Musings: On Being and Non-Being: The Impossibility of Black Polyamorous Existence (Part II)
0. Preface
I would like to preface this writing by asking you to not cite anything without my permission.
My Musings are like a sandbox; a place where I get to explore my thoughts and give shape to them, usually for the first time. So what you’ll see below is an attempt to work through a series of complicated thoughts that I am trying to put language to for the first time. For the sake of brevity and the nature of my blog writing, in some places there are moves that may seem to require more careful qualification than I give it here rather than, say, in my professional academic writing. Still, though, this writing proceeds from my position of situated knowledge and I invite good-faith dialogue and engagement in the comments. Thank you.
I.
In part I, I gestured toward a suggestion that Black love and romantic love were ontologically distinct.
That was a year ago.
For what it’s worth, I’ve done a lot of more reading, writing, and conversing since then; and am only now feeling as though building on the series of scattered thoughts collected there is even possible.
If what follows here is at all unclear, please forgive me as I grapple with a language bent on foreclosing (or, at best confining) the expression of a positionality it was never intended to include. And, it may also be, as Fred Moten suggests, that this positionality is one bound in a kind of fugitive movement — always-already moving away from being captured. “Opaque” queerily becomes an “achievement” for Black writers and theorists of the Black — an “achievement” that this writing assumes no such aim whatsoever.
In the interregnum (perhaps the only space that there is) a few themes have arisen on which I’d like to remark here for the very first time; not as a way of establishing an authoritative or definitive voice on the matters to be explored, but merely as a way of following my mind’s wanderings along with its philosophical probing and curiosity and situating my thoughts in relation to Afropessimist thinkers.
II. On ontological distinction
Clarification on this matter is pressing and it’s a matter that I’ve been far less than clear on. In my view, Black love and romantic love are socially ontologically distinct.
When I began musing about Black polyamorous existence, I drew inspiration from both early Fanon and Charles Mills.
Mills’ notion of social ontologly is helpful. For Mills, the terms “social ontology” and “social metaphysics” are
“meant to refer to the basic struts and girders of social realtity in a fashion analogous to the way “metaphysics” simpliciter refers to the deep structure of reality as a whole.”
Said differently, social ontology involves the nature and property of the social world and not the world as a whole. Social existents find themselves always already in a world (regardless of how indifferent to “societies” a world may be). It seems certain that a world can exist without a society, but no society can exist without a world. Thus we should approach early Fanon with some caution and a keenness for perceiving tension when he writes that:
“Ontology — once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside — does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be Black; he must be black in relation to the white man. Some critics will take it upon themselves to remind us that the proposition has a converse. I say that this is false. The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.”
On one hand, the passage might represent a kind of ontological drama so far as it seems to imply that the Black is an impossible thing if, as it turns out it is a “thing” at all. So, Fred Moten is right to probe the question of whether there is “ever anything called a black social life?”
Think again here of Mills’ social ontology. What ever the social existents are—and indeed, race and racial categories being among them — they are so within the larger frame of ontology. This enables the possibility of what we might want to call the “without-within” for the Black; it becomes possible, in other words, for the Black to be a thing marked by a particular kind of socio-ontological obfuscation that, at a phenomenological level, gets experienced as a kind of outside-ness of the contours of a social ontology while simultaneously existing within the larger ontological regime. As such the Black is outside of the inside, but not outside of the oustide — interregnum perhaps? (What or where is the outside of the outside?)
This tension is found in early Fanon; his early humanism comes in to fine relief when we understand how the category of “black” is tethered to the category of “[hu]man” for Fanon, marking a kind of reluctance toward jettisoning the black’s belongingness to that category. (We ask again, where, or what is the socio-ontological position of the black? Is the distinction one to be found in ontology or, indeed, in social ontology?)
Writers picking up on Fanon’s hint travel in several directions. For Frank Wilderson, for example, a requirement for the black to have social ontological standing requires the possibility for the black to exist in a kinship structure, shared with other humans. A possibility which he denies (Indeed what might it mean for the Black to be seen as “kin”?), thus he interprets Fanon as understanding the positioning of the black as outside of the outside.
It also appears in some places that David Marriott reads Fanon in this way as well. For these writers, the distinction goes beyond a socio-ontological one to make, in fact, an ontological one.
Moten’s writings show up more agnostic on the question regarding the positioning of the Blackness. For him, the Black is in a state of perpetual fugitivity — an always already movement away from capture. So, we can’t say with any ontological precision whatsoever whether the Black is inside (?), or outside of the inside but inside the outside(?), or outside of the outside(?).
Much more on this can and should be said, but it’d be best to leave more precise explication for another venue and another day.
Regarding the ontological or socio-ontological positioning of the Black in Fanon, for our present purposes we do well not to demand more precision from the subject than the subject allows.
Be that as it may, there is utility in early Fanon’s phenomenology, even if, as it turns out he is speaking in metaphor or jettisons this position in later writing. We can understand Fanon’s work in Black Skin as attempting to provide a phenomenonogical account of what it might mean or feel like for one to be marked Black. The Black, and more pertinently for my own concerns, the Black polyamorist, needs a phenomenology.
Whatever a phenomenology of Black polyamorous existence might turn out to be, it seems evident that its socio-ontological occupation cannot be ignored so far as we understand Black love to be a social existent.
Crucially, the methodology that my claim of Black polyamorous non-being rests, takes as evidence the fact Black love has a unique history within American history and takes on variations that set it apart socially and historically from the ways intimacy and love has been experienced by their racialized counterparts. For example, when one enters the archives the encounter with terror endured by Black intimacies is staged —one encounters the violence of reproductive labor, forced breeding, forced separation, rape, and infanticide. This seems to me to be within the purview of our social (or socio-historical) landscape.
I’ve argued that non-monogamy occupies a central place in this history — though the foregrounding of its place is typically outside the frame of many historians. The archives also contain stories of adultery, plural marriage, and polyaffectivity, for example.
Tera Hunter’s notion of the Third Flesh approaches this point, but only insofar as it characterizes the the ever-present superior relationship of master (i.e. the third flesh) to slave. However, for Hunter, the third-flesh becomes obsolete the moment formal slavery is abolished.
We should note, though, that slavery is not merely a set of formal political relationships between the state and those whose status it designated as people and those whom it designated as chattel, although it certainly includes this. My work on Black love seeks an analysis of slavery, to riff on Wilderson, that understands it as a 21st century dynamic as opposed to a historical past — one that can accommodate the ongoing suffering of Black people and their intimate relationships.
III. On time
In the section above, I’ve tried to partially explain the distinction between ontology and social ontology as best I understand it at the present moment. Further, I tried to begin to suggest that matters of Black love concern our social ontology (though this be inside of the purview of ontology simpliciter). I tried to round out the section by gesturing toward a need for an understanding of slavery that understands it as a 21st century dynamic as opposed to a historical past.
Time and time again, this endeavor has brought me face to face with history and counter-histories — American history, African-American history, histories of diaspora, Indigenous histories, histories of colonialism (which is to say histories of imperialism; which is to say histories of terror and violence; which is to say histories of suffering; which is to say histories of death and dying), histories of capital and capitalism, and histories of philosophical thought, only to name a few. Perhaps I see now, as clearly as I have ever seen, that a philosophy of history must be as important to philosophers as its histories of philosophy.
What is history? And what of its narratives and the stories we tell about them? How are they told? And who gets to tell them? It seems to me that no questions are more central to the enterprise of epistemology and knowledge production.
Saidiya Hartman’s work invites us to confront these questions. She asks,
“How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?”
and
“how does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom?”
Put differently, how can we tell the stories of those subjects who are not supposed to have stories, without superimposing the impossibilities that contour the lineaments of historical narrative? Can we speak of a position that resists telling? What can we make of the always already, which is to say the “foretold and anticipated”?
The work of Hartman and others like Christina Sharpe, Patricia Saunders, David Marriott, David Scott, and others, approach temporality and chronology with an intention to interrogate its situatedness as a linear construction.
Whereas Hartman speaks of the “foretold and anticipated”, Sharpe speaks of a “past that is not yet past” and emancipation as an “unfinshed project”. Marriott and Saunders orient towards chronology not as a line but as a kind of circularity. For example, Saunders writes that
“the same questions and issues are presenting themselves to us across these historical periods. It is the same story that is telling itself, but through different technologies and processes of that particular period.”
Marriott says that
“paranoia and destruction soon teach us that the future will always return in the form of negrophobic malice”.
What might it mean to understand the future, not as some far-away destination, but as recurring moments always returning? How does a past that has not yet past complicate how we confront the future and its alleged possibilities? And how does this threaten history? That is, how does this challenge or displace the received or authorized account of history? Of time?
In probing these questions, these writers obscure one’s attachment (which is to say their situatedness in relation to) the present “now”. Said differently, when or where is ‘now’ if the past is not yet past? Where is ‘now’ if the future is always already returning? To riff on Hartman, the “what happened when”, is thrown into crisis. It becomes possible to posit slavery as an ongoing relationship, here, now, so far as emancipation is incomplete and unfinished. As Toni Morrison writes in Beloved, “everything is now. It is all now.”
In the last two decades, artists and legal scholars have highlighted the language of the United State’s 13th amendment to its Constitution which reads
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except for the punishment of a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
I’m reminded here of the photography of Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun that I encountered in an exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art, which catalogues the Angola Rodeo, a rodeo that “triumphantly claims to be the longest-running prison rodeo in the United States”; a rodeo that, as The University of Califoria, Santa Cruz’s Institute of the Arts and Sciences remarks,
“thousands of visitors buy tickets …, eager to watch the people imprisoned in Angola ride angry bulls, act as rodeo clowns, and perform bareback horse riding.”
The work of these scholars and artists is quite convincing concerning their arguments situating carcerality as both anti-black and as an extension of slavery. For example, they discuss how mass incarceration (and indeed the anti-black police brutality and anti-black vigilante violence that attends the police-state) disproportionately targets and confines Black bodies and they take the ongoing control and subordination of the Black to be uncontroversial.
I’ve tried to show how the monogamous condition of American marriage is implicated in the ongoing subordination of black folks, both before and after the event of Emancipation, as well. For example, in part I, I drew on historians Tera Hunter and Dianne Stewart that how monogamous marriage functioned as a linchpin in the construction of whiteness in America.
For instance, monogamous marriage functions as the basis on which controlling images of black women as “ho’s” and “jezebels” rests (so far as these images imply participation in multiple and sometimes simultaneous sexual relationships); which is to say that the pluralistic breeding practices that black women were forced to endure in at the hand of their white masters did not care about monogamous pairings.
Partus Sequitur Ventrem meant that children born unto slave mothers inherited the status of their mothers — thus, slave women’s wombs were lagniappes and a primary means for increasing one’s capital, providing slave owners incentive to force the reproduction of Black bodies in horrifically terrifying and inhumane ways.
Subterfuge in other cases is documented as well. For example, quasi-marriages and wedding ceremoncies were imposed on slave relationships as a way of ensuring the continued reproduction of slaves by slave couples under the guise that these intimacies were of the slave’s “choosing.”
After Emancipation, historical record shows Freedman’s Bureau agents extending little regard for the complex non-monogamous dynamics that existed in the antebellum. Bureau agents believed that any arrangement that deviated from monogamy contaminated marriage while positioning Black women and children to become state dependents (a rationale that would return in Ronald Regan’s 1976 presidential campaign which cast Black women as “Welfare Queens”) as one Bureau agent recounted
“‘Whenever a negro appears before me with 2 or 3 wives who have equal claim upon him,…I marry him to the woman who has the greatest number of helpless children who otherwise would become a charge on the bureau.’”
Other legislative barriers evoked judicial and carceral punishment too as penalties were raised for Black non-monogamists. In Georgia, the “Act to prescribe and regulate the relation of Husband and Wives between persons of color” instructed Black folks with two or more spouses, to select only one to marry
“immediately after the passage of this Act by the General Assembly…If such man, thus living with more than one woman, or such woman living with more than one man, shall fail or refuse to comply with the provisions of this section, he or she shall be prosecuted for the offense of fornication, or fornication or adultery, or, fornication and adultery, and punished accordingly.”
Relevant to our present now, marriage’s anti-black and anti-non-monogamous histories converge in peculiar ways that extend the subjugation of, which is to say the slave status, of black non-monogamists.
For example, the United States Supreme Court has not tried a case on plural marriage since the 1800s. According to legal scholar Martha Ertman, the precedent was set in Reynolds v. The United States (in 1879) where the court reasoned that plural relationships were
“odious among the northern and western nations of Europe” “and almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic, and of African people” and ultimately “fetters, the people in stationary despotism.”
These beliefs were solidified in the public imaginary with the publication of “Uncle Sam’s Troublesome Bedfellows” and “The Elder’s Happy Home” in popular media of the day — both appearing in the wake of the Reynolds decision. Thus, the regulatory shadow cast by legal marriage, or what Anika Simpson and Paul Taylor call “marital shade”, on black non-monogamy was, and is, fortified in language and imaging that is, straightforwardly racist, and anti-black. This precedent and the language that houses it have not been overturned.
I approach newly emerging questions probing the stakes of historical understanding with caution. Which histories get prioritzied in the the retelling of History? Why? How? A chapter in David Marriott’s book Whither Fanon titled “Historcity and Guilt”, comes to mind; a chapter that I have not yet gotten to but am eager to read.
I wonder how much of institutionalized (and indeed linear) historical narrative’s function is to provide a kind of comfort when encountering the past(?); a way of moving on from it; a way of absolving guilt. What do we lose in a failure to untether the now from the past? What do we gain? What if we understand time not as linear, but circular? Hartman’s questioning probes me further:
“… is narration its own gift and its own end, that is, all that is realizable when overcoming the past… And what do stories afford anyway? A way of living in the world in the aftermath of catastrophe and devastation? A home in the world for the mutilated and violated self? For whom — for us or for them?”
Attempts to tell of the socio-ontological positioning of Black polyamorous intimacies nuance and obscure the history of Black intimacies.
This obscurity is unsettling to many folks because it is at once threating and disruptive; not only to the notion of racial progress (for whites), but also to the notion of the “romantic” and “romantic love” (understood as monogamous, respectable, and legitimate). For the Black, progress narratives function as a sedative in the pacification of revolutionary ideas and actions.
Take what we might call a “history of marriage futures” through the prism of non-monogamous blacks, for example.
In the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Supreme Court case that made way for legal recognition of same-sex monogamous dyads, then President Barack Obama proclaimed that “love wins,” as if to say the achievement of legal recognition for same-sex monogamous relationships under marriage in the America constituted an arrival to a future destination not only for Black lovers, but for all lovers — marriage equality, it is so called.
Yet, it is not lost on black non-monogamists that Obama’s claim comes from behind the whitest of picket fences, from a Black husband to a black wife, with two lovely, black children and “Bo.” Obamas assertion and personal politic were bound up in a mononormative, which is to say respectable, imagination.
While the Obergefell decision struck down restrictions barring same-sex, intimate unions from being recognized by marriage, it left its monogamous condition intact. Thus, when Obama, a black husband, claimed that “love wins”, he became further implicated in the reification of a mononormativity that excludes the legitimization of Black non-monogamous intimate relationships.
The monogamous imaginary has “love” also winning in Loving v. Virginia (1967) making way for folks to marry interracially. It has love winning with the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 defining the rights of free people including their right to enter in to legal contracts (read as marriage).
Understood linearly, these events are both futures and histories; they represent points to be spun into story of progress — one that allows us to believe that we’ve gotten “better” at recognizing Black intimate relationships.
On this view, these events were futures before they were pasts. Additionally, they are events that occurred before now which is to say they are past relative to our present. Under the normative weight of the linearity of [Western? Modern?] narrative, we are supposed to learn from this past something about progress — things get and have gotten better. What is seldom discussed or engaged is the necessity of suffering embedded in the before.
(No. We are not to interrogate that too closely. For, then, the likeness of suffering of now to the suffering of then might be exposed.)
This is disturbing. This is uncomfortable. Instead, the line disguised as narrative is where we’re to find solace. That solace, which is to say that delusion, is what ought to contour our imaginations — how we think about after now.
But the history of marriage futures offers no solace for Black non-monogamists, for they can see no progress on the question of whether their loves are legible, legitimate. Each of these futures now past get swallowed up by a past that is not yet past for Black non-monogamists. In other words, the future always already returns; it does so as anti-non-monogamous which is to say negrophobic and anti-black.
IV. Resolution, Hope, Liberation, and the future
In recent conversations and interviews where I’ve tried to discuss the social ontology of Black love and Black polyamorous (non-)being, I’ve consitently been asked about resolution, hope, liberation, and the possible acceptance of non-monogamies by future societies.
On different occasions commentators have asked me:
“Can we reflect on the possibilities for flourishing despite all that is going on politically? And Can you give our audience some hope that there is or can be a sexy, erotic, fun, and or pleasure-centered future for us? How might we start our journey?”
and
“How do we learn to divest from [the] things we’ve been socialized in?… What does sexual liberation look like to you and how does ethical non-monogamy contribute to that picture?”
[“Hope? Despite all that is going on politically?,” I wonder to myself in the first case. “Liberation? Ethical non-monogamy contributing to that picture?,” I think to myself in the second.]
I’m also reminded of Mimi Schippers’ work Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities where she describes her method as, speaking from her position of situated knowledge, offering
“fantasy in the form of fictional narrative as both polyqueer cultural production and a temporary move away from the ‘evidence,’ which is always looking back, and toward the futurity of polyqueer potentialities. this is not to say that I will ignore the evidence, but that I will move beyond it through fantasies.”
Whether in conversation or scholarship, I’ve wanted to interrogate the source of desiring hope for a liberated future, which is to say I’ve wanted to interrogate Black imagination and the Black imaginary (whatever they may be).
I’m reminded again of the ways that, for many folks, historical narrative is to provide a kind of comfort when encountering the past; a way of moving on from it. [Here, again, is the line; linearity. Draw one in the sand]
[Does Liberation require recognition? Is it possible to recognize an existent at a location that resists telling?]
Being propositioned for remark on hope for a liberated future is unsettling. Perhaps this experience is made even more so when encountering the work of scholars like Schippers, who acknowledges that marital monogamy is sutured to whiteness as superior and indeed to whiteness as superiority. (Do they realize that asking Black polyamorists for hopeful futures is not asking them to change the world, but to end it? Any “hope” for the liberation of black polyamorists is intricately bound up in the obliteration of racism and the annihilation of mononormativity — and this, without question, would be the end of the world as we know it.)
In America, the history of marriage futures has not shown non-monogamies worthy of its validation, which is to say its legitimation. To be clear, marriage is not the only terrain on which Black intimacies can be validated; however, in the West, the institution has been a vessel through which power, privilege, protection and social ontological obscurity have filtered in ways that reproduce anti-Black violence; a reproduction that is always already a return for the Black non-monogamist.
For example, “The Elders’ Happy Home” appeared in American media in the wake of the Reynolds decision and so, was a part of American resistance to non-monogamy both shaping and reflecting, public opinion. It positions the practice of non-monogamy as synonymous with black marking.
In the image, a polygamous Mormon family is depicted rambunctiously — numerous wives and children scream and fight while their patriarch does nothing. As if the scene was not chaotic enough, paying keen attention to the single Black child in the cradle (although none of the wives appear Black) completes the suggestion that polygamy “Blackens” the entire scene and creates a situation where white domestic ordering gets replaced by inexplicable miscegenation and chaos.
The Black child’s presence points at the ways that visibility aligns with a kind of hypervisibility — as an oppressed racial subject, the child’s humanity gets obscured and ignored while the child’s presence is simultaneously difficult to ignore to the racially perceiving subject — emphasizing how Mormon passage into whiteness (though they be a predominantly white church) must first pass-through monogamy.
So long as we have not and do not revisit resistance to nonmonogamy, this rationale always already presides over the lives and loves all those living in the afterlife of slavery, which is to say the afterlife of the Reynolds decision, each time mononormativity goes unchecked.
This is why, for example, when I confront Schippers’ “beyond” evidence (outside of the outside?) and the commentator’s “despite all that is happening politically right now?”, queasiness rises in my gut. This is why I can’t accept that evidence “is always looking back”; it is a looking now and a looking then; a look at the interregnum. Perhaps the only space that there is.
