A review by ralowe
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

5.0

the tension around representation comes up here. narration for whom? what is redundant in a narrative drawn from intimate knowing of lived experience? or is consciousness forever vexingly unattainable because something cannot be both known and told simultaneously? something is always cloyingly unreal in the telling of black lives, there is always doubt, even when something has been lived through, it eternally defies narration as the narrator and the narrated fall under suspicion. memory exists in excess of the accountable, the recountable. words fail douglass: "It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it." what exhausts me with sadness is witnessing douglass toil in the frame of humanity, attempting to reconcile the black and the white in some design of common sociality, emblazoned "america." i want to ask who really wrote this? what blackness must be is lessened under terror for its own survival. he's puzzling how the slavemaster can serve the same god as the slave: how's about some fucking decency? i totally feel him on that. i mean you could totally just not kidnap, enslave and fuck with people. am i right? but, the mechanisms of white supremacy are so fundamental to modernity that, as blackness living in amerikkka knows, it far outlives the supposed formal institutional disappearance of chattel slavery. i'm reading this book for the first time, although i have a very fly frederick douglass t-shirt and have been obsessed with the dilemma for the radical imagination around representation/surveillance, bad faith and blackness. does self-possession with and against traumatic memory challenge the status of representational art/politics as either productive or refuge? there's an irresistible anecdote about the white-on-black image of frederick douglass on the t-shirt i have, where the person who gave it to me assumed that "he was some white guy;" the classic image looks like something on dollar bills, plus the white ink on black fabric doesn't help. but this isn't really what i want to say when i talk about (mis)representation. more like the ineffable terror of enslavement reduced to sentimentality. but sentimentality gets a bum rap, for all the passages of seemingly dissembling florid high gothic reverie: it's "master's tools" spread eagle for the discerning appraisal of who? the "covey brawl" chapter would contradict this summation. but are not these inspiring scenes of the very most equivocal significance for the despairing oppressed black as much as the relieved well-intentioned liberal? enslaved humanity is a structural impossibility, cruelty is only quantifiable in the reflection of analogy to a legitimate subject, not in itself: you can't be cruel to an object, you can only be cruel to an object. i couldn't stop thinking of this aporia, especially during the would-be inspirational scenes. saidiya hartman proved this very well in scenes of subjection. that structural ambivalence has always been maddening to me. douglass calls attention to this in the last chapter, where saying too much becomes akin to doing too much. i wonder if this whole narrative is a document to some future removed humanity to whom moral appeals might be successfully made, perhaps living in a context with no comparable oppressive structure, an impartial audience. it feels redundant to whoever would hold stake existing in a slaveholding society. this beautifully rendered record mystifies me. when is the proper time and place for an "Upperground Railroad?"