by D. M. Aderibigbe

My uncle was happier that Saturday than other Saturdays, which were usually his happy days: they were the only days he never had to go to work or church; the only days he got to eat his favorite meal—pounded yam and egusi soup—all fashioned to the shape of his appetite with my grandmother’s fingers. But usually this happiness didn't manifest on his face: we usually only knew he was happy from his voice and actions. However, that particular Saturday I saw his cheeks dance to every word that fell off my mouth and I knew happiness could actually show on his face. Why was he happier than ever? A new sports show was to kick off that Saturday. Of course there had been sports shows aired on different TV and radio stations; my uncle was not happy because of that particular show, but because of the theme song that accompanied it: Peter Tosh's "You are An African."

Many years after that Saturday, the lyrics of this song would haunt me like guilt: “Don’t care where you come from, as long as you’re a black man, you’re an African." Throughout these many years, I thought about what it meant to be black, and what it meant to be African. The ultimate question was: Could blackness equate Africanness? This question bobbed in my heart for about a decade. When I came across Afrocentric scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, and Léopold Sédar Senghor in the university, these philosophers would untie knotted thoughts in my heart with their voices. At the end of the class, the professor asked some fundamental questions: What would you call a white-skinned individual who is ingrained in African culture and shares the African beliefs and experience? On the other hand, what will you call a black person who has spent all his life in the West and knows nothing about Africa? The professor suggested that Africanness as a concept or as a way of living has more to do with the heart than the skin.

The first time the picture of Africanness as blackness ever came to my head was in high school reading the famous Sierra Leonean poet and novelist, Syl Cheney-Coker. My high school literature teacher’s thoughts were a thorough departure from what I would later learn from my socio-political philosophy class in the university. He concerned himself with the following lines of Cheney-Coker’s poem “Freetown”:

but all calling you mother womb of the earth
liking your image but hating our differences
because we have become the shame of your race
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and I think of my brothers with “black skin and white masks”
(I myself am one heh heh heh)
my sisters who plaster their skins with white cosmetics
to look whiter than the snows of Europe
but listen to the sufferings of our hearts

According to my literature teacher, these lines were directed toward Africans who used bleaching lotions and cosmetics in a bid to turn their skin to white, while at the same time still keeping faith with the belief in Africanness: the struggle for a better destiny for Africa and Africans. His explication of the poem yielded some pictures in my head, pictures of the people I knew who had bleached their skins but still professed their love for Africa, such as Michael Jackson. I had some such people around my house: their skin got lighter as their self-proclaimed Africanness got louder. My literature teacher disbanded the class with the question: How would you describe this group of people, patriotic Africans or not?

It's been many years since that literature class—so many years that I have grown to the point of articulating my own thoughts. Recently I decided to read the poem again and came to the conclusion that Coker was saying that yes, Africans who bleach their skins while professing their love for Africa are genuine. Africanness transcends the skin and goes deeply into the mind. But then there is another important motif heralded by Coker, which is that of Africans who fled the continent because of their disillusionment with the concept of Africanness—Africans who may return one day, when they realize what they have missed:

but we African wandering urchins
who will return one day
say oh listen Africa
the tomtoms of the revolution
beat in our hearts at night
make us the seven hundred parts of your race
stretching from the east to the west
but united inside your womb

Meanwhile, this question continues to haunt me. Last year, a white man of Scottish origin named Guy Scott emerged as the new president of Zambia after his predecessor Michael Sata died, making him the first white leader of a democratically elected African government and the first since F. W. de Klerk in Apartheid South Africa. On the radio, two specialists in anthropological studies argued on why Scott is and isn't an African. I was alone in the room and I knew no one could hear or respond to my question, yet I kept screaming: If Scott isn't an African, am I an African? Am I? Am I?

D.M. Aderibigbe is a proud native of Nigeria. He graduates in 2014 with an undergraduate degree in History and Strategic Studies from the University of Lagos. His poetry appears in Poet Lore, Asheville Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, RHINO, Grist, B O D Y, Vinyl and elsewhere.

Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark
Edited by Matias Viegener
Semiotext(e) ($13.95)

by Spencer Dew

Writing defies death in that “to work in this world and to matter,” as Kathy Acker put it, is to leave behind words that outlast the body, the corpse. This is not, of course, to say that writing somehow transcends the play of power, that it can’t be seized and manipulated, as an object, for various ends (whether capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, or of a leftist critique that, in the act of remixing, cranks up undercurrents, stripping bare the otherwise subtle ideology). But to speak of—and with—Kathy Acker is to speak of a more ideal mode of reading, a more ideal mode of community. Acker, drawing on the work of the paired thinkers she here refers to as “my favorite old shoes,” Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille, held that such community, a community of “friendship,” must be predicated on recognition of and maintenance of difference—“Real difference. Not fucking games. That’s what makes friendship,” she writes in these pages.

There are some fucking games between McKenzie Wark and Kathy Acker, though maybe some authentic encounters too—and certainly, in this collection of emails, some potential for Acker’s words to live again, to transcend the grave. There is what one might call a plot: girl meets boy, boy jerks her around, girl is brilliant, boy less so. Boy waxes in favor of the image of girl; girl bitingly and mournfully deconstructs the image and the dependence of culture producers on such images—on celebrity, on product, the name on the marquee, the portrait on the paperback cover—for their physical survival.

But one does not read Kathy Acker for the plot; rather, one reads her for the community woven together in her references, for the visceral and prophetic rage she (un)articulates, for the demonstration of and invitation to engage in artistic process, for thoughts on and words that gesture toward the bodily and the sexual, and for theory and exemplification of that ideal of community to which she was such a devout believer and selfless experimenter.

So here is Acker talking about Shaivite Hinduism and its theories of sexuality more explicitly than she does when she uses such material in Pussy: King of the Pirates, and here, too, is Acker musing on Nietzsche’s “permanent revolution” (“that lovely myth”), but also on The X-Files and her fondness for professional wrestling as a manifestation of a charming American “stupidity” as well as, simply, “The best performance art.”

And here is Acker on the wider realities of American society: “It’s homelessness and AIDS and a society that’s in the process of killing off the middle classes.” She speaks of driving through small towns and talking to people, of the backgrounds of her students, of the ubiquity of abuse and oppression, of what she calls the “big black hole” of the sacred at the center of America (fuelling a thirst for fundamentalism, for instance). “I just can’t bear seeing the world I live in,” she writes. “I have to hide in overwork. I can’t bear seeing what I’ve become. My friends. I guess when there’s no hope, what you do is come and fight. So that’s what’s happening, who we are. We’re fighting the only ways we know how, through culture and no one wants culture, and it’s war.” We have an intimate voice here not unlike the voices in her novels—“I come up for air and who am I . . . lonely and scared”—but we also have the voice of the writer, speaking outside of the curtain, putting plain words on the historical material conditions that define her life and will lead to her death: “We’re rats walking tightropes we never thought existed. No medical insurance; no steady job; etc.”

On process, the view of the artist rather than the art is intimate and sometimes surprising. The emails collected here are predominantly from early in the morning or late at night. “I’m such a schedule slob,” she says. She speaks of the energy and momentum of production: “You just write and write, work, I know work, and then shape it down, rework it, and extract the hot stuff. If you do enough, there’s hot stuff.” And she reflects on her collaboration with the Mekons for the album that accompanied Pussy: King of the Pirates: “I’m never having a book that isn’t sung again.”

The talk on sex is charged, because in these exchanges—most from August of 1995, with one short follow-up from February of 1996—Acker is trying to figure out what Wark wants of/from her, and she doesn’t appreciate his power plays or his seeming lack of recognition regarding the basic politics of sexual/romantic relations. In her communications with him she is clear and direct in terms of her desires both relational and physical. “To me, top/bottom is just stuff that happens in bed,” she writes. “Who fistfucks whom. Outside the bed, I do my work and you do yours. I fucking hate power games outside the bed and have no interest in playing them.” She goes on to say that “I love being someone’s object. I love being wanted. My body wanted. And wrongly. ‘Come here, slave.’ It’s one of the sexiest things I know. Totally not equal to ‘You’re a victim.’” Sexual politics is politics, sexual relations one arena for broader modes of relation, either oppressive or utopian. Thus, when Acker speaks of sex, she’s always also speaking of something else—community through transcendence of the self? Acker here describes sex as “that fabulous not knowing” as well as “this danger whose name is sex.”

In these pages we have something like a summary or walking-through of an as-yet unpublished lecture of Acker’s, on Bataille and Blanchot and community and Wuthering Heights, available in fragmentary notes and a fragmentary audiotape in the Acker archive at Duke University. It is an important document, a formulation of Acker’s central philosophy, and the pages here are likewise important—from the insistence on approaching Bataille as a thinker concerned, foremost, with community, to Acker’s joining in Bataille and Blanchot’s struggle to imagine community in the wake of fascism and communism, “this possibility which, one way or another, is always caught in its own impossibility,” a community predicated on “recognition of radical difference.” Here is Acker, writing to Wark but surely also just writing:

So Bataille, and through Bataille, Blanchot turns to the self-other (relation?!) as the possible ground for community. Remember, we are talking about the ground of radical difference. Let’s see if I can find one of the essential (essential!?) passages: “A being does not want to be recognized, it (notice the “it”) wants to be contested: in order to exist, it goes toward the other, which contests and at times negates it.” (91)

This notion of difference as contestation, as always difficult; this recognition of encounter as risk, a risk of self and of (fabulous) not knowing—these key aspects of Acker’s thought and practice are tall orders, while the flip-side (othering as reduction, as fetishization; that safe egotism of treating others as objects to be used and manipulated outside of the bedroom zone of play but in the world always) is easy, even reflexive. Acker is famous for appropriation, a tactic she engages as part of her quest to instantiate and illustrate a community of radical difference. But recent days have illustrated the flip-side to this utopian approach of “no fucking games”—the games played by Kenneth Goldsmith with the body of Michael Brown when he claimed that body as a work of art, say—and have led to widespread recognition of the ease of collaborating in deep patterns of oppression while also sparking discussion about the baffling way in which people (poets, conceptual artists, thinkers!) can remain blind to their own privilege and exercise of power, even while explicitly entering into specific histories.

Acker’s words need to be heard in these contexts, and these critiques of appropriation and the power play of seizing the other offer some tension for considering the project of this posthumous anthology of emails. Matias Viegener’s introduction begins by describing how an unnamed novelist declined to write an introduction to the volume, saying, “it felt too much like rooting around in someone’s underwear drawer.” This is the second such volume of posthumous correspondence from Acker to be published, though the first, Spread Wide (Dis Voir, 2005) was explicitly framed as an ongoing collaboration, Paul Buck and Rebecca Stephens and John Cussans writing around and in honor of Acker, even as their texts were arranged around an array of notes from and photos of the bookshelves of Acker. That volume eschewed the move of pushing forth from the emails into more voices, using Acker’s text in order to create more communication and thus new community; rather, the contents in I’m Very Into You are framed with forensic stamps of date and time sent, subject line, to and from addresses, and further framed with tenuous academic conceits of an introduction and an afterword. There are no notes, and only some names have been changed, plus some mistakes have slipped past the editors (Stephen Phofl’s Death at the Parasite Café is here “Paradise Café,” for example.)

The “Afterword,” by John Kinsella is a letter to Wark and, like Wark’s contributions throughout, is simply mismatched with Acker’s texts, heightening that sense of something sordid at play in this little book, these emails from a dead woman presented in a publishing “collaboration” as one-sided as the flirtation they partly detail. That such imbalance would characterize a volume that delves into and attempts to make clear the ubiquity and consequences of imbalance of power is perhaps ironic and certainly poignant, heightening the reader’s sense of loss. Sure, it feels at times like rooting around in someone’s mail, which it is, but the mail of an artistic and intellectual figure taken too young from a society that needs her, that needs her thoughts and her desires, her perceptions and her hopes. What we have, instead, is her writing. I’m Very Into You, problematic as aspects of it might be, contributes to that oeuvre in a useful way.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Peter Richardson
St. Martin’s Press ($26.99)

by Ryder W. Miller

The Grateful Dead seem to be calling it quits again, having announced that their last show will be this summer in San Jose following three concerts in Chicago at Soldier’s Field—the last place they played with frontman Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995. They will be bringing it back home to the Bay Area where it all started, and where most of the band members have their roots. This year happens to also be the 50th Anniversary of the band, and it is unlikely that anybody who has seen them live will ever forget them. They have created a fandom that is unmatchable, and they are now old rockers who didn’t burn out or fade away—they still pursue creative ideas and ideals.

Gone, however, is Garcia, who was central to the creative output of the band. There was a time when there was something akin to a religious fervor about this man, who had lost a finger but could still strum a guitar like a genius. Like Bob Dylan, he declined the position of authority and just wanted to play music. The psychedelic experience for some, though, was more than entertainment: it could also be transcendental for those willing to take the risk. The partying was not for everybody, though, and the Grateful Dead could be fun and profound even without altered states of mind. They were also improvisational, so one did not know exactly what to expect from each show—some say they never played a song the same way twice. There have also been new band members over the years that brought new energy and creative ideas with them.

No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead from San Francisco State University scholar Peter Richardson is one of at least three books about the band published this year. (Other books include So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead by Rolling Stone writer David Brown, and Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead by Bill Kreutzmann, which is a personal firsthand account.) No Simple Highway gives a broader cultural history of The Dead, who were influenced by many of the famous icons of the 1960s and were bohemians before the term “hippie” was widely accepted. There are many famous people in this tale about who and what inspired the band members. Although they lasted well beyond the 1960s, for many they were representatives of that time, a way to remember that cultural forces that brought an end to the Vietnam War and created new art forms and styles.

Richardson’s book explores the key elements of The Dead’s enduring appeal, including ecstasy (transcendence), mobility (nomadism), and community (tribalism and utopianism). One could find these things by going on tour with the band. As Richardson shows, going to a Dead concert was more than just an evening out—for many it was religious. (Bassist Phil Less called it “A pretty far out church.”) The show could be a place to disappear into a different world and return the next day a little wiser. Richardson explains:

Like most forms of shamanism, the Dead’s version emphasized four broad themes: The universe’s interconnectedness, altered states of consciousness, sharing those experiences through ritual and symbolism, and employing the insights gained after returning to ordinary consciousness.

Like most rock & roll narratives, the story of The Grateful Dead also has its tragic parts, but most of the members have survived to see Richardson’s assessment, which also offers a great deal of information about the time and place in which the Dead began. The book can be slow going in parts, but it is an astute exploration of what has survived from the 1960s and why. The Dead would argue that they are not solely a 1960s band, having continually adapted to the times—a high point being their reaction to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. They needed to be on their toes to survive in a complicated world. As a group they took on that challenge, and Richardson shows how they fit into the bigger American picture.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret
translated by April Knutson
Univocal ($24.95)

by Kelsey Irving Beson

Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf could be described as a “difficult” work, as problematic as that term is. The book, which takes its premise from Three Guineas, Woolf’s 1938 treatise on academia and the feminine, is a response to and an extension of the latter’s imperative: “Think we must.” Although Woolf pondered gender and philosophy over three-quarters of a century ago, her essay provides a solid framework for a timely exploration of modern issues such as identity politics, assimilation, and the role of a liberal arts education. In addition to discussing their own experience as women philosophers, authors Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret also incorporate the responses of several female scientists, historians, and academics “on the subject of what ‘women do to thought,’” giving Women Who Make a Fuss the feel of a varied and occasionally contradictory dialectic rather than a cohesive, explanatory essay.

Although Women Who Make a Fuss is overflowing with complicated ideas, Stengers and Despret take a radically non-didactic approach—they don’t profess to know what the answers are or even what questions to ask; rather, the book is about why and how to formulate those questions. Rather than drawing any fixed resolution, the authors advocate for a constant reworking in which answers (and their questions) are precarious, ever-changing, and marked by “permeability.” Moreover, they assert that any fixed verdict would be antithetical to the project: “here is the material, it’s up to you to see . . . if you can make it compatible with your questions.” It’s crucial to keep “the space of hesitation open”—as one contributor puts it: “I cannot foresee what [the reader] will be able to do with my text and therefore I must leave room for unforeseen connections.” This epistemological strategy is incompatible with many prevailing conceptions of knowledge, such as the traditional masculine model of academic self-determination (“one exists because one crosses swords”) or the newer, neoliberal-tinged, “competencies”-based incarnation of the university. Consequently, readers that visit this book looking for pat answers—or even questions that could possibly give rise to them—are bound to be dissatisfied.

Although they discourage the reader from static conclusions, the authors are far from wishy-washy—their position may have relativist overtones, but it’s an almost aggressively interrogative relativism. Most controversially, many of the contributors are unflinching in their assertion that academia continues to demean women’s work. Nourished by both “anger and laughter,” they drop scathing feminist bon mots worthy of Andrea Dworkin (“good female students . . . know they are tolerated as long as they remain inoffensive”). Stengers and Despret confirm that the hierarchical academy may be right in its longstanding paranoia, that it was “perhaps not wrong to mistrust women, these traitors, incapable of taking seriously the great problems that transform thought into a battlefield.”

This acknowledgement of the continuing marginalization of women as a class is satisfying, perhaps even more so because of the lack of a prescription (or, for that matter, proscription) for what to do about it. In the context of rampant “polemicists (who think that the world is waiting only for their argument)” and a left that has identified itself into infinitesimal, ineffectual factions, Women Who Make a Fuss feels both old-school and innovative. Stengers and Despret implore us to reject post-feminism, with its “abstraction of an amnesiac equality,” in favor of an ever-ripening philosophy: “feminism, this adventure which must be again and again reprised anew.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015