Propelling into the “Weird South” with Melanie Benson Taylor’s New Collection on Postplantation Literature https://ift.tt/riuPDk7
The word “weird” gets tossed around Southern parlance freely. In The Weird South: Ecologies of Unknowing in Postplantation Literature by Melanie Benson Taylor, the word takes on a new meaning. To find how this word applies to a place and a people, she searches all the way to states of being. Using Timothy Morton’s conceptualization of the old Norse word urth in Dark Ecology, Taylor uses this “twisting,” similar to a Mobius strip, to further explore a region fraught with contradictions. A place like the South needs to have a complicated definition of weirdness.
The book is broken up into three parts, each signaling the weird, ecological South: grave, trees, and forest. Each part explores certain pieces of the Southern literature in a post-plantation U.S. South. In the first chapter, Taylor focuses on Katherine Ann Porter’s 1934 short story “The Grave.” We are introduced to Miranda and Paul, white siblings who stumble upon “shimmering treasures from the empty grave that once contained their grandfather’s remains; and, shortly thereafter, the bloated, pregnant belly of a rabbit that Paul has expertly shot and skinned.” In these paralleled graves, Taylor begins her treatise. From holes interring treasures and the secrets of a skinned rabbit, the young Miranda finds fragments of “unknown thought” that have been buried by the colonization and privilege attached to their shared family history. Some things may be buried or moved, but the shame remains.
Taylor depicts a South haunted by its own history. For it to exist, the oppression of people, as well as flora and fauna, was instituted. The weird occurs when the ghosts of this past slip into the present, not only to haunt it, but to live alongside it. In this way the holes in the earth, as well as the slain rabbit (her belly full of aborted kittens), show, “The natural world functions again as a template, a lesson laid bare, about the tangled operations of pleasure and grief, desire and subjugation, of killing as authority and increase, and of the terrible consequences of human dominion.”
In “Trees,” Taylor dives into the writings of Black authors like Charles Chesnutt and Richard Wright. Using Chesnutt’s short story “The Dumb Witness,” Taylor lays out how the materialism of the South, the natural world, and racism itself are intertwined in intricate ways that may be impossible to untangle. She says, “the natural world” and so-called “inferior races exist in an assemblage of oversight and overdetermination; that historical forces have altered irrevocably the capacity for disambiguation, if not for regeneration; and that true liberation must occur within the spaces of detention — the structures, the furniture, the myriad “things” created out of the accumulation of victimhood.” Her exploration of the story’s ending, which I leave to you, the reader to uncover, is a deft interpretation of how navigating these “things” leaves all who participate in their making, whether they be victim or victimizer, tainted by their existence.
Wright’s novella The Man Who Lived Underground is another way to explore the relation to materialism. In it, a harassed and distressed Black man, Fred, escapes underground from police custody as his wife is in labor. From underground, he can enter the world above to take others’ possessions that make him feel free. He enters a state some might consider madness. But, “What if ‘madness’ is understood, in this case, as a function of the weird — a way of exceeding the usual terms and measures of social analysis, ‘unmooring’ us entirely from the coordinates of the made world where men like Fred suffer?” asks Taylor. The only option forward from this place of madness, unmoored, according to Wright, is death.
In the final chapter, “Forest,” Taylor explores how Indigeneity shows up in the collective Southern unconscious, including how it becomes an overly fantasized solution on how to extrapolate Southern “weirdness.” Her review of the literature shows that there seems to be a belief by Southern authors in a post-plantation South that returning to Native American thinking will reconnect us to the land, healing humans’ strained and strange relationship with it. However, Taylor says, “We cannot continue to manufacture mythologies of return, renewal, and restoration that hinge on identity groups whose very ontology has been produced by the cognitive and biopolitical structures we now seek to escape.” She goes on to pose the question, “More fundamentally, how do we unmake the world that made us without also obliterating ourselves?” It drives home the point that we cannot see the “Forest” for the “Trees.”
What makes this book is how it treats what makes the South weird. Rather than define it or cure it, Taylor seeks to learn from that inherent weirdness. Based on the texts she generously explores, her approach to the South’s weirdness is to embrace the “dualism” inherent in that definition. We will never find a way to move forward without first acknowledging how we got here, who was hurt in the process, and who we are as a result.
In wrapping up “Forests,” she quotes heavily from Janet McAdams, an Alabama Creek woman whose work focuses on returning us to deep universal time as a way of restoring connectivity with the earth — and ourselves. In doing so, Taylor seems to argue, we may come to understand the twisted way we’ve arrived at this place in our history in order to truly move onward. Because, it is “only the human body — the emphatically present, sensual, erotic potential of the here and the now, the self and the other, urged on by the animal and the fossil but not defined or delimited by it — that gives ‘energy’ to propel forward into an already haunted future, a new story waiting to be told.”
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