A Black gay man's reflections on torture and dictatorship.

Not long ago, a black gay man asked me why I write about topics "different" than those that--according to him--other contemporary black gay male writers typically address. Provoked, in turn I asked him exactly what he meant. He responded that it seemed strange to him that I appeared to be so interested in writing, in both fiction and nonfiction, about politically repressive conditions (such as nations suffering under despotic regimes) and, sometimes, torture. Why, he asked, was I as a black gay man interested in "those things"?

His provocation, together with a persistent anxiety that I feel--namely, the burden of historical memory--compels these reflections. The anxiety is a peculiar sort of haunting: one that, after decades of sometimes real horror, I can now acknowledge as my own difficult relationship with historical memory, a painful weight with which I believe most black people in the diaspora invariably struggle in one way or another, whether fully acknowledged or not.

The man's question was a provocation altogether different from this atavistic weight. It struck me as odd and--obviously--troubling for several reasons: one, it seemed to presuppose that there were without question certain topics about which, even or especially according to some black gay men, black gay writers "should" write, to the exclusion of others; two, a black gay writer expressing interest in geopolitics and geopolitically-informed history appeared, at least to that reader, strange, even anomalous--especially, perhaps, if the history and geopolitics were located in certain Latin American or South Asian nations; three, the question's assumption of "This is clearly who you are, one of 'us'"--homosexual and recognizably "black," racially marked by my skin color, hair, and features--did not make room for the nuanced differences of my cultural identities from the speaker's: that I am not and do not consider myself, for example, an African American, but rather a Jamaican American, born in the US to Jamaican immigrant parents, and thus "black," culturally speaking, in a distinctly different way from his African American self-different with, I imagined, assuredly different culturally informed interests.

On the most general level, the question within his question startled me'. why show. imaginative interest in anyone who isn't a part of "your" perceived group? This query I found the most problematic and disturbing, for, among other things, it represented, for me, the most vexing limitations of a particular type of identity politics--the sort that can always lead easily to myopic single-issue political approaches, such as the idea, expressed recently in The Advocate (a "slick" LGBT/"queer" biweekly newsmagazine) by African American lesbian Jasmyne Cannick, that LGBT rights should take precedence over immigration issues, as if some of us were not simultaneously both LGBT and--(but who would have thought it?)--immigrants. (1)

Besides, I thought, what black person of whatever sexual orientation or gender, living in the US and possessed of good (historical) sense, wouldn't make a connection between the systematized torture and dictatorship historically imposed on black people's lives in this country and throughout our diaspora, on the one hand, and the global tortures and dictatorships sometimes more widely known, on the other hand? By these latter, I mean to suggest, for example, Abu Ghraib; the US Army's present-day abuses of the rights of Guantanamo Bay prisoners; Saudi Arabian plutocracy informed by a hand-in-glove client relationship with the US; Israel's consistent viciousness toward Palestinians; and memories of Latin American and some African dictatorships, among which Pinochet's in Chile, the late General Sani Abacha's regime in Nigeria, South Africa s apartheid state, the Rwandan Hutu supremacists' rampage and genocide, and the violence visited on Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, and Guatemalan peasants, especially those involved in insurgency, number among the most terrifying and unforgettable. It is, of course, important to remember that the US, the UK, and a few other "first world" nations (such as Belgium and France, in the case of Rwanda) have had a pernicious hand somewhere along the way in these nations' ultimately devastating affairs, invariably enabled by the same supremacist ideology, and ultimately machinery, that has made consistently possible the degradation and decimation of black and other people of color, and the poor of all colors, within the US.

I began by stating that these words, prompted by an unsettling question, also emerged out of what I call a "haunting"--the abiding, often unwelcome, but frequently welcome, presence of an historical memory (as in the recollection of images and recountings of slavery's violences visited for centuries on black people) that has long weighted my dreams and waking hours. Although, as a bicultural person, my consciousness has been partly shaped by the landscapes of Jamaica--a place where lynchings, for example, did not occur as they did in the US--I have never been able to get lynchings, of all the violences enacted against black people, out of my mind. I am, quite literally, haunted by them; I have pent innumerable hours over the rears leafing through--gazing, transfixed, at--photographs of lynchings, in books like Without Sanctuary: gazing, taking in what it is not possible to take in without an indescribable twist in the gut: the rip there, the coldness there. The coldness--real chill--always backed by the stealthy horror of a "There but for the grace of God" intake of breath. A sharp intake when one understands, as one must learn to understand, that having descended from Jamaican slaves as opposed to, say, African American or Brazilian blacks, remains one of the sheerest accidents of history." a mere flicker beneath the eyelid of some 200- or 300-year dead slave ship captain who, in the year of his Lord 1746 or 1803, received orders to dock his cargo (all of it, he hoped, arrived in the New World alive and fit to work and breed to death) in Kingston, instead of--that month--in Charleston. Is it because of my constant re-summonings of this too-much-to-remember history, this too-heavy-to-bear memory, that, for me, the words "torture" and "dictatorship" so often feel so loaded, bear such resonance? Is this why some comparisons strike me as so obvious? (2)

Comparisons, for example, between the postures and glee of the US soldiers (including even a black soldier) who tortured Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the postures and frequent glee--or utterly mesmerized, glassy stares--of those who, beneath the charred, neck-stretched bodies of the blacks they'd lynched, pointed up at those dangling forms, making sure later to take away what souvenirs they might? (Singed hair, perhaps; testicles, maybe. A nipple here, a finger there. Everything, even ashes, up for grabs beneath those trees.)

My imaginative projects these days seek to make sense, for myself, out of that black gay man's question--"Why do you care about all that, as a black gay man? Why not just write about Beyonce Knowles, AIDS, the (so-called) 'down-low,' and our relationships with white LGBT/'queer' people and black heterosexuals?" My current writerly projects seek to make sense out of--bring a new sort of order to, in the reflective realm of a writer's imagination--the time of "skin, skin, and hot blood" (Morrison's description in Beloved of the indescribability of lynching) while making connections between those traumatic historical realities and the sexualized, sometimes racialized realities inevitably present in torture and often obscenely visible under repressive political regimes. Across these terrains, much looms for a writer to ponder: the relationships, for instance, between masculinities enacted--performed--in torture and dictatorship scenarios (the torturer exerting the force of masculinized absolute power over his female or male victim with the most "dangerous" tool of all, the electrical shock device or beating truncheon), and the highly self-consciously performed, problematic masculinities in, for example, queer male porno films (heard in lines such as "Yeah, suck that big dick, you little faggot!"--or, as I watched some years ago, a deeply racialized US porn film scene in which a white man, lying on his back, literally screamed to a black man, whose first language audibly was not English, that he wanted him to "fuck my white ass!"--to which the black man shouted back, in a "dangerous" tone, "Yeah, I'm gone fuck yo' white ass!"). Across these terrains, versions of Beauty and the Beast revisited yet again; once more, a go-around with the white damsel in (desired) distress.

Perhaps that man's question about my "different" topics, the life-long heavy shadow of memory, and reflections like these, and more, will finally lead me one night, one day, more fully, unflinchingly--bravely--into passages like this one:

      Down there, in that secret place,
   they had forced him to eat excrement-well,
   shit--of course. Forced
   him and all the others, as they had
   laughed. Laughed as they watched
   him gag on the shit they had fed him.
   But then, moving his lips over it slowly
   on the billy club as they'd commanded,
   forcing his tongue to welcome
   it--welcome it whether days-old
   and hardened or fresh-warm, sickeningly
   moist and parasitic--well, none
   of that was the worst; no, not even
   when, more than once, the laughing,
   uniformed men had forced the billy
   club back into his throat and ground it
   against the few back teeth he'd still
   had at the time. The worst had been-well,
   yes: the fear of being ripped open
   again with the club; of being burned
   inside and out, touched in that way
   again by one of them; strung upside
   down, hands manacled, face fully
   immersed in the piss bucket from
   where there could be no escape except
   for the momentary gasps that thrashing
   allowed. All at once he is drowning
   once again, he cannot breathe, his
   complete his-ness fully exposed but
   not, down here, his own. He is where
   all hands may partake of his his-ness,
   all objects find their way in and out. In,
   and out. (3)

Works Cited

Allen, James, Hilton Als, and Leon F. Litwack, eds. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photographs in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000.

Cannick, Jasmyne. "Gays First, Then Illegals." The Advocate Online 4 Apr. 2006. 14 July 2006 <http://www.advocate.com/exclusive detail ektid28908.asp>.

Glave, Thomas. Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. "We 55 Respectfully Disagree." The Advocate Online 11 Apr. 2006. 14 July 2006 <http://www.advocate.com/exclusive detail ektid29496.asp>.

Notes

(1.) See both Cannick and the "open letter" dissenting response to Cannick's article, signed by 55 Advocate readers, "We 55 Respectfully Disagree'.

(2.) See "Abu Ghraib: Fragments Against Forgetting" (Glave 207-21).

(3.) Glave, from fiction in progress.

Thomas Glave is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories and Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent. These reflections, in slightly different form and with a slightly different title, were first delivered as a paper for a panel ('Sexual Topographies: Queer Reading, American Contexts: A Roundtable Discussion") at the American Literature Association conference, San Francisco, 27 May 2006.