What struck me most while (finally) reading Ta-Nahesi Coates's personal essay was his emphasis on the body. Racism and slavery was about control of the body. In my hoped-for book/doctoral project, I am also focused on the body as the true locus of human rights, but as one of the mythically "white" people reading the book I became aware that I do not really know this in my body. My only similar experience around this feeling of threat to the body has been as a woman; it arises in situations where you feel inescapably categorized and, in some contexts, utterly invalidated.
Security of the body has been the issue for black people and also for women, but for the former it has been more profound and arbitrary. When he saw his young son nudged off an escalator by a white woman stranger, Coates's anger, justified, arose because of a physical act, an assault on the child's body. Migrants on the border or on Manus Island near Australia suffer in camps that are prisons. Habeas corpus; a power has their bodies and controls their freedom of movement.
Transcending the body happened for Coates at Howard, in a university where he felt safe enough to learn about and challenge our flawed human situation. But transcendence is not disembodiment. As a librarian, I love that his body ended up in the library, where he claims to have felt in the best place for his style of learning. Rather than hear a lecture, he could just explore and devour the knowledge. The building and the books were protected physically, and maybe that helped strengthen his sense of a secure body as well as his body of knowledge. I am exploring how a book, a codex, a text, is like a human body: complex, related to and sharing other textual bodies, and strong even if not premanent.
Bodies die; books burn; libraries crumble; digital objects disappear. However, some part of the knowledge survives into another person or text. We can imprint each other. Perhaps that reaching out to press the inked stamp on a newer or broader group of our fellow humans lessens the gap, however slightly, between the world and us.
Security of the body has been the issue for black people and also for women, but for the former it has been more profound and arbitrary. When he saw his young son nudged off an escalator by a white woman stranger, Coates's anger, justified, arose because of a physical act, an assault on the child's body. Migrants on the border or on Manus Island near Australia suffer in camps that are prisons. Habeas corpus; a power has their bodies and controls their freedom of movement.
Transcending the body happened for Coates at Howard, in a university where he felt safe enough to learn about and challenge our flawed human situation. But transcendence is not disembodiment. As a librarian, I love that his body ended up in the library, where he claims to have felt in the best place for his style of learning. Rather than hear a lecture, he could just explore and devour the knowledge. The building and the books were protected physically, and maybe that helped strengthen his sense of a secure body as well as his body of knowledge. I am exploring how a book, a codex, a text, is like a human body: complex, related to and sharing other textual bodies, and strong even if not premanent.
Bodies die; books burn; libraries crumble; digital objects disappear. However, some part of the knowledge survives into another person or text. We can imprint each other. Perhaps that reaching out to press the inked stamp on a newer or broader group of our fellow humans lessens the gap, however slightly, between the world and us.
