{"id":29931,"date":"2013-10-23T02:10:22","date_gmt":"2013-10-23T02:10:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=29931"},"modified":"2016-06-24T19:55:11","modified_gmt":"2016-06-24T19:55:11","slug":"crossings-undone-presents-pyrrhic-futures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=29931","title":{"rendered":"crossings: undone presents, pyrrhic futures"},"content":{"rendered":"

crossings: undone presents, pyrrhic futures<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The State<\/a>
\nDubai, U.A.E.
\nVoicing
\n2013-03-30<\/p>\n

Tiana Reid<\/a><\/strong>
\nColumbia University<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cCyaan live split. Not in this world.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The first time I read Michelle Cliff\u2019s<\/a> 1987 book No Telephone to Heaven<\/em><\/a>, I immediately forgot which character had said this line. Was it Harry\/Harriet, the queer Jamaican character? Or was it Clare Savage, the cosmopolitan \u201cbi-racial\u201d protagonist? It could have been either\/both really. And that was partially the point.<\/p>\n

What I did<\/em> remember, however\u2014what I felt\u2014was the resonances of feeling the impulse of having to choose identity. The backdrop, for Clare, and to some extent for Cliff too, is about negotiating an existence in between races, cultures, nationalities and an endless act of et cetera. In the book, Clare undergoes a process of becoming(s) through a series of transatlantic yearnings, which culminate in her realization that she must choose her identity. And then, well, dies for that choice. In an essay called \u201cClare Savage as a Crossroads Character,\u201d Cliff writes that \u201cin [Clare\u2019s] death she has complete identification with her homeland; soon enough she will be indistinguishable from the ground. Her bones will turn to potash, as did her ancestors\u2019 bones.\u201d<\/p>\n

All the same, Clare is never accepted and never accepts herself. I\u2019m still not sure what\u2019s worse. No Telephone to Heaven<\/em> complicates the idea of wholeness and that in order to \u201cbe true to yourself\u201d if you have one parent, say, of European ancestry and the other of African ancestry, you should, as a citizen of the West (or perhaps the global West, i.e., the world) acknowledge the ambiguity of your both\/and state of being, as if everyone doesn\u2019t exist in a similar mode of being. A multimodal existence\u2014 a similar vacillating position of entering, understanding and being in the world. Don\u2019t we all exist between things\u2014parents, cultures, lovers, yesses and nos, life and death?<\/p>\n

What I remembered, then, was what I didn\u2019t think I had to be aware of. What I remembered was that until then, until that very moment when I read No Telephone to Heaven<\/em>, I had identified as \u201cmixed,\u201d which would refer to my White mom and my Black Jamaican dad, who got married and had sex and had miscarriages and then had me. But I mean, isn\u2019t a child always a mixture?<\/strong> Aren\u2019t we (and is the \u201cwe\u201d here decidedly North American?) all products of mixings and jumbles and breaking of the law pre-Loving v. Virginia<\/a><\/em> and also victims and perpetrators of rape before abolition, and, and, and\u2026?<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t get into how I learned how not to identify as \u201cmixed,\u201d how I began to understand that \u201cmixed-race\u201d in my generation was predicated on racial essentialism, false notions of purity, historical inaccuracies and worst of all, a sense of superiority over those who were only<\/em> Black. Soon, I understood \u201cmixed\u201d as an intermediary between Black and White, a cushion almost, between racism and progress…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

crossings: undone presents, pyrrhic futures The State Dubai, U.A.E. Voicing 2013-03-30 Tiana Reid Columbia University \u201cCyaan live split. Not in this world.\u201d The first time I read Michelle Cliff\u2019s 1987 book No Telephone to Heaven, I immediately forgot which character had said this line. Was it Harry\/Harriet, the queer Jamaican character? Or was it Clare […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,125,8,26,394,20],"tags":[14228,14229],"class_list":["post-29931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-the-state","tag-tiana-reid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29931"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47938,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29931\/revisions\/47938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}