“If something makes itself felt, known, from the zone of those of us said to be and have nothing, then the interrogation of what nothingness means is our urgent task. The nothingness of possibilities otherwise, of living the alternative.”

Ashon T. CrawleyBlackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, (New York: Fordham University Press: 2017), 197.

The past is not always or yet past.

This issue of MICE, Ghost Intimacies, is enfolded in the complexity of haunting and of our relations. It asks time and again: who or what do we want to connect and remain connected with? On the one hand, it seeks to identify the many ways in which systems of oppression survive and haunt the lives of queer, Indigenous, and people of colour. It is beyond dispute that our present has inherited logics of servitude and individuation that continue to protect the institution of white supremacy. The routinization of violence against our bodies is a sharp reminder of the current state of coloniality we endure, here in Canada and elsewhere: an imminent and immanent relationship to police brutality, state violence, everyday racism, and to their monuments (prisons, first and foremost). Forced intimacies g/host or carry such hatred in their heart, sometimes beyond the strictures of time and space.

On the other hand, this issue summons alternative approaches to haunting, in ways that seek to overthrow the politics of disappearance, forgetfulness, and even hostility toward the dead, performed by racial capitalism. If the latter—grounded in exploitation, extraction, and the spectralization of “others”—is meant to deny the complexity of life, then how do we exit its oppressive regimes of visibility and linearity? For whiteness, by declaring itself the signifier of transparency and ownership, forestalls the advent of unanticipated temporalities, of ways of living and believing in the world that do not privilege time as teleology, in order to guarantee its coherence. Such is how the racial is construed, to negate movement and relationality to a phantasmatic other. It is the vibrational materiality of Indigenous, people of colour, and queer temporalities that is repressed in the service of producing (hetero-)normative life. That is how our communities (an emphasis on those of us affected by these processes of slow or violent death) are made ghostly.

In dissent, we ask: how can the force of haunting be unleashed effectively against the politics of disappearance and separation enacted by capitalism? How do we—“those of us said to be and have nothing”—practice intimacy under duress? How do we reckon with what neoliberalism has rendered ghostly? How do we stop being ghosts? And what would it mean to end a world that perpetually brutalizes intimacy in the interest of competitive individualism, and continues to impose its view by severing the social?

In January 2017, Nasrin Himada and I sat down to talk about the upcoming publication of Bla_K, the past publication of Frontiers and my thoughts on the intervening 25 years. What follows is an excerpted collage of our exchange, interspersed and elucidated by my commentary.This interview was initially conducted for the publication of Bla_K: Essays and Interviews by M. NourbeSe Philip, and a full version of it will appear in the book which is forthcoming from BookThug in October 2017.

M. NourbeSe Philip: When I first met you, you said “Interview with an Empire”Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally, ed. Romana Huk (Middletown: Weselyan University Press, 2003), 195–206.was very important to you, in terms of your own practice and thought and, indeed, it was your deep interest in the essay that catalyzed this publication of Bla_K (forthcoming 2017).  I deeply appreciate that, particularly given that I have felt like a disappeared writer in Canada for the last twenty-five years.  My work is much better known in the United States. 

Nasrin Himada: And that’s how I even found out about your work in the first place, through the United States. I want to begin by discussing your concept of “be/longing.” Your putting the slash in be/longing opened it up for me. 

MNP: The slash is important because it says so much. A lot of our struggle resides in the language I believe. Jewish people talk about the Shoah. There's a word in Swahili, Maafa, which means a great terrible tragic occurrence or event. Some people, myself included at times, use Maafa in referring to the transatlantic slave trade. I recently started talking about “The Great Scattering,” because for me it captures one aspect of what happened to us, the scattering of Africans, within Africa to the Maghreb as a consequence of the Arab slave trade, and across various lands and oceans, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.  It has been a great and terrible scattering. 

But when I think about us, the descendants of the Maafa, it's not just the loss of the homeland and family, it is also the loss of language and culture, and the way into the latter is through the former. What makes us human and sustains us is culture and we need language for that. The Scottish missionary David Livingstone understood this, arguing that the best way to introduce Christianity to Africans was first to destroy their culture, then introduce commerce and then religion. And one of the most effective ways of doing this is to start with destruction of the language. The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩwa Thiong’o, who wrote Decolonizing the Mind (1986), stopped writing in English and began to write in his native Gikuyu and has observed that Africa cannot have a renaissance until they begin to work in their Indigenous languages. How do we speak of what happened to us? In what language? Where can, or where do, we belong in any language?  

I’ve found Simone Weil helpful in understanding how some of this scattering came about. In her book The Need for Roots (1949), she talks about how the European, after uprooting himself within Europe, spreads around the world uprooting all the other peoples of the world. 

NH: I never thought about it that way, but that's what colonialism does, it uproots people from their land. 

MNP: And their own cultures. The Europeans set out to uproot the rest of the world of their cultures. And so I see all of us caught in that net or trap. And so, for me, there's this issue of trying to find a language to rest in. And I think for me it's the fragment because there’s nowhere else to go. But then there's also this physical aspect of where do I call home? Is it possible to be/long anywhere?  

NH: In a place that's a settler colonial place? 

MNP: I don't want to use the word “settler.” Because they are not settlers, they are unsettlers. A mother settles her baby, and maybe it's coming from settle, as in to pacify, and that's what the Europeans did, they attempted to pacify people violently. I suppose you can pacify violently. Language affects us physically. They are unsettlers. Because they have unsettled everything around us.  

In the Caribbean, where the Indigenous people were for the most part wiped out, I believe we still have this issue of "how do we belong?" Particularly as those societies remain colonial societies despite independence. So for me it has everything to do with how do we ever make ourselves a resting place, which in turn, begins with a process of undoing the process of colonialism. I turn to the Martiniquan writer and poet Édouard Glissant who talked about Relationship and how crucial that is to creating different spaces. I am reminded of Zong! (2008) and how that work is all about words being in relationship to each other. Words creating spaces to allow other words to breathe. Colonialism was not about this kind of Relationship. It was rather about power—power over.  

One possibility of developing a culture of Relationship would be for us African-descended peoples and First Nations to recognize each other on both sides of that slash that stands in for the dark water, for us to see ourselves in the Other, and to see that we are really two sides of the same coin. And that maybe we have something to share with each other. I don’t know if you’re aware, but the first Africans were brought to the Americas on the advice of Bartolomé de las Casas, the sixteenth-century Dominican priest of Spanish origin, because he wanted relief against the decimation of the Indigenous people in Latin America. The rest, as they say, is history. This is what I mean about the importance of understanding the shared roots of our exploitation. Both peoples have a great deal to overcome. 

NH: On their terms I think.  

MNP: I’m not sure what you mean on their terms. 

NH: I mean in the sense that you're saying it can't really happen until we’re able to have that discussion, where Indigenous knowledge, culture, and history are centred in how we can be together.  

MNP: I understand what you’re saying and I don’t have a problem with that. What concerns me is that when African-descended peoples of the Maafa or Great Scattering are subsumed under the word “settler,” our particular and peculiar history is erased. I don’t think that white settler Canadians who now entertain liberal guilt about depredations of colonialism against First Nations people are either able or willing to entertain that. I also realize that First Nations people may not be particularly interested in making such a distinction, and I entirely understand that. It does not mean that what I know to be the truth is any less the truth—that we did not come to this part of the world as unsettlers. We came as property. In the holds of ships. I have to remember what forces brought me here. We lost everything except what we could remember. To be seen in the same way as the European settler is to do a second violence to us, the descendants of the Maafa. 

This does not mean that we do not ally with First Nations people; indeed, it strengthens the reasons why we should support them in their struggles. And I believe that until they receive what is rightfully theirs, none of us is free and we are all participating in their oppression by virtue of living in the colonial state of Canada. We all have blood on our hands. But I will not take on the liberal guilt of the white European unsettler. It’s a complicated position but a truthful one for me. After all, Canada does have a history of recognizing or acknowledging the existence of different groups, such as the French, the Acadians, the Metis, and so on. I am not necessarily claiming official recognition—although why not?—but we are two years into the UN International Decade for People of African Descent. This is intended to be a period of time in which there should be greater recognition for African-descended peoples, greater social and economic development as well as more access to social justice. This UN-declared decade, however, has been recognized more in absentia than anything else. None of the three levels of government under Stephen Harper, Kathleen Wynne, and Rob Ford, during whose respective terms it was declared, acknowledged it. Which reveals a glaring issue in our communities in Canada—we have no central organization which can speak with one voice on issues such as this.  

NH: When you speak that way I can’t help but think about my own positionality; my family didn't have a choice to come to Canada but they also did. They did have the privilege to apply for permanent residency, to land here, but if we go far back enough, in the sense of their uprootedness, then they really didn't. 

MNP: And that uprootedness has a name and an address. There was a time when Britain had its finger in every country around the world. The sun never set on the British Empire was what they prided themselves on. And what is happening today is actually the blowback, the ripple effect. Same with the United States.  

But to come back to the issue of African people here, I think that one of the things that concerns me greatly is anti-Black racism, which I think is universal and not only found among white people but among all non-Black people. 

And my argument is not for special treatment, my argument is to be particular about my own memory. For me to be willing to lump myself in with the white settler is to erase my memory of how I came here. 

I have heard relatively recent immigrants passing comments on First Nations people—that they don’t pay taxes and that they should get over what happened and so on. This is outrageous. First Nations people are right to have an attitude towards newcomers who come into this land and take a position on them and their memories. It cannot happen; it must not happen.  

NH: And that makes total sense in exactly how you’ve described memory. It’s in how you activate a sense of self-determination in a collective way.  

MNP: I have too much respect for Indigenous cultures to believe that they would be indifferent to the stranger like myself, who has washed up here somehow through the same set of events that has destabilized them and has moved us from our homeland. I am confident that there could be some sort of understanding and compassion for that kind of stranger and how that would look is up to both parties to work out. 

NH: In "Interview with an Empire" you continue with this issue concerning memory but specifically in relation to language. You write, "The challenge for me is to write from that place of loss. Of nothing if you will, to make poetry out of silence." As a poet and writer, how would you describe your relationship to language? How do you see that emerge in a way by speaking to/back to Empire in the interview? In it you write, "To erase the body is to erase the memory, and while this particular Black body is here in this white space called Canada, there is memory." I am wondering if you can speak more about this relation between body memory and writing, particularly in how it shows up in your work, in your practice as a writer. I can't help but think of Zong! here as well.  

MNP: The most important work that I’ve done over the last 25 years is Zong! It has been described as a conceptual work—in the same way that She Tries Her Tongue (1988) was described as a postmodern work—but it has roots deep in the ancient, oral art form oríkì, of the Yoruba of Nigeria. Again it was my engagement with language, which I talked about above, that helped me to understand how the fragment can resonate and have great power. For those of us who often have nothing but fragments of our original cultures, this was revelatory. And life-sustaining. All was not necessarily lost. The work has also moved and moved me to performance, bringing a dimension that is integral to the practice of African cultures.  

Every year in November on the anniversary of the Zong massacre, we have a collective reading of the entire book. One of the remarkable observations is that although the content is tragic, at the end of the reading/performance there is a feeling of coming to rest, of peace, even. This confirms my belief in the capacity of art to heal. I also realize that I am not interested in speaking back to Empire in a work like Zong! or its performance. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t be critical about the depredations of Empire—god knows it has unleashed on us all a scorched earth policy. But Zong! is its own raison d’être—although it comes out of the European archive, it is not a reaction or response to Empire. It simply is. As lamentation, mourning song, extended wake. Indeed, the title for last year’s event was “Zong!: A/Wake 5 Years,” playing on the idea of the wake for the dead, but also being awake to all that has happened—as in remembering. Zong! reminds me that we can find our lost selves in the most unexpected of places. 

Jamilah Sabur considers Commodity (2017) to be a digital ensemble between herself, Ricardo Dominguez and the late Peruvian singer Yma Sumac. Sabur overlays her electronic scoring with Sumac's "Chuncho" and sings words inspired by "The Ante-Chamber of Revolution" by Ricardo Dominguez.

This is the first dream I would like to write down after coming back from Colombia. I was sick for a while and just recovered, with full energy. Before bed I had a meeting with Koichi, Rit, and Tew at a Chinese restaurant about the upcoming soundtrack album. For dessert I had Ginkgo Biloba, which I think contributed to this vivid dream I had. There were two stories stitched together.

In the first one I found myself in a monkey colony in a setting that was half forest, half city. I was there with a mission but I don’t remember the details. I knew that human and monkey territories were separated. I was protected by a monkey without whom I would be attacked by the other monkeys. It was at night. I was asleep in a large warehouse in the forest. In my sleep I knew that the monkeys loved to drink pens’ ink. I had all kinds of pens with me, ballpoint pens, gel pens, etc. The monkeys would attack you to steal the pens and suck the ink from them. In my sleep I knew I had stashed two valuable black-ink pens inside my polo shirt, on my chest, behind the buttons. In the middle of the night I sensed that there were monkeys in silhouette crawling along the ceiling’s beams above me. My monkey protector was not there. As they came closer they shone a flashlight at me. I woke up. They turned off the flashlight. I tried to lift myself up but I couldn’t. I couldn’t open my eyes. It was a struggle with myself as the hungry monkeys were approaching. Finally I called out my friend who was sleeping beside me, “Raymond, Raymond, Raymond!” I repeated his name many times but no one answered. I woke up. In the dark I saw that I was sleeping alone. It was 3:35 am. I was exhausted from the dream and the jet lag. I tried to go back to sleep but I couldn’t. The monkeys’ presence was still there. Then I remembered that at dinner Tew told me that Rit, her husband, often had nightmares that made him shout in his sleep, violently. My shouting might have happened due to this information. 

After I fell asleep I had a second dream. I was also on a mission in a Colombian jungle. I trekked to different villages to murder several mafias. I was accompanied by a man who was a top-rate assassin. But our mafia targets were expert killers as well. The numbers of their kills flashed by—100 people killed in this village, fifty people killed there. But the numbers also included something like twenty people killed by landslides. Then we were joined by a woman killer. She said that she hadn’t slept with a man for eight years and to feel free to sleep with her. Then I was told that the mafias travel in gangs and about twenty percent of them were gays who slept with one another. We arrived at the outskirts of a village full of trees. I was looking for a spot where I could shoot. But I don’t remember the rest of the dream except that it was all about looking for the places to shoot, or for hiding spots. There was not really any action taking place.

The next day a friend emailed me: 

“I dreamed about you last night (a dream!). We were talking on the phone. I was using a traditional payphone inside a booth on the side of the road. The noise of the traffic was very loud and a bus swerved along the curve and its engine drowned out what you were saying and I didn’t hear what you said. I asked you and you didn’t reply but said we should have dinner to talk about it. I can’t remember what the topic was, but it sounded serious.”

PANG! Went the pan into my back as a sharp pain traveled upwards in my spine and into my head. I stumbled to turn around to face a woman who grudgingly exclaimed,“You think your negro cunt holds all the magic in the world don’t cha.” Panting for air I looked around the mess that made up the kitchen. There was flour spread out on the floor, broken glass shattered everywhere, ripped curtains barely hanging on to the windows, and a screaming kettle echoed the ringing in my ears. Standing on the other side of a table that separated the two of us, the woman continued, “KEEP OPENING YOUR LEGS FOR MY HUSBAND AND THE GOOD LORD SHALL STRIKE YA...” Her voice became a murmur as I started to notice the lavish details of her French Creole fashion. My gaze was immediately brought to the attention of a letter spread out on the table between us, dated 1751. I became appalled in the midst of her rage. Next thing I knew I was falling backwards… Was I fainting? Or was I being pulled back into reality again? In a strange way the two felt similar.

“Woiii!!! Jistis, where you go this time?” my sister inquired.

“Same place. 1751,” I mustered as the room spun. “This time the Mistress hit me over the head with a soup pan, talking about how I open my legs for her husband and all kinna ting. If you could have seen the white lady Priscilla, bloodshot eyes and all—”

“What di bumbarass?!?!” she fired. “My girl is being taken from 2017 and brought back to the olden days slavery,” she went on in disbelief.

“You could imagine my surprise. Hopefully, soon Gwanmanman is going to be h—”

“Relax!” she insisted, snapping at the mention of our grandmother.

The hairs on my back stood up as I sensed something threatening my being with another spell. Since my sister and I moved into this house I’ve felt oppressed by these visions. My memories before here have become hard for me to remember. It’s as if these visions have replaced my memories, making themselves at home in my consciousness.

My attention was soon caught by my sister’s necklace as it shone with familiarity when she moved towards the kitchen. Ignoring her question, I asked, “Pris, where did you get that necklace? It’s so beautiful and oddly eccentric.”

“Ocean gave it to me. Man said I’m the apple of his eye. Could you believe that!? He is pure papisho.” She laughed as she walked off into the kitchen. The necklace had some kind of energy attached to it, pulling me in and pushing me out again.

As I tried to stabilize my thoughts I heard some thuds at the door, “Ouvri pòt la!!”

“Pris, it’s Gwanmanman!! I’ll get it!” Running for the door in all my excitement for my grandmother to work her obeah on this spell I tripped over the mat. Priscilla’s feet were suddenly in front of me walking towards the front door whilst passing me straight. Before I could ask for help I hit my head on a giant vase. Unconscious, I could hear Gwanmanman’s light feet sweep the foyer of our old house. As she spoke her voice had a certain edge to it, different from when she was outside shouting as if  she owned the home like every Caribbean mother does. Priscilla’s voice was going in and out softly in response. However, with every syllable a sinister twist hijacked the natural calibre of her voice. Something was off.

“...Priscilla…” Gwanmanman paused, “my child, where is Jistis?”

“Gwanmanman, moi la! I’m here!! I’m here,” I mumbled as I tried to push past the painful breathing in my throat. I don’t know how she did, above Priscilla’s nonsense rambling, but she heard me.

“My baby, what happened to you?” she gasped as she kneeled to my aid. She then leaned in and whispered in my ear, “That is NOT Priscilla. It is a very dark presence that has attached itself to her trying to get to you.” She began to speak faster: “As soon as I step foot in the house I sensed it.” She continued, “I do not mean to scare you but I can see the shadow of the presence attached to her energy.”

I slowly tilted my head to see the truth in Gwanmanman’s face. However, behind her the most terrifying yet familiar eyes penetrated my soul. These eyes did not belong to Priscilla, yet they moved like they were born with her.

Just then Priscilla raised the handle of a machete above grandma’s head. —BOOP! Went the sound of grandma’s body. As the machete hit my grandmother's skull I heard a crack and her body fell to the floor. I shut my eyes tight quick. Play dead Jistis, play dead!

Play dead Jistis. Play— “Sara, baby open your eyes and take off your dress,” he gently commanded. I opened my eyes and the words flowed out of my mouth on their own, an instant response to such a bland name that nobody has ever called me outside these visions. “But Massuh, yuh lady say—”“Shhh... shhh... she’s dying from the miscarriage and not nearly as beautiful as you are.” He continued, “You fathered me three children and still not a crack in that smile of yours.” With his hand groping my waist and lips kissing my neck I could recall the last flashback I had with the Mistress and the look of her bloodshot rageful eyes. I never asked for this. Massuh always comin unto me with his old breath. “I have something for you, my beautiful Sara.” Just then he pulled out a necklace and put it around my neck. I acted surprised and, in awe, cracked his favourite smile. When I glanced at the pendant it looked all too familiar. That was Mistress’s necklace. *GASP* “Priscilla!”...“I beg your pardon?” Massuh responded in confusion as I felt my consciousness being pulled back into the house.

I awoke to my unconscious grandmother lying next to my stiff body. Through the window I could see the deep orange Caribbean sun starting to go down on my sweet St. Lucia, sealing the existence of yet another day. Quietness stole my breath as my head ached with pain. Remaining laid out on the ground, I lifted my head to look around the room. I wondered where Priscilla was. With the help of Gwanmanman and her obeah senses I now knew the truth. Life with these spells was finally starting to make sense. It was not Priscilla in my sister’s body. It was the Mistress from my former slave life. But what did she want from getting closer to me?

Just then I saw something move in the shadows beside the curtain. The beams from the sun made it difficult to focus beyond the light. It was blinding just like the Mistress. But there she was staring through my soul with her own soul. As she moved closer to me her necklace caught the light. As I struggled to get up to run, she threw me against the wall and pinned me down by my throat. Her grip was strong. “My my oh my, now we can finally have a formal reintroduction,” she said as she laughed. “The sheer fact of knowing my husband was fucking you kept me barren and sick, childless and unmotherly...” She pressed against my neck, gradually blocking my breathing, then she swallowed hard and held back tears. Her eyes got darker and blood tears began to stream down her face as I gasped for air and my body jerked. The room got blurry and her voice got rough as her aura began to shift. I could taste the sorrow and dreadful misery that made up her eighteenth-century white womanhood climbing down my throat like a sandstorm in a desert. She was possessing me. My body was to be her slave once again. I could feel my consciousness tighten and fall back, making space for her intrusion. My body: a vessel for her own immortality, a Machine.

I was smacked in the middle of a sugarcane plantation. The hot sun was beating on my back. Sweat running down the sides of my face. The world in a sugarcane field looked the same at every corner. Negroes everywhere. Cutting sugarcane. Whips beating Black skin. Blood. Screams. Sunset. Massuh touching me up. Sleep was miniscule. Same damn pattern everyday. This was a loop, not a life. I had to find a glimmer of salvation. But what? I told myself, “LOOK UP JISTIS while Massuh is distracted. What do you see baby girl?” I see broken souls, ghosts of the past, present, and future. All their faces, erased. Bodies mechanical. “Try again!” I demanded of myself.

“Who do you see? What do you see?”

That sun hat looks familiar, I thought. Shouting the word “Gwanmanman” made time stop. It was nice to see her familiar face look up from the sugarcane. “How are you here?” I mouthed. “I have been looking everywhere for you,” she mouthed back as she made her way closer. When she came close enough, she whispered with a mix of sadness and happiness, “My child, oh how I’ve missed you.” “I missed you too mawmaw,” I replied as tears dripped down my face, becoming one with my sweat. As she wiped away my tears she gently informed me, “Sometimes in order to go forward, we must go back.” She further explained, “You’ve had many past lives my child, this is not the only one.” I slowly began to catch on. “Gwanmanman, this explains the loop I have been living in!” I said in deep realization. “Indeed, baby girl, and you must recognize this wretched existence of enslavement as an interruption to our true and complete Indigenous African presence upon this earth.”

I AM my ancestors, I thought. This recognition felt so warm and fuzzy, like a calm fire burning within me. My thoughts echoed into the universe as if I had said them out loud. The world began to convulse and my sight was altered by an odd intensifying pixelated view of life on the plantation surrounding me…

“SHIT! She’s waking up! Quick, retrieve the tranquilizer! She knows too much!” one man panicked.

“Doctor, I thought you said that the mental collapse is enough to—”

“I said what I said, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t loopholes. The computer simulation program is soon to be updated with a hardware that restricts awakening and we will soon be able to resolve the issue,” he said as he adjusted the incubator on my brain. “Come next year, 2050, we can…” His voice faded out as my ears started to ring.

Restricts “awakening”? Year 2050? As my eyes fluttered open, bright lights burned my sight. Once I was able to see beyond the light I could see that I was in what looked like a laboratory. Millions of see-through cubicles existed beyond the glass walls that surrounded me. Doctors in a frenzy. Blood splattered all over the glass levels, floors, and walls, tools flew everywhere, and Black people were breaking free. What was going on? As I twisted my head to look around I saw straps holding down all four of my limbs and my blood streamed from a needle in my forearm into a nearby machine. What were they doing to me? I was way too weak but I knew I had to try to fight it.

Just then, a white woman entered the cube. “Is my fertility injection ready?” she inquired. *GASP* Mistress?

I started to pull and tug at the table violently and one of the doctors proceeded to hold me down, but before he could stab his fat needle into my neck, a single bullet shot exited the Mistress’s forehead. My eyes widened in disbelief. As her body hit the floor, Priscilla’s presence with a firm grip on a gun was revealed in her place. The doctors’ bodies hit the floor just as quickly.

“PRISCILLA!” I shouted excitedly.

“Priscilla, what is going on?” “GURL!!!” she sighed and continued, “No time to explain sis, we have to run or we may never get another chance to break free.” As she cut me loose before running off, we paused. Our tears of joy bound our hug in the midst of the chaos. It wasn’t long before a loud siren went off and lights flickered red throughout the building, reminding us to get our legs moving. And just like that our search for a door to freedom in these winding glass halls transitioned us from ghosts in a machine to fugitives of the future.The essay “The Real Ghosts in The Machine” by Ricardo Guthrie inspired the title of this short story. The ghostly intimacies that Jistis, the protagonist, encounters during her reincarnation, hauntedness, and computer simulation is illuminated by the metaphor that is “the ghost in the machine.” This is intensified by the ways in which Jistis’s positionality as a Black person, more specifically an Afro-Caribbean woman, is implicated and rendered ghostly in the machine that is whiteness and colonialism in the different temporalities (past, present, and future) that she experiences throughout the story. Jistis’s soul represents the “many ways [in which] race fills … space as yet another ‘ghost’ in the machine.” "The Real Ghosts in the Machine: Afrofuturism and the Haunting of Racial Space in I, Robot and Detropia," in Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-blackness, ed. Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones (Lanham: Lexington, 2016), 47.

From what I knew, Wang Ying had sleek black hair pulled back with grease, mostly appearing with a centre part and a sideways glance. And when her glance entered my field of vision, I would no longer feel my feet beat upon the road. In my darkness, only she would respond to my call.  

My name is Hua and my first break as an actress came along this dark road. I was eleven years old and had survived my family, was mortally alone and my brain was doing tai chi underwater. Having worn various masks throughout my career, I realize my only aspiration ever was to be closer to Ying.

A Shanghai-based actress from the 1930s, she first made her name playing roles in films such as Goddess of Freedom (1935) and Sai Jinhua (1936). She won the latter role over the future Madame Mao, who would persecute her in the Cultural Revolution. In prison, Ying was called Prisoner Number 6742. When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke, she toured in China with a politically charged street theatre troupe. The play list included Put Down Your Whip. Outside of films, she also appeared in paintings.

1. Assign all ingredients a character in your language of choice. Write a lyric for each of these ingredients as you fill the bathtub with hot water. The steam should help lubricate your poetry.
2. Apply one tablespoon of honey to cover the breadth of your eyebrow. Using the crushed charcoal, divide it between your brows and affix to the honey. The honey should be viscous and not drip.
3. Pour one litre of milk into each pot slowly in a counter-clockwise spiral. Like runners on a racetrack, the path must run counter-clockwise. Do this over the course of ten minutes.
4. Turn off the tap running into the bathtub and bring the star anise into the water by submerging your left hand fully into the basin. Release. Pour in all of the salt.
5. Stir the rind of one orange into the pots of milk and place the pots into the bathtub. The bottom of the pots should not touch the floor of the tub. If they do, add more salt to the water.
6. When it feels right, empty each pot of milk and orange rind into the tub and place a fig leaf where the pot once floated.
7. Submerge your body into the bathtub until your fingers and toes turn into raisins. Recall the lyrics for these ingredients as you wash your body.

In these four vignettes, cruising and space-time are connected by spectrality. In both the form and content of this essay I hope to model an ethics of haunted cruising in which the ghost (the undead revenant as well as the ghosts of colonialism) is the figure of the uncanny space and the untimely rhythms of cruising. We do not cruise in spaces with total agency and self-possession, for we are cruised by spaces themselves, which have their own disturbing magnetisms and seductions.

Figures of Cruising in Goodbye, Dragon Inn

Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film Goodbye, Dragon Inn shows us that history never says what it wants of us; its ghosts are never so explicit. An ethics of haunted cruising demands attunement to the minute gestures, sometimes imperceptible, of the history of a space and its inhabitants. The slowness of Tsai’s camerawork opens this possibility in the visual field, allowing our gaze to cruise the screen and its details to cruise our attention in turn.

Cruising is an eroticized sensing of space. The layout of the long shot gives us access to the goings-on of the cruising ground. Extending down a diagonal line of depth, the viewer has visual access to three zones in the ecosystem of cruising: the bathroom stalls, behind which cruising is “consummated” (and we are startled when a hand reaches out to close a stall door a long minute after the other cruiser has already left, making time feel discontinuous); the sink and the exit door, which constitute the border demarcating cruising’s territory; and the urinals, the prime site of cruising’s manoeuvres. Individual desire circulates in this space, notably so in the second man (whom we shall call, as shorthand, the “protagonist”); but as viewers we are treated to a geometric matrix of desire’s drift, interpersonal but also—insofar as it makes a network with wood, fluorescence, ceramic, the sound of water—non-human. Cinema dissects for us the hyperawareness of spacing that is central to cruising: the intention-laden space between three bodies compressed at the urinals asymmetrical against three consecutively empty urinals; the personal space intruded upon when the man reaches over the vulnerable pissing man to grab his cigarettes from the countertop. The fluid schematics of desire are traced onto, and etched into, those more static objects of the space, offering us an impressionistic cartography of cruising.

Cruising is durational. The temporality of cruising is waiting. When cruising in the public sphere people find an activity that covers for their cruising: an implausibly long piss, or a two-minute handwashing session. Tsai’s meditative shots translate cruising into cinematic form: we sweep the scene and install ourselves among these patient surveyors. In Tsai’s mise en scène, the cigarette becomes the object that expresses each cruiser’s idiorrhythmy: the pace and beat of their unique experience of time, of breath. Waiting is cruising’s mode of chronomorphosis: bending time out of shape and away from cause-and-effect progressions. This temporality is distinct from the cruising that occurs in spaces specifically designed for anonymous sex, such as the bathhouse or the strip club, where the music sets a regular rhythm and dictates the speed of the space, dragging the cruiser’s tempo in its tow.

Cruising is the negotiation of the awkwardness of asymmetrical contact. In the bathroom scene, not once is a glance exchanged; one party looks upon another body while that body pretends to be preoccupied. When the protagonist finally approaches the consummation of cruising with the Japanese man under the guise of needing a light for his cigarette, eye contact is made but desires pass each other entirely by. Cruising is the negotiation of this awkward imbalance, and what distinguishes master from amateur is how gracefully they handle desire’s duds and flops.

Cruising is a matter of death. Tsai wants us to take the ghost literally. Amidst all the surface movements of ordinary life, the film throws us a dramatic twist when the handsome Japanese man tells our protagonist “你知道这戏有鬼” (You know… there are ghosts here?), a question inflected as though it is a matter-of-fact statement. This revelation opens a rift in the film's reality. As the film never tells us who the ghosts are, nor what any of the characters are cruising for, it leaves the entire epistemological surface of the film suspended in ambiguity. By unseating our epistemological certainty (for surely in our spectatorship it’s not odd to assume characters are alive) this utterance doubly recasts how we watch the film. First, it makes all characters flicker in the ambiguous half-light of are they ghosts or are they not. If the ghost is understood as a forceful post-mortem attachment to space (we imagine that these ghosts are cinephiles melancholically attached to the dilapidated theatre), then the ghost figures history’s haunting, its self-remaking as a palimpsest of traces of the past and present: nothing is fully lost, nothing is fully there. Second, it reinstates the death that was always fundamental to the act of cruising: death concealed in the legacy of disease vectors, but also our mutual exposure to the possibility of each other’s violence. In his own cheeky, understated way, Tsai asks us to take the ghost seriously as what is neither irretrievably lost nor properly accounted for in the official records of history.

Barthes in Morocco: Cruising Coloniality

Roland Barthes, the twentieth-century French semiologist, lush stylist, and consummate aesthete, offers us a verbose counterpoint to Tsai’s reticent images: here I stage their incongruous encounter. I had read Barthes with the utmost devotion for half a decade, and when I came upon his cruising diaries, I swallowed them up wholesale, orientalism and all, too deeply identified with his gaze to pay enough attention to how he turned bodies of colour into ghosts, unreflexively phasing them out of history. As a colonial artifact, Barthes’s diaries are a matrix of attractions (desire’s spectral identifications) and repulsions (colonialism’s willful blindnesses).

1969, Morocco. In the pages of the posthumous diary-essay collection, Incidents (1987), Barthes cruises for the love of hustlers; money enters the scene of cruising. Where sex happens it’s mediated by Barthes’s particular intellection, beholden to the erotics of meaning as any lover of signs must be: “I enjoy Amidou’s vocabulary: dream and burst for get an erection and have an orgasm. Burst is vegetal, scattering, disseminating, not moralistic, narcissistic, closed off.”Roland Barthes, Incidents, trans. Richard Howard (Oakland: University of California Press, 1992), 29.

Barthes brings out cruising’s erotics of the nuance even as he spectralizes the ghostly figures of the boys who are spoken for. He draws a private delight out of the Moroccan boys’ awkward French-as-a-second-language semantics; he translates their speech into his own systems of desire. As a reader, I am aroused by the clipped textual condensations of sex—“Mustafa is in love with his cap. He won’t take it off to make love”Ibid., 19.—and charmed by Barthes’s writing, which makes these incidents (incidents: a euphemism for paying for sex) into spectral traces, faint afterthoughts of cum on soil.

Raised in stark relief throughout are the power relations that mark the difference between the white man of means who cruises, and the Moroccan boys being cruised. The boys’ agency and desire become an effaced spectral trace, unreadable beyond how they are codified by the context of culture and religion—a culture that is trespassed by Barthes’s sex tourism. As a trained semiologist, Barthes is unmatched at understanding the furtive codes that appear in cruising (a furtiveness lost in the heterosexual context, which never needs to develop an underground shadow-language); he lets the world cruise him with generosity and openness to its miniature surprises. But much as he takes delight in little missed translations of signification, and in the gestures of the boys who transport him away from oppressive environments of Paris, he fails to consider the knotty colonial power that allows him those pleasures in the first place; he consigns those boys to spectral representations, outlined by colonial force.

Ten years later, it is cruising that will make Barthes give up on desire, never having learned the lesson about trying to pay for what he wants (love) by buying the wrong thing (sex). In this scene, Oliver is the indifferent “last” hustler in Barthes’s cruising diaries: “Then I sent him away, saying I had work to do, knowing it was over, and that more than Olivier was over: the love of one boy.”Ibid., 59. Hyperaware of his aging body, hustling fails to satisfy Barthes’s despair over his encroaching and absolute unloveability. (Perhaps despite myself, I empathize with his misery.) It is Barthes himself who has become a ghost to the hustlers, recognizable (as a man of means; as the master of a financial transaction) but no longer seen by the light of love (love being that which exits the considerations of any economy). Unlike the hapless protagonist in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, cruising for Barthes is wrapped up in the power of money that makes it easy for him to consummate a cruise, but it cannot fulfil the desire for the amorous commitment that is not achievable through economic exchange. We are left to answer the question in our own ethical practices: how can we pursue Barthes’s erotic attention to spatial and cultural details without losing sight of the systems that define and delimit our erotic investments?

Learning from Bathhouses

I cruise in a Taiwanese bathhouse, startled by the flatness of my desire while surrounded by the sight of all these bodies that looked like mine. It was here in this mirror maze that the whiteness of my desire was laid bare, rooted in reams of history: my accelerated assimilation at age four into the Western world, and a whole diet of culture that fronted the sexiness, and sexual power, of white bodies. Here was an internalized racism whose expression was not self-hatred but self-indifference: desire could find no purchase in bodies “like mine,” and even this invocation of likeness indicated a foreclosure performed on the grounds of race: do not look too much like me to fuck.

To be haunted by your own body, the body you’ve carved away from yourself through a powerful turn of abstraction, blanching, bleaching, repressing what you know too well is already open for all to see.

The bathhouses in Toronto I always visit with a close friend. The thrill of transgression lies in the attempt to bring intimacy into a place whose express purpose is primarily grinding sex out, this shared intent nearly machinic. A different sense of homelessness pervades here (in the city I call home where people ask me “where I’m from”); I feel unmoored from the tendernesses that sustain my living. I make a provisional list of semiotic codes operative at the bathhouse. States of being: at rest and open to sex (reclining, but wide awake); at rest and closed to sex (sleeping); restless (cruising for a thing desired or for desire itself); touching oneself; fucking or about to fuck; cleaning oneself. Above all, a profound boredom, the hypnotic circulation of passing and repeating bodies that grazes the sublime. 

Taking The River Back to Dragon Inn

In Tsai’s 1997 film The River, father and son both visit the bathhouse seeking reprieve from the banality of their family life. One night, their desires overlap—in the same room, with each other:

This is as close as Tsai comes to spectacle, and this vision of cruising—filmed such as the bodies are flecks of illumination in an otherwise abstract pitch-darkness—is the antithesis to the expansive spaces of Goodbye, Dragon Inn. In this scene, in this momentary burst of corporeal comfort, both father and son seem possessed by each other, fucking with total abandon, yet held apart by a blacked-out distance of a non-recognition soon to be disintegrated. Instead of the geographically mapped diagram of cruising’s zones: a formless void renders the father and son in a sealed and unanchored space. In place of the cover of anonymity that allows cruisers to go unidentified, unnamed: an intense recognition that re-establishes kinship at its most fundamental level, that is, the familial in its uncanny form as incest. Sometimes what haunts you in your spaces of pleasure is too alive, too close to you. Not only does cruising slip away from attempts at defining its essence, it is also capable of inverting into the very scenarios and subject positions it tries to escape.

The violence at the end of this River scene—the father towering over his collapsed son, his seething anger, the impossibility of avowing what has just taken place—reminds us that, of course, power differentials both subtle and explicit exist even in lieu of the casual colonialism that characterizes Barthes’s diaries. Cruising is no such utopic vacuum of relationality outside power. As the movie theatre in Goodbye, Dragon Inn closes for good, the operator of the theatre attempts one last time to catch the attention of the projectionist by gifting him with a half bun, peach shaped, almost explicitly the symbol of romantic love à la Aristophanes. We watch her watch him leave with the bun, and then leave alone in the rain, to the sounds of Yao Lee’s 留恋 (Nostalgia): it’s half bitter, it’s half sweet, year after year. The spectral cruising that explodes the heart of the film boils over into the world outside the theatre and then into our everyday sociality. Cruising is the haunted figure of the missed connection, the tempo that stumbles out of sync, the ordinary unevenness of desire. We learn from Barthes that to expect romantic affirmation and amorous unity in cruising is to make space for your own disappointment. We learn from Tsai that, despite—or rather because of—its disappointments, failures, and foibles, cruising names the practice of attuning oneself to the strange desire-lines that cross the scene of a space and its time. 

1999

with my own & begin
the faithful work of drowningOcean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2016), 8.

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When we thought of Viet Nam, we always suspected that it was more than an origin. We felt that there was no transparent trajectory from the homeland to us. We knew our parents had arrived and are still arriving through a devouring ocean, through holding hands with ghosts of the war.  

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Viet Nam is known as “the theater of wars and destructions,”Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Elsewhere, within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (New York: Routledge, 2011), 19.as a narrative of loss.Lan P. Duong, Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 6. 

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A woman interviews my parents about the war for a film project. She is trying to document a victim story, but somehow it feels off. My parents tell her about how they each left the homeland one night and talk about the wrongs that were inflicted on them. I am not sure if I am supposed to be in the living room. Soon after witnessing this narrative of loss, I notice the shape of others in our daily life. My mother talks about sweet little nothings and those left behind.

For a while I just kept replaying this image and wanted to treat it as a referent. Here is where my father’s life altered, and so my life began. Still, there is more to this image than an originary event that I cannot bear witness to. The image feels like an echo, traversing public and personal experiences, surrounded by disaster and grief. Out of a felt concern for this image, I attune to the reality of this grief.

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Does being haunted mean feeling this state of overwhelming grief? We try to imagine all the deaths that birthed our existence in the Vietnamese diaspora, and realize we can never give them a worthy funeral. What would have happened had our homeland not felt so defeated by the war and not flung itself into a strange communist capitalist society model?

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