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‘Sticks and stones may break my bones/ But words shall never hurt me’. How many of us have recited this old school rhyme, gaining confidence from the very words whose authority we reject? How many of us deny language access to the realm of physicality, refuse to acknowledge language’s access to our corporeality? How many of us, lying to ourselves, hold onto this illusion? Words do hurt; words exist in semantic fields; semantic fields influence corporeal existence(s). Words break asunder the bodies of people(s); they confine skeletal apparatuses and fleshy beings to subjugation. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the Black body on whose skin, the Wynterian Man’s discourse stumbles; there, in the critic and theorist Hortense Spillers’ words, while ‘sticks and stones might break our bones, words […] most certainly kill us’.[1] I think of one word. One word that operates the rack of our being and renders us bisected. One word that seemingly thrusts us outside the Symbolic Order, yoking our bodies to the gallows of non-existence while, paradoxically, reading and forcing us to read said bodies within semantic fields of malignity and monstrosity. [2] One word: BLACK. It is beautiful: our fathers scream “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud”; our mothers speak of the precious dream it was “To be young, gifted and black”; we look in mirrors and marvel at our skin colour. Yet linguistically — most evident in the literary sphere — ‘Black’ accrues negative significations that force our bodies to continually carry the burden of negated and abjected meaning. How then as readers and, most importantly, as writers, do we navigate this space? Towards answering this, we must ask, "What is Blackness"? We must question how we understand blackness in relation to the Black body. Who/what determines its contours and sketches it into being? Which aesthetic categories accompany it? In order to find a beginning, this article briefly examines the word Black in Old and Medieval English.

Explicitly, textual descriptions of the Black body often position it as the victim and/or root of trauma and pain. Implicitly, traditional texts treat Blackness as both an unspoken negation and a monstrous Other. In one paradigm, posited as all that the normative self (read here as white male) is not, Blackness sits between nothingness and opposition. Though one may assume that prior to the transatlantic slave trade, the Black body was not part of the English literary imagination, early English texts’ constructions of the sublimated Self as white, Christian, and ‘English’ male were dependent upon ethnographies of a monstrous, pagan, and foreign Other – an Other later recycled for the characterisation of an untameable Africa. Moreover, medieval literature stressed the link between Blackness and sin. Or, as Geraldine Heng posits, ‘black accrued […] negative significations that yoked the “abstraction” of blackness […] to the devil’, an abstraction that recalls the physical Black body.

Blee, sweart, swear-tian, (ge)sweorcan, gesweorc, wann, salowigpad, earp. All are Old English synonyms for blackness. All are used in contexts that conjure evil spirits. The most characteristic word for black, sweart, (found eighty-four times in Old English texts), though used to describe literal black objects (ravens, waters, and nights), is primarily employed in religious poetry to symbolise hell and black souls (see: Christ III in The Exeter Book; Solomon and Saturn in The Nowell Codex; Genesis A and B in the Junius Manuscript).[3] From the Platonic Cave to the Abrahamic God’s declaration —  ‘Let there be light’ —   allegories and images of dispelling blackness for whiteness inform Western thought and literary traditions. Abstracted blackness evokes ideas of immorality and ignorance, of existing outside the salvation of Christianity. Thus, in The King of Tars (c. 1330), blackness signifies malign ignorance — the King of Damas changing from black to white upon his conversion to Christianity.  Correspondingly, when Ham observes the nakedness of his father, though the Bible itself makes no mention of his blackness, the early church fathers (9^th Century), develop a narrative in which Ham is ‘blackened’ — the curse of servitude written onto his body (through spreading black ink) to remind others of his sin. Blackness, it appears, a phantom, that eventually emerges as the monstrous Black body in the works is f white (Conrad, Behn, Shakespeare) and Black authors. Consequently, traditional malign stock characters (the antagonist, monster, Milton’s devil) can be read through racialised lenses.  Regardless of direct reference, Black writers inherit texts that fetter goodness to whiteness and its obverse, Blackness, to malign monstrosity. As such the Black writer/reader often meets their body as an ominous alien, violently shuttled, or, in the words of Frantz Fanon, ‘spread-eagled, disjointed, redone’.  Certainly, for Fanon, the phenomenon of language is a colonial space, and thus, the extent to which the Black subject assumes the coloniser’s language may be indicative of the extent to which he enters the ranks against his own negation (2).

How cruel, how dire ... to end on a note of Black pessimism, that is. We don’t have to. Literature, after all, is a space of openings. Though to write ‘Black’ always conjures up a history of malign monstrosity (the semantic field of Blackness) it also reaches beyond. So, I ask you, when we ask, "How does the Black writer reconcile these representations of Blackness?", may we answer, "Through its cracks, by looking beyond closure?"

— Kasablanca Adu, recent MSt graduate