The (In)visibilty of Blackness in the World
The ultraviolet lights shot through the air while my body twisted and contorted from the vibration of the speakers. The people around me stomped their feet as they allowed their souls to take over their bodies for at least one night. It does not matter what words are speaking to us as long as our feet can hear the rumbling. The world around us for once is not killing us as it has always intended to do. The club I am in is filled with Black faces and I am not alone for once, I am one of many, and no one shall take or confuse this body for their own.
I am in South Africa in 2019. Studying abroad, discovering a continent where home does not mean I have been before but where an ancestor of mine has called it so. My host brother, a bisexual man, has taken me here to explore his home of Durban. The nightlife was filled with the faces of people who I have only seen pictures of back home. The high cheek bones, dark skin mirroring purple, pride in their eyes, charisma in how they stand, and their accents rich in authenticity. The beauty I was seeing was something I did not fathom in my dreams because it is hard to imagine Blackness which I cannot see.
We entered a club where sexuality had no restrictions and the laughs coming from backward hanging heads found no ground or ceiling. Women dancing with their friends on the dance floor as they seek their own peace. Black men finding another man’s mouth for comfort, to love them in the open, maybe, I thought, this was the only space they could find out what freedom felt like. Hips swinging on the 1 and the 2 and the sweat drenching from our backs leaving shirts dripping on the dancefloor. It is here I saw the dancehall music which would change how I view music on Black flesh. How it does something more to the body then therapy, it is bliss, an inescapable euphoria. I felt it all night and saw that we could all finally be seen. Where there is no invisibility with those outside these walls. That we are living and loving right here and that is all we need.
Recently, I finished Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man which is lauded for its takes on racism and the toll it imposes on Black people. I first encountered the novel my sophomore year of undergrad. The unnamed narrator’s uncle tells him to undermine white people with “yeses” and “grins” and to “agree ’em to death and destruction.” His grandfather felt like a teacher after doing this his whole life, even serving a war for a country who did not and would never love him during his lifetime. What does it do for Black people to love a country even through our own demise. That we die and smile in our deathbeds because Blackness is not a way to see ourselves as light, but as death, as nothing.
In Kerry James Marshall’s painting A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) exudes this idea of social and psychological exclusion and invisibility. A painting of a dark figure, in front of another dark background. The image is difficult to look at, the missing tooth, the white coming from his teeth, eyes, and shirt are the only vibrant colors. It is hard to look at it. It is hard to digest it and be comfortable with something that is saying this is a Black man in front of us. This is why the painting is so important for Black art.
The same way it can make its audience uncomfortable is the same reason why Blackness can be hard to understand. The aesthetic of it is beyond our comprehension. A definition can not be made. He is inconspicuous, not because he is unable to be seen but we are too embarrassed to include him. Even the question of hypervisibility that Blackness entails is terrifying. Zora Neale Hurston famously said in her essay "How It Feels to be Colored Me" that “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” When I am with those who come from the same lineage of history, we will easily disappear into the darkness of night. But when I am with anyone else the invisibility I had with others becomes visible, we are exposed, the light is on us. If only the world did not expect us to carry the burden of a race I did not ask to become.
We turn this colonial repulsion into “Black is Beautiful” but who are we trying to convince? asks Toni Morrison who objected to the need for “Black is Beautiful.” In a NY Times piece she says it was a “full confession that white definitions were important to us,” and that “ White people presumably had no objection to beautiful people.” Morrison refused to accept that Black people must write for the acceptance of a white audience or the “white gaze.” Shouldn’t the black be Black because identity is how we imagine what life can be for flesh that is constantly being destroyed? When Morrison writes it is to examine how love and trauma coexist in the world for Black people. The first book I read from her was The Bluest Eye. Reading about Pecola Breedlove, feeling like Pecola, are we all like Pecola? Trying to love ourselves everyday in new forms but forgetting we do not need to strip the skin to do so. That the love we hold for ourselves and our loved ones will always flourish through time and space.
Morrison told Ellison and every person who loves Invisible Man, “Invisible to whom?” We are more than what an oppressor has defined us. If my legacy is solely based on how others have interpreted my life, then have I really lived at all? But it is hard to know if what I put into this world, whether it is a poem, or human being, will be loved as I love it. Invisibility is not just being overlooked, but when being comfortable has been stripped from us. If we were truly invisible then the greatest capital that this country has ever controlled would not be brought across a sea. There would be no world without Blackness and for the world to operate there must be anti-Blackness for it to spin.
When I think back on that night in South Africa. Where I saw another form of Blackness that was not disturbed like mines has been. It seems so rich and pure. Apartheid had confined a culture for a moment but the music kept them alive, dancing was the heart, and singing open up their souls. The freedom of “being” was the only world they knew and I envied it. I do not want to become a shadow of myself where I have embraced a consciousness which I do not recognize. Even with the absence of light, I know myself within this darkness and I would rather have that then to live where I cannot see who I am.