Breath Back
An epistolary introduction to reparation and repair
Zoé Samudzi and noor asif
Zoé to Noor (12/27/22):
After an early December fire in my building left me unable to live in my apartment for forty-three days, a generous acquaintance offered me her home in Martha’s Vineyard for the holiday season. I spent a lot of time driving around the island, empty and navigable in the off-season without the summering tourists. I was told to visit the Aquinnah Cliffs because I’d see some of the best oceanic views on the island, and when I reached the top of the climb overlooking the crashing waters, I inexplicably began to sob. The town and its breathtaking cliffs lie within the federally recognized lands of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head, the southwestern corner of the Vineyard. I’m still trying to figure out why I cried: why I was so overwhelmed by the sight that I almost plopped down into the muddy grass. Granted, the song I was listening to, the title track from Good Bye, Lenin! composed by Yann Tiersen, reached its stirring crescendo just as the vast and seemingly endless sea made itself visible to me.
Whiteness always steals the best vistas for itself. As someone who teaches and studies photography, I couldn’t help but think about the affective power of these views—the deliberate utilization and exploitation of the sublime as a tactic of settler preservation, an oxymoron of sorts. Landscape photography grew what visual studies scholars Joan Schwartz and James Ryan described as the settler geographic imagination, the visual means by which settlers were able to situate themselves in the traversed and “unexplored” lands around them, both near and far. Jutting mountain peaks, treacherous rivers, placid lakes, inviting coastlines, and rugged, romantic frontierspace became newly accessible. This indexical photography staked out all illuminated land, which is to say all land, as assimilable within settler dominion. And in order for these pristine ecologies to be protected in necessary absentia of the native stewards that had been there for millennia, the land must be saved: enclosed by the state for conservation efforts to proceed, foreclosed from Indigenous peoples who would be genocidally dispossessed and relegated to reserves. Comfortably, one can say that this expanded photographic imaginary yielded the national park system—celebrated commitments to protecting the land’s natural beauty that would probably not have been necessary if political consensus had not coalesced around cancerous expansion.
White sight, following Nicholas Mirzoeff, is not simply an epistemic structure of world making, it is also material: “White sight measured land taken from the Indigenous and worked by enslaved labor in chains, a unit of approximately twenty-two yards.” White sight is an articulation of the replacement of North American natives with African ones, the decimation of northern and southern lands for industry and the establishment of the plantationocene. Speaking of white sight in the literal, the Gay Head Light, construction for the lighthouse at the Aquinnah Cliffs, was requested by Congress in 1796 during John Adams’s presidency to control commercial maritime traffic from crashing into the jagged rocks at the foot of the cliffs. This first lighthouse was first illuminated on November 7, 1799, and it entered the National Register of Historic Places nearly 200 years later, in 1987. Conservation, I think, rests at the nucleus of the state’s mythology of an uroboric repair that performatively tidies in the wake of its own self-justified destruction.
But I think also there’s something striking about settler memory in the United States and what/how it absents.
It feels inconceivable (only metaphorically, though, because we urgently have to conceive of it) how much settlement has forcibly assimilated and commodified Indigenous worldings foundational to survival—place names, agricultural techniques, and animal husbandry, among other things—at the same time that those worlds in those original grammars have been disappeared. What the state permits of sovereignty is nominal recognition and a favorable name change, but how do you make reparations for lifeworlds annihilated and dispossessed through genocidal processes of settlement? The Wampanoag are on that island and in Nantucket, eastern Rhode Island, and southern Massachusetts. Scores of other Indigenous peoples have been and are subject to attempted and ongoing eliminations endure around the world. If we try to conceive of reparations and the repair of those worlds, how do we calculate what they are owed at the same time as displacements, occupations, cultural destruction, and forced assimilations continue?
I was really glad to think about this issue on reparations with you because, in addition to our shared political commitments (and our mutual disinterest at making an arrogant attempt at a comprehensive psychoanalytic agenda), we have very different political interests. I feel like my North Star is always land, which has political-economic and psychic-metaphysical characteristics. How would you assemble your starting points?
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Is each reinvention dependent on a form of destruction? How can we square our need for invention with our need for repair?
Noor to Zoé (6/6/23):
If your North Star is the land, mine is literature and the kinds of sociality that it carves out—the way we talk about it and the way we write (about) it. For me, the question of repair and the viability of reparations begins with Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.
Black Skin, White Masks is a text that breathes. Its breath becomes rapid, feverish even, at times furious, at other times sunk in despair, and finally gains momentum such that it ends midair, soaring. At the very end, Fanon takes us through a series of breathless aphorisms that disintegrate the text’s dependence on a Manichean logic. He writes, “I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission; there is no white burden.” Fanon attempts to release himself, as well as all Black and white subjects, from the heavy weight of a responsibility mired in racial difference. A page later he writes, “I am not a prisoner of History. I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life. In the world I am heading for, I am endlessly creating myself.” For Fanon, to commit yourself to a political project in which you owe something to others based on racial injury is to lock yourself up in the narrativized and binarized past with no way out. Fanon’s solution is to radically reconfigure both the psychic and the social by way of taking the risk of perpetual reinvention, of embracing continual shifts and transformations that defy categorization. For Fanon, then, invention is at odds with reparations. Where the former moves forward, breaking ground, the latter is stuck. Reparations impose an old-world order onto the new.
As a noun, “reparations” connotes an object to repair injury, an object that can be defined as a material good, or as an ostensibly viable solution, while its plurality evokes a sense of unquantifiability. Similarly, as a verb “repair” indicates an ongoing process that may or may not have an end. Both seem to imply a reach toward the horizon of cure, that beacon of light that Freud himself felt ambivalent about. Indeed, the very phrase “the talking cure” embodies the relentless deferral of a cure via the spoken word. The horizon is always receding. Yet of the two, I find reparations as a political project to be disillusioning, not least because of how it gets roped up into a liberal humanitarian rhetoric that reinforces a savior/victim complex which in turn crystallizes subject positions so that there is no room to breathe. Yet still, I would like to think that we live in a world where we owe something to one another. Especially because the world continues to smart from the pain of the past as much as the present. None of us are unencumbered by the meticulously woven and weighty layers of a grammar, or a symbolic order, imposed on us by traumatic historical forces.
Where reparations feel transactional, passing from one entity to another, repair requires intimacy and a sense of communion. Togetherness is imperative to invention, or breaking free from the grammar imposed on us, so that the leap one takes is not taken alone, but with another in tow. And the pain of newness is felt by all, as a necessity to effecting change.
I learned this while teaching earlier this year. As an instructor for a larger lecture course, I was tasked with teaching my students Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, followed by William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. My students refused to read Heart of Darkness as literature, rehearsing their own versions of Chinua Achebe’s critique of the novel as perpetuating racist ideals spurred by the logic of empire, which relies on the dehumanization of Africa and the presentation of nonindividuated Black bodies. My students read Conrad’s serpentine descriptions of the Congo, in which the natives blend into the landscape or evoke the dread of remote kinship in the British narrator, as lazy, though no less brutal, expressions of racism. They recognized these descriptions as performing a literary rendition of what you point out as “white sight.”
Naturally, I dreaded having to teach Faulkner after this, and not surprisingly, our first class on The Sound and the Fury was met with thrown hands. But something shifted the longer we spent untangling and suturing the various strands of the Compson children’s stories. At the end of the semester, I was amazed to see that despite their accusations of the novel’s unintelligibility and its white, patriarchal sentiment, several of my students wrote their final papers on The Sound and the Fury. What was even more striking, and frankly serendipitous given our present issue of Parapraxis, was the fact that nearly all of these papers used the novel to work through the problem of repair. These papers seemed to ask: Is repair possible when confronted with a dread of racial difference and an inability to mourn the loss of a white, Southern aristocracy? In one paper, a student wrote about how Quentin (the older brother, not to be confused with his niece of the same name) attempts to remedy his failure to protect his younger sister from promiscuity and the corruption of miscegenation by coming to the aid of a young girl from Italy who can’t seem to find her way home in the streets of Cambridge. By acting as the immigrant girl’s older brother, Quentin strives to instigate repair along two axes: his weak masculinity, which is tied into his previous inability to control his sister, and his bitterness, borne out of a racist outlook. Yet, as the student contends, Quentin’s fate is suicide, which he had planned prior to helping the girl and ultimately follows through with afterward. The novel seems to suggest, as my student points out, that repair can only happen when it coalesces with destruction.
To set fire to the old and leap out into the new—this seems imperative when we think about racism and its intersection with land, property, slavery, and subjecthood. But, I still wonder, is this what Fanon meant when he wrote about the need to continuously reinvent himself? Is each reinvention dependent on a form of destruction? How can we square our need for invention with our need for repair? To put it differently, can something new emerge through the ongoing work of repair? Is revisiting trauma the same as picking at old wounds, or does a capacity for world making exist in this process?
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In the face of the barbarity that refuses our breath, we must steal it back for ourselves
Zoé to Noor (7/6/23):
As I think about you consideration of these questions in the classroom—particularly about the Fanonian relation between reparative invention and cathartic destruction (extrapolating and taking some interpretive liberties here) and the imaginative possibilities of trauma contra to the often performative reiteration as a kind of re-wounding—I also place them into the archive of the ethnological museum where I am now. The museum is the sine qua non of imperialism’s worlding materiality, containers of plunder representing the contextualization of all there is to know and be seen vis-à-vis the brutal transformation and elimination of lifeworlds, the surgical excision of commodities deemed valuable, and the unashamed display of theft coupled with the new ascriptions of meaning. When you write about Black Skin, White Masks as a text that breathes, I can’t help but think of Shahram Khosravi’s essay “The Archive of Stolen Breaths,” which, also using Fanon, locates the sea as an abject archive of migrant suffering and state murder that feels analogous to the suffocated death within the physical museum. From industry-polluted air to counterinsurgent tear gas to the Mediterranean, whose turbulent waters can drown in under a minute, to uttered allegations of “I can’t breathe” as one perishes at the hands of the state, Khosravi internationalizes this theft of life-sustaining air; Fanon might summarize it as “combat breathing.” Khosravi writes that “the atmosphere is weaponized and the states have integrated the air into their structural violence. It means that the stifling political structures target not only the bodies of the migrants, Indigenous people, or political protestors, but also the whole environment they are in. The air has become a medium for terrorizing people. The unequal right to breathe has led to a crisis in the reproduction of life.”
I take the idea that “we live in a world where we owe something to one another” very literally; I know you’re talking about practices of collective care (or at least I think), but here I’m also talking about debt, because without engaging in the political project Fanon warns about, there are things that are owed. But Fanon, via Khosravi, reminds us, I think, that at stake for reparations is not simply life stolen in the past but also in the present and future. You’re right when you say that reparations reinscribe old world orders because central to any consideration of redress has to be an imagining of future possibilities.
In this frame of the impossible task of “decolonizing the museum” or “decolonizing the archive”—whatever these are supposed to mean outside of liquidating contents—I share your deep disillusionment with reparations as a project of historical redress and the deliberate constraint of imagination. The easy first step is restitution. But restitution alone can never be sufficient, because the return of objects is not a sufficient address of the political, cultural, economic, and epistemic wounding of coloniality that the circulation of artifacts and human remains represents in the past and present.
I’d like to believe that “invention” and “repair” are synonyms in different temporal registers. I think they exist in a political galaxy in which inhered to reparations is the conception of past-present: annihilation and destruction (whether material or ideological or intrapersonal or some other axis of existence) are necessary in order to be able to create and imagine and be otherwise. Revisiting trauma is useful because it can allow us to learn how to better steward and heal it by learning how to refuse to reproduce it. I think we repair by ever so slowly chipping away at the violences that uphold the edifice of European modernity: in the face of the barbarity that refuses our breath, we must steal it back for ourselves.