the blueshift journal

Civilly unseen

 

                   You know those images of white girls in protests who are up in the faces of riot cops, yelling and calling them pigs or murderers, or saying whatever they want to them. I guess this is supposed to mean something. This is supposed to be their activism; their civil disobedience. As a viewer, or as an observer if you’re in that protest with them, you’re kind of watching the scene with disgust and annoyance as the cops keep face-forward and in some of those shots, she chestbumps him.

                  Or the video of a kid standing at the top of the stairs telling a group of police officers in the foyer to “get the fuck! out of my house,” many, many times. And how he keeps calling them “niggers” (or “niggas,” whatever). And how one of the officers is a black man. And how the cops don’t even so much as give the kid eye-contact.

                  I mean, that’s invisible.

                  Wherein aggressive people are not deemed a threat, not worthy of brutality. I keep thinking – they’re not the one these cops are looking for. Brutality is reserved for the visible. The rest are picnic goers, walmart shoppers, spoiled brats, school skippers, going through temper tantrums and growing pangs, fucking punks.

                  The people who are visible are criminally seen – the minute they pick up a toy gun, pull on a hoodie, put something in their pocket. It’s like the moment the cyborg’s eyes glow red and locks in its target.

 

***

                  I am invisible at times. I live in a town where black folks are one-half of one percent of the adult population. In the bar, when the beer mug is splashed to rest in front of me, my room vanishes. The other drinkers are interested in window, in wall, in sign beyond me, in door behind me. We like to pretend I don’t exist.  Invisibility is a loneliness. a negation. a thick wall.

                  I wish against the issue of my inconvenience. I wish they thought in more terms than label and correctness. I wish they were happy for my difference.

                  This invisibility is a complaint of the lucky. of the living. 

                  In such racially homogeneous settings, we are twice forgotten, people of color. Once in the mainstream subconscious, because they don’t have to think about us, really until someone reminds them we are here. The moment we must (sorry) insist on our presence. We have no choice really. Say we have a question about something on a bill, or need to order the daily soup, or need to walk through a space where they are all standing. And from which they have not moved.

                  And then we are again forgotten in the conscious, wherein they are nervous around us once they’ve seen us. Maybe they are afraid they may say something wrong, afraid the situation may go sour. They think they might let something slip, not know what to talk about, get it wrong. Of course, this is about best intentions. I’m not even talking about people who are consciously bigoted.

                  But let’s call this civil invisibility. We are invisible, but in a survivable way. We are left to our black and brown devices. Remaining outside, intact preferably. But often outside.

                  I am an apparition who can move through corridors. I do this all the time.  

 

***

 

                  The first time I read Invisible Man, I remember thinking it wasn’t the first time I’d read it. I knew that basement of lights, that voice of the speaker hiding out inside his flooded room, daring anyone to discover.

                  I chalked it up to coincidence, a faint connection I could not make. I put the book down. It was somehow enough, or maybe too much.

                  Then I returned to it. Reread the prologue. Then the first chapter felt familiar, too. And how could I have any familiarity with the battle royal. How could it be familiar to me. As a girl. As a light-skinned girl. I felt rather ill and put it down again.

                  I’d let go of my hauntings by the second chapter. Particularly since that ride with the founder begins so stiff and unfamiliarly. Then the speaker and the founder find Jim Trueblood and learn the perverse story behind his still-infected wound.  

By the time I reached that early point in Ellison’s novel, I felt sick again. I put the book down and did not pick it back up for months. The sickness, too, felt familiar. Not because of the perversion exactly, but because of the founder. Because of the way the story is told - in front of white folks. We are supposed to stay invisible.

                  When I picked it back up, I could not remember entirely what I’d read. And so I started from the beginning again. Basement lights. Battle royal. Ride with founder. Trueblood. And as I read it the 2nd, the 3rd time, I knew that I’d blocked it out.

Then I moved on.

                  It took me three tries to read all of Invisible Man. I have yet to understand why I had this reaction to the book’s opening. That deep sense of recurrence. Of knowing the story by heart.

                  Robert Bly says that when a poet has discovered a true analogy, “he/she is bringing up into consciousness a relationship that has been forgotten for centuries,” and it is in this way (and maybe only in this way) that I can pinpoint any understanding of invisibility/visibility. I know it in my gene, in my hunch, in my paranoia. I know it in the mural landscape moving around me, in the falling of brown men and women who attempt to live a flawed humanity, in other words, who attempt visibility, or is it … invisibility?

                  --- forgotten for centuries.

                  Nothing else seems to explain how I understand those basement lights. Sometimes, when I am lost in my awe of those sections, I have the faintest notion, a suggestion of a thought – that I was born in that basement room. All the light bulbs hanging above me like the most awful mobile. A sort of soundless, blinding introduction to sight.

                  It seems to me impossible to pinpoint, to lay reference to invisibility. It’s a kind of sixth sense. A sneaking suspicion. An accusation to an empty space from an empty room. You cannot (literally) put your finger on it, because once you touch it, it can be seen.

 

***

 

                  Claudia Rankine has a passage in Citizen where a clerk corrects a man who cuts in front of a woman in a drugstore line. To her, he says “Oh my God, I didn’t see you.”

                  She says, “You must be in hurry.”

                  He says “No, no, no, I really didn’t see you.”

                  The very act of demanding the mirror acknowledge its reflection has changed the preceding moment. Now it’s a discussion of visibility. But the actors here are speaking of ghosts. Of moments ago. The dynamic of invisibility is destroyed, now. The speaker can no longer be assured of her invisibility. Because even as the man assures her that she was momentarily invisible, he acknowledges her visibility, once forced. But he insists on her former invisibility, and in his insistence, he affirms her presence – by way of contrast. It’s really two different conversations.

                  Or maybe it’s four. Because he is also insisting that she, like him, is invisible! You might imagine him saying “Because I don’t see color!” He means to reassure her civility, through his blindness.

                  What an awful state. The invisible shifting in and out of perceptibility. The invisibility is embodied only in the discussion of its absence. And which is preferable, to be seen, or to be not seen?

 

***

 

                  The truth is, I don’t usually mind being invisible. Sometimes I try to walk through white walls. I could yell with a kite. I could stand on my head. Sometimes I could speak loud and everybody hush, or talk low and people get louder. There’s always a fire hydrant on in the street and I’m the only one hears it.

                  I laugh at nothing to no one. I laugh at something to someone if they listen. I can sense channels switching off. I don’t know whose from, from whose; it feels national. I don’t know which channels avert me, it feels pre-ordained. The truth is sometimes I walk into the streets as my father. I have his strut, his hair, his jaw, his teeth.

                  … my father had no teeth.

                                    Then I remember who I am. And I can’t tell which ghost is which.

                  Some days I don’t care.

                  I know what it means and to whom, and whom by. But it’s hard for me to gauge from inside.

                                                                                       I am not

                                                                                                  invisible. I don’t know which invisible is drowning or curt or

                                                                                                  daily bruised, which invisible, which mirror, which fear. I can’t

                                                                                                  tell if it’s invisible or haunting, what’s left. Sometimes, I wanted

to wake my father from his sleep. I wanted to tell him to break, to shatter, to glass up the street. The sleep and the wake. The ache in the head. The way I watched the walk to his door. That invisible could have been the kind that reaped.

                  But there is a fine line between civilly invisible and criminally visible.

 

***

 

                  “Something in this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life.” – Ralph Ellison

 

***

                  George Zimmerman was not stalking a ghost. Were Eric Garner in a different skin, different clothes, not only would have been less likely to have to resort to selling loosies on that street corner, but his invisibility would have been more likely to protect him. Those officers were not surrounding nobody there. Daniel Pantaleo did not dangle from the neck of a phantom. He came to Eric Garner looking for his skin, his height, his flaw. Reaching his arms to the giant above him, he pulled at the weight of a man of mass. Of course, Pantaleo claims he did not put Garner in a chokehold, but not because he did not see him, not because he thought no one was standing there. Those officers were watching for him, waiting for him to make a move, any move.

 

***

                  Civil invisibility probably gets me jobs. Or it might invite me to dinner to say it did. I’m sure it has put my name on lists, just so it could point to those lists. I don’t know which, or when, or who, because of course that’s complicated, and out of sight.

But I know it hasn’t killed me, or rendered me seen. I am in my skin, with my hair and my teeth and I am eating the world.

                  … or I am in my skin, my teeth and my hair and I am watching bodies that feel like mine gunned to the ground and choked and beaten and then I am watching my body fade into the static of a video mosaic hum.

                  Most days I want to eat with my teeth and make it a show and pretend it didn’t happen and vanish the air right back.

 

**

 

                  It occurs to me that this is a dream of the loner. There is no one looking at you, so you can do whatever you want. Say whatever you want. Sit for as long as you need to. If no one talks to you, or asks you to explain, you only have to explain to the page.

                  It makes you more productive.

 

                  Q:        How do you write about things?

                  A:         Stop talking about them.

 

                  In my invisibility, I am stealth. I finish work and writing and projects. I make good food and clean house. I am afforded space. I dislike questions. I find less need to share the answers. I like my memories where they belong. I like things put up, like toys with ambient, yellowing wood. If I think about this too long, it bothers me that I don’t have to defend my person against too many people asking too many things of me, too many questions.

                  I didn’t want to want to be invisible. But it is, it is, a room full of lights.

 

**