Black Women's Writing Revisited

26      In the King essay, Alexander argues that since the lived realities of many people continue to be determined by real racially motivated violence, there should be a space for what she calls "bodily history," a recognition of irreducible black collective, physical memory. Further, she reclaims the history of "black bodies in pain for public consumption" and repurposes it, through the example of the Rodney King videos, as a site around which the black community could organize productively (ibid. 177). Alexander begins the piece as follows:

At the heart of this essay is a desire to find a language to talk about 'my people.' 'My people' is, of course, romantic language, but I keep returning to it as I think about the videotaped police beating of Rodney King, wanting the term to reflect the understanding that 'race' is a complex fiction but one that, needless to say, is perfectly real in at least some significant aspects of our day-to-day lives (ibid. 175).

When Alexander declares that she writes, "to find a language" we should hear an echo of Williams, which I quoted earlier.A quest for language rather than an argument drives the essay; thus it is true to its French roots essai, which leads to the verb essayer, meaning to try and is further associated with risk, risquer. One important difference is that an essay typically focuses on a single subject but Alexander presents a collage of subjects around an idea. In this case, the essay is divided into separate sections: "A Witness and a Participant," which is about scenes in Frederick Douglass's 1845 narrative; "Emmett Till" "Rodney King" and "Post-black"? Post-script." I focus on the King section as well as Alexander's forms of address to the reader throughout the essay.

27      Returning to the opening lines quoted above, we read that Alexander connects King's experience to "our day-to-day lives." Alexander writes:

In these anti-essentialist, post-identity discursive times, I nonetheless believe that different groups possess sometimes-subconscious collective memories, which are frequently forged and maintained through a "storytelling tradition," however difficult that may be to pin down, as well as through individual experience. There needs to be a place for theorizing black bodily experience into the larger, ever-evolving discourses of identity politics" ( ibid. 178).

In Alexander's concept then, King's experience, which is in a sense his personal, isolated reality, becomes generalizable as a community event through its telling. When viewed on television and interpreted through an historical lens, the Rodney King incident can and I think she might say should become all of our experience, through empathy, through being a witness. The videos act as storytellers and our viewership serves as the means to empathy and community formation. By learning our history we witness it and it becomes part of our collective memory (ibid. 183). The word metaphorically enters our flesh.

28      Empathy is a metaphoric, imaginative leap that can build collective memory and form bonds of community. Alexander frames her discussion of Douglass by asking, "What do the scenes of communally witnessed violence in slave narratives tell us about the way that 'text' is carried in African American flesh" (ibid. 181)? This reference to flesh can be linked with Spillers' discussion of body and flesh in her 1987 essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: American Grammar Book," which first appeared in the journal Diacritics. Alexander explores the idea further on in this section when she examines an excerpt from the Douglass narrative in which he describes his Aunt Hester being whipped. Alexander writes of Douglass' description of the beating:

Douglass's synaesthetic response is instantly empathetic, and the memory is recorded in a vocabulary of known bodily sensation. He imbibes the experience, which is metaphorically imprinted on his now traumatized flesh in the shrieks experienced as 'heart-rending' and that left him 'horror-stricken' (ibid. 183).

This scene communicates the ways in which violence is witnessed both visually and aurally. Through description of bodily sensations, Alexander writes, Douglass communicates empathy with his aunt. The text mediates how he feels; perhaps as he writes to find language for his feelings, he makes the experience part of his memory, thus part of his own bodily experience. There is also the implication that he is next, which Alexander addresses, saying Douglass's witnessing of the event revealed the true brutality of the institution and strengthened his resolve to escape. And, of course, he eventually was instrumental as an abolitionist orator and writer in the movement to overthrow slavery once he was free.

29      If empathy means stepping into another person's place or feeling that you are in their place and share the same fate-even that you are willing to share their fate then we need to figure out language to represent that unity. It is not merely that I step into King's place. When I watch him on the video that is me. That's I and I or I-me and I-him getting beaten like that.

30      Although Alexander does not literally use the term "I and I," as I read the way she constructs this radical formation of identification between the viewer and King in the videos, I recognize the concept of I and I. The notion of "I and I" in this specific orthography originates with the Rastafarians in Jamaica. Although it can be written in many languages - Je et Je for the French, Yo y yo for the Spanish, it signifies absolutely nothing in those languages because they do not have a concept equivalent to the Rastafarian use of the first person. I and I is an expansive notion of self that includes the speaker and his or her audiences. It refers to the unity between people and their shared interests. Sometimes I actually replaces other pronouns such you or him. Rastafarian gender politics (due in part to the sexualization of Rastas through Bob Marley's commercial reggae, which is a whole other story) is the crashing limit to all this notion of unity but their way of addressing each other with the pronoun I when they mean you or even he, goes some distance toward expressing my view of how the first-person voice works in such a unique way here.