"A Lovely Polar Bear Afternoon"
This week’s
post is one that you are welcome to come back to over the quarter. Have there
been any readings, screenings, or projects from other courses this quarter,
that have “popped” because of material you have been exposed to in Animals
& Literature?
In this
post, cut and paste an excerpt from something you’re reading or read from
another concurrent course or University activity that connects to, crosses
over, or is in conversation with any
material from Lit 80E.
The length of your post is your choice.
I offer a too-long example from an essay[1]
written by Columbia Law School Professor Patricia J Williams. In her 24-page
essay, she begins by sharing the earliest known history of her mother’s family.
It is the story of her great-great-grandmother who was purchased as an
eleven-year-old by a white lawyer named Austin Miller who immediately
impregnated her. When Williams goes off to law school, she writes, “I do
remember that just before my first day of class my mother said, in a voice full
of secretive reassurance, ‘The Millers were lawyers, so you have it in your
blood.’ ”
The essay is a beautiful
experiment in lyric and a legal storytelling that circles around the issues of
female embodiment, race, origins and property law. Of the many anecdotes and
metaphors she uses, there are the polar
bears. Her aunt tells her a story about polar bears. “The clouds took their
shape from polar bears, trees were designed to give shelter and shade to polar
bears, and humans were ideally designed to provide polar bears with meat” (16).
When she finally gets around to telling her own the
polar bear story[2],
it is in the section titled “Them”.
Them
“In the law,
rights are islands of empowerment. To be un-righted is to be disempowered, and
the line between rights and no rights is most often the line between dominators
and oppressors. Rights contain images of power, and manipulating those images,
either visually or linguistically, is central in the making and maintenance of
rights. In principle, therefore, the more dizzyingly diverse the images that are
propagated, the more empowered we will be as a society.
In reality, it was a lovely polar bear afternoon. The
gentle force of the earth. A wide wilderness of islands. A conspiracy of polar
bears lost in timeless forgetting. A gentleness of polar bears, a fruitfulness
of polar bears, a silent black-eyed interest of polar bears, a bristled
expectancy of polar bears. With the wisdom of innocence, a child threw stones
at the polar bears. Hungry, they rose from their nests, inquisitive,
dark-souled, patient with foreboding, fearful in tremendous awakening. The
instinctual ferocity of the hunter reflected upon the hunted. Then, proud teeth
and warrior claws took innocence for wilderness and raging insubstantiality for
tender rabbit breath.” (Williams 23)
WILLIAMS CONTINUES…
“In the newspapers the next day, it was reported that
two polar bears in the Brooklyn Zoo mauled to death an eleven-year-old boy who
had entered their cage to swim in the moat. The police were called and the
bears were killed.
In the public debate that ensued, many levels of
meaning emerged. The rhetoric firmly established that the bears were innocent,
naturally territorial, unfairly imprisoned, and guilty. The dead child (born
into the urban jungle of a black, welfare mother and a Hispanic alcoholic
father who had died literally in the gutter only six weeks before) was held to
a similarly stern standard. The police were captured, in a widely disseminated
photograph, shooting helplessly, desperately, into the cage, through three
levels of bars, at a pieta of bears; since this image, conveying much pathos,
came nevertheless not in time to save the child, it was generally felt that the
bears had died in vain.
In the egalitarianism of exile, pluralists rose up as
of one body, with a call to buy more bears, control juvenile delinquency, eliminate
all zoos, and confine future police.” (Williams 23)
Now, it would be naïve to take Williams’s
discussion of race and rights and make some quick n dirty link to racial
whiteness as evinced by the polar bears' white fur or snowy white (natural) habitat. In my reading, Williams’s strategy for
making explicit a racial identity is to make it ambiguous and ambivalent. She
uses contradictory words like “gentleness” and “conspiracy” to gesture at ways
of looking. To see and be seen are always at odds.
FURTHER, to this point…
“At the funeral of the child, the presiding priest
pronounced the death of Juan Perez not in vain, since he was saved from growing
into "a lifetime of crime." Juan's Hispanic-welfare-black-widow-of-
an-alcoholic mother decided then and there to sue.” (Williams 24)
FINALLY, she reflects on an
experience when she had to scream, "Don't I exist for you?! See Me! And
deflect, godammit!” to a group of Dartmouth Summer Basketball Camp youths who,
“about a hundred of these adolescents, fresh from the courts, wet, lanky,
big-footed, with fuzzy yellow crew cut” had pushed her off the sidewalk.
“I pursued my way, manumitted back into silence. I put distance between
them and me, gave myself over to polar bear musings. I allowed myself to be watched
over by bear spirits. Clean white wind and strong bear smells. The shadowed
amnesia; the absence of being; the
presence of polar bears…. A complexity of messages implied in our being.” (Williams 24)
The essay is wonderful because
I have no idea what the polar bears mean other than being polar bears. But theorizing them connects to our readings of
Berger, Sax, origin stories, and Adams even Seth. In particular, I see Seth's idea of “wild” being set-up by the anthropomorphized bears and the zoomorphized
11-year old.
This is the 3rd time I've been assigned to read this article in my grad school career. It appeared most recently for Professor Bettina Aptheker's FMST 260 seminar, Black Feminist Reconstruction, Spring 2015. Now-ish.
This is the 3rd time I've been assigned to read this article in my grad school career. It appeared most recently for Professor Bettina Aptheker's FMST 260 seminar, Black Feminist Reconstruction, Spring 2015. Now-ish.
In this
post, cut and paste an excerpt from something you’re reading or read from
another concurrent course or University activity that connects to, crosses
over, or is in conversation with any material from Lit 80E.
You may
return to this post any time, and more than once, this quarter.
Please
“comment” in this thread.
