Fences: The tenses of generation and gender

  August Wilson’s screenplay of Fences, based on his stage play by the same name, is cinematic but not in terms of spatial expansiveness.

Often when a play is translated to screen the story’s texture and tone expands and intensifies with the camera’s roving attention to and multiplication of location: topography, industry, ecology, street life, farms. Under Denzel Washington’s direction, however, this version of Fences remains constricted to the backyard, where the literal fence is being built, or to other small segments of Troy (D. Washington) and Rose’s (Viola Davis) house, thereby signaling other sorts of fences. Rolling my memory back through the film, I can recall only a few scenes outside of the house.

   There are the street scenes: children playing outside as Troy and Jim (Stephen Henderson) amble home from work, jawing about this and that; Rose hurrying down to the church with cakes for a bake sale; and Cory (Jovan Adepo) pausing before a Marine recruitment office. Other than those, one brief scene takes place in a hallway where Troy waits to talk to a union rep, one at the church, and a more strained and lingering scene unfolds in a dark, nearly empty bar. (I’m bracketing Gabriel’s (Mykelti Williamson) street scenes because those, too, are filmed almost claustrophobically as if to index how Gabriel is fenced in by his mental illness, even when he is in wide open spaces).

The fenced-in spaces do not render the film static, however. The camera twists and paces within these tight spaces like the repetitive, desperate walk of caged tigers. Yes, the characters move; they sit and walk and stand; they yell and joke and swing and cry. But their bodies don’t suggest agency or practice; rather, the roiling camerawork tracks their emotions, the frantic pacing of their affects.

I was reminded, as I watched, of Elizabeth Povinelli’s comments on tense, and of Orrin Pilkey’s comments on enigmatic shoreline currents. Pilkey is an ocean geologist who has tried and failed to understand what happens to ocean currents as they come to land. Deep ocean currents have been mapped and studied successfully, but the chaos at the shoreline remains elusive. When rolling water meets its limit in land, the predictable patterns shift to a constantly emerging order that cannot be grasped by established scientific methods.

In Economies of Abandonment Povinelli contrasts the incommensurate grammars of time (tense) assumed by the Australian settler colonial government and by her Aboriginal kin and friends. She writes, “the social divisions of tense help shape how social belonging, abandonment, and endurance are enunciated and experienced within late liberalism” (p. 11). “Thus,” she continues, “how various narratives of belonging, abandonment, and endurance are socially enunciated and experienced depends in part on the ways that the relationship between the time of narration and the event narrated, or, put in another way, the event of narration and the narrated event, is grammatically marked” (p. 12).

In legal battles over land and mining claims in Australia, for instance, the contrast between an assumed past (mountains are Not-Life) and an assumed emergence (mountains are Dreaming sites that require ongoing attention and care) shapes legal judgments but hinders substantive understanding between the two tense-users. On a more domestic level, Povinelli argues that “intimate events” are also “performative tense projects”, encounters that map the desire, granting and foreclosure of affirmation, agency, and inheritance. Tense, that is the use of, orientation toward, and assumptions about when events [will] occur[red] grids the possibility of interrelational and intergenerational recognition.

  And so: The generational and gender relations in Fences, brilliantly acted and beautifully filmed, indicate ever emerging orders of incommensurate tenses that shape the heartache of being African American in the 1950s…and before…and after.

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Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble

   The two aspects I most appreciate about Donna Haraway’s 2016 Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke UP) are her commitment to a unique form of scholarly writing and her commitment to a practice of partiality.

For scholars used to reading ‘theory’, Staying with the Trouble might jar the ear and eye. Haraway argues, shows pictures and tells stories through neologisms and repetitions, and with a casual prose cadence that superficially belies her deep and broad grasp of ecological, feminist, anthropological, and philosophical bibliographies. She tends to start a chapter or line of thought with a term—a slogan or a neologism—and then to spin out from this term with a set of stories, artistic practices, and theoretical interventions. She doesn’t quite term her process “SF” (though she should), but she points to SF as a “ubiquitous figure” in her book. SF, she says, stands for “string figures, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fact, and science fiction.” SF is “a method of tracing”, “the actual thing, pattern, and assembly that solicits response” and it is “practice and process; it is becoming-with each other in surprising relays” (3).

For instance, while Haraway doesn’t dispute the usefulness of the designation Anthropocene, she crafts the term Chthulucene (from chthonic = earth and kainos = now) (2) as a way of deflecting scholarly and activist focus from humans (anthropos) to humus, that is, the soily muddy earth continually produced by the death, rotting, and breaking down of living matter. Over and again, Haraway notes that she is not posthuman but “compost hummus”, and that instead of limping along with the Humanities, we should be crafting Humusities. We are, she insists, always immersed in sympoesis, a sensory materialism of multi-species becoming.

What Haraway intuits and responds to through this form of writing is the ways in which bodily habits are reified and replicated by linguistic habits, so that we need new words and new linguistic patterning (or pattering) to scrape off the reified encrustations and open the cognitive and physical channels for different affective and practical engagements with the world.

Haraway’s slide from human to hummus situates her ethics firmly in matter and in the partial connections of material entities (instead of universals or principles situated meta-physically) (13). Hers is an ethics and politics born of what she terms “finite flourishing” (10). It is a feminist practice of finding and creating “big-enough stories in the netbag for staying with the trouble” (54). Like Melanie Klein’s “good-enough mother”, these big-enough stories do not function like phallic superheroes but as string figures that connect partial entities and remind those of us partially connected by these figures to keep our focus low and long. Through her multiple SF’s Haraway gives us ways of feeling-with, becoming-with, loving and living and thinking-with all that is threatened and dying or dead in our world–but in ways that do not sink us into mourning but give us good-enough tools for conjugating our mourning with our loving and joyful being-with the world.

I wish to end with an extended quotation from Haraway:

“The details matter. …Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise. Such exercise enhances collective thinking and movement in complexity. Each time I trace a tangle and add a few threads that at first seemed whimsical but turned out to be essential to the fabric, I get a bit straighter that staying with the trouble of complex worlding is the name of the game ove living and dying well together on terra, in Terrapolis. We are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, and sometimes joyful histories too, but we are not all response-able in the same ways. The differences matter—in ecologies, economies, species, lives.” (29)