Marginalized Artists and the Performance of Personhood
on the commodification of trauma and the "duty" of the minority artist
I have learned recently that crisis is a great time to be oppressed and artistic. More so, the audience is more willing to glance at the oppressed and artistic at times in which the performers are in danger. I get requests, but I do not often take them. In this time of perpetual political strife, I have had friends ask me to soundtrack the moment to their liking, to provide the keynote speech to my own subjugation, to be a brown band-aid pasted over the growing black hole. Hungry some people are for my black gay thoughts on the rise of conservatism and casual anti-blackness, the evolution of homophobic rhetoric, ICE raids targeting Haitians, or the rise of bigotry in young men. All these events are inches close to my home. Still, my articulation is demanded. It is a great time to be oppressed and artistic because we look best when we are barely holding ourselves together. We, as oppressed artists, are valued by how much we can educate, all the foreign experiences we can impart on a reader. I have a friend that calls everything I have ever written “insightful”. He is not Black, not gay, not from America originally. My words are steps into a universe he does not know but wishes to understand. I want to explore, though, what use the art has for me, what use art in general has for the marginalized artists that do not learn from their own filled canvases. Where are we on our own pages? What is expected from marginalized artists, and do these expectations hinder the creation of art itself?
I thought I was a writer, but I guess I am a teacher. I have dreams of being an author, which means I am working towards my name in listicles. (Here are 10 books you can read to understand the African-American Experience! 5 Queer Poets to Read Now!) With each pen stroke, I hear the questions: What is it like to be Black? What does that mean to you? What should that mean to us? I am to appease the voyeurism dressed up as curiosity, the emotionally lazy hoping to read their way into radicalism. Minoritized artists become explainers of empathy and tour guides of their own cultures. With each extended metaphor we are supposed to convince another audience member that we are people and should be seen as such. My words are maps of interracial interaction; minority artists are obliged to draw up peace treaties between the oppressor and the oppressed. Carrying the burden of constant education is daunting. Worse, it is not just any of our stories that causes the effect of empathetic education. Blood is our own sign of life; we scream so they know we are there. We must translate our lives into the language of suffering. Only as good as the tears on our cheeks, only poignant if we let ourselves look like we were just saved from the noose. Ocean Vuong puts it best in his poem Not Even:
“...everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns to gold.”
The same of course applies to Black pain, queer pain, disabled, women, immigrant pain. I said we were at our most beautiful when we are barely holding ourselves together; that was wrong. We look best when we allow ourselves to be cut open and dissected. The issue is not just that we are expected to showcase our pain for the oppressive gaze; it is that this performance of pain is equated to our overall personhood, our value as human beings. We become ego inflators, dark decorations on reading lists, dogs saved from the pound with eyes still glistening and mouths still whimpering. We act as real estate agents touring and selling our identities back to the consumerist systems that perpetuate their oppression: Look under the bed and around the corner of Blackness; go up the stairs and into the closet of queerness!
Due to the fact that this performance of pain and personhood is such a well-worn avenue, the very audience we are supposed to impress grows tired of our offerings. Before I penned my most recent article, I asked a new friend of mine what I should write about. I presented him the four options I was having trouble choosing between: my parents, pride, Palestine, and protests. “Write about your parents,” he said, “the other ones are overdone.” I swallowed my response and followed his advice fearing that otherwise I would be perceived as endlessly offended and perpetually dissatisfied. However, I found it interesting how he took my options to be thesis statements instead of broad topics, as if an article about pride starts and ends at a parade. It was as if there is only one way to be queer, and one way to talk about it, that has already been used up. My exploration of queerness, then, would not be a unique personal documentation of my journey towards self-acceptance, it would be a redundant waste of words. There was no way that I could say something unique or useful about the gargantuan topic of Palestinian liberation, especially as someone who lives in the American imperialist project today. It was impossible that I could provide a subversive perspective on protests even though my rights were fought for using them. But those implications are natural when marginalized artists are viewed not as creators, but as teachers and when art is viewed not as an experience, but as something to consume. No one wants to hear the same lesson twice.
As expected, this expectation is not extended to artists part of the national majority. Those artists are not reduced to vast identities or told their subjects are redundant. Giovanni’s Room, for instance, is not just about queerness, but many would say such. It is about internalized homophobia, codependency, and insecure performances of masculinity. To reduce a piece of literature to a singular vast identity would be like me stating that Pride and Prejudice is merely a tale of heterosexuality. Every story by a Black author becomes a Black story (of which there can only be a few), whilst novels by white authors get to be novels about the human experience (of which there is never enough). We have Black books, queer novels, immigrant poetry, and disabled literature but never blonde books, hetersexual prose, able-bodied novellas. Those are simply books, prose, and novellas. Writers of the majority get to be complex and useless—speak of one specific facet of being human, not one entire specific identity, and only if they so please. Their identities are rendered invisible. Minority writers (and the work they produce), on the other hand, are reduced down to entire vague identities that no singular work can scratch the complete surface of. They are expected to completely and fully represent their communities with each letter they pen. The idea is that their communities are monolithic enough to make such a feat possible. The fact of creating oppressed art by sheer proxy of one’s identity creates a conundrum within the oppressed artist. They either play into the hands of the systems that keep them suppressed by discussing their trauma and seeming saved, or they turn away from discussing aspects of their identity that do in fact impact their lives and are worthy of discussion, degrading the quality of their work and suppressing them once again in a different fashion through silence. Hughes touches on the latter aspect of this experience in the first paragraph of his work The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain:
One of the most promising of the young Negro poets said to me once, “I want to be a poet—not a Negro poet,” meaning, I believe, “I want to write like a white poet”; meaning subconsciously, “I would like to be a white poet”; meaning behind that, “I would like to be white.”(1) And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.
What is so interesting about this mode of consuming art is that the experience is diluted in the process. We are so hungry for art that we suck the art out of itself, like vampires thirsty for the lifeforce of creation. We reduce essays and paintings and novels to didactic talking points far less artistic than the very art we sought out in the first place. Negro Poetry, for instance, does not even become Negro Poetry in certain hands—but instead Negro Arguments, Negro Claims, Negro Lessons. That is not to say that artists do not write with intention that should be analyzed, just that art is equally what was said and how it was said. Both should be discussed. Sometimes, when people finish reading something I wrote, they say they “loved the message” or that the “themes were impactful.” I wish to respond: “You liked the message. Thank you. But did you like the sentence? Did any metaphors get stuck in your bone marrow, any phrasing unique enough for you to remember and save for later? Did I have any impact? I am not a good writer just because you find me agreeable.” With other forms of media, the same issue occurs. We intake art created by marginalized people and we forget that they are artists. We stare at the subject of the painting, commenting on its placement in the portrait, without mentioning how each painstaking brushstroke was intentional. As if studying Van Gogh and never uttering the word "impressionalism". It is not artistic to think something and be correct, less artistic to say something that others agree with. Marginalized artists deserve to be analyzed and appreciated in their entirety, from implicit arguments to form and artistic choices. To act as if we are only the messages we provide is to play a part in our reduction as artists. We truly become teachers, tour guides, and real estate agents: necessary and commendable but not necessarily artistic.
Here is typically the part in the essay where I provide a call to action, how I would want each reader to progress after reading the final word. However, it would feel contradictory to the entire point of this article if I were to teach a reader how to behave, as if I am a college lecturer instead of an artist in a Google Document. I will say that I believe this issue extends to how minorities are treated holistically. While it is still contentious whether or not art imitates life, it is certain that artists imitate all. In other words, how we treat artists is a manifestation and reflection of how we treat one another. Just like artists, marginalized people in general are expected, at any given moment, to elucidate and sell their culture to any curious outsider. We have to suffer through questions centering how often we wash and style our hair, how our accents developed, why exactly hate speech is harmful, or where our family is really from. It seems people outside of minority groups can only comprehend those identities through the microscope of oppression. Such a limited lens is jarring to me, as someone who believes blackness, for instance, is a song written in the key of joy. We, artists or otherwise, are not required to enact pro-bono instruction or espouse articulations of our oppression just because we are asked to do such. Artists should be understood as just that: creators of worlds that reflect something about our own, creatives free to express whatever it is they so choose. While art can and should promote understanding, creatives should not be expected to provide obvious answers to how to interact with or live alongside minorities. It is not the job of the artist to convert the bigoted, create maps of their misery, or paint stages with their blood for standing ovations. Although crisis is a great time to be oppressed and artistic, the oppressed deserve to be artistically autonomous. With our artists in chains, it is no surprise our people remain captive.
A few things inspired this work that feel necessary to cite:
Reading and Conversation with Ocean Vuong || Harvard Radcliffe Institute
Rebecca F. Kuang, "Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: The Value of Art in Times of Crisis," 2022
Langston Hughes--The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/the-commodification-of-trauma/