Last Words: Tisa Bryant, UNEXPLAINED PRESENCE

This Thanksgiving Friday’s Last Words feature comes, appropriately I think, from Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence.

From the back cover:

“By remixing stories from novels and films to zoom in on the black presences within them, Tisa Bryant ruminates on the sublime power of history to shape culture in the subconscious of both the artist and the viewer. Moving from interrogations of François Ozon’s 8 Femmes and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando to the machinations of the Regency House Party reality TV show, Unexplained Presence weaves threads of myth, fact and fiction into previously unexplored narratives lurking in our collective imagination.”

Also from the back cover, a blurb from Brent Hayes Edwards:

“With its eccentric inventory of souvenirs, scrims, and shadows, Bryant’s writing intuits an angle of criticism in a tone of description. It prowls the backgorund of classic films, rustles at the margins of novels, peers into the storage room of museums, cataloguing the ways blackness persists in culture: as curio, as enabler, as counter-example, as temptation, as nightmare. Neither to indict, nor to romanticize the counter-archive. But instead to gather its shards of song (“Hush now. Don’t explain.”) within a “fixed boundary of silence.” And to point to a continuum of other histories, preserved precisely in the ways they are extinguished.”

I started watching the British reality TV show Regency House Party after reading Unexplained Presence. Basically people go to a fancy house in the British countryside so they can do Regency roleplay. It’s crazy. There is much talk of being excited to “live in history.” But when a West Indian girl (Seal’s sister!) shows up, people don’t want to talk about history anymore. At dinner that night, the host offers a spun sugar decoration in the form of a sugar plantation. The West Indian girl, whose name is Tanya Samuel, talks about dehumanization. An old British woman sniffs about only ever hearing one side of the story. FOR REALS. A girl says, “I don’t want to feel guilt for something I’ve never done or wanted to do. I can’t be guilty for our history.” People say these things on television. Like a badass, Tanya Samuel emphasizes that she prefers honey to sugar. Just go.

And a holiday bonus, from CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock’s “The City Real and Imagined”:

funny how
everyone who
tells me they’d
rather live in
centuries
past is
rich
and
white

Tisa Bryant, Unexplained Presence:

Discussion is wide-ranging, passionate. Dead bodies are permissible dinner topics. Rare beef is served. Von Hagens describes taking the body apart, bone by sinew by organ, and the process of plastinating them. There is no protest. Slavery cannot be discussed at dinner although it makes the dinner possible. But this talk has a sexual subtext. Somehow. Sweetmeats. They engage fully into the macabre, into the ethics and morality of this activity. But not the peculiar instiution. They get close up. They get curious. They wonder at the identity of a plastinated female corpse. Much as they are repulsed, they want to know whose bodies these were. Where they came from. They want to touch.

“I feel compelled to look and look and look.”

“He was looking at me like he wanted my body. Like he really wanted my body.

Apart from the partially fabricated eye of the corpose, it’s all very, completely real.

The Countess looks triumphant. She’s shaken things up on a libidinal level, which is what’s important here. The atmosphere is positively corporeal. She’s becoming the Darling of the house, and flaunting the moral convention of the time, she sleeps with Gorrell Barnes and proclaims herself “winner.” No enraged chaperone cries “Foul!” The ring, we suppose, is to come later.

Throughout this sequence, Miss Tanya Ourika Samuel, in her yellow dress, is scarce, and with each subsequent scene of a corpose, exposed skin, illicit romance, and sexual amourousness, she recedes further still into the background, taking with her the memory of dead Africans, the windmill powering the sugar mill, the smiling black boy, the banana trees and feathered turban. The bronze Negro and Negress at the dorway hold their lamplights high behind her fading back.