Geophagia
The pull of the earth
Tiffany Lethabo King
“On a stranger’s arrival in the island [Dominica], his attention may be attracted by many of the negro and coloured women having a small piece of wood, generally a slip of bamboo, protruding from the mouth.... Snuff, wrapped in a leaf, is carried about the person, usually stuck in the waistband, and in this the wooden brush is dipped from time to time, and replaced in the mouth, the powder gradually finding its way into the stomach. The quantity of snuff consumed in this way is astonishing, but many indulge the habit secretly, who are ashamed to betray openly their devotion to this filthy custom, which appears to be altogether confined to women.”
—John Imray, M.D. Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, 1843
When I draw my own diasporic genealogical tree as of late, snuff chewing becomes a branch. In the nineteenth-century Scottish physician’s notes, I can glean traces of brief appearances and gatherings of women like my mother who craved tobacco and other non-comestible items. I think about the geophagists: men, women, and children on plantations who were “addicted” to dirt. I see and name my mother’s other kin in the gathering of negro and coloured women with bamboo, dirt, and tobacco stuffed in their cheeks. No known blood ties but branches protruding from their mouths.
The more times I go back to color in the contours of my mother, the more I find myself trying to recall her appetite. What were the things she craved? Clams on the half shell, oysters, Big Red chewing gum, and Marlboros. I often recoiled from the things that she liked on her tongue. I can still smell the faint intermingling of stale chemically produced cinnamon flavor and tobacco wafting from her pocketbook when she opened and closed it. Before her passing in 2022, I had developed an appetite for oysters and could indulge with her. But I never became a cigarette smoker. I have no idea what it tastes and feels like to draw in air, tobacco, and nicotine as the orange embers climb the length of the paper cylinder, the dangling ashes surrendering to gravity. However, in late April of 2022, as I was in the middle of pouring my mother’s ashes from the crematorium’s packaging into an urn, her dust billowed around my face, drifted up my nostrils, down my throat, floated into and swam around my pupils, and dusted my hair. I had the urge to rub her ashes on my gums.
For now, curb your urge
To rub my ashes on your gums
The ones in our line who come to terms with the Black “female within”
Tend to have this hankering[1]
For now, curb your urge to rub the ashes on your gums.
The urge, which was not particularly keen, only lapped up against me during the times I came in contact with my mother’s ashes. My appetite for my mother, her matter, her dust, was not anything that I necessarily had to beat back or wrestle down. I laugh a bit now as I think about the word “appetite” and how it was used by a Bahamian woman, who was not out, whom I thought I wanted to date when I lived in Atlanta. She talked about us—Black diasporan lesbians—as having a certain kind of appetite. For centuries, Black appetites, cravings, and urges have incited deep racial-sexual anxieties. I probe and pick at the geophagic urge for the breadth of this essay.
I have returned to errant appetites—geophagia and pica—over and over again for the last three years. I turned to geophagia first as an academic preoccupation in 2020 after reading L.H. Stallings’s A Dirty South Manifesto (2019) to think about queer Souths and after 2022 as an unruly and peripatetic appetite of my own that I had to confront shortly after my mother’s death. Stallings’s oeuvre attends to Black feminist and queer oral traditions, as well as Black orality writ large. From Mutha’ Is Half a Word (2007) to Funk the Erotic (2015) to A Dirty South Manifesto, Stallings has considered Black vernacular cultures, Black sexual transaesthetics, and Black sexual desire and politics (including the erotics of geophagia/geophukit). While Mutha’ Is Half a Word, in the words of Stallings, “is not about mothering or motherhood,” the implications for discussions of the Black maternal are realized here. According to Stallings, the phrase “mutha’ is half a word” comes from the comedienne LaWanda Page’s 1971 comedy album of the same name. As “old guttural street slang ‘muthafucka’” is a part of Black sexual vernacular and when used “strategically by Black women, has literally been a disruption of master narratives on Black womanhood and motherhood.” Echoing Stallings, muthafucka is a trickster’s word and a part of the Black oral traditions and practices of refusal that make dirt eating and geophukit possible.[2]
The Black appetite courts piercing attention, surveillance, and intervention. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Black gustatory practices in the New World like dirt eating, called Cachexia Africana, perplexed and stoked the anxieties of the planter class, as well as the physicians that plantation owners employed to help maintain their slave populations. In 1799, physicians like Colin Chisholm diagnosed Cachexia Africana (and to a lesser extent Mal d’Estomac) as a disease that affected Africans in the Americas exclusively.[3] The disease was diagnosed as an African problem. Cachexia “refers to weight loss, wasting of muscle, loss of appetite, and general debility associated with disease.” The translation of Cachexia Africana is “literally the African wasting disease.” Due to its potentially devastating impact on plantation (re)productivity, the disease and its carriers became critical sites of observation and medical intervention on plantations. When Cachexia Africana manifested in negro women, or Spillers’s female flesh, dirt eating became a crisis marking where medico-plantation epistemological infrastructures could collapse upon themselves.
“Echoing Stallings, muthafucka is a trickster’s word and a part of the Black oral traditions and practices of refusal that make dirt eating and geophukit possible.”
The Scottish physician John Imray was a leading physician on the island of Dominica who treated Black people living on plantation estates between 1835 and 1841. He published his observations of the patients that he treated and the postmortem exams that he conducted on people who suffered from Cachexia Africana and Mal d’Estomac. The article “Observations on the Mal d’Estomac or Cachexia Africana, as it takes place among the Negroes of Dominica” published in the Edin burgh Medical and Surgical Journal in 1843, is organized into five sections: causes, symptoms, “Morbid Anatomy and Pathological Deductions,” treatments, and case notes from ten examinations. Of the ten examinations, six are postmortem. All three of the Black men exam ined were dead at the time. Four of the seven women patients were living when examined. Three had expired.
Imray’s medical case reports are remarkable for several reasons. The reports function as adjuncts to the archives of medical experimentation taking place on plantation-laboratories. Imray’s article and case reports document Black disabled enslaved (and apprenticed) peoples’ lives on plantations in Dominica. The case notes also evince slave owners’ desperate methods of treating their chattel and laborers who failed to be productive and reproductive. Imray’s medical notes hold import for scholarship on Black life on plantations in the British West Indies after the “abolition” of slavery in 1833. The period between 1834–1838 represented an interregnum or transition period where former slaves were placed “under the control of planters” for a trial period to test out emancipation as a project.[4] Essentially, there was no “Negro Jubilee” in practice. After the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, enslaved people in British Colonies like Dominica still experienced everyday life as enslaved people had under slavery. According to historian Dexter Gabriel, “fears abounded that chaos might take root with emancipation, leaving plantations in ruin and colonies rife with racial disorder.” In the British colonies, the white settler slavocracy gingerly tiptoed out “Emancipation” as an experiment to take place under “controlled conditions.” These fears reveal significant levels of white racial anxiety, and Imray’s archive might offer a sense of what this interregnum may have tasted like and felt like in the enslaved person’s (or apprentice’s) gut.
Witnessing, standing at the bedside and at the edge of exam tables with and after Bettina Judd who performs a poetics of care in her book Patient. which tends to Joice Heth, Lucy Zimmerman, Anarcha Wescott, Betsey Harris, and Henrietta Lacks, I linger with the women “addicted” to dirt eating and suffering from the wasting disease. Sitting bedside, I also watch and listen for what Joy James and Rizvana Bradley name as the Black “maternal function” in their work. For James, the Black maternal (as the “captive maternal”) requires a focus on function, not gender or identity markers.[5] Pace Bradley, the maternal function is an anti-representational structure that surfaces in Imray’s archive of dirt eaters.[6] The Black “maternal function” in my own reading of the Imray archive emerges as a maternal break or rupture with slavery’s plantation orders of representation as well as “abolition’s” or Jubilee’s (a non-event) orders of representation in 1833.[7] Further, the Black maternal function of dirt eating as boundary transgression, symbolic collapse, failed reproductivity, a refusal of normative care for the self and others works against the grim imperatives of social reproduction, and ex/gender orders on the plantation. While Cachexia Africana—characterized by dirt eating and wasting away—might have been medically diagnosed as a paradigmatically “female flesh” disorder, in practice and through its contagion it escapes the boundaries of female femininity.
“I submit that geophagia offers itself as an archive that tells stories about Black maternal chaos and the errant appetites that unfurl plantation sensoriums, including gender.”
Black female flesh and those who follow the condition of the “belly” become practitioners of Cachexia Africana, geophagia, or the captive maternal. According to Saidiya Hartman, “the belly is made a factory of production incommensurate with notions of the maternal, the conjugal or the domestic. In short, the slave exists out of the world and outside the house.” At this geophagic site of the disfiguration of the maternal, woman and (re)productivity are the unfurling of gender —or ungendering. For Joy James, “Whether they are biological females, males, non-binary—all those feminized into caretaking and consumption, Captive Maternals point to gaps in theory about the consumption of maternal lives and bodies.”
I submit that geophagia offers itself as an archive that tells stories about Black maternal chaos and the errant appetites that unfurl plantation sensoriums, including gender. This Black geophagic and maternal archive also challenges conventional and psychoanalytic notions of the maternal. The geophagic archive of Dr. Imray is particularly interesting to me as it offers us a quasi-clinical setting (psychoanalysis’ primary scene), a trace of Black flesh’s “geophagic order” and its maternal chaos that eroded the edges of the plantation that doggedly pursued its durability even after its legal “abolition” in 1833. Thus, my own preoccupation with the geophagic practices of Black women as captive maternals in the archive compels me to seek out what Bradley calls “a contagion which serially and diffusely extends the threat of metaphysical ruin.” I hope to catch a glimpse of the captive maternal standing in and eating away at the threshold (of the world) that they are made to produce yet cannot enter. Imray’s medical notes in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal document seven cases of negro wom- en’s episodes with Mal d’Estomac from 1835 to 1841. The women’s ages are variously and imprecisely categorized as spanning the cohorts of: “negro girl,” “negro girl, aged about 20,” “negro girl, aged about 25,” “negro girl ... suckling an 8-month-old child,” “young negro woman,” “middle-aged negress,” and “elderly negress.” The gendered assignations range from girl to negress to woman and a suckling child.
THE GEOPHAGIC ORDER’S “SICK AND SHUT-IN LIST” (1836–1837)
In 1836, Rose, an elderly negress recovered.
In 1836, Mary Ann, a negro girl, aged about 25 “has no wish to get well.”
In 1836, Felicité, a negro girl suckling an 8mo old child, “admits that she contracted the habit of eating earth during pregnancy” and a nurse [another negro we can presume] needs to be found for the child. Felicité ultimately recovered.
In 1837, Etiennette, a negro girl about 20 “long affected with Mal d’estomac; in the last month of pregnancy” delivered a child on January 17th. The child died shortly afterward. The mother recovered.[8]
THE GEOPHAGIC ORDER’S “NEW SAINTS” (1835–1841)
In 1835, Charlotte, a negro girl died.
In 1837, the child of Etiennette died shortly after being delivered.
In 1837, Mary Ann, a middle-aged negress, who suffered from Mal d’estomac “died rather suddenly.”
In 1841, Angelique Taylor, a young negro woman who had been eating snuff for years became ill. After “desist[ing] from the habit” could not stop eating “starch, arrow-root dry, & c.” She was attacked with “erysipelas of the lower extremity and died.”
The cases of members of the Geophagic Order, perhaps a Geophukit order in L.H. Stallings’s terms, interest me because of their refusal to perform maternal functions of social reproduction of plantation time and plentitude. They become sites of incapacity, inscrutability, and refusal. I can only imagine the ways that Mary Ann, about 25, expressed to Dr. Imray and her master that she had “no wish to get well.”[9]
THE GEOPHUKIT CASE: MARY ANN (NO WISH TO GET WELL)
(FROM IMRAY’S CASE NOTES)
November 4th, 1836.—Mary Ann, negro girl, aged about 25, attached to a coffee estate in the mountains, was sent from thence about eight or nine months ago to a sugar plantation in rather an unhealthy valley, where she says she fell ill and the menses became irregular. She was removed from some time to the coffee estate for change of air, but to the present time has continued ailing. The tongue, the gums, and mucous membrane of the mouth were white; the tongue retained its roughness; countenance had an unhealthy look, of lighter tinge than natural; she complained of beating at the heart and inability to walk any distance or do any work, exertion causing debility of her limbs and increase of palpitations. Menstrual discharge scanty, and when it does appear, which is at irregular intervals, she feels great lassitude and weakness of the lower extremities.
One pill, consisting of two grains of iodide of iron and half-a grain of opium, was ordered to be given three times daily, and good nourishing diet was prescribed.
December 5th.—This patient is rather better, but she does not seem to have benefitted much from the treatment, nor is it likely that any treatment will be of service, as she appears determined not to reside on the estate, and has no wish to get well.[10]
Certainly, imagined and positioned as another Black belly, Mary Ann intended on wasting away. If wasting, death, and addiction became an alternative practice of care for the captive maternal, many could join in and engage in this nonlinear process. Etiennette’s geophagic addiction perhaps caused her child to die. Felicité, a site of contagion, required a wet nurse for her eight-month-old to prevent the transmission of her appetite for dirt to her child. Angelique Taylor, a young woman, gave up snuff to pick up the habit of eating “starch” and “arrow-root dry.”[11] A different Mary Ann (the middle-aged negress) died and could no longer perform care, on or for the plantation.
PARTUS SEQUITUR VENTRUM— OR FOLLOWING THE APPETITE OF THE BELLY
In Rana A. Hogarth’s book, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840, Hogarth notes the ways that physicians attempting to understand and treat Cachexia Africana in the Caribbean and the United States produced, circulated, and relied on a pathologization of enslaved motherhood in order to locate and treat the disease. Hogarth scrutinizes the pathologization of Black mothering in the journals produced by physicians like James Maxwell who treated the enslaved on plantations in the Caribbean. Maxwell for instance, “provided a range of overlapping etiologies for the disease, which included enslaved mothers’ inability to feed and care for their children. This gendered view of Cachexia Africana merely reflected a long-standing impulse to pathologize enslaved motherhood. Among the constellation of potential causes, Maxwell singled out mothers as the chief agents setting in motion the desire for eating dirt.”[12] Accusations against Black mothers included: “long and continued lactation,” “improper nursing,” “an idiopathic affection from imitation” (imitation and or contagion), “a consecutive to diseases inducing the malus corporis habitus [ill habit of the body],” “mental disquietude,” “innutritious and indigestible food,” and “the erroneous method of nursing Negro children is by far the most frequent cause of dirt eating.”[13]
By the early 1800s, a proto-Moynihanian discourse was circulating in medical journals about the poor mothering habits of West African and enslaved women. In Robert Thomas’s 1815 book, The Modern Practice of Physic: Exhibiting the Characters, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, Morbid Appearances, and Improved Method of Treating the Diseases of All Climates, the author speculated that “Negroes imported from the coast of Africa, who are of an inactive indolent habit” and “[Negro] children of lax fibres, and who have been badly nursed and afterwards neglected, are the most liable to [Cachexia Africana’s] attacks.” In medical journals, physicians like Thomas and Maxwell dispensed and circulated scripts about bad Black enslaved mothers. Imray would have had access to these medical theories and studies as he conducted his own visits with patients in Dominica.
Across several plantation estates in Dominica, where Imray treated slaves suffering from mal d’estomac and Cachexia Africana, Imray also provided his own brief or assessment of the moral character and fitness of enslaved women on the plantations. In Imray’s assessment: “Young women who were subject to mal d’estomac were frequently found to be dissolute and irregular in their habits: excess in dancing, promiscuous intercourse...., [and] the passion of jealousy.” According to Imray: “The origin of the attack can be traced to moral causes”—“discontent, jealousy, or any other distressing mental affection.” This need to identify and pinpoint the origins, whether somatic, emotional, or of the mind, was driven by an urgent economic imperative. In addition to Cachexia Africana rendering the enslaved incapable of labor for varied periods of time, for enslaved women, reproductive functions were also interrupted. Women experienced “obstruction or suppression of the menstrual discharge.” Even when menstruation was not interrupted and enslaved women did become pregnant, the spectral threat of the woman’s own craving for dirt was thought to be able to be passed on to children either in utero or through example. Imray hypothesized that Cachexia Africana was “also sometimes contracted during the period of gestation, and is met with in both sexes at the early age of five or six.” If children did not contract it in the belly or womb they were impressionable and seemed to acquire the habit “by the mere force of example.”
The Black enslaved mother’s sins included: passing down the appetite for dirt in utero, breast feeding too long, breast feeding incorrectly, creating an oral fixation or errant appetite, and modeling bad behavior through their own dirt eating (tobacco smoking) habits. What is notable about this Black maternal disease, is that it can be passed down to children of “both sexes.” If it is passed on and manifests in children, it can be thought of as what Spillers might call the “‘female’ within.” The Black maternal becomes a site of ungendered chaos and disfunction more than a gendered position. In part, this maternal practice and function of dirt eating becomes a partial answer to Hartman’s question: “What is the text of her insurgency and the genre of her refusal?”[14]
Part Two: The Belly as Lordean Chaos
“The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”
—Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” 1978/1984
“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.”
—Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” 1978/1984
“Therefore, the female, in this order of things, breaks in upon the imagination with a forcefulness that marks both a denial and an “illegitimacy.” Because of this peculiar American denial, the black American male embodies the only American community of males which has had the specific occasion to learn who the female is within itself, the infant child who bears the life against the could-be fateful gamble, against the odds of pulverization and murder, including her own. It is the heritage of the mother that the African American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood—the power of “yes” to the “female” within.”
—Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 1987
In 2014, the journalist, writer, and liberal political pundit Charles Blow published his memoir and Bildungsroman Fire Shut Up in My Bones. Blow’s coming-of-age story takes place largely in Gibsland, Louisiana. It is a story of survival, his experience with sexual assault as a child, suicidal ideations, an awareness of his bi sexuality, and his attempts to resist the seductions and violence of Black cisheteronormative masculinity. Charles creates a beautiful portrait of his younger self as a queer child who shared a special intimacy with his mother. He was a “mama’s boy” who clung to his mother’s side. In his own queer way, he refuses a disavowal of the maternal. He refuses this disavowal by a deep cathexis to his mother and by taking part in the Black maternal habit of dirt eating.
In Blow’s memoir, the child Charles take us to the bend in the road where he and his brothers ate clay. Young Charles and his brothers, in part due to hunger pangs caused by poverty, dig up and eat clay. Blow describes the addictive qualities of clay dirt:
When my brothers and I finished our digging in the junkyard, we climbed into the ditch across the street and dug for a treat. We flaked off pieces of edible clay dirt that smelled to me like dry earth at the beginning of a fresh rain and tasted like chalk soaked in vinegar. Folks said it was good for you. Settled your stomach. Staved off illness. All I knew was the taste was addictive, and that ditch—where the curve of the road cut deep into the ground and exposed the strata—was the only place in town where that dirt could be found. Best of all, it was free.
Blow depicts boys engaging in activity that has been pathologized for the most part as a gendered performance of deviant Black femininity. They have succumbed not only to the Black “female within” but to the pull of the flesh of the earth and “land’s refusal to be metaphysically alienated from flesh.”[15] They fail to become autonomous masculine subjects. Blow, who often feels like an exile in this community of boys that he shares a house with, is now united with his brothers through this Black maternal act. He and his brothers become a community of the afflicted, making company with useless Black enslaved women and their non-reproductive compulsions. Geophukit.
I don’t exceptionalize Blow’s and his brothers’ maternal practices of care as aspirational or revolutionary, as they emerge in the “early stages of the Captive Maternal.”[16] Joy James argues that these initial stages of maternal care which are oriented toward survival as a goal often succumb to a “conformity and obedience” to the genocidal state. However, this repetition of the mother’s oral fixation, whether passed through the belly during gestation, or in observing and mimicking the mother’s desire for dirt, are an expression of Spillers’s “the power of ‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within.”[17] Dirt eating, practiced ostensibly by Black cismen, can be a version of the Lordean “erotic resource within each of us,” or them, that “lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane.”[18] Charles and his brothers become the Black male who came to learn who the Black female within is.
The children follow the condition of the geophagic mother. While Blow does not assign queer identities or practices to his brothers, scripts of Black pathology that emerge from Moynihanian traditions have the effect of queering boys raised by Black matriarchs. Kevin J. Mumford, in the article “Untangling Pathology: The Moynihan Report and Homosexual Damage, 1965– 1975,” compellingly argues that Black matriarchs were perceived as raising queer Black boys who failed to develop proper Black masculinities.
What rendered Blow queer as a child in the eyes of others was his non-normative gender performance and its proximity to femininity. Blow offers musings about his queerness as it relates to his sexual desire, his loneliness and depression, and his experiences of sexual assault. I affirm these readings of Blow’s queerness and I offer an additional reading that runs along the axis of a Spillerian recognition of the Black “female within” and a masculinity that comes into formation through the feminized act of earth eating, another kind of mudda tongue. Lordean Chaos is specific and needs to be read and reread within the gap that it announces.
“The haunting specter of the maternal is impossible to escape, particularly if melancholy and loss are produced by childhood hunger and the need for the mother and her provision.”
In Archive of Tongues, Moon Charania pays close and careful attention to her own return to her Brown, Pakistani mother as well as a Black feminist tradition of meditating on the Black mother (Spillers, Bradley, Musser, Nash) as an “epistemological limit in psychoanalysis.” The Black maternal (and the Brown for Charania) functions as a site of failure at the level of both language and the symbolic in both psychoanalysis proper as well as within its feminist successor science. Charania’s efforts to understand and come to terms with the failed language of her mother, albeit an alternative mode of sociality, surfaces, and tarries with deep anxieties about the Black (as abyss) and Brown mother as an impossible space of “successful subjectification.” The Brown maternal’s attempts at language are nonsense. The Black maternal’s capacity for the attempt for language is perhaps even an unthought. And certainly, as a dirt eater, the Black maternal is more than “mute” or without language, as the Black maternal’s mouth is full of dirt.
The turn to the psychoanalytic gives me some resources to think about Charles and his brothers as not only queered (on sociology’s terms) by being raised by a matriarch, but also queered (in psychoanalytic terms) by the acts of eating clay. Their clay eating keeps them tethered to the feminine (their mother and enslaved mothers before) and refuses a form of consumption that might provide nutrition, healthfulness, or a productive relationship to their bodies, masculinity, and the imperative of differentiation. As boys with errant appetites that give into the pull of the earth and the female or mother within, they fail at what you call “successful subjectification.”[19] This hankering for my mother’s dirt-as-flesh and Charles’s and his brothers’ addiction to clay-dirt function as returns to the maternal and a site of ungendered failure. The haunting specter of the maternal is impossible to escape, particularly if melancholy and loss are produced by childhood hunger and the need for the mother and her provision. For Charles and his brothers, the retrieval of their mother’s stolen reproductive labor (Musser) as food provisioning becomes an all-encompassing desire, a desire so strong that it exceeds any available language. It’s all-consuming traveling through the body as a need to eat the mother (and her sustenance) or at least eat like a Black enslaved mother. In 1843, Dr. Imray described the Black patients as “addicted to earth-eating.” While Blow and his brothers through the boundary blurring act of eating dirt ungender this Black maternal function and take it beyond the bounds of the feminine, they cannot take it fully outside of the realm of Black female flesh, to which they remain tethered or addicted.
In her book, Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley issues what I find to be an important caution (for my purposes, a correction) about the way that the “ungendering” has been theorized and taken up by scholars. The conventional reading of Spillers’s schema of ungendering is that the hold and the sociopolitical order of the New World interdict a cohering of gender to the Black body. In “Mama’s Baby: Papa’s Maybe,” we read that “under these conditions, one is neither female, nor male,” and “we lose at least gender difference.” Scholars tend to interpret these lines in a way that produces a convention which Bradley problematizes in Anteaesthetics:
Although it is a common practice to read Spillers’s concept of “ungendering” as theorizing black interdiction from the semiotics of gender difference that adhere to the ontology of the modern world (which it most certainly is), I would suggest that reducing ungendering to this interdiction alone is insufficient to explain her turn to black “female flesh engendered” as “a praxis and a theory, a text for living and dying, and a method for reading both through their diverse mediations.” That is, ungendering is also a gendering—an (un) gendering.
This paradox of ungendering as a process of gendering is important.[20] In “Mama’s Baby: Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers produces scene after scene of examples of female flesh ungendered. At the level of fleshly violence, female flesh (belly) is “strung from a tree limb,” or in Linda Brent’s (belly’s) case there is the attempt to escape the “gigantic sexualized repertoire” of violence that both her master Mr. Flint and her mistress Mrs. Flint (womb) enacted. Ungendering emerges through gratuitously violent processes of gendering that produce flesh as that which exceeds the coordinates of gender. The violent application makes gender meaningless. Michelle V. Rowley’s concept of “gender-as-genealogy” helps us think about what gender is doing in any context in which it is called forth. Gender in this case (ungendering), can be thought of as a discourse and genealogy of the unleashing of metaphysical violence against Black female flesh to sustain the Black as vestibular. In another example, scenes from Jennifer Lyle Morgan’s Laboring Women, where she reads Richard Ligon’s seventeenth-century travelogues provide a discursive and aesthetic register for understanding how gender—and its application—work to ungender. Ligon observes, describes, and monstrously genders African women and their bare breasts. In Ligon’s eyes the bare breasts (gendered parts) that hang as the women bend over to labor produce for him an image of a “six-legged” (ungendered) beast.[21] One cannot bypass Black female flesh to arrive at the position of the ungendered. One must go through it.
THE BRIDGE AND THE THRESHOLD/VESTIBULAR
I want to tarry in the Chaos that Lorde explores in her formulation of the erotic. And I want to take up the maternal chaos (dirt eating) as the erotic gap that we need to mind. In “Uses of the Erotic,” the poet as an attender of etymology and origins returns to the Greek eros as a point of departure for her own riff on the erotic. While the origin of the erotic is in chaos, Lorde takes the reader right up to the edge of the chaotic and then pulls them back. In my book The Black Shoals and in a 2021 presentation on geophagia delivered at Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute, I read Lorde as taking us into the depths of chaos.[22] I was overplaying my hand here and deeply invested in a plummet into an abyss that Lorde was not intending to descend into. The definition of the erotic that Lorde offers in “Uses of the Erotic” is well rehearsed and rather straightforward: “The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women.” Out of chaos comes “creative power” and “the lifeforce of women.”[23] What is murkier is the gap that Lorde creates and minds between the self and chaos. While I have taken expository license by moving too quickly with and through the erotic into the chaotic abyss, Lorde maps out the boundaries of the chaotic and the self by recasting the erotic as “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”[24] But she draws a line and comes short of the threshold or vestibular function of the belly.
However, for my purposes in this account of geophagia’s maternal function, I intend to give a closer and more careful reading of the erotic as “the bridge” and as distinct from the threshold.[25] Initially intended by Lorde to reconnect the “spiritual and the political” realms, the erotic functions as a place of connection and passage.[26] A part of its feminist work dismantles hierarchies that would give more credence to the political (and rational) over the spiritual (and sensual). Making space for and legitimizing the sensual enables Black maternal gustatory perception cum gut politics the potential to break plantation orders and sensoriums that hold Black creativity, production, and reproduction captive.
I want to take Lorde’s spatialization of the erotic and its relationship to the beginning (formation) of our “sense of self” and the “chaos of our strongest feelings” more seriously. It offers us the assumed corporeal ground of the maternal and brings us into the territory of the psychoanalytic. Lorde’s space of the “measure between” the self and chaos is a womb space. A reading of the erotic as womb, in Lorde’s register of the lifeforce of women, or as a “deeply female and spiritual plane,” allows us to think of the creative, lifegiving power of biocentric reproduction. It is important to note that Lorde’s womblike space of the erotic is not specific to Spillers’s Black female flesh. Lorde’s womb, or perhaps the gestating mother, is both the abyss (chaos) and the measure/birth canal which is a space of passage. The maternal is both chaos and a path—the bridge/passage—from chaos through her (womb’s) labor. Her labor, contractions, and birth canal become the erotic path and point of entry into the beginnings of a “sense of the self.” The passage to the self as a form of (psychoanalytic) flight from the chaotic abyss of the mother into form and language: the autonomous self. The erotic overwritten as an essentially “woman/female” source of power and knowledge is a deeply maternal matter. However, if the captive maternal is the “measure” or the gap that we must mind, we need to recast it through its abysmal origins in the hold of the ship and then again on the plantation.
In the case of the captive maternal, Lorde’s “measure between” brings us to the belly. The distinction between the womb as Lordean bridge/measure and the belly as vestibular or threshold is important. In 2016, Hartman opened her essay “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors” with the line: “The slave ship is a womb.” “Partus sequitur ventrum—the child follows the belly” becomes the grammatical dictum that ensures that the reproduction of the “modern world follows the belly.” Calvin Warren takes Hartman’s use of belly seriously, as he distinguishes the Black belly (nonbeing) from the White womb (Being). Rephrasing and extending Hartman’s formula, Calvin posits that the modern world follows the belly to “the extent that the belly provides the non-place of undifferentiation, so that beings can differentiate themselves from non-being.”[27] For Warren, in psychoanalytic and metaphysical terms, the “Black belly” is also the forgotten and absent in Luce Irigaray’s The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, as the belly becomes the condition of possibility for white Woman (Being). Mrs. Flint’s womb and Linda Brent’s belly come to mind here.
The belly is a Spillerian ungendered space (a unit of reproduction) that also reproduces undifferentiated existence. Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” is a critical resource and in fact urtext for Black gender and sexuality studies and increasingly for psychoanalysis. Julia Kristeva’s abject feminine maternal (womb) that becomes a space of perverse boundary blurring is different from Spiller’s female flesh’s belly where no boundaries or differentiation exist. Turning to an archive of the captive maternal and the gustatory practices of dirt eaters who ruin the maternal symbolic order forces us to chew/ruminate on Black female flesh as a process or function that we must move through rather than jettison to get to ungendering. Our geophagists, and the geophagic archive, might compel us to turn our attention to the maternal as an order of undifferentiated and wasting gendered capacity that starts as an undeniable gnawing in the gut.
[1] These lines come from some prose that I was writing in response to Bettina Judd’s book Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought. Northwestern University Press, 2022. Leaning into what Judd calls the “affective sedulity of Black creativity” is required for this occasion. I am grateful for her work, particularly the creative rituals to attend to grief that she offers her readers. Additionally, a line from Hortense Spillers’s essay is partially invoked, evoking “the power of the Black female within,” p. 80. See “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” diacritics (1987): 65–80.
[2] See L.H. Stallings, A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South, and especially chapter two, “Geophukit Manifesto.” In this chapter, Stallings’s poetics toggle back and forth between acknowledging forms of settler colonial violence and a refrain that refuses the violence. One of the violences that Stallings names is the classification of dirt eating as the disease geophagia. The refusal or refrain to a pathologization of dirt eating is to proclaim “geophukit” in defense of consuming dirt. Geophukit simultaneously names violence and refuses it, p. 67–68.
[3] Barret Bell,“Good Eatin’ Dirt”: Historical Constructions of Dirt-eating in the United States. University of Louisville, 2010, p. 12–13. Bell cites Colin Chisholm’s “An Account of the Cachexia Africana,” The London Medical Journal 2 (1799): 171–173.
[4] See Dexter J. Gabriel’s Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism. Cambridge University Press, 2023, p. 6
[5] See Joy James, “Maternal (In)Coherence: When Feminism Meets Fascism,” in Parapraxis as well as in the “Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time, Theft, and the Captive Maternal.”
[6] In Rizvana Bradley’s “Vestiges of Motherhood: The Maternal Function in Recent Black Cinema.” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2017): 46–52. Bradley is considering the Black maternal in the context of Black cinema. Bradley argues that within Black cinema, the Black mother has surfaced as an “anti-representational structure of Black motherhood” as well as a difficult structure of black maternity and its attendant grammar of loss, abjection, and rejection, p. 48. The maternal is not something to rescue, valorize, nor fill in the void of.
[7] In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman refers to formal Emancipation in 1865 as a non-event and a continuation and intensification of racial violence and discipline against a recaptured, fungible, labor force.
[8] John Imray, “Observations on the Mal d’Estomac or Cachexia Africana, as It Takes Place Among the Negroes of Dominica.” Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 59, no. 155 (1843), p. 317, pp. 316–19.
[9] Imray, “Observations on the Mal d’Estomac or Cachexia Africana,” pp. 316–21.
[10] Ibid, 317.
[11] Ibid, 321.
[12] Rana Hogarth, Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2017, p. 73.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Saidiya Hartman. “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors.” Souls 18, no. 1 (2016), p. 171.
[15] Lamonda Horton-Stallings, A Dirty South Manifesto, p. 42.
[16] See Joy James’s explanation of the phases of the “captive maternal” in “Maternal (In)Coherence” in Parapraxis (Issue 01: The Family Problem, Winter 2022) where she theorizes that “[c]aptive maternals are fragmented through conflict, compromise, and betrayal; they are not aligned despite a lineage of centuries of dishonor and abuse.” See also the article that introduces the term: “The womb of Western theory: Trauma, time theft, and the captive maternal.” Carceral Notebooks 12, no. 1 (2016): 253–296. As an adult, Blow’s own acquiescence to the U.S. as a graphics editor for the New York Times and liberal news pundit for the liberal press, often put him in a position as a champion of a U.S. genocidal settler state.
[17] Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” p. 80.
[18] Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” 1978/1984, p. 89.
[19] Moon Charania. Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness. Duke University Press, 2023, p. 18.
[20] Bradley pursues this paradox patiently and carefully in other publications like “Vestiges of motherhood: The maternal function in recent Black cinema.” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2017): 46–52.
[21] Jennifer Morgan, Laboring women: Reproduction and gender in new world slavery. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, p. 14–15.
[22] Tiffany Lethabo King, “Meditations from the Shoals: Errant Appetites,” presented on September 27, 2021 (on zoom) for High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University. In this presentation, I read Stallings’ “geophagia” queerly through Lorde’s “erotic,” and Spillers’s “female within.”
[23] Lorde, p. 89.
[24] Ibid, 88.
[25] Ibid, 89.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Calvin Warren, “Improper Bodies: A Nihilistic Meditation on Sexuality, the Black Belly, and Sexual Difference.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 8, no. 2 (2019): 35–51, p. 45.