A Requiem for Mr Wilson: Comments on David Goldberg’s Conversation with Achille Mbembe

There is footage, in black and white, of a tall African American gentleman in smart suit and tie, and a hat too, walking past a baying mob of white men. The year was 1957, in Arkansas, and the gentleman was Mr L. Alex Wilson, an African American journalist who had gone there to cover a local school’s refusal to admit nine African American students. As he passed by, the feral mob, now drunk on hate and anger, set upon him and began to kick him until his hat falls off. He stoops and gently picks it up, and as he does so, one man jumps on his neck and begins to choke him, but his tall frame holds still and he does not buckle. Another swings a lump of brick against his body, and now he is hurt and bleeding. Still they push, shove and kick him with much force and this time he falls over. But he gets up; he does not fight back, he does not run, he does not resist; he merely walks away. Throughout the ordeal he maintains his dignity, calmness, composure and even poise. Wounded, bloodied but unbowed, Mr Wilson still filed his news report that evening.

One can fill volumes of books with such stories of the African American experience: of unspeakable horrors and indignities of racism. But this is not a story that is peculiar to the African American experience; it is a story of being black, almost anywhere. These stories fill the archives; they live in memories and are embodied in contemporary black lives across the world. But what is to be made of the histories that are contained in these archives; how do we put them together without descending into the endless recycling of stories of debt (Harney and Morten, 2013), and debit, of loss and victimhood, of dehumanisation, demoralisation, trauma and of helplessness? If these are the only stories that they hold or the only story to be told, then the historian will be less than faithful to the content of those archives, and would only end up with a skewed, unbalanced and one-sided account of the black experience. History does not consist in a single story but can be viewed as a kind of balance sheet, with debit and loss, credit and merit, and profit, too. If it is true, as the Igbo say, that the story of the hunt will always favour the hunter, that is, so long as the hunter is the one telling the story, how can the story be told from the perspective of the hunted? Which is to say that the idea of loss or deficit or debt is a story told from the perspective of the victor, but when the supposed vanquished tells his or her side of the story, a new perspective emerges, perhaps a more balanced narrative. Perhaps there is profit in loss, dignity in defeat, strength in powerlessness, and that loss or defeat or powerlessness was never one-sided.

In his fascinating conversation with David Goldberg, Mbembe explains what he is trying to achieve in his latest book, The Critique of Black Reason (2017). The aim, he explains, is to trace the ‘genealogy’ of blackness not merely from a single place – because that will not do, the archives will not allow it – but from the different perspectives for which archives are available. This means not just the experience of blackness in the US but also from the perspectives of the different continents that have shaped blackness as well as how blackness has shaped itself.

The African American experience mirrors the black European experience and the Asian African experience, as all of them mirror the African experience, given that all these experiences began on the African continent. But the African American version remains the most dominant, particularly in the diaspora in all its peculiarities, particularly of the consciousness of being black in a predominantly white society. What holds everything together and makes Africans the target group for racial dehumanisation is, according to Mbembe, capitalism. Capitalism is the pernicious instrument of power and control that turns everything into commodity, including human beings, and lays them to waste after use. For nowhere in human history have so large a number of human beings from a particular part of the world been converted into a mere thing, through black enslavement. Or as he puts it, ‘black as a thing, the burning fossil that fueled capitalism during its primitive era’. It is the instrument of subjugation and dehumanisation that determines where blacks live (ghetto or prison), how they live (without education or job, or left with only menial jobs) and how much they earn.

This is a conversation rich in all the themes that it touches; from the idea of power and control to the impotence of that same power in the face of solid resistance; from enslavement to empowerment, from dehumanisation to the recognition of humanity, from death to resurrection. (Although Mbembe is dubious about identity politics, particularly as expressed in the politics of recognition, only because he wonders what recognition is meant to achieve, as it places no obligation beyond mere recognition. In this sense, perhaps recognition must be seen as the beginning and not the end of what is required; which is to say that recognition can only work if it leads to action and to change.)

But this engagement between white and black is a dialectical process of building and tearing down, of constructing and destroying, of action and reaction, of pushing and resisting, of damage and repair, as both sides – white and black – are conscious as well as alert to the action of the Other, both recognising the symbiosis of their relationship.

Black reason is also consciousness of Blackness, of itself, within a landscape that whiteness has constructed. It recognises Blackness in fellow black people, which is more than mere sympathy or fellow feeling. It is recognition that is born out of the similarity of experience that causes a black man to call a fellow black man brother, or a black woman to call a fellow black woman sister, as though they are literally children of the same parents. Blackness therefore creates black solidarity within, as Tommie Shelby explains in We Who Are Dark (2005), solidarity born of intimacy (a feeling, a smell, a quality, or a sense) that is instantly recognisable in ‘we who are dark’. Thus, the kinship or kindred spirit or fellow-feeling that blackness produces becomes evident in a black spectator watching a sports contest between a white and a black athlete, where the black spectator would almost automatically be supporting the black athlete. This is not because the black spectator has anything against the white athlete, but because of what the archives and the memories tell him or her, of the history of black subjugation under white power and the collective psychology that that induces. The black spectator recognises that the black athlete is a brother or sister symbolically engaged in what is more than a sporting contest but also a re-enactment of a centuries’ old battle in which whiteness has always prevailed. But here black victory is hoped for, prayed for and cheered on. For there was a time, shortly after emancipation of the slaves in the USA, when it was thought that the freed slaves would not be able to read or write or set up businesses and would not be able to understand the rules of sports, let alone be able to play them. Cheering for black victory is not for victory’s sake but as a way of correcting the narrative lie and myth that have been told about blackness. This is where efforts such as ‘Black History Month’ come into play.

Still, what are we to make of the millions of black lives that have been wasted through slavery and the other modes of violence perpetrated against black people? How do we ensure that those lives are not lost in vain? Sadly we cannot undo what has been done; but we can repair that which has been broken. However, in order to do so there has to be a careful rearrangement and the retelling of the past, through a process of re-enactment, as Collingwood (1946) believes all history must be written. This idea of writing as a way of ‘repairing’ is an important concept that Mbembe emphasises. For him, writing is a way of correcting past mistakes and setting the record straight. As the archive is always incomplete, even if full of the narrative of black debit and loss, the requirements dictate that we should restore that credit, that merit, in order to produce a balanced story. Or as he puts it, it is about ‘how we retrieve such lives from a broken existence and provide them with some kind of “home” or “place” where they might be at peace’.

So writing is remembering, not in a pitying, victim-depicting manner but in a reinstatement of their lives as human beings and not mere objects of someone’s waste. Or, as Mbembe remarks, ‘It is about building a liberating memory, not dwelling in a traumatic memory’. To this end, Mbembe, in one of the final chapters of the book, titled ‘Requiem for a Slave’, writes as a poet, not a lament but a memorial, a celebration of the life of a slave.

This is where Mr Wilson’s story becomes relevant and why the African American experience, which Mr Wilson’s life embodies, remains enduringly significant to the black discourse, even though Mbembe thinks the American dimension is only one chapter in the discourse. Like most African Americans, Mr Wilson was conceived, born and raised in the sin of racism, shaped by the contours of its iniquities, and made to carry the heavy burden of the perceived sins of blackness upon his shoulders. His entire world-view, his spatio-temporal mode of perception, as well as his categories of thought, were framed through the prism of blackness and at every turn he was conscious of the ever-present heavy and bewitching gaze of white ‘paternalism’ and of its power to shape almost every aspect of his life. In work, in play, in sleep, even in dreams, he saw the inescapable machinery of whiteness endlessly churn out anti-black messages and images as definitive of blackness, as Pieterse tells us in White on Black (1992). Indeed, as a journalist Mr Wilson had covered many ritual ceremonies of the lynching of young black men, an experience that no doubt would have seeped deep into his mind. But Mr Wilson also shaped his own life, through his intelligence and education – which saw him become the editor of a newspaper – his elegant appearance, his response and resistance in the face of violent racism. So despite his incarceration in this prison of racism and enduring the perils of segregation, he still managed to contribute to the archives of black experience by documenting the actions of his white oppressors.

So we see his reason(ableness) against the unreason of the white mob, his calmness against their aggression, his civilised response to their primitive violence, his smartness against their scruffiness, his quiet reserve against their loudness, his intelligence against their ignorance and so on and so on. Ironically, as a black man Mr Wilson was meant to preternaturally embody all the savage aggression displayed by his attackers, while he in fact was the embodiment of the calm reserve and quiet dignity that are considered to be the natural preserve of whiteness. Thus we see that dialectic played out in a contradictory manner: the unreason of whiteness as against the reason of blackness, which is not the way that the story was meant to be told, but which the archive tells us to be so. This irony makes Goldberg remark that ‘it is not quite clear who’s more mad and who is more civilised’.

Mr Wilson died in 1960, reportedly of Parkinson disease, also reportedly the result of that brutal attack he suffered several years back in Arkansas. This is in essence the damage that racism causes and the death that it brings. The idea is to repair that damage in some way, by way of writing or by way of retelling that story. This, in some sense, is a remembrance of the life of this gentle African American man who perhaps did more for the society that treated him so badly, and gave him no moment of peace until they saw the back of him, than the very people whose deeds claimed his life. It is indeed a requiem for Mr Wilson, but by way of Mbembe’s critique of blackness.