Cyborg Grammar?

Chapter One Cyborg Grammar? Reading Wangechi Mutu’s Non je ne regrette rien through Kindred Tiffany E. Barber A maimed figure—part human, part animal, part machine—is suspended in the middle of a gray and brown, cloud-like background. Severed from its upper half and projected into a cumulous abyss, only the lower limbs of the figure remain, separated like scissors. The bottom leg extends and the top leg bends at the knee, reaching upward like a scorpion’s tail or a morbidly elegant arabesque. Instead of a knee joint, the top leg is equipped with a motorcycle wheel that connects to spinal tubing. Green and gray-scaled ten- tacles cover its pelvic region. The right half of the picture plane is bisected by the figure’s bottom leg. Instead of a foot, the end of the leg is fitted with an amalgam of animal hoof, stiletto, and blooming flower. The left half of the picture plane is dominated by a coiling serpent whose skin is imbued with violet, red, and other earthen hues.1 The center of the image is the most visually arresting. Occupied by black root-like structures emerging from the figure’s lower excised torso, the gray background is spattered with colliding color fields of ochre, green, and pink spewing from the figure’s top leg from which its foot appears to have been violently amputated. The composition is arranged in such a way that it is hard to tell whether the coiling serpent is responsible for the figure’s ruptured state, or if the plant parts have caused the body to breach internally. The collage, Non je ne regrette rien (2007) by artist Wangechi Mutu, confronts the viewer with a complex scene that is repulsive yet seductively compelling, and the arrangement of human, animal, plant, and mechanical parts suggests a type of mutualism that results in a dismembered body. Known for her 3 4 Tiffany E. Barber grotesque representations of black female bodies that exist between the cyborgian and the Afrofuturistic, Mutu’s Non je ne regrette rien offers a unique approach to black female subjecthood, what I call transgressive disfigurement.2 It pictures ways of being that are not predicated on wholeness but which instead incorporate alternate, at times violent or “undesirable” forms of transformation that serve to produce dismembered black female bodies. In 2000, just before graduating with an MFA in sculpture from Yale University, Mutu began exploring relations between black women’s bodies, female victimhood, resistance, and transformation. Pin-Up, two grids of twelve 13x10 and 14x10 images, was her first series of collaged female figures. It consists of images culled from pornography and health and beauty magazines mixed with ink and watercolor on paper. Mutu’s collage practice has since evolved to include images extracted from automobile and motorcycle magazines as well as dated anthropology and anatomy pamphlets and textbooks. A primary component of Mutu’s subject matter, the female cyborg body, brings her work into conversation with the liberatory presuppositions of posthumanism as feminist critique first theorized by Donna J. Haraway in 1985.3 The incorporation of various modes of technology and mechanical parts as proxies for human limbs situates Mutu’s work within a posthumanist discourse of the cyborg. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Haraway writes, “A Wangechi Mutu, Non je ne regrette rien, mixed media on Mylar, 138.4 x 233.7 cm, 2007. Cyborg Grammar? 5 cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment” (Haraway 1991, 180). Haraway embraces technology as a way of moving away from a humanism built on normative binaries and dualisms in order to create a regenerated world without gender. For Haraway, humanism’s binary system is crippling and requires a welcome incorporation of technology to negate this system: “We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitu- tion include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (Haraway 1991, 181). Following Haraway, Mutu’s figures revel in boundary confusion. As such, they dispel the utopian ideal of a whole, self-possessed body. This ideal is frequently associated with a modern Cartesian humanism centered on wholeness that underscores science fiction, a genre with which Afrofuturism finds kinship and comes to play in Mutu’s work.4 But where Haraway’s theorizations of the cyborg neglect an explicit examination of race, the figures in Mutu’s collages assail racialized dimensions of female humanity by critically emphasizing how black female bodies are seen and acquire mean- ing. And rather than a hopeful dream, Non je ne regrette rien excises the black female body as a privileged signifier or site of identification for black female subjectivity; Mutu’s black cyborgian female figures are perpetually uneasy, undone. In addition to posthumanism, because of the joining of racialized and gendered bodies with techno-mechanical parts Mutu’s work has repeatedly been considered Afrofuturistic. Since its coining, Afrofuturism has been considered a revisionist discourse in which racialized and gendered bodies in the past, present, and future use technology to new reparative ends. Bringing the discourses of posthumanism and Afrofuturism into direct engagement to ana- lyze Mutu’s collages posits new conceptions of subjecthood relative to race, gender, and sexuality. Other than mentions of race as a system of domination and a call for intersectional feminist scholarship that contends that race, gender, sexuality, and class are not mutually exclusive, Haraway stops short of directly dealing with the implications of race in relation to the cyborg in her manifesto.5 As a result, Tricia Rose questions the usefulness of the cyborg as both an imaginary and a political formation for black women in the portion of her interview with Mark Dery included in Flame Wars: The Dis- course of Cyberculture (1994). Rose notes, “I’m not troubled by the cyborg as an imaginary, but by the fact that it’s almost impossible for the average young woman to see herself as a person who could take up that much social space” (Tricia Rose qtd. in Dery 1994, 216). 6 Tiffany E. Barber According to Rose, the cyborg’s possibilities are too fantastical to func- tion in actuality; the average (black) woman, presumably unmotivated by or unaware of such possibilities, cannot imagine herself as such a transgressive figure. Here, Rose dismisses the potential for ‘the average young woman’ to possess agency in radically new ways, and in doing so, she refuses to ac- knowledge the transformative power of the cyborg. Furthermore, Rose wor- ries that Haraway’s theorizations of the cyborg reinforce gendered dynamics of technology in which machines are signifiers of an “impregnable masculin- ity,” while flesh is coded as feminine (Tricia Rose qtd. in Dery 1994, 217). Finally, Rose contends that previous conceptualizations of femininity do not allow for racialized and gendered subjects—namely black women (Rose in fact posits herself as an example)—to exhibit power and aggression without being perceived as masculine. Mutu herself regards her visually disturbing and disruptive collages, which picture complex, fragmented, and exaggerated black female bodies, as a way to “question the relationship between resilience and compliance,” between agency and victimization (Wangechi Mutu qtd. in Murray 2005, 8). Indeed, much of the critical response to Mutu’s collage practice situates her work within a redemptive paradigm. Within this paradigm, agency and resistance are linked with transcendence and transgression, despite the overt ref- erences to deviance, disease, and disfigurement that populate her collages. As such, Mutu’s work is often summarily praised for what critics consider to be its staging of hybridity and multiplicity as modes of resistance; her figures are understood as adaptors and adaptations that tack back and forth between danger and reclamation, mutations of normalized ideals of femininity, beauty, and sexuality. I propose, however, that Mutu’s collage practice results in something more alarming, more disturbing than this drive toward reparative resistance. Rather than claiming that Mutu’s images picture repaired or reas- sembled bodies, I locate Mutu’s work within discourses of posthumanism and Afrofuturism to depart from them. What other ways can we read Mutu’s collage practice? Can the feminist theorizations that shore up discourses such as posthumanism and Afrofuturism allow us to think of Mutu’s collages as repetitions of fragmentation, and further as representations of anti-healing rather than of redemption? In this chapter, I offer a close reading of Non je ne regrette rien against the grain of how her work is typically theorized to claim that Mutu’s project is actually to produce dismembered black female bodies. Within this frame- work, Mutu’s Non je ne regrette rien dismantles normative constructions of black female subjectivity and freedom by crafting maimed black female bodies. Additionally, my analysis of Mutu’s use of collage moves away from readings of the artist’s own African origins and fragmentation as a feature of postcolonialism.6 My study of Mutu’s Non je ne regrette rien instead rejects notions of “the body” itself as a locus for identity formation. 7 Cyborg Grammar? 7 To set up this approach to Mutu’s work, I read the figure at the center of Non je ne regrette rien alongside the protagonist in Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred to bring new considerations to a relation between historical and discursive violence and black female bodies.

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