Re-Fleshing the Black Body: Form, Figuration and the Hot Bloom of Becoming in Sterling Brown's "Southern Road"
David Wojahn once declared this a magnus opus, but it's just more academic stuff no one cares about and something I would re-write if I wanted to publish elsewhere. It was, however, the first spark leading me to an awareness that the soul is not inside the body but the body is inside the soul (that is the magic of poetry).
Re-Fleshing the Black Body: Form, Figuration and the Hot Bloom of Becoming in Sterling Brown's "Southern Road"
The Great Migration in the early part of the 20th century of African Americans from the mostly rural South to the cities of the North–one of the largest migrations of any ethnic group in the United States–was, for some, an opportunity to exercise individual and collective autonomy. Though moving North meant leaving behind their social and economic bases, because the migration was mostly to the largest cities which had influence over both the sociopolitical and artistic culture of the United States, African Americans were able to grow new communities of their own to influence American culture. The Harlem neighborhood in New York City became the center of this "New Negro Movement," and it is fitting that Harlem was originally built to be a suburb of exclusivity for upper middle class white people, replete with grand stately houses, streets, and amenities. Later termed the Harlem Renaissance, the artists and writers engaged in this cultural movement had opposing views on what kind of art Black folks in America should be making.
Writers like Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, and James Weldon Johnson believed Black literature should be "high brow," which is to say, white. Of contemporary Black music, Alain Locke writes that "the mind of the Negro seems ... to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation" (qtd in Davis 151). But the "Negro problem," as articulated by Booker T. Washington, was not due to systemically cancerous racism, but an individual failing of Black people to reach the ideals of white culture; in other words, it is an individual failing to erase their own Blackness, deemed primitive even amongst themselves. Spiritual emancipation, for Locke and others urging this creative move towards whiteness, is exactly that: a move towards whiteness. In his article "The Negro Spirituals," Locke argues that spirituals are not themselves a musical tradition, but a raw potentiality to be forced into the shape of a "classic" musical tradition: "A genius that would organize its distinctive elements in a formal way would be the musical giant of his age" (Locke 209).
But writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sterling Brown recognized that Black music and literature already had a form, one that was legitimate despite its non-conformity with Eurocentric "classical" music. In his manifesto "The Negro Artists and the Racial Mountain" Langston Hughes writes, likely of Countee Cullen, that "one of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, 'I want to be a poet–not a Negro poet,' meaning, I believe ... 'I would like to be white'" (Hughes 99). "This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America–this urge within the race towards whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible" (99). The proponents of this kind of Black literature and music argued that it had value in itself and could function as a catalyst to wake people up to the realities of what it meant to be Black in America, and to embrace it. "It is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro–and beautiful!'" Hughes continues: "let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand" (104). Sterling Brown, like Hughes, wrote many poems in the blues form, legitimizing it as a poetic form and unifying both the high- and low-brow. In his poem "Southern Road," he goes even further by using the form of a chain-gang song, putting the poetry in the mouth of the hollering reader whose breath in turn animates the poem into a more embodied, ontological form, rather than a two-dimensional literary form. For Black people, the only way to become a speaking subject was to inscribe their voices in the written word (Gates 130).
At the same time, modernists like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ezra Pound were also calling for a new kind of literature that would capture the disillusionment of the war-torn era. In the aftermath of WWI, the concept of "God" no longer functioned as a transcendental signifier–something from which every other signifier splits off from and which would stabilize meaning–and modernists like Eliot were looking to poetry as the new transcendental signifier that would make the world possible for art.
Interestingly, it was three years after Eliot's The Waste Land was published that Alain Locke suggested that "a genius that would organize its distinctive elements in a formal way would be the musical giant of his age" (Locke 209). This was already ten years after the initial Modernist revolution and writers like Eliot were set on disrupting the stifles of form inherited from the stuffy Victorian poets. But should a Black person dare aspire to anything other than to fall into form with canon, it was considered primitive and unrefined, even by other members of the Black community like Locke.
The intentions of the modernists were surely not malicious, if a bit naive; and they did recognize the ideology that inheres in classic literary tradition. The ideology hidden within the poetic line is described by Anthony Easthope in his 1983 book Poetry as Discourse. First, poetry is different from prose in its phonetic and semantic repetitions of signifiers, foregrounding them. Such signifiers cannot transparently communicate meaning because they precede and thus mediate between the signified and the reader. Because of this precedence of the signifier over the signified, "the form of a poem can not be seen as a means of representation which is isolated from the poem's ideological nature. The organization of the poetic line, we are told, is historically determined and in itself therefore ideological" (Stone 211). British poetry, for example, is dominated by iambic pentameter which coheres its discourse. From the Renaissance onwards, English poetic discourse has occupied the same space along with "the capitalist mode of production and the hegemony of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class" (Easthope 24). Accordingly, "this discourse continues to 'produce' the reader who produces it through a reading in the present" (Dowling 247).
However, in exalting Mythic Method, they perhaps did not realize they were replacing one ideology with another. Eliot, in his essay "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," praises Joyce's novel for its use of myth as if myth could be historically neutral. The utilization of myth, he writes, "is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (qtd in Donoghue 207). Arguing that the novel died with Flaubert, he holds that Ulysses is a grand accomplishment in a new non-narrative form in whose footsteps all should follow, and which his poem The Waste Land later exemplifies.
However, his effusive critical praise of Ulysses for its use of the Odyssey as a foundation amounts to no more than calling it a "scientific discovery" because "no one else has built a novel upon such a foundation before. It has never before been necessary" while explicitly refusing to elaborate his claims (207). What Eliot fails to see is that the entirety of white European literary canon (and most of its culture) sprang forth from ancient Greek literature and myths; "such a foundation" undergirds the entire canon of Western literature. Instead, he assumes myth is somehow ahistorical, that it is some kind of naturally occurring semiotics of the unconscious, a universal language to draw upon outside of the ravages of the contemporary moment. However, he does not mention what it is, exactly, Joyce adds on top of its Odyssean foundation to make it anything more than simple allegory. It is merely an ideological echo of a logocentric and patriarchal past, a flat pastiche produced as a performative act for Joyce's own self-aggrandizement. It zombifies a dead ideology, and acts as an eccentric distraction so it may go unnoticed that the emperor is unclothed. One can even read Eliot's essay itself as a form of linguistic myth with its grand universal declarations; indeed some have speculated that Eliot was using Joyce as a conduit by which to praise himself retrospectively for the late mythic additions to The Waste Land in the hopes that readers would analyze it with the mythic method in mind and thus make himself into a myth.
Myth is indeed a way of controlling, ordering, giving shape–but to literature, bodies and history, not the violent paroxysm of a dying imperialism. Myth actively sanitizes historical intentions, justifying them and making them appear natural, and contingencies eternal; in its making of the past a historical reality, it thus makes present circumstances too seem natural. "And just as bourgeois ideology is defined by the abandonment of the name 'bourgeois,' myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in [myth], things lose the memory [from which] they once were made," Barthes writes in his essay "Myth Today." It is an egregore, a collective delusion that "has turned reality inside out" and "has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation[;] in short a perceptible absence" (Barthes 142). Succinctly, "myth is depoliticized speech" that gives to human acts "the simplicity of essences" and "does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible" and "organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves" (144). William Carlos Williams could just as well have said "No ideology but in things."
Eliot may have been on to something with regards to working with the unconscious, however; it may be that it just comes off flat and empty because of the condition of racial relations in the United States at the time:
[T]he white American figuratively [forces] the Negro down into the deeper level of his consciousness, into the inner world, where reason and madness mingle with hope and memory and endlessly give birth to nightmare and to dream; down into the province of the psychiatrist and the artist, from whence spring the lunatic's fancy and the work of art. ... Obviously this position need not be absolutely disadvantageous for the Negro. It might, in a different culture, be highly strategic, enlisting in his cause the freedom-creating powers of art. For imprisoned in the deepest drives of human society, it is practically impossible for the white American to think of sex, of economics, his children or women-folk, or of sweeping sociopolitical changes, without summoning into consciousness fear-flecked images of [B]lack men. Indeed, it seems that the Negro has become identified with those unpleasant aspects of conscience and consciousness which it is part of the American's character to avoid. Thus when the literary artist attempts to tap the charged springs issuing from his inner world, up float his misshapen and bloated images of the Negro, like the fetid bodies of the drowned, and he turns away discarding an ambiguous substance which the artists of other cultures would confront boldly and humanize into the stuff of a tragic art. (Ellison qtd in Gates 109-10; emphasis added)
Not only is the entire semiology of myth an emptied abstraction, but the privileged minds feeding off of it and reproducing it, too, have become bland and evaporated, both a sort of abstracted simulacrum: copies with no originals.
One of the problems with Ulysses using the Odyssey as its foundation (or any other canonical mythological texts that Western culture is based on) is that it fails to see within itself an immanence of the logocentric speech/writing binary, in which speech is privileged over the written word because of its immediacy, i.e. the voice is assumed to be located closer to the soul and inner person because it comes so immediately from the body, whereas writing can exist in a writer's absence. Speech is an inheritance from the oral tradition out of which texts like the Odyssey were birthed, a vestige irrelevant to the particularities required by poetry in particular. Following Derrida, the logocentric thought in which we are steeped privileges speech over writing because thought (in logocentrism, thought is thought based around "logos" or reason) is mediated in communication "first through speech, and then later through writing. Speech is thus the original signifier of meaning, while writing is merely a signifier of a signifier. ... Logocentric thought privileges speech for this characteristic as well as its interiority — 'thinking to oneself' is typically thought of as internally 'hearing oneself speak' rather than 'reading one's own writing.' This thought process establishes speech as the primary human medium and writing as a secondary technology" (Harrison).
As long as writing remains within this logocentric paradigm and derivative of speech (thus inheriting the narrative structures and the temporal contingencies of oral literature which cannot delinearize or "go back" to a previous part of the text to unpack meaning in a different way), it will only ever be a continually accreting, pupating mass always trying to build up a clear meaning that cannot be apprehended and does not exist (since words as signifiers only mean something in the continual différance and deferral of meaning). A written literature born or derived from oral literature does not reach its full potential of discursive possibilities because it is temporalized the same as speech, appearing to the readers like one signifier after another in a horizontal, linear syntagmatic chain they must follow like a train on tracks (similar to how one must listen to speech, in one straight line). Non-linear novels like Ulysses do not escape this, either: one can cut up a line, but so long as it is reconstituted as a line, it is still a line. One can chop up the temporality of the imagined world of the novel, but it is still contained within a framework of linearity. In the case of a novel, it is quite literally arranging signifiers along one track linearly, line by line, page by page, in flat two dimensions.
This ignores the spatial aspect of not just language but existence, bifurcating the coin of space-time and living only in the temporal half. Writing within the logocentric paradigm in which speech is privileged over writing, tacit as it may be in Joyce and others' work, necessitates the concept of an a priori space–another kind of transcendental signifier to which everything else can point back to in order to define themselves and stabilize meaning instead of it constantly being this slippery deferral–and time that underlies the semiology of empirical signs that enable us to split the unity of our experience and articulate a difference between space and time that, like myth, appears natural. But this splitting of space and time is less naturally experienced than it is much more an effect of a structure that can be described grammatologically: "Origin of the experience of space and time, this writing of difference, this fabric of the trace, permits the difference between space and time to be articulated, to appear as such, in the unity of an experience" (Derrida 65-6).
Gotthold Lessing argues in his essay "Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry" that because aesthetic art like sculpture and painting use different materials than literature, they must also be different in the creative laws to which they adhere: "If it is true ... that painting and poetry in their imitations make use of entirely different means or symbols–the first, namely, of form and color in space, the second of articulated sounds in time–if these symbols indisputably require a suitable relation to the thing symbolized, then it is clear that symbols arranged in juxtaposition can only express subjects of which the wholes or parts exist in juxtaposition; while consecutive symbols can only express subjects of which the wholes or parts are themselves consecutive" (Lessing qtd in Frank 7). As Joseph Frank writes in one of the first essays on spatial form in literature, The Idea of Spatial Form, Lessing believed "aesthetic form is not an external arrangement provided by a set of traditional rules. Rather, it is the relation between the sensuous nature of the art medium and the conditions of human perception. The 'natural man' of the eighteenth century was not to be bound by traditional political forms but was to create them in accordance with his own nature. Similarly, art was to create its own forms out of itself rather than accept them ready-made from the practice of the past, and criticism, instead of prescribing rules for art, was to explore the necessary laws by which art governs itself" (Frank 9; emphasis added). As much as this argument applies to the difference between the plastic arts and literature, it applies to written and oral literature, though one must bracket Lessing's assumption that the natural order for poetry is consecutive.
Frank, specifically citing Eliot, Pound, Proust, and Joyce, argues that modern literature contemporaneous to his essay was moving towards a spatial form that undermined the primacy of the temporal in literature, contradicting Lessing. Quoting Pound's definition of the Image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" (11), wherein the image "is defined not as a pictorial reproduction but as a unification of disparate ideas and emotions into a complex presented spatially in an instant of time. Such a complex does not proceed discursively, in unison with the laws of language, but strikes the reader's sensibility with instantaneous impact" (11). He continues by elaborating the importance of the instantaneous presentation of those complexes in order to have "that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art" (Pound qtd in Frank 11).
Eliot and Pound both attempted this in their writing, and Eliot does achieve some success with this aim in The Waste Land, "where syntactical sequence is given up for a structure depending on the perception of relationships between disconnected word-groups (or what I would call mythemes, given that words are a kind of myth). To be properly understood, these word-groups must be juxtaposed with one another and perceived simultaneously." While the word-groups follow each other in time–more of a consequence of space than of time–"their meaning does not depend on this temporal relationship. The one difficulty of these poems, which no amount of textual exegesis can overcome, is the internal conflict between the time logic of language and the space-logic implicit in the modern conception of the nature of poetry" (Frank 14).
For if an image is supposed to present an instantaneous emotional-intellectual complexes in simultaneity, then "linking images in a sequence would clearly destroy most of their efficacy. Or was the poem itself one vast image, whose individual components were to be apprehended as a unity? But then it would be necessary to undermine the inherent consecutiveness of language, frustrating the reader's normal expectation of a sequence and forcing him to perceive the elements of the poem as juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in time" (12). To undermine such sequencing is exactly what is needed to undermine the ideology and constraints of the ideology of myth, narrative, and orally-derived written literature.
This conception of spatial form can be seen as a kind of externalized or visualized différance, reflexive because word-groups primarily to something else inside the poem, where "meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time." Rather than the traditional approach to writing where words and word-groups immediately refer back to what they signify and meaning is put together in sequence of those word-group-signifiers, "modern poetry asks readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity" (15). However, it still does not achieve its goal–a line is still linear even if you chop it up.
The modern poetry Frank cites does not achieve its goal primarily because it remains two-dimensional, which accordingly–even aside from Frank's so-called spatiality that only exists conceptually–can never accurately depict anything other than that which is two-dimensional–other writing, perhaps, though even that is slippery–as Lessing argues. It remains two-dimensional because of that pesky logos that dominates and mediates our thinking, makes us create language and myths and higher and higher order abstractions until life and all thought lives in the privileged mind rather than in the body. Reinforcing the mind/body binary opposition, it also cleaves subject from object the same way the structure of our language cleaves space from time. It has taken as a false assumption the page as a discrete, separate object from the subject who reads it and inadvertently reinforced it.
Derrida himself questioned whether it was possible to get outside of this logocentric paradigm. I argue that it is possible with a kind of spatial form that does not flatten history and is grounded in the body and the self rather than some external transcendental signified. It is in the interplay of subject and object, the dialectical gap between written and the spoken, that possibility exists. Perhaps better examples of spatial form are Jean Genet's early prison novels, in which Derrida "identifies an interstitial aestheticism and an oscillatory 'style navette' which radically subverts the notions of spatial enclosure, narcissism and corporeal essentialism. The interstice therefore appears a potential site of resistance, an immanent source of critique that is (dis)located in the fissures and cracks of conventional architectonics, emerging from within the panoptic architecture and the supposedly 'docile bodies' of the disciplinary regime" (Blackburne 22). What is needed is contre, meaning "both opposition and proximity" and "comparable to the ambivalent figure of the interstice and the deconstructive notion of 'espacement,' share in the way these limit-concepts blur the distinctions between inside and outside, self and other, presence and absence"–and subject and object, speech and writing (22). It is Sterling Brown who does this by wedding speech and writing together where they meet in the in-between body and produce an orthographic ontology (that is, a mode of existence outside of the flat narratological x- and y-axes; imagine such axes shot through by a z-axis, figuratively speaking).
A spatial, embodied literature is especially needed for those whose bodies have been reduced to nothing more than flesh, as is the case with Black Americans. Hortense Spillers makes a distinction between "body" and "flesh" and posits the body as metonymic for the entirety of social arrangements. The captive body on slave ships was atomized and the flesh divided, and lost "any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and anatomical features." This reduction to flesh amounts to a "theft of the body." Flesh has been torn from "the captive body [which] reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor" (Spillers 68, 67, 67). I would argue it does not even have the dignity of being for the captor; it is one kind of Deleuze's "body without organs." It becomes not just an unbodied flesh, or simply commodified meat, or an inert ontological object; it is denied a body at all, relegated to the realm of concept (territorialized by logocentrism) where it can be more easily contained and corralled, and the violence against it justified.
Concentrated in flesh is "'ethnicity' that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor discourse away" and ethnicity "belongs ... to a class of symbolic [logocentric, for one] paradigms that ... inscribe [it] as a scene of negation" (67, 66; emphasis added). At the same time, the hegemony of logocentrism is writ directly on these bodies. There is a violence that inheres in words: just as the structure and semiotics of language cleaves apart subject and object, words themselves are a kind of abstracted myth created by circumscribing concepts, carving them from the unity of flesh of the world, a kind of carnal semiotics. Violence and scars are "undecipherable markings on the captive body" that "render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh." Recognizing the importance of naming and the power of words, Spillers declares "sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us" (67, 68).
Ethnicity is perceived as "mythical time" which creates "white" and "black" as oppositional binaries, where Black is perceived as negation, i.e. not-white. However, both in literary tradition and sociopolitically, a canonical white literature (and the white modernists' version of spatial form and "mythic method" in addition to the typical narrative forms) was (is) contingent on the presence of black slave (see: Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark). Black bodies in America have not been merely subjugated, but erased: "If we think of 'flesh' as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the [slave] ship's hole, fallen, or 'escaped' overboard." On slave ships, they "were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all" (67, 72).
What Spillers says of gender can be more generally applied to Black ontology itself: "This problematizing of gender [or existence, body] places her ... out of the traditional symbolics of female gender [or ontology], and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female [Black] social subject." She recognizes the power in taking control of language, in this case through naming (which is to say, circumscription and deracination) that happened as a result of matriarchal family structures that developed without a patronym because of slavery: "Actually claiming the monstrosity of a female with the potential to name [or a Black poet to wield a pen], which her culture imposes in blindness, [she] might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female [Black] empowerment [and way of being]" (80).
Not only are Black subjects denied a body, but they are also denied a space for existence. Christina Sharpe asks what it means to inhabit this denied space, this Fanonian "zone of non-Being," or what she calls "the wake," and suggests it may be found in "images, poetry, and literature. ... That set of work by Black artists, poets, writers and thinkers is positioned against a set of quotidian catastrophic events and their reporting that together comprise what I am calling the orthography of the wake" (21). The wake is a liminal space; it is the wake of the slave ship, the wake of a funeral and watching the dead, the wake of consciousness. If one can recognize living in it, that "the wake has positioned [one] as no-citizen" then, perhaps, we may be able to establish "ways of re/seeing, re/inhabiting, and re/imagining the world." To stay in the wake is to "rupture the structural silences produced and facilitated by, and that produce and facilitate, Black social and psychic death" (Sharpe 22).
But how does one stay in the wake, both "with and as those whom the state positions to die ungrievable deaths and live lives meant to be unlivable?" Sharpe suggests the way out is through art and the body: "[w]e must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work; think the ways the hold cannot and does not hold even as the hold remains in the form of the semiotics of the slave ship hold, the prison, the womb [and perhaps language itself] and elsewhere in and as the tension between being and instrumentality that is Black being in the wake," like Sterling Brown turning the body from an instrument to be tortured and exploited into a musical instrument that sings itself into being again by combining song, poem, breath, and word (21-2).
Perhaps, then, the wake, a kind of interstice and therefore "a potential site of resistance" as mentioned previously. That Jean Genet's novels reasserted "bodies and spaces deemed unacceptable ... constitutes a resurgent materiality that overflows literal and metaphorical segregations, identified by Derrida as an 'element of contagion' that affects the corporeal, the spatial and the textual alike" (Blackburne 22). Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of art and literature, like Sharpe's suggestion, is one place this may be enacted. "Just as the spoken word is insignificant not only through the medium of spoken words, but also through that of accent, intonation, gesture and facial expression, and as these additional meanings no longer reveal the speaker's thoughts but the source of his thoughts and his fundamental manner of being, so poetry ... is essentially a variety of existence." Art is not for simply presenting ideas and characters the way typical literature is a horizontal chain of signifier immediately referencing a signified, one after the other; it is "to depict an inter-human event. A novel, poem, picture or musical work are individuals, that is, beings in which the expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed, their meaning, accessible only through direct contact, being radiated with no change of their temporal and spatial situation. It is in this sense that our body is comparable to a work of art. It is a nexus of living meanings, not the law for a certain number of covariant terms" (Merleau-Ponty 151).
As I suggested before, it is in the collapsing of the subject-object dichotomy (or the written-reader dichotomy) that a third ontological space can begin to be pried open. Though "the natural world presents itself as existing in itself over and above its existence for me," one can "rediscover the relationship between the embodied subject and its world, because it is transformed by its own activity into the intercourse between the epistemological subject and the object" (154). Perception, for Merleau-Ponty, is more of a reckoning with the environment than a passive act and sensuality. There is no "central I" from which objects run, but only the perceptual field itself "which draws along in its wake its own horizon of retentions and bites into the future with its protentions." Though we conceive of time as linear and typical writing reflects that, "I do not pass through a series of instances of now, the images of which I preserve and which, placed end to end, make a line" (416). The key to Sterling Brown's orthographic ontology is injecting the speech aspect to the poem, its own kind of Derridean trace of speech that can be returned to and animated with the breath. Thus, "in trying to describe the phenomenon of speech and the specific act of meaning, we shall have the opportunity to leave behind us, once and for all, the traditional subject-object dichotomy" (174).
Brown is not the first to use language subversively; Signifyin(g), or engaging in rhetorical games, was already an established practice in the Black community. "The African-American rhetorical strategy of Signifyin(g) is a rhetorical practice that is not engaged in the game of information-giving, as Wittgenstein said of poetry. Signifyin(g) turns on the play and chain of signifiers, and not on some supposed transcendent signified" (Gates 52). One can conceptualize it as such: typical signification exists as a chain of signifiers configured along a horizontal x-axis, and Signifyin(g) exists along the paradigmatic/semantic y-axis in which associative relations are suspended (49). I suggest the addition of an orthogonal z-axis to chart the ontology created in the wake and in the shattered dialectical gap between speech and writing and subject and object. Philosophers have theorized what needs to be done, but not done it; I propose Sterling Brown, in his poem "Southern Road," has not just opened a Bhabhan "Third Space" of ontologic enunciation for this different social subject, but created a way of re-membering it. As a generative site of not just artistic creativity but "generative ontology" vis-à-vis the interplay of forms between the spoken word/breath which in turn interplay with the body, and draws the reader into this act of creation, and puts it into their body which also breathes life into it, thus constructing a mode of being that eludes capture and can remain free and sovereign.
I visualize Brown's poem like the beginning credits of the popular TV show Westworld: a sort of hepatic regeneration of bodies re-membered, a creative act in the zone of non-Being/liminal space/the wake (mirrored in the sad, timeless quality of the poem). Different aspects of the poem can correlate to putting in the spine, bringing in the blood, and finally inflating it with breath and spirit and meat. The flesh of Being extrudes through the ribs that are each line calcified by repetition, welling and pushing resurgently to the surface under the morbid dirt of social-cultural-political history under which it has been buried: a hot bloom ripening to burst out of that différantial space of creation.
The image of the chain gang breaking apart, then bringing together again, like the breath that speaks the poem into being. A creative act like the word of God (as in the spirituals that were often sung on chain gangs). They function metonymically for the chain of signifiers that is the language of the poem, both horizontally (physically in space) and vertically (through the multiple meanings and associations of the poem's speaker's [or multiple speakers'] words) as well as chained to a sociopolitical history, to space, and to this seemingly liminal time in which the poem takes place. The rhythm of the poem expands and contracts with each line, like heaving lungs, in an alternating in/out breath of an individual speaker and simultaneously in an alternating call and response of one speaker and the rest of the men. Each in/out breath can be seen as a presence/absence, respectively, or even life/death (since breath is the signifier of life). The phonetic spellings of some words, too, recall the breath into a dead and lifeless written word.
Each "hunh" is like a blow to the body, but also a kind of bracing and enunciation, declaration. In the "hunh" one can also imagine hearing a hammer breaking rocks or hitting railroad spikes, a kind of fighting back. The last line of the first stanza, "Long ways to go" (Brown, line 6), speaks to the temporality and distance, except it is an eternal temporality that may well not exist. Hence, suspension–same as the suspended potentiality of being in the line "Babe's not bo'n" and each repeated "bebby" (line 18). There is also an irony in the line "Got me life": it sounds life-giving out of context, but these men (or at least our speaker) are imprisoned for life and therefore not-dead but not-alive, i.e. in the wake.
Brown's mention of "Gal's on Fifth Street" references the selling of flesh, reduced to pure physical exchange economically, a kind of slavery by a different name not much different than the chain gang. The reader can feel the weight of oppression in the reference to the "Ball an' chain," which may be not just a reference to a wife but to the legacy of slavery weighing them down physically, shackling their fleshed being to the world. When the speaker references a "Po' los' boy, bebby" again we see suspension: being "lost" suggests a liminal or interstitial state, the same as "boy" is full of potential, of not-yet, half baby/half man, that echoes in continual deferment of the self with the last word of the poem and its ellipses: "Evahmo'..." (lines 13, 29, 41, 42). The word "los" (lost), in the act of speaking this poem, represents the sankofa ("it is not wrong to go back for that which you have lost"—i.e., re-membered) that has been enacted in it. One could also argue there's a subtle connotation with the Spanish "los" as in multiple nouns or multiple selves (within one self, or chain gang). Living in the wake, these men on Brown's chain gang are not living and not yet dead, are stripped of any identity, and made to work like machines; their flesh shackled, spirit and breath and the generative ontology erupting from the shattered dialectical space are the only things that can't be chained.
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