Let’s consider joy: family reunions; images like the ones from Beyoncé’s Homecoming, with black college students looking and feeling free; house parties; spiritual spaces that, despite pageantry, encourage catharsis; novels echoing communal voices.
Emily Bernard embroiders her essay collection, Black Is The Body, with references to multiple sources of black culture — her parents’ connections to Fisk University and Meharry Medical College, two HBCUs that nourished her Nashville community; a visit to her grandmother’s church home; celebratory references to black literature (Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man) — to contemplate freedom, and the moments when surveillance reinforces violence.
Bernard suggests black joy is always complicated, marred by the possibility of external (and internal) surveillance and the specter of sudden violence. The collection’s most explicit violence occurs in 1994 as Bernard, then a Yale grad student, sits in a coffee shop surrounded by “the hum of low pleasant talk,” immersed and reaffirmed by Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Johnson’s novel offers a safe space, Bernard hints, that reminds her she can be subject, not object; the novel repositions her from a perspective of being acutely “aware of being the only black person present” to one where she feels empowered to observe, judge. But this power is disrupted by the reminder of her physical body: Bernard sees a man enter the coffee shop; moments later, he violently attacks and stabs her.
Other disruptions occur: as a professor at the University of Vermont, Bernard is aware of her blackness, and seeks connections with other people of color and well-meaning white people. But as she enters what she assumes are free, safe spaces, she is scrutinized, rejected, insulted, confused, or annoyed.
For instance, even when in black-centered spaces during visits to her family in the south, Bernard still experiences unease. She describes her family as living “a free life in the black world of North Nashville” away from the judgmental and sometimes punishing gaze of “the white world of South Nashville,” but within these spaces, Bernard encounters internal jostling for power and control, threats to freedom. Her father’s sternness, Bernard suggests, could represent his attempt to gain control after a lifetime of not being allowed to move freely — living in Nashville, during the era of Jim Crow, he was afraid to stop for gas and always drove “along known routes.” And Bernard sees a parallel between freedom and a certain lack of surveillance(“in North Nashville no one white was watching. We could relax. We were free”) with the recognitionher family has formed “a black community, in spite and because of racism.”Like Faulkner’s Quentin, Bernard claims she doesn’t really hate the south. One of the book’s loveliest descriptions is of Bernard falling asleep in Hazelhurst, Mississippi to “the song of a summer bird, a robin or a blue jay” with a song “as improbable as it is gentle and pure.” Still Bernard feels uncomfortably restrained in her grandmother’s church, and sometimes, among members of her family with whom she shares “the same genes and moods and history.” “Being at home,” Bernard writes, “does not necessarily mean being at peace.”
When Bernard journeys with her husband, who is white, to Ethiopia to adopt her daughters, the prose reminds us of possibilities, the “sky thick with all the blue left in the world,” for locating freedom. The pleasure Bernard takes in her daughters is transferred to their homeland. Bernard feels she is “in the middle of something, something bigger than myself … I am surprised and pleased when people speak to me in Amharic, the way I seem to blend in.” This longing for home, for calm and acceptance, isn’t unique to Bernard. Other women of African descent report a similar search for community — Journalist Natasha Tarpley describes Africa as “our greatest hope for salvation, for certainty that we belonged somewhere” – and writer and photographer Emily Raboteau relates how “Ethiopia had long been the shining star of the black continent” for blacks in the diaspora. Africa is where Bernard forges connections, even as she recognizes “my Americaness is all over me, beneath language, down to the way I laugh and move my hands.” So in Africa, Bernard may have found freedom, but it’s still a complicated space, one where she continues to be reminded of difference.
Bernard’s observations make me uncomfortable but they may be true. I attended HBCUs as an undergraduate, later, taught at two, and didn’t realize the rarity of breathing freely, of living and thinking in a space where you’re viewed as human and complex. You go somewhere that feels like home, places where you’ll make friends with other black people nerdier than you — but even these spaces risk intrusions and interruptions. Bernard’s prose tenses with all these ideas: our physical spaces reflecting our bodies’ potential for movement, to be seen but not studied, to live and breathe with ease.Our bodies become raced because of our environments, or really, the people within them, and Bernard asks us to consider the contradictory, crisscrossing ideas we carry. For example, it’s unsettling to see her daughters’ eyes “radiate with wonder as they [weave] their brown hands” through a friend’s blonde hair, but encouraging to learn that both Bernard and her friend understand “the tangled relationship between race and beauty,” and that one daughter, Giulia, still enjoys her own natural hair. That all of these emotions can exist within the same space is a testament to Bernard’s ability as a writer. Her prose takes on and meets the challenge of blending her narrative’s emotional and intellectual resonances:
“It is in here and out there, my racial identity; it is something I have both lived and learned.
My racial sense of self is made of rage and faith, pain and joy; it’s a sensory cocktail I remember experiencing every time I heard my church aunts and uncles tell their tales — black tales — about how they made it over and broke through. By black, I mean black, not African American; I was born in the same era in which my father was reborn, in the wake of civil rights and the first stirrings of Black Power, and all of their attendant pageants of glorious struggle and triumph. It goes deep, beyond the skin, the organic racial romance that informs everything I do, and everything I write. I am black — and brown, too; Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell.”
Bernard also discusses being observed in mostly white spaces and the pressure people may feel to be perfect within them. In today’s political climate, our movements are watched, monitored, tracked. And if surveillance serves as a precursor to violence, then people from minority groups may feel an additional need to represent, to convey images of respectability, financial security, or “wholesomeness” — and being well-dressed becomes representation as a form of protection. A Muslim student tells Bernard, “I always hold the door open … because I might be the only Muslim that person has ever seen.” Bernard also describes her own beauty rituals, her attempt “to cultivate a respectable racial self” that she realizes is “always, like it or not, engaged in act of representation.”
Bernard’s introduction reinforces how she has always viewed the attack on her “as a metaphor for the violent encounter that has generally characterized American race relations.” What I wondered about: Bernard was one of seven people attacked, and she acknowledges she “was not stabbed because she was black.” If so, then what becomes most symbolic, the attack or its aftermath? Of those attacked, the most serious wounds were suffered by Bernard and a white man. She details how her attacker “obviously … and salaciously” focused on young women –which makes it interesting that Bernard is the only woman to sustain life-threatening injuries. Did the assailant view Bernard’s body, the only black body in the space, as an intrusion, as part of a space where it “didn’t belong”?
The attack on Bernard occurs when she’s relaxed (“I took off my glasses and my watch. No distractions, just me and the page, as naked as I allow myself to get in public”), reading and writing. Will Bernard ever again remove her glasses in public? (Not likely.) And after the attack, when Bernard enjoys a macabre moment of humor with the EMT who saves her, is the moment genuine — or is she laughing to avoid feeling vulnerable? (Probably.) The attack seems to make her more aware of being vulnerable, as does the confusing way she was treated afterwards: kindly, by a white couple, strangers(?), who visit her in the hospital — and callously by a white doctor who refuses to speak to her while thrusting his fingers into her wound.
One of the strangest moments in Their Eyes Were Watching God, the novel Bernard mentions most frequently, occurs when the protagonist, Janie, sees a photograph and is unable to recognize herself, see “dat dark chile as me.” Throughout this collection, we see Bernard being stared at but we also encounter her own scopophilia, her own form of staring back, as she witnesses herself and others.
[Published February 1, 2019 by Alfred A Knopf, 223 pages, $25.95 hardcover]