Michael Abraham

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1993), Toni Morrison calls for “studies of the technical ways in which an Africanist character is used to limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness. . . . Such studies,” she continues, “will reveal the process of establishing others in order to know them, to display knowledge of the other so as to ease and to order external and internal chaos.” In demonstrating the reflexive role that Africanist personae play in white American literature—the manner by which white people construct blackness as a screen for the projections that enable, through simultaneous disavowal and enforcement, their identifications as white—“Such studies will reveal the process by which it is made possible to explore and penetrate one’s own body in the guise of the sexuality, vulnerability, and anarchy of the other” (Morrison, Playing, 53). In other words, the legacy of white American literature is such that the presence of a Black character often tells us exclusively about whiteness, rather than about blackness: knowledge of Black people or of blackness in general serves less as a contrast to the whiteness of the author or of their white characters than as what Morrison terms their “shadow,” an obscuration of the accumulation of contradictory affects—desire and revulsion, identification and antipathy, pity and fear—that grounds and enables whiteness in its literary (and, as we will see, psychic) manifestation. The presence of Black characters, or in Morrison’s language, Africanist personae, thus represents a need in the imagination of the white writer for a textual strategy that will allow the exploration of white identity without having to identify with its internal contradictions and both historical and present violence. The white writer accomplishes this evasion by projecting the psychic material of whiteness onto their representation of a phantasmatic Black body, overdetermining it. This study of Elizabeth Bishop attempts to answer Morrison’s call in Playing in the Dark. Alongside several letters spaced throughout her career, I here read three poems of Bishop’s for their representations of both race and desire, situating desire (and particularly sexuality) in Bishop’s writing as the point of most urgent identificatory instability wherein the sense of a white self is most obviously a projection onto a racialized Other. Across these poems, sexuality constitutes, in Morrison’s language, a situation of “external and internal chaos,” a situation which simultaneously demands the penetration of one’s own body to know it and the disguise of that intimate self-exploration as penetrative knowledge of the racial Other. The first two poems in this essay, “Cootchie” and “Songs for a Colored Singer,” come from the end of Bishop’s first collection, North & South (1946). The third, “In the Waiting Room,” is the first poem in her final collection, Geography III (1976). The arc of my reading neither seeks to charge Bishop with racial animus nor to exonerate her from charges of racial insensitivity. Rather, what I seek to do is to reveal a long movement in Bishop’s thought from the notion of race as merely a marker of otherness to a recognition that whiteness is also a race, that she also occupies a racialized subject position. Such a movement seems like a rather small one on the page, visible only in minor rhetorical and perspectival shifts from poem to poem. My contention, however, is that the identificatory and affective mechanisms that these minor shifts disclose are operative on the deepest levels of self-fashioning, not only for Bishop, but for many white people (myself included) whose politics and lives skew progressive and cosmopolitan according to the standards of their times. More simply, fantasies of desire, broadly construed, offer themselves to many white people as sites wherein repressed racisms of various kinds may manifest.