ERIN HANSON

The frustration of repeating oneself over and over again without getting any closer to transmission is the smudged progression of Ligon’s piece. Mechanization gives way to affect as   a printing press mimics a hand — perhaps angry, perhaps impatient, perhaps in pain, throbbing — that becomes less steady with practice. Each iteration blurs at least two boundaries: one between text and that which lies behind it, the other between human and machine. The blotchy bottoms of Ligon’s etchings, I mean to say, exemplify the communicative despair of the affected object — or the commodified human. The stark difference between black shape and sharp white background slips into the messy incommensurability of différance. Deferral is racialized in an off-kilter balance: a mantra of not feeling colored colors itself in alongside an insistence on opposites that succumbs to shades of gray. And this vertical asymmetry between repeated phrases (on each print)  is countered with an ostensible horizontal symmetry between contradictory ones (of the two hangings). Sameness looks different; aporia looks alike. Such is the affective paradox, Ligon seems to say, of Black expression under epideramlization — of feeling colored.

But — in the spirit of Hurston, who featured  asymmetry in her article “Characteristics of Negro Expression” — what are we to make of the strip of white that serves as a quasi line of symmetry between the two etchings? Situated as it is, amid texts that show such dysphoria for positive and negative space, how are we to theorize this one gap that does not collapse? Put differently, how do we understand a reading of the juxtaposition? One interpretation would be that the side-by-sideness shuts down the fantasy of straightforwardness and symmetry; transmission is always already interrupted. The clean, pure white strip draws your eye only, on second glance, to offer a sort of non-statement: “I DO NOT ALWAYS FEEL   I FEEL MOST COLORED.” In other words: if a vertical reading down the prints shuttles us to the limits of communicability in an inky coagulation, a horizontal reading across the two starts there — even as borders between text and background appear their most clean, easy, and self evident. Still, this should not discount those moments of not feeling colored (“COLORED”: the thing that is dropped in the opening line “I DO NOT ALWAYS FEEL”). What is the potential of this communicative failure, of this absence present from the beginning, of this slippage between human and thing, of this characteristic of Negro Expression? Even if assymetrical, where is there resistance?

I turn to Jean Toomer’s Cane in hopes of answering some of these questions. “Night, soft belly of a pregnant Negress, throbs evenly against the torso of the South. Night throbs a womb-song to the South” (Toomer, 142). Night, the pregnant black body, is the occasion for song. Not simply the negative space of in-between days, night is fecund. A chance to slip into the cane break to feel another’s touch or through the cotton fields and out of sight: the space between Georgia Dusk and The End of Daybreak is a vessel, a secret, a possibility, a potential. Its blackness is a pregnant pause. But this container carries hope in between, in spite of, a more persistent pain. Daytime, “White-man’s Land,” breaks the promise the mother carries. The unborn child, black night, becomes one of many, indistinguishable in the gray of smoke and ash, perhaps ink and paper. “Burn, bear black children.” The real pleasure of escape into the night only syncopates the rhythm of pain that beats against the South, the black mother’s body, a commodity in markets of (re)production. If pain is a distress signal — a message that the body is in trouble, that pressure needs relief, that something needs to change, to syncopate, permanently — what happens when the White Man will not respond? The ebb and flow of hurt is an SOS that is never acknowledged. Pregnancy becomes infanticide when the body’s felt graphemes (pain punctuated by joy) are produced by the same apparatus with the power to ignore them: the apparatus of (neo)slavery, I mean, whose very existence depends at once on commodifying humans and on not recognizing the pain, the joy, the affect of commodities. A pain that pulsates, sent again and again only to be turned away: throbbing is an infinite deferral. And song, a new sort of communication, sounds in the in-between.

So this throb enkindles lyric as even as it burns bodies. Pleasure springs in the gaps of pain. These two do not cancel each other out; the first does not justify the second. They are held in uneven simultaneity, asymmetrical alternation, an ebb a fraction of its flow. Gaps are a slow inhale of night air one moment and a gulp of smoke the next. Not always feeling colored — say, in the black night when one can escape, can feel pleasure and hope and at peace with enclosure — and feeling colored again when day breaks, thrown up against sharp white man’s land background: such is the asymmetrical affect of the in-and-out of a cane field clearing, the in-and-out of night, day, human, commodity, language, lyric.