In The Wake of Jordan Neely: The Sousrealism of the Undercommons
The closest subway to my apartment in New York City is Broadway/Lafayette. It’s a crowded, often frustrating intersection of multiple lines. The F train is notorious for its irregular appearances. This week it was also the site of a vigilante murder when a white man choked Jordan Neely, an unhoused person acting out in the train. Such moments are part of NYC daily life, after the almost total breakdown of care in the pandemic and the coming to power of Mayor Eric Adams, who appears to consider the unhoused and the migrant as his personal enemies.
The Visible and the Unsayable
Such is the condition of what Christina Sharpe calls the “weather” of “antiblackness as pervasive as climate” (In the Wake, 106). A Black man is killed and his white assailant leaves the police station without charge. It is a weaponizing of Fanon’s experience on the train— “Look, Mama, a Negro!”—in which the sound of a visibly Black person has become intolerable to a certain kind of white passenger. Had Neely remained quiet, he would not have been assaulted, just left to negotiate the violence of the streets without aid or compassion.
For Neely to speak closed a certain circuit of the visible and the unsayable in the regime of white sight. Remember here how the regime in Israel demands “quiet” from Palestinians. Think of the silent regime in modern prisons, far more sustained than Bentham’s fantasy of visibility. In Reading Gaol, when Oscar Wilde was a prisoner, the guards wore felt slippers to eliminate even ambient noise from the lives of the incarcerated.
Black Dysaesthesia
Once again, there is no possibility to breathe in the regime of mass incarceration that does not end at the prison door. In her analysis, Sharpe alludes to the “work” of New Orleans physician Samuel Cartwright, notorious for his 1851 assessment that enslaved people suffered from “drapetomania,” the compulsion to run away (In the Wake, 111). He further fantasized “defective hematosis” in Africans, meaning they were less well able to breathe and required to work hard in order to survive.
The result was what Cartwright called “Dysaesthesia Aethiopica” (Black Dysaesthesia), a “hebetude,” or laziness, of mind and body, especially prevalent among “free negroes.” In case the reader missed the point, Cartwright banged his drum again: “To narrate its symptoms and effects among them [the free] would be to write a history of the ruins and dilapidation of Hayti.” Abolition caused dysaesthesia, the Manichean opposite of white sight, institutionalized in Haiti’s freedom.
According to Cartwright, those with Black dysaesthesia would “break, waste and destroy everything they handle….They wander about at night…They slight their work….They raise disturbances with their overseer.” All of these actions were modes of refusal and resistance. By describing how the enslaved destroyed plants they were supposed to cultivate, broke their tools, tore their clothes, took (“stole”) what they needed and refused to respond to punishment, Cartwright inadvertently described the general strike against slavery (1861-65) in the making. He instead diagnosed them to be symptoms of mental illness caused by “blood not sufficiently vitalized being distributed to the brain,” rendering the enslaved “like an automaton or senseless machine.” Jordan Neely was, it might be said, diagnosed with Black dysaesthesia by his attacker.
In case it might be thought that Cartwright was a marginal figure, note that his analysis of fugitivity was widely shared. For the future architect Frederick Law Olmsted, it was “the natural instinct of freedom in a man, working out capriciously, as the wild instincts of domesticated beasts and birds sometimes do.” Think here of the 2020 Central Park birdwatching incident in Olmsted’s Ramble.
But that, it will be said, was long ago. Not so long ago, in colonial Algeria, French psychiatry perceived a pre-existing “indigenous criminality” in the Algerians, due to allegedly less developed brains, whose symptoms included “explosive reactions ‘of protest’ (fear, panic, defence or flight).” Needless to say, Eric Adams, acting without qualifications or information, diagnosed “serious mental health issues” in Jordan Neely.
Sousrealism on Haiti Time
The alternative to white sight was already visible to Cartwright in 1851 as abolition in general and the free republic of Haiti in particular. In her exactly counterpointed register, Sharpe tracked how Haiti “erupts” into the present-day, creating a “crack” in which time is cracked, but bodies are also cracked “in trans*Atlantic time” (128).
Following Sharpe’s insights, it is necessary in the wake of Jordan Neely to “crack” the collective cultural unconscious that supports white sight. This work counters the projection of white reality with its own realism from below, a sousrealism from the undercommons. Sousrealism ungrounds the material and territorial support of coloniality. Through the resulting cracks in white sight, the specter of justice can and does appear.
Writing her essay “1943: Surrealism and Us” under fascist Vichy occupation in Martinique, poet and writer Suzanne Césaire (1915–66) concluded:
Our surrealism will supply this rising people with a punch from its very depths. Our Surrealism will enable us finally to transcend the sordid antinomies of the present: white/Black, European/African, civilized/wild – at last recovering the powerful magic of the mahoulis drawn directly from living sources.
The result would be what she had called in 1941: “the freed image, dazzling and beautiful, with a beauty that could not be more unexpected and overwhelming.” For Césaire, freedom was “that other abyss,” one every bit as profound as that of the unconscious. From “below” (sous), in this abyss, the freed image could emerge, a sousrealism that made it possible to go beyond the libidinal cathexis of (white, male) surrealism. This sousrealism is companion to the “sousveillance” that watches the watchers.
Slippery Ground and the Tide of the General Strike
The specters of the Atlantic world operate on what is known in Haiti as tè glisse, slippery ground. According to the novelist Edwidge Danticat, “even under the best of circumstances, the country can be stable one moment and crumbling the next.” Tè glisse may slip into the abyss of Atlantic slavery but it also allows for sousrealist possibilities to arise from the fugitive spaces of the undercommons.
For white supremacy, there has long been the fear of slipping on the “specter of Haiti,” the actually existing possibility that racial hierarchy might fall. What has become known as the “great replacement” panic is not a recent or minority view within white sight, it is what whiteness has been for two centuries.
The “ground” on which white sight “stands,” to reference the “Stand Your Ground” laws now active in thirty states forming a neo-Confederacy of armed “rebels,” was always already visibly cracked and fissured. It becomes “slippery ground” when the tide of the feminist general strike rises, which Rosa Luxemburg described as: “a gigantic network of narrow streams; now it bubbles forth from under the ground like a fresh spring and now is completely lost under the earth.”
In 2020, the tide rose and created such slippery ground that the statue of Cecil John Rhodes fell in 2015, followed by the jettisoning of statues of slaver Edward Colson, Columbus, and Captain Cook into the abyss of the ocean in 2020. And it is from slippery ground that sousrealist freedom can emerge.