Huck & Jim

at the art institute of Chicago

At the art institute of Chicago, in one of the more minor atria, is a statue of Huck and Jim. The statue is enormous. It must be two or three times the size of a normal man.

I've never read Huckleberry Finn. Sometimes when I make admissions of ignorance like this (on twitter, rest in peace) they are the source of outrage — I think people forget, or don't think about the possibility, that I am not an american. My inattention towards Mark Twain is about as surprising as your ignorance of Steve Biko or Banjo Patterson. But I admit I present something of a challenge on this front as I come from pretty much everywhere else. And I have spent eight years of my life in the USA; three years as a child, in semi-rural texas (long story), five years in Boston for graduate school (oh sorry “outside of Boston”). But eight years, even some childhood years, even out on the farm in Texas where I picked up the habit of saying y’all before it was, uh, “cool” (it’s not cool), do not an American make.

I was never more acutely aware of this than when I started going to black lives matter protests in 2014. I went with my friend from tumblr (of course). It felt so weird to be there, as if this was not my fight, like I was passing through it. That made me feel like I could not engage more fully. But it's just as possible that my separation from the issue is what allowed me to engage with it at all. I don't think any of the other MIT phd students in my cohort in economics went, and it felt to me like I was not able to drum up any enthusiasm for it among them, which made me feel incredibly bitter. That bitterness reflects that I loved and do still love my classmates, and that I had hoped for more.

One time I had to explain to one of my american classmates that there still is structural racism in America. Another time I had to explain to another what Agent Orange is. I mean of course I didn't have to. But I sort of felt outraged by the ignorance. Maybe you can think dropping agent orange on the jungles of vietnam is allowable (it's a war crime, but still, you could think that). But you should have to think it! You shouldn't be shielded from having to form the thought.

A lot of us have a strange relationship to ignorance. It is a little self-flattering for me to claim that my only objection above is to the ignorance — I clearly also object to the position, or I impute something about the world or the worldview based on the ignorance I can witness. And then a lot is staked out there on that quite narrow band. I think very fondly of the two classmates I mentioned above. I like them both a lot; I feel a little bad to use them narratively. What happened there is real, it's true to say it. I also think it is revealing of something broader, or else I would not lay out in these terms. It is absolutely real and I am confident these people would remember those encounters in exactly the same manner. Yet the person is collapsed inside the lines.

I am pretty sure that is also what is happening to me when people get outraged at my ignorance. One time I tweeted that I had only just discovered — through reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X — that Cassius Clay and Muhammed Ali were the same person. I simply thought there were two different groundbreaking african american boxers. It was one of the most vigorous shellackings I have ever received on twitter. People thought this ignorance was in and of itself racist. (I totally disagree; again, seppos, you tell me faithfully that you know in this moment who Albert Luthuli was and I'll entertain your right to judge me.)

People love the admission of weakness. And I am not per se against mob justice, as distasteful as it is. It can be right or wrong; I am intrigued by it, as I think most people are. There is nobody who really disavows it — much like free speech, we are arguing over the lines. Mob retribution has a borderline sexual energy of punishment, triumph and correction. I think we should try to curb its excesses, and acknowledge that it is usually ill-directed and ill-determined, but I do not think we are going to stamp it out. Especially not ye olde social media pile-on. I think online is real, obviously, but when you're an adult with a regular job, you really can just log off. It's not the same thing as a lynching.

So “mob justice” is too broad a term. It smuggles an analogy inside of what appears as definition. People who live most of their lives online (uhhhh) are very typically and frequently guilty of this specific analogy. (An “alt centrist” is a thing that only exists on the internet.) I don't want to say you have to touch grass but probably you have to touch something. One time in an interview Helen Dewitt described her own physical body as “something of indifference to me”. This condition is no better than the millions of people whose own minds, thoughts, emotions, and histories are clearly of indifference to them. It is also probably no worse.

The statue, which is called “Huck and Jim”, is made of silver chromium or else it only looks it. More probably it is made of plastic (no, it's stainless steel). Huck is bending down to look at something else. His hand makes a claw as if gathering. Jim stands beside and behind him. Jim stretches out his own hand as well. His hand hovers over the small of Huck's back, and barely an inch is between them. His palm is flat and open. Both of the men are naked.

Huck could touch Jim. But Jim cannot touch Huck and we all know it.

***

I didn’t get a picture of it. I don’t know why, I take pictures of everything else in museums. I feel like I might have had the sense that this statue was not for me. I also now cannot find a picture online of the steely burnished version that replicates or even calls to mind the feeling I had of looking at it. This picture of the white-cast version is the closest thing I found:

https://exhibitview.info/post/183596085991/charles-ray-huck-and-jim-2015-detail-the-art

To see the full statue, consult this picture of Jerry Saltz genuflecting before it.

Studio International has it in chrome.

***

It is easy for me to feel like Americans are poisoning the world by exporting their garbage culture. But then there is this! This astoundingly beautiful, well-formed and well-created statue.

In Raoul Peck’s “I am not your Negro”, in a voiceover, James Baldwin describes the intense spiritual malaise of white american people, the malaise that must arise from decades of ruling over other groups of people as your victims when you know in some way you’re all the same. I recognised this description immediately, for the same psychological malaise affected and still affects white south africans. And if white Australians or Canadians have been spared from it, if they have been spared, which I’m not sure, it is only due to having more fully eradicated or “bred away” or done such as that to the faces of their victims. Our victims. Obviously. Hm.

One (one!) always wants to shy away from it, to be made un-complicit in this history (and retreat to the higher register!). This is not possible. Inside that same body of the self is a yearning for a history, for a culture, which will never be stamped out. But people want to feel good about the history of themselves and their land, of, say, America — or they want to feel good about their part, their sub-group in it. There is no other explanation for the childish ways they behave. If I come from a bad place, from a bad set of activities, I must be bad. And yet the past is an obvious crime scene. Each of us comes from some thing not entirely good.

One time I was showing a friend a lovely picture I took of my grandmother laughing. He said “I can tell from this picture your grandma is a wonderful lady.” I started stammering like Yosemite Sam, “Well, I — she is but — I mean — but, I, well — she’s incredibly sexist and racist!” This seems uncharitable, but I don’t think it is. She has passed now, anyway, now that I tell this story in public. I notice how deeply I would be inclined to protect her otherwise.

She was not a violent or virulent racist, she was never consumed with hate. (Though she did once get very angry when I called Cecil Rhodes a bastard and my father, her golden child, agreed.) But the interior mental indolence that comes from assuming you will rule over others forever takes its toll. To live under apartheid and not resist it does something to you. It seeps into the walls. Your entire life is structured by it; it totally infects your worldview. My grandmother expected to live forever with such a childish ignorance that I think it was the direct result of white supremacy, which keeps white women particularly in the role of the perpetual child. It is unbelievably mentally damaging. There is no is-ought distinction that can be maintained in this set-up. Once you expect to rule, you think it's good.

And yet. White South Africans are the whites that other colonialists use to feel good about themselves. For those of us who come from it, from people who did not want to live under apartheid but lacked the stomach to volunteer themselves for state-sponsored death or life in prison, the preferred choice was to leave, to melt into some other body of settler colonialists in the kind of place where you didn’t have to think too hard about it, the kind of place where they’d already completed — more or less — the genocide.

I think it is right to try to leave a country you consider ethically repugnant, what else is this “I’m moving to Canada” stuff about from the American liberals (now’s the time), but surely it’s hard to fully feel good about it when the countries you are escaping to are only doing better — in the sense that they are not abusing, harassing and oppressing a large underclass — only because the vast majority of the original owners of the land have been already murdered. (And you can’t feel good about yourself for living in Europe either, in countries that enriched themselves off the back of this business.)

My whole life I thought it was strange to be a white African, until after being poked and prodded over this by one too many Australians I suddenly realised a white African is no more freakish than a white Australian, or a white American or Canadian. It is aggravating to witness how profoundly and entirely these other white folks think themselves above us (ha ha ha ha! wow imagine!). They seem to themselves not only more good, but more whole, more natural. They also think of themselves as wiser and more informed; preternaturally qualified to comment on white African racism even though they know nothing about it.

Or, as Liam once said, you should have to pass a test consisting of the single question “Who was Joe Slovo?” before you are permitted to comment on south africa.

The thing that is most fantastic about africa, or let me say Southern Africa the places I know most well, is what an abject failure the colonising project was there. To be in southern Africa is to be surrounded by the ruin and defeat of colonialism and apartheid. It is not that it does not carry the legacies — how could it not — but I am an Afro-optimist, because the cultures and the peoples there survived intact, more than intact, they are thriving by any definition, especially considering what their histories have been.

Who can say this is so in America, now? Especially now? And from this same root springs this sociological fact, that now a “white american” feels natural, instead of being abominable, a totally janky thing. I am not saying it is unnatural per se (what is natural may be abominable, janky); but think of how you think of a white south african. A white american is the same thing, from a legacy only more expert at slavery and genocide.

Who can say how or why this happened. But I often think about how, it seems to me, perhaps some part of the reason the white colonialists failed so comprehensively in southern africa -- compared to the US and Australia -- is because the bantu peoples got to the area first. They displaced and conquered the previous inhabitants, who even now live partly on reservations within bantu-run states; the bantu tribes, particularly the Zulu but not only, had powerful and advanced martial capacity, along with the brutality that this prowess typically requires (required?). And yet it is impossible not to read about the zulu and feel a little romantic towards them, in exactly the same way one does for the romans and greeks. (I had you in the first half, didn't I? Not gonna lie!)

The European settlers in south africa faced an organised military power with a recent experience of empire-building and conquest. I don’t know how widespread that was in the world. I only know a little of the history of our lands. Yet to me it seems that the Zulu, Matabele and Xhosa understood very well what would happen in the event that the whites were not resisted by force. Often I think of how white western fears around immigration are the subconscious buried echo of our guilt, knowing that when it was we, when it was us on the horizon, we indeed came with hostile intent. Our own awful attitudes to immigrants reflect the optimal attitude towards us: Don't stand around and treaty with us. Fetch the assegai.

***

Not everybody is like us. Jim only wants to touch Huck, not to kill him.

Of course white people are not the only large group of people to have generationally enriched themselves by the exploitation of others. We are merely the most prominent example. There are colonial histories other than that of europeans, there are exploitative structures of all kinds in this world, and generational thieves of all ethnicities; there are nilotic and cushitic people in the southern rift valley who think of the bantu as the british by another skin and name, to give one small example.

But not every group of people is like this, and not everyone in every group is like the group he comes from. People are far more varied, far more strange, than politics or averages. There will never be successful separatism either, for the simple reason that there is no essential separation across groups. We are bound up in this together, but only some of us know it, but not knowing it does not make it any less. People will always be curious about one another. No sooner does one erect a border or a boundary than one suddenly yearns to get across it.

When I was young my father used to sing “John Brown’s Body”. To this day I have no clue where he could have heard it. When I was in those Black Lives Matter protests, I often felt ashamed that I could not go to the front to clash with the police, in fear of losing my student visa status if I got arrested. One time I expressed that to my friend at one march, and two black girls next to us overheard me — one of them immediately linked up my arm and said to stay here with them where I was safe from deportation. Let us not be under any illusions that everyone everywhere would show other people such compassion (high bar) but still, this did really happen.

Yet the feverish white imagination gnaws at its own self constantly, wondering what its starving fear portends. Almost every white insult against black is a confession. Every white fear around black sexuality, much like every straight fear around gay sexuality, and every male fear around female sexuality, is the tip (just the tip) of such a ferocious iceberg that Freud himself would require several lifetimes to survey it. The most common set of white complaints about nonwhite people: That they are stupid and dishonest and lazy and oversexed and violent. The most common features of white supremacy: violence, rape, labour expropriation, deception, and a heartrendingly idiotic desire nay belief that the subjugated people think well of us and never want to hurt us.

The one that sticks out to me the most though is lazy. Nothing could be more lazy than a slaveowner lounging on the porch. And then expecting, when the jig is up, to be compensated by the state for the loss of this supreme indolent status — and then indeed receiving this compensation! The original vile rent-seeker, massa, and his wife, coddled and protected, living off the labour of others, a bloodsucking welfare queen.

Huck wants to get away from society, fair enough. Jim wants to get away from society, even more fair enough also. Yet Huck keeps wondering if he ought to turn Jim back in, a displaced, projected feeling of his own fears and critiques about himself.

We are no different to any other peoples in the storied history of conquest. And so although I have not read Huckelberry Finn I know a lot about it, in the same way that nobody adjacent to the mediterranean world in the year 190 BC would have been entirely ignorant of the founding legends of Athens and Rome, or could have helped but know the name of Jupiter or Zeus. In that same excellent museum, alongside Huck and Jim, you can find countless artworks depicting other histories of yearning and slaughter. There is nobody who is not touched by this. Why should we try to deny it? Who, anymore, wants to try?

***

I'll tell you who's been trying to deny it: The Whitney! So much for the woke echo chamber of the coastal museum elites! The freaking Whitney couldn't handle it, even back in 2015 when the whole world seemed to be woke (no?). It had to be rescued — like so much else in American life — by the Art Institute of Chicago. Jerry Saltz wrote this beautiful paean to this situation, and here's how it goes:

“For all its promise, the new Whitney Museum of American Art is and will be marked by an invisible original sin that can’t be lifted. That sin? An aesthetic one that perfectly mirrors America’s hysteria and mania around race, what D.H. Lawrence called the fear of our “old, hoary, monstrous … unspeakably terrible … and snow white … abstract end.”

After boldly commissioning eminent American artist Charles Ray to design a sculpture to be permanently installed on the public plaza outside the new museum, the Whitney blinked and declined Ray’s proposal. According to Calvin Tomkins, the museum feared the work would “offend non-museumgoing visitors.””

Well well well well well. Now who's the lily white snowflake.

I'm right, I'm very right, but being unfair. The truth is that just as nobody is truly threatened by ignorance in general — only the ignorance of others he has already decided are against him, or ignorance which assaults his projects or worldview in some way — nobody is immune from special pleading for their feelings. Everybody knows the way it feels to take offense. The explicit argument of the "anti-woke" bridgade is that it hurts "midwestern families'" or “ordinary Americans” feelings if they have to be reminded they’ve benefited from colonialism, that they come from, say it with me, a pack of settler-colonialists.

One time when we were at dinner — okay we were skiing in the Austrian alps just kill me — I don't even like skiing! I never went skiing again, is that better?? — some friends of our family accused me of having white guilt, I don't remember why. “Yeah, I do,” I said. “I'm just trying to raise the average at the table.”

Listen too much white guilt is not necessary, and nor is it even helpful; self-absorbed white progressive left-liberal martyrdom is cheap. Is martyrdom going to build a world where Jim can touch Huck if he wants to? No. Who is going to build a world where we can make real contact? Approximately nobody. The world is held together — you know I’m quoting Baldwin, this time from the interviews in Paris — truly held together by the love of very few people.

They were able to get it up in Florida. Huck and Jim in DeSantisLand.

Baldwin voiceover again: “The question you’ve got to ask yourself, the white population of this country has got to ask itself, North and South, because it’s one country, and for the Negro, there is no difference between the North and the South… it’s just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is American fact. If I’m not the n*gger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it’s able to ask that question.”

Apparently not, or not yet. Saltz diagnoses it expertly: “This is where the hysteria sets in.”

To attempt to repress the statue has certainly the feeling of castration. The statue would be acceptable if only the men were clothed, or their dicks were the same size, right? Over on Tablet, Jeremy Sigler, alias Jewfro, elaborated on it in this way:

“But the reason the Whitney sensed controversy certainly has nothing to do with Huck’s gesture, but with a part of Jim’s anatomy: namely his penis, which is sizable and compositionally a little too close to Huck’s vulnerable rear end. It is on the verge of innuendo yet somehow resists being read as a sexualized image.”

At first I disagreed with this — come on, like, look, it is obviously homoerotic — and it is! — but when I thought about it more I realised that Jewfro was right. (Humbling, as always, to be schooled in the arena of desire.) A thing can be erotic without being sexual, this is it. This statue is not about sexual desire: instead, it portrays a deep yearning. I think Jim is reaching out to Huck to verify for himself that Huck is yet human, that he is flesh and blood, and they are thus, undeniably, the same. The tension in the statue is held entirely in the fact that Jim cannot do this, he holds himself back, unable to confirm what he has already deduced.

In the book Huck eventually declines to turn Jim in because, he realises, “I knowed he was white inside.” Huck can know this because he has been able to probe Jim to his satisfaction; in saying white inside he means being human. It is my sense from looking at the sculpture that Jim would like to probe Huck also, and discover him to be black inside, in return. That’s all.

The body or whatever thing inside us that attempts to touch, that yearns for answers, goes on searching. And yet we can barely sense it, not even if we want to, or want to want to, lobotomised, sick as we are. If this is rapprochement, it is so only in the sense that would make us most uncomfortable — unless of course you're me, but maybe I just get to stand outside of it, for once. It's nice to not have to think about my own experiences. Man it’s good not to live in the hegemon. Sleep so easy not living in the hegemon. Sucks to be you guys, living in the hegemon. What you all do matters so much more.

They have to be naked. If they were clothed, the statue would be nothing. It is this open display, this bare attempt at contact, by which the statue suggests that there is still a hope, a chance of understanding. The distance, like all safety, is configured in the mind.

***

Alright, for posterity, here’s the screenshotted Saltz: