, ironic,
liberating aspects of language” (Fingering the Jagged Grain, 6). This histori-
cal reality inflects any discussion of what black expressiveness can mean.2
It is poetry as a genre that best exploits these conundrums of expressive-
ness, the gaps and insinuation and juxtaposition that make meaning
tenuous and rich. As Aimé Césaire argues, poetic language respects the
“knowledge born in the great silence of scientific knowledge” (“Poetry and
Knowledge,” 134). Césaire is distinguishing between the exactness of scien-
tific thinking, and the truths that poetry can reveal about human life. For
him, what is transcendent about poetry is its reliance on a kind of inex-
pressible expressiveness, its pursuit and celebration of that which cannot
fully be revealed (146). Césaire is not alone in this line of argument; the poet
Carl Phillips notes that poetry speaks not as “documentation—which is
part of the business of prose—but as confirmation—echo—of something
essential to being human, flawed, mortal” (Coin of the Realm, 161). Phillips
is referring to the way that poetry often abandons the sequential logic of
prose and surrenders to what is random and excellent. In fact, because
poetry does not depend on characters to tell its story, it does not have
a reliance on identity as fiction does; poetry can be about a sensation, a
moment, a something that is impressive and coherent—or not. In this
regard, the aesthetic of poetry is almost intrinsically quiet.
The point here is not to privilege poetry as a genre, but instead to
use what we know about the capacities of poetic language as a frame
for rethinking expressiveness. One could argue that all language use is
the capacities of waiting 105

figurative in the ways described above, functioning on gaps, elision, acci-

dents, coincidence; the truth of its expression is always partial, though no
less significant for its partiality. There is a humanness to the partiality, in
fact, a sense that what is true is beyond the limits of our social rules, so the
best we can get is a glimpse. This is a notion of language as the domain not
of meaning but the stuff of dreams, abundance, and inexactness.3
Essential to poetry’s expressiveness is form, the particular shape of a
poem. Indeed, it is the form of a poem that contributes mightily to its
figurative qualities: whereas content can be easy to comprehend—what
happens, where it happens and to whom, what is being described—form is
often more implicit, and its contributions to meaning are not always clear
or definitive. One can see this in thinking about how a line break or an
example of alliteration inflects what is being said, or how the overall shape
of the poem (is it in predictable stanzas?) influences what we perceive. Even
aspects of form that are explicit, for example particular genres such as a
sestina or a sonnet, do not contribute to meaning in conclusive or pre-
dictable ways. It might seem counterintuitive to suggest that form creates
spaciousness since, on the surface, form implies structure; after all, a sonnet
is fourteen lines and a sestina ends each line with one of six repeated words.
But in reading a poem, structure itself becomes another variable of the
process of deciphering.
In black cultural studies, considerations of form are often secondary to
those of content. That is, the critical emphasis tends to be on what a work
says or means, more than on the impact of its structure or genre or literary
features. This prevalence of content is not exclusive to black culture; instead
it is a common disposition of everyday readers that results from the fact
that asking and understanding “what” is easier than thinking about
“how” (the latter requires technical knowledge and language). And still the
emphasis on content in black culture is particular to the issue of publicness:
Racist discourses expect black art to tell the true story of black life unvar-
nished by craft, which is also an expectation of nationalism. This reinforces
the social imperative of black art and it encourages us to read black cultural
works as social documents or as texts of resistance. What is lost here is
not only an appreciation of artistic value but also a sense of how form can
disturb the assumed precision of content and support a reconsideration of
expressiveness.4
106 the sovereignty of quiet

The impact of form is hard to talk about in the abstract, so let’s look
at Natasha Trethewey’s “Incident,” a poem from her Pulitzer prize–winning
collection Native Guard. “Incident” is a pantoum and therefore it is com-
posed of quatrains that rely on overlapping repetition: the second and
fourth lines of a stanza become the first and third of the next, and the final
line of the poem repeats the very first. Trethewey’s poem reads:

We tell the story every year—

how we peered from the windows, shades drawn—
though nothing really happened,
the charred grass now green again.

We peered from the windows, shades drawn,

at the cross trussed like a Christmas tree,
the charred grass still green. Then
we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps,

At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree,

a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns.
We darkened our rooms and lit hurricane lamps.
the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil.

It seemed the angels had gathered, white men in their gowns.

When they were done, they left quietly. No one came.
The wicks trembled all night in their fonts of oil;
by morning the flames had all dimmed.

When they were done, the men left quietly. No one came.
Nothing really happened.
By morning all the flames had dimmed.
We tell the story every year. (41)

The content of the poem is fairly easy to summarize—it is about the vio-
lence of a cross-burning by Klansmen in a family’s front yard in the
American South—but what is the impact of Trethewey’s rendering of this
iconic narrative in such a tight form? For one, the story seems to unfurl and
has more dimensions and points of understanding than an anecdote about
a cross burning might otherwise have. For example, the meaning of the
repeated phrase “nothing really happened” is broadened to suggest at least
the capacities of waiting 107

four things: nothing but the cross burning happened, though the family
was bracing for much more; or no one—no neighbors or law officials—
intervened, that night or in the days after; or, the men were disappointed
that family did not agitate in a way that would authorize violence greater
than the burning; or that the term “nothing” is an understated assessment
made in the safety of being at some relative distance from this moment. It is
the repetition and juxtaposition inherent to the pantoum that amplifies the
simple idiom “nothing really happened,” and which helps to give rounded-
ness to a story that could be told with less dimension. Another example
of the poem’s expansiveness is the way that the men become white via
repetition—at first, the whiteness is not clearly identified as their racial
identity (“a few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns”) but instead
is part of the narrator’s reading of the symbols of the incident. It is only in
the next iteration that the men are white, and the harshness of that name—
“white men”—is so much more threatening and definitive than the earlier
line. Again, repetition provides greater texture.5
Like many poetic forms that rely on strict rules of repetition, the pan-
toum is highly structured, even awkwardly so; still the form is key to the
multiplicity and ambivalence of the story that the poem tells. This is quite
an achievement, since cross burnings are so quintessentially fraught with
meaning that they can efficiently sum up whole chapters of the public dis-
course of race in the United States. And yet Trethewey’s poem offers a
nuanced portrait that has varying levels of horror and concern, as well as a
sense of everydayness (it is casually titled “incident”). There is more than
one story here, even as the narrator says that “we tell the story every year,”
and as the poem unfolds, one can imagine the competing stories in the
annual telling—some filled with fear and resentment, some with humor,
some with bravado and invented bravery, and so on. The humanness of the
people who experienced this incident and the fact that it must have involved
a range of emotions, not only in the moment it was happening but espe-
cially in the recollection from year to year—this humanness is sustained via
the form of the poem, the way none of the emotions is expressed definitively
or singularly. The poem and the story it tells are haunted, packed full of
what is unsettled and unresolved, complicated and multiple. Violence hap-
pened for sure, but amid that violence were the ones who experienced it;
their experience was and is still, in each telling, magnificent, and it cannot
108 the sovereignty of quiet

be narrated completely, and hence the poem repeats lines of the story as if
to create a narrative that respects the flexibility of expression. This is the
achievement of the poem—to use form to tell a story quietly, which is to tell
it with the expressive complexity of the inner life.6
The language of Trethewey’s poem is spare and simple, even as the
anecdote extends beyond the boundaries of realism. This is a crucial point,
since realism is the de facto aesthetic expectation of black art. Whether
from within or outside of black culture, realism is attractive because it
emphasizes the real and promises to represent an object or experience in a
straightforward and concrete manner. This promise is compatible with the
political dimensions of blackness, especially the argument that art has the
obligation to challenge racist characterizations. Because of its easy fit with
nationalism, realism has accrued a kind of authority in black culture. And
though one is hard pressed to argue against the important role that realist
depictions have played in documenting black humanity and experience—
and the benefit of those depictions to civil rights achievements—the preva-
lence of realism also reinforces the troubling idea that blackness is singular.
Besides, rather than reinforce facile notions of blackness, realism, as an aes-
thetic concept, should remind us of the constructedness of the real, the fact
that a thing is being represented.7
The limitations of realism might explain the popularity of surrealism
amongst some black artists: Surrealism moves away from a commitment to
realistic representation and focuses instead on the unconscious, the mar-
velous, and the fantastic. The surrealist aesthetic is interested in the magic
of unexpected intersections—not a characterization of the social notion of
time, for example, but time as it is felt in lived experience, morphing and
irregular and sometimes mundane. Surrealism is a language of possibility, a
dream language that honors the inexpressible. This language is poetic in its
approximation of abundance, feeling, excellence, intensity.8
Such an expressiveness is legible in the work of Lorna Simpson. One of
the most celebrated contemporary visual artists, Simpson first gained wide
attention for her black-and-white photographic series in the late 1980s and
early 1990s. These pieces mostly feature black female subjects whose bodies
are cropped and whose faces are hidden from the viewer; they highlight
repetition as each piece showcases two or more figures in similar postures,
dressed in stark, simple clothing (suits or white shifts). Simpson’s striking
the capacities of waiting 109

visuals are sometimes accompanied by phrases or sentences, and their

overall composition have a documentary quality, as if each subject is being
catalogued for study, as if her hair and body and temperament are being
diagnosed. In this way, the work evokes a sense of realism and speaks to the
larger social narratives about black women (facelessness as marginalization,
for example). Yet this realism is complemented, even disturbed, by the
surreal ghostliness of the repetition: Each duplicated figure exhibits subtle
differences in posture or the fall of her dress, as if the careful viewer is
seeing shades of one person’s complexity. The subject becomes a body
of multiplicity, a being of nuance whose humanity is illegible if one only
reads through a social lens. These are magical women who seem timeless
and mysterious. Simpson’s work doesn’t offer an objective truth about
black women but instead indulges in whimsy. Indeed, in her odd and
beautiful juxtapositions Simpson offers a visual language that unravels our
racialized and gendered expectations. As Holland Cotter writes in a review
of Simpson’s work, “Most of the figures in her pictures . . . [are] . . . generic
presences, adaptable to any narrative. The implication is that there are
many narratives of race available, all of them conditional and subjective,
created by the pressures of personal experience, interpretation and mem-
ory.” There is no single integrity here—not of body or politic or agency;
just the vagary that is more reflective of the wildness of life as it is lived.9
One of Simpson’s achievements as an artist is the ability of her work to
take on matters of gender, race, and violence without disavowing complex-
ity in her visual language. This is evident in looking closely at one of
her more iconic works, Waterbearer. The composition here is consonant
with Simpson’s aesthetic—a black woman figure, dressed simply in a shift,
whose face is out of view and who is framed by a text that is foreboding and
vague—though the piece is different from the others because of its single
subject. The expansive capacity of Simpson’s language is noticeable in the
dissonance between the text and the image, for while the figure evokes
strength and vulnerability and dancerly grace, the caption seems to deny
this very humanity. Here we have a black woman, holding two water vessels
(one plastic, one pewter). Her water-pouring could be an act of labor and
subjection, something spiritual and cleansing, something more mundane.
Her pose is rife with motion, not just in the tilt of her head or the creases in
her dress or the cascade of the water, but also in the engagedness of her
110 the sovereignty of quiet

Figure 4. Lorna Simpson, Waterbearer, 1986. Gelatin silver print, vinyl lettering.
Photograph 45 ! 77 (framed), 55 ! 77 inches overall. Courtesy of the artist and
Salon 94, New York, N.Y.

action, as if we are watching her move. The posture also calls to mind
Themis, the Greek titan of justice, or even the emblem of crucifixion. And
yet, in all this, this black woman is mysterious to us. We have to ponder who
she is, what she is doing and thinking; we are struck by the competing
litheness and firmness of her bearing of water, and she seems to float in a
timeless nowhere. All of this ambiguity is in contrast to the caption, which
speaks to racial and gendered violence in an iconic way: a man missing, a
“they” who are questioning, a woman who bears witness and who is dis-
counted. The astute viewer knows this narrative and might be inclined to
use it to frame the figure. But even the caption itself is ambivalent, not
in terms of the threats it describes, but in the exactness of what it says—
Is the man who disappeared black? Is he killed or on the run? What is his
relationship to the woman, and who are the inquisitors? Is the woman
in the image the same as the woman announced in the text?
There are more questions in the caption than there is clarity, and the
questions multiply when you consider the accompanying image; as a result,
the capacities of waiting 111

the overall expressiveness of Simpson’s piece work is figurative: It doesn’t

say any one thing, though it is powerful and articulate. Moreover, it pulls
the viewer into imagining the inner life of the subject, for though we are
called to notice the racialized and gendered body in a political context, we
are also compelled to pay attention to the very human simplicity of the
body posed as elegantly as it is. We don’t, in fact, know very much about
this woman who is turned from us and engaged in pouring water; it is as if
Simpson is showcasing her inner world by reminding us of our lack of
access to that world. This is an important achievement in the piece because
some of its compositional aspects are so dramatic that it could easily be
more shrill or categorical. And in this regard, Simpson’s Waterbearer seems
to marvel in an expressiveness that is quiet.10
Simpson’s use of juxtaposition and sparseness to explode expressiveness
is reminiscent of the qualities of Whitfield Lovell’s KIN VII (Scent of
Magnolia), the frontisiece of this book. As discussed in the introduction,
Lovell’s piece seems to invite the viewer to imagine a broad inner life for his
figure. What sustains this invitation is the spare quality of the composition,
and the relationship of the image to the artifact—each placed just so, just
next to each other without excessiveness. Lovell’s work is pure visual
poetry, his drawing enjambed and aligned above the wreath, and meaning
left open: Who is that man? What was he thinking then, and what was the
taste he liked the most? Was he a poet, a lover of words, or did he prefer the
lilt of a soft piano? What to make of these flowers that are part of his profile?
These questions are only askable if we forgo a lens of public expressiveness,
and instead allow the possibility that he has an interior life that is largely
inaccessible to us. Commentators have noted a certain haunting quality in
both Simpson’s Waterbearer and Lovell’s work overall, an assessment that
makes sense given how their subjects seem so exposed and vulnerable, not
just to violence but to life itself. In this regard, they are ghostly in the way
that Avery Gordon uses the term—that ghosts are bodies of wild agency
that are not fully comprehensible to our social and political language.
The expressiveness of poetic language works on a level beyond what is
social or political. One might even say that it is a language that tries
to approximate sensation rather than ideology. It can be definitive or
dramatic, this language, but it is reflective of the interior and so its sureness
is fleeting or at least multiple. This point is hard to describe clearly, though
112 the sovereignty of quiet

there is an example in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha: part of it is the

way the novel approximates a short story whose economy requires that
most of the action is left unarticulated. The chapters are anecdote-sized and
are catalogs of sensation rather than the full-fledged declaration of belief.
The breadth of Maud Martha’s interiority happens off the page and is not
fully legible to the reader. In this regard, Maud Martha’s expressiveness is
respectful of a certain ineffability, of the idea that language cannot suffi-
ciently represent the interior; in fact, the novel seems to be built on that
principle.
There is yet another example at the end of Marita Bonner’s “On Being
Young, a Woman, and Colored,” where the narrator launches into a flour-
ish, proclaiming that she and her protagonist are “ready to go wherever
God motions.” This final section is written more poetically than the rest
of the essay—sentences that are short and full of allusions, ellipses, and
incomplete thoughts. To make sense of the end of the essay is to engage
these juxtapositions, the pieces of thoughts that form a composite rather
than a strong declarative statement. Indeed, what is clear at the end of
the essay is not so much the specificity of Bonner’s arguments, but a strong
feeling—the wealth of anxiety and excitement and willfulness of the narra-
tor’s ambition. This palpable feeling is a proxy for what is not fully said or
fully sayable in words; it is the sublime of quiet, an awesome quality of
experience that is hard to express clearly. As the narrator gives up clarity
and instead surrenders to these wild feelings, it is the surrender that is
expressive.11

Another idiom for thinking about quiet expressiveness is prayer. Concep-

tually, prayer is an expression of one’s contemplation and dreaming. And
yet this expressiveness cannot be articulated completely or precisely; it is
figurative and poetic. In this sense, prayer is a type of exceptional commu-
nication that is “much richer than speech alone. It is a particular kind of
speech that acts, and a peculiar kind of action that speaks to the depths and
heights of being” (Zaleski and Zaleski, Prayer, 5). The language of prayer is
fashioned from a deep level of human understanding that exists beneath or
beyond what is conscious. And the very magic of prayer, its will and ability
to make something happen, is consonant with ineffability.12
the capacities of waiting 113

Inherent in prayer is the idea of self as audience; that is, the praying sub-
ject speaks to a listener who is manifest in his or her imagination. Even in
many orthodox or evangelical contexts, the closeness one has to God in a
moment of prayer is related to the strength of one’s faith. The emphasis
in prayer is not so much on the deity who is listening as it is on the subject
who is praying and his or her capacity and faithfulness. In this way, prayer
reflects the most perfect communication—to speak to one who is and is not
one’s self. This excellent conversation exposes the praying self as both needy
and capable.13
An essential aspect to the idiom of prayer is waiting: the praying subject
waits with agency, where waiting is not the result of having been acted upon
(as in being made to wait), but is itself action. In waiting, there is no clear
language or determined outcome; there is simply the practice of contem-
plation and discernment. This is a challenge to the way we commonly think
of waiting, which is passive; it is also a disruption of the calculus of cause
and effect which shapes so much of how we understand the social world.
Conceptually, prayer makes space, and in this space the praying subject
explores the inner life, encounters and tries to give name to desires and vul-
nerabilities. One waits, waits to see one’s own self revealed, to feel the range
of sentiments that manifest when one sits and . . . waits. This waiting is
tingly and it can momentarily liberate the self from the strictures of its
social identity. “Waiting is something full-bodied” and voluptuous, and it is
in waiting that the self becomes more capable of its own human bigness.14
Waiting has no audience or cause. We often think of waiting as a term
in need of a preposition—waiting for someone or something, waiting to
embark or retreat. There are many examples of this in classical literature
where seafaring or war-making men, or even just men of adventure,
head off and leave behind women, children, and the old to wait for their
return. But waiting is not the opposite of adventure and discovery, as Zora
Neale Hurston shows in various moments in her novel Their Eyes Were
Watching God. In a scene discussed earlier, after Jody slaps her for burning
dinner, Janie, the novel’s protagonist, “stood where he left her for unmea-
sured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the
shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was” (67). This is
a terrific characterization of waiting as a place of stillness that is also filled
with change. In her waiting, Janie finds “that she has a host of thoughts she
114 the sovereignty of quiet

had never expressed to him, and numerous emotions she had never let Jody
know about” (68). Waiting here is active, even renegade; it is surrender.
It can be wild and energetic, but it is not urgent; waiting is its own thing,
self-indulgent, like falling into water. As it is for Marita Bonner’s narrator
(“So being a woman you can wait”), there is no waiting “for,” no result
expected; the act itself is the result, the encounter with one’s interior is the
achievement.15
There is a sublime agency to be found in waiting, a point that is demon-
strated in Dionne Brand’s poem, “Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater.”
Brand’s poem is the standout her 1990 collection No Language Is Neutral,
which was shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General Award, and which
explores the politics of language through the experiences of various
Caribbean women subjects. “Blues Spiritual” is a fifty-one-line description
of its title subject, a woman who was born into slavery. No specific date or
place is given though we are told, in an epigraph, that Prater was 115 years
old when she sat for a photograph. It is this image and gesture that serves
as inspiration for Brand’s narrator.*
Like Trethewey’s “Incident,” Brand’s “Blues Spiritual” relies on repeti-
tion; it consists of three stanzas of almost equal length, each describing the
same few details in unadorned language with minimal punctuation and
no capitalization. The story the poem tells is not of Prater, but of her wait-
ing to take the photograph. The narrator describes, over and again, Prater’s
waiting—waiting until technology was capable, waiting through a century
of labor and struggle, waiting with what looks like silent patience but which
is really something more difficult to pin down precisely. This reiteration of
Prater’s capacity to wait is complemented by the few details the poem offers
about her age, her pose, her marked legs, her black dress, her expressive
eyes. Because the details are so few, much of the poem studies her waiting
and theorizes what it means.
Brand’s piece is a straightforward narrative poem and it reads without
effort, but if you could see it, you might notice the way its simplicity belies
the dynamism of the narrator—that it is the narrator’s meditation on the
photograph that is being described in the poem, more than it is anything
essential about Mammy Prater. The narrator is determined to read Prater’s

*The poem was not available for quotation. The reader may be able to find it online.
the capacities of waiting 115

life and agency through the image, and to find the story that she, the narra-
tor, needs to hear. To the narrator, the photograph is evidence of Mammy
Prater’s agency, waiting as an act of willfulness and defiance. The narrator is
looking for a forbearer, for inspiration, and Prater’s waiting is the perfect
legacy to claim. In this way, the photograph is a story of triumph in the
narrator’s rendering.
And yet, the poem, in its repetitive stanzas, seems incapable of telling
us much about Mammy Prater other than the few stark details. Indeed,
Prater’s life seems to evade capture and what we get is a glimpse of her—a
snapshot—while the fullness of her humanity is left inexpressible. This
is the genius of Brand’s poem—that the narrator gets to use Mammy
Prater for her self-indulgent needs, even as the poem itself avoids caricatur-
ing its title subject. The poem cannot tell us what Mammy Prater was
thinking on the day of the photograph. Did the act of sitting remind her of
anything? Was she tired? Was she hearing her heartbeat? Were there
birds overhead, or was the day cloudy—and how did this affect her mood?
As the narrator repeatedly engages the few details in the photograph,
and muses on the meaning of Prater’s waiting, she also confirms what we
ought to know already: that it is not possible to sum up 115 years of living—
of any kind of living, never mind the kind that Prater was sure to have
had—in a poem or novel or in any language. And even when we need defin-
itive stories to inspire us, that need should not override the reality that
human life is beyond neat description. What is most important about
Mammy Prater cannot be known, and the poem respects the sovereignty of
the inner life.
In its wishfulness the poem is the narrator’s prayer, full of her desire and
vulnerability, her expression of faith and neediness; it is an expression of
the narrator’s longing.
Brand’s poem illustrates at least two different examples of waiting: the
first is what the narrator imagines for Prater, that she waited for the right
moment to take this photograph. In the narrator’s mind, this waiting is
robust—it has anger and impatience, is intentional and not, is a mark of
strength and despair. But there is a second quality of waiting exhibited by
the form of the poem—the way that the repetition of the few details of the
poem slowly produces a distinct but incomplete image of Mammy Prater.
That is, in reading and re-reading the three stanzas and noticing how they
116 the sovereignty of quiet

revisit the same scant details, the image of Prater unfolds in slow motion,
arriving in pieces and never in full clarity. The poem sets us up to wait for
Mammy Prater, to wait for her to reveal herself (or to be revealed). And the
waiting is rewarded, though not with a picture of a representative black
woman, but instead with the realization that the incompleteness is as it
should be; the reward is noticing how beautiful Mammy Prater is because
she is left unknowable. There is a respect for what cannot be expressed, even
in a poem of such capable expressiveness.
Prayer is dreaming and self-assessment, wild motion rapt with possibil-
ity and ache, a self-conversation that is driven by the abundance of
imagination. And yet this self-indulgence does not correlate with solitude.
In fact, the connective intimacy of prayer is evident in the narrator’s effort
to study Mammy Prater: “Who were you,” she seems to ask, “and how
did you live? What can I learn from your living?” And though her questions
go unanswered in one sense, the connection she has with Mammy Prater
is vibrant, an exchange between the praying subject and her imagined,
perfect listener.16
This idea that prayer can articulate beyond its own self-indulgence is
important to thinking about the bowed heads of Tommie Smith and John
Carlos; that is, to read their protest as quiet expressiveness does not disavow
their capacity to inspire. In fact, nothing speaks more to their humanity—
and against the violence of racism—than the glimpse of their inner lives.
The challenge, though, is to understand how their quiet works as a public
gesture, without disregarding its interiority. This is always a conundrum
because of the ease with which the terms of publicness overdetermine how
we read human behavior, though the novelist Colm Toibin provides an
instructive example in an essay, “A Gesture Life,” on Pope John Paul II.
Remembering his experience of a papal mass, Toibin writes:

The ceremony lasted for hours. He did not once lose the full rapt atten-
tion of the crowd. He did nothing dramatic, said nothing new. Before he
spoke—and every word he said was translated into many languages on
our radios—he remained still. There must have been music. But it was
the lights that I remember and the sense that he had no script for this, that
it was natural and improvised and also highly theatrical and professional.
More than anything, it was unpredictable.
the capacities of waiting 117

And in that first hour, or maybe half-hour, he did something gen-

uinely astonishing. With a million of us watching, he lifted his hands and
cupped them over his face. It was nothing like a gesture of despair; he did
not put his head in his hands out of unhappiness. He held his head high
and proud so that it could be seen, and he left his hands in place covering
it. The crowd watched him, presuming this would last a few moments as
he sought some undistracted purity for his prayer or his contemplation.
We waited for him to lower his hands, but he did not. He stayed still, the
world gazing up at him. What he did ceased to be a public gesture, but
became instead intensely private. It was like watching somebody sleeping.
I do not know how long it lasted. Maybe twenty minutes; maybe half an
hour. He was offering the young who had come here in the infant years of
Eastern European democracy not a lesson in doctrine or faith or morals
but some mysterious example of what a spiritual life might look like.
Somehow he managed to put a sort of majesty into it. Even those among
us, like myself, who had no faith anymore and a serious argument with
the church had to watch him in awe. He was showing us his own inner life
as beautifully simple as well as strange and complex.

Toibin captures what is sublime in the pope’s display, how this gesture that
is done in public also retains all of the vulnerability and unpredictability of
the interior. There is inspiration in this gesture which serves both the
pope (his moment of contemplation, as if seeking a clear inner space from
which to pray) and those in attendance, especially Toibin. This is prayer as
self-indulgence and connection, and it is also true of Smith and Carlos’s
expression of protest—not so much the fists and the gloves, but the bowing
of the heads. However planned that bowing was, it is also such a human
act that it manifests as a sign of their inner lives; it makes the whole thing
transcendent in a way that is beyond words. And their capacity to speak to
collectivity is not hindered by the interiority of their gesture; in fact,
the inspiration of their public display is in seeing its deep human privacy.
This is the expressiveness of quiet.
 Notes

introduction
1. The bowed heads were probably in part an attempt to look away from the
American flag, similar to Vera Caslavska’s own silent gesture of turning her head
slightly to the right and slightly down during two medal ceremonies, in protest of
the Soviet Union’s invasion of her country, Czechoslovakia.
2. The image is engaged most commonly as a piece of “social movement photo-
graphy,” in the way that Leigh Raiford uses the term; see especially pages 225–226 of
“Restaging Revolution.” For an excellent discussion of Smith and Carlos, see Amy
Bass’s Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the
Black Athlete. Notably, in Smith’s autobiography, Silent Gesture, he briefly talks
about a range of thoughts while in the blocks at the start of the race (22); he also
repeatedly describes himself as a quiet person, especially in regard to Carlos’s more
exuberant personality.
3. In this regard, Walter Johnson’s thoughtful essay “On Agency” is instructive in
the way it cautions social historians against the pitfalls of the concept of resistance.
I thank Elizabeth Pryor for alerting me to Johnson’s work.
4. There is such a rich body of work here that it is almost impossible to cite com-
pletely. Some recent useful references in terms of studies of the limits of blackness
include Reid-Pharr’s Once You Go Black, Gilroy’s Against Race, Holt’s The Problem
of Race in the Twenty-first Century, Wright’s Becoming Black, the introduction of
Jarrett’s African American Literature beyond Race, Warren’s survey of the historical
discussion of activism and black intellectualism in “The End(s) of African American
Studies,” Brown’s Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva, Carby’s Race Men, Ellis’s
“The New Black Aesthetic,” and Golden’s notion of post-black in Freestyle. The
point about the specific contributions of black women studies is addressed in
chapters 2, 4, and 6, though one could call up the names of Susan Willis, Hortense
Spillers, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Wall, bell hooks, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Barbara
Smith, Ann DuCille, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Mary Helen Washington, Barbara
Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Mae Henderson, Nellie McKay, Claudia Tate, and

139
140 notes to pages 11–12

Gloria Hull as a start. The list of black artists would be even longer, though it is
important to notice Ralph Ellison’s excellent and still relevant “The World and the
Jug” (which makes the interesting claim that the black novel is always “a public
gesture, though not necessarily a political one”) and James Baldwin’s “Everybody’s
Protest Novel” (where he describes black culture as being imagined as a “counter-
thrust” to the “thrust” of dominant culture); particular references to other artists
can be found in the body and notes of the pages ahead. Finally, there have also
been works by more conservative writers, like John McWorther. What makes
his arguments distinct from the one above is that McWorther implies that racism
and a discourse of resistance is no longer relevant; the argument in quiet is to ask
what other capacities, besides resistance, inform black culture—a very different
question.

chapter 1 — publicness, silence, and

the sovereignty of the interior
1. This claim about the relationship between publicness and black culture is based
on reading publicness through Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere,
articulated in his classic The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, as well as
Michael Warner’s and Nancy Fraser’s engagement of Habermas in Craig Calhoun’s
edited volume, Habermas and the Public Sphere. For a fuller explication of this claim,
see my essay “The Trouble with Publicness: Toward a Theory of Black Quiet.” Also
see Houston Baker’s essay “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” which
argues that black culture is “drawn to the possibilities of structurally and affectively
transforming the founding notion of the bourgeois public sphere into an expressive
and empowering self-fashioning” (13). Baker goes on to suggest that black culture
situates its “unique forms of expressive publicity in . . . relationship . . . to the sense
of publicity itself as authority” (13–14).
2. Du Bois’s use of double consciousness is cited often, but it is Ernest Allen, Jr.’s
“Du Boisian Double Consciousness: The Unsustainable Argument” that takes a
broad historical look at the term. In this work, Allen makes an excellent and well-
researched argument that the term is not crucial to Du Bois’s ideas; indeed, Allen
argues convincingly that the specific notion of a black double consciousness was
generated from critical misinterpretation of Du Bois’s first chapter of Souls. As good
as Allen’s argument is, it misses the ways that a notion of double consciousness is
engaged in the opening passages of the chapter—how those opening passages
expound on Du Bois’s definition of the term. Further, that so many scholars have
found the term to be useful in describing black experience is reflective of the general
power of doubleness as a characteristic of racial blackness; it matters less if they
extrapolate more from Du Bois’s chapter than he himself might have intended. For
examples of the lasting significance of the idiom of doubleness in Du Boisan schol-
arship, see Dolan Hubbard’s introduction to The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred
Years Later (especially pages 5–7 and 12–13) as well as essays in that collection by
Keith Byerman, Amy Kirschke, Shanette Harris, Carolyn Calloway-Thomas, and
Thurmon Garner. Also see work by Paul Mocombe (The Soul-less Souls of Black
Folk) and especially Dickson Bruce, Jr. (“W.E.B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double
notes to pages 24–28 145

16. The same is true of much of the civil rights movement, which is remembered
for its publicity, though it also has quiet and reflectiveness at its heart; see chapter 4
for a further discussion of this point.
17. For a consideration of existentialism in black culture, see Lewis Gordon’s
Existentia Africana, especially chapter 1. The larger point here is that blackness exists
as a concept and as such, it is explored, argued, engaged, rejected, and theorized,
especially by people who seem to embody its identity. This contemplative dynamic
is evident in much of the work by black writers and artists, from Fanon and Du Bois
and Anna Julia Cooper, to Langston Hughes and Kara Walker and Toni Morrison.
(This is part of the self-reflexiveness of race as Lively discusses it.) Existentialism is
explored further in chapter 3.
18. For a broad discussion of the nature of photography, see chapter 1 of Liz
Wells’s Photography: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition. This sense of photogra-
phy’s ambivalence and multiplicity is argued in Susan Sontag’s On Photography and
Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. The expressiveness of photography is multiple and
exuberant, and in this regard it is similar to the characterization of the expressive-
ness of the interior.
19. The quotation is from the end of Afaa M. Weaver’s stirring “Masters and
Master Works: On Black Male Poetics,” where he makes a call for a new aesthetic,
claiming that “the choice now for black male poets is to embrace this space
where they can ask themselves this question of what constitutes beauty and ask it in
terms of their own lives, and not those lives weighed down by the suppositions of
identity. . . . Black male poets must explore the beauty of the quality of being
human.”
20. I am borrowing language here (and in the beginning of the paragraph) from
Anna Julia Cooper’s statement that “only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when
and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without
violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro
race enters with me’ ” (A Voice from the South, 31).

chapter 2 — not double consciousness but

the consciousness of surrender
1. The comment is from an essay in A Voice from the South and reflects Cooper’s
overall argument about the importance of black people to discussions of American
national culture. Cooper’s work is especially important because it reflects the racial
and gendered anxieties of a postwar America in the 1890s, where the role and poten-
tial of black citizens was a question linked to larger concerns about technology, civil
rights, and modernity.
2. The term “surrender” is used often in religious discourses, but for the concept
of quiet, the more compelling use is in psychoanalytic writing; see especially Dennis
Miehls’s “Surrender as Developmental Achievement in Couple Systems” and
Emmanuel Ghent’s “Masochism, Submission, Surrender.” I am grateful to Miehls
for the references here.
3. Not much has been written about Bonner’s connection to Du Bois, though her
work, especially this essay, is often characterized as being immersed in his notion of
146 notes to pages 30–35

the “talented tenth.” And yet many of Bonner’s plays and stories deal with the expe-
rience of working-class people, as Judith Musser astutely notes. For further discus-
sion and a good general introduction to Bonner, see Joyce Flynn’s introduction to
Frye Street and Environs: The Collected Works of Marita Bonner.
Bonner’s essay is similar to others written during the Harlem Renaissance that
assert the idea of a “new negro” but that also note the contradictions between the
promises of modernity and the realities of black life, although Bonner is particular
in her attention to sexism. For example, see Alain Locke’s “The Negro Takes His
Place in American Art” as well as his anthology The New Negro, James Weldon
Johnson’s Black Manhattan, Du Bois’s “Criteria of Negro Art,” and especially
E. Franklin Frazier’s “La Bourgeoise Noire.”
4. Letters have long been considered a gendered form, and even the literary and
cultural domain of women. See various discussions in Elizabeth Cook’s Epistolary
Bodies (especially chapter 1 on letters as a negotiation of the gendered binary of
public/private), Rebecca Earle’s edited collection Epistolary Selves (especially Carolyn
Steedman’s broad-minded “A Woman Writing a Letter”), and Caroline Bland and
Máire Cross’s Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter Writing. Sharon Marcus’s dis-
cussion of letters in Between Women (especially pages 32–43) offers conceptual sup-
port for thinking of Bonner’s essay as a diary entry, as if the narrator is speaking of
herself explicitly in the second person. The fact that the essay’s epistolary nature
avoids the first person except on one occasion will be addressed later in the chapter.
5. Since Bonner’s essay is not well known, it is important to be careful in charac-
terizing the nuance of her arguments, especially when working with excerpts. For
example, in critiquing the capacity of people to judge not on the basis of color or
gender, but of something finer, something more astute, Bonner writes, “And what
has become of discrimination? Discrimination of the right sort . . . [that] weighs
shadows and nuances and spiritual differences before it catalogues . . . that looks
clearly past generalization and past appearance to dissect, to dig down to the real
heart of matters” (“On Being Young,” 5). This passage, when isolated, might suggest
that Bonner is ignorant of the material consequences of racism, or for that matter,
sexism, which is hardly the case.
6. This is the essence of intersectionality, as first described and defined by
Kimberlé Crenshaw; see her essay “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity
Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Lorraine Roses and Ruth
Randolph, in their essay that considers many of Bonner’s unpublished works
between 1941 and her death in 1971 (“Marita Bonner: In Search of Other Mothers’
Gardens”), note the intersectional character of her ideas; see especially page 179
as well as their entry on Bonner in Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary
Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers 1900–1945.
7. Patricia Hill Collins makes an attempt in Black Feminist Thought to recover
silence from its pejorative and enfeebled position: “Silence is not to be interpreted
as submission in this collective, self-defined Black women’s consciousness” (98).
Collins then goes on to cite the end of Bonner’s essay, writing that “U.S. Black
women intellectuals have long explored this private, hidden space of Black women’s
consciousness, the ‘inside’ ideas that allow Black women to cope with and, in many
notes to page 36 147

cases, transcend the confines of intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and
sexuality” (98). Also see Evelynn Hammonds’s discussion of a politics of silence and
a politics of articulation in “Black (W)holes.” It is notable how much the concept of
silence has been a part of black women’s cultural work, particularly the considera-
tion of voice.
Bonner’s use of silence in this essay has garnered some scholarly attention. Zetta
Elliott (“Writing the Black [W]hole: Facing the Feminist Void”) wants to make a
distinction between silence and quiet, though she claims quiet as a synonym for
decorum. Cheryl Wall reads the essay’s ending as “a cluster of images of silence,
entrapment and paralysis” (Women of the Harlem Renaissance, 8), a reading that
makes sense in the context of Wall’s larger argument about the second-class status
of women in the Harlem Renaissance. But one is hard pressed to miss the wild and
reckless arrogance implied by Bonner’s Buddha metaphor as well as the motion and
agency of her use of stillness. In one of the only other scholarly comments on the
essay, Joyce Flynn compares its ideology to Bonner’s other early piece, “The Hands:
A Story,” noting that “in ‘The Hands’ Bonner seems to be expressing skepticism
about romantic racialism of either kind” (introduction to Frye Street and Environs,
xiv). Flynn goes on to argue that “On Being Young” “explores a dichotomy seen in
many works by Afro-American writers: the dichotomy between inner reality and
socially sanctioned racial and gender roles” (xv). Also see Margo Crawford’s essay in
The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, which notes Bonner’s use of
Buddha as a location of agency.
8. Bonner’s use of idioms of domesticity and femininity, noted by most scholars
who have written about this essay, can be somewhat perplexing, given her critique of
identity as a whole. Part of her argument engages the principles of womanhood that
are embedded in a Victorian gender binary and that still shape our common stereo-
types about gender. In phrases like “the softness that makes you a woman,” Bonner
is engaging this binary deliberately, using the notion of women’s inherent interior-
ity as a location of agency, even using the category of woman as a metaphor for the
interior. But it is interesting to note that Bonner’s argument here is about wisdom
and understanding—about people’s capacity to experience each other not through
categories of identity, but through paying attention. She notes that despite all of the
progress civilizations have made, there remain profound gaps in the capacity to
understand the humanity of another person. For Bonner, this intimate and simple
practice—the capacity to pay attention to another—is the real gauge of social
progress, and in this regard, it is women’s assumed attentiveness that gives them
access to this insight. Bonner is keen to elevate woman’s insight to the level of social
meaningfulness, personifying their particular “understanding” as the snubbed twin
sister of “wisdom.” And as she describes the failure of civilization since the Greeks
to appreciate the wisdom that comes from being a woman, she maintains the sense
that being a woman is, or could be, the location of considerable power.
9. This refusal of the terms of publicness is especially notable. Bonner’s stance is
not a moment of “Diva Citizenship” which, as Lauren Berlant defines it, is “when a
person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privi-
lege” (Queen of America, 223). Berlant goes on to comment that “the centrality of
148 notes to pages 37–39

publicity to Diva Citizenship cannot be underestimated” (223), and her arguments

make sense as a timely critique of the way that a politically conservative discourse
of privacy and intimacy overshadows a consideration of the public dimensions of
citizenship. But imbedded in Berlant’s comments is an unquestioned celebration
of the liberating potential of publicness, a potential that is counter to the case
that Bonner’s essay makes. In fact, against Berlant’s larger claims, one could
argue, as Robyn Wiegman does, that “to be excluded from the public sphere of
citizenship [is] not to be uniformly cast as inhuman” (American Anatomies, 45).
Also see Kimberly Nichele Brown’s arguments about the “revolutionary diva,”
which include a consideration of audience and publicness as a part of the dynamic
of Du Boisian double consciousness.
10. For a general discussion of the limits of autobiography, see especially Paul
Jay’s reading of the anxiety of the autobiographical subject (“Posing”) and Sidonie
Smith’s discussion of the trouble of the body (“Identity’s Body”). Both Jay’s and
Smith’s works are part of a larger body of criticism that explores the politics of
representation and truth in autobiography, including work by Leigh Gilmore
(especially the introduction and chapter 1 of The Limits of Autobiography, chapters 1
and 2 as well as the conclusion of Autobiographics, and her discussion of the “mark
of autobiography” in the introductory essay in Autobiography and Postmodernism);
see also Paul John Eakin (Fictions in Autobiography) and Timothy Dow Adams
(Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography). There is also a useful analysis of
“the politics of representative identity” in Robert Levine’s book on Martin Delany
and Frederick Douglass (see especially the introduction). Part of what is being
engaged here is the way that autobiography, as a public genre, replicates the same
troubling capacities of publicness as discussed in chapter 1. And yet another aspect
is the way that the dynamics of race impose an expectation of truth or authenticity
on the representations of black subjectivity, even in fictional genres; see Robin
Kelley’s Yo Mama’s Disfunktional (especially chapter 1), bell hooks’s “Postmodern
Blackness,” and Ann duCille’s Skin Trade (especially “The Occult of True Black
Womanhood”).
More specific to Bonner is Judith Musser’s essay on Bonner’s response to the
“talented tenth” (“African American Women and Education”). Though Musser’s
essay is about Bonner’s fiction, it is valuable in thinking about the use of voice in
“On Being Young.” Musser argues that Bonner “avoids any autobiographical
elements from her distinctive childhood” (73). While “On Being Young” is clearly
autobiographical, it is interesting that Bonner resisted the imposition of autobiogra-
phy in her writing in general. Finally, to consider Bonner’s biography in relation to
the essay, see Roses and Randolph, “Marita Bonner: In Search of Other Mothers’
Gardens.”
11. Elizabeth Hardwick makes a keen argument about authorial agency in letters;
for her, the “letter is, by its natural shape, self-justifying; it is one’s own evidence,
deposition, a self-serving testimony. In a letter the writer holds all the cards”
(Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature, 198). Hardwick is talking about
Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, but her insights here are applicable to Bonner’s
narrator (and perhaps even to Bonner herself). Certainly, Bonner’s narrator is
notes to pages 39–40 149

controlling, narrating her anxieties as if they are precisely those of the reader. But
this exchange is part of the intimacy that is so fascinating in the essay, that the
narrator uses this control to create an argument that sustains interiority. It was
bell hooks’s essay “Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple” that led me to
Hardwick’s book.
12. The issue of audience is one that every writer faces, yet it manifests as a partic-
ular issue for the black writer. The debate about audience is central to the discourse
of the Harlem Renaissance (and it is from here that we get Langston Hughes’s defin-
ing essay on the topic, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”) as well as the
black arts/aesthetic movement (for example, the aesthetic declarations by Amiri
Baraka, “Black Art” and “The Revolutionary Theatre”; Hoyt Fuller, “Towards a
Black Aesthetic”; and Addison Gayle, “The Black Aesthetic”). The matter of audi-
ence is most often framed as an anxiety of what it means to write “for” a white
audience or readership; see Sherley Anne Williams’s Give Birth to Brightness and
John Young’s Black Writers, White Publishers. It is worth noting that Young’s title
and premise borrow somewhat from another iconic Harlem Renaissance essay,
Zora Neale Hurston’s “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” though Hurston’s
argument is more dynamic than Young’s.
But, as Hughes notes, there is also the anxiety caused by the expectation that black
writers will write for black readers and in service of the ideas/arguments of cultural
nationalism and civil rights. Perhaps the best scholarly discussion of these matters of
audience is in Hazel Carby’s Race Men, particularly the introduction and first chap-
ter. Carby is right to consider audience alongside the notion of the (black) public
intellectual. Similarly, Eric Lott, in The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual, is astute in
noting the “double consciousness” of audience for the black public intellectual; also
see Thomas Holt’s “The Political Uses of Alienation,” Robert Reid-Pharr’s Black
Gay Man (especially chapter 2), Corrie Claiborne’s “Quiet Brown Buddha(s),”
William M. Banks’s Black Intellectuals, Elizabeth Alexander’s The Black Interior
(especially the introduction), Shelley Eversley’s The Real Negro, and Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.’s “The Black Man’s Burden” and “Criticism in the Jungle.” In terms of
gender as a part of the discussion of audience and black public intellectualism, see
Carby (Race Men), Kimberly Nichele Brown (Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva),
Susan Willis (Specifying), and Marlene Nourbese Philip (She Tries Her Tongue,
Her Silence Softly Breaks). Finally, many black writers have spoken eloquently about
this dilemma; see M. Afaa Weaver’s “Masters and Master Works,” Earl Ingersol’s
Conversations with Rita Dove, and Carl Phillips’s Coin of the Realm, as three quick
examples, as well as David Lionel Smith’s astute essay “What Is Black Culture?”
which explores the impositions that nationalism makes on the black artist.
13. In his famous essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Althusser
offers this efficient summary of the dynamics of interpellation: “The subject acts
insofar as he is acted on by the . . . system” (170). Many scholars have engaged
Althusser’s notion, especially to consider the limits of identity, most famously
Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter .
14. Carby, in her chapter on Du Bois in Race Men, makes a very convincing argu-
ment about his engagement of the dynamics of public intellectualism: “Within the
150 notes to page 41

opening pages . . . Du Bois establishes his ability to speak as a race leader and grants
himself the authority to evoke a convincing portrayal of the black folk by integrat-
ing his own commanding narrative voice, as a black intellectual, with the life of the
folk” (20–21). This point is enhanced by Holt’s argument that Du Bois’s ideas in
“The Conservation of the Races” seem to be recalibrated for a white audience when
the essay is revised as the first chapter of Souls (see especially 238–239 of “The
Political Uses of Alienation”). Emily Bernard, in Remember Me to Harlem, captures
the issue of public intellectualism and its importance to Du Bois: speaking in regard
to his stewardship of The Crisis, Bernard notes that “The Crisis was his pulpit . . . No
word was published in The Crisis that didn’t meet Du Bois’ standards. Because art
has the potential to liberate black people from social bondage, Du Bois believed it
should be approached with gravity, even reverence. Every time a writer put pen to
paper, he was taking the future of the race in his hands” (xvi). The case for the
public-mindedness of Souls is also supported by Robert Stepto’s chapter in From
Behind the Veil, especially pages 53–66, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Oliver’s
introduction to the Norton edition of The Souls of Black Folk. None of this attention
to publicness as a valence of Du Bois’s work is intended to dismiss the way that
The Souls of Black Folk is also introspective (as Arnold Rampersad terms it in The Art
and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois); in fact, Nellie McKay goes as far as celebrating
Du Bois’s engagement of idioms of the private sphere in his writings. Still, the larger
point is the way that the exigencies of being a public intellectual manifest in
Du Bois’s articulation of black consciousness, and how this sits in contrast to
Bonner’s idiom of consciousness.
15. I am using the term “metalanguage” after Evelyn Higginbotham to refer to the
ways that race becomes its own language system and accrues totalitarian signifi-
cance, even to the exclusion of other aspects of identity. This claim about Du Bois’s
thinking in Souls (and elsewhere) is intended to support the idea that Du Bois was
committed to racial difference in a way that Bonner was not; as Holt notes, “the util-
ity of racial difference for social progress [is] a theme to which Du Bois would
frequently return” (“Political Uses of Alienation,” 237). K. Anthony Appiah, in “The
Uncompleted Argument,” goes further, arguing that Du Bois’s ideas are marred by
their acceptance of race as a biologically meaningful construct. Appiah’s claim has
been contested by many scholars, notably Lucius Outlaw (“‘Conserve’ Races?: In
Defense of W.E.B. Du Bois”), Robert Gooding-Williams (“Outlaw, Appiah, and Du
Bois),” and Bernard Boxill (“Du Bois on Cultural Pluralism”). What is clear, and
largely undisputed, is that Du Bois was interested in race as a political and social
construct, that he was committed to exploring the way that a notion of race and
racial difference could be used to mobilize black progress (this is Holt’s point and it
is supported by Bernard W. Bell’s essay tracing the evolution of double consciousness
in Du Bois’s thought, “Genealogical Shifts in Du Bois’ Discourse”; also see Dickson
Bruce, Jr., “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness”). Feminist
scholars like Darlene Clark Hine have noted the limitations of Du Bois’s idea
because it is so singularly focused on race; see her essay “In the Kingdom of Culture.”
16. See Joyce Flynn (introduction to Frye Street and Environs), Will Harris
(“Early Black Women Playwrights”), and Judith Musser (“African American
Women and Education”) for a discussion of Bonner’s nuanced engagement of race,
notes to pages 43–48 151

a consideration that foreshadows the ideas of black women in the 1970s and 1980s
(for example, the Combahee River Collective) as well as the articulations of a
postmodern blackness or a new black aesthetic in the early 1990s (for example,
Trey Ellis, Nelson George, Greg Tate).
17. Imagination is often described as a balance between the interior (internal
acts, deliberations, constructions) and external objects, behaviors, states of affairs:
“the power of forming mental images or other concepts not directly derived
from sensation” (Manser, “Imagination,” 596). In philosophy, the term is also dis-
cussed in relationship to aesthetics and phenomenology (see, for example Sartre’s
Imagination). More specific to black culture, Elizabeth Alexander sees imagination
as key to thinking about black interiority, asking “Where is our abstract space?”
(Black Interior, 7).
18. This is the argument that many scholars make about black identity; see, for
example, Michele Wallace, “Variations on Negation and the Heresy of Black Female
Creativity”; Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black
Female Sexuality”; Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color; and Corrie
Claiborne, “Leaving Abjection: Where ‘Black’ Meets Theory”; as well as Roderick
Ferguson’s discussion of aberration. This is also implied in Du Bois’s double con-
sciousness—that the black subject is not recognized as a human being—and is the
motivation for his gathering evidence of aspects of black life that had previously
been understudied or unacknowledged (in Souls but also in his Atlanta University
Studies). The idea of “blackness as negation” is also legible in Avery Gordon’s study
of ghosts and the phantasmic (Ghostly Matters), Sharon Holland’s Raising the Dead,
as well as novels like Morrison’s Beloved and Ellison’s Invisible Man.
19. This notion of consciousness as a sphere of freedom has been central to my
very early thinking about black women’s contributions to cultural studies, and even-
tually to the concept of quiet.
20. The point about triumph is echoed in Judith Musser’s essay on Bonner’s
fiction, “African American Women and Education”; Musser writes, “Although
[Bonner] follows the African American women’s writing tradition in portraying
women as her main characters, these women are not independently strong, nor
individualized and not triumphant” (73). The idiom “self-measure” is influenced
by Nikki Giovanni who, in Gemini, notes “I think it’s been rather unconscious but
we [black women] measure ourselves by ourselves” (144).
21. Jamaica Kincaid has a lovely passage in her novel The Autobiography of
My Mother that resonates with the idea of quiet: the protagonist Xuela is remember-
ing her father’s death and notices that “then a great peace came over me, a quietness
that was not silence and not acceptance, just a feeling of peace, a resolve. I was alone
and I was not afraid . . . The man to whom I was married, my husband, was alone,
too, but he did not accept it, he did not have the strength to do so. He drew upon the
noisiness of the world into which he was born, conquests, the successful disruption
of other peoples’ worlds . . .” (223–224).

chapter 3 — maud martha and the practice of paying attention

1. This era of writing between 1940 and 1960 has been called urban or social
realism, though Ellison is most often described as being modernist and the terms
notes to pages 102–105 163

capacity of freedom within, untethered to the world outside and its hateful gestures,
a freedom that can inspire a more meaningful relationship to activism.
26. The idea of love as “the prize” is inspired by Baby Suggs’s language during her
speech in the Clearing in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

chapter 5 — the capacities of waiting,

the expressiveness of prayer
1. The nature of language is studied in various scholarly traditions, though
the comments here are informed by Ferdinand de Sauserre’s work in linguistics
and Jacques Lacan’s in psychoanalysis. Also see José Medina’s book Language:
Key Concepts in Philosophy. McLaughlin’s essay “Figurative Language” is useful
because it is related to literature and also because he suggests that language is, in
part, interior.
2. It is in this regard that language and literacy are part of the celebrated nature of
black expressiveness; see, for example, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Figures in Black.
Many writers have engaged the idea of language as ambivalence; see my discussion
in chapters 6 and 7 of (Un)Becoming the Subject.
3. Many poets have written about the nature of poetic language; see, for example,
Mary Oliver’s excellent A Poetry Handbook. In her poem “Morgan Harris,” Cheryl
Clarke notices the interior of poetic language: “To her, poetry is the smallest thing,/
her greater depth” (Experimental Love: Poems, 14). This sense of what is small, what
is tender and fragile, is the aim of poetry; as Rita Dove notes, poetry is a form that
“connects you to yourself, to the self that doesn’t know how to talk or negotiate. We
have emotions that we can’t really talk about, and they’re very strong” (quoted in
Clarence Major’s The Garden Thrives, xxvi). Dove goes on to suggest that “I really
don’t think of poetry as being an intellectual activity. I think of it as a very visceral
activity.” The claim that is being made about the language of poetry is also relevant
to the short story, which works with limited space and therefore relies on
brevity and symbolism, at least as much as the novel (see note 11 below). This is even
truer of music, where pieces are made up of gaps and silence as much as they are
of notes played, a point that is especially legible in listening to jazz. I am grateful to
L. H. Stallings for the reference to Clarke’s poem.
4. For a consideration of the tension between form and content in black litera-
ture, see Gates’s Figures in Black (especially “Introduction” and “Literary Theory
and the Black Tradition”), “Criticism in the Jungle,” and his introduction to
The Signifying Monkey; also see Madelyn Jablon (Black Metafiction) and Keith E.
Byerman (Fingering the Jagged Grain). Additionally, see William Andrews’s formu-
lation of “posing as artless” (To Tell a Free Story), John Michael Vlach’s By the Work
of Their Hands (especially the introduction and chapter 1), and Robin Kelley’s
Yo Mama’s Disfunktional (especially chapter 1). An anxiety about form fuels many of
the aesthetic debates of the Harlem Renaissance (including varying essays by
Romare Bearden [“The Negro Artist and Modern Art”], W.E.B. Du Bois [“Criteria
of Negro Art”], Langston Hughes [“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”],
Zora Neale Hurston [“What White Publishers Won’t Print”], Alain Locke [“The
Negro Takes His Place in American Art”], and George Schyuler [“The Negro-Art
164 notes to pages 107–108

Hokum”]), and of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s (for example, Amiri
Baraka’s “Black Art,” Addison Gayle’s “The Black Aesthetic,” and Hoyt Fuller’s
“Towards a Black Aesthetic”). For a more general consideration of form, see Hayden
White’s The Content of the Form, and Michael Boccia’s Form as Content and Rhetoric
in the Modern Novel.
5. Of repetition, James Snead writes, “whenever we encounter repetition in cul-
tural forms, we are indeed not viewing ‘the same thing’ but its transformation.”
Snead’s comment is from his truly excellent essay “Repetition as a Figure of Black
Culture,” 59.
6. In keeping with the aesthetic of the entire collection, Trethewey uses the
intimacy of family (mother/daughter relationship; biracial child’s relationship to
the South; interracial family; black men’s relationship to the national family) to
explore big narratives of race, loyalty, war.
7. In this regard, realism is authority, as Wahneema Lubiano has phrased it in
“ ‘But Compared to What?’ Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism,”
and has often been advocated, implicitly or explicitly, by cultural leaders. The
intent of authoritative realism is to document, a goal that means being attuned to a
public audience as well as committed to a notion of truth that necessarily compro-
mises the representation of complexity. The best overall work on realism and black
culture is Gene Andrew Jarrett’s Deans and Truants. Some key examples of the advo-
cacy of realism by cultural leaders include Alain Locke’s “The Saving Grace of
Realism,” Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Amiri Baraka’s poem
“Black Art,” and Addison Gayle’s “The Black Aesthetic.” Also see Gates’s discussion
of the politics of realism in his introduction to Figures in Black, especially pages
xxvi–xxvii. For other discussions of the presence and limits of “racial realism,” see
Dubey’s Signs and Cities, Tate’s Psychoanalysis (especially the introduction),
Jablon’s Black Metafiction, and Eversley’s The Real Negro; as well as the general dis-
cussions of realism by Michael Elliott (The Culture Concept, especially chapters 2
and 3), Kenneth Warren (Black and White Strangers), Amy Kaplan (The Social
Construction of American Realism), and Michael Bell (The Problem of American
Realism).
8. Part of the consideration of surrealism must include its political inclinations—
that many proponents of the aesthetic saw it as a way to advocate progressive, even
revolutionary, ideas. This merger of the political and the imaginative made surreal-
ism attractive to the Negritude poets and other black writers; see Jean-Claude
Michel’s The Black Surrealists and Robin Kelley’s Freedom Dreams, especially the
chapter “Keepin’ It (Sur)real: Dreams of the Marvelous.” Some scholars suggest that
surrealism, conceptually, is natural to black experience, as Kelley does in discussing
Richard Wright: “For Wright, black people did not have to go out and find surreal-
ism, for their lives were already surreal” (183). One challenge in thinking about sur-
realism is its use of primitivism, which seems similar to racist notions about black
identity; as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting notes: “Reason, Absolute Truth, Logic—
ideals held as unique to the European Enlightenment—are denounced by Césaire in
favor of the madness, the illogical, uncivilized, cannibalistic tendencies ascribed to
blacks by Europeans” (Negritude Women, 9). Sharpley-Whiting goes on to argue
notes to pages 109–112 165

that the primitivism of surrealism was not exclusive to black people, though there
was general acceptance of the idea that “people of color . . . were more in touch
with the id” (85). Some of these ideas about surrealism are also relevant to other
ideologies of fantastical expression, for example magical realism.
Another example in thinking about the quality of language described here is Mark
Rothko’s late works, those brilliant paintings of two or three blocks of colors. These
pieces evoke terrific fluidity and intensity, a sense of being overwhelmed by the
ocean of feeling. That such simple and abstract blocks of color could produce such
abundance and intimacy arises from the poetic capacity of Rothko’s language. His
aesthetic is not minimalist or even economical, and is not merely beyond what is
real (or hyper-real); instead, it is accessible and supple, expressive as well as ambigu-
ous, a bigness of feeling. See Jeffrey Weiss, who quotes Rothko’s claim that his
work is about intimacy (Mark Rothko, 262). Rothko’s work has been described as
abstract expressionism, though he never embraced the term. He has also been
described as minimalist, though minimalism—which is sometimes based on
objectivity—is different from the capacity being described here. On minimalism,
see Kirk Curnutt’s Wise Economies (especially pages 205–216) and Cynthia Whitney
Hallett’s Minimalism and the Short Story.
9. Here I am referring largely to pieces like Same, Time Pieces, Easy for Who to Say,
Guarded Conditions and Dividing Lines. These pieces and further discussion of
Simpson’s work can be found in Beryl Wright and Saidya Hartman’s Lorna Simpson:
For the Sake of the Viewer, Deborah Willis’s Lorna Simpson, and Coco Fusco’s
English Is Broken Here and “Uncanny Dissonance”; also see my discussion of
Simpson in chapter 1 of Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory.
10. André Bazin claims that “The photographic image is the object itself, the
object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it” (“The Ontology
of the Photographic Image,” 8). This claim might be too bold to be entirely true
(for example, Smith and Carlos’s image is informed by time and space), but it does
speak to the way that Simpson plays with timelessness.
11. There is a predicament of expression with the sublime that makes it an inter-
esting framework for thinking about quiet. Historically, as a part of the discourse of
aesthetics, the term “sublime” has been used to describe an excellent and awesome
quality of experience, a sense of transcendence. The sublime is a revelation of what
is beyond our social understanding of humanness, an awe that is divine; in its capac-
ity to take us beyond what is human, the sublime is a disturbance or even loss of
identity. The sublime has been used interchangeably with the beautiful, though
beginning in the Enlightenment, the sublime was theorized as superior to the beau-
tiful. The distinction between the two lies in the argument that the sublime is
beyond nature, while the beautiful is limited to and by nature; the sublime is “the
inhuman, the realm of things beyond ourselves, the dimension of otherness we can
never know” (Mary Arensberg, The American Sublime, 1). This is all part of the long
intellectual history of aesthetics, a discourse that has shaped thinking from ancient
Greece to the Enlightenment to postmodernism and has been central to philosophy,
religion, art, psychology, and sociology. Most interesting to thinking about quiet is
the notion of beauty as a human capacity to perceive, experience, judge—beauty as
166 notes to pages 112–113

a quality of being or measure of being human. Some useful general resources here
include Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime (especially
pages 1–10, where he argues that the expressiveness of the sublime is freedom),
Umberto Eco and Alastair McEwen’s History of Beauty, and Jerome Stolnitz’s essay
“ ‘Beauty’: Some Stages in the History of an Idea.” Also see Stolnitz’s and Stephen
Ross’s encyclopedia entries on “beauty.” Of course, the concept of beauty also has
historical relevance to racist ideas about black inferiority, especially physically; see
Maxine Craig’s Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? and Noliwe Rooks’s Hair Raising. In terms
of thinking about the sublime as a loss of identity, see Donald Pease’s “Sublime
Politics,” Helen Regueiro’s “Dickinson and the Haunting of the Self,” and Frances
Ferguson’s Solitude and the Sublime (which argues that the beautiful is social and
the sublime is isolation); also see Barbara Freeman’s construction of the “feminine
sublime” as an engagement of otherness. For other discussions of the sublime
and beauty, see Marc Conner (The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison, especially pages
49–76), Dolan Hubbard’s “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Invention of the Sublime in
The Souls of Black Folk,” and Gilbert-Rolfe’s discussion of Schiller in Beauty and the
Contemporary Sublime.
Another way of describing this kind of language is to notice its gaps and hesita-
tions, as if it were working “by some more intuitive method of communication, by
rhythm, or as the structuralists would say, by a deep structure that lies beneath the
conscious level of concept” (Charles May, The New Short Story Theories, xx), a level
of human capacity and understanding that exists beneath what is conscious. This is
Charles May’s way of thinking about the language of short story, and it seems to be
consonant with the idea of interiority. Discussions of the aesthetic of the short story
as a genre have informed the consideration of language in this chapter; see, for
example, May’s and Julio Cortazar’s essays in The New Short Story Theories, Michael
Wood’s Children of Silence, Curnutt’s Wise Economies, Raymond Carver’s “On
Writing,” Valerie Shaw’s The Short Story, a Critical Introduction, and Susan Lohafer
and Jo Ellyn Clarey’s Short Story Theory at a Crossroads (especially Lohafer’s
excellent introduction to part one and Austin Wright’s essay). Also see Suzanne
Ferguson’s argument about interior action (“Defining the Short Story”).
12. Prayer is a vast concept, hardly representing a defined set of notions. Philip
and Carol Zaleski, in their highly readable and comprehensive book Prayer:
A History, note that prayer merges “the absurd and the sublime . . . the fantastic and
the banal,” action and contemplation, the material and the imaginative, being
and becoming (3–6). Furthermore, it may be interior, even a sense of stillness,
but it is concerned with the world of things and is also motion (as in the African
proverb “when you pray, you move your feet”). For further references on prayer,
see Patricia Carrington’s Freedom in Meditation, George Maloney’s Inward Stillness,
and D. Z. Phillips’s The Concept of Prayer.
13. Within various religious traditions, the discussion of audience and even
double consciousness would be different from that above. The discussion here is
predicated on the concept of prayer drawn from its general practice. No distinction
is being made here between ritual and personal prayer, for example, or the ways that
religious communities can serve as an external audience; instead, prayer is being
spoken of in its most essential and idealized sense.
notes to pages 113–120 167

14. The quotation is from Natalie Goldberg’s distinction between procrastination

and waiting (Wild Mind, 211).
15. Hurston herself notices the gendered difference between men and women’s
concept of adventure in the opening paragraphs of the novel, which starts “Ships
at a distance carry every man’s wish on board.” In contemporary literature,
works like Sena Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife challenge the construct of women who wait
for men’s return from epic adventure. And of course Mary Helen Washington
famously critiqued the characterization of black men’s adventures as being more
meaningful than black women’s stories of interior journeys (see the introduction of
Invented Lives).
16. This is part of the magic that Brand’s narrator is able to manifest. Magic
is a part of the Zaleskis’ history of prayer: “prayer partakes of magic and sacrifice
yet reserves to itself something altogether more mysterious, more difficult to
define” (90); see especially chapters 2 and 3. Also, in thinking about prayer as a
means to connection, see D. Z. Phillips, who makes a convincing argument
about the tenuousness of such connection (The Concept of Prayer, especially
chapters 1 and 4).

conclusion
1. In philosophy, oneness is often discussed in conjunction with Spinoza’s notion
of monism, though the two terms are not synonyms. A notion of oneness is also leg-
ible in the medieval concept of beauty via the doctrine of the “transcendentia”; see
Jan Aresten’s “Beauty in the Middle Ages” as well as his encyclopedia essay “Beauty.”
The term is also relevant to psychoanalysis (for example, Jacques Lacan and Luce
Irigaray), psychotherapy, and religion.
2. For Spillers, the “one” is a perfect name for the remarkable ambivalence of
human potential: “the ‘one’ is both conceded and not-oneself; it is not to be
doubted as its sureness is tentative” (Black, White, and in Color, 395). She, the “one,”
is a being but she is also becoming, her existence in flux as much as it is also assured
and definite. In this way, oneness reflects the idea of cosmopolitanism, the sense of
being not a citizen of a state or a particular community but of the world.
Cosmopolitanism, as Anthony Appiah notes, “rejects the conventional view that
every . . . person belong[s] to a community” (Cosmopolitanism, xiv) as well as the
conclusion that a person is the same as his or her community. This idea is not the
same as universalism, since cosmopolitanism does not ignore the differences of
human experience or the cultural or economic particularities of specific communi-
ties. Instead, cosmopolitanism is based on the notion of broad humanity—that any
person can belong to or be connected with any experience or possibility, that a per-
son’s humanity is not confined to the particularity of his or her social or communal
identity. As the North African playwright Terence writes in one of his comedies
from antiquity, “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.” Appiah reads
Terence’s statement as the principle of cosmopolitanism (see 101–113) and also
discusses the role of difference (see xv). For a further consideration of cosmopoli-
tanism and black racial identity, see Ifeoma Nwankwo’s Black Cosmopolitanism and
Robert Reid-Pharr’s essay in Black Gay Man; also see the excellent work in Pheng
Cheah and Bruce Robbins’s edited Cosmopolitics.
 About the Author

Kevin Quashie is an associate professor at Smith College, where he teaches

in the department of Afro-American Studies and the program for the Study
of Women and Gender. He is coeditor of the anthology New Bones:
Contemporary Black Writers in America, and is author of Black Women,
Identity and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject.