by Jill Magi

The idea to “break every rule,” as if it is my choice to do the breaking, is attractive, strong.

So why do I balk at the mandate? Nine years after first reading Maso’s work, why talk back to her essay?

It could be I am simultaneously attracted to the idea of individual expression yet wary of a judgment that might slip the so-called non-innovators into a place of invisibility, a category labeled “simple.”

It could be I am wary of a belief in modernity as progress—wary of utopian longings that hinge on the secular, and wary of postmodern arts that are not actually anti-modern.

What cannot be said or written might be “heaven.”

For some, writing has only been capable of pointing toward utopia in what it does not say, cannot say. For some, it is through innuendo, hidden meanings, double meanings, silences, speaking in tongues, stuttering, non-verbal utterance, or singing that utopia is conjured. What cannot be said or written might be “heaven.”

Therefore, it might not even be possible to “lose faith in our belief that language is capable of a kind of utopia” if the written word has actually been most often used as a tool of oppression. For some, there is no faith to lose.

Writing may be separate from any utopian longings—it simply “is”—or, at best, writing might be a tool to get there, but certainly not a reliable one.

There is a long history of privileging the text; this privileging might be one of the central characteristics of the western modern consciousness. The events of history and the situation of the contemporary world show that this privileging of the text, this idea of the modern state and citizen, may be quite flawed.

Utopia, for some, is more likely achieved through a spiritual practice, for example. For some, utopia is not a secular or political pursuit or secular manifestation of something called “freedom” here on earth.

Most literary pursuits—birthed most often from a secular modernism—are secular and proud of it. Yet, some believe that anything that resembles a utopia on earth would not be constituted entirely of the secular, or reached by means of a secular art, or the belief in generic, state-sponsored human rights.

Duty

If “the creation of literary texts affords a kind of license, is a kind of freedom, dizzying, giddy,” then it is also, for some, and during some times, a kind of responsibility or duty. The ability to fulfill duty is a kind of freedom.

But when the creation of a literary text comes with a feeling of responsibility to a community, or a sense of duty, and if this is mixed with the knowledge of another possibly hostile audience, then “old ways of seeing” might be important to employ and engage rather than discard. This engagement with “old ways” may help to showcase “the old” as acceptable, especially in cases when certain ways of writing and talking and even being are thought to have been, historically, socially and politically, deemed as “less than” or inferior or perhaps even silenced.

Therefore, a writer might radically employ or engage tradition or “the old.” Depending on who is doing the seeing, “old” is sometimes quite unique and can even come across as “unfamiliar” which might appear, to some writers, to be “new.”

What May Be Innovative: A Writer Imagines Audience

Yes, “writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering, capable of great passion,” and language, written, is also a representational system open to interpretation. Political contexts and power relationships inform the interpretation of the written word. And so, writing functions as a system of desire and longing and suffering, therefore, not just for the writer, but for readers.

Writing in an Emergency Situation

For example, African American writers of the early 20th century yearned, not at all secretly, for their race to be considered human. This yearning—this emergency situation—was in direct response to the epidemic of lynchings at that time, as well as the failings of the federal government of the United States that left most blacks poor, unprotected, and susceptible to great violence during Reconstruction.

Therefore, “To become the center,” was quite radical; it was to become equal under the law and to be able to count on institutions of law and peace keeping.

The literary debates of the black intelligentsia and artists reflected this desire for security and rights, as well as discussions of language strategies that would best lead them, and the whole country, to that place.

When Realism is Radical

In response to “Why does realism equal verity?” sometimes “verity” is quite dangerous and does not “equal accessibility.” For example, is the voice of Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God true or is it minstrelsy? Does the realism of her voice make the text accessible? Or foreign? The answer depends on the reader.

More questions to prove the relativity of possible answers: Does Hurston’s “speakerly text,” as Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls it, “joyfully violate the language contract”? Whose contract? If she transcribed a deeply known, to some, voice of the south, was this “irresistible” to her fellow black writers in the north? To white northerners who wanted to know about this “other”? Did she “convince both us and others that we are autonomous, we are not them, not exactly, but we are nonetheless joyful and free”? Did she damage the New Negro Movement’s cause by her “active refusal of the dominant code”?

Richard Wright and others were afraid that the “verity” of Janie’s voice, her illiterate status, and her desire for porch stories and love could be misused and interpreted as caricature, evidence that black folk who did not use standard English were less intelligent, less than human. The truth in that voice made them afraid that Hurston’s text would be taken as evidence to perpetuate a mistruth: black people are inferior, don’t speak proper English, and black women are filled with sexual desire only.

Sometimes leaving certain “lexical surfaces” undisrupted, letting them alone, or marrying an oral surface with a lexical surface is a very high stakes thing to do. Hurston brought in true oral surfaces and translated them to lexical surfaces—she chose not to disrupt Janie’s way of speaking. For this choice, Hurston’s work was dismissed.

I wonder, how did Hurston survive? I know she died in obscurity, but she appeared not to change her writings. In her body of work, there isn’t the “young and risky Hurston” followed by the “settled down and vernacular-free Hurston.” Is her polemical and race-caricatured essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” a feisty response to Wright? Is her statement, “I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it” a refusal of the NAACP-crafted rules of narrative and identity?

One Conclusion

Tradition, innovation, and freedom—and what constitutes all these things in the literary sense—are perspective and context dependent.

What contract is one breaking when one is already, before speaking, before writing, “strange, elusive, other?”
Some, through the fact of their existence, violate the language contract simply by speaking, let alone by writing. Their very bodies are new kinds of texts, often mistrusted, subject to gaze and interpretation, even before a word is transcribed. Perhaps whatever their form of looking back, whatever text is generated by this subject, is an artful miracle. It might look very demotic, very plain. The innovation is in the act of speaking, writing. The innovation also rests with the reader who decides that the text might reveal complicated meanings—if they read closely, if the reader understands the times.

I delight in the small sonic and larger semantic shift from “break every rule” to “make home rule.”

Excerpts from a course notebook:

What did Gandhi mean by “home or self-rule,” or “hind swaraj”?

Home rule means there is never a larger freedom without a personal responsibility.

Hind swaraj is wary of a secular state and does not necessarily seek full acceptance there.

By extension, hind swaraj is wary of an art that is bent on personal expression devoid of a strategy of peace, devoid of the knowledge of the workings of power, devoid of the heart.

According to Gandhi, a person is civilized, not a society—and this can be done instantly, in a moment of awareness.

Gandhi said that when you are thinking of the end result you can’t be steadfast in your act.

Non-violence does not intervene—it achieves nothing; rather it interrupts production (celibacy). Non-violence is experiential—remaking the body, the self.

There are differences between violence at a micro-level and the violence of states, militancy.

Religious violence can equal great violence but then it’s over; state violence has violence built in, it keeps going, self-perpetuating, often in a spectral fashion. Proponents of a religion-free state will often target religion as a source of violence. Gandhi continually corrected these notions, reminding liberals that secularism has done little to foster sacrifice and compassion.

The anthropologist asks, “What are the grounds for action when the terrain is already violent?”

I think about this question as a writer who sometimes uses “fracture” and sometimes employs a poetics of “difficulty.” What do our communities need now? What do I want to say? Who am I writing for? Engaged in seemingly endless calibrations around these questions, and wary of any declarations on how to answer them, I remember this:

Gandhi is never clear that hind swaraj comes to a knowable end result or “revolution.”

© Jill Magi. All rights reserved.