SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 60
This erasure amplifies beyond the narrator's physical vanishing. It maps how systems deny
Blackness legibility while depending on it as a foundation. Blackness persists as unspeakable
yet structural. This invisibility becomes Blackness's voice. Absence transforms into presence.
The unseen radiates influence. Blackness articulates itself through resistance to articulation.
It haunts frameworks that try to deny it. Ellison's "of" constructions weave a double helix.
Physical existence and immaterial Blackness spiral together. Neither claims dominance.
Neither submits to complete separation. Blackness encompasses and exceeds interior and
exterior bounds. To say, I call this a type of Dilated Realism, where realism or conventional
form stretches under Blackness's irresolution and ontological pressure that maintains form by
threatening to exceed it at every moment.
By examining Ellison’s treatment of light and darkness, I reinforce the argument that
‘the blackness’ is luminescent. Attempts to incorporate light into an already ‘illuminated’
category (traditional aesthetic regime) will short-circuit that regime or ‘blow its fuse’ because
the two are incompatible.
Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware
of one’s form is to live a death. I…did not become alive until I discovered by
invisibility…It allows me to feel my vital aliveness.… The truth is that light and
light is the truth.44
Blackness is light. Jackson ventures the question of Blackness being explored as void through
visual art, arguing that specific artworks aim to transform perceived voids of Blackness,
despite the many politico-aesthetic challenges people have put on the representations that
portray blackness as absence or lack.45 Jackson pinpoints “crushed black” in art, a technique
that explains how underexposure in photographs or photographic development creates
shadowed areas lacking detail within this image. In connection to the visual politics of
blackness, the underexposure and invisibility of Blackness points to an unknowability and
low-axiology of blackness. It suggests it is ‘invisible and formless’ without light or a source.
Ellison explores blackness as invisibility and void. He reveals it as a force of illumination. As
applied to Ellison’s Invisible Man, the logic for this conclusion is that illumination need not
be technically luminescent but energetically propelling, often able to shift the focal point
from technical structure to an amorphous character that always eludes capture. Even when
present, it is non-apparent. The difficulty of crafting suspense with blackness is the nonappearance of a highly energized, non-visible blinding node.
Revision and Reflection on Suspensecraft
After my 2018 workshop experience, I put “Mama’s Boy” aside. I said that I would
“return” to the story when I could “handle it” because—admittedly—that experience, and
the story, was more than I could handle at the time. You see, one can conceive a thing and
not know how to manage it once it materializes. It is no longer within you; it has come
through you and is now of the world. The writer’s task, then, is a test of how one deals with
the world––and, for me, I was not as adept at dealing with the world as I am now. I would
Ellison, Invisible Man, 7
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, “Black Light: On the Origin and Materiality of the Image,” TOPIA: Canadian Journal
of Cultural Studies 46 (April 2023): 134–48, https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2022-0044.
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