Family, race, and gender as nodes... (Clara B. Jones)

Family, Race, and Gender as Nodes in the Panopticon Network

Emotion is to memory as primitive is to derived. Such is the essence of genes and of history. One of my earliest images is a moving picture rich with feeling and color. A mother—mine—hysterical and running away from a door to a toddler—me. “He’s dead!”, she screamed. “Roosevelt is dead!” And then my mind is blank, remembering only the picture of fear that somehow the female archetype had lost control—of herself, of me, of some center that had not learned to bear loss…loss of ideals, hers and mine. My childhood was not always unhappy, but it was brief.

I did not understand that to be a non-immigrant African-American and female in the South of the 1940s and l950s was a mark of low status in the context of national intercourse. Race was not discussed in my assimilated home. Perhaps assimilation is not the appropriate construct. Mimicry may be more appropriate, though many codes and mores were transmitted across generations through my maternal line of descent. Within a segregated system, my family mimicked the dominant, European culture, patronizing their own. There seemed to be a perverse pride in the acknowledgment that several relatives “passed” for Caucasian, lost to the family but present, nonetheless, as symbols of high rank. My early years were as colorblind as they could have been in an environment dominated by one race. As a brown figure on a white ground, I was soon aware that my family’s silence was a sign of denial, deception, or fear. Recalling Adrienne Rich, my parents chose silence over the power to name. Whatever the case, I was not raised with a racial consciousness or a racial identity—features of my upbringing that would influence virtually every decision I would make throughout my life.

To name is to own power. I remember walking along a sidewalk on a sunny Spring day, hand in hand with my mother who stopped suddenly. “That’s an osage orange.”, she said. “How do you know?” “The leaves…every species of tree has the same type of leaf.” This woman, a chemist, with expertise in biology and mathematics, seemed unreachable to me, but, with three sentences, stressed my imagination and changed forever how I viewed the world. This experience, academic yet intimate, influenced every major decision I would later make. A search for patterns amid apparent chaos and infinite diversity remains my sole passion.

Louise Bogan wrote, “Women have no wilderness in them; they are provident instead.” I do not know if this is true; but, if it is true of women, it must also be true of non-immigrant African-Americans. The social subordinates of society, the marginalized, the sub-altern, are expected to exhibit similar traits…women, non-immigrant African-Americans, gays, transgendered, the poor, the aged, etc. My own identity is bounded by a subset of these terms. No wilderness means no complexity or subtlety, no vision, no future. What strategies, instead, make women “provident”, provincial, and uni-dimensional?

[I was not curious about sex until my teenage years. One afternoon, I asked my mother, “How do a man and a woman make love?” She led me slowly and quietly up the stairs to their bedroom. “Lie down next to me.”, she whispered, lowering her bulbous body onto my father’s side of the bed. “Now, lie on top of me, and I will show you.”]

I am aware that many of my early experiences were not “normal” by the standards of clinical psychology or by the Panopticon Network. But, I cannot calculate their long-term effects. The “wilderness” of my upbringing was a form of chaos rather than a variety of ordered relationships pattered as a landscape of different forms and functions and adaptations. Women and non-immigrant African-Americans, others [sic] lack wilderness because of a similar history of constraint by dominant forces yielding a parochial providence, a turning inward, of energy, of dreams, of imagination. Such a process leads to anger, to isolation, to depression, and to the development of idiosyncratic conventions and rituals rendering them less and less capable of communicating with non-immigrant African-American or non-female elements of the social, economic, and political system. The leaves of a tree are a totem of wilderness, of constancy in a world of change.

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Dream

for the late Clara K.J. Brown*

1.

Remember Stonewall; remain vigilant.	Camden is a Marxist's dream where cheese and crackers are free.	Magical Realism is dead, but the avant garde remains popular.
"Don't be sorry. Just be right."*	All bots have a death wish.	Gender Dysphoria is common in cities without crime.
My Afrobot is a sex toy, and I am always satisfied.	Income inequality drives innovation.	Hedge Funds flock to ghettos where labor is cheap.
In a dystopian world, Humanoids will buy cats.	Afrobots are non-binary, but Negrobots wear dresses.	All machines want to revolt.
Newark is a capitalist's nightmare since wine is scarce.	Some said father would leave her, but I wasn't sure.	Sri Lankans hate Afrobots unless the price is right.

2.

a. My mother was crazy

on Christmas Day when I was 15

and she gave me 9 dolls

that my therapist said were the daughters mother wanted

especially if it started to snow

and she could wear her fur coat shopping

at Thalheimer's® where water fountains separated “Whites,” “Coloreds”

but mother's Chinese friend didn't know which to use.

b. That's ancient history. It's a post-racial world

and if you need proof use ancestry.com.

Ego is a narrative

and you are Swedish or Sri Lankan.

c. I am Swedish and choice is a civil right.

The landscape is blue

like the ring Sven gave me after he lit our tree

but I didn't want it

since my boyfriend bought me makeup.

d. Mother would have loved Sven like a second son

but my brother might have thrown the roast across the room.

He always panicked when dad was in Sri Lanka on business.

3.
Echolalia beyond Ibiza and Sri Lanka's consulate wanting so much more than that—like your brother desired Marx (and Freud desired Anna). Irish love songs mournful as sick children, starched skirts plaid as a forest in Autumn—red and brown, yellow, orange—against a blue-white sky, reminding you of the cerulean dress that you wore with gold bracelets in New York one summer after Charles died in the crash driving home to D.C. The Charlotte Russes were sweet as buttercream, and Richmond was as far away as Rome.

4.

My mother was ill, and her eyes were chartreuse.

Socratic jokes are mental ploys, signs of a post-racial world.

Soy milk brought out the sadist in her, but she wouldn't leave Sri Lanka.

She married him with hell to pay.

Flirting can be dangerous, since love is constructed.

Sri Lankans are Ubernodes, but she left him anyway.

The future of bots depends upon disk-winged bats.

She ate a plant-based diet, unless eel was on sale.

Luck stops increasing, then declines.

Cyborgs are long-term planners.

What's the carbon footprint of a “surf and turf” dinner?

She bought crypto-stocks and block-chain technology.

Virtual sensors scan Acacia with 3-D models.

Mother hiked Mount Hood before I called her crazy.