The wound and the opening

In 1971, member of the Black Panther Party and leader of the prisoners’ rights movement George Jackson is killed by prison guards. Thousands gather in Oakland for his funeral. The mourners, Maya Angelou writes in her essay about the funeral, “st[an]d ache to ache,” their faces reflecting “anger, loss, dismay, and confusion.” ¹ Wonder “had been scraped away by the ceaseless repetitions of the scene down too many years.” So too horror, which, “to deserve the name, ought to include the unexpected, the incredible.” ² Jackson’s death is neither unexpected nor incredible. Another Black man murdered in America, by America, in 1971. Jackson’s brother had been killed a year earlier.

That terrible feeling of inevitability, Angelou writes, creates

a nightmarish sense of déjà vu. . . A feeling that all the happenings, the words, the shufflings, the edgings forward and movings back had been done on this very street since life began. That they would continue being done under this same merciless sun forever. A textured perception that all the mourners were bit players, in an eternally running drama. That the curtain might, would never fall. There would be no intermission and no revision of the studied script. And worse, that this exhaustive action was merely a rehearsal for the next rehearsal. ³

Endless rehearsal in the wake of endless Black death, Jackson’s funeral becomes yet another rehearsal, for the next death, the next funeral, which will be, itself, a rehearsal for the next. . . and the next. . .

But then a shift. A break. An opening.

The mood changes, subtly at first. Huey P. Newton is speaking, then Bobby Seale, speaking of the fight, the revolution. The funeral ends. “Fists punched dark holes in the air.” A salute, a silence. The script is tossed out. “The silence,” Angelou writes, “might mean that the rehearsal was over, the curtain about to rise, and that the real play is about to begin.” She ends, “Power to the people.” ⁴

I come across Angelou’s essay in the days after George Floyd’s funeral. The friend who sends it to me describes it as a gut punch. It hits me, too. I am stunned, immobilized, by Angelou’s not-quite-hope that a curtain might yet rise, that this seemingly endless rehearsal might finally end and the real play commence. Stunned, immobilized, by this moment of not-quite-hope almost fifty years ago.

I am thinking about Jackson and Angelou as I read Joseph Winters’s recent essay, “Nothing Matters: Black Death, Repetition, and the Ethics of Anguish.” ⁵ I am thinking about the rituals of anti-Black violence, and the rituals that mourn and resist that violence. About repetition, rehearsal, and revolution. About the break, the opening, that Angelou not-quite-hopefully describes, and about the countless funerals since. Winters writes in the wake of another death, another funeral, another eulogy. In the wake of die-ins, of “Say her name!,” of uprising, of trauma and repetition. Winters is weary, though he, too, holds out something that is not-quite-hope for the possibilities of an ethics of anguish: “To re-say the name of Breonna Taylor is to participate in a ritual of conjuring and mourning, to be a witness to the afterlife of black death. Mourning exists at the edge of being and non-being, presence and absence. Mourning occurs within the remains and the hauntings.” ⁶ Conjure ghosts, Winters says. Be haunted by them.

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Winters’s 2017 book, Hope Draped in Black, introduces the idea of melancholic hope to characterize this ethics of anguish:

Perhaps this play between pleasure and suffering, or hope and anguish, is where we should end – and begin. And perhaps the trope of the cut used in literary jazz is a fitting sound for this interplay. Recall that the cut within literary jazz signifies both a wound and an opening. It suggests that better horizons and possibilities might be enabled and opened by a heightened and more vulnerable awareness of the wounds and damages that mark our social worlds. A more generous and promising world, according to this view, relies on an opening toward, rather than attempts to escape from, the fractured quality of social life. ⁷

Because closure—and the ethical imperative of resisting closure—is a central theme of Winters’s Hope Draped in Black, it seems right to begin here, at the end of his book. ⁸ Winters’s characterization of the cut as wound and as opening echoes Gloria Anzaldúa, for whom, Winters notes, “a wound is both a mark of being torn . . . and an indication of an opening toward others.” ⁹ In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa writes that the U.S.-Mexico border is an open wound, “una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” ¹⁰ Anzaldúa’s image is ambivalent. “Before a scab forms,” she writes, “it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture.” ¹¹ The border is a wound, wounded by violence and domination. It bleeds. But that blood nourishes the borderland, and births the new Mestiza, a new subject who transgresses and spills out over the borders that seek to confine and categorize her.

Like Anzaldúa, whose text intersperses poetry and prose, theory, memoir, myth, history, present, and future, in ways that resist easy genre categorization, Winters is captivated by the breaks, ruptures, and repetitions that can “frustrate linear notions of progress.” ¹² Staying with the loss is the melancholy; anticipating the possibility of rupture proffers the hope (or something like it). Winters finds examples of melancholic hope in Black literary and aesthetic traditions: from W.E.B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk, to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, to Charles Burnett’s Killers of Sheep, to Toni Morrison’s Paradise. Winters attends, particularly, to the cuts and breaks that characterize these works, interrupting their stories and characters. These literary and artistic devices and styles make it possible for the artists to depict, describe, and enact an ethos characterized by melancholic hope. Those who are melancholically hopeful refuse foreclosure and open toward others and otherness. In his book, Winters commends melancholic hope where he finds it in art and literature, and he recommends it to his readers.

Winters distinguishes “melancholy” in his sense from Sigmund Freud’s use of the term, which Freud himself distinguished from mourning. ¹³ For Freud, mourning is the “typical” experience and expression of grief in response to loss, worked through as the mourner finds new objects to replace those that were lost. Freud’s “melancholy,” by contrast, is the condition of dwelling in grief, while internalizing the loss of the beloved as a loss of self. ¹⁴ As Winters notes, Freud is distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy, typical and pathological ways of responding to loss. Winters, by contrast, insists that dwelling in loss is the ethical response to persistent and repetitive death. The work of mourning is inexhaustable; those for whom we grieve cannot be replaced and the deaths keep coming. Melancholy, Winters writes, “names one way that we are undone by the sufferings and struggles of others, one way that the dismembered haunt and agitate our narratives, memories, and frameworks of meaning. A less violent and cruel world depends, in large part, on our capacity to be figuratively wounded and opened by the dissonant qualities and blue notes of life’s many soundtracks.” ¹⁵ Like the conjured ghost who haunts, the wound remains. It does not heal.

In “Nothing Matters,” Winters writes of rituals of conjuring and of mourning. Rituals are not central to Hope Draped in Black, but repetition is, and rituals, of course, are repeatable routines—sequences of acts that can be enacted again and again. Their repetition and regularity can mark time. A morning prayer. A weekly sabbath. An annual festival. But they often mark time in ways that stand at odds with time’s assumed passage or progress—they mark its circularity, its rhythms and returns, the continuity of what was and what is and what may be. In Angelou’s account of Jackson’s funeral, it is this repetition, this circularity, that gives way to hopelessness, the perpetual return to the scene of mourning. It wears away wonder and horror, replaces them with the inevitability of tragedy. But, as Winters notes and Angelou shows, even here there is the possibility of the new, not as the outcome of some progressive engine of history, but as différance, and as interruption.

And so rituals play an ambivalent role in Winters’s imagination of melancholic hope. Rituals of mourning reckon with loss, and the repetition of these rituals can be a way of staying with it. Angelou suggests one danger of such repetition, that sometimes the break never seems to come. But there’s another danger, and one to which Winters is equally attuned: that rituals of mourning can attempt to work through loss on the way toward wholeness; they can attempt to place the dead securely in the past, where they cannot haunt us, and to heal the wounds, leaving no scars behind. While he does not directly address the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney, murdered along with eight of his congregants at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston by a white supremacist, Winters’s pointed critiques of Obama’s rhetoric—how it characterizes democratic progress and the possibility of a “postracial” America—surely apply to Obama’s eulogy for Pinckney too.

Winters charges Obama with crafting a progress narrative to buttress a presumptuous optimism and American exceptionalism. In the eulogy, Obama characterizes Rev. Pinckney as a person of hope and of faith, and he places Rev. Pinckney within a distinctly American story of racism, democracy, and grace. Obama invokes grace—God’s grace, but embodied in the expansion of American democracy and justice—as a way of making sense of Rev. Pinckney’s death. The murderer, Obama says, “drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress. An act that he imagined would incite fear and recrimination; violence and suspicion. An act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin. Oh, but God works in mysterious ways. God has different ideas. He didn’t know he was being used by God.” ¹⁶ Obama tries to show how this horrific act of hatred can be woven into a story of redemption. His eulogy integrates death—murder—into a narrative that is both Christian and American, a story of American civil religion. From original sin to reconciliation, through grace. Through the actions of American citizens, working toward racial justice, the deaths of Rev. Pinckney and his congregants can be made good. The wound heals, the nation made whole.

Meanwhile the funerals keep coming. Their repetition belies the narrative. “The nightmarish sense of déjà vu. . .” as the American ritual of anti-Black violence is enacted again.

But rituals do other kinds of work as well. Rituals of mourning need not foreclose; they can also disrupt such linear notions of time, of progress, of healing. Such rituals appear, obliquely, in two places in Winters’s book, in examples of melancholic hope culled from W.E.B. DuBois and Toni Morrison. Winters sees melancholy, for instance, in the sorrow-song tradition, which he discusses in his treatment of DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk. For Winters, and for DuBois, the sorrow songs express and enact grief and anguish; they remember loss; they yearn for liberation. Against revisionists who would tell of the “black slave, careless and happy,” DuBois writes, the sorrow songs “are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.” ¹⁷ The singing of the sorrow songs is not the work of mourning, in Freud’s sense, a working through of grief on the way toward wholeness; it is melancholic, because it refuses to leave the sorrow behind—even as there is something like hope and beauty in the singing and hearing of those songs.

Winters also finds melancholy—and melancholic hope—in the healing rituals that Morrison imagines in her novel, Paradise. A group of women, traumatized, live together in a convent where they gather, and heal. Winters cautions that the convent should not to be read as a utopia. Like Anzaldúa’s borderlands, it is born of woundedness. But that wound, too, is an opening. Near the end of the novel, the convent women participate in a healing ritual. They draw silhouettes of their bodies on the floor, and, laying in them, share “half tales and the never dreamed,” stories and memories and imaginings. The healing ritual—which is also a kind of conjuring—begins in pain and trauma, and works in and through this pain toward an open and receptive vulnerability. Winters stresses the importance here of “aesthetic, ecstatic, and religious experiences—all bodily rituals that potentially minimize the tendency to deflect pain and violence onto other people in an attempt to shield oneself from these undesirable features of life.” ¹⁸

Winters’s melancholic hope stays with the wounds while sensing that they are painful openings to the world and to others. There are rituals of violence that perpetuate such wounds, and rituals of closure that prematurely stitch them up. But there are also rituals of melancholic hope. Enacted in the pursuit of justice, such rituals enact grief and anger at untimely and unjust death; they dwell in loss and refuse its resolution or incorporation. And they imagine a world that is otherwise. Wound, and opening. Repetition, and break. Rehearsal for what is yet to be.