Black History Month: The Making of Memory and Remembering
I’d like to tell you a story. It’s a story of things. Not things really but people; a story of people told through things, which is how we often do tell the story of people. The things we collect; the things
we discard; the things we covet; the things we disparage. These things do not merely belong to us but are us. This is the story I’d like to tell. This is the story told in this edition, not of stories in the
service of Black history month but narratives of space and time, history and memory—it is a
speculative story, one of the imagination.
It begins with Frederick Douglass, not Octavia Butler; or Delany (the Black would be physician
turned abolitionist speculative fiction writer or the Black science fiction writer) nor Du Bois; and
certainly not the film Black Panther but Douglass—but not the slave or the emancipated man; not the
abolitionist; but Douglass the folklore; Douglass the speculative myth. What does this mean? What
kind of story is this? Let me explain.
Well, you see this story begins with Frederick Douglass—the rumor, the speculation, the very idea of
the ‘man’. It has to, for to ask, “who is Frederick Douglass” is also to ask, “what is Frederick Douglass” as in, Douglass is equal parts man and equal parts myth (and demonstrates that the very idea of man-itself-is-its-own-myth; and the idea that every one of us, no matter how solid we may appear, is a fabrication).
Douglass is the one who reminds us that what constitutes our nation and us as its citizens is not
legal statutes or documents and the identities and relationships, they constituted in us and for us, but
something else entirely. He reminds us that what constitutes the who of us collectively and individually is not merely an anthropological or theological concept. Instead, Douglass argues that what makes us human is our capacity to imagine.
And though it may sound strange, it was Douglass who once argued, “it would hardly be extravagant to say of it, what Moore has said of that of ballads, give me the making of a nation’s ballads, and I care not who has the making of its Laws.” It was Douglass, who said these very words while a fugitive from the law, writing and speaking, traveling the nation, evading the newly passed Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
So, what could he have meant about the power of song or picture? Simply that we as human beings
are akin to looking at the clouds in the sky and pulling from them forms against which to measure
and define ourselves and our reality. As clumps of white dust become the arms and legs of dogs and
cats, we, similarly imagine ourselves into the past and project ourselves into the future, shaping our
identities along the way, and making ourselves into the best and/or the worse versions of ourselves.
For Douglass, this is not merely a metaphor—we are both the clouds and the imaginative rendering
of the clouds; both the producer and the product of our own imagination. As Douglass notes, the
“key to the great mystery of life and progress,” is understanding “the process by which man is able
to invert his own subjective consciousness, into the highest objective form, considered in all its
range, is in truth the highest attribute of mans [sic] nature.”
In transforming our subjective states into the objective forms of our material world, we shape
ourselves as we shape our world. Douglass believed that if we can just remember this aspect of
ourselves, we will find that our world is not concrete but the ephemerality of own most creative
selves—that we are aesthetic fabrications of what we imagine about the world.
This, for me, Frederick Douglass has always been the one, why he is the generation of the story I
would like to tell, and why it is apropos that we begin an edition on Black history month. This is not
merely due to that fact that the month was inaugurated by Carter G. Woodson and set within the
month of February to honor Douglass’ birth; it is also to honor the speculative and creative element
of Douglass own life inherent in the celebration itself. By his own account, Douglass himself was a
product of his own creation—meaning, given that he had no official ‘proof’ of his existence, given
his enslaved background and a lack of a birth certificate it was Douglass who had to give himself an
origin, had to, in a sense, narrate his own existence only after having lived his life. Douglass was not
unique in this aspect; what made Douglass, though, a seminal figure for me, is his willingness to
center this speculative status into a creative impulse.
Douglass made himself into his own creation. It is Douglass, then, who reminds us not only of the
significance of this month but also the significance of the imagination itself. As a figure both
historical and mythological, both someone born and someone made, an icon and iconoclastic—the
beginning of both African American literary studies and the beginning of Black speculative fiction,
one who was aware of and utilized this specific type—he reminds us and teaches us that our world,
our nation, our identities within it are a composition both written and built, a fairytale both light and
dark—both the lighted house in the nighttime forest giving comfort and those unknown creaking,
hidden sounds in the brush that urge us towards the house—both the fear and its dissolution.
But back to our story—the one of things but really of people.
I take my daughters to RISD every Sunday to look at art. This activity is the one represented in the cover collage art to this story. I remember on one occasion, when my eldest, just two at the time, taking notes and asking about each piece of art, especially the religious paintings in the grand blue room, found herself drawn in and by one painting, asking one simple question: ‘why’? I did not take this to be a question about art itself,
in terms our art theory—one concerned with the reception or appreciation of it as aesthetic
object—but one concerned with the sublime, that is the feeling it elicits. I found buried within her
question of ‘why’—specifically, her wondering and wandering eyes staring up, her hand gently
around my index finger pulling me down, asking, ‘why does it look like this’—the real question, not
so much why, but how? How do we do this? How do we take this assemblage of color and form and
turn them into an image—could I do something like this, too? And I remember reflecting
on Douglass himself and his words, recounting them to my daughter, “great mystery of life and
progress,” is the “process by which man is able to invert his own subjective consciousness into the
objective form…the highest attribute of man’s nature…peculiar to humanity.” In much simpler
terms, I told my daughter then what I tell both of them now, “the world belongs to all of us; we each
get to make it whatever our imagination will yield.”
As I talked with my daughters about Douglass and what moved them about what they experienced
in the museum, I thought about what Douglass offered us that I wish to offer to my daughters, and
what I think is the gift of this month. The idea that the meaning of the world itself, and for us, the
conceptualization of blackness, while it is thought to be the fabricated of the white imagination, is
also a concept, a reality that creates itself. Douglass and this month reminds us that it is image that
takes control of itself and tells the world about itself, directly and indirectly through metaphor,
memoir, introspection, and speculation.
Douglass showed us that this is at once the fate and the promise of blackness in the United States, its bleakness and also its great and hopeful promise. It is Douglass who reminded us that history is not given but something we do; that the past as well as the present and the future are like works of art, things we construct from what we find around us; and, that we, like works of art, are the products of our choices and our values.
In the cover collage art, my daughters are at RISD moving through a hypothetical and living exhibit of Douglass, the man and the myth—of what he made of himself and what we’ve made of
him; the stories he told of himself and the stories we told of him. The collage image is to reflect the
fact that these stories that we tell are equally a contemplation of memory and remembering, of
history and of storytelling. Let us take this as a challenge and an opportunity, then, to actively think
and to rethink, consider and reconsider the very boundaries of space and time, meaning and value
around which we have not only made the world but the ways we live in and through it.
During this Black history month, I wish to challenge the reader to find in it not only a celebration but also a moment for such contemplation to remember not only these sets practices that Douglass has passed down to us, as a writer and a as a man but also the challenge and an opportunity to think and to rethink, consider and reconsider the very boundaries around which we have not only made the world but the ways we have chosen to remember it.
Each of the selections in this edition speak to an altered view of a traditional Black History Month
edition of a magazine. Instead of merely highlighting successes or meditating on specific forms of
loss, these pieces invite the reader, as Ralph Ellison famously noted, “inside the skin” not so much
to walk around and view its interior, but to give a feeling, a mood, as it were, to the victories and the
difficulties, the complexities and contradictions of Black life in the modern West that is the United
States.
COLLECTIVE WORKS
Ikea Johnson reflecting on the seminal metaphorical and literal barrier between the Old World and
the New World that is The Door of No Return, a portal through which the free African person
found themselves transported to and enmeshed in the new reality of chattel enslavement. Utilizing
an Afrofuturist framework, Johnson’s essay invites us to rethink and reengage the past by imagining
“Black futures through both historical memory and speculative possibility.”
Gwendalynn Roebke’s “Un-Making Wombs and Worlds” is an attempt to think through the horrors
of enslavement to imagine how such conditions could be the unexpected catalyst for a “path of
defiance”. In the spirit of this issue, Gwendalynn implicitly asks, how do we imagine that which is,
unimaginable, at least from the perspective of “western theory”? In other words, what role does the
imagination play in such things as these—such things as the monstrosities of “coloniality’s “death
ethic”” and the meaning of such a thing as the end of the colonial world?
Nancey’s story, too, is a reminder, but of a different sort than Gwendalynn’s. It reminds us that what
we’re ultimately interrogating, excavating, cultivating and acknowledging here, in this edition, is the
idea of Black History Month itself, where it comes from and what it means for us to participate in it
as not simply a moment of political action or social transformation, but one that ultimately centers
of the folkloric, on storytelling itself about reality or what we taken to be real. It, like Gwendalynn’s
think piece and my own historical fictional stories, simply asks, ‘what if?’ In other words, this
question ‘what if?” is also a revelation that, as Nancey reminds us, “there is magic and beauty in
seemingly mundane things, if you just change the lens or rearrange your perspective.”
Alex Taylor’s poem dance with no less rhythm than perspective thinking through and with blackness
not as a racial reality, but as a way of knowing and doing—as a way of loving, knowing how to both
give and receive, and the meaning of intimacy, as a way of existing with and against histories, and
ironic failure of recognition by way of obliquely misrecognizing. Taylor at once captures this dual
experience, of generating one’s own sense of self and value met with the backdrop of social and
historical devaluation, which at once belies understanding and is the source of a deeper self-
awareness.
And finally, Soph Green’s speculative fiction reminds us of the connection between experience and
insight, about the force of foresight and the second-sightedness of memory and recollection, all
inherent qualities in the meaning and value and continued existence of Black life.
Taken as a whole, these pieces are each a snapshot of this month as celebration: a celebration of the
imagination; a celebration of what is possible and probable of the human spirit; a celebration of this
is a deep meditation of how this month is captured in lives and words and gestures and deeds of
people.
Let this set forth the inauguration the blackness of Black History Month.
Bio
James B. Haile, III is an Afrosurrealist and Afrofuturist writer and aspiring collage artist. Currently,
Haile holds the Jane Cotton Ebbs Endowed Professor in Philosophy at the University of Rhode
Island, where he is also an Associate professor of Philosophy with a joint appointment in English.
He is the author of The Buck, the Black, and the Existential Hero: Refiguring the Black Male Literary Canon, 1850 to Present (2020), and author of the recently released book, The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom.
ARTIST STATEMENT ON PIECES FROM GUEST EDITOR
“Three Body Problem”
One of the most pressing questions of the modern period is the question of freedom. But whose
freedom and under what understanding? Central to answering these questions, then, is the voice and
perspective of the one asking and the one answering.
This is the question that Frederick Douglass faced in his abolitionist work –what would constitute
the ending of enslavement and the beginning of Black freedom? This is the question over which that
Douglass found himself at odds with white American abolitionists: who was going to define the
meaning of abolitionism and who was going to define freedom?
Ordinarily when studying objects orbiting around a star, an astronomer is able to predict the
movement of these objects in the past and project their movements into the future. Yet, when a
second star of equal size is present, there becomes a problem—each star exudes equal gravitational
force on the objects, making their orbit erratic and unable to trace back or predict in the future.
You see, Douglass discovered a phenomenon that we are still experiencing: there are competing
forces who wish to define Black life—its progress and its freedom. And with these competing
forces, it makes our understanding of abolitionism and freedom erratic and difficult to understand in
the past and predict for the future. The question of which central ‘star’ will exude the gravitational
force to define and understand Black life and Black freedom become something of a three body
problem of racial politics in the United States of America.
“Merciless”
Much of what we take to be true about the world lives in and is communicated through the story
form of folklore and mythology. This is where the imagination thrives and how it comes to make
sense of the material order of what we call ‘reality’. We have many stories that we tell about Black life
and about Black death to make each make sense within our world. These stories, though, go back
farther than the ones we currently tell and involve the basic elements of human civilization—the
worry over the unknown and the anxiety over the future.
What you have in front of you is a creative reinterpretation of one of the oldest stories in the
modern world, Little Red Riding Hood, reimagined through one the most important and influential
tropes of this same historical period—the unknown and fear of blackness itself.
I only ask you to think about this question: What would it mean for the story of Little Red Riding
Hood (dating back to the 17th century but popularized at the beginning of the 19th century) to really
be a story of Black life in the modern world—a way for society at large to make sense of the
ominous presence of Black people?