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CHAPTER 1
ERRANT GRAMMARS
Defacing the Ceremony
And what was Columbus doing on the coasts of West Africa in 1468?
— JOHN HENRIK CLARKE, "Christopher Columbus and Genocide"
They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos; uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmaredoor that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially fukú — generally a curse of doom of some kind, specifically the Curse and Doom of the New World. ... No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú on the world, and we've all been in the shit ever since.
— JUNOT DÍAZ, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map toopen space for discovery; intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did theoriginal charting of the New World — without the mandate for conquest.
— TONI MORRISON, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
"Why here? I mean it just seems so out of place," lamented Jean Brady, a volunteer who helps the Friends of Christopher Columbus Park maintain stewardship of the park in Boston's North End. Brady was responding to the red paint simulating blood that covered portions of the sailor Columbus's forehead and face, a shoulder, and portions of his folded arms. The crimson paint ran down the conquistador's back into a pool of bloody red surrounding his feet. A tag spray-painted in black letters, with each word stacked on another, read "BLACK LIVES MATTER!" For Brady, as well as other onlookers, the statue of Columbus, defaced by allegedly Black actors, confounded North American common sense and frustrated conventional narratives about the origins of the New World.
When local residents and visitors to the park were confronted with the bloody defacement of Columbus "the discoverer," they expressed their sense of incredulity. People could not seem to wrap their heads around why Columbus had become a target of despoilment by "allegedly" Black actors. The local ABC News affiliate in Boston interviewed two individuals who became aware of the event during their visit to the waterfront the day the story was being covered. When the ABC reporter showed them images of the defaced statue, one of the visitors responded confoundedly, "Oh look, there's blood there," as if the association of blood with Christopher Columbus was some kind of non sequitur or had some oblique kind of relationship to the historical figure. In the White "American" imagination, if bloodletting was associated with Columbus at all, it was confined to Indigenous peoples and failed to touch the bodies and lives of Black people.
The defacing of the statue in June 2015 became a news item because of its association with the Black Lives Matter movement. Since its design and placement in the park, the statue has been defaced several times. Often around annual Columbus Day celebrations, Indigenous and Native activists deface the statue in protest of the "bloody" festivities. In 2006, in response to upcoming Columbus Day commemorations, protestors beheaded the statue. The removed head remained missing for days. Accustomed to these ongoing acts of protests from the usual suspects, the Native American community, local and national news outlets covering the defacement found the event novel and newsworthy on June 25. This particular act of defacement was new because the accused perpetrators were Black. The Black actors of this form of symbolic violence created a cognitive dissonance for the mainstream U.S. news audience and their journalists.
Beyond local stories about the incident in the Boston metro area, national news sources covered the incident. Labeled an act of "vandalism," the incident was presumed to be part of the string of acts of vandalism and defacement of Confederate monuments across the southeastern part of the United States immediately following the massacre of nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina. This incident of "vandalism" in the northeastern city of Boston elicited a number of responses. For the North End resident Jean Brady, it did not sync within the space and time of Boston, Christopher Columbus, or the Movement for Black Lives. As a sympathizer with the movement, Brady found it hard to believe that the people who belong to or believe in Black Lives Matter's cause would participate in an act like this. In a state of disbelief, she stated, "This is not what they would do." A few days later, the Boston Herald interviewed Daunasia Yancey, the local founder and lead organizer of Black Lives Matter Boston. While Yancey maintained that members of Black Lives Matter Boston had nothing to do with this political act of public resistance, she also stated, "We fully support it."
In the comments sections that appear on a number of the online sources that reported the story, commentators left a range of responses that evinced an inability to make the connection between Black death and Black rage and Columbus. Readers' comments covered a wide range, from those that insulted the intelligence of the "vandals" to ones that characterized the act as an appropriation of Native American issues and responses that relegated Black death and White-supremacist violence to the Confederate South. One comment left on the Media Equalizers website, where the news article appeared, is particularly telling. A commenter with the username "Jack Sparrow" simply weighed in with, "What a moron. Columbus had nothing to do with Africans in America."
This kind of historical amnesia or willful North American ignorance of Columbus's role in the slave trade and how conquest invented and instantiated Blackness as a form of abjection in the modern world is due to North American quotidian circulations of settler colonialist common sense. For many, Columbus and the unfortunate yet inevitable genocide of Indigenous peoples are traditionally treated as unrelated to Black life and death within the public discourse of the history of the Americas. Even leftist critiques of the normalized acts of commemoration (Columbus Day) and public forms of pedagogy that naturalize conquest typically are singularly focused on Columbus the murderer, not Columbus the enslaver. More important, what remains uninterrogated about Columbus is his role in inaugurating the modern notion of the human and affixing it to a "European self." This European self knows itself and continually performs its existence through the dehumanization of Indigenous and Black people. This aspect of conquest, a violent and repetitive process of making the modern human through extinguishing Black and Indigenous life, is disavowed and willfully forgotten. One legacy of the Columbian rupture was the creation of a Christian humanism that would transmute into various forms of secular humanism, which, in turn, would maintain their parasitic relationship to Indigenous and Black life.
It is clear that various news sources disavow Columbus's role in the Atlantic Slave trade through circulating the idea that the supposedly Black vandals were misdirected in their public act of protest. The tone and framing of most of the coverage presumed that Columbus and conquest had nothing to do with Black people. One of the problems with settler colonial common sense's erasure of Black suffering from the equation is that Black critiques of the notion of the human are simultaneously disavowed. When Black performances of resistance focus on conquest, the making and remaking of the human as non-Indigenous and non-Black becomes central to Black critique. I invoke performance here and cite how Diana Taylor uses the term in her work The Archive and the Repertoire. Taylor argues that theatrical and embodied scenarios of conquest and discovery "haunt our present." Scenarios are performed, repeatable, and flexible "meaning-making paradigms" that make "visible yet again, what is already there: the ghosts, the images, the stereotypes." For example, Taylor asserts that twenty-first century shows such as Survivor and Fantasy Island are examples of scenarios of discovery and conquest. In fact, the "discoverer, conqueror, 'savage,' and native princess for example might be staple characters in many Western scenarios," as well as in these televisual productions.
As scenarios are "flexible and open to change," the "scenario of conquest, restaged in numerous acts of possession as well as in plays, rituals, and mock battles throughout the Americas, can be and often has been subverted from within." I argue that the "vandals," as performers and actors, restage the scenario of Columbian discovery and conquest in a way that momentarily disrupts its temporal, spatial, and narrative power to disavow and "unknow" the ongoing violence of conquest. The act of defacing or bloodying the statue of the conquistador in 2015 (and over and over again) short-circuits the idea that conquest is a past sin committed for the greater good. The presumably Black actors, or agents acting in the name of Black life, deface Columbus, as well as open up the possibility of contending with the ongoing violence of conquest. The defacement as performance simultaneously shoals conventional settler colonial logics and puts a number of events and performances into motion. The theatricality of the act makes conquest a "living present" and an occasion of the now. More important, the theatrics make the historical and ongoing resistance to conquest by Indigenous and Black peoples visible, alive, and, in effect, repeatable. Conquest, as well as resistance to conquest, is a living, quotidian, and ever present moment that actors can interact with and interrupt. It is not an event, not even a structure, but a milieu or active set of relations that we can push on, move around in, and redo from moment to moment.
In addition to situating conquest in the present motion of "the now," the act of defacing and tagging the itinerant sailor illumines a Black critique of the human that is at the heart of interrogating the violence of contemporary social relations. The placement of blood on the statue's face, shoulders, arms, hands, feet, and back transports us to the inaugural scenes of genocide and capture that produced the human and the other human (and less than human) Native and Black bodies. Sylvia Wynter reminds scholars that the inaugural violence of conquest and the "scene" of the making of the European human and the Black (human other) occurred on the shores of what is now Senegal in the 1440s. In this recurring scene starting in the mid-1400s, Black people become lesser humans; Indigenous peoples soon follow in the 1490s, when the bloody theatrics and overrepresentation of the human are restaged at the site of Indigenous bodies who become lesser humans on the other side of the Atlantic in what will become the Americas.
However, in this 2015 scenario, it is Columbus who is trapped and subjected to violence. The scenario and ceremony of blood is disrupted. Black actors throw blood on or bloody the conquistador this time. I read the act of defacing, bloodying, or perhaps even killing the symbol of the modern human-as-European conquistador as a performance of Black critique and revolt. The power of reading this as a form of Black performance and critique is that it renders the act alive and repeatable. Further, Black performance as a critique of the violence of conquistador humanism enacts a kind of utterance, "speech," and extratextual act outside of and against the overrepresentation of the human as a violent and normative state of existence. In conversation with Fred Moten's understanding of Black performance, the bloodying of Columbus illustrates how "Black performance has always been the ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism of surplus — invagination, rupture, collision, augmentation." Black actors and their performances can interrupt the narrative commonsense and quotidian processes of making the human. Further, the defacement of the statue in the name of Black Lives is a critique of the human from a space outside of full and proper humanity — Blackness. For Black actors, the human — and its overrepresentation as Columbus — becomes a site for the potential destabilization and reorganization of the idea of the human outside of the normative mandates of conquest and the death of Native and Black peoples.
Further, Black revolt as performance sits both within and outside the bounds of translatability. Sometimes the meaning can be discerned within humanist modes of speech and gesture, and at other times, it is elusive because it speaks outside humanist systems of signification and corporeal protocols. The performed revolt and defacement of Columbus as a stand-in for the human is part of a set of intentional kinetic motions in the act of throwing the red paint and bloodying the statue. It is also an alternative form of Black writing. This particular form of Black writing disfigures the notion of the normative human as it makes space for something else or otherwise.
In The Archive and the Repertoire, Taylor attends to the ways that Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica in the fifteenth century developed a unique relationship between embodied performance and writing that marked an epistemic rupture and illumined a precolonial (and, in 2015, perhaps decolonial) orientation to logos, or "the word." Taylor explains that the theatricality of the scenario "does not rely on language to transmit a set pattern of behavior or action." While the Black Lives Matter action on the Boston waterfront may have involved a "tag," or a form of writing that operates through shared Anglo linguistic systems, it is hard to tell whether embodied performance, ceremony, song, utterance, or the words came first and animated the force of the performance/disruption. Taylor goes on to describe the relationship of the Indigenous peoples of the America to writing: "Although the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas practiced writing before Conquest — either in pictogram form, hieroglyphs, or knotting systems — it never replaced the performed utterance. Writing though highly valued, was primarily a prompt to performance, a mnemonic aid. ... Writing was far more dependent on embodied culture than the other way around."
In Mesoamerica, writing was a prompt and an aid, not the totality of the performance. In other words, writing was not the goal, the achievement, or what carried authority, as it was in Europe. While I speculate here, I wonder whether the bloodying and the tagging (writing on) the statue of Columbus could also be read as a combination of antihumanist and anticolonial theatricality and writing. Without needing to decide which came first — as only the taggers know — the acts of bloodying and tagging can be interpreted as interdependent. Further, as there were no witnesses, it is difficult to tell which came first: the bloodying (embodied performance or throwing of paint) or the tag (writing as an embodied performance of defacement and erasing/revision). The ordered logic and mechanics of writing are also altered or rewritten in this act of defacement.
The ceremonial defacing of Columbus exists within the Black tradition of the destruction of property as a feature of abolition and fugitivity. More important, property destruction as part of the repertoire of Black revolt is always an act that remains partial and beyond full knowability as part of its act erases or destroys evidence of its full meaning. The tag or the writing itself, "BLACK LIVES MATTER!" also does not offer full knowability as a phrase, despite how it is currently invoked by those affiliated with the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). What I infer from this act of defacement is that it marked an active and living moment in which the inaugural scenes of violence that created the understanding of who is human were interrupted. The taggers crashed this ceremony of the violent making, remaking, and monumentalizing of the human and disrupted and changed it.
The utterances, performances, and statements of Black abolition and Native decolonization that meet at the space of Columbus's monument (in 2006, 2015, and the future) require new words, syntax, tense, visuality, and senses. They require a transformation of the person encountering them for them to be felt and, one hopes, understood. I chose the defacing of the Columbus statute and, more important, its illegibility for some "White humans" as a point of departure for exploring what the White conquistador human cannot, fails, or refuses to see. More important, this is an invitation to talk about everyday modes of parasitic self-actualization in North America in ways that are blunt and direct. The second decade of the twenty-first century and its forms of documentary technology — such as the cell phone and digital images — have saturated everyday life with scenes of carnage. While the gratuitous bloodletting of Black and Indigenous communities since 1492 has not stopped, the modes of erasing them through academic and political discourse are challenged by digital technologies and movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock Sioux's protectors. These contemporary social movements confront the genocidal violence of the state and White supremacy in ways that require new and old forms of speech. Social movements now explicitly center the abolition of white genocidal violence in ways that have required a shift in speech and activity toward what Wynter would call "street speech."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Black Shoals"
by .
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