"[W]hat has been stolen is the “flesh” and the very semantic field on which one can be imagined to be Human, which is why the price tag on reparations would not merely bankrupt the world economy but would obliterate a global frame of reference – one which makes articulation (from war to diplomacy) between myriad nations and cultures possible".
-– Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms 1
Black debt, whether as living in and with debt, as debt, living by debt, is death. Black death is a debt. Black people are in debt because they are Black; they are Black because they are in debt 2. Blackness is an indebtedness and form of being (symbolically) dead, whose death does not even belong to it. Black debt is “being for the captor”3; this is both its function and locus. This debt, as Blackness’ symbolic form, is imposed from without but lived (within, or psychically) as a sense of “radical indebtedness or loss”4. This loss yokes Blackness to a condition of valuelessness, what Lindon Barrett might call the “devalu[ation] [of the] racial category of blackness”5.
Black is nothing, in nothing, living with nothing (and for nothing)6. Black debt is social, as death, it is socially lived. Blackness’ intimacy with death marks a life that has no right to live nor die; it is to live as if already dead and to die a death that can never be yours. Put simply, both Black life and death have no right to be. This debt is a death and life that is haunted by vulnerability and openness; to support this claim we could point at the pile of bones disinterred from graves through processes of displacement and dispossession to facilitate and clear space for the unfettered White enjoyment of bodies and land through settlement, agriculture, business, mining and leisure. Here Black corporeal death emerges as unimaginably accessible 7.
Black death, as debt, exceeds materialist frameworks and framing; it is a debt at the core of being and as the tension between living and dying. Ontologically, Blackness contaminates debt and transforms it and is transformed by it, into a racial category and a question of what it means, fundamentally, to be and not to be. Death, I argue, structures the distance between structural indebtedness and immunity from it; Blackness is positioned as the limit of what debt can become and what it would mean for one to be completely subsumed by, which is to say, to fall into a kind of debt wherein no way out is imaginable.
I am interested in how (Black) debt constitutes a perpetual dying, a falling; could we speak of Black death as a falling and a blackening of debt, or a kind of socially dead debt, or debt because of/caused by social death? Which is to ask, in what ways (does debt corpse Black life-living)? What does Blackness do to the concept of debt? Through this procedure, I want to consider or position this debt as a kind of debt that makes all other debts possible and simultaneously puny in relation to it. As a fundamental debt, this death makes possible or grants coherence to this present onto-epistemological world; materially, it is its stolen “flesh” that inaugurates the world as we know it. To resolve or settle it, as the above epigraph from Wilderson suggests, would cause a cataclysmic rupture of unimaginable proportions in the internal logics of and processes that sustain modernity. This paper claims, contentiously, that It is not in the interest of anyone to settle this debt without losing the very concept of debt and life as such.
Furthermore, Black debt is unpayable, which is to say, when it is black, it never dies, it lives in death, in the cold of death, it lives on when the dust settles, as matter and debt that can’t be settled. To pay or settle it would do more than merely “bankrupt the world economy”8; it would unsettle the world and precipitate a crisis of unimaginable proportions 9. This fear at the heart of capital is a question of ontology whose dance with Blackness was always frightening. The Canadian journalist Naomi Klein writes, “[N]ot only did the volatile market not like the idea of a liberated Mandela, but just a few misplaced words from him or his fellow [African National Congress] leaders could lead to an earth-shaking stampede”. Klein’s description of the overwhelming scale of the stampede is no exaggeration, for we do have evidence the South African rand’s propensity to chaotically go into what Klein calls a “free fall”10 engineered by the forces that don’t seem to “like” the idea of a ‘free’ Mandela. Klein obviously takes for granted that the anxieties of the world (financial markets) are a perverse negrophobia that is structurally prior to the “misplaced words”. As Wilderson recently put it, while reflecting on the free falling South Africa rand post-1994, “the mask of Blackness meant that the world now saw South Africa as a Black space and so the currency experienced one of the constituent elements of social death, which is “general dishonour”11. The rand, previously thought as “white money”, had by now been radically “Blackened in the eyes of the world”12.
This unpayable, unsettled debt, which is an unending death and infinitely deathly, whose sole utility is to never end or be settled or settle itself, is the matter of the imago: the black imago is this debt, Blacks dead in the imaginary of culture, as objects-images that can’t be anything else, whose suffering survives as illegible. This debt moves-lives as an ungraspable and “unnamable loss”13, “the within loss” (Philip, 2008:28).
Because Blacks (in life, in and as death) are of interest to ‘the public’ (read: civil society), they become, (1) in life, “the interests of global capital” (Silva, 2020:39), and (2) in death, as the astronomical profits accrued from our (actual and always imminent) dying. Take for example, the notoriety of South African insurance companies’ anti-black practices that equate death and loss with Black life. From this two things become clear: firstly, Blackness figures as the imminent danger that undermines value and (consequently) constitutes an actual threat to property. The Black community and ‘its’ property must be protected from itself and its deadly drives and impulse or propensity for (self)destruction and/or (self)harm. This community could be described in the Fanonian parlance as the “town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation”, and conclusively, it “is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute”14. This condition of generalised dishonor characterise, in highly pronounced ways, the place of this community in the imaginary of culture/society; these ill-famed “men of evil repute” cannot be trusted with their, or anyone else’s, property, including their actual bodies and lives (whose value only ever factors when they must be protected from themselves). Secondly, following on from the latter bracketed point, the anxieties of capital find full material expression as profits accrued from our potential death: it becomes more profitable, from the position of the insurance company, to insure property in “the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation”. We could consider here Steve Biko’s sharp and impatient critique of capital that he sums up as, “in South Africa now it is very expensive to be poor”15. In life, Blackness is made available to parasitic profit maximization mechanisms of the insurance industry. In death16, companies (particularly those that provide funeral/burial services) line up to cash in on the myriad tragedies that befall Black life. To put this more crudely, to be Black is to be a risk, to be in risk, to risk or endanger the lives of others, who might also happen to be Black too. In their article Is race a factor in insurance, Wendy Knowler writes:
“[b]ankers and insurers will argue vehemently that their interest rates and premiums are based mainly on risk. This would mean smaller mortgages in riskier areas, and higher premiums for those who live in statistically riskier areas and drive riskier cars in a riskier way. But given the warped political and social history of this country, some of the riskiest areas remain predominantly home to black people. (2019; emphasis mine) 14.
Fundamentally, the Black body, home and community/area, is the reification of risk and concretisation of crisis. As Knowler insists, insurers’, by way of disavowal, can argue empirically that there is an actual link between the ‘risk’ status of your neighbourhood and what you pay. Which is to say, to be in a Black body, live in a Black home, stay in a Black community/area, all amount to one and the same thing; I am risk, I live in risk, and surrounded by other risks, risky and under risk individuals who, like me, are the most extreme form of being in the world.
This is a brief extract from an upcoming essay due to be published in our upcoming #ISSUE7, 'Shifting Ground: Bodies, Space and Afro-pessimism in Africa'.
NOTES:
1 Frank Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, (Duke University Press: 2010), p. 101.
2 I am thinking of Fanon’s insistence that we push and invert the Marxian framework’s conception of what it means to suffer: “In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.” (Grove Press, 1963), pg. 40.
3 Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book”, in Diacritics (1987:67).5555
5 David Marriott, Whither Fanon: Studies in the Blackness of Being, (Stanford University Press: 2018), p. 325.
6 I am considering Jared Sexton’s thoughts that black people have no good enough reason to get out of bed in the morning. Additionally, my reading echoes and is indebted to David Marriott’s understanding of Black death as a death that is “nothing, less than nothing” (2018:354).
7 I would recommend to the reader that they spend some time with a feature film directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (2019), starring Mary Twala Mhlongo and Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha. This stunning drama stages the tragedy of Black death against the background of state violence and all its anti-Black logics and destructive impulses.
8 Wilderson, Red, White and Black, pg. 101
9 For example, what would it mean to settle the debt owed to the people of Haiti who were subject to “the greatest heist in history”? See Marlene Daut, When France extorted Haiti – the greatest heist in history. Available here: https://theconversation.com/when-france-extorted-haiti-the-greatest-heist-in-history-137949. For a discussion of the debt inherited by the African National Congress from the Apartheid regime and the former’s refusal to hold white monopoly capital in South Africa financially accountable, see Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007).
10 This expression is evidently relevant to the nature of abstractions this present text is attempting to make.
11 Zamansele Nsele and Frank B Wilderson, III (2020), Part I: ‘Afropessimism’ and the rituals of anti-black violence, in Mail & Guardian. Available here: https://mg.co.za/article/2020-06-24-frank-b-wilderson-afropessimism-memoir-structural-violence/
12 ibid.
13 I borrow this line from Frank Wilderson’s poem, Convocation of Conquest.
14 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 39. emphasis mine