Untitled
Glenn Ligon

A is for Afropessimism
A dyspeptic variation on Afrocentrism, Afrofuturism, Afronauts and various other “Afro” words.

B is for Black
A child of the civil rights movement, my mother believed that as black people
we would use our natural talents and abilities to rise above adversity.
Paradoxically, she also believed that blackness consisted of habits, not nature,
and most of those that she associated with it were negative. In response to the
“grown acting” of my childhood years she used to say, “Roll your eyes at me again
and I will knock the black off you.” For years I imagined that blackness was like the
shell of a hard-boiled egg, which, if tapped frequently and methodically, could be
peeled away; or that blackness could be scraped off like the surface of burnt toast.

C is for CocoRosie
My mother attributed some of my bad habits to “following what white people do,”
which only added to my general confusion about racial identity. Nowadays,
following white people’s behavior is not an option because there is so little
of it left to emulate. The breadth of this scarcity was made clear to me
when I read a recent article in The New York Times about the band CocoRosie
(“Twisted Sisters,” July 6, 2008). Bianca, one of the sisters who make up the group,
explained that their mom was ashamed of the looks she had inherited from her
Syrian Orthodox mother and Native American father. “Our mom’s a seriously beautiful woman;
she looks like Cher after the surgery, but growing up, she was ashamed of who she was,
”Bianca said. “Nowadays, who would want to be white? But back then, in farm country,
anything other than button-nosed blonde didn’t fly.” While I applaud the sentiment
behind this white flight, I note that it occurs at a moment of increasing black misery
and hopelessness. It would seem that not all forms of disappearance are created equal.

D is for Disney
A more radical instance of disidentification was Sun Ra’s retreat from the category of “human.”
After all, better to be from Saturn than to be from pre-civil-rights-era Birmingham. What Ra did
not give up, ironically, was his love of Disney. Ra’s 1989 album, Second Star to the Right,
is composed of freewheeling versions of Disney classics such as “Some Day My Prince Will Come”
and “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” While some jazz musicians have been drawn to popular music in general,
Ra—with his sense of self-invention and the fantastic—perhaps found a particular resonance
in the gesamtkunstwerk that Walt Disney created at his theme parks.

E is for Elmo
And better to be an alien than unemployed. Actors such as Michael Dorn and Tim Russ as Worf and
Tuvok in Star Trek, Joe Morton as the Brother in Brother from Another Planet, Ahmed Best as the
voice of Jar Jar Binks, James Earl Jones as the voice of Darth Vader, and Kevin Clash as Elmo
have excelled in giving voice to the non-human.

F is for “I Believe I Can Fly”
Rising above the confines of the terrestrial reminded me of another act of levitation I witnessed
at the opening of “Frequency,” an exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2005. Standing in
front of Rodney McMillian’s untitled (2004), an abject piece of canvas with strokes of latex
paint and charcoal that started on the floor and traveled eight feet up the wall, I thought,
“The children believe they can fly.” This is not to say that I haven’t flown too, but the
effortless, Michael Jordan-like virtuosity of the piece and its dialogue with the work of
artists such as Marcel Duchamp and David Hammons left me speechless.

G is for Green
Richard Green burst into seventh grade French class to ask what Voulez-vous
coucher avec moi ce soir? meant. Richard was what my Uncle Tossy called
“a complicated Negro.” Streetwise yet slightly ‘country,’ athletic, yet bookish,
Richard was an anomaly in the overly liberal, predominantly white private
high school we attended. My more wicked classmates would sing Kermit the
Frog’s theme song, “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green,” whenever he walked into
the student lounge. Richard’s outburst in French class became legendary,
although I knew he was simply asking about lyrics from the Labelle song
“Lady Marmalade.” Embarrassed for him and for my people, I told my classmates
that I didn’t know what all that mess was about.

H is for Happens to be Black
Obama, it is said, is a presidential candidate that “happens to be black.”
This is despite the fact that he is biracial and chose to call himself an
African American. I happens to be black too, though I don’t know how it happened.
Because I never felt I was in a position to choose my racial identity,
it never occurred to me that blackness was something that could happen to you,
like being mugged, or winning the lottery. I thought one was just black and that was that.

I is for Invisible Man
I first read Ellison’s novel in high school. The density of the text mirrored
what I thought about black people: that we were a deep people. It was reading that
book that made me think I wanted to be a writer, although when it was first published
not everyone was happy with its depiction of black life. One critic claimed,
black people “need Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man like we need a hole in the head
or a stab in the neck.” Still, that novel was a crucial catalyst
for the use of text in my paintings.

J is for Jerry Lewis
Every Labor Day I would watch his muscular dystrophy telethon.
I wondered what it would be like to have someone raise money for my cause.
What that cause would be, I wasn’t sure. Brooding Negro Syndrome, perhaps?

K is for Krazy Kat
I, too, used to mistake bricks for love.

L is for Ligon!
My mother worked as a therapist’s aide at Bronx Psychiatric Center, a large mental health
facility in the Northeast Bronx. Sometimes, after school, I would meet her at work to go
to the lunch counter at Woolworth’s for grilled cheese sandwiches and ice cream sundaes.
Since the hospital was an outpatient facility, half of the people we ran into on the walk
to Woolworth’s were being treated at the hospital. I would play a game with my mother called
“Patient or Employee,” the object of which was to guess whether the person who shouted “Ligon!”
at my mother as we passed on the street was a mental patient or a co-worker. I was never very
good at this game.

M is for The Many Things She Gave Me
International Children’s Day, a United Nations-sponsored holiday celebrating
the rights of children, was a holiday that my brother and I took very seriously.
Every year on Children’s Day I would ask my mother what presents she had bought for me.
“When you are a parent, everyday is Children’s Day,” she would reply, rolling her eyes.

N is for Negro Sunshine
“Rose Johnson and Melanctha Herbert had been friends now for some years. Rose had
lately married Sam Johnson a decent, honest kindly fellow, a deck hand on a coasting steamer.

Melanctha Herbert had not yet been really married.

Rose Johnson was a real black, tall, well built, sullen, stupid, childlike,
good looking negress. She laughed when she was happy and grumbled and was sullen
with everything that troubled.

Rose Johnson was a real black negress but she had been brought up quite like
their own child by white folks.

Rose laughed when she was happy but she had not the wide, abandoned laughter that
makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine. Rose was never joyous with the earth-born,
boundless joy of negroes. Hers was just ordinary, any sort of woman laughter.”

Three Lives, Gertrude Stein

O is for Oprah
Oprah Winfrey believed her ancestors were Zulus, but they turned out to be from Liberia.
"Oprah, of course, wants to be Zulu. She's announced to the world she's Zulu," said scholar
Henry Louis Gates, who helped her trace her lineage. "Oprah is not Zulu. None of us are Zulu.
There is no African American who comes from the Zulu people."

(“Fascinating look into history, race and DNA”, Oakland Tribune, January 31, 2006)

P is for Proud
James Brown’s “Say it Loud” was released in 1968. When it came on the radio
I could sing the Say it Loud part but I could only whisper, “I’m black and I’m proud.”

Q is for Questions and Answers
I gave a lecture at Princeton where, as an aside during a lull in the question-and-answer
period, I said that black people were going to disappear. Afterwards at the wine and
cheese reception, an elderly woman came up to me to thank me for the talk. “When you said
you thought black people were going to disappear I knew exactly what you mean,” she said,
her face full of sympathy. “I mean you’re just not interesting to us any more.
Now there are Chinese people and Mexicans…”

R is for Race
Childhood crushes: Race Bannon on Jonny Quest, and Racer X on Speed Racer.
Every Saturday morning I would wake up at 6 a.m. to wait for my cartoon paramours to
appear in black-and-white on the old console TV we had in the living room of our apartment.

S is for Shadows
I first saw Warhol’s Shadow paintings at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in 1979.
I remember thinking that it was an awfully big room in which to show paintings of nothing.
Although I never met Andy Warhol I saw him once on the street in SoHo. He was thin, ghostly,
and almost transparent. To make a career out of being fascinated with one’s own
disappearance is quite a feat. I realized that if disappearance could be a subject matter,
I could be an artist.

T is for Tyrone
My brother Tyrone was a year older than I and although we didn’t look alike,
people would often ask if we were twins. When we were in elementary school,
my mother used to give me his secondhand clothes to wear. She stopped doing that
when I told her that wearing hand-me-downs made me feel like “I was not myself.”

U is the United States of Africa
The U.S.A. is where Uhura, the communications officer on Star Trek, was from.
Recently I read that Nichelle Nichols, the actress that played Uhura,
wanted to quit the show after the first season but Martin Luther King, Jr.,
persuaded her to stay on because she was a “role model.” Although I was proud to see
a black person on TV, Uhura annoyed me. In the future, couldn’t black people do more
than just operate the switchboard?

V is for Vulcan
A planet where they had learnt to suppress emotions. I was obsessed with Vulcans
and when I went to Star Trek conventions as a teenager I bought all the Vulcan
paraphernalia I could find. I tried to imagine being a Vulcan, although I knew it meant
that I would have to give up my Richard Pryor and Parliament-Funkadelic LPs and
that was too much of a sacrifice. Also, there wasn’t a black Vulcan until 1995
when the character Tuvok was introduced on Star Trek: Voyager; by that time
I had moved on to wanting to be Jeff Koons.

W is for white
Q. You've seen the evolution from Negro to black to African-American?
What is the best thing for blacks to call themselves?

A. White.

Sociologist Kenneth B. Clark being interviewed for The New York Times.
(“An Integrationist to This Day, Believing All Else Has Failed,” May 7, 1995)

X is for X
When I was in my twenties, I met a member of the Nation of Islam who told me
that since black people took the last names of their masters, we all had slave names.
That was why, he explained, Malcolm Little had changed his name to Malcolm X.
I considered changing my last name to X for a week or so, but decided that it would
involve too much paperwork and it would upset my mom.

Y is for “You feel me?”
You feel me?

Z is for Zulus
I remember when being called a “Zulu” was an insult. When I was very young,
black people didn’t want anything to do with Africa. Ironically, this was after
a period earlier in the century when black people organized themselves around
leaving America and going back to Africa. In the late sixties, black people
rediscovered Africa again, although it was still a mythologized Africa,
an Africa where everyone knew our name. Nowadays everybody wants to be a Zulu,
though we don’t necessarily want to live in Africa.
Being a descendant of a Zulu is enough. Zulu is beautiful.
Now that’s change you can believe in.

 

Glenn Ligon
October 2008