Suzanne W. Churchill

Teaching

Hard Rock Returns to the Panopticon

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been teaching a unit on prisons in my first-year writing course, “Building Stories.” We read Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, which offers a persuasive argument about how racial discrimination lies at the heart of the American prison system, even in the absence of explicit racial animus. Alexander doesn’t mention the French philosopher Michel Foucault, but when she describes the way in which our American disciplinary system has “perfected” itself, accomplishing social control in ever more subtle and insidious ways, she could be taking a page out of Foucault’s 1975 playbook, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Alexander and Foucault offer brilliant, eye-opening critiques of the criminal justice system, but in the immortal words of Carly Simon, “Nobody Does It Better” than poet Etheridge Knight, who, writing from prison in the 1960’s, tells us everything we need to know—and plenty that we might not want to know—about race and the American prison system.

320px-Presidio-modelo2To appreciate Knight’s genius, it helps to understand a bit of Foucault. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault develops a theory of “panopticism,” based on Jeremy Bentham’s 19th century model of the “panopticon,” a circular prison with a central watchtower. Foucault uses this prison prototype to illustrate a cultural shift in European disciplinary systems from the old, heavy style of thick-walled dungeons to a lighter and seemingly more enlightened style of perpetual surveillance. In this new model, prisoners assume they are under constant watch by the guards and thus begin to police themselves, or as Foucault puts it, “the major effect of the Panopticon” is “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (319). By internalizing the condition of being watched, the inmates become part of a disciplinary system that controls not only their bodies, but also their minds; they become “caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers” and begin watching themselves (319).

Etheridge Knight’s 1968 poem “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane” offers a glimpse of a panopticist disciplinary regime from inside an American prison and from the perspective of its African American inmates. The poem depicts the way the inmates internalize a mode of surveillance, watching their folk hero Hard Rock and making assumptions about their own condition based on his behavior. What makes Knight’s poem so striking—and so disturbing—is that it reveals how the modern, “enlightened” system of criminal surveillance remains tied to the old system of whips and chains that disciplined black bodies during the era of slavery.

The unnamed speaker of the poem speaks in the first-person plural “we,” serving as a spokesman for the other inmates. He gets his authority from the common folk he cites, a collective voice who claims Hard Rock was “‘known not to take no shit / From nobody.’” Although we first learn of Hard Rock through word of mouth, the bulk of the first stanza is devoted to a visual description of the legendary hero. Folklore may proclaim his mythic status, but it is his visible “scars” that “prove” his greatness:

Split purple lips, lumbed ears, welts above
His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut
Across his temple and plowed through a thick
Canopy of kinky hair.

The final detail, a “canopy of kinky hair,” is also the most significant racial marker, visually signaling the importance of race in defining Hard Rock’s defiant position within the disciplinary regime.

Although the “WORD” acquires significance through its capitalization, the act of watching dominates the poem: “we all waited and watched, like a herd of sheep,/To see if the WORD was true.” As in the first stanza, visual evidence assumes primacy over word of mouth. Power must be verified through a system of surveillance. Thus, when “the testing came,” it is a test “to see if Hard Rock was really tame” (emphasis added). The definitive answer to the test comes when Hard Rock returns from the “Hospital for the Criminal Insane,” after being subjected to a lobotomy as punishment for his defiance. He “just grinned and looked silly / His eyes empty like knot holes in the fence.” Deprived of sight, Hard Rock is dispossessed of power, reduced from his formerly heroic proportions to the pitiable object of the inmates’ collective gaze. Rather than being empowered by their own ability to watch Hard Rock, the inmates are shamed by his diminished status. They turn away, their “eyes on the ground. Crushed.” As the inmates see Hard Rock reduced from a “Destroyer” and “doer of things” to a passive, unseeing fool, they see themselves reflected in his tragically reduced image. Like Hard Rock, they are rendered powerless and incapable of doing anything:

We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do,
The fears of years, like a biting whip,
Had cut deep bloody grooves
Across our backs.

Here, the simile of the “biting whip” symbolically transports the inmates back to the conditions of slavery. The “fears of years…cut deep bloody grooves,” linking the system of panoptic surveillance to the violently racist regime that preceded it. Knight’s poem thus allows us to see what Foucault overlooks: the role of race in the systems of discipline and punishment that govern our modern, democratic society. Nearly half a century later, Michelle Alexander is drawing our attention back to a problem, which hasn’t gotten any better, even if it is less visible. Read her book, and see what you think.

Works Cited

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindedness. New York: The New Press, 2010. Print.

Foucault, Michel. “Panopticism.” Ways of Reading. 5th ed. Ed. David Barholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999. 312-342. Print.

Knight, Etheridge. “Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane.” Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, 1997-2003. Web. 13 Nov. 2013.

What Does the Fox Say? Onomatopoeia & the myth of pure language

by

This weekend my sons have been belting out lines from the Norwegian duo Ylvis’s viral video, “What Does the Fox Say?” Fortunately, a student in my seminar had introduced me to the video last week, so I was able to impress my sons by joining in. “You know that song?” Zac asked incredulously, to which I replied, “Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!”

Like 3 million others, I found the video to be funny and infectious—an irresistible sing-along song the likes of which I haven’t enjoyed since my girl-scouting days. As Devon Maloney points out in Underwire, the song doesn’t just get stuck in your head, it messes with your head, raising existential questions that have troubled philosophers and poets for centuries:

Like, “Why am I still hopelessly stuck on the insanely catchy clutches of a song about animal noises?” and “Should I be reevaluating my own understanding of animal noises? Do elephants really go … “toot”? And of course, the most important question of all: “Wait, seriously, what sound does a fox make?”

According to my other son Luke, “We actually know what a fox says, Mom. It screams, and it sounds a lot like a human scream.”

Such an empirical solution to the song’s driving question may satisfy the scientifically minded, but it doesn’t solve the song’s semiotic mystery. “What does the fox say?” is not about animals that sound like humans, but about humans trying to sound like animals, or more precisely, humans trying to come up with words to represent animal sounds. The song captures our love affair with onomatopoeia, words that sound like the thing they refer to or describe. Animal noises are some of the most common onomatopoetic words and are often the first words acquired by babies, who learn to say “moo” and “quack” almost as soon as they say “mama” and “dada.” (The video’s scenes of an elderly man reading to a child seem particularly instructive here.) Part of what’s funny and pleasurable about the “What Does the Fox Say?” video is that adults at a cocktail party, champagne tulips in hand, are indulging in an infantile urge to mimic the animal world.

What makes the video even funnier is that the adults don’t really look like the animals they represent. This is not the cast of Cats, whose feline purring, pawing, and rubbing suggest a more disturbingly adult form of zoophilia. Rather, in the children’s picture-book world of “What Does the Fox Say?” the humans are clearly human. By the time the elephant man descends from the porch saying, “toot,” we recognize that his “toot” resembles an elephant about as much as his costume does, which is to say: not much. The animal costumes and sounds in “What Does the Fox Say?” are mimetic not of real animals, but of the simplified, cartoon-like icons that we use to represent animals.

In this way, “What Does the Fox Say?” delivers a sophisticated language lesson. It highlights the human desire for a pure language, in which words magically correspond to the things they represent. Yet it also exposes the myth of pure language. Linguists like Saussure teach us that language is arbitrary—that words have no innate connection to the things they represent. There’s nothing particularly catlike about the word “cat.” Instead, “cat” refers to a cat because it is not a “bat” or a “hat.” Similarly, the words “neigh” and “horse” are no closer to the equus feras than they would be if spelled out in “morse” code (here again, the video seems uncannily wise in asking if a h0-0-0-0rse would recognize its name in mo-0-0rse code). Words acquire meaning through their system in a chain of signifiers, not because of any innate connection to the things they represent. Because onomatopoeic words differ across languages (a dog says “ouah-ouah” in French and “kien-kien” in Japanese), we know that even these “sound-alike” terms conform to linguistic codes rather than to natural sounds.

Still from What Does the Fox Say videoOnomatopoeia comes from the Greek words for name + making. It reflects the basic human urge to name things—to capture and communicate the essence of things. Yet term’s root exposes the problem: we make the names; we don’t find or discover them. Although we want to know things as they are, our efforts to name them are mere approximations. Still the drive to know and name remains strong. “What is your sound… Will we ever know,” the lead singer croons, lamenting (or perhaps celebrating) that what the fox says “will always be a mystery.” In this way, the video really does entertain existential questions that philosophers and poets have been pondering for centuries.

Playing in the Dark with Whitman

by

Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is a powerful elegy for Abraham Lincoln—a personal remembrance that also serves as a national memorial, uniting a deeply divided nation in a communal song of praise and mourning. As much as I love this poem, however, I am troubled by it. In sections 5 & 6, Whitman pans out to give us a vast panorama of the U.S., describing the land, cities, lanes, woods, fields, orchards, and streets through which Lincoln’s coffin passed. In Section 5, he catalogs the features of the natural world (grass, wheat, and apple trees), and in Section 6, he depicts the human landscape:

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads

Why doesn’t Whitman include any African American laborers the fertile fields of section 5, or mention any African American faces or “unbared [brown] heads” in lines of mourning in section 6? Of course, you can argue (and probably will) that Whitman’s depiction of nature includes no people, that he is attempting to create a vision of natural bounty, in which nature’s plenty can nourish and replenish the war-torn land.  And you can argue (and probably will) that his portrayal of the American people is not race specific because he wants to project an image of national unity, in which “the thousand voices rising strong and solemn” sing together in unison. I won’t disagree with you on these points, yet I still think the absence of explicit racial signifiers is remarkable in a poem dedicated to the president who had just put an end to slavery. This absence is especially striking, given the symbolic presence of the “great cloud darkening the land.” There is darkness haunting the poem, and it is a darkness worth scrutinizing.

Toni Morrison’s essay “Black Matters”  helps explain how the repressed presence of African Americans returns in the form of a dark cloud that haunts the poem—what she would call an “Africanist presence.” Morrison rejects the assumption “that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed by, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of first Africans and then African Americans in the United States” (31). Rather, she insists, an Africanist presence is crucial to the formation of American literature, although it often surfaces in oblique, coded ways. She introduces us to this troubling idea gently, writing:

I have begun to wonder whether the major, much celebrated themes of American literature—individualism, masculinity, the conflict between social engagement and historical isolation, an acute and ambiguous moral problematic, the juxtaposition of innocence with figures representing death and hell—are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding Africanist  presence. …A real or fabricated Africanist presence has been crucial to the writers’ sense of their Americanness. And it shows: through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, and the way their work is peopled with the signs and bodies of this presence. (310)

African Americans are a “significant…omission” in Whitman’s elegy, but the poem is nevertheless “peopled with the signs and bodies of this presence.” The repressed African American people return in the symbolic form of the “Dark Mother always gliding near with soft feet” (line 143). This shadowy figure of death serves as the necessary darkness against which Whitman can recognize own vitality and affirm the continuity of a nation in crisis. The poem represses the race issues that divide the nation, only to resurrect them in a unifying symbolic figure of the Dark Mother. Perhaps we can appreciate the full power of Whitman’s great elegy only when we acknowledge the symbolic power of Africanism in his poetic restoration of American national identity.