Édouard, Ellison and the Invisible Man

Special Thanks: KA, DG, DC, and RG - Encouragement goes a long way.

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

There are quite a few times in my life when I felt convinced that I was invisible. In the fifth grade I began writing poetry and I was accused of plagiarism. In the eighth, I was grabbed by a police officer for using my student Metrocard on Brooklyn-Queens Day. What he did not know was that I attended private school and did not have that day off. In the twelfth grade, I expressed my desire to attend Howard and my friends looked at me, mouth agape, as if I had just kicked a kitten.

Those moments were not so much about me questioning whether or not I existed, as I was aware of my own feelings and sensations, but more akin to something out of The Sixth Sense. Perhaps I could only be seen by a child whose heart was free of judgment. I was invisible in those moments because I did not resonate with anything familiar.

The moments that once seemed so distant to me suddenly reappeared when I returned from the Mecca to New York City.

One morning on my way to Harlem, I wrote furiously after reading an excerpt by Édouard Glissant. Édouard Glissant is an African francophone philosopher who has written numerous works about creolization, identity, and multiculturalism. I had not long ago attended a conversation put on by L'Institut du Tout-Monde about Glissant's work when an aging white woman with wrinkles etched into her hands and face, literally sat on me and then forced her way between me and a small child. There was no apology, much less a snide remark or sneer. She simply refused to see me.

In that instant I felt simultaneously hostile and helpless. The obnoxious act was done and could not be undone. A simple stare would have been too mild of a response and an exclamation would turn me into a spectacle and a stereotype. I reflected on this incident a great deal and was reminded of Édouard Glissant's theory about opacity in his latest work, Philosophie de la Relation. Glissant asserts that opacity - the state of being unclear and difficult to understand, is a human right and especially so for people of color. He suggests that opacity is a prerequisite for peace in the world and in relationships between people who are different. This is in stark contrast to much of the literature and analyses of people of color and Africans in particular, because Glissant is demanding the right to not be translucent objects for observation, admiration, or condemnation.

To be opaque and accepted without being fully understood is to be fully human. It is to breathe a breath of freedom in the Parisian spring air, or to sit in a cafe in Montmartre and be able to think free thoughts and write free words. It is to render the invisible visible. It is Ellison's dream fulfilled.

At least in theory.

I believe that the struggle of between the desire for opacity and the occupied space of translucency leads to another concept in Édouard Glissant's work. He calls it the permanence of violence.

Glissant asserts that in the past, when conflict reached its height between groups, it erupted in temporary violence. It was a means to a specific end. Today, however, violence is perceived as a permanent entity - a way of life, or rather a way of death. Peace has become an idea reserved for those privileged enough to be academics and philosophers rather than something tangible that the "ordinary" can draw upon.

I am arguing that Glissant's theories interconnect. The absence of opacity - invisibility -is the primary cause of consistent violence amongst people of color. Violence has become a desperate means of becoming visible.

The possibility of violence is in the moment where someone feels "disrespected" for getting his shoes stepped on and feels the need to retaliate with force. It is in the camaraderie lost in families and sports teams but found in gangs. It is in the astronomically growing numbers of black male depression and suicide in young adulthood. It is in the aggressive, hypermasculine posturing that many young men mimic throughout the US, regardless of color, but are especially worrisome for men of color who use it to validate their very existence. It is in the moments on the train to Harlem, when one questions whether or not he is really there.

Peace is possible when the mind is willing to accept what the eyes have seen. Peace is possible when people can inhabit spaces of thought freely without being haunting spectres existing only between the ghettoes and football fields. Peace is possible in the moment when a man in a suit or a baseball cap has the right to hear, "Excuse me. Is this seat taken?"

Soundtrack: Jay Electronica - Eternal Sunshine

Common - Be