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Racial Violence and Representation

Louis Armstrong: I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You

The 1932 Paramount film ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You’ starts by showing the cartoon characters Betty Boop, Bimbo and Koko moving through the jungle (Fleisher 1932).[1] This happy scene is disturbed when, all of a sudden, they are surrounded by a gigantic amount of identical looking black men. These men are scantily clad, with only some leaves around the pubic area, and decorated with bands around their ankles and wrists, and rings in their ears and noses. Furthermore, they are holding a knife and fork. There is no room for doubt: these men are depicted as cannibalistic savages. After kidnapping Betty Boop, they make sexual advances towards her, while dancing rhythmically around her, accompanied by drum music. Meanwhile, Bimbo and Koko narrowly escape death by cannibalism. The happy end consists of Bimbo and Koko managing to free Betty Boop, and their pursuing assailants getting killed by a volcanic eruption.

As if this showy racism isn’t enough already, the savages are also in a fairly direct sense equated with the musicians accompanying the animation, namely black icon Louis Armstrong and his orchestra. This is, for example, done by morphing the floating animated head of one of the savages chasing Bimbo and Koko smoothly into the filmed head of a singing Armstrong, which is changed back to the savage again before the chase ends. In this way, not only the stereotypical African savage, but by extension the entire American black community is portrayed as a homogeneous, primitive group; sexually dangerous to white women and physically dangerous to white men.

How can this painfully racist film be of value in contemporary times? One opportunity this combination of image and sound plausibly offers, is being useful as a means to rehabilitate the resistive sides of the painful history of black subjugation. The importance of this is stressed by Fred Moten (2003) in his book ‘In the Break’. Interestingly, Moten empasizes the role of sound as a medium of resistance. How can the music provided by Armstrong and his orchestra be deployed as a way to reconfigure this blatantly racist short as a testament that proves that black persons treated as objects ‘can and do resist’ (Moten 2003, 1)?

 Armstrong and the orchestra most likely weren’t in a possition to influence the scandalous way they and black people in general were portrayed in the film. Still, they had some freedom of movement in the domain of sound. Indeed, the song they play, in which the suggestive title ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You’ is repeated over and over again, is ‘a formula for offering resistance to white authority, cloaking insult with flattery’ (Raeburn 2013-2014, 65). This became clear to Armstrong a year earlier in Memphis. After he and his band were detained by the police for being on a bus that was ‘too nice’ for them, he had to do a free performance in return for their release. During this performance, he dedicated this particular song to the police who had imprisoned him on racist grounds. Much to the band’s surprise, this dangerous move did not lead to white violence; instead, the police responded positively to the dedication. White Americans did not recognise the insult; however, many African-Americans who heard the performance over the radio did (Raeburn 2013-2014, 63-65). With Paramount, Armstrong repeated this subversive tactic, reaching an even larger audience.

This way, it’s possible to reconfigure the film as a testament of resistance. Nevertheless, the question could be raised to what extent this view would overly glorify Armstrong’s role. Eventhough he was able to express a subversive message, the question remains if his participation didn’t contribute to the legitimation of the racism of the film, and if this possible negative contribution doesn’t outway the positive subversive side. Wouldn’t it be better if he hadn’t participated at all? On the other hand, it could be said that he was forced to comply with the violent white culture in some way, since his career and life as an artist were at least partly dependent of a white dominated industry.

In conclusion, Paramount’s ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You’ can be reconfigured as a testament of black resistance, relying on the subversive music accompanying the racist pictures. This case is even more interesting as it simultaneously highlights the difficulties in constituting such testaments. It points to the nasty way a oppressive white world forces suppressed black people towards the difficult path of negotiation between, and combination of, compliance and subversion.

Mees Wolffs

References

Fleischer, Dave. 1932. I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You. Fleischer Studios.

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Raeburn, Bruce Boyd. 2013-2014.  ““I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead”: Louis Armstrong’s Smack Down with White Authority and his First Films, 1930-1932.” Southern Quarterly 51(1-2): 58-72.

Webpage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPpOJvm6998.

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPpOJvm6998.

Categories
Racial Violence and Representation

Kansas Joe & Memphis Minnie: When the Levee Breaks

American poet Fred Moten (2003) argues that contrary to Marx’s famous claim, the commodity can speak (6). Black slaves are not silent objects merely defined through their subjectification. Rather, slaves are objects that resist; people who are their own subject. A resistance developed from mere sounds, into speech and eventually whole songs (Moten 2003, 22). Songs are more powerful in conveying the horrifies of slavery than whole volumes of written texts are (Douglass 2009, 40). After the abolishment of slavery in the U.S., music remained a way through which black Americans expressed their pain and worries. However, in this short essay, I will argue that despite the powerful potential of this music there arose a new form of objectification, namely black music being appropriated by white capitalists. A way through which the black suffering itself is now objectified by white artists and turned into a for them profitable commodity.

An example of such a song expressing black suffering is the recording of When the Levee Breaks (1929) by the Black American blues duo Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie. Their lyrics are about the great Mississippi flood of 1927 that ruined many homes, farms, and lives in the delta areas. Residents of the delta were mostly black people still living and working on the former slave-driven plantations. After the flood, these people had no house or job which led to many black Americans being coerced back into slavery to rebuild the white-owned farms (Simba 2017). The song has a typical blues AAB scheme through which McCoy’s voice expresses the fear of losing everything when the levee breaks.

If it keeps on rainin’ levee’s goin’ to break
If it keeps on rainin’ levee’s goin’ to break
And the water gonna come in, we’ll have no place to stay
(Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie 1929)

Although the lyrics clearly express black misery and worry, this pain does not necessarily come forward within the music. McCoy sings in quite a plain descriptive voice, while the melody and rhythm are almost cheerful except for the occasional melodramatic blue note.

It could be argued that 40 years later, the American band Led Zeppelin did a better job in expressing the worry and pain of the Great Mississippi flood through their recording of When the Levee Breaks (1971). They made a 7-minute-long recording in which the music was slowed down and dragged making the song more dramatic. The fear of the levee breaking can be heard in the way these lyrics are sung and the central, heavily played, drumline intensifies the feeling of fear and pain even more. However, this pain was historically felt by Black Americans and originally put in a lyric by Black musicians, but now performed by a British white band. By doing this, Led Zeppelin appropriated a black tradition that is not theirs. Secondly, they released this song and so turned the song into a for them profitable commodity. However, they did not properly credit the original artist causing that they did not benefit from this profit. Therefore, I argue that by releasing their song, Led Zeppelin objectified Black suffering and turned their pain, through music, into a profitable commodity. Thus, following Moten, Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie did express their subjectivity through music, but at the same time, this expression itself got objectified by being turned into a white-dominated commodity.

Vera de Wit

Reference List

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Kansas Joe & Memphis Minnie. When the Levee Breaks. 1929. Columbia Records.

Led Zeppelin. “When the Levee Breaks.” Track 8 on Led Zeppelin IV. 1971. Atlantic Recording Corporation.

Moten, Fred. “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream.” In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, 1-24. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Simba, Malik. “The Mississippi River Great Flood of 1927”. Blackpast. September 18, 2017. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/mississippi-river-great-flood-1927/

Categories
Gendered Violence

Throbbing Gristle: Convincing People

Over a steadily plodding synth bassline and kick drum punctuated by intermittent guitar fuzz, a chant begins:

There’s never a way
And there’s never a day
To convince people
You can play their game
You can say their name
But won’t convince people

The vocals are delayed, creating a hypnotic call and response over the electronics in the background. The chanted message contradicts itself:

There’s several ways
And there’s several days
To convince people

This is the initial tension of Throbbing Gristle’s Convincing People. At first, there was no way, no time, to convince people—now suddenly there is. I want to use the convoluted concept of convincing found in Convincing People as a starting place to consider the origins and mystification of structural violences found in neoliberalism.

Now you’re people
And we’re people
We’ve gotta be
To convince people
It’s the name of the game
It’s the game of the name
Convincing people

In the song, the act of convincing people is explicitly described in three ways: as an impossibility (“there’s never a way”), as something attainable through multiple possibilities (“there’s several ways”), and as a larger phenomenon (“the name of the game”). By the end of the song, we never learn about any of the “several” ways to convince people; we actually hear about a way that you’ll never convince people (by telling people what to be convinced of), but for the most part, the means of convincing are fundamentally ambiguous: it’s not what is seems, or is it? So maybe the song is nonsense, and it doesn’t have a properly argumentative claim regarding convincing people—but still, the song’s hypnotic instrumental and its droning vocals work to convince the listener of something, producing a mood which vacillates between the trivial and sinister.

As Francoise Vergès observes, neoliberal capitalism arrives enters into communion with popular feminisms by “coopting” universalist forms of the latter, and ignoring “combat based” feminisms.[1] She writes, “[d]riven by market logics, the structural adjustment programs imposed by international institutions on the Global South had devastating consequences, particularly for working-class racialized women and for Indigenous peoples.”[2] This is essentially a description of structural violence, which aptly exemplifies the aforementioned “vacillation” of convincing people: here the banal intricacies of financial and political policy generate the sinister in the form of immediate and long term consequences for racialized people. At perhaps the smallest level, “market logics”—inherently ones of persuasion—have convinced state and corporate actors to compile, revise, and enact policy. The same market logics lead to the economically-touted notion of consumers as rational actors, while knowing that rationality is subject to persuasion. Policy legitimizes and abstracts violence, it convinces while simultaneously condemning the act of convincing. Outwardly, there’s never a way to convince people, but in fact there are several ways: for neoliberalism, convincing people is the name of the game.

Likewise, neoliberalism is the game of the name. Practices of nomenclature, identification, and subjectivation work to legitimize its regime, while discrediting anything that is not named. Do you believe in a better alternative? Name it—how else could anyone be convinced to take you seriously? No one wants to buy an unnamed product. Against convincing, perhaps we can thwart its regime by denying subjectification, desubjectivizing ourselves, always refusing to be convinced.

Like the song convincing people, the neoliberal machine covers its own tracks, mystifying the banality of policymaking as a completely rational one, in spite of its violence. As Vergès identifies, it sacrifices blameable “violent men” as bad apples to remain structurally intact, to “generate abominable violence.”[3] We don’t want to convince people…

Pat LeGates

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[1]     Françoise Vergès, A Feminist Theory of Violence: A Decolonial Perspective, trans. Melissa Thackway (London: Pluto Press, 2022), 5.
[2]     Vergès, 6
[3]     Vergès, 8

Categories
Gendered Violence

2Pac: Brenda’s Got a Baby

Violence against women is not an isolated, nor a universally homogenous phenomenon. It should be seen as a pluralistic and complex form of violence that is inextricably linked to other forms of violence, as Vergès and Gago convincingly show in recent texts. This means that it is incorrect to depict gender-based marginalization, assault, and even murder as caused by the inhumane actions of some deplorable bad men (Gago 2020, 63). Instead, underlying economic and racist structures, among others, should be given due attention (Vergès 2022, 13-14; Gago 2020, 74). Vergès for instance points out that sexual harassment in the workplace is linked to racially motivated underpayment (Vergès 2022, 23), and Gago claims the increase in domestic violence is partly causes by deteriorating conditions of the traditional male breadwinner (Gago 2020, 59). As a result, it is also incorrect to talk about ‘the’ oppression and mistreatment of women. Indeed, the complex intersectionality ensures that oppression takes specific forms, whereby simplistic universalistic claims should be rejected and replaced by an approach that starts from particular situations (Gago 2020, 57).

Although both Vergès and Gago use concrete examples to support their more general theoretical claims, neither zooms in on an individual life to explore how gender-based violence can manifest itself  over time. Focussing on a personal story allows the requested specificity to be met, and gives the opportunity to examine how different forms of violence interact. Music is evidently a powerful medium for telling such a personal story. Hence, a song that focuses on the story of a woman’s life ravaged by violence can plausibly contribute to Vergès’s and Gago’s texts.

‘Brenda’s got a baby’ by 2Pac (1991) is suitable for offering such a view on the overarching problem of violence against women through a personal lens. In this song, the listener is told about the story of a 12-year-old girl from an American ghetto. Central to this story is the event from which the song takes its name: a teenage pregnancy. 2Pac doesn’t present this as an isolated drama, but places it in broader contexts. He tells about the way various forms of violence have followed each other in the life of the girl. This includes her wretched home situation. Her father is a ‘junkie’, her mother is almost like a stranger to her, and both of the parents don’t care about their daughter beyond her capability to bring in money. The video accompanying the song shows that this mistreatment should not be seen as separated from the relationship she enters into with her cousin. While the parents argue, Brenda looks lovingly at her boyfriend; supposedly her refuge for safety and affection. However, this seemingly (much) older lover turns out to be a molester, who furthermore abandons her during her pregnancy. To make things worse, Brenda is barred from her parents’ house after giving birth, as she is no longer economically profitable to the family. Left alone with the baby, she decides to sell drugs, but soon turns to prostitution after being robbed. In the following confrontational words, 2Pac ends the song, the prostitution, and Brenda’s horrible life: ‘Prostitute found slain, and Brenda’s her name. She’s got a baby.’

2Pac not only cogently connects the successive forms of violence Brenda faces, but is furthermore not blind to the economic and racist structures that underpin this cycle of violence. As shown, economic precarity is assigned a major role: not only does it lead Brenda’s parents to neglect their child, but it also causes Brenda to feel compelled to sell drugs and to prostitute herself. In addition, it is clear that this is all linked to racist structures. Indeed, as shown in the music video, the ghetto in which Brenda grows up contains only black people. Significantly, white people only enter the video when Brenda’s life has already come to an end, as police officers come to autopsy the corpse. Finally, 2Pac is not only concerned with the economical marginalization of the racialized inhabitants of the segregated ghetto, as the song’s opening words demonstrate: ‘I hear Brenda’s got a baby, but Brenda’s barely got a brain. A damn shame, the girl can hardly spell her name.’ Educational means seem to be severely lacking as well.

Thus, with this personal story, 2Pac provides a powerful realization of the emphasis on specificity and intersectionality of violence against women that Vergès and Gago would call for some 30 years later. Nevertheless, it would be unwarranted to blindly follow 2Pac’s depiction of the situation. For example, the question could be asked if a severe lack of educational means is the proper interpretation, or that 2Pac is merely dismissing Brenda’s intelligence. Or both? Brenda’s own side of the story would be helpful, or even required. In general, this points to the fact that not only the particularity and the structural background of violence on women should be taken in account, but also that multiple perspectives are needed.

With this particularistic, structuralistic, and multi-perspectivalistic view in mind, there’s also a chance to think about appropriate kinds of action to be taken. For example, it would be would be insufficient to blame and prosecute Brenda’s parents and boyfriend. Instead, for the particular forms of violence women face, the structures that give rise to it should be laid out in a joint effort, and should subsequently be attacked. Obviously, exactly what structures are to be attacked depends on the case. For Brenda’s case, this undoubtedly means that a war should be started against the racist US ghettos as a manifestation of structural marginalization.

Mees Wolffs

References

Gago, Veronica. 2020. Feminist International: How to Change Everything, translated by Liz Mason-Deese. London: Verso Books.

Vergès, Francoise. 2020. A Feminist Theory of Violence; A Decolonial Perspective, translated by Melissa Thackway. London: Pluto Press.

Categories
Gendered Violence

Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Clutters

Is there a war on women’s bodies? It is this question that drives Verónica Gago’s (2020) analysis on sexist violence. Gago poses that we should see the endless escalation of violence against women not as a private conflict that happens only in the household, but rather as a total war on the female body that pervades every layer of society. Doing so allows us to see gendered violence as a systemic and structural problem, intentionally (re)produced by the patriarchal hegemony, while also showcasing the localised form violence takes on each particular body (Gago 2020, 59-61). As such, this leads Gago to the conclusion that the battle of violence against women starts and ends by breaking free from the heteronormative hegemony of today’s society. How, then, is this process initiated? Where does it start? In what follows, I will explore the answers to these questions as found in the works of Gago and singer-songwriter Fiona Apple.

Adopting Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement that one is not born but rather becomes a woman, Verónica Gago argues that “becoming-woman alerts us to a theft” (2020, 79). Becoming-woman essentially entails to conform to the heteronormative meaning of the word. As such, society takes possession of the female body “in order to produce a two-part, binary organism, thus making us into a body that is not our own” (Ibid.). However, she claims, becoming contains revolutionary potential. Instead, the Nietzschean notion of ‘becoming who you are’ is the first step to freeing oneself from the dominant – and indeed, violent – hegemony (Gago 2020, 80). It is this sentiment in particular that is taken up in Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020).

Reminiscing about several different situations, Apple tells the story of breaking free from one’s metaphorical prison. One of these is an unhealthy, abusive, and asymmetrical relationship that Apple is afraid to end – “I know what you can do, and I don’t want a war with you” (Ibid.). Throughout the song, Apple realises that this relationship holds her back emotionally and personally and proclaims – ushered in by the clashing of a cymbal, while the melody intensifies – to “fetch the bolt cutters, whatever happens, whatever happens” (Ibid.).

While the music dwindles again, Apple tells us about her experience with sexism in the music industry: “While I’d not yet found my bearings, those it-girls hit the ground. Comparing the way I was, to the way she was. Saying I’m not stylish enough and I cry too much.” (Apple, 2020). While writing from and about an entirely different context, Apple echoes an important point made by Gago: the system will make use of whichever (violent) means necessary to discipline women in conforming to the heteronormative mould, to “becoming-woman” (Gago 2020, 79). This point is emphasised when Apple tells us that she “grew up in the shoes they told me I could fill”, but that these were “shoes that were not made for running up that hill.” (Apple, 2020). Yet, she declares: “I need to run up that hill.” (Ibid.). Powerfully expressed through a sudden polyphonic explosion, Apple affirms her mission of self-realisation. She tells us: “I will, I will, I will, I will, I will.” (Ibid.). Consequently, with a final clang of the cymbals, she professes to ‘become who she is’ and “Fetch the bolt cutters, whatever happens, whatever happens” (Ibid.).

An important remark must be made here. The Nietzschean ‘becoming who you are’ is accomplished individually. It is a process in which the ‘I’ simultaneously realises and creates itself by taking ultimate responsibility for who one is (Look 2001, 9). This self, having been shrouded and corrupted by outside influence, is uncovered. For Apple, however, this self-realisation must always work in tandem with the ‘other’. Throughout Fetch the Bolt Cutters she emphasises the role of ‘them’ in her finding of the ‘I’. Particularly the line “I thought being blacklisted would be grist for the mill. Until I realized I’m still here” showcases the paradoxical nature of being outside of discourse. Becoming who you are cannot be about isolating oneself. For Apple, self-realisation must always happen in relation to, as well as in conjunction with the other.

There is a war on women’s bodies. How do we fight it? Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters and Verónica Gago’s Feminist International offer similar answers to this question. In particular, both argue that self-realisation is the first step in the battle against systemic sexism. Rather than becoming-women conform the heteronormative system, women must become who they are. They must fetch the bolt cutters and cut themselves loose. Of course, this is not an easy process. The war on women and their bodies is not easily ended, and the way to peace is far from close. Yet, these analyses offer two relatively hopeful accounts of the cessation of this war, in which disruption and subversion through self-realisation are key for the transformation of the system.

Giovanni Prins

References

Apple, Fiona. 2020. “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” Track 3 on Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Epic Records.

Gago, Verónica. 2020. Feminist International: How to Change Everything. Translated by Liz Mason-Deese. London: Verso.

Look, Brandon. 2001. “Becoming Who One Is” in Spinoza and Nietzsche.” Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 50: 327-338.

Categories
Gendered Violence

Nirvana: Rape Me

The members of Nirvana, from their humble beginnings to their rise to stardom, always fought for the rights of marginalized and underprivileged groups. And the song Rape Me is no exception. While the song has a catchy “rock” structure, with a buildup in the verse and an explosive chorus, this only adds to the very uncomfortable message conveyed in the lyrics, reeling us in with the music, but then making us listen to some quite unpleasant lines.

The first lines of the song are:

Rape me
Rape me, my friend
Rape me
Rape me, again

These lyrics, while being pretty straightforward, still manage to convey what could be going on inside the mind of a rape victim. The already uncomfortable request of being raped assumes even darker tones when it’s directed towards a so called “friend”, someone whom the narrator should be able to trust. Furthermore, such a request elicits various questions in the listeners: Why would anyone ask for this? Is the singer mocking me and comparing me to a rapist?  To make it even worse, the narrator then states <<Rape me, again>>, implying that the sexual violence perpetrated has happened multiple times. Like in a gruesome car accident, we almost can’t look away from this bleak depiction; we are forced to come to terms with the violent and unsightly reality of rape. Then, to drive the point home, the chorus comes in with a single, repeated line:

I’m not the only one

The statement here is that rape is not a rare and isolated phenomenon, but is instead widespread and many people suffer from it. The singer also includes some variation in the following verses, with lines such as <<Hate me>> and <<Waste me>>, hinting at the problematic behaviours that usually surround sexual violence. While the song does a good job at describing the victim’s side in a case of sexual violence, it’s not clear whether the band considers rape as just the act of an individual or a symptom of a larger, systemic problem.

The latter option is instead exactly what Francoise Vergès, in A Feminist Theory of Violence; A Decolonial Perspective, and Veronica Gago, in Feminist International: How to Change Everything, propose. Both of these authors believe that violence against women (and other groups) is not simply the result of the independent action of violent individuals, but is instead systemic, denoting a relationship between economic exploitation, racism, and sexual violence.

Vergès showcases how these different forms of violence and inequality go hand in hand with the example of a strike from McDonalds workers in 2018, which was started by Black women, advocating for better salaries and a safer, harassment free, work environment. Gago, instead, tries to go directly to the common roots of capitalism and patriarchy, for example, proposing the idea of <<The implosion of violence in homes as an effect of the crisis of the figure of the male breadwinner>>, postulating that <<The collapse of the wage as an objective measure of male authority>> led to an increase in domestic violence.

The relationships that connect racism, capitalism, and patriarchal structures are still object of debate today. The bounds of each one of them tends to blend in with the others in a kind of blur, so that giving a clear definition results tricky, to say the least. So, the least we can do, is try to empathize with the victims of violence, by putting ourselves in their shoes.

Edoardo Chen

Bibliography

Vergès, Francoise. 2020. A Feminist Theory of Violence; A Decolonial Perspective, translated by Melissa Thackway. Pluto Press.
Gago, Veronica. 2020. Feminist International: How to Change Everything, translated by Liz Mason-Deese. Verso.
Nirvana. 1993. “Rape Me”, track 4 on “In Utero”. Geffen Records.

Categories
Gendered Violence

Angèle: Balance ton Quoi

In francophone countries, the #MeToo-movement expressed itself using the hashtag #BalanceTonPorc, which can loosely be translated as “denounce your pig”, where pig stands for the perpetrators of sexual abuse and aggression against women. With Balance ton Quoi, Angèle places herself at the centre of this discussion.

Balance ton quoi both captures and exposes double standards within the #MeToo-debate. Firstly, the song starts with the observation that “they all speak like animals, pottymouthing all the pussies”1. By maintaining that men speak like animals about pussies, Angèle shows how the objectified percep- tion of women (i.e. the reduction of women to chattes, i.e. pussies) differs from the perception of men (who merely act like animals). This difference in perception is an example of a broader class of divisive structures that Vergès identifies in our social world, a class of structures that produce a “division between a humanity considered entitled to protection and those (almost by nature) excluded from it.” (Vergès 2022).

That men are the ones deemed worthy of protection produces an issue that can be retraced in Balance ton Quoi, namely, the excessive emphasis on and concern about the aesthetics of the political debate that often absolves men from the obligation of engaging with the actual content of the debate. From a theoretical standpoint, this can be understood in terms of Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible, the political constellation of what is sayable and unsayable, of who is worthy of speaking and of being heard, seen, and being taken seriously. (Rancière 2004). Indeed, Angèle explicitly states that she will not be invited to speak on radio stations, because her words are not very nice, and, moreover, states that she will remain polite on television, implying that the opportunity to speak on the issue hinges on the very choice of her words.2. Evidently, however, the real problem at hand is not the way in which the issue is raised, but the issue itself. The emphasis on form over content which derives from the differential perception of men as subjects to be protected, however, reinforces their position within the already existing patriarchal structure.

There are also other, more implicit manners in which this double standard, this skewed distribution of the sensible, is brought to light in Balance ton Quoi. Firstly, the song has myriad instances of deliberate self-censorship: the replacement of the word “porc” for the word “quoi” (i.e. what) throughout the song, and the decision to never finish the sentence “to go fuck oneself ”3. Additionally, this can also be seen in the stylistic choices in the song: melodically, the song sounds girly, light-hearted, and at times even happy. Angèle sings with a highly pitched voice presenting herself in a non-threatening, innocent, almost infantile, “traditional” feminine manner. The intention seems clear, however: by embracing the role relegated to women within the distribution of the sensible, as being worthy of speaking and of being heard only when presenting themselves in such a non-threatening manner, Angèle (re)aestheticises the demands of the #BalanceTonPorc-protesters by establishing herself as an interlocutor worthy of being heard.

While this recentring of the political debate on the content instead of the form is certainly useful, there is, however, room for criticism. Angèle’s method of transposing a “traditional” notion of feminity onto the #BalanceTonPorc-discussion excludes victims of sexual violence that do not and/or cannot be embedded within this prescribed notion of feminity, like black, working class women, who are not traditionally seen as non-threatening or girly, but rather as e.g. aggressive. We argue with Vèrges that any “conversation about women’s protection from systemic violence cannot adopt a binary female victim/male perpetrator approach”(Vergès 2022), because such an approach is blind to the axes of race and class. In excluding these axes from consideration, one remains within the logic of racial and class domination, and therefore, ultimately, preserves a system of dominance centred around them.

Stephan Loor

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1 In French: Ils parlent tous comme des animaux, de toutes les chattes ça parle mal
2 In French: Ouais je passerai pas à la radio, parce que mes mots sont pas très beaux. (…) Ouais je serai polie pour la télé.
3 In French: aller te faire en-hmmmm.

Categories
Gendered Violence

Nirvana: Rape Me

I’m not the only one
– Kurt Cobain (Nirvana 1993)

When you first listen to the song Rape Me of the Grunge band Nirvana, it may sound like a song that normalizes rape, rather than a weapon to fight the war on women. The first lyrics of the song exemplify this:

Rape me
Rape me, my friend
Rape me
Rape me again

But as the frontman of the band Kurt Cobain pointed out many times: it is actually an anti-rape song. Cobain was frustrated that their listeners did not understand that their previous song Polly was also an anti-rape song. It was about the actual event of a 14-year-old girl being kidnapped, tortured, and raped. Combined with Cobain’s aversion to the media and his dissatisfaction of his listeners, he wrote Rape Me. For me, this song not only stresses the epidemic and systematic nature of violence against women, but also the ambiguous power of the victim to be submitting and mocking to the rapist.

At the beginning of the song we hear the catchy four-chord guitar riffs that reminds us of Smells Like Teen Spirit. Then we hear Cobain singing quite casually ‘rape me’, with variations like hate me’ and ‘waste me’. Combined with the link between rape and violent behaviour, the song creates a beautiful yet haunting aesthetic. With the repeated sentence ‘I’m not the only one’, Cobain reminds us that rape is not a rare phenomenon, it is widespread problem which many people in our society suffer from, or as the sociologist Verónica Gago would put it: there is a war on women’s bodies (2020). In the chapter ‘Violence: Is there a War on and against Women’s Bodies?’ Gago argues that there is an ongoing conflict against women, because of the escalation of deaths and rapes of women, lesbians, and feminized bodies (2020, 56). Why does Gago speak of a ‘war’, instead of a problem? Describing it as a problem would make the issue more neutral and dismissive, rather than admitting the nature of the conflict. Sexual violence is not just the result of individual actions, but the complex relationship between the patriarchy, capitalism, and male dominion. Therefore, sexual violence is not a problem of the private sphere, but rather a war that is an attack on the female body (Gago 2022, 59). Moreover, the political scientist Françoise Vergès indicates rape as a weapon of the state (2022). In the chapter ‘Neoliberal violence’ Vergès states that rape ‘has always been a weapon of war (and of colonial war in particular); there is no colonization, no imperialist occupation without rape.’ (Vergès 2022, 23). Gender-based and sexual violence is used to destroy communities; rape-victims often feel excessive shame and rejection (Vergès 2022, 26).

But where Gago and Vergès argue that sexual violence against women and feminized bodies is a larger war-like conflict reproduced by the patriarchal hegemony, Nirvana’s Rape Me points out the paradoxical position of the victim. In an interview Cobain states: ‘’It’s like she’s saying, ‘Rape me, go ahead, rape me, beat me. You’ll never kill me. I’ll survive this and I’m gonna fucking rape you one of these days and you won’t even know it.’’’ In other words, Cobain tries to give the narrator a defiant yet powerful position. The rape-victim paradoxically enough gives consent to being raped. On the one hand, this can be understood as taunting and deceiving. This is true for the story behind Polly, where the victim managed to escape by acting defeated in order to led the rapist’s guard down. On the other hand, it could also be a cry of helplessness. This tension reaches its climax at the end when Cobain painfully screeches ‘rape me’ over and over again to create and ambiance of eruption. These abrasive vocals express the power of the victim to mock the rapist, but at the same time the realization of capitulation.

Thus, while Gago and Vergès provide us with a theoretical framework to see rape as a weapon used in a war fought against women, Nirvana’s Rape Me expresses through the art of music the ambiguity of the victim’s power and helplessness.

Brenno Mulder

References

Gago, Verónica. ‘Violence: Is there a War on and against Women’s Bodies?’ In Feminist International: How to Change Everything. Translated by Liz Mason-Deese, 56-83. London/New Tork: Verso.

Nirvana. ‘Rape Me.’ Track 2 on In Utero. Geffen Records, 1993.

Vergès, Francoise. 2022. ‘Neoliberal Violence.’ In A Feminist Theory of Violence, 10-34. London: Pluto.

Categories
Border Violence

Dave: Three Rivers

The album cover shows a small boat at sea, a symbol of migration which is the central theme of the album with very personal insights into Dave’s family history as migrants. (notably his own mother’s testimony of migration at the end of the song Heart Attack). In this melancholic song, the young rapper from south London tells three different stories of migration and the struggle migrants face when trying to settle in the UK.

The first verse tells the story of the windrush generation, a generation of Caribbean people that were “drafted to England” (Dave, 2021) with the promise of citizenship and better life conditions. However, these people suffered from the latter change in immigration laws and many suffered and died from being unlawfully deported as they could not prove their status. (Williams, 2020) The Jamaican community, especially in London, is a main actor and influence in British culture, (Dabydeen, 2010). Dave highlights said influence by referencing the Notting Hill Carnival, one of the world’s biggest street carnivals. Dave also names a list of English footballers from the national team, who are children of migrants of the Caribbean, to put emphasis on the way the United Kingdom profited in many ways from migration.

The interlude then follows with a sample from a news report about the false promise of the British government to those migrants and a moving testimony from someone who lived in the UK since they were 10 years old, paid taxes for 37 years but are still deemed to be illegally here.

The second verse is about a migrant family from Eastern Europe in the 1990’s with description of violence that can point towards the Balkans War. Contrary to the first verse which depicted the origin country of migrants as paradisiac, the image painted here is much more gruesome with ‘dictators and leaders persecuting your people’ and ‘Bodies of the innocent pilling’.  This is a reminder that people who are risking their lives on dinghies and under cargo trucks are not doing so out of spite or as a scheme of undermining a country’s identity but because they are “escaping from war, conflicts, violence and injustices” (Cesare, p50, 2020). The end of the verse explains how through difficult times this migrant drinks to cope which causes him to be violent towards his family and become a reflection of what he was seeking to escape. This is an interesting point about various forms of violence that occurs with migration and how the hardship and violence inflicted upon migrants can cause wounds that will be the root of more violence: a form of transgenerational trauma (Phipps & al.2014) .

The final verse is about migration from the Middle East. It sheds light firstly on the duality of western governments when it comes to migration. “Your oppressor is your liberator” (Dave, 2021) is an antithesis referencing the multiple interventions for freedom and peace causing constant war and violence in the region. The same governments that profit from the demise of ‘third world’ nations, through weapon sales, natural resources exploitation and “an economy of dispossession” (Walia,p.29, 2021), are also the governments building walls to protect themselves from the migration of people leaving the chaos.

There is also further exploitation of the migrants that compose an important part of the workforce of many western countries while still often being less considered than other nationals. This is beautifully expressed by Dave: “We rely on migration more than ever before, they’re key workers but they could not even get in the door”. Key workers are the workers in the UK that had to keep working during the Covid pandemics, many of which came from migration. (Fernandez-Reino, 2020)

Finally in the outro, Daniel Kaluuya talks about identity and racism, as a famous Academy-Award winning actor, British-born of Ugandan parents. He explains then rather than defining himself against the tide, which “still makes it about them, still makes it against the poison that you’ve internalised”, he “Switched rivers” which is to say he changed his perception of what being black or from a migrant family means, and conceived it as an “asset”.

The overall song with melancholic piano and various samples from news reports and testimony creates a touching and emotional atmosphere which can help the listener connect with the stories on a deeper level, through empathy. The common feature of the three stories is that they depict the human reality of migration and forces us to face it. It deconstructs the various preconceived ideas about migration to draw a complex image of violence in migration.

Julien Djenidi

Bibliography

David Dabydeen, 2010, “Notting Hill Carnival”, Centre for Caribbean Studies, University of Warwick
Di Cesare, Donatella. 2020. “Migrants and the State.” In Resident Foreigners: A Philosophy of Migration, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Phipps, R.M. and Degges-White, S. 2014, A New Look at Transgenerational Trauma Transmission: Second-Generation Latino Immigrant Youth. Journal of Multicultural Counselling and Development, 42: 174-187
Mariña Fernández-Reino, Madeleine Sumption, Carlos Vargas-Silva, From low-skilled to key workers: the implications of emergencies for immigration policy, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 36, Issue Supplement_1, 2020, Pages S382–S396
Wallia, Harsha. 2021. “Fortress Europe.” In Border & Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Categories
Gendered Violence

Charlotte Adigéry, Bolis Pupul: It Hit Me

For the theme of gender violence, I intend to analyse and explore Veronica Gago’s “Violence: Is There a War on and against Women’s Bodies?” (2020) through a live performance by Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul. I will be speculating about the musicians’ experiences, but I neither have the lived experience of their pasts, nor the lived experience of making and performing their songs. Hence, the following will be speculative and explorative. It is not about them but about an interpretation of their performance that makes possible an engagement with Gago, specifically her reflections on war and traversing fear.

The song I have chosen is Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul’s ’It Hit Me’ (2022) played live. Hence, this contribution constitutes part of a mixtape, but at the same time I ask the reader to use their imagination and hear the song as a live performance. To aid the reader in this, I will provide some context. The themes of the song, roughly, revolve around (trans)gendered violence. The live setting of the specific performance I am referring to is the OFF Festival (2022) in Katowice, Poland. Poland is currently a place of regressive politics, with anti-women’s and anti-LGBTQ legislation being rolled in many parts of the country. This to the extent that some have even created an Atlas of Hate to map out the policies of hate that are being enacted throughout Poland (“Atlas Nienawiści (Atlas of Hate)” n.d.). It is not hard to imagine one feeling fear, when going on stage in Poland to perform a live set about the themes mentioned earlier. Fortunately, Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul were met with an attentive, listening audience, full of movement and responsiveness.

The song has two verses that each tell stories of intimately detailed pasts. These pasts are made manifest to the audience in the chorus with a pounding kick drum and them singing ‘It hit me’, a powerful, performative version of realizing that they have been violated. In the moment of the chorus, Gago’s notion of war is declared, understood as a move that makes violence visible (Gago 2020, 80). Furthermore, Gago states that this way of declaring war means ”taking on an array of forces […] finding another way of living in our bodies.” (Gago 2020, 80). Their performance could be seen as a vital instantiation of this ‘taking on’. To name a few examples, ‘forces’ could here be both the audience, the context that the audience experiences the performance in, the performers’ own lived experience and various recombinations of these. Hence, the declaration of war is clearly not only something that happens on the personal, but in this case also on the community level. In that sense, the audience could be seen as embodying the role of compañeras (Gago 2020, 67), as those who actually help you out, as opposed to the transphobic and misogynist Polish authorities. The process of naming ‘war’ thus happens along an axis of performer-audience, situated between the stories of the verses and the intensity of the choruses. The performance calls attention to and makes violence visible through the ‘it hit me’ of the chorus, while founding itself on the familiarity of lived experience.

This emancipatory act of familiarization could help disarm the fear, as Gago might put it (Gago 2020, 83), of playing and listening to music that centres on themes being violated by the country they play out in. To Gago, one way forward is to “traverse” and “coexist with” fear (Gago 2020, 83). A live performance of a song is a traversal in a very physical (through sound waves extending themselves across distance, enveloping the ear membranes they touch) and historical way (through the multiple becomings told by the embodied lyrics). At the same time, “It Hit Me” never claims that ‘everything will be alright’. It ends with a distorted, intense beat, and a sampled catcall. It does not eliminate but rather co-exists with fear.

By shouting ‘It Hit Me’, Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul carve out a space in an Atlas of Hate. They enable multiple ways of co-existing with, moving bodies along to and traversing ‘fear’, potentially taking away the fear’s pacifying power. The live performance of ‘It Hit Me’ also asks us as listeners how we might approach and engage with live concerts as a type of social practice that makes violence visible.

Lukas Hjulmann Seidler