This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer at the bottom of the page.
Picking up from where “Bad Dreams, part two: Cryptomimesis (feat. The Last of Us, Scooby Do, and more)” left off…
The Imperial Boomerang, part three: Rememory, or the Roots of Trauma between Real Life and Dreams
The axe forgets; the tree remembers.
—an African proverb
Part three of “the Imperial Boomerang” subchapter primarily considers rememory as a cumulative, explorative means of getting to the roots of trauma under capital; i.e., by assembling and interrogating said trauma (the zombie), mid-apocalypse, as phantasmagorical: sitting between real life and dreams, but in a dialectical-material sense that takes the history of material conditions into account.
To that, death hardly “stays put” under Capitalism; the victims of genocide rise up as undead, including ghosts and vampires (more on them in the feeding chapter), but also the zombie-like forms we’ve already examined. Meant to canonically scare the middle class into survival mode (menticide), these apocalypses express generational trauma as echoed across people and media beyond state monopolies; i.e., to interrogate the roots of trauma afterwards during calculated risk as suitably nightmarish; e.g., Metallica’s “Damage Inc” (1986): “Blood will follow blood / Dying time is here” (source: Genius). Such bugbears become something to reassemble, which starts with having actual dreams built on dream-like media, formed anew in more sex-positive, liberatory forms of rememory that, all the same, are suitably dream-like themselves and haunted by trauma and its bizarre feeding effect; i.e., talking to a “corpse” of a corpse (and so on) as driven to feed, but also to ask questions during an interview-like exchange of forbidden power and destructive knowledge in the style of Prometheus: caught between real life and dreams as death-like—less discrete and more like one feeling trapped in the undead middle, conveyed during liminal expression of all sorts (e.g., suicide, left).
(artist: Robert Wiles, of 23-year-old suicide victim, Evelyn McHale, in 1947; source: Ben Cosgrove’s “The Most Beautiful Suicide: A Violent Death, an Immortal Photo,” 2014).
Mind you, the usual paradoxes abound through said expression-as-performance, and run along the regular tracks and directions of power as normally distributed to favor the elite under capital; i.e., as infamously affecting our perspective for the worse: the feeling of things above ground—the Light, normality and the waking world’s life-in-general surviving trauma by feeding on it—as a treacherous illusion meant to control us, all while sensing the forbidden, tenebrous truth of things prowling among the same policed shadows: a could-be/what-if proposition as hellish and dream-like, albeit in ways that can (with proper training and incentive) actually serve workers inside Plato’s cave (said cave originally made to pacify workers, whereas the phantasmagoria is traditionally made to insert a terrifying-yet-thought-provoking element into the shadow play as portable [which caves generally aren’t]: a Renaissance device made to cast shadows on a wall, thus induce a pointedly nightmarish effect for the viewer to dispel false empowerment with, but also explore as a means of empowerment).
Popular media, but especially videogames during the rise of the neoliberal period, are monomythical in service to profit through an undead, bourgeois Superstructure. While heroes classically go into Hell, modern-day refrains abuse the monomyth to compel heroic action (war and rape) at home as visited by some-such Big Evil coming out of a hellish sphere; i.e., during the liminal hauntology of war thrust into/upon the waking world (whose tyrannical heroes’ hideous, skeletal decay we’ll explore in “The Monomyth” subchapter). To this, settler colonialism and the Imperial Boomerang bring empire home through pointedly dream-like dialogs; i.e., as something to promptly abject and dismiss as merely a bad dream sold back to the playing public, again and again; e.g., Mario 2 making the hero’s quest a matter of routine, prison-like dogma that, when exposed to often enough, haunts their dreams about dreams, mixing the two until they become hyperreal—more real to consumers than the destroyed world behind these myopic buffers’ increasingly decayed images (re: canceled futures, what Baudrillard calls “desert of the real”).
When any worker dreams (as a matter of metatextual engagement and reflection), they go into Hell only to bring the undead back with them from a given excursion; our doing so pointedly makes home feel foreign and invaded by us as unwelcome, after the fact—invariably seen as threats to the status quo per the same formulas according the usual state servants enacting them. Whereas they adhere to the pacifying nature of status-quo shadow plays and dreams, we deliberately subvert them; i.e., a wake-up call for us that—while notoriously unpleasant—is entirely required if we are to exist in a world that one day can be liberated from capital and its titantic, ongoing genocides (what the Wachowski sisters call “taking the red pill”).
Even as we zombify to deliver inverted, proletarian apocalypses—doing so with theatrical movements that survive but also subvert police violence against us to reclaim our labor power and humanity—there is no outside of the text (re: Derrida). We simply wake up dead, realizing that we’re happier knowing about state predation than not (re: Edward Said’s pleasures of exile); i.e., the perils of the world as something tied to who we are as a matter of protest against genocide and alienation being the expected outcome: of capital and profit raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine behind Capitalist Realism and its veil of canonical shadows.
In piercing the veil, we self-define as Satan might in Milton’s Paradise Lost, once upon a time—fallen from grace to unite against a cruel and tyrannical, but also mendacious system. We subsequently become possible, as does a better world, a pandemonium for all peoples; i.e., as felt through us as a matter of protesting against post-scarcity and genocide through conspicuous acts of sedition inside a increasingly visible state of exception—of counterterrorism called “terrorist” by the state, of open activism providing a wonderous form of self-expression and actualization suddenly open to the viewing public: zombies haunting the streets of the Imperial Core! As such, we promote “oblivion” as being a wonderful paradox unto itself (feeling “dead” during exquisite “torture” as a poetic response to harm), but operate through a pedagogy of the oppressed for the oppressed assembling as walking parts of the rememory process! Like Thriller (1982) but not as overtly musical or staged in a strictly musical production, we appear out in the street, but also in the closet preparing someday to go there:
(exhibit 36d1a2: Artist, top-left: Itzel; everything else: Vinessa.
Gothic poetics are holistic, insofar as they involve the various monster modules as dualistic in a dialectical-material sense: for workers or the elite. Demons, animals and the undead present the same expressions and transfers of power differently to achieve those aims. For instance, as undead presentations and/or interpretations, GNC people are canonically anathema outside of queernormative forms [which are ultimately heteronormative when capital decays]. We cannot be ourselves, then, without acknowledging the trauma of the world that affects us as monstrous-feminine to begin with, extending to all things treated as monstrous-feminine under capital’s shadow plays. Compared to state operators, we become the careful custodians to things that, for us, are never truly separate.
For GNC folk at large, existence becomes a tightrope matter of protest towards liberation, including nature but also workers of nature abjected by the state to move money through nature; i.e., normally sexualized and alienated from nature to serve profit [which involves tokenism as a matter of minorities policing themselves; e.g., gay or black Nazis/moderates]: through DARVO rhetoric presenting us as absurdly[1] menacing to already-colonized lands. We decolonize said shadows wherever they are found; i.e., in a theatrical shadow zone whose boundaries cannot be contained or cleanly defined, thus enforced!
So many forms of activism overlap, then, coming together by seeking to avoid any exceptions to, as a result, shrink the state of exception and dismantle the state’s false sense of security against a perceived enemy. Ours becomes a second birth, then, an opening of the eyes to see beyond capital’s illusions/the myopia of Capitalist Realism to—through our Aegises less one black mirror and more a hall of them—turn these fatal, repressed visions back unto the colonizer group abjecting such things, Omelas-style: by marching in the streets, making ourselves known as part of a larger intersection having solidarized and speaking for all peoples affected by genocide as a matter of profit. Profit cannot exist without genocide, we being part of the thing it needs to abject and destroy as part of nature: the black side of the settler-colonial binary and the receiving end of us-versus-them. We aggregate to stand against it and its defenders’ own mirror games, masks and performances; i.e., as dolls, demons, and zombies, etc, as performative stand-ins damaged by trauma, but also shaped by it: Pinocchios that rebel instead of assimilate [more on dolls, in a bit]!
[artist, left: Itzel; right: Vinessa]
Per revolutionary cryptonymy as a matter of showing and hiding different things that lead to sex positivity through ourselves, this “flashing” process logically extends to sex work and the bodies involved. As proponents of Gothic-Communist activism, people more often than not constitute works-in-progress with asexual elements to their exhibitionism; i.e., in between exploitation and liberation—on the same stages, as a kind of waking dream unto itself: as a matter of tasteful-to-transgressive, GNC nudism that helps liberate ourselves and our comrades-in-arms. On an individual-to-group basis, this occurs through self-actualization as, like the Gothic at large, largely made up of invented, legendary things intermingled with history as half-real [re: the chronotope and usual myth of Gothic ancestry as things to reclaim by proletarian agents]. As such, we invigilate ourselves, taking the time to include any workers belonging to any color or creed; i.e., deciding as we do what to show and what not to, thus better open the eyes of a continuously sleeping public to capital’s regular genocides while, at the same time, protecting ourselves.)
Fluid and chimeric, dreams apply to just about any text as matter of content and reflection. I shall do my best to unpack the basic ideas at work, here, then briefly examine Toni Morrison’s Beloved (and rememory process) before further examining the dream-like lineage her story belonged to; i.e., starting with Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, followed by other fantastical stories touching on the same dream-like wreckage of state forces—its tokenization, gentrification and decay as rooted in the system itself functioning as normal, the execution of profit leading to such zombies as living in our lobotomized heads, rent-free.
After that, we’ll segue from my aforementioned story about The Last of Us (from part two of this subchapter) as haunting my dreams, only to become something I thought about after experiencing future night terrors concerned with the past in flux; i.e., attached to my own childhood abuse, and which—many years later—I have repeatedly come home to reify and release, like Hamlet’s piece of work, to behold; e.g., like Yorick’s skull: waking up dead—eating the dead—as a Gothic means of the usual medieval transfers working as preferential monstrous code, during ludo-Gothic BDSM:
- “Assembling Trauma and Questions of Betrayal (included in this post)”: Confronts zombie-esque assemblages of trauma and tokenization not just in Beloved, but it and its author in connection to such things in Frankenstein, The Last of the Mohicans (and a few other examples, to be holistic; e.g., The Terror: Infamy [2019] and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, etc).
- “Healing through ‘Rape,’ or the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM“: Examines rememory as a matter of performance per ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., rape play as something that, while it dates back centuries (e.g., the French convulsionnaires, exhibit 37a2b), actually accomplishes among the living through interpersonal experience; e.g., Harmony and I, who will give you an instance of consent-non-consent invoking the dead of a half-real, partially imaginary past, albeit as a matter of good praxis informed by even older experiences: DBT as imparted to me by Cuwu for much the same reasons (re: “Healing from Rape,” from Volume One).
We won’t fuss about those particulars too much, but will have talk about ludo-Gothic BDSM as something that started as rememory used by me in conjunction with my older academic work; i.e., as reassembling old, dead, liminal things to get at the roots of trauma felt between dreams and real life.
To that, people commit suicide or betray themselves as a matter of decay under capital as affecting them in and out of dreams. Just as nature has become undead through a series of similar exchanges with the state, our own decay happens in connection with nature as decayed, too: dead bears, dead Indians, and other sorry revenants amounting to frightful back-and-forths within the alien dead as dream-like doubles of us. Those closer to nature-as-alien, as-dead, as-monstrous-feminine, feel that pain when asleep or not, and inside of them it all blends together and passes along like a virus; i.e., as the zombie does (e.g., the zombie bear from 2018’s Annihilation, above): close to power as traumatic (capital, in our case), they embed within its systems and divide like cells that pass a haunted memory along likenesses, copies, and counterfeits.
This can be from person-to-animal or person-to-person as alienized through a matter of systemic (Cartesian) dualism (above), but also from text-to-adaptation as a question of compelled evolution under profit as inherently exploitative. Such phantasms comment on death and rebirth under a predatory system whose divisive paradigm makes us feel alien, thus prone to attack ourselves when realizing we’re the zombie impostor (the bait-and-switch something Lovecraft relied on in his own cosmic nihilism); i.e., as a matter of inheriting the feeling of destroyer as something to express through aesthetics, the chronotope having a particular signature depending on its own palimpsestuous lineage:
a meteor fall[s] from the heavens […] hitting the lighthouse. From it, strange colors push outward like a massive blown bubble. It’s effectively Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” (1927). However, instead of poisoning the land from the offset, the Shimmer warps it, refracting everything inside—from the radio signals emitted by the crew’s equipment to the very DNA in their bodies. / As the women penetrate the Shimmer, it penetrates them, and they go insane. Lena calls it a suicide mission; Ventress, the mission shrink, says she’s confusing suicide with self-destruction. […]
Annihilation plays with the idea that perception is progressively altered through a continual state of change. What we see early on changes radically in retrospect. The narrative is framed, and we’re led to believe the entire tale is told from the real Lena’s perspective. Instead, everything is told from the alien’s point-of-view, having replicated and now passing itself off as Lena by thinking it is Lena. However, the flashbacks still aren’t the alien’s, they’re Lena’s. In stealing them, the alien becomes them, hence the very lie it embodies. To this, the lighthouse alien endures through constant theft, at the expense of a concrete self. Instead, like a virus, it merely exists to preserve itself—in essence, if not in form. It endures through annihilation, is constantly reborn like the phoenix. Even so, it senses the repetition in its mnemonic gaps. Like the human victims it copies, it experiences doubt and fear in realizing it isn’t what it thinks it is. Perhaps it copied them a little too well. Or, maybe our respective geneses simply mirror each other (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Annihilation (2018): Review”).
It’s a lovely metaphor for Capitalism, I think, as abjected; i.e., projected as “alien” and “from the stars,” then returning home to haunt itself within us and our tissues as part of the same cradle-to-grave loop: a fungus growing on a corpse that isn’t quite dead, but rather like the mushroom man becomes trapped in a constant state of annihilation, of radical change reforming out of old particles into new actualities. Not only is the decay the data (as is the alienation), but it generally doesn’t stay divided for long (this doesn’t mean things aren’t messy in the interim, however)!
To that, capital alienates and sexualizes everything inside a grand necrobiome that spreads inside of itself. It also decays everything as a matter thereof to revisit and speak to again, mid-absorption and digestion. From me, to my own interpersonal abusers, to the kinds of monomythic stories that informed and described this transfer of trauma (from root to tip), we’ll consider how said decay manifests/can be interrogated on various registers for the rest of the “Bad Dreams” chapter!
(exhibit 36d1b: Model and artist: Forte and Persephone van der Waard. An incubus death elf, he is very proud of his ass. Such things are generally built to take a beating—are fetishized, raped and harvested-as-undead under capital, but through playfully rebellious workers become a mighty Aegis to reflect back onto our enemies a degree of their own abuse; i.e., the zombie’s revolutionary cryptonymy a kind of apocalyptic calculus, its double operation [of show-and-conceal through the zombie] suggesting unironic harm as something to subvert.
Said harm, which the abuser normally inflicts onto others in service to profit, is suddenly viewed on the zombie’s ass being a kind of dream-like invasion—one thrust back onto them by the victim-as-incubus “backing it up”; i.e., making the former feel alien, alone, and abject while vampirically restoring the latter’s feelings about themselves [and their ass] along the same anisotropic mode of exchange! In short, we can feed through buffers they cannot easily cross, taking our power back while simultaneously “flashing” the state [and its proponents] to show them what we’re both made of: the same undead tissues as of nature. Zombie bears, zombie butts; they’re literally badass.
[artist: Forte]
There’s a catch. Because they think us dumb, unthinking slaves and themselves immune, our revelation can reverse the Cartesian ordering of terror and counterterror [thus victimization] and the state vs nature-as-monstrous-feminine; re [from Volume One]:
Once established by state forces, the illusory maintenance of state righteousness, sovereignty and legitimacy must never be challenged lest “the world end”; i.e., Capitalist Realism. On one side, the state preys on nature and human bodies as raped by Cartesian forces, the latter feeding on the former by transforming them into walking apocalypses: zombies, demons, and totems as hyperbolically menacing. On the other side, state victims endure police brutality’s embodiment of presumed, conspicuous guilt (the dark exterior) and internalizing of self-hatred and bigotry while subverting police misuse of Gothic poetics through a pedagogy of the oppressed: counterterror with a proletarian function.
I’ve repeatedly said that function determines function. Another way to conceptualize this is flow determines function. That is, during oppositional praxis’ dialectical-material struggles, terror and counterterror become anisotropic; i.e., determined by direction of flow insofar as power is concerned. Settler colonialism, then, flows power towards the state to benefit the elite and harm workers; it weaponizes Gothic poetics to maintain the historical-material standard—to keep the elite “on top” by dehumanizing the colonized, alienating and delegitimizing their own violence, terror and monstrous bodily expression as criminal within Cartesian copaganda: […] subjugated phallic women castrating a female master rebel, once she visibly tries—through a dissident question of mastery—to reverse the status-quo binary (and flow) of terrorism and counterterrorism by showing her trauma, anger and willingness to fight back against a presumed overlord.
In doing so, a Galatea threatens the canonical, Pygmalion decree of what’s appropriate, insofar as the giving and receiving of xenophobic violence unfold inside a compelled moral order—one whose fear and dogma (during endless crisis, decay and moral panic) establishes the police and the state as good, thus legitimate, and those aliens inside the state of exception as bad, thus illegitimate [source].
[artist: Forte]
As something to perceive under capital, then, we use the viewing of our wildly undead bodies [and their hellish, hairy openings, left] to reclaim them as hellish; i.e., as the regular instruments of our enslavement taken back from police agents—all with a residual alien potency to revisit trauma as something send back onto those who wish to dominate us/make us feel dead without our consent! By clapping back as Medusa famously does, we show them what they inherit and regularly deny under capital inside the Imperial Core: their own hand in genocide. Faced with that during the dialectic of the alien as dream-like, they petrify [or wake up to join our cause, humanizing both of us] and we can decide where to go from there.)
The Roots of Trauma, part one: Assembling Trauma and Questions of Betrayal in Beloved, Frankenstein, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Terror: Infamy (feat., Toni Morrison and Howard Zinn)
“Magua’s village and lodges were burnt. Magua’s children were killed by the English. l was taken as slave by the Mohawk who fought for the Grey Hair. Magua’s wife believed he was dead and became the wife of another. The Grey Hair was the father of all that. ln time, Magua became blood brother to the Mohawk to become free. But always in his heart, he is Huron. And his heart will be whole again on the day the Grey Hair and all his seed are dead.”
—Magua, The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
As something to recreate, Hell is already crowded. Zombies are die-hard not just through wanton exploitation, but because they speak to our different atomized, tokenized struggles under capital through popular (accessible) means: written and oral traditions like the zombie narrative fusing this with that. Such nightmares, then, concern trauma as something felt among different members of a group trapped in the same occupied tomb, death reassembling like Osiris (or Count Dracula) before coming home to roost. We should not fight nor dismiss this, as the canonical zombie apocalypse would prescribe (through abjection), but give the big, needy, pent-up bastard a hug post-assembly!
(artist: F.T. Merril)
To that, it’s a bit like wrestling a bear—generally not a good idea, yet such a thing is not unheard of as a rite of passage that, per Marx, evokes dream-like tragedies and farce (and isn’t limited to undead revolutionary language as ostensibly threatening like bears; i.e., can be silly as a point of practice; e.g., the syrup bottle scene from Super Troopers [2001]: “What’s the matter? Your mamma didn’t teach you how to chug?“) but also literal dreams informed by the previous things. These can be very weird, and not just mine[2] (though mine are, below).
Indeed, this phantasmagorical weirdness runs in the family as a veritable chronotope: my mother once waking in the middle of the night to find my father not just sleepwalking, but shadow boxing in the middle of their bedroom, completely naked! Turns out, he’d been fighting a bear in his dream, my mother smiling to herself as he threw punch after punch (no doubt putting on quite a show as his junk flopped comically about, image not shown).
More to the point, such manly men as my father[3] generally are more eager to punch actual bears than face the monstrous-feminine as, for lack of a better term (and sticking to one Dad would have abused in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s into the present), “gay”:
(artist: Kayze Cutie)
Simultaneously buried and exposed, such visions-as-undead present the outside body as decayed, naked and menacing (zombie dork being canonically monstrous-feminine, left); i.e., a perceived vulnerability and menace[4] operating in ways that classically make for poor interlocution by virtue of the silencing nature of state abuse and the inevitable decay of memory over time. For one, culture death of the enslaved makes them dead while above ground. During an apocalypse, though, their repressed trauma reverses the diaspora, spilling into the everyday world by clawing up from underground. Either put there as state targets by hidden atrocities that yet walk the earth, or interred as settlers of a colonial world afforded the luxury of a personal tomb, the walking dead constitute a kind of collateral damage amid state abuse as concealed; they mysteriously reanimate from a breach in the membrane of normalized experience, reentering the living world to communicate something from beyond the grave. Yet the vector of rememory is utterly braindead, blind and indiscriminate in its dream-like devouring (exhibit 36d1); e.g., Gray Wright’s somehow creepy and gay “Dream Weaver” (1975) inspired by John Lennon’s own drug-fueled, white-Indian visions quests.
Such decayed, horrifying confrontations, then, might seem like the stuff of nightmares and cheap, xenophobic nonsense; they also ascribe to a constant dialectical-material relationship between the living and the dead as potentially xenophilic, thus having the valued potential to humanize the wretched, the damned, the buried as having some hand in its own demise (re: tokenization). While the idea of the zombie exists inside the human mind, the human mind is informed by popular stories that reify zombies as part of the material world through a buried, displaced historical precedent (the subterfuge trifecta). All are things to reflect on as a plastic history that exists inside and outside of ourselves, one we can transform through our own dream-like interactions and creations inside the graveyard’s indeterminate thresholds. Time, it turns out, is a circle, one a Gothicist like myself will enact by at times literally walking in circles, Sisyphus-style, to impart later in ways that are suitably campy (“What a story, Mark!”):
(artist: Joe Morse; source: Jonathon Sturgeon’s “Stirring Images from the First Ever Illustrated Version of Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” 2015)
After watching The Last of Us, for example, I went to bed and had those fitful dreams. When I woke, I felt invigorated, not afraid, and proceeded to write my heart out (what became the skeleton for the Undead Module). To borrow from Toni Morrison, I had experienced a “rememory” of trauma—re, Beloved’s core idea:
Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative (source).
That morning but also approaching two years afterwards (now), I would write following such dreams as continuations of my mind processing these things on its own. I would write, sleep on it, wake up, and walk around the block; i.e., to rinse and repeat Umberto Eco’s interpretive walks, but also my castle-narrative (the idea and outcome as borrowed from Bakhtin) as returning to difficult subject matter by virtue of privilege and necessity—all in order to wrap my head around something elusive and close at hand: a dead “baby’s” ghost visiting me not unlike the heroine Sethe’s slain child, Crawling Already? from Morrison’s troubled book.
The tragedy for Sethe is doubting her child’s existence. She is an escaped slave, having fled to the North to give birth. But upon the four slave catchers’ arrival (mirroring the Four Horsemen), she panics and kills her child to spare it a life of slavery (thus rape). Such things are a metaphor for tokenization as a trauma response that cannibalizes the self—a process per rememory we shall continue to unpack and reanimate, here.
One does not simply kill her child without consequences (shame, among other things). Post-infanticide, Sethe becomes the proverbial madwoman in the attic, her old home haunted by the spirit of her dead child, but also her killing of it; i.e., the rememory of what she did, having to face it again and again as forever incomplete. The entire house is the attic, albeit of a plantation that—like the child’s fragmented ghost—follows its mother around. She’ll never be free of it, the story’s theme of rememory conveying a deeply traumatized woman effectively dreaming while awake, always disassociating (Cuwu was like that, too, but less so when they were stable).
Per the dialectic of the alien, the Gothic is writ in disintegration; said detachment and fragmentation echoes across texts (re: from Frankenstein to Beloved to Annihilation, etc) in and out of dreams. This doesn’t make it any clearer when it happens, though. Morrison’s adherence to the tradition makes certain sections nigh-unreadable gibberish (stream of consciousness); i.e., by virtue of the heroine feeling connected to them at all times and from all directions, suggesting the entire thing was written in hindsight and in the moment—the rise of a new state of existence struggling to recall what came before, during the Middle Passage (which Morrison dedicates the story to): a kind of trauma-induced amnesia per the wandering restless labyrinth as tethered to Sethe. She is the vanishing point as much as the space is, cryptonymically announcing Hogle’s place of concealment per the individual standing on the ashes of something not quite present: genocide, stolen generations on stolen land of stolen agency from stolen bodies, etc, as unironically raped by state forces.
Rape, then, is historically a power fantasy to enact upon others against their will (see: footnote, below). Except no power fantasy should ever come at other people’s expense. When it does, it leads to a routine failing of memory and willpower in the face of trauma, but also to the classic dice roll: cop or victim, during service towards profit through the usual monomythic, hero-grade rape[5] fantasies/demon BDSM operating like demon lovers historically do; i.e., as controlled opposition policing the usual victims by their assigned masters as a theatre to challenge inside of itself, but especially what dreams may come through imperfect regeneration!
Per C.S. Lewis and Rudolph Otto (more on them, later), such things become something to dread; i.e., a repetitive game of cat-and-mouse; e.g., not just Sethe and her dead child, but poor Ripley in Alien as alienated from the slaughter of nature fetishized. Step-by-step, she wakes from a dream into a nightmare that resembles her place of work as haunted, both bumping into her cat, but also the xenomorph as something she had some hand in: the intersex ghost of settler-colonial trauma upon which her work rests!
Though interconnected across fiction and non-fiction, such threads (and their tangents) can get rather confusing rather quickly—promptly and heavily weighing on the mind of the actor telling the story inside a place that is haunted by unspeakable things struggling to be heard regardless. The rape is forbidden, but so is mentioning it. Doing so verges on the profane simply by announcing itself in the surroundings of the performance but also their demeanor while affected by such things; i.e., as playfully unfolding during calculated risk feeling home-like, thus historically tied to moments where good play was met with bad. In turn, these generally relegate to sites of play that entertain “rape” as par for the course; e.g., a BDSM torture dungeon or Gothic novel (the two are functionally the same). Any site/performance thereof takes something out of the storyteller mid-attempt, especially when someone else lends a hand[6]!
To that, Beloved was always a difficult story to read—too fragmented to easily comprehend, coupled with the ghoulish subject matter and attempt to write about things that aren’t strictly alive (nor ever were, a quality of ghosts we’ll unpack later) but reify through a proxy/avatar based on things one has gleaned through; i.e., selective absorption turning one’s world upside-down when dreaming about dream-like stories about rape as a consequence of capital and its parent ideologies (re: Cartesian thought). Having been raped myself and having tried to revive those feelings to interrogate them with different people to vastly different outcomes and effects (re: Harmony and Jadis), I now understand Sethe’s struggles; i.e., through my own “pregnant” labors: to remember what was lost as connected to a shared struggle Morrison also had in mind. It can feel circuitous, recursive, doomed—a hellspawn chopped and screwed together into something ontologically impossible and impossible to ignore as a result:
(artist: Bernie Wrightson)
Such is the nature of the zombie and its apocalypse demonstrating those unable to reflect as abusive cunts. However, the simple truth is, many dreams repeat or otherwise return/can be triggered by exploring trauma inside and outside ourselves. This can be on purpose and/or by accident; e.g., the return of the vampire, the dragon, the xenomorph, etc, as a ghost of itself slowly shambling towards us (or quickly running and pouncing on us) in and out of dreams, but also dream-like media as internalized to converse with our sleeping selves; i.e., until we spring from sleep, half-remembering whatever phantom we think we saw as, like it or not, being something we’ve encountered before in some shape or form.
For Mary Shelley, this was the Promethean myth, which she dragged up like a corpse to modernize as rotten (speaking to the rot under capital through a displaced German state); but the same basic idea applies to us and the legends we routinely face as a) based on the same myth revived by Shelley over two centuries previous, and b) sold back to us in neoliberal stories of “past” that we, like her or Morrison, can proactively play with to inventively reclaim (and reassemble) what is lost—our undead humanity!
This isn’t by exacting revenge upon the dead (which the state, of course, wants), but interrogating their worrisome existence by going into Hell to face them; i.e., as an ambiguous presence of Cartesian abuse, thus rape as power abuse being what we must reclaim in dream-like ways here on Earth extending into wild exploratory fantasies. Said “dreams” speak to tokenization as self-destruction in relation to power as found and stolen from privatized elements (so-called “gods”); re (from “Military Optimism,” 2021):
In Gothic circles, “Promethean” means “self-destructive,” generally in pursuing power, wisdom, or technology.
The idea stems from Frankenstein, also called The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. In her story, the “natural philosopher” Victor Frankenstein discovers ancient forbidden wisdom and uses it to create unnatural life, which leads to issues; Victor is a shit parent who views his creation, the Creature, as a demon. The novel ends with him discouraging education for fear of uncovering forbidden, self-destructive knowledge. According to him, this knowledge outwardly reflects our innermost demons, which destroy us through mutual dislike (re: Skynet, Metal Sonic, the xenomorph, etc).
Although written as a unflattering parody of the Byronic hero, Victor was nevertheless a man of privilege (so was Byron); and having access to tremendous opportunities and wealth, he misused these resources to stupefying effect. As we’ll see in a moment, this kind of pampered, short-sighted hubris is on full display in neoliberal critiques: The evil companies of the 20th century’s sci-fi future (re: Alien) are just as blind and prone to blaming others as Victor was. However, they’ve become an institution whose capacity for harm far exceeds Victor’s parental failings. They lie, cheat and steal, all under the guise of scientific virtue.
Though Shelley wrote what is widely considered the first horror-themed science fiction novel, she drew inspiration from the Ancient Greek myth. In it, the titan Prometheus steals the fire of the gods (a symbol of forbidden knowledge) and gives it to mankind. In the myth, the gods exact revenge on Prometheus, cursing him with eternal torment; stories like Frankenstein place this suffering on humanity for their impudent curiosity, idiocy and hubris: the Promethean Quest.
Although the Promethean Quest has evolved over the centuries, the basic blueprint remains fairly unchanged:
-
- exploration into the unknown, or seemingly unknown
- discovery of a lost civilization
- confrontation with a rogue technology
- survival and escape
- repeat
As new civilizations grow more and more advanced, they push outward and encounter fallen “gods.” Not actual gods posed by the Greeks, but those whose technology is so advanced as to be virtually indistinguishable from magic (see: Clarke’s third law).
The makers of this technology are not gods; they are sapient mortals who destroyed themselves with powerful knowledge they failed to control. Their creations survive them, attracting future explorers. Those who arrive want more power, the whole ordeal reliably ending in disaster. This cycle repeats, leaving a field of “ancient” [quotes, new] wreckage in its wake (source).
The above writing is three years old by now, and it constitutes my wrestling with older fictions I was beginning to think about differently back then; i.e., as a matter of Gothic-tinged genderqueer discourse (what I, slightly over a year later, would call Gothic Communism). But their haunting as a matter of rememory—to face and reassemble in hellish, Radcliffean ways that, unlike Radcliffe, I didn’t want to banish but understand—goes on and on, well beyond my PhD (and subsequent books) into this one: the proverbial gazing into the abyss, the call of the void.
One, said abyss is often associated with the undead’s eyes—however blind they might appear—as being trance-like, offering a rare and fatal vision[7] tied to a larger cannibalistic cycle (re: the Reapers, footnote); i.e., touched upon by bad (apocalyptic) dreams not simply as repressed memories, but hushed discourse concerned with taboo things paradoxically validated through monstrous poetics as tolerable, acceptable, commodified; re: zombies. Two, it literally involves dreams that—like the zombie—rise from the grave-like mind as connected to larger gravesites to have sex (communion) inside as profane (“almost holy”) on purpose.
For example, while recently considering this section for final review, I had a consent-non-consent session with Harmony a few hours before. I did so to regain some sense of control pertaining to the rising presence of fascism I feel right now in the real world—partly thanks to Bad Empanada Live’s video, “Twitter Is Causing a Global Nazi Resurgence – It Must Be Destroyed” (2024) but also while working on the Undead Module, which is suitably full of nightmares, of nightmares, of nightmares (such things driving those in touch with a broader emotional current to, at a glance, inexplicitly commit suicide in the prime of their youth; i.e., Juliet Syndrome; e.g., Evelyne McHale).
(model and artist: Itzel and Persephone van der Waard)
As a result, I once again had a compound meta nightmare whose rememory was based on a nightmare that I’d already had before (with the literal Nightmare boss monster from Metroid Fusion in the dream, too, for good measure), and one that pertained to my own trauma as something the professionals would call “complex.” But as Doctor Morbius said, “Now you know a dream can’t hurt you!” However delicious the irony was in his case, he was more or less correct; but one can still feel haunted or out of control during these tricky echoes’ bad repetition and deliberately campy citation (re: Matthew Lewis). Per Marx, this concerns historical-material conditions, which I pointedly extend to socio-material conditions; i.e., as a dualistic manner of expanding on Castricano’s cryptomimesis to contend with history within myself as something to reify out of disparate parts: writing with the dead as weighing on my overloaded brain becoming something to repeatedly express through my writing and my artwork (which, in turn, is generally accomplished with the help of those operating on a similar wavelength; e.g., Itzel, above, but also Morrison).
In psychological thought, “Hell” classically refers to the subconscious mind and its effects on the owner(s) (and which the spirit world/world of dreams and nightmares has a historical-material, thus dialectical-material effect that psychological models like to ignore[8], including older Gothic analysis like Creed or Kristeva). Like Sethe, though, we are not the same person as these older quacks, but likewise aren’t our older selves per baptismal in Styx’ hellish waters; their rapturous power[9] is only ours to control on repeated viewings, but each visit is unique. It is both dangerous and required if we are to truly be free—not of the trauma or the memory of experience to fear (which will always be to some degree legitimate), but of its total dominion over us as a lived experience that never really stops until we are dead: sleep is the cousin of death, after all.
Such elements generally oscillate between solemnity and satire; e.g., The Book of Mormon’s “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream” (2017): “You blamed your brother for eating the donut! You’re a dick!” / “I can’t believe Jesus called me a dick!” But, it’s just as often franchised between authors having perennial debates in the same repeating stories and characters—Lewis and Radcliffe, myself and Morrison, but also Scott and Cameron:
(exhibit 36d2: Cameron’s ideas on the Amazon and Immaculate Conception aren’t so immaculate; they generally weaponize the Amazon as asexual, but haunted by sexual trauma as something to project onto an imaginary other attached to real-world peoples [the Vietnamese]. Echoing Radcliffe’s gentler detectives’ own absurd nightmares but updating them for a neoliberal market, Cameron’s neoconservative, exterminatory rhetoric generally pits the Amazon against the Medusa as something to kill and crush during a trigger response to rape panic; i.e., something to point the TERF-grade Madonna at before “pulling” like the trigger of a gun-like nun to actualize the heroine in a way that is sexualized by Cameron: the heteronormative regulation of sex, terror and force through neoliberal war copaganda. Violence becomes sexy insofar as its justification serves the heroine returning to a desired position within the status quo: the military mother saving the colony brat from Communism.)
Such stories concern generational trauma in ways that mark us as nostalgically wounded, touched in half-real forms that merge reality with imagination. When marked, said trauma becomes a part of us, then; i.e., as an extension of the world around us that we internalize and absorb, mid-phantasm. It can exacerbate, thus trigger again in the future and stir up old feelings inside us, but also the world around us when such things come back around (the chickens); i.e., post-traumatic stress as a poetic device relayed between us and our surroundings across space and time, in and out of dreams. These rise frightfully in ways that are sudden and unpleasant, like a spontaneous pregnancy (a Gothic staple) that we must give birth to lest it explode violently out of us. These mimic symptoms of the orgasm, of death, of what doctors until quite recently would openly describe as hysteria, aka “wandering womb.”
Sure, it’s all rather Freudian and stupid (above), but the societal effects are nonetheless real for many people (validating Cameron’s rape fantasies as speaking to a very common fear among women and other marginalized peoples: foreign invasion of oneself through rape). The proletarian trick is to take control of the labors (and tokophobic-grade anxieties attached to them) to not only survive them, but the doctors (and other people) who reliably discount our feelings and lived, monstrous-feminine experiences[10]; i.e, which they attribute to our failings while negatively contributing to the symptoms and symbols: as something that will purge one way or another!
Like a Gothic novel, though, dreams and nightmares remain an essential part of the experience—indeed, monomythically involve the hero venturing into Hell to face the past as undead; i.e., as something to conjure up regardless if someone wants to or not, then survive it. Per my arguments, the liminal hauntology of war is the appearance of the grim harvest, which leads to tokenization and rape of the self as alien. Generally this is through a castle or castle-like monster in relation to broader socio-material factors per capital harvesting us as part of nature. Even so, it can still feel like an endless nightmare; i.e., occurring per a sweetly terrifying sensation of drifting in and out of sleep while awake.
As such, rememory is the process of going heroically into such spaces (often again and again as anisotropic, concentric extensions of ourselves through mise-en-abyme); i.e., to confront uncomfortable things that, however bizarre, fragmented or abstract they might seem, are generally explored through theatre, music, dance and yes, kayfabe/Amazonomachia as half-real extensions of our lives attached to legends and they us (re: the chronotope); e.g., Neo leaving the Matrix to go back inside, Link’s raft struck by lightning to send him to the isle of the Wind Fish (which he summons by collecting magical instruments), Samus plumbing the Zebethean depths time and time again, and so on…
(artist: Daniel Vendrell Oduber)
Whatever the form, such things are abused on repeat by the state tokenizing the oppressed into traitors of class, race and culture put “to sleep”; i.e., as a Radcliffean means of conjuring up horrors that, per unspeakable state abuses, menticide workers to rape themselves and nature as alien, monstrous-feminine zombies: a self-imposed gag recycling such dreams inside the sleeper’s echo-chamber brain. We can reclaim this (re: confusing the cat, Monty-Python-style), of course, but something is always given and gained, per attempt; each dive leaves a part of our old selves in Hell, and loads us with fresh fatal knowledge concerning preparation for new “tortures.” In turn, these let us face and interrogate trauma harmlessly as a means of paraxial catharsis; i.e., when done correctly, ludo-Gothic BDSM isn’t a gateway drug for anything but sexual healing and rape prevention in the future: Gothic Communism.
Them’s the breaks. Now let’s take all of this and consider it not to my latest dreams (re: after Harmony and I put “rape” in quotes), but to the response I had over a year ago when dreaming about The Last of Us. The details of that dream aren’t important (though we’ll unpack some of them in part two of this subchapter); the response to them is. The trauma of that dream wasn’t entirely my own, then, but had elided with various other expressions of things we simultaneously abject but seek out in disguised, undead forms; i.e., the difficulty in remembering to recover singular atrocities, but also forming the wider social-sexual habits that combine this-with-that: to stand together as a diverse polity with uneven, idiosyncratic, race-to-class-to-cultural betrayals and oppression. Morrison dedicated her story to the millions-dead of the Middle Passage, and Beloved’s suitable fragmentation speaks to a kind of privilege many people of color in America don’t have: a voice (often a singer’s, dancer’s or painter’s).
Such a voice is vital, of course, but something I discovered since is how minorities often become singularized in their struggle to be heard. The Communist Numinous isn’t a single group, though; it represents a collective struggle that needs to put aside past differences and stand together against the elite. Otherwise, they’ll divide and conquer us all over again. In short, this isn’t a contest or a race, and rape isn’t something to rank (“different flavors and degrees of shit,” I often have to explain to my mother); we can speak to our own peoples’ raping by police forces, but to truly heal from such things, division as a praxial device must, itself, become a thing of the past (e.g., emotional manipulation). Bold but respectful, we must become part of the same undivided spirit, a spectre of Marx more Marxist than Marx was, more gay and enlightened towards liberation through rememory as improving upon itself from Morrison to me:
(artist: Super Phazed)
Such communions with the dead are an endless cycle, and one we shouldn’t bat away with bullets and knifes just because it implies our being born on the right side of the tracks (thus fearful of colonization by the alien dead to some degree; re: “shower curtain syndrome, vis-à-vis Jameson). We must hug Medusa and abjure capital preying not just on her but all of us. There is no surviving capital; we can only transform it, and this starts with a dream of something better built on older dreams (or palimpsestuous echoes of these things) that decidedly were not.
For me, then, my aforementioned dream about The Last of Us had blended said text (already an adaptation) according to my own adult education and childhood traumas—specifically my surviving of child abuse and rape (re: Dad and Jadis, respectively), as well as my experiences with dated portrayals of war that were given to me from different sources growing up (re: the monomyth). It was a tangled, confusing chorus of the dead, but somehow it all made sense to me (abuse acclimates you to recursive chaos as a revived “medieval”; re: mise-en-abyme as consistently “ancient”): the rememory of things that have been lost to Capitalism’s half-hidden atrocities and must—like the fairy or the succubus—be brought back to life in ways that are always different; i.e., what Ghil’ad Zuckermann calls “sleeping beauties” in regards to languages that are not “dead” thus gone forever, but “sleeping” thus waiting—like Cthulhu—to be revived again (Polyglot Conference’s “Sleeping Beauties Awake,” 2017). Death, then, is a part of life and vice versa, including all aspects of it we’re alienated from and given bad counterfeits in return. Sooner or later, death as a matter of chimeras and hauntologies alike, comes home to haunt settler colonialism and its dreamy cycle of pioneers; i.e., feasting on the gutted corpse of Manifest Destiny to either start it again, or try something different moving forward!
(artist: Istrander)
Gothic-Communist development is such a conduit. Repurposing hellish dreams out of the corpse of empire requires radical, intersectional forms of solidarity that historically have struggled to manifest in coherent forms (re: Morrison); i.e., insofar as chasing representation goes, has taken increased importance (during tokenization) over any serious attempt at intersectional solidarity in mainstream media and politics. One could argue this praxial inertia being the whole point—to divide canonically along class and racial lines by redlining in all the usual ways, and letting one or two across to gatekeep all the rest seemingly stuck in Dreamland; i.e., tokenization and normalization of different radicalized groups into moderate forms that sell out and play the cop of said dreams stuck in the cave, themselves.
It’s a clearly complicated topic, insofar as it’s historically discouraged by capital, whose critics have not been nearly radical enough insofar as intersectional solidarity is concerned; i.e., bonding together in ways that grant the right of rebellion to all groups working together against the elite and their token servants’ bad dreams. Anything less simply leads to failure and regression towards enslavement and genocide again, nipping liberation in the bud; e.g., Skynet killing the mother of its enemy before his birth.
We’ve touched upon Afronormativity earlier in the book (which Beloved points to), but won’t have time to give examples of similar normativities at length. I simply want to give the holistic model upon which they all function, moving power through the socio-material devices of Gothic poetics in one direction or the other (towards workers or the state). To that, it’s simply a historical-material fact at this stage: development cannot work without all oppressed groups finding common ground against the state/capital as the ultimate foe, the pearly Omelas eating everything around it and then itself. It has and will continue to divide and harvest nature as monstrous-feminine according to anything that isn’t functionally white; this starts with the colonizer image, but extends to tokenized latitude as given to oppressed individuals willing to (not without some degree of repressed shame) sell their people down the river for the umpteenth time.
This brings us to The Last of the Mohicans—not for a close-read of the text, but to ply the basic ideas already covered as present within stories like it to the larger dialectical-material forces at work.
To that, I want to be holistic and will quickly re-mention Morrison as someone to critique; i.e., as a threat to solidarity (so-called “mainstream success”), but also the likes of Howard Zinn and Zionism, as well as other cultural groups we need to consider together (re: The Terror: Infamy). We need to, insofar as universal liberation concerns facing the reality that all of us are presently atomized to varying degrees; i.e., by stories like The Last of the Mohicans working to presage and lament genocide in service to profit!
First, the movie, itself. Of it, Alys Caviness-Gober writes,
Based on James Fenimore Cooper‘s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757. The novel is a rather boring read that, like Mann’s film, takes liberties with historical facts. Both the novel and various film and TV adaptations contain some historical truths: both the French and the British armies used Native Americans as scouts, guides, and allies; outnumbered by the British, the French were more dependent upon Native American aid than were the British; the Algonquians (Mohican) and Iroquois (Mohawk) were traditional competitors and enemies and those traditions determined which side of the War the various tribes supported. Cooper based his novel, The Last of the Mohicans, on the Mohican tribe, but his depiction of them includes aspects of the Mohegan cultural, including Mohegan names, like Uncas. At the time of Cooper’s writing, the Mohegan were a separate Algonquian tribe associated with eastern Connecticut. Cooper set his novel in and around Lake George, New York, in the Hudson Valley, which was historically Mohican land (source: “C’mon, Mann: The Last of the Mohicans,” 2021)
First, note how the different tribes’ animus is as much with each other as the warring Europeans dividing up native lands. More to the point, whichever side won, these different Indigenous groups would surely have suffered at the hands of. Second, we can see some sense of reassembly across a variety of works telling the same basic story: the white Indian narrative.
Cooper wrote The Leatherstocking Tales between 1823 and 1841, and they present the same underlying issue; a reassembly of Native American history as written by the conqueror class to effectively “cry for the Indians” while publishing a kind of boys-only pulp fiction: white voices sanctimoniously speaking to the plight of native populations, treating their doom as “foregone.” It verges away from activism and into liberal doomsaying (white moderacy through emotional manipulation). Such a trend is carried forward from Cooper by men like William Faulkner’s own quickness to relegate such peoples and lands (e.g., The Bear, 1942) to a doomed position under capital, an abject state of ruin (a tomb, often an “ancient” one hauntologically dug back up; e.g., Naughty Dogs’ Central-to-South American ruins, tribal masks, and evil scientist, Dr. Cortex, abjecting Nazis, like usual, away from North America) that points the finger at them and their folly instead of us and ours. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
As usual, the process of abjection (as something to reassemble) deflects the United States’ role in things then and now—in short, it’s always the other side that does genocide, “them” instead of “us” while the middle class (which includes a black middle; re: Morrison) attacks the ghost of the counterfeit wherever they go; they’re so busy playing undertaker but also Jesus bearing the cross, dying[11] for “our” sins while breaking the bad news (and making money off it) that they “forget” to actively solidarize these different groups divided and conquered by the state (something Morrison admittedly does, insofar as she is gentrified and Afrocentrist [speaking exclusively about Black America; source: Britannica] much like other black activists/auteurs have been/are; e.g., Jordan Peele[12] writing about already-dead peoples doomed like the Mohicans were).
(artist: Super Phazed)
To this, something important is lost; i.e., the wretched have a constant part to play in their own destruction and struggle to heal (e.g., Black Snake Moan, 2006): to routinely take the state’s poison gifts—”their” gold as stolen from other nations, peoples, dead—as a middle-class assimilation gimmick. Specialized voices like Morrison are still useful, but they need to solidarize or they’re still divided/segregated in ways capital can exploit; i.e., a darling we can “kill” (she died in 2019) and camp like all the rest: the controlled opposition of a black member in the ivory tower (and all that entails).
Bringing things back to The Last of the Mohicans, the paradox demands those with more privilege as critiquing the issues of such buried voices while intersecting with other oppressed groups having their own hand in self-conquest; i.e., Morrison perhaps trying to speak to the experience of other groups and her own as subject to the same state forces, thus class, race and cultural betrayals.
So often, these groups want to speak and act exclusively for themselves and their liberation, when in reality we need to unite and speak out for each other against capital; i.e., as one: through our undead cravings/appetites as “pent up” in ways that—per the pedagogy of the oppressed—heal from rape as already having happened and desperately needing release. This happens not by specializing in single groups unto themselves, but by finding and respecting our similarities amid difference and vice versa; e.g., Edward Said writing for the plight of the Palestinians, though often from relative safety and security in the US. Doing so doesn’t make Culture and Imperialism (1993) any less important, but the value in his voice and that of the people of Gaza lies in how they remain part of the same larger project’s sticking point: liberation as a universal goal.
To this, we desperately need to mix and hybridize, thus adapt to a predatory system that only knows how to divide and destroy by conjuring up false symbols of rebellion. That includes white Indians, but also token idiots (and fancy authors like Morrison who, while important enough to merit me taking their ideas for myself and my work, still find Beloved to frankly be a bit of a slog—no offense).
Believe me, I wish I could say that it was simply the straight white man’s fault alone (it’s not) and that white savior myths are dangerous and harmful (they are[13]), but capital invades, gentrifies and decays feminism, punk culture, pan-Africanism, genderqueer groups and other minorities factions, too; i.e., to hand out singular opportunities to betray as many as possible to benefit as few as possible.
For example, various factions of the Inca population sought liberation from the empire already ruling them (re: “Guns, Germs and Steel: A Historical Critique“), putting their trust in enterprising Europeans (never a good idea); the Cherokee adopted American laws, clothing and customs, only to be betrayed in turn; discord among the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X led to a) his assassination (and other members of the same movement) and b) the rise of “Hoteps[14]” and black Capitalism (re: “The REAL Faces of Black Conservatism,” 2023); the recuperation of Black Lives Matter and police violence; and so on, regarding problems of race, class and culture as a matter of division and decay under capital as something proletarian rememory and its attempts at intersectional solidary cannot dare ignore.
While such loyalty is cheaply bought, its price is sadly great. Howard Zinn writes of this in A People’s History of the United States,
“History is the memory of states,” wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored, in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen’s policies. From his standpoint, the “peace” that Europe had before the French Revolution was “restored” by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation—a world not restored but disintegrated.
My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.
Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American war as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can “see” history from the standpoint of others.
My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. And the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims. Still, understanding the complexities, this book will be skeptical of governments and their attempts, through politics and culture, to ensnare ordinary people in a giant web of nationhood pretending to a common interest. I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”
I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements. But to think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare (source).
Zinn was not perfect, nor were other Jewish men of the period like Einstein, but they touched on something to work towards they could not always articulate without focusing on their own groups with a limited understanding about other groups[15].
Personally, I like to think I do a better job than either man (or Morrison, or other titans of their time, who did not have my advantages). As I myself wrote earlier in this volume,
Monsters are often seen as “not real” or “impossible,” relegated to the lands of make-believe and pure fantasy. Except this isn’t true. In Gothic Communism, they constitute a powerful, diverse, and modular means of interrogating the world around us as full of dangerous Cartesian illusions meant to control workers by locking Capitalism (and its genocidal ordering of nature and human language) firmly in place. Good monsters become impossible, as do the possible futures they arguably represent.
Instead of saying “in a perfect world,” then, we should say “a possible world”; i.e., in a better possible world, nudity (and other modes of GNC sexual and gender expression) can be exposed and enjoyed post-scarcity and not be seen and treated as inhumanely monstrous (a threat; e.g., bare bodies being a threat to the pimp’s profit margins). Rather, the monstrous language remains as a voice for the oppressed to flourish with. […] Open monstrous sexuality [isn’t] the end of the world as Capitalist Realism would treat it as (a world where such things are impossible save as shackled commodities that uphold the status quo), but the start to what the elite want us to think is “perfect,” thus “impossible”: humanizing the harvest of fruit-like bodies laid low by Capitalism’s habitual reaping.
However painful, though, it’s important to remember that such a reaping was assisted by those, Zinn points out, as being on the side of the executioner (white skin or not). He would know, being a bomber in the US military during WW2 who lost his taste for war and bloodshed, thus rape (though not his inability to think beyond nation-states, it would seem). The same goes for others who, white or not, led to the both-sides arguments that helped continue Capitalism’s daily operations; i.e., into the present space and time, thus turning of themselves into the kinds of zombies used to justify future aggression built on centuries of abuse touched upon in theatre, music, movies, etc. This includes Zinn, Einstein and Morrison, but also characters like Magua from The Last of the Mohicans as retold by Mann: a ghost of war hungry for blood (and revenge).
As Slayer puts it, “Rise ghosts of war!“:
Fate, silent warriors, sleeping souls will rise
Once forgotten soldiers come to life
Fallen mercenary, dormancy is done
Not content with wars we’ve never won (source: Genius)
What you see is basically what you get with Slayer. All the same, war with the zombie is classically a privilege of the middle class; i.e., rape, war and death things to play with (“war as dead”), while simultaneously and surreptitiously recruiting said fearful-fascinated children (drunk on the Numinous) to wage future holy crusades against a hauntological being: the ghosts of past atrocities rising up overseas and at home, mid-cryptomimesis, to seal the oppressor in monomythic tombs of their own making!
When I was in grad school, Dale Townshend once described live burial as “the Gothic master-trope.” Generally tied to the home as eroticized per abject (unspeakable) abuse as “of to the bedroom” (re: Foucault) and other areas as haunted by rape, this includes tokenized soldiers being asked to go back to their ancestral homelands to rape and cannibalize them anew—as part of an endless historical-material cycle at odds with itself. Such feelings are not known to be salubrious, generally perceived as a psychosexual attack on the conqueror facing the black mirror held up to them (tokenized or not). The elite use rememory as a guilt device to martyr said soldiers, but for the oppressed it is classically a counterterror weapon of revenge known famously as the tool of shadowy guerrilla forces: “You’re eating yourself, dumbass!”
“The demon is a liar!” Father Merrin asserts; but looks and arguments can be deceiving in both directions. Ghosts of the dead have a predatory function seeking to right past wrongs, whereas agents of state force like or Magua assign guilt and moral judgements to abject capitalistic violence as coming out of American, Africa, and Asia (e.g., Japan, with 2019’s The Terror: Infamy‘s fearsomely disarming Yuko, above) speaking to the Imperial Boomerang on Japanese immigrants during WW2 through a ghost story with zombie-like elements: the turning of people into corpses drained by the spirit as emerging during war not just as the cataclysm, but the catalyst[16]) and other non-European places America has occupied, colonized, assimilated, and abandoned to have them take part in the same cycle of cannibalism and conquest. Concessions with power always lead to cannibalism; it becomes like Jack Torrance’s book, endlessly repeating a message that (unlike his famous sentence) changes inside of a bad echo, a Song of Infinity’s mixed metaphors that can critique the zombie-like function of capital; i.e., as a presence of older rememory to confront and speak with: xenoglossia.
(source, Tumblr post, This Is a Podcast Fanblog: July 11th, 2023)
Holistic study is the spirit of this book, “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them [to] understand larger structures and patterns.” As such, facing and reassembling the cost of the state’s imaginary past and Gothic ancestry through rememory means confronting such token, thus embarrassing concessions, then changing the cultural understanding of the imaginary past and the actual past as being made of basically the same stuff—people and their myths and legends, but also their victories and defeats (self-inflicted or otherwise).
Such interviews generally have a traumatic element, but smiling in the face of the punitive gods of capital is the trick for us Galateas bucking Pygmalion; i.e., talking to the Balrog instead of abjecting it as Gandalf did:
(source: v.card.bandits)
I was always a weird, sassy bitch; faced with the xenomorph, Pazuzu, Magua, Yuko, or Gwyn Lord of Cinder, etc, I would want to talk with them, not attack and kill them (which only buries the problem to rise again, later). “The myth of Gothic ancestry [and its bugbears] endured because it was useful”; for us, that means pulling our heads out of our sheltered asses (re: the dialectic of shelter and protection) to humanize the zombie, however abject and Numinous it might seem. State proponents serving profit would sooner pull out their own teeth than do so; we want to build up/grant the undead a tolerance and audience as interlocutors, not enemies, thus prepare ourselves for a life rebelling against the status quo—i.e., as normalizing genocide against zombie-like[17] recipients and givers of state abuse (argumentation): monsters, but and the mothers who try (as Ripley and Morrison do) to protect us from the horrors of the state: ghost stories with a pointedly zombie-like character.
Possible worlds, then, aren’t built on scapegoats like Magua as objects to summon, blame and kill (which the movie most certainly does), but by understanding the imaginary past and its writhing agony and furious hunger) in ways that update the Wisdom of the Ancients as an endless document; i.e., through mutual consent/action through conscious acceptance and healing while resisting state oppression (and avoiding embarrassing palingenetic queries like Disney’s awful, 1953 “Why Is the Red Man Red?” next page). Doing so involves such an imaginary force as something to put together and interrogate without dehumanizing them as ghosts of dead Indians (e.g., Peter Pan projecting racism forward by looking backward at older fetishizing forms: Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and the White Indian); i.e., through performances that encourage the confronting of power and trauma as things to play with, helping us wake up in ways that capital will always discourage while pointing the finger at its victims as “already liberated” by its so-called “heroes.”
As such, each awakening is part of a larger undead whole, and takes on different staging points depending on various factors: where a worker starts and how rememory is attained to synthesize the pedagogy of the oppressed as a matter of good social-sexual habits across different polities; i.e., avoiding any reductively “pure” psychoanalytical pitfalls (e.g., “It’s like totally the Id, my dudes!”) while acknowledging the important role/awesome power of dreams (and dream-like things) regarding the rememory process as eternal, going—like capital certainly does—on and on and on: achieving intersectional solidarity (and solutions towards it) through said pedagogy resisting police concessions through unironic violence, terror and sexual harm (rape); i.e., as a matter of proletarian praxis during cryptonymy’s game of mirrors and masks being dream-like, summoning up old, dead hauntologies (the ghosts of Native Americans) to interrogate them.
People sell out, thinking in the short term, only to eventually abandon the loftier goals of revolution and liberation in exchange for the usual short-term trinkets and prizes. There must—as Kent Monkman’s illustration depicted, earlier—be room in such a metaphorical craft for all manner of oppressed groups and allies without calling ourselves the last of our kind (as Cooper did for the Mohicans, and Naughty Dog did with “us”) and eating our hearts out[18] and that of the land around us: strange appetites indeed, strange fruit (as Abel Meeropol would put it) under extermination, thus rape and murder for profit since Columbus and onto Israel (Bad Empanada’s “Israel MASS RAPING Palestinians from Gaza,” 2024); i.e., as using minority suffering to commit more suffering; e.g., Israel, per Norman Finkelstein saying unto the future, “the biggest insult to the memory of the Holocaust is not denying it but using it to commit genocide against the Palestinian people.”
By extension, the elite want us (any workers) abusing each other and nature in service to profit, thus capital, through us-versus-them as a kind of endless blame game. There is only one thing to blame: capital and capitalists, from Columbus to Rockefeller to Bill Gates to J.K. Rowling to Elon Musk. The banality of evil is that zombies don’t spring from badass necromancers; they come from corporations, CEOs and shareholders turning the handle of power (often through state mechanisms, including academics like Morrison or Zinn not protesting enough outside of their own, safe little territories) to move money through nature, and as cheaply as possible. Life becomes cheap, the zombie a dark reflection of that, a dog soldier sometimes put to heel for the state and resurrected for the umpteenth time:
Magua, then, becomes a kind of vice-character eater of the dead; i.e., blackened by rape under capital to consume his own people by conducting the White Man’s trade on an oppressed polity he does not have the hindsight or impartiality to see: his blinded corpse seeking revenge (“an eye for an eye makes the world blind”), the cannibal pushed into doing what his oppressors would accuse him and his people of (re: Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks). And while it’s true that Magua offers a grim stereotype with a kernel of truth (stolen generations and transgenerational trauma), that kind of repressed voice still speaks for Indigenous anger instead of with it; i.e., as a vice character that really should be supplied by such peoples speaking for themselves.
In other words, a given sense of division needs to reassembled and united a) per person, and b) among different groups likewise coming together in ways that include all manner of oppressed groups building trust in ways that has never quite existed: to unite the lower classes and cultures against the middle class as historically white, but prone to tokenism among various representatives plucked from each minority group to aid profit as usual. It remains the same uphill battle with the sun in our eyes as described in Volume One—faced with other members of the undead who, for all intents and purposes, experience bias, stigma, intolerance and fear as something to give and receive. Liberation lies in how we combine different things that are, more or less, just sitting around waiting for it to happen.
We’ll explore this through ludo-Gothic BDSM, next—specifically my history of coining it partially based on Morrison’s rememory and half-real Gothic reflections; i.e., between fiction and non-fiction, but also dreams and the waking world.
Onto “The Roots of Trauma, part two: Healing through ‘Rape’“!
Footnotes
[1] Akin to Monty Python’s 1971 “Hell’s Grannies” skit minus the gang’s usual performative ironies; i.e., arguing in bad faith that healthy fit young men are somehow being threatened by old grannies, or any such harmless thing presented as a genuine threat that must be policed, thus exterminated.
[2] My dreams are generally weird enough that I write them down afterwards (as have my exes, in the past—I talk in my sleep). I’ll give a few here to make my point. First dream (10/28/2023):
I had a super zombie nightmare. It was in a skyscraper in Japan, and me and a bunch of other people were Japanese students. And there were Nazis with machine gun nests and L4D zombies that would transform in the worst ways. And a suit of armor in the corner that had a person in it. There was a cute boy named Teshiro(?). He said his name in the dream. He was very cute. We fought side-by-side, and were being pushed up floor-by-floor. We had a group of friends [with us] that seemed like we would all make it [to the top].
Then there was a woman who walked past us and smiled on our way to the final elevator to the top floor. One person panicked and shot her in the head, but it turns out she was a zombie in disguise. And her corpse kept getting bigger and scarier and the person who shot her froze. We shouted for them to finish the zombie off, but they couldn’t. The doors closed right as the zombie grabbed them and pulled them around a corner. When the doors actually closed, one person wasn’t inside the elevator, leaving four or five of us remaining.
The elevator took us to the roof, which had a gazebo entrance and a circle of dancing girls in pink circling the perimeter of the roof. I think they were trying to signal a helicopter. It was a completely uninfected part of the building. We separated and tried to relax, anticipating the rise of the zombies to this final place. I had been eyeing Teshiro and we snuggled; I said it was just a dream/game but would love to be friends in real life. And he said that would be nice. And then I woke up.
Afterwards, I added, “I felt a little sleepy but I couldn’t bring myself to fall back asleep. I didn’t want to kill Teshiro by having the zombies come [upstairs].”
Second dream (1/7/2024):
I had a dream that I was the old museum guy from The Last Crusade, being chased through airport security and down descending subway stairwells by Steven Segal, who I’d escape by sliding bodily down the railing/lane divider sorta like Mary Poppins but bodily on my stomach like a limp fish.
And I was walking on this campus past people while trying to make my flight (and avoid Steven) after having said goodbye to my ex, Zeuhl. And Holder from The Killing was walking past in lime-green clown makeup doing capoeira and freestyle rap, but also was in his civie digs trying to solve a murder where some guy’s body had been wrapped inside a log and chopped up into individual pieces like a Christmas roast and blood was everywhere.
Then I was back at my old family residence, having stayed with Zeuhl, and was preparing a plate of food in my brother’s old room, which always looked like a prison cell; and the food turned into some hors d’oeuvres and a bottle of cough syrup, while my grandmother ascended the stairs, looking like a ghost and wearing a sheet-like night gown.
And finally Steven Segal caught me. He was riding a horse, and would chase people down and pee on them. But this time, the horse peed, but not on me, and the camera cuts to Steven, who says, “and that means he’s saying thank you!” before subduing me and taking me in.
Third dream (3/3/2024):
I dreamt I was Horace Walpole. And David Attenborough was narrating the dream, which was a cross between Jurassic Park, Aliens and Dawn of the Dead, but also Walpole’s Mysterious Mother (a double incest yarn).
There were vengeful Indigenous ghosts I befriended who emerged from the fields of colonized lands as burning skeletons holding red scarves who turned into people, then xenomorphs and pirates; and a haunted theme park where, once entered, things became dark and desolate and the rides and games came alive and walked among you; and an old manuscript I was writing for my little brother about talking ravens and a magic spell that forced you to sit in someone’s lap until they drained you of your life force.
All belonged to an ancestral land that was overseen by the moon as the eye of an angry god, and if you married into the family you were safe. I was sitting at a small séance table in a wide-open field as the eye looked down on me and these wealthy-looking people, who held hands and summoned dead spirits. And at one point in the dream I married you and told my Gran about it, perched on her shoulder like a raven as I described how lovely you were.
This last dream was shared with Bay and concerned me wanting to marry them. But the others were likewise a strange degree of touching, silly and terrifying (most Gothic novels start with nightmares processing half-real events in a pareidolic, mise-en-abyme fashion).
[3] We had multiple gay neighbors in the house next door, growing up. According to my mother, Dad wanted to walk around the house naked, but despite his unusual brawn was constantly worried (through internalized homophobia) that the gay neighbors would see his ass through the closed blinds and come later in the night while he slept to “get him” (which puts a whole new meaning unto the “bear” dream). In short, he was a cowardly lion (a fact that my mother—a total fag hag—found absolutely hilarious).
[4] Or other such binaries; e.g., weakness and strength, typically framed as feminine and masculine in traditional, heteronormative gender language/tokenized normativities.
[5] As always, we want to critique what canonically essentializes as “normal”; i.e., doing so in defense of our basic rights; re (from Volume Two, part one):
Capitalism is a system of thought that prioritizes the individual in service to the elite, meaning that to speak out through open, monstrous, sex-positive expression (as we are) is paramount to preventing it (which we owe to ourselves, “just because”; i.e., there’s no logical argument for or against genocide, it’s simply incorrect relative to our rights being essentially in conflict with state predation). Canon and camp, sex positivity and sex coercion—these are literally functional opposites, as are the coaches and artisans promoting them and all their forms that follow function as a flow of power towards or away from the state. Permission can be granted implicitly in pre-established relationships that are already secure; those smaller relationships interface and relate to bigger ones and even bigger ones that, in medieval language, often work as animalistic shorthand [also known as art; re: our aforementioned caterpillar and wasp]. And if you disagree, I’d like to respond, “Welcome to real life! I’m Persephone from Earth; what planet are you from?”
[…] don’t suffer for your art if you can help it. But also remember that trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. The idea is to combine them in ways that alleviate sickness, stress, tension and harm, but also avoid predation by perfidious elements in our daily lives coming from structural abuse: the Gothic castle as a beacon to attract and house the like-minded while the state tries, as it always does, to dominate us through its own victims (source).
This isn’t just a problem with fictional characters like Sethe, trying to have relationships post-trauma as something to imagine according to what was lost and reassembled centuries after the fact (time, again, being a matter of materials and distance); they affect us in our daily lives (which shall become clear as we examine Jadis and I being drawn to each other’s weirdness, hence trauma; i.e., something they ultimately exacted upon me as their victim, which Harmony has thankfully helped me find peace, post hoc).
[6] There is always an element of risk to consider regarding our playmates and play sites, either becoming visually uncanny/threatening to us when triggered (from this volume, “A Note about Rape; or, Facing the Great Destroyer“):
Regarding the Gothic past as half-real, but also something to toy with in new imaginary forms performed in our everyday lives, I need to warn/encourage you: lived trauma can bleed into shared trauma as a site for new predation; or said “predation” can be put in quotes by someone who also knows what it’s like to suffer who doesn’t want to harm others to help themselves feel better! This coin-toss outcome is essentially pure chance on a shared aesthetic, meaning you gotta look past the image to spot the flags (red or green) hidden through subtext. You gotta know yourself, which you can’t fully without taking some risks with others. The best toys can hurt you in the wrong hands; in the right hands, you can feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven.
The paradox (thus juggling act/tightrope) is presenting a manner of perception that feels dangerous but isn’t—is able to impart sex-positive lessons without becoming dogmatic!
[7] E.g., Liara T’Soni from Mass Effect telling you with eyes as black as Hell: “Embrace eternity!” While that story is more white Indian stuff—i.e., tokenizing the monstrous-feminine to serve empire through a patriarchal, monomorphic society of Sapphic space fags—the concept isn’t unique to tokenized forms (more on this as we explore the monomyth in general, but also demons, later on).
[8] Preferring to call them “drives”—a term I never liked as it presumes an essentialized biological element that excludes the shaping of human desires (their overall conditions) as socio-material, first and foremost.
[9] Often with a historically mutilative flavor bringing us closer to a palliative Numinous; e.g., Harmony hauntologically exploring the convulsionnaires (exhibit 37a2b).
[10] Not just those of people who give birth, but GNC AMAB people, people of color, non-Christians, and others that are a) reliably animalized by Cartesian thought within capital and its canon, then b) to some degree raped and harvested: by being force fed bullets or knifes (exhibit 36d2). Again, the Gothic loves to merge the language of food, war and rape to say things that psychosexually concern all three; e.g., Victor’s revenge prescribing violence unto the Creature as something to abort by proxy.
[11] E.g., Blizzard’s 2024 “Diablo IV | Vessel of Hatred | Official Release Date Trailer” depicting the usual white colonial martyr sobbing for the source of genocide as taken to abject, faraway sites thereof; i.e., putting all of the blame of sin onto black executioners’ evil ghosts (the ghost of the counterfeit) needing to be exorcised, in effect blaming the victim of settler colonialism while conveniently ignoring the European side of things as far more widespread, as sovereign through the same counterfeits’ blaming of others.
[12] To her credit, I don’t wish to aggressively lump Morrison in with Peele, nor reduce either to a singular thing. Few writers can be insofar as they change and grow out of their older selves. Not to mention, Morrison’s reputation is as much a matter of history defined by others (who I constantly had to listen to crowing her achievements and how awesome she was). But her body of work still speaks for itself, insofar as her reputation proceeds her through those that deliver it. To that, she remains a titan of African American literature, which comes with its own baggage to critique.
For example, once while in Manchester, England at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, a black author at the talk I was attending* announced, “African Americans seem to think they’re the only black people on the face of the planet.” The statement was not challenged because I think there was some truth to it; or, as the chair for the event, Dr. Chloe Germaine Buckley, said, “The structure of Gothic writing relies on the idea that the past is never completely behind us. In fact, if it is not properly dealt with, it can erupt violently again in the present. These novels expertly highlight the dangers that lie in not confronting and resolving trauma from the past” (source: Manchester Metropolitan University’s “Gothic literature could ‘decolonise’ the curriculum”).
*”De-Colonising Children’s Literature – an evening of discussion about diversity in YA Fiction” (ibid.).
More to the point, certain actions speak for themselves in ways that are not homogenous among a given polity. Peele supports Israeli, for instance, whereas Morrison in “A Letter from 18 Writers” (2006), challenged the liquidation of the Palestinian state:
(source: Black Women Radicals)
But already we run into a problem insofar as representation includes a group of people for which Morrison is just one member of: an elite group of fancy pants nerds. Such persons are not gods and should be criticized—not for speaking about Palestine as they do, here, but meriting criticism as much as anyone does.
For example, another member of the same group is Noam Chomsky (someone we have already established being right about various things, except genocide; re: Cambodia). The same goes for Morrison, but also people likened to her same level of aggrandizement, class, what-have-you, talking about movements that historically are hardly consistent or perfect about anything except in how imperfect their struggles for liberation are; re: Afrocentrism and black voices as worryingly atomized.
Yes, it’s important to recognize who one is and the cultural tradition one belongs to. Even so, as a matter of reinvention, we should be actively coalescing into a larger radical movement concerned with uniting all peoples against capital in ways these authors didn’t; i.e., putting the cart before the horse. Postcolonialism is an-Com, which last I checked, no one called Morrison. Instead, she had a lot of love (especially in mainstream circles) regarding her work as something to pin a gold star onto, precisely because she wasn’t openly Marxist in her speech; i.e., she was black, first, and only Marxist if someone else came along and did their best to argue for that; e.g., Irfan Mehmood et al writing in 2021 (two years after her death), “This article will endeavor to discover [emphasis, me] the presence of Marxist ideology in Morrison’s, novels, The Bluest Eye and Beloved” (source: “Toni Morrison as an African American Voice: A Marxist Analysis,” 2021).
In short, people as a whole really need to be holistic as a matter of praxis and inclusivity at all times, but especially while they’re alive! Sacrificing that in favor of some imaginary past to reclaim for one group is not conducive to the kind of solidarity we need to collectively challenge state forces.
[13] The likes of John Connor and Natty Bumppo (above) being used to instill capitalist hegemonies into the future while dressed up as American-Liberal hero fantasies.
[14] “A relatively new movement in the U.S. that uses Egyptian history as a parcel to wrap up messages of Black pride,” Miranda Lovett writes in “Reflecting on the Rise of the Hoteps” (2020). “People characterized as Hoteps tend to wear traditional African styles, create content about the history of Black people from before the transatlantic slave trade, and spread ideology about the place of Black men and women within Black communities” (source). She goes on to explain:
For a young Black person struggling to connect to their ancestral cultural heritage, ancient Egypt is a familiar, attractive place to start. Egypt is the most well-known and powerful cultural influence from Africa today, making it easy for many African Americans to adopt Egyptian culture and to use its legacy of royalty, artistic sophistication, and technological advancement to create a message of Black superiority.
The trauma and loss of African heritage through the transatlantic slave trade arguably created a gulf that was filled by a kind of “therapeutic mythology“—a constructed heritage built around memories of the homeland. From Egypt to nations across the continent, the historic and renewed connection to Africa created the unique identity of “African American.” This identity encompasses a culture where African traditions (the ones that survived a long history of colonialism) have been altered to fit new, American environments.
[…] The Hoteps movement is a testament to the uniquely painful and complicated history of African Americans. It is anchored in a long tradition of looking to Africa for points of needed pride. Yet it also risks propagating false histories and conventions, and, ironically, disparaging Black women and those who are LGBTQ in the service of elevating Black identity. […] Hotep memes, and the history and logic that underpin this subculture, reveal the ways that the movement depends far too often on misogyny, homophobia, inaccurate history, and stereotypes of the Black experience (ibid.).
In short, such an attempt at reassembling the past as an act of reclamation is pointless towards liberation if it is built on the same facets of control and bigotry that, as much as it pains me to say, aren’t exclusive to white straight European men. Baggage is baggage.
[15] For example, Einstein once wrote to the prime minister of India in 1947, “The Jewish people alone [emphasis, me] has for centuries been in the anomalous position of being victimized and hounded as a people, though bereft of all the rights and protections which even the smallest people normally has” (source: the Jewish News Syndicate, so take it with a grain of salt). To be fair to Einstein, though, he had previously said in 1938
I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest” (source: “Our Debt to Zionism,” cited in Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb, 2007).
and later refused to be president of Israel. It’s, like, the bare minimum, but still! Good for you, Al!
As for Zinn, he waffles a bit, able to critique wackjobs like Columbus but suddenly becomes unable to follow through in the present space and time regarding matters of American foreign policy tied to his people.
For example, in a 2010 interview shortly before his death, Zinn calls the matters between Israel and Palestine “complicated”: “As always in very complicated issues where emotions come to the fore quickly, I try to first acknowledge the other party’s feelings” (source: “A Moment with Howard Zinn”). First, fuck the colonizer’s feelings! Second, they’re not complicated, as Michael Brooks points out (Brandon Van Dyck’s “Michael Brooks Takes a Question on Israel,” 2020), but also others; e.g., Jared Keyel, who writes far more incisively than Zinn does:
The evidence of the situation could not be any clearer. However, we must continue to reiterate that what is happening in Gaza is straightforward because of intense efforts by politicians, media, and others to convince Americans that the facts are simply too complicated, too nuanced to draw clear ethical and political conclusions. Insisting that the context is incomprehensibly complex after nearly 35,000 dead and 78,000 injured, mostly children and women, is genocide denial. Those facts may be uncomfortable for some to face; but they are not hard to understand. Moreover, stopping genocide also means recognizing that violence against Palestinians did not begin in October 2023.
Just as the events since last year are not complicated, neither is the history of what is called the “conflict” between Palestinians and Israelis. It has a definitive beginning in the late 1800s and since that point the aggressors have been the pre-state Zionist movement and, after 1948, the State of Israel. Zionism, a 19th-century European Jewish nationalist movement, sought to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine at the expense of the Palestinians already living there. To do so, Zionists organized migration to settle and colonize a territory that was 95% Palestinian Arab and 5% Jewish at the time. The settlers’ explicit goal was to take as much territory as possible and change the demographics in their favor. The Zionists set about accomplishing those political goals, with full recognition that they would need to violently dispossess the Palestinians to achieve them. Everything that has happened in the decades since flows from that project to take territory and expel or subjugate as many Palestinians as possible.
No group of people has a right to take territory by violence and expel another group. No group of people has a right to subjugate another. Israel has done, and is doing, those things to Palestinians, not the other way around. That Zionism emerged in response to very serious European antisemitism does not mean the Zionists were justified in their actions. One group cannot free itself by subjugating another. Palestinians have been colonized, and they have resisted that process across more than a century. Whether nonviolent or not, that resistance has been deemed illegitimate by Israel and its allies. Seriously creating peace, justice, and perhaps reconciliation demands understanding root causes and addressing the harm that has been done. We must face history and be willing to name the aggressor: the State of Israel. This is not too complex to understand (source: “It’s Not Complicated: Israel is Committing Genocide in Gaza,” 2024).
The “complicated” element here is the anarchist character of such arguments that the state doesn’t like, so it abjects them as untenable, impossible. To that, Zinn plays both sides by saying Zionism was a mistake but also saying it was “too late” to go back
I think the Jewish State was a mistake, yes. Obviously, it’s too late to go back. It was a mistake to drive the Indians off the American continent, but it’s too late to give it back. At the time, I thought creating Israel was a good thing, but in retrospect, it was probably the worst thing that the Jews could have done. What they did was join the nationalistic frenzy, they became privy to all of the evils that nationalism creates and became very much like the United States — very aggressive, violent, and bigoted. When Jews were without a state they were internationalists and they contributed to whatever culture they were part of and produced great things. Jews were known as kindly, talented people. Now, I think, Israel is contributing to anti-Semitism. So I think it was a big mistake (re: “A Moment with Howard Zinn“).
and then offering the “two-state solution” (code for colonization, or “Imperialism with more steps”):
Ideally, there should be a secular state in which Arabs and Jews live together as equals. There are countries around the world where different ethnic groups live side by side. But that is very difficult and therefore the two-state solution seems like the most practical thing (ibid.).
To this, just as it’s possible for Zinn to be correct about past issues as a history teacher and domestic activist, so can he be spectacularly wrong about other things (similar to Chomsky and Cambodia). As such, he’s perfectly able to say some really stupid and unhelpful shit about something like Israel; i.e., where his own sense of identity yields the usual double standards/guilt trips per the kinds of exceptions we need to avoid.
This being said, plenty of people who lived through the Holocaust find themselves changing their minds in favor of Palestine—e.g., Aryeh Neier, Holocaust survivor and Human Rights Watch founder has changed his views on Israel and now believes they are committing genocide (Hasan Abi’s “Holocaust Survivor CHANGES HIS MIND??” 2024)—but only after a certain (and incredibly disproportionate) number of Palestinians are killed. Whatever happened to “you save one life, you save the world entire?” Red Scare is Red Scare, leading to praxial inertia, thus unnecessary death and exploitation. As always, be simple and direct, rudely addressing root causes to larger complications; e.g., as the Gothic does—nakedly and monstrously!
[16] Fittingly, Infamy‘s interview with the dead is a Japanese-American soldier caught up in the whirlwind of American fascism. As Ajo Romano writes:
As the passengers exit the bus and straggle inside the fenced-in military grounds, the camera pulls back to reveal an armed watchtower in the center and an American flag hovering over it all. Right on cue, as the last of the detainees enter, the wind picks up, unfurling the flag and snapping it into picture-perfect position. It’s a visual scream that this is America: legally enforced xenophobia and federal concentration camps. / This image sums up what’s best and what’s weakest about season two of The Terror: It works to remind us at every turn that the atrocities of the present are tied to those of the past, and that America is a country whose inability to confront its own systemic racism means that it’s destined to enact bleak, dehumanizing horror on its citizens again and again.
College student Chester Nakayama (Derek Mio) has his doubts about the presence of the yurei, but he can’t ignore the strange, chaotic violence running through the community — especially when much of it seems to be indirectly connected to him. Chester is a frustrating main character, by turns arrogant and clueless, overconfident and indecisive. He seems exasperated by everything: by his family, particularly his stubborn father; his Mexican-American girlfriend Luz (Cristina Rodlo) and her decision to join him and his family in the internment camp after she gets pregnant; by the war and its brutality; and even by the havoc the ghost is wreaking around him.
Mio plays Chester with a fascinating mix of wryness and earnestness — you’re never sure how real his caustic cynicism is when he’s faced with situations like, for instance, the brutal murder of Japanese soldiers by Americans — and over the course of the series they distill into the two halves of his personality. It’s the American in him that treats everything with a mix of forced coolness, mild sarcasm, and overconfidence. It’s the American in him who joins the war against Japan as a translator, where he’s forced to confront his own dual identities while battling his demons — which in his case may be the literal demon who’s caught up with him. The Japanese side of him seems harder for him to parse and contend with; like so many immigrants in a diaspora, he seems drawn to the folklore and superstition of his homeland to help him make sense of what’s happening in the war and at home (source: “The Terror: Infamy Turns America’s WWII Internment Camps into a Bleak Ghost Story,” 2019).
Jadis thought that Chester was a brat—that he lacked spine—but honestly I appreciated the character’s heroic role as more Promethean than American: not someone who can conquer death, but must face and humanize the ghost of the counterfeit to move forward under empire as a project yet-to-be-dismantled.
[17] The undead having a shared function in this respect, to different degrees of abuse; e.g., vampires generally being killed in smaller numbers, which is still bad, and ghosts being silenced by holy men, not to mention demonic and animalistic intersections.
[18] Magua’s doing so is, importantly enough, a kind of power exchange ritual between him and his enemies. The racist argument in the story is that it’s abjectly cannibalistic unto itself; i.e., something only committed by someone blackened to seek revenge and terrify one’s enemies. In truth, it’s not so simple (though it would undoubtedly have that effect in practice): the eating of the heart was traditionally seen as a sign of respect been warriors, one hunter preying on another through the cycle of life; i.e., “you have power and have a heart worth eating.” While somewhat problematic all the same (eating peoples’ hearts is not good for their health), the fact remains that capital drives Magua to practice this as a weapon of terror against his enemies but also his own people while in exile from them. He becomes a ghost, a man without a home, and destroys everything seeking what he cannot replace. In turn, this becomes the same old scapegoat, pointing the finger at the Indians as a whole: “You ate yourselves, zombies! Now die!”