Notes on Negro Progress
Re: Boomerangs, Black Ice, & Black Matter
Dear Theaster,
I must begin, friend, with conveying delight at the invitation to express, in capsule form, some thoughts and sentiments regarding my own Negro progress. Such a task, however, induces much trepidation, given not only the sheer difficulty of the subject but also the fact that we know who’s listening, or always seeking to listen in. But share we must, secrets even. It seems your terms operate a most Peculiar conjunction: Negro and Progress repel one the other as do vinegar and cream: the first recalls a personhood twinned with the strangeness of the time of grisly patriarchs, as the second betokens that grandiose endeavor towards the New, Modern thing. Yet contradiction is the general action principle, as one of our finest writers christened: the sign of the Boomerang! Don’t forget to duck(!), friend, as you flee the border.
It is my conviction, as it were, that to speak of my own Negro progress we must begin with a detour addressing with candor and acuity the condition of the Negro at large. There has commenced, it appears, a Peculiar turn of the Boomerang whereby this vexing figure, with his infamous condition, has ramified upon domains—and in ways thoroughly dismaying to some of our fellows unaccustomed to such twists—heretofore fancied to be free of his effects.
It’s the Age of the Boomerang indeed, dear friend, but stranger still: as the great bard from Queens announces: the age of Black Presidents is the age of Mass-Niggerization! Remember “Be a Nigger, Too,” friend? The condition of the Negro in some of its more brutal aspects has gone viral just as a Negro himself has been tasked with stage managing the global grotesqueries! “Austerity Kills!” say the good social scientists. Do duck, my friend, but also cleat your footwear for the Age of Black Ice!
Which is to say, it’s a Celebration! The Negro is America’s Metaphor (sing), The Negro is America’s Metaphor (sing)! We’re on our way! The Big We this time. The Nigger is really trending this time. It may be 1776 for the Negro for real this time! Perhaps this is the key to the riddle of the Contemporary: time is illmatic, indeed. BEING is illmatic, as our fabulous friends in California might say.
The arts, you say? Following the physicists, the Marxists—our steadfast allies—say there’s “dark matter at the heart of the art world.” A dense invisible mass, excluded, yet teeming in and as its shadow, the hidden yet resplendent totality of whose labor constitutes the creative force field holding the entire thing together. Like Caravaggio at his bleakest, where a most consuming chiaroscuro is effected by a multitude of low tones generating the full spectrum of texture where the exclusive highlights play.
Ey ey, ring a bell, friend? The little we, the lady of the races, the little Negro knows: there’s this other dark mass at the heart of World as such, forming and disrupting the whole New, Modern thing, the dark mass magnetizing the whole Human thing. It seems Progress requires the negation and implication of this Black Matter, as the ground floor of its terrible momentum, which is why I look askance upon it, side-eye, if you will. Are we not the veritable victims of Progress? Is it not the monstrous complex from which we plot interminable escape? Aren’t the arts likewise a most cunning accomplice of Negro subjection, a vast machinery for entrapping our extravagant imperatives?
The arts are everywhere and so are we; if our allies rally to Dark Matter, we say, “Welcome to the party! Allow me to show you to the basement.” Progress? Perhaps. How to speak of organization, movement, art against the tide? If I were to utter the name of Progress, it would be thus: the coming, the return to sight, the deep sense of deeper Matter as a door, (a poor door?), or Loophole, as the great Slave had it, to... Exodus? Jubilee? Commonwealth? Poverty? Let us gather again, and again, and carry on our purloined and confident production, our door-making.
As for my own little shot in the dark, Progress, if you will: following several friendly leads I’ve uncovered the blackness of the great Frenchman, Gustave Courbet. Believe me for now, friend, I’ll explain later. And perhaps even less credible, I’ve learned that TV is an Ocean, a Peculiar iteration of passage, a medial passage, or dare I say even, a petite Middle Passage: a chasm, a regime of oblivion. I was born into this watery grave—ten years after the King entered his—which is surely no place for Roots. I’m digging the Black Matter there.
With gratitude,
Benin