Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

4. The Occupied Territory: Homosexuality and History in Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts

172 4 The Occupied Territory Homosexuality and History in Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts You are not to touch other flesh without a police permit. You have no privacy— the State wants to seize your bed and sleep with you . . . You are not to touch yourself or be familiar with ecstasy. The erogenous zones are not demilitarized. —Essex Hemphill, “The Occupied Territories”1 T H E C A RTO G R A PH I C M E TA PH O R S of zones, territories, and borders seem apt for examining representations of sexuality in the writing of Black Power and Black Arts Movement intellectuals during the Sixties. In the works of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Eldridge Cleaver, and others—as for Frantz Fanon, at least in the early work Black Skin, White Masks—black sexuality is a terrain dominated by the history of enemy maneuvers, its capacities and limits delineated by the uses to which it has been put to serve white supremacy. The writers of the Black Power/Black Arts Movements identified sexuality as one of the primary means by which black subjugation was achieved and concomitantly as one of the primary arenas in which black liberation was to be won. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., endows the occupied territory with a topography when he reads Jones’s early work and concludes that “[a] mid the racial battlefield, a line is drawn, but it is drawn on the shifting sands of sexuality.”2 The Occupied Territory 173 This line is drawn with an astonishing number of references to the figure of the homosexual, which, once evoked, is almost invariably ridiculed and castigated. The profusion of homophobic rhetoric in the works— Gates considers it an “almost obsessive motif”—has drawn attention from critics such as Lee Edelman, Phillip Harper, Dwight McBride, Robert Reid-Pharr, Marlon Ross, and Michele Wallace.3 Generally these analyses work to identify the sexist, homophobic biases of the authors and the complicity of their arguments with the very forces they ostensibly oppose , and to read against the grain of the writers’ attempts to demonize homosexuality, revealing instead the deeply intertwined, mutually constitutive relationship between racial and sexual identities in African American and American culture. I want especially to engage Edelman and Ross at this juncture, since their analyses of the homophobic rhetoric of Black Arts/Black Power thinkers provides a foundation for my investigation of how Baraka and Cleaver represent the power of taking pleasure in abject blackness. Edelman demonstrates how literary representations of blackness frequently attempt to manage the challenging fact that racialization is accomplished through subjugation by containing or marginalizing threats of penetration to black male figures in the texts. Edelman’s discussion of the overlap between homophobia and African American masculinist anticastration rhetoric—he uses Morrison’s chain-gang scene as an example —pegs “internalization” as the threatening specter both for homophobic black nationalists and antihomophobic nationalists: the peril of racist domination is that the dominated black person internalizes a white or foreign ideology or belief or practice, thus compromising his claim to authentic blackness; for Edelman double-consciousness presents a dilemma wherein blackness is constituted by its compromise, by its constant oscillating struggle with the “foreign,” with the occupying power that calls blackness its Other. Blackness is thus in its primary dimension—its very creation—penetrated or penetrable, and Edelman sees the recognition of this dilemma and the fear of its perpetuation metaphorically figured in the writings of Eldridge Cleaver et al. as the fear of being penetrated in homosexual sex—the compromised black male body being entered through a hole, invaginating the phallic invasions of its conqueror and enslaver who appears in the guise of a dominant lover, and thus becoming acquiescent to or, more disturbingly, desirous of what, given historical legacy, always threatens to be an essentially compromised (and thus defeated, even abject ) black male identity. Thus, in Edelman’s view, for Cleaver and Baraka 174 The Occupied Territory white racism equals castration (or emasculation) equals homosexuality; white racists castrate black Others while homosexuals castrate themselves. In this vein homosexuality as intellectual or representative figure is both too passive and too active: its activity as threat lies in its involvement, its engagement, its struggling consent, to the “abjectifying denial of . . . ‘masculinity .’” Edelman sees penetrability fears and the difficulties of maintaining the boundary between activity (racial and political resistance) and passivity (racial and political surrender) being distributed in the...