My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 98

Clyde Talyor

Clyde’s Response

In Portrait in Georgia, Toomer links the
composition of the Southern belle to
the tortured Black body that sustains
her existence:
Hair — braided chestnut
coiled like a lyncher’s rope…
And her slim body white as the ash
of black flesh after flame.
Walker understands this relation
clearly — as proof, look at one of her
silhouettes of a Black slave woman,
arm upstretched to support an image
of a White Southern belle of equal size.
Fact is, there are glances of rebellion
and resistance among her hellish scenes.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

Skipping the issues of authenticity of
a work — I argue that the supposed
identity of an author is part of the
meaning of the piece, a view that Diehl
overworks big time — there is another
question, whether the identity or
ideology of the artist cannot be
over-ridden within the work itself.
Two examples: Ellison’s budding
neo-con values could not prevent him
from writing the raging Black militant
Ras the Destroyer as the most compelling
character in Invisible Man. The great
classical instance is where Milton in
Paradise Lost, as William Blake rightly
points out, drew Satan as a dashing
romantic rebel more captivating
than God, who looks like a grumpy
bourgeois landlord by comparison.
Some critics call this dissociation of
sensibility. Or, like, I just couldn’t help
myself, despite my good or evil
intentions. Which breaks down to say,
Okay, so you hate Kara Walker, but
how does that hatred automatically
condemn this specific work?

The second most pathetic point of
attack is the weird list of associations
linking Walker as a supporter of
Domino sugar and its heritage, including
its present owners who were not around
when sugar was having its tragic impact
on slavery. Diehl goes all over the art
plantation scraping up false evidence.
Is it ingenuous that she doesn’t mention
Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power:
the Place of Sugar in Modern History,
which is like talking about evolution
and not mentioning Darwin? From
the notes of Walker and the essay by
Edwidge Danticat, it is clear that
Walker’s sphinx-goddess sits squarely
in a tradition of critique anchored by
Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery.
Mintz carries this analysis deep into
the functioning of one commodity, a
pioneering work of this kind. Then
came tea, cotton, opium, oil, and other
narcotics. CLR James jumped onto
the analysis of the sugar plantation as
industry, and its slave workers as the
first proletarians, either before or after
Mintz, and DuBois made the same
connections to the costly entrance of
Blacks into modernity through cotton.

To pretend that Walker did not research
this narrative and was its ignorant dupe
shows a massive lack of perception
when looking at the work. A Subtlety
was far too subtle for Diehl. Does the
image of a gigantic Black woman in
Mammy guise, rendered in white to
suggest sugar escape recognition of a
powerful trope of the slave past?
Jean Toomer’s Cane probably gives this
concept its most awesome realization.
As poet Michael Harper explained
in a lecture, leading me to write an
essay based on his idea, in the Georgia
stories of Toomer’s book, the Black
characters are metaphorically, like sugar
cane, planted, nurtured, cut down,
boiled, refined and in many cases
bleached into white sugar to be
consumed by their enslavers — a kind
of evil trans-substantiation.

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I almost feel sorry for Carol Diehl,
throwing everything she’s got at
Kara Walker, only to get stuck like
Br’er Rabbit on Walker’s sugar goddess.
Her desperation to make Walker
pay for past sins and imagined
transgressions leads her into bad
arguments. I am close to Diehl on one
score: had a White artist plunged so
deeply into self-loathing of Whiteness
as Walker has done with her Black
inheritance, she would not have
become such a darling of the culture
industry. I don’t defend Walker’s earlier
work, but I hope there are multiple
ways of rejecting or condemning it.
But Diehl hurls venom at A Subtlety
as an art piece simply because Walker
made it.