Plantation Memories

Episodes of Everyday Racism

Grada Kilomba

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771135511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Plantation Memories is a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories. From the question "Where do you come from?" to Hair Politics to the N-word, the book is a strong, eloquent, and elaborate piece that deconstructs the normality of everyday racism and exposes the violence of being placed as the Other.

Released at the Berlin International Literature Festival in 2008, soon the book became internationally acclaimed and part of numerous academic curricula. Known for her subversive practice of giving body, voice, and image to her own texts, Grada Kilomba has adapted her book into a staged reading and video installation. Plantation Memories is an important contribution to the global cultural discourse.

CHAPTER 1

THE MASK

COLONIALISM, MEMORY, TRAUMA AND DECOLONIZATION

THE MASK

There is a mask of which I heard many times during my childhood. It was the mask Escrava Anastácia was made to wear. The many recounts and the detailed descriptions seemed to warn me that they were not simple facts of the past, but living memories buried in our psyche, ready to be told. Today, I want to re-tell them. I want to speak about that brutal mask of speechlessness. This mask was a very concrete piece, a real instrument, which became a part of the European colonial project for more than three hundred years. It was composed of a bit placed inside the mouth of the Black subject, clamped between the tongue and the jaw, and fixed behind the head with two strings, one surrounding the chin and the other surrounding the nose and forehead. Formally, the mask was used by white masters to prevent enslaved Africans from eating sugar cane or cocoa beans while working on the plantations, but its primary function was to implement a sense of speechlessness and fear, inasmuch as the mouth was a place of both muteness and torture.

In this sense, the mask represents colonialism as a whole. It symbolizes the sadistic politics of conquest and its cruel regimes of silencing the so-called ‘Others’: Who can speak? What happens when we speak? And what can we speak about?

THE MOUTH

The mouth is a very special organ, it symbolizes speech and enunciation. Within racism, it becomes the organ of oppression par excellence; it represents the organ whites want – and need – to control.

In this particular scenario, the mouth is also a metaphor for possession. It is fantasized that the Black subject wants to possess something that belongs to the white master, the fruits: the sugar cane and the cocoa beans. She or he wants to eat them, devour them, dispossessing the master of its goods. Although the plantation and its fruits do ‘morally’ belong to the colonized, the colonizer interprets it perversely, reading it as a sign of robbery. “We are taking what is Theirs” becomes “They are taking what is Ours.”

We are dealing here with a process of denial, for the master denies its project of colonization and asserts it onto the colonized. It is this moment of asserting onto the other what the subject refuses to recognize in her/himself that characterizes the ego defense mechanism.

Escrava Anastácia³

In racism, denial is used to maintain and legitimate violent structures of racial exclusion: “They want to take what is Ours and therefore They have to be controlled.” The first and original information – “We are taking what is Theirs” – is denied and projected onto the ‘Other’ – “They are taking what is Ours” – who becomes what the white subject does not want to be acquainted with. While the Black subject turns into the intrusive enemy, who has to be controlled; the white subject becomes the sympathetic victim, who is forced to control. In other words, the oppressor becomes the oppressed, and the oppressed, the tyrant.

This is based upon processes in which split off parts of the psyche are projected outside, always creating the so-called ‘Other’ as an antagonist to the ‘self.’ This splitting evokes the fact that the white subject is somehow divided within her/himself, for she/he develops two attitudes toward external reality: only one part of the ego – the ‘good,’ accepting and benevolent – is experienced as ‘self’; the rest – the ‘bad,’ rejecting and malevolent – is projected onto the ‘Other’ and experienced as external. The Black subject becomes then a screen of projection for what the white subject fears to acknowledge about her/himself: in this case, the violent thief, the indolent and malicious robber.

Such dishonorable aspects, whose intensity causes too much anxiety, guilt or shame, are projected outside as a means of escaping them. In psychoanalytical terms, this allows positive feelings toward oneself to remain intact – whiteness as the ‘good’ self – while the manifestations of the ‘bad’ self are projected onto the outside and seen as external ‘bad’ objects. In the white conceptual world, the Black subject is identified as the ‘bad’ object, embodying those aspects that white society has repressed and made taboo, that is, aggression and sexuality. We therefore come to coincide with the threatening, the dangerous, the violent, the thrilling, the exciting and also the dirty, but desirable, allowing whiteness to look at itself as morally ideal, decent, civilized and majestically generous, in complete control, and free of the anxiety its historicity causes.

THE WOUND⁴

Within this unfortunate dynamic, the Black subject becomes not only the ‘Other’ – the difference against which the white ‘self’ is measured – but also ‘Otherness’ – the personification of the repressed aspects of the white ‘self.’ In other words, we become the mental representation of what the white subject does not want to be like. Toni Morrison (1992) uses the expression ‘unlikeness’ to describe whiteness as a dependent identity that exists through the exploitation of the ‘Other,’ a relational identity constructed by whites defining themselves as unlike racial ‘Others.’ That is, Blackness serves as the primary form of Otherness by which whiteness is constructed. The ‘Other’ is not other per se; it becomes such through a process of absolute denial. In this sense, Frantz Fanon writes:

What is often called the Black soul is a white man’s artifact (1967: 110)

This sentence reminds us that it is not the Black subject we are dealing with, but white fantasies of what Blackness should be like. Fantasies, which do not represent us, but the white imaginary. They are the denied aspects of the white self which are re-projected onto us, as if they were authoritative and objective pictures of ourselves. They are however not of our concern. ‘I cannot go to a film’ writes Fanon, ‘I wait for me’ (1967: 140). He waits for the Black savages, the Black barbarians, the Black servants, the Black prostitutes, whores and courtesans, the Black criminals, murderers and drug dealers. He waits for what he is not.

We could actually say that in the white conceptual world, it is as if the collective unconscious of Black people is pre-programmed for alienation, disappointment and psychic trauma, since the images of Blackness we are confronted with are neither realistic nor gratifying. What an alienation, to be forced to identify with heroes who are white and reject enemies who appear as Black. What a disappointment, to be forced to look at ourselves as if we were in their place. What a pain, to be trapped in this colonial order.

This should be our preoccupation. We should not worry about the white subject in colonialism, but rather about the fact that the Black subject is always forced to develop a relationship to her/himself through the alienating presence of the white other (Hall 1996). Always placed as the ‘Other,’ never as the self.

‘What else could it be for me,’ asks Fanon, ‘but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?’ (1967: 112). He uses the language of trauma, like most Black people when speaking of their everyday experiences of racism, indicating the painful bodily impact and loss characteristic of a traumatic collapse, for within racism one is surgically removed, violently separated, from whatever identity one might really have. Such separation is defined as classic trauma, since it deprives one of one’s own link with a society unconsciously thought of as white. ‘I felt knife blades open within me … I could no longer laugh’ (1967:112), he remarks. There is indeed nothing to laugh about, as one is being overdeterminated from the outside by violent fantasies one sees, but one does not recognize as being oneself.

This is the trauma of the Black subject; it lies exactly in this state of absolute Otherness in relation to the white subject. An infernal circle: ‘When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color,’ Fanon writes. ‘Either way, I am locked’ (1967: 116). Locked within unreason. It seems then that Black people’s trauma stems not only from family-based events, as classical psychoanalysis argues, but rather from the traumatizing contact with the violent unreason of the white world, that is, with the unreason of racism that places us always as ‘Other,’ as different, as incompatible, as conflicting, as strange and uncommon. This unreasonable reality of racism is described by Frantz Fanon as traumatic.

I was hated, despised, detested, not by the neighbor across the street or my cousin on my mother’s side, but by an entire race. I was up against something ...