Speaking of Geronimo

At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, many Native American communities lost the land base that had made self-sufficiency possible. In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act, which dictated that reservation land had to be divided into individual plots and allotted to Indians as private property and whatever land remained after the allotment process would be made available to white settlers. Native people were nearly universally opposed to allotment. Most Native people then and now believe that land cannot be owned as property. It is to them like dividing the sky into plots and owning those, an impossibility. But white people be tripping, as you know, and they could not understand other people’s view of the world as legitimate. But in this case what white people thought should not have mattered because Native people had legal documents, treaties, to ensure that their view of the land would be recognized on lands they held.

White people have now mostly forgotten that treaties are legally binding documents that the United States entered into with tribal nations. England first, then the United States, recognized that the land belonged “from time immemorial,” as the legal language puts it, to the Native inhabitants. Thus in order to gain possession of the land, these governments negotiated with tribes in order to extinguish Native title. That is, tribal nations ceded land (what is now the continental territory that comprises the U.S.) but reserved for themselves some territory and rights that were spelled out in the treaties. So for all the territory they gave up, tribal nations reserved the right to have their remaining lands administered in trust by the federal government. The government agreed IN FUCKING WRITING WITH SIGNATURES AND EVERYTHING to hold Native lands in common and for the benefit of Native peoples. So when Indians objected to allotment, arguing rightly that allotment would deprive communities of the resources that had always sustained them, that should have been the end of it. The Indians were not counting on vague promises made by white people (fuck that noise, Indians thought), they were depending on documents that Presidents themselves had signed in solemn rituals. But by passing allotment, then enforcing it, the federal government went back on its legal obligations, not to say its moral ones, evil motherfuckers. Congress declared it had plenary power over Native lands and thus could renege on the very contracts it had made. Of course it wasn’t phrased that way. Congress argued that it was trying to "help the Indian.” By turning Natives into property owners, the argument went, they would magically give up their culture, their history, their communities, and turn into permanently tanned white people.

Allotment had the result that white people who pushed for it really envisioned: Indians lost 90 million of the 140 million acres they held prior to the passing of the Dawes Act. The loss of this land did not turn Indians into thriving white-ish people. What it did was impoverish Native communities and turn Indians into dependent people. The endemic poverty found on reservations today is the legacy of allotment.

But how many non-Indians think of this history today? How many non-Indians think of Native people in specifically historical ways? If non-Indians think about Native people it is usually as a symbol of something, a symbol they, non-Indians, can identify with. I hear the song “Geronimo” on the radio and wonder what it means for its audience. The song evokes Native history as a kind of thrilling heroic resistance, as valor in the face of impossible odds, as boldness. I’ve argued here before that it is very difficult for popular music to represent history, but as this song illustrates it is quite easy for pop music to obscure it.

Arcade

Dear Readers,

Arcade: Literature, Humanities, & the World has been kind enough to publish something from Pop Erratic in its fine digital pages. This journal is published by that fly by night outfit, Stanford University, so please give it a look before it's too late.

Sincerely,
Enrique

I Can Read You Like a Magazine

We finished the drinks and went outside. It was dark and raining hard. I wanted to keep talking to her so I offered to walk her home. She dressed like a cool kid from the early ‘60s. She wore her very dark hair pulled back, and her red lipstick contrasted against her fair skin. As we walked I could feel the rain seeping through the holes in the bottom of my shoes. We got to her house and she invited me in to dry off. I followed her up upstairs to her room. She turned on a lamp, which was just enough light. We sat on the side of her bed and talked some more. She laughed at me when I suggested that she was interested in me for the things I said in class. I had a high opinion of the kind of student I was. She told me about the languages she wanted to learn and why. She read some Proust out loud (pol). I found this silly. After a while she put The Boatman’s Call on the stereo—this phrase sounds so archaic now. “Into My Arms” started playing and we got silent. I lay back on her bed and closed my eyes to listen, my feet still on the floor. She lay down next to me. It was warm in her room but I could feel that my socks and shoes were still wet. When the song was over I opened my eyes and saw that she was lying on her side looking at me. She kissed me. We kissed for a while. It got very late. I said I had to go home. She said she would walk me back. We went back out into the rain. About halfway between our places we stopped under the awning of a convenience store and kissed again. My feet were soaked. When we stopped kissing I told her that this was wrong because I had a girlfriend. I told her she lived in Japan and that she was coming back for Christmas vacation in a couple of months. I said I was sorry and that this shouldn’t have happened. She said it was fine, and we went off in our different directions. The next night she called me some time after midnight. She asked if she could come over to talk. She came over. She told me she thought I was afraid and maybe I had a girlfriend but what had happened between us was real and we should give it a chance. I said that maybe she was right, but I couldn’t go through with that. We kept at the conversation for hours. She looked wounded and beautiful, and I wanted her most that night when I kept saying that I couldn’t. She left at dawn. A couple of days later I came home to find flowers on my doorstep. A few days after that, I was sitting on the curb reading when she walked up to me. I asked her coldly if she had left the flowers on my door. She said fuck you and walked away. The last time I saw her I was coming around the corner of my block, arm in arm with my girlfriend. She saw us and turned around. My heart was racing. I never heard from her again.

If all of this sounds like a cliché, it’s because it is. But it's no less true for being a cliché. That is, sometimes our lives take the form of familiar narratives. I think that this is one of the things that Taylor Swift is getting at in “Blank Space.” Sometimes things like desire develop in obvious ways and sometimes they turn out more or less in the way we imagined they would. Nonetheless, we feel these commonplaces as if they had never happened to anyone else before. No one’s broken heart is unique but it always feels that way.

High All the Time

I went crazy in the spring of 1999. I got a letter that spring from my mother and in it she included a recent picture of herself holding her granddaughter in front of an iron bar fence. My niece was slipping forward towards the camera. The breeze blew my mother’s hair across her face as she tried to hold on to her granddaughter. That picture affected me in ways that I can’t fully explain. It placed me in the heartbreaks of my childhood. It evoked feelings and experiences that I shared with my brother as children that I can’t bring myself to ever really address openly. What happened to us was not unique. We weren’t the first or last Salvadoran children left behind to navigate poverty and neglect by parents who moved to the U.S. in order to make some money. But the sociological dimension of what happened to us does not erase the effects of that experience. The picture prodded at something half forgotten but easily inflamed in me. And so I got drunk. For a couple of months.

I drank and drank and drank. I started drinking in the morning. I would take a good friend of mine from our 9 a.m. language class to have bagels and beer. I would drink at home in between classes and at the bars after classes and into the evening. Most nights, I would leave my girlfriend and go to a bar where I kept running into the same girl, a classmate from a course on literary theory. I wanted to destroy something in myself and so I started walking that girl home. I wound up in her bed. My girlfriend once found us drinking together on campus and I acted as if nothing was wrong. When she left, I kept drinking with the other girl. I once bumped into this other girl, another classmate from another literary theory class, in the library and invited her to have drinks with me later at the bar. I passed out before we ever met her and forgot all about the invitation until a couple of months later when that same girl yelled at me for asking her to another drink as if nothing had happened. I fell off bikes drunk. I fell over walking. I got into trouble with the police. I made scenes and embarrassed myself over and over. I broke my girlfriend’s heart but she somehow forgave me. I didn’t want to be sober. Eventually and for equally mysterious reasons, I stopped wanting to be drunk and so the craziness dissipated.

In The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz says that white people drink to forget and that Mexicans drink to remember. As with any of these broad comparisons, things are probably more occluded by it than they are clarified. But it is true that many people in this country consider the self-destruction of intoxication to be an act of forgetting. Tov Lo’s “Habits” speaks to this idea. “You’re gone and I gotta stay/High all the time/To keep you off my mind,” she wails in a voice with such high emotion that it makes my throat catch every time I hear it. But intoxication isn’t just about forgetting or getting distracted. I’m not sure it’s just about remembering either, though I know that drinking and remembering go hand in hand for many of us at times. Maybe when I went crazy I drank to fill the present with a different set of memories, memories that could compete with the old wounds. It wasn’t drinking to negate the past or to bring it back to life in a mania. Rather, I was perhaps trying to invent a new past--equally fucked up but for different reasons--that would balance the existing bruises. Bukowski says that “some people never go crazy./what truly horrible lives/they must lead.” I know that’s a romantic sentiment that ignores some clear social and psychological realities. But beneath the illusions or maybe because of them, there is something in those words that speaks to me.

I’m Also About That Bass

In The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James asks why slave masters routinely tortured and injured their slaves, that is, why did they deliberately harm their own property. James reminds us that slave masters did so because no matter how much they degraded their possessions, the black people bearing the torture nonetheless retained the full measure of their humanity, with all of the dignity and resistance that went along with it. Slave masters beat and maimed their slaves in order to protect themselves. They sought through their daily violence to subdue the rebellious spirit of people in chains. Slave masters regularly whipped slaves for minor infractions and poured salt, alcohol, and hot ashes in the bleeding wounds. They poured burning wax over their bodies, poured boiling sugar cane on them, burned them alive, and roasted them over slow fires. They filled them with gunpowder and blew them up. They buried them in the ground and covered their heads with sugar or honey so that ants and flies would eat the flesh off their faces. They made them eat excrement or drink urine. Many of these tortures were common enough to have names: blowing up a slave was called “to burn a little powder in the arse of a nigger.” And of course they forced them to work for the benefit of the master, forced them to have children to increase the master’s property, and forced them to try to accept their inferiority.

After that long history of torture and degradation, black people after emancipation were kept in the margins of society through the continuation of racial terror. White mobs routinely tortured and killed black people for questioning white supremacy. Black people were denied their basic rights—the right to educate their children, the right to choose where they should live, the right to be paid fairly for their work, the right to move freely within society without fear of being abused, the right to be treated with basic human decency. The continuing disinvestment in black communities, the continuing criminalization of blackness, the continuing devaluing of black life are all part of a systemic problem that continually pushes African-Americans to the periphery of American society.

Something that we may recognize as black culture emerged out of and to make sense of these social realities.  By black culture I mean more than the literature, art, or music made by black artists that has played such a key role in the development of American culture in the last four centuries. I mean more than the styles, postures, and sensibilities created in black milieus that have transformed American popular culture. I mean everything, including the distinctive vernaculars associated with African-American people. Everything, including how black people talk, is related to their coping with and sometimes even flourishing under the burden of white racial terror. White racial terror.

And so when I hear a wonderfully catchy song like Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass” I feel conflicted. The song is bubbly and happy, harmonic and rhythmic, playful and positive. Only a snob or a monster wouldn’t like that song. But the song not only depends on the musical genres developed in the Black Atlantic, Trainor’s voice itself is inflected by black patterns of speech. Which is fine, I suppose. It’s a free country, as they say. But it does gall more than a little that the people that benefit today from the history of racial terror get to mimic the voices of the victims of that terror. White people can sound “black” if they want, no one can tell them otherwise. But they do so fully aware that they don’t have to bear the burden or the consequences of black history. So fuck those people.