Frank B. Wilderson III - Afropessimism

Afropessimism

FRANK B. WILDERSON III

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A DIVISION OF W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

ALSO BY FRANK B. WILDERSON III

Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid

Red, White & Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frank B. Wilderson III is professor and chair of African American Studies, and a core faculty member of the Culture & Theory Ph.D. Program at UC Irvine. He spent five and a half years in South Africa, where he was one of two Americans to hold elected office in the African National Congress during the apartheid era. He also was a cadre in the underground. His books include Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid and Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. His creative writing has received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; the Maya Angelou Award for Best Fiction Portraying the Black Experience in America; the American Book Award; and the Zora Neale Hurston / Richard Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction.

To inquire about booking Frank B. Wilderson III for a speaking engagement, please contact Evil Twin Booking at https://eviltwinbooking.org. His critical documentary, Reparations... Now, is available for educational screenings on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/73991006.

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.

FRANTZ FANON

Im prized most as a vector through which others can accomplish themselves.

CECILIO M. COOPER

The slave is the object or the ground that makes possible the existence of the bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction, defines liberty, citizenship, and the enclosures of the social body.

SAIDIYA V. HARTMAN

The term nervous breakdown is sometimes used by people to describe a stressful situation in which theyre temporarily unable to function normally in day-to-day life. If you have a primary care provider, talk to him or her about your signs and symptoms or seek help from a mental health professional.

DANIEL K. HALL-FLAVIN, M.D.

They cannot love themselves as black but are made to hate themselves as white... What do you do with an unconscious that appears to hate you?

DAVID MARRIOTT

Elsewhere, I have written about the dissolution of the revolution in South Africa after Chris Hani, the chief of staff of MK, was assassinated; how Nelson Mandelas moderates consolidated power and purged the ANC of its most prominent revolutionaries, such as Winnie Mandela; how Khanya and I parted; how President Mandelas intelligence czar put my name on a list of ultra-leftists to be neutralized. I wont rehearse that here. Toward the end of 1996, I returned to America, the plantation of my birth.

In Compton, where I worked as a substitute teacher in grade schools, middle schools, and high schools, I was gobsmacked to see the police using tactics on Black children that I thought Id left behind in the schools of Soweto. The next year I went north to Berkeley to get a Ph.D.; and equilibrium seemed to return to my life. But the year 2000 came and, one day, I cracked. In the nineteen years since my breakdown I have not been able to pinpoint the cause. One day I was attending seminars and political rallies, the next day I was groaning on a gurney in the student health psych ward. The absence of an origin story unnerves me to this day.

THE DOCTOR AND THE NURSE at the UC Berkeley clinic pressed me for answers. What brought this on? How did I get to the clinic and (if they released me) how would I get home? They peered at my car keys in my hand, as though it were a dangerous weapon in the hands of a child. I shook my head and told them I had taken the bus.

Now the pain was not only in my heart, but also in my rib cage and my arms. If the antagonism was not between the haves and the have-nots, as Marx had claimed, nor between the man and the woman, or the gay and the straight, as I had learned in my graduate seminar on psychoanalysis, but if the essential antagonism was, instead, between the Black and all others, then to free the world was to free the world of me.

for Halloween I washed my

face and wore my

school clothes went door to

door as a nightmare.

When I left my apartment to come there, I had looked down the seven steps from my door to the street as though I were staring into a ravine. I thought I would pass out. My Honda Civic dozed at the curb like a blue sleeping lizard. My keys had scratched the wrought-iron railing as I stumbled down the steps. Threads of saliva spooled on the hood of my car. Somebody help me, I groaned. But I didnt want my neighbors to see me like this, let alone come to my aid. My neighbors in Berkeley, like my neighbors in Kenwood, were White. It would take ten reincarnations to free me from their debt. You dont want to owe them, something deep within me had said. But how could I explain all of that to this doctor and this nurse? I told them the truth, that I took the bus there. But I didnt tell them why. Make them feel safe.

They sent me home from the UC Berkeley clinic with pills. SSRIs, which sounds like a branch of the military, when in point fact it stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, uppers for depression, and chlordiazepoxide, which, I was pleased to hear, was not a rare form of leprosy but a pill for panic attacks. We normally dont prescribe antidepressants and anti-panic drugs together, the doctor confessed, as though gilding his conscience by being up-front with me.

For several weeks after I left the clinic, I sought Black therapists, thinking they could help me best. They were no saner than me; which is not to say that like me they were falling apart. For the most part kind of care). Without realizing it, we worked hard together in order to help me solve all the problems I wasnt having, to lead me from the gully of despair, and to keep me from going crazy again. But I hadnt gone crazy.

Many people do go crazy and many of them are not healed, but none of them are Black. (One can go crazy only if one has been sane. The time of sanity is not a temporality that the Slave has ever known.)To a fleeting eye their madness looks like mine. They go crazy from the pressures of racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonial rule. The external forces of aggression become too much for them and they too find themselves being gaped at on a gurney. But their tensions are bundled in the question, How does it feel to have a problem? My tensions (and those of the Black therapists who tried to heal me) are bundled in the question, How does it feel to be a problem? Theres no analogy between having and being.

Every story of despair has a three-point progression. Equilibrium: the status of the mind free of psychic trauma. Disequilibrium: the intrusion of a wounding trauma, which indeed all but destroys equilibrium. Equilibrium restored, renewed, or reimagined: the therapeutic cure in psychology or the end of analysis in psychoanalysis. But if the mind has never known the first point on that progression, if madness (even low-grade and as-yet-unexpressed madness) is your status quo, then time stands stills, for you cannot possess your own image as your ego ideal. You cannot love yourself as Black, but are