SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 59
SINE QUA NON
the world. For Ellison, the ‘ginger-colored’ character is what Jackson terms an “animal
man,”42 where the black figure is seen only as animals occupying the human form that is not
necessarily non-human but an otherwise version. Ellison writes:
substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids…[that] might even…possess a
mind. [It] is invisible… simply because people refuse to see [it]...Like the bodiless
heads you see sometimes in circus shows, it is as though I have been surrounded
by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me, they see only my
surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination–– indeed, everything
and anything except me.43
The blackened person’s physical, enfleshed existence emerges as a nullified being,
where the physical presence of a blackened person is a question of rather than a literal nonexistence—an absence constructed by and within the physical anti-black world, one which
Ellison sets up.
Accordingly, “...the blackness of my invisibility” spotlights a call toward the announced
second character. Ellison notably does not use ‘my blackness.’ He uses ‘the blackness.’ Such
a decision between ‘my’ and ‘the’ removes ownership of Blackness, relieving it as a leashable
thing one can own, often reduced to an exterior or ownable and claimable condition. But
Blackness is formless, of which everything is inside, making it beyond the physical. It can
conceal its specific units of measurement or legibility because it is unruled or the principle,
which determines how and whether it can be read in step with the contemporary discourses
that evoke and commune with it.
His physical and spectral manifestations coexist and collapse into a singular paradox from
which his being emerges. This relationship operates as mutual inscription: invisibility marks
blackness while Blackness imprints onto invisibility. These conditions share characteristics yet
remain distinct—they orbit each other in endless recursion without a stable center, deriving
meaning from this mutual haunting. The phrase "blackness of my invisibility" transcends
possession. It maps how blackness permeates and transforms the narrator's ontological status.
It charts the unbounded ways blackness shapes being while resisting formal definition. The
sentence structure performs its philosophical content: it enacts perpetual evasion of formal
capture, demonstrating through form what it articulates through content.
Invisibility becomes a landscape. The text maps it as a plane where Blackness inscribes
itself. This spatiality rejects invisibility as absence. The void transforms into canvas. Negation
births creation. The narrator illuminates "the blackness of my invisibility." He attempts
reconciliation. He strives to make these twin forces legible. Yet "and vice versa" shatters linear
clarity. Illumination and obscurity collapse into each other. Seeing becomes unseeing. The
text resists capture like hieroglyphic flesh. Language performs this resistance. "The" replaces
"my" before blackness. This grammatical shift externalizes Blackness beyond personal bounds.
It becomes a collective force. It exceeds individual containment.
Blackness radiates outward while pulling inward. This disaggregated relationship
fractures traditional ontology. Identity can no longer anchor itself in individual experience.
Ellison's "the blackness" describes a force exceeding form while transforming forms that
try to hold it. "The invisibility of the blackness" marks where Blackness encounters erasure.
43
Ellison, Invisible Man,3
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