Given that sympathy is something Hayden and Tolson hope their poems produce rather than merely display, their poems are inevitably concerned with answering the following question: what is required for the coming-into-being of a form of sympathy that has the potential to transform the conventions – whether racial, economic, or political – we so consistently and unthinkingly reify? The answer to such a question demands a theoretical consideration of the relation between self and other. This is one of the tasks the cultural theorist Frantz Fanon sets for himself in his influential book Black Skin, White Masks. The relation between self and other, he observes, is necessarily predicated on an implicit demand: “I find myself suddenly in the world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other” (Black Skin 229). This is as much to say that in some sense sympathy, or at least its precursor, is essential to the basic functioning of any social contract: “freedom requires an effort at disalienation,” as Fanon puts it (231). From Fanon’s existentialist perspective, our efforts in this regard determine the very nature of humanity: “I cannot disassociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother. Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Every one of my silences, every one of my cowardices reveals me as a man” (89).
As is clear from the title of his work, Fanon approaches these issues through the challenging cathexis of race and its attendant realities. However, in his famous chapter “The Fact of Blackness,” his initial representation of the increasing tension between personhood and objecthood in the life of the (black) individual is devoid of any discussion of race:
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.
Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and by taking me out of the world, restoring me to it. (109)
In the scenario Fanon paints here, the attention of others initially greets the subject as a blessing, because it frees him from the terror of being merely an object by granting him a subjectivity borne of his relation to others. However, this state of affairs does not last. Refracted through the prism of racial ideology, relationality returns the subject to an externally administered “crushing objecthood” that originates not through the absence of attention from others, but because of it: “just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. . . . I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together by another self” (109).
The core movement of racism captured here lies in its refusal to recognize the other as both fully human and as racially specific in that humanness, which in turn guarantees the impossibility of sympathy. More than this, it encourages the development of other, potentially violent forms of feeling in the person of the oppressed: “Affect is exacerbated in the Negro, he is full of rage because he feels small, he suffers from an inadequacy in all human
communication, and all these factors chain him with an unbearable insularity” (50). As a possible solution to this toxic situation, Fanon theorizes the primacy of relationality, the basic connectedness between two individuals who might be separated by all other exigencies, race among them: “The only means of breaking this vicious circle that throws me back on myself is to restore to the other, through mediation and recognition, his human reality, which is different from natural reality. The other has to perform the same operation” (217). Here Fanon expresses
his belief less in the power of sympathy than in its essential precondition: recognition. Recognition of the other as human, and therefore of value, is for Fanon the basic unit and promise of social possibility, the condition on which any understanding of the self, and ultimately of civilization itself is premised: “In order to win the certainty of oneself, the incorporation of the concept of recognition is essential” (217).73
To support these claims, Fanon turns to the section in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind in which Hegel sets out the well-known dialectic between lordship and bondage. The centrality of the trope of recognition to Hegel’s argument is immediately clear:74
“Self-
consciousness,” he writes, “exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized’ [Anerkannt].’” Such recognition entails a reciprocal relationship between two individuals on the
level of consciousness itself, since to know oneself as a distinct self requires, paradoxically, acknowledgement from without: “this other is for itself only when it cancels itself as existing for itself, and has self-existence only in the existence of the other” (231). Selfhood, for Hegel, is a function of interdependence, which means that recognition of the other is not only a
prerequisite for the development of anything like civilization, it is fundamental to the possibility of the very concept of a self. We can therefore establish the moment of recognition not only as the necessary ground for sympathy, but as the moment at which sympathy becomes possible at all as a concept or idea. Hegel himself makes this clear when he notes that recognition –
73 For Fanon, the problem of race precludes, at least in his own time, the possibility of Hegelian recognition. Blacks
are considered equal to whites in name only: “the Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom, for he has not fought for it” (Black Skin 221), and as a result he remains “a slave who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master” (219). “For the French Negro,” Fanon concludes, “the situation is unbearable. Unable to ever be sure whether the white man considers him consciousness in-itself-for-itself, he must forever absorb himself in uncovering resistance, opposition, challenge” (222). Hegel’s dialectic is important to Fanon in part because the real-world dynamics of race expose its time-bound insufficiency. But in their poetry, Hayden and Tolson explore the possibility of forms of recognition that, through the restorative violence of their enactment, begin to work against the historical processes that have resulted in the alienation of the black citizen from (trans)national culture.
74 For more on recognition in Hegel see especially Robert R. Williams’ Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, in which
Williams argues that while the concept of recognition was introduced in the German philosophical tradition by Fichte, it was Hegel who “appropriated and transformed the concept of recognition and regarded it as the fundamental intersubjective structure of ethical life” (26).
because it reveals to the self not only the other, but the selfas other in the eyes of the other – is the hinge on which human relationality turns:
Each is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and hence its own certainty of itself is still without truth. For its truth would merely be that its own individual existence for itself would be shown to it to be an independent object, or, which is the same thing, that the object would be exhibited as this pure certainty of itself. By the notion of recognition [Anerkennung], however, this is not possible, except in the form that as the other is for it, so it is for the other; each in its self through its own action and again through the action of the other achieves this pure abstraction of existence for self. (232)
Hegel’s claim here – that we arrive at a valid concept of self only by way of the other – is a landmark observation in Western thought that has been taken up in the work of numerous theorists. The importance Hegel assigns to recognition is crucial to my argument because it provides a philosophical and historical reference point for understanding the poems of Hayden and Tolson, in which recognition also plays a pre-eminent role. Hayden and Tolson stage, in their poems, scenes of recognition not only between individuals but between disparate cultural categories. In their poems, these categories are wrested from their conventional positions and forced into productive collision with each other. In particular, idioms and nationalities thought to be distinct encounter one another within the space of a single poem, sometimes a single line of poetry, in order to provoke moments of cultural recognition that will create space for the transformative identifications these poems seek to produce.