I. Augustus Durham, "Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius" (Duke UP, 2023)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome, everybody, to the New Books in African American Studies. My name is Darius Carter. I'm Associate Professor of Africana Studies at UMass Boston. Today, I'm joined by Dr. I. Augustus Durham, and we'll be discussing his book, Stay Black and Die on Melancholy and Genius, published by Duke University Press. Dr. Durham, welcome to the pod. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, and thank you for having me, Dr. Carter. Do you want me to call you Dr. Carter?

You can call me Darius. What about you? You can call me Augustus. That's fine. Wonderful. All right. So, Augustus, tell us who you are, where you're from, what you're doing. So I am Augustus Durham. I'm an assistant professor of English at the University of Toronto. And I am originally from Toronto.

Connecticut, born and raised, but did my PhD work at Duke University and then did a postdoc at the University of Maryland College Park as a president's postdoctoral fellow before working in New York and then transitioning to work in Toronto. So you have gifted us this really stunning and layered experience.

And at times, deeply, deeply reflective books, Stay Black and Down. I'm very curious to know how you came to the project. Like, what is the story of this book? It's kind of a roundabout story. So some background. In the PhD program, you have to take these exams ahead of becoming ABD or all but dissertation students.

And so when I took my exams, you have a major field and two minor fields. And so my major field was like African-American literature from like 1865 to the contemporary. And then my two minor fields were something like psychoanalysis and affect. And then maybe I think maybe something about black feminism or something to that to that effect.

But all that to say, when I originally got to my Ph.D. program, my dissertation was going to be about black men and their relationships with the with the divine and how that actually engendered melancholy. But in preparing for my exams, a couple of random things happened that kind of set me on the course for a stay black and die on melancholy and genius. So one thing was, as I was preparing for my exams for the major exam, I.

A memory returned to me from my childhood where when I was a child, when I would say to my mother, I need X, my mother would say to me, almost always, all you need to do is stay black and die. So I thought that was really interesting in part just because it's such a kind of odd thing to hear a parent say to a child, also knowing that it's a colloquialism that exists throughout black culture.

Um, and so I knew that since I was interested in melancholy, that that was an interesting way to kind of enter me into the conversation I wanted to have about melancholy. And again, thinking about Black men and Black male authors and their relationships with the divine. Um, but what, as I was reading that year in, in advance of my exams, um, some interesting things happened that set me on the course for the book.

So one of the things was I had read Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. And there's a moment earlier in the book where he's talking about how the colonized go to the metropole. And he says something to the effect of you go to the metropole, you see Paris and die. So I was thinking, oh, that's like, you know, just stay black and die, see Paris and die. You know, that's kind of quirky, I guess.

And then I was reading St. Clair Drake and Horace Caton's Black Metropolis, but particularly the introduction brought by Richard Wright. And near the end of the introduction, he references the Book of Job and having gone to seminary before going to Duke for my Ph.D.,

I remember that in the book of Job, there's one where Job's wife says to Job, curse God and die. So I was like, oh, that's like a really interesting thing. Like stay black and die, see Paris and die, curse God and die. Something about this seems interesting to me around what I'm thinking about with melancholy. Like there has to be some kind of connectivity that exists between these things.

And so I actually wrote my three exams with those titles. So the first, the major exam was Stay Black and Die. Second exam was See Paris and Die. The third exam was First God and Die. And then you see, pass your exams. I made me B. And then again, chance encounter. I am on my way back to Durham after I think the Christmas holiday thing.

And, and the many of my thoughts come when I'm in transit, you know, kind of like free associating, which probably puts you in mind of like Sarah Servanak's book, Wandering.

Um, and so, um, I'm headed back to Durham on a mega bus and I had an epiphany like, oh, you know, you've written all of this work recently about like in the last three or five years, two or five years, you've written like four or five papers about Frederick Douglass. Like what's, what's going on there? Um, and again, Frederick Douglass would have been someone that I would have written about with regards to the divine, because in the first autobiography he does, you know, near the end of it, he does a whole kind of riff about Christianity and that kind of thing.

But the through line for those Freddie Douglas papers was that I had written consistently about his relationship to his mother. And so then I thought, oh, well, maybe this conversation about black male authors in the divine, it could be a generative one, but maybe there's something else going on around the mother, particularly because Stay Black and Die is something that my mother said to me. And at least with Curse God and Die, that's something that a woman is saying to her husband.

And so then the object really kind of emerged from there, like thinking about still melancholy in black men, but how that melancholy might be read through their relationships with their mothers. And then also how if that melancholy is generative of something or enable something, it could be something that we might call genius. Yeah.

So that's really how the project emerged. And then, you know, again, you write the dissertation and it transforms and shifts all the more. But yeah, that was really the kind of foundation for the book. Wow. Thank you for that. So you've got, you've got, I don't want to call them case studies. You've got these figures, this quintet, right, that you used to arrange this gorgeous project.

How did you come to these folks? Like, tell us who they are and what pulled you towards them for this project? Yeah. So in a way, kind of, they also happened by accident. So like I said, I was en route to Durham and I realized that I'd written like three or four papers about Frederick Douglass. So he kind of emerged by way of epiphany.

So for what's worth, the chapters are Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Marvin Gaye, Octavia Butler, a character in Octavia Butler's short story, Bloodchild, and then Kendrick Lamar. So...

So yeah, Frederick Douglass kind of emerges kind of as an epiphany. Marvin Gaye had been in my head for a really long time, particularly because I have very, very vivid childhood memories of listening to him with my father while watching the VHS of Motown 25. This is a story that I have shared with others. And so he's kind of been in my head probably since I was a child. The other three people, though, kind of were a bit more random.

Ralph Ellison really emerged by accident because I originally planned to write about Richard Wright. Really write about Black Boy. And again, like these relationships with the mother, particularly the opening scene of Black Boy where he burns the, almost burns the house down and he's beaten and in the midst of what

It's almost kind of like a comosso state in the wake of the beating. He talks about having dreams of clouds like cow hunters. So, you know, like what's going on around the feminine and, you know, and that kind of thing. And then also another moment in the in the narrative where he writes a short story. I believe I believe it's called The Hounds of Hell's Half Acre or something like that.

And a teacher, a female teacher reads it. And I think if I recall, enters it into a contest and he wins. But he ends up getting in trouble with his grandmother, if I recall, because the word hell is in the title. Right. So kind of lost in genius kind of thing. So suffice it to say, I had planned to write about Richard Wright. My committee said to me, go off and read, read.

in advance of writing and then, you know, go write. And so I thought, oh, well, I'll go read some Ralph Ellison, in particular Richard Wright's Blues, which he writes about Richard Wright. And read Richard Wright's Blues. And I was like, let me just go read some more. And again, read some more Ellison. And then I read his essay, The Little Man at Chia Station.

and thought, oh, if I'm thinking about men and the women in their lives, mothers, mother figures, actually, maybe I don't have to write about Richard Wright. I can write about Ralph Ellison because it seemed germane to me also just because of the opening of Invisible Man, that kind of thing. So that's how Ralph Ellison emerged. Again, by accident, I really wanted to write about Richard Wright. Octavia Butler is actually in the dissertation.

And the kind of compulsion to write about her was in part because in the dissertation, the original chapter that I have her in was actually a hybrid chapter where I was thinking about the notion of the potential mother. So I was reading and it was like a potential mother and they're in their relationship to the law. And so I the chapter was half about a.

a legal case around Alice Kip Rhinelander, a kind of really interesting case about this woman who could pass, who buried this white man and...

There's questions about whether or not he knew she was if she was black, they annulled the marriage. And then this court case happens and she exposes herself. And also then I again, because it was a chapter about potential mothers in the law, I put that beside Octavia Butler's blood child, which is a story about what she calls her pregnant boy story. So Octavia Butler had been there before.

but by the time it came time to write the book, I decided to, and I had taken the legal case out and put in another, um, object. I was, I had to put in, um, still thinking about the law. I had put in, um, Howard Thurman, the theologian, Howard Thurman, um, beside her. Um, but, um, in advance of, uh, I should say after getting the book contract, I decided that since everything else was single chapter, that it made sense to do a single chapter, um,

chapter. So that's why Activia Butler is there. But I think Activia Butler is also there because, you know, again, it's all men. And then there's a Black woman who's writing about something that's in line with the work. But also, she, to me, is kind of like the pivot of the book, because it is in chronological order. So she really kind of is the pivot between the 70s and early 80s with the Marvin Gaye, and then the contemporary with Kendrick Lamar.

The other part of it, too, that I think is in her importance is that she actually kind of helps me to engage a kind of subtle critique of the gender wars of the 80s, especially given that in my mind, she actually is engaging in gender trouble before Judith Butler by way of the short story.

And then the last chapter, Kendrick Lamar, also kind of happens by accident. I originally thought I only wanted to write a four chapter book, but my editor said, you know, consider maybe a five chapter book. He had heard me give a paper on Kendrick Lamar at a conference. And so although the book manuscript had been done, he said to me, I said to him, oh, you know, it's done. But I know you had mentioned possibly Kendrick Lamar chapter. I can do it, but I would just need a little bit more time because at that point it was kind of really in an article.

And so he said, take the time you need, do it. And so Kendrick Lamar really emerges as like the most contemporary figure in the book. To my mind, I thought a five chapter book was going to be way too long. And I originally thought that when handing in the manuscript that they were going to cut a chapter, but they ended up keeping all five.

So that's really how they all emerged. Again, like Douglas and Gay had kind of, I kind of knew I was going to talk about them. And especially given that in both cases, there is a kind of religious undertone to the narratives that they share. But yeah, Ellison kind of happens by accident. Butler was there in a different form. But then I kind of reimagined it and made it a single chapter story.

And then Kendrick Lamar was really kind of by compulsion, but also to kind of round out a contemporary figure for the book. So the book spans the 19th century to now.

Oh, that's fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. I'm like, let's step back for a second because I've really loved to hear you talk about blues, blackness and melancholy. Right. Like how are you using these three terms, these three ideas and putting them in conversation with genius?

And I guess it's not even that there's three on one side and then genius on the other. But I guess I'm interested in these four parts kind of, you know, stewing together in your project. Could you work us through that formulation? Hey there, Ryan Reynolds here. It's a new year and you know what that means. No, not the diet. Resolutions.

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Rules and restrictions may apply. Yeah, for sure. Hopefully it won't be too long-winded. So basically, I guess the starting point would be this quote by Albert Murray, cultural critic Albert Murray, who says, the Negro invented the blues.

Europeans admitted psycho psychoanalysis, you invent what you need. And so because the book is interested in melancholy, certainly psychoanalysis is there. But I felt like that phrase was an interesting way to kind of enter into the conversation that I wanted to have in the book, which is to say that, you know, the analogy would be that European is to cycle. The European is psychoanalysis, what the Negro is to the blues. Right.

And so then in those ways, the blues and psychoanalysis are kind of have a similar import for the two parties. And so for me, that phrase, but then also Albert Murray referring to what he calls the blues idiom, which to me, again, kind of takes on an affective posture.

where he basically is arguing that, you know, it's the move from the blues to blues music. The blues being, and he really, he actually will say melancholy, despair, sadness to blues music, where he says, you know, basically onlookers think that the New Yorker is about to cry when he's about to perform, but he's actually about to have a good time. So even that kind of parallel around

crying in a good time, you know, seemed to me germane to what I was thinking about with genius. So, you know, because I take up psychoanalysis in the book, and in particular Freudian psychoanalysis, I'm really kind of trying to play around with what would it mean for me to think about Freud in the blues idiom.

And so what that then means is that, and especially given that by way of psychoanalysis, his reading of melancholy really kind of undergirds some of my thinking with regard to the notion that like the melancholy that one experiences is by way of the loss of the love object who he would read and other analysts would read as the mother. Right.

So again, my preoccupation with Black men and their mothers, even my own understanding of my relationship to my mother by way of this quote. Again, that kind of Freudian psychoanalysis is helpful. But at the same time, because I'm trying to work through what it would mean to think about Freudian psychoanalysis or Freud himself as being read through the blue's idiom, what that then means is that I'm trying to work through what it would mean for me to lose him, to lose Freud in the work.

And so throughout the book, it's not as if I am throwing him away, per se, although one can make the case that I am. But really what I'm trying to do is if if, again, this analogy stands up that, you know, the Negro invents the blues, Europeans invent psychonauts as you invent what you need, then in some ways I can make the case that that the Negro loosely understood.

blacks, the black, you know, whatever, is thinking psychoanalytically, even if that language is not being used in various forms of work.

And certainly then this becomes all the more important to me by way of Frederick Douglass because in the book I basically argued that before psychoanalysis even emerges as an idea, as an episteme, and for that matter, even before Sigmund Freud is born, Frederick Douglass is already speaking in a psychoanalytic register in 1845 and 1855 in his biographies. And for that matter, even in the kind of prologue to the book, Echo,

I also argue that a lot of Equiano is thinking in a psychoanalytic frame.

You know, literally something he says about his mother ahead of being sold into the slave trade literally syncs up with something that Freud will say about his mother. This notion of like being one being one's mother's favorite would make one a conqueror. So, you know, as I think about blues, blackness and melancholy, I'm kind of trying to and here in the book is where I assert that I played the dozens.

So I'm kind of trying to manipulate psychoanalysis in a kind of blues idiom to kind of fit the argument that I want to make. At the same time, I'm also saying, you know, again, someone like Frederick Douglass or, you know, even someone like Ralph Ellison, who we pretty much are assured probably read some Freud. You know, Marvin Gaye, you know, that all these people are thinking psychoanalytically, even if they're not.

fully aware of who Sigmund Freud is or Jacques Lacan is, or, you know, Melanie Klein, you know, right. Um, but also that then what I think emerges is that because, uh,

these thinkings are products of the West, Western thought, then inevitably what also happens is that these men kind of, I guess the best way to explain it would be these men become reducible to the West and Western thought by the ways in which they engage with these women. Right. So that the women become objects for them toward their,

genius or towards their selfhood or their individuality, their individualism. And I want to sit in the tension of what that might mean. And sit in the tension of what it might mean for Black aesthetics that these men who we regard as heroes have to become heroes oftentimes by making the women in their lives, rendering them nothing. So that when we see these performances of genius

Even if this genius is being read through or being colored by their melancholy, it almost always has to take on the relegating the women to nothing. And so one of the reasons why I opened the book with this memory of my mother is to actually perform not that.

It's to say, like, the book only emerges because of this memory I have of my mother. So that even in the midst of my own melancholy about her passing, I recognize that, like, that thought signals my own genius. Or what might be my own understanding of how I might read genius in others. So I think in those ways, like, blues, blackness, melancholy, it kind of, they're all entangled in that.

In order for me to kind of try to find a way through and sit in the tension of that. And I think the last thing I would say is that, but also in the arc of the project is that I'm basically kind of contending with, especially given like how much of us were like anti-black, you know, proliferates in our lives right now. I'm also kind of trying to sit with

how they're kind of being reducible to certain kinds of Western fault lines might help us to understand their own ambivalences around gender, their own ambivalences around Black women in their lives, which might be read as anti-Black gestures, but also then trying to think through

how we might then realize the faults of how we understand genius so you know like instead of always understanding it being this you know these grand gestures like you know three autobiographies or you know this magnum opus like Invisible Man you know that it could be something as simple as a mother knowing how to read

Um, or someone giving you a riddle. Um, so yeah, you know, I'm kind of trying to wrestle and live in the tension of, of that. Um, which also, you know, in short form, really saying that I'm really kind of trying to live in the tension of sitting with what I've been taught and, and my, my unlearning.

I really appreciate that. Yeah, especially like that, like towards the end of that reconfiguration of genius or something that I hear is like, you know, the far more distributed and quotidian that we might, you know, be willing to recognize in any given moment. But like giving us these reading practices that help tease that up in these different ways. Oh, yeah, that's fantastic.

Yeah. So, you know, let's, let's geek out a little bit in these chapters. You know, you told us a bit about Frederick Douglass. Can we jump right into Ralph Ellison? Oh yeah, for sure. Tell us things about Ellison. Like, you know what, tell us about the archival material that you're pulling together, literary material, like,

What sources did you pull from to assemble this chapter on Ellison? And what is it that you want us to understand about what Ellison's doing? Yeah, that's a great question, especially given that, again, he kind of emerges as an accident. So with Ellison, the Ellison chapter is called Travel Ralph. And so in that chapter, I'm very much interested in reading his work as a kind of travelogue.

to understand you know the women in his life um and so as i stated earlier i i really open it thinking about um the essay the little man at chiao station an american artist artist and his audience um and in particular he opens the essay with a memory about his piano teacher miss hazel harrison at tuskegee um he's there for three years and and drops out um but

The general premise of the story is that he's there training as a trumpeter and he basically has a recital and he fails.

And so he goes to see Miss Hazel Harrison, who has a piano studio in the basement of a building. And and I basically say, you know, to kind of like dress his wounds from this this failure. So she tells him this riddle about the little man at Chiao Station and basically says to him, you know, there's always a little man who knows the music and knows the tradition. But you disregard him because he's only there, you know, like to put the coal in the oven. He's, you know, the coal man.

And so Ellison will go on to say that like that riddle stays with him for the rest of his writing life. But what intrigues me about that riddle, and in particular Hazel Harrison, is that when Hazel Harrison arrives at Tuskegee, she has just been in Germany and flees from Germany basically immediately.

with the rise of the Third Reich. And when Ellison writes about the kind of impetus for "Invisible Man," he says that, "I was thinking about a Negro pilot who gets caught in a Nazi camp." And so I'm thinking to myself, "Oh, like, it's so interesting that that would be the germ of what he was originally thinking about with 'Invisible Man,'" and that basically is Hazel Harrison's life, right? Like, someone who's basically

their endermen you know literally flees with the rise of the reich um so there's that but then there's also the fact that when um ellison writes the prologue to invisible man um you know obviously invisible man lives in this underworld and um in the moment of him smoking reefer you know it's um

he circles down and he starts hearing women in this circling down, you know, that people oftentimes refer to as being almost like Dante's in front of. So here's, you know, a woman screaming, a woman singing. He, at one point he says, who sounded like my mother. But I'm again, at the level of the parallels and the metaphors to me was seemed very interesting that, you know, Invisible Man lives in this underworld. He smokes Reaper. He circles down. He hears women screaming.

In these kind of sonorous ways, even if it sounds like some kind of chaos. And yet what we also recognize is that at the beginning of A Little Man at your station, in the amid failure, he circles down to this basement studio where this woman is playing a basement piano studio where this woman is playing the piano.

So to me, it seemed like Ellison's Invisible Man is, and understandably, when you read the literature, a lot of people say it's not autobiographical. It's not, you know, so there's a cadre of people that would argue that it's not autobiographical.

And so to me, although I kind of tried not to lean into heavily to being autobiographical, if it's what made me autobiographical, I do want to read it as allegorical of perhaps Ms. Hazel Harrison, precisely because of these parallels around Nazi Germany, you know, people and women in basements, sound and noise. But also, you know, again, knowing Ellison,

You know that this and again, this travelogue, because, you know, Ellison is born and raised in Oklahoma, goes to Tuskegee, ends up in New York. But yet at every moment in his life, these women are there fostering the genius. So, you know, again, in Oklahoma, there are these anecdotes he tells about, you know, one year for Christmas, his mother gives him a typewriter.

Again, we have Tuskegee with Miss Harrison. Also in Oklahoma, there's another woman named Zelia Breaux, who was his teacher, who owned a theater, who had these Black women blues singers come through, like Bessie Smith. And Ellison is being exposed to them. So again, we see that even at a really early childhood, he's being exposed to Black women and noise, sound, and

That kind of thing, right? That again emerges in Invisible Man, where again, like, okay, fine, we might make the case it's not autobiographical, fine. But there definitely seems to be some kind of allegorical imputation that we can give to it.

precisely because in each stage of his life, there is sound. And then again, he leaves Tuskegee. He goes to Harlem. He lives under this woman who is like basically like a fledgling opera singer. And he basically wants to argue, could I be mad at her for singing so much given that the singing and the frequency of the singing is suggestive of her desire to hone her craft? And, you know, he's in, in,

She's above him and right outside is a drunk who always yells, who disallows him to be able to type. But when she's up there singing, he can type. So again, like there's something going on about loss and sound, right? And whatever these losses enable among these women in his life. So, you know, like I, I, I try to read pretty closely. Um, little man, she all stationed again, the early parts of, um, of invisible man. But I mean, I would even say, you know, um,

deeper into Invisible Man when we get the character Mary and that maternal figure and you know that bank that he tries to get rid of and every time he throws it out someone's like oh your bank that you want to get rid of and yet it keeps following you so yeah you know with Ellison it was really yeah thinking about travel and you know why is he so preoccupied with women in basements or being under women or you know underworlds and sound

And, you know, how might that be emblematic of of understanding his melancholy and his genius? Even when he's in Oklahoma, there's an anecdote that he tells about he, you know, again, as a plug in a trumpet trumpeter, he wants his horn to sound like black women, blue singers.

Right. So there is something going on around craft and and genius and the black woman so that, you know, it's not just his mother. But, you know, I'm borrowing from from Patricia Collins, these other mothers exist in this life world that I think that in chapter I'm saying impart to him the groove.

Right. So that's the section of the chapter called How Ralph Got His Groove Back. And it's really kind of trying to think about groove and sound and noise and again, like what it means for circling down and being underneath. And, you know, I would say in this chapter, my background, my undergraduate degree is in architecture. So here the architecture kind of

training kind of really comes to the world where I'm thinking about space and acoustics and noise like that. Right. So, yeah, that's the Ralph Ellison chapter again that happens by accident, really. Right. But but, yeah, really is thinking about travel.

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Yeah, absolutely. There's, you know, sound space, acoustics, movement, and even, you know, for me, kind of selfishly, like historical thought.

I think about how early on in the book you cite Elizabeth Alexander, who's referring to the Moan. I think about Michelle Russell, who in Slave Codes and Liner Notes talks about the um associated with Middle Passage. Is it Duke Ellington who did Black, Brown, and Beige?

I was like, yeah, right. So it's like sweeping, right? Like narrative, like black passage of movement and the whole nine all the way down to like OJ's and ship away. Right. So there's something to be said for, um, you know, the very things that you take up in the chapter. I'm not funkadelic in the mothership. Yeah. All the way. Right. Travel, movement, openness, constriction. Yeah. Yeah. Or even, um,

bb king um nobody loves me like my mother and she's jiving too yes like you know like there's something going right you know and i mean and for what you know and even for ralph ellison you know and here is the connectivity between ellison and marvin gaye you know ellison is also going to write you know essays about mahalia jackson no he's a reference you know uh marion anderson even in um

In that short story where I'm mentioning him talking about being a trumpeter when he was a child, you know, living with music, right? So, no, these Black women have some kind of hold on him. So, again, even these perhaps unconscious moments of, say, even the prologue of Invisible Man, it would seem to me that there's some kind of connection going on around the fact that he's hearing blues women sing.

As a child, you know, sitting beside this woman, you know, Zelia Bro at her piano, you know, and, you know, black women are coming through. And then, you know, he's writing about, you know, women in basements who are yelling and, you know, that, you know, that church service where he says, you know, black is and black ain't, you know, the kinds of ecstatic expressions to me are not coincidental.

Absolutely. Oh, that's good. That's good. I'm having like a deep dive back into the system's body of work. That is one of the things I really appreciate about this project is you really make me sit back and think about what I missed, you know, on earlier readings. And it's not, you know,

I don't bemoan it. I'm excited, you know, that this project has given me multiple opportunities to return to works, um,

with a new pair of eyes ears the whole nine right like i sit in my body different you know when i'm combing through these essays now or i am you know curious in a different kind of way about ralph ellison that's not just about invisible man or that mug well what a mug shot that was wrong why have i said yeah you know yeah yes yeah i think i think when he was maybe like a freshman at tuskegee or something like that yeah all the way so you know they're all of these um

new arrangements that I get to bring to the work that I'm really thankful for. And your book is bringing me back to that kind of space. And so, you know, having talked about Ralph and Fred, let's jump into Marvin. Tell our guy. Yeah, all the way. All the way. And so, you know, what would you like your readers to understand about Marvin Gaye in this book?

Hmm. That's a, that's a great, that's a great question. Um, so it's funny, uh, for the Duke press blog, they, you know, as authors, you do like these kind of a press release about the book from the authors on words. And, um, something that I said about the book is that I think in a lot of ways, the book is trying to unpack like hero worship. And of course the complications of that, because in the case of someone like Marvin Gaye,

as I said earlier, you know, this is someone who I had been listening to since I was quite little, you know, and again, and, and, and the memories are very, um, both vivid and, um, and natal. And so far as like the listening happens with my father. Right. So, so there's a way in which like, it's also, you know, there's bonding that happens over Marvin, right. You know, with, with the patriarch. Um, um,

But, yeah, so, you know, in the Marvin Gaye chapter, I'm basically thinking about manliness or what it means to be a man. And my entry point is his record Trouble Man from the Trouble Man film and soundtrack. And really, it begins with me mishearing. So the track begins, I come up hard, baby, but now I'm cool.

When, you know, having heard that song for years, I thought he said, I come apart. But he says, I come apart, right? And so to me, that seemed like a very interesting, you know, the formal term is a mondegreen. But like, it's like a very interesting thing to consider, like, you know, up hard and apart kind of are in conversation and maybe not really. But like, let me see if I can make this work, especially given what we know about his life, you know, again, so.

you know, 1984, his father kills him, you know, again, around a lot of lore about, you know, were they fighting? Was the father being abusive to the mother once again? Another kind of thing. But I guess, you know, again, in light of me mentioning hero worship, I mean, I guess what I want to say and what I want people to leave the Marvin Gaye chapter with is that it's a couple of things. I mean, on the one hand, knowing the story,

The melancholy that I think resides with me about him is that I think that it's totally possible that he was never going to make it. Like the nature of that trauma at such a young age, there was, you know, if only for being in a different place at a different time, perhaps. But it's almost like the beginning of the life sets the stage for, and especially given, again, as I talk about in the book, you know,

He's born on April 2nd. It's Palm Sunday. He dies on April 1st, April 4th. I mean, all of the I mean, all the very kind of uncanny things about the life, you know, again, April 2nd, 1939, Palm Sunday. Marian Anderson gets up and sings at Lincoln Memorial, Lincoln, Miami, excuse me, on April 9th, Easter. I mean, you know, all of these very, you know, so he's born, you know, during Passion, the passion.

You know, he dies, you know, all that kind of stuff, you know, seemed to me to be, you know, haunting, haunted me, you know, once you begin to, you know, but yeah, you know, it's as if, you know, knowing these things, it's like, you know, like, even with the under guys, like a certain kind of literature, like, you know, like, he was born, you know, under, you know, he was born to you to be crucified.

But I think the other thing is that I think knowing the life, I'm really trying to unpack performances of manhood. And precisely because, again, knowing the history, you know, the house that they grew up in is his father's a pastor and the father runs the church through that house. But that's also the site of severe abuse, in particular, physical abuse.

That the way he narrates it seems to border on some sexually weird and peculiar things. This is also the site, you know, it's a church, it's a house. It's also the site where the father is cross-dressing. Marvin himself will say in private moments, I also engage in these acts. And again, there's a wealth of, you know, secondhand information around, you know, from people in Motown who are like, you know, who's wearing wigs, who's wearing, all this kind of stuff. Right.

Um, and so I'm, I'm trying to work through performances of masculinity and how within those performances, we actually can encounter trouble. And so for me, the fact of Trouble Man at the level of him, his, his execution of it being primarily in his falsetto outside of these random moments where he screams in his chest voice seemed to me to be a way that he's working through precisely that kind of trouble. Um, it's,

you know, consciously or unconsciously interesting homages to say Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson, who you will say he has, he feels kinship with. And certainly, you know, again, because of that, then Spiller's, fortunately, Spiller's work, Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe an American Grammar Book becomes really important to me precisely because, you know, she's going to make inroads for me around both like the grammar, right?

But also what it means to say yes to the female within. Right. So, yes. So, you know, I think so I think with Marvin Gaye, it's really trying to sit with and that's why it's called man, man, right.

both man as in, you know, the noun, but also man is the verb, you know, what it means to man these things, right? And how they themselves can enact kind of trouble. What I'll also say, and then I'll be quiet, is that to me, the way the book is formatted, when I originally thought about writing it, I didn't do this, but

Again, I'll share it here, but like originally the first two chapters, I was going to call in love, like clump them as in love, in part because I think that the first two chapters kind of engaged in the kind of sentimentality. So, you know, given the Douglas chapter in the 19th century, you know, these kinds of tropes that exist around certain kinds of literature that exist in that time.

But I would say the latter half of the book, the Marvin Gaye, the Octavia Butler, the Kendrick Lamar, I would have pumped under the title In Trouble. So In Love and In Trouble, also playing on Alice Walker's short story collection. Because I think that coming out of Ellison and into Marvin Gaye, Octavia Butler, and Kendrick Lamar, I'm really pressing into gender and performance.

And again, the kind of trouble that emerges when we really unpack these performances. And again, Marvin Gaye to me is the perfect entry point precisely because of, again, this falsetto and this belting thing. But also because we recognize that he is wrestling with, even by way of his own last name, he's wrestling with.

gender. He's wrestling with masculinity and femininity and him calling it hot stuff. And what it means for him to engage in hot stuff, even though he also will say that it's like evil. Yes, I'm very much trying to think through masculinity and performances of masculinity and how even in those performances, there's a way in which he also still can emerge

in the cultural lore as a kind of sex icon, sex idol, you know, despite this kind of other side of him that people do and don't know about. Some do know, but don't, right? And don't know about the guys that, you know, he maintains this veneer. So yeah, that chapter is really more about performances of masculinity and the kind of troubles that it can bring. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ooh, thank you for that. I'm like, you know, I...

I've been hanging out with this chapter quite a bit, which, you know, we've discussed. And also there's so many like personal annotations in the margins where I feel deeply implicated as a reader in the best way to write. And also like more of this, more of this. In part because, yeah, they're, you know,

Marvin is a beloved figure, you know, and there's still so much more that we have to unpack about him, his relationship to women, to girls, to gender, you know.

Like all of it. And so, yeah, this chapter felt like a really wonderful invitation to just kind of hang out in the messiness, you know, of this soul man that really, you know, stays a kind of persistent part of our cultural imaginary. And so, you know, you move us from Marvin into the work of Octavia E. Butler and...

Where do you want us to go with Butler's work? I mean, yeah, Butler. I mean, I often say about Butler, the thing about that chapter that's so interesting is that Bloodchild in and of itself is such a kind of fraught piece of work because she's putting a lot of things on the table that in any other circumstance she probably would feel really black and white about.

Talk to him. Uh-huh. Yep. And yet, you know, we kind of emerged from the end of it like what just happened. So as I was saying, you know, Butler to me kind of actually allows me to kind of engage in some gender theory, especially given that I opened the chapter thinking about Alice Walker's idea of womanist women.

And the womanish. And so I kind of am trying to work through, given that Butler's short story is about a pregnant boy, you know, and again, a kind of woman of her own, her own imagination. Given that, you know, that's the premise of the short story. Basically, I'm kind of trying to work through the possibility that a little boy could be womanish. Over and against the prevailing understandings of these women.

thoughts in these thoughts, these quote unquote thoughts. And so, you know, again, the general premise of the story is that this family, the Terrans live on a planet called Preserve. I'm just saying the Terrans are humans, generally speaking. And that they have this kind of ambivalent relationship with these aliens, the T'Lik. And basically one of the main aliens, T'Gatoi, is the

Both like aunt, other mother, family friend, lover, loosely understood because of the way that she kind of navigates, right? Protector, but also antagonist for this family. And one of the reasons why she remains present is because she needs Terrans, these humans, to carry aliens to proliferate the species.

And so I'm working through, again, the melancholy in Jesus that in part because throughout the story, the main character, Gan, who is the pregnant boy, is pregnant.

experiencing Ticketoy, but also experiencing Ticketoy in close proximity to his mother. And the fact that his... Leanne. And the fact that his mother... And he's working through the ambivalence of this woman is a kind of enemy to the family, but also a friend, you know, a family friend. And she does all this stuff in our house. And yet...

you know, it is as if we have no, no power until we learn that this mother and the father really have harvested in the house guns, which, which the spear precisely because the guns can kill them. And they're in essentially like in the species. And so to me,

that the melancholy and genius of it is that both Gan experiencing the loss of his mother in the face of this family friend, who's also an enemy, who, you know, is using these people in order to proliferate the race. At the same time, she's also giving them protection. This is what I mean when I say, like, it's a fraud, because you're kind of like, you know, also Gan is a child, Tigatoy is an adult, so you know that there's some weird...

kind of incest um um and all the more because Gan's father carried Ticketoy like carried the Ticketoy and you know Ticketoy now needs you know her brother

who's also like her child, who could also be her lover, right? You know, like it's all this, you know, all this stuff. But at the same time, you know, to me, what's interesting about the work, and again, any number of people have written about this, including Carla Holloway, you know, is that, you know, Butler will say this is not a slave narrative. And yet the tropes themselves seem to be very much in line with that, right? And again, around these notions of gender and gender trouble, and again, the law, right? Because Tigger took as protector, right?

is a kind of a lawgiver. And so what happens before and after the law, for me, is very intriguing around these notions of melancholy and genius, especially because the story story begins with the last day of my childhood began with a visit home. So we're entering something in the middle. There's a prehistory to it, and then there's this kind of after, this afterword to it. But suffice it to say, I think

that Butler is important because again, like it's that interesting eighties, nineties moment where gender wars are really ratcheting up. And, you know, it's the rise of womanism. It's the rise of like that kind of second to third wave feminism that's happening. Right. You know, and people are making a lot of different cases around gender and the fluidity and, and, and, and strictness of it. And having this story, pregnant boys, we have, you know, Hey,

Alien who has a tentacle that could be a phallus, right? You know, like, you have all of that happening at once in the 80s before, again, before Gender Trouble is even published, right? And so I'm very much interested in Octavia Butler as theorist and also how this short story can actually help us understand both, like, again, the kind of quandary of gender, but also, you know, how

through her own imaginative act, she actually engages in this kind of melancholy and genius, both at the whim of her imagination, which again, the whim of her imagination actually emerges from a fear, right? But also how it might be interesting to understand that amid these kinds of silos of thought, like womanism, like feminism, like all these kinds of things, that perhaps we are arriving at a place where

even if it's science fiction, that we're arriving at a place where we recognize that some of these things we want to hold so dearly to actually aren't capable of actually addressing even something like the imagination. So trying to kind of work through that, you know,

So that the latter half of the book is really in trouble. We'd be in trouble if the strictness of these categories, and that's not meant to be totally reducible to some of the categories. These things have waves and they're whatever. But the strictness that we give to these categories might actually inhibit things that are happening on the ground that actually counter

that right and certainly again as I'm thinking about the 80s and the early 90s and the gender wars you know again like although and it's funny because in another conversation I had with C. Riley Snorton

I was asked about this chapter and in particular, like, you know, the fact that in many ways, again, before even the the the kind of cultural category really emerges as a cultural category. No, then in many ways, Gant is actually trans. Right. And I say, like, oh, Butler doesn't use that language. And so I don't impute that to the story. It's intriguing to me that a pregnant boy does exist in her and her writing world.

Right. And that also given that it exists in her writing world, there is a way in which like that existence itself is quite normal. Right. You know, that it is that it is a necessary category that exists in the preserve in order for the speech to continue. Right. And so, again, although it's science fiction, again, I'm really kind of trying to press into these constructs of gender.

And again, coming out of Marvin Gaye where you have cross-dressing, actually now you have a boy who's pregnant. So we're more and more towards these gender things and these concepts around gender that, again, might mean that the epistemes and the silos may be inept or inadequate now to address

you know, even something like the imagination. Absolutely. Oh, wow. So we've now like, you've made these moves, right? We've gone through these four figures and we're now taking all of this information that you provided with us and thinking about Kendrick. Okay. Like I think that my first read of the book, this was the chapter where I had to pause for a minute.

There are a few moments early on where I pause as a reader, but that's in part because I was like, well, I need to go read some notes. I need to go read a couple of things again and then come back in. And then with Kendrick, I still can't explain why I approached that chapter with such trepidation. Because it's not like I'm a Kendrick standard or hold on. I was like, where do we get like, how do I reconcile this?

Know what you said about these other you know these other four with Kendrick and so it felt so far removed for me. And then I started reading and I was like, well, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. So all this is to say, because, you know, listeners were reading there with me and we didn't talk about it. Yeah.

Can you tell us about the inclusion of Kendrick in this project? Like, you know, it seems like such a timely inclusion, especially given what's transpired since the publication of your book and like, what an excellent decision. And of course, I would not have known that that was going to happen this year, right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, you know, again, Kendrick Lamar, again, had been someone who had been...

I would say not in the same way, but Kendrick had kind of been in my head the same way that Marvin Gaye had been in my head from my childhood. Because Kendrick Lamar drops to Pimp Butterfly right smack dab in the middle of my PhD work. Surprise album. Oh, thank you.

Um, and so, um, but the thing about the Kendrick Lamar piece that was important to me at least was, and again, we see this with the rise of a lot of things, you know, like it was like the lemonade effect where the immediacy of the album meant that people had something to say about it right, like that night or that day. Um, but for me, I felt like I needed some time to sit with it a while before I could kind of come fully to what it was that I wanted to say, um, about the project.

Um, and so to your point, again, this is the intro piece. So, you know, it's Marvin Gane cross-dressing, it's Gann as pregnant boy. And then here in the chapter, it kind of is, it's a bit of like, uh, and when I use this term, it's not to say that I necessarily am overly, uh, wound up about it, but basically it feels to me, this chapter feels like a kind of way of thinking about like the Anthropocene. Only so far as like, uh,

I'm trying to work out if it's possible that Kendrick Lamar is a butterfly. Again, species.

But suffice it to say, you know, I think about To Pimp a Butterfly and basically I'm working through whether he's a pimp or a butterfly. Certainly, you know, like I can kind of, again, playing the dozens, think about the fact of him being a Gemini. So, you know, there's this notion of the two-ness and the split when, you know, that kind of thing. But also, given that I'm thinking about To Pimp a Butterfly, I thought it would be necessary to pair it with the literary text in order to kind of help to kind of both keep it

in the same kind of vein of the other chapters, even with, you know, we're reading David Ritz's Divided. So, you know, so there is a text there. I also like to pair the sonic with something that might be textual.

And so because I'm thinking about whether or not he's a pimped butterfly, flight is very, very important to the chapter. And so I pair the tracks that I'm thinking about in Pimped Butterfly with Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. And again, these are just a flight and again, manliness and that kind of thing. But they're really, you know, that the chapter is really thinking about love. Yeah.

especially given that Kendrick Lamar is thinking a lot when he does his press tours about how can I use my career, how can I pit my career towards helping people, the song I, the choruses I Love Myself, as said to the Izy Brothers, Who's That Lady, and again, my move to say I am that lady. But yeah, and to Ben Butterfly, it's

the four tracks that I'm thinking about, um, there's a running thematic in there around this character named Lucy. Um, generally speaking, Lucy is understood to be Lucifer, but I'm also interested in Lucy being the oldest fossil found in Ethiopia in the late seventies, Lucy, so-called Dinkanesh. Um, and so, um,

And again, also the fact that at the end of I, he references Ethiopia and Nuggets that, you know, like that, that he is Africa has some kind of resonance in his head, especially also because before Japan butterfly, he goes to South Africa, you know,

these kinds of you know very bald winning and you know like i left and i came back yes it's like that you know ellison too you know ellison you know all these people travel right you know um barb and gay you know it's been like oh he dies right um right um so um so yeah thinking about whether he's a pimp or a butterfly in flight um but again you know

Kendrick Lamar too, you know, I focus on the album, but I also focus on the music videos and again, kind of read them alongside Morrison. But you know, the music videos are very psychoanalytic, right? So it is the treatment for you and he is standing in front of a mirror and it's, it's, it's the

the mirror phase right you know like very Lacanian in those ways right it's the mirror phase you know the notion of him splitting his voice as the split ego you know so engaging in these again Alba Murray you know like the blues you know Kendrick Lamar in a blues idiom you know thinking psychoanalytically but yeah thinking about love and you know or love in quotation marks right but you know to your point

It seems to me, again, unbeknownst to me, you know, that what's been going on this past year and in recent months around him and particularly Drake is really intriguing because I think, and I have said this in other places, that it feels like to me part of what maybe confirms what I'm arguing in the book is that this ongoing beef to me feels like an indictment on...

And in particular, I feel like what Kendrick Lamar is basically arguing by telling Drake, you know, like, you can't use that word, you know, you use that word anymore, right? Is that essentially, in some ways, and I talk about this also in the chapter, that, you know, like, we're dealing in authenticity politics, right? And basically, essentially, what I think Lamar is saying is that, you know, your mother, you don't have a Black mother, so you don't have the right...

And again, here we go. This is something that's covered in the Douglas chapter. You know, this is... And so far as people are kind of, you know, really riled up about these things, you know, this is not really a new...

kind of conversation because, you know, even Douglass is wrestling with, you know, whether or not my intellect comes from my black mother or my white father, this rumor, you know. So it seems to me that even Kendrick Lamar in the 21st century is really engaging in a kind of interesting conversation, you know, that could be read as problematic, you know, that could be read as like, you know, whatever, around

like the nato community uh and that's even with the understanding that like even some of his own pronouncements and uh performances might be themselves problems right um yet you know uh

And throughout his work, the mother is there. On Good Kid, Mad City, the mother is there. Mr. Morale, the mother is there. He's everywhere, right? And so, again, in that mode of melancholy and genius, when he says, I was running for answers until I came home and then mama plays, right? There's something about that that to me seems...

germane to what I'm interested in. And again, of course, not knowing what would then happen in 2024, I feel like what's happening, this beef, confirms, you know, this kind of interesting preoccupation around race and maternity. And again, even if we want to go so far as to say that that move is the offshoot, the love child, for lack of, you know,

of, you know, like part of Secretary Ventrum, right? Like that my Black mother gives me a certain kind of thread that you don't have. Hence why, you know, like, you know, so just literally you are not like us. Yeah. Like literally, right? I think that, like, I think that that's, you know, I think that that's what's at play. Again, like, you know, not knowing what would happen, it to me is really,

I am indebted, I guess, to my editor, right? That it's there because in some ways it really does tie the whole book together because it's like, this is something that's being talked about with Frederick Douglass in the 19th century. And now we've been in the 21st century, these kinds of conversations around raciality and maternity and, you know, who's your mom, you know, all that stuff is still very, very relevant, right?

It is a question of if you can actually love yourself, right? So yeah, that's what my chapter is kind of thinking to him. Yeah. Augustus, thank you so much. What a gift of a conversation and a book. I'm like, it's timeless hell. And I'm just...

I'm really, really thankful for this project and I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. For those listening, I appreciate your questions. Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah. You know, look, we've got many more conversations to have, you know, coming soon, coming soon. But the book again, because I want y'all to buy it and I want y'all to buy multiple copies and gift them. Stay Black and Die on

melancholy and genius um daris carter and i'll see y'all next time thanks again daris appreciate it