SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 61
SINE QUA NON
not classify this as a premature manifestation. It is perfectly timed and begins acting as a
benchmark to which the writer strives to be able to deal with; if it had never manifested so
early, I would not have developed life skills to eventually learn to deal with such a challenge.
Nearly ten years later, as I pen this essay alongside revising the unpublished manuscript of
“Mama’s Boy,” I am left reflecting on what transpired during that workshop.
The contradictory response—private praise for “major talent” alongside public discomfort
with the story’s “excess”—shows a tension that emerges when work challenges the established
boundaries of a form while remaining within it. I recognize that the submission disturbed
conventional frameworks of suspense aesthetics, especially when positioned alongside The
Silence of the Lambs, which forced a reckoning between disruption and comprehensibility.
Perhaps while the instructor saw “talent” and genuinely wanted to help, what he was trying
to attune was how to get me to accommodate my perspective within a rigid structure, not
always capable of allowing Blackness to roam free. When I applied all the notes, the story no
longer broke form or successfully made suspense squirm, as I had intended. The form broke
the story and forced something worse than the first draft into existence.
The problem, as I can see it now, was a craft problem—craft that I can recognize was
not a concern for me then. I believed a unique perspective on the world was enough to have
the world take up the work because it was so unique that it would become legible through its
uniqueness. Years later, I recognize that a unique perspective is not so unique. Many—though
not everyone—have them: artists, theorists, philosophers, engineers, scientists, technologists,
mathematicians, even animals. Those who can have their unique perspectives work in the
world and can work with the orders of the world to make that happen. It is not a matter of
conforming but of forcing a hallucination that convinces others that you have.
In reviewing Ralph Ellison’s craft mastery, I explained, through radial suspense, how
Blackness roams free, and it is the writer’s role to guide it through the pages as it roams, to
uphold, expand simultaneously, and fracture literary elements. That is difficult work––and
that work is the talent: how much and how deeply one has lived to understand what is
required to be heard. The relationship between craft and Blackness is one of accommodation,
where the writer must be able to recognize how deliberately complicated such a naturalistic
wielding of an unresolved energy and discourse can be—how it can warp forms that expect
resolution—and how to foreground one stake of Blackness from the infinite multitudes that
may, at any time, produce infinitely more stakes that illuminate the ones the author chose not
to foreground. It is an oscillating complication.
For the writer, a self-perpetuating tension emerges that is opaque yet compelling; when
mastered, it is opaque yet perceivably clarified. It is a two-headed story: one that speaks to
form and another to chaotic ether. It is, as Sam Gilliam says, “Just because it…resembles you,
doesn’t mean you [understand it].”46 That is the first head of the perceivably clarified portion
of Blackness: a global hallucination of comprehension, where one believes they “get” what
is being done. Even in writing this essay, one may notice that I elected not to call out the
infinite “stakes,” per se—for that would contradict my argument about the unpinnability of
Blackness. It would also do little more than repeat the work already done since Invisible Man’s
creation: the interpretation of the invisible portion of the character. That is, I take that if it
is invisible, it is not meant to be seen, which counters much interpretative work that tries to
cast light on a being who is already luminescent. So, while this essay explored what is being
46
Gilliam, “Abstract Art Is Political | Artist Sam Gilliam | Louisiana Channel,” YouTube video, 6:34.
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