Passing

            On Wednesday I spent a lot of time typing out Tuesday’s lecture notes.

            Before leaving for English class I went out to buy a can of beer for later. I headed out 15 minutes later than usual because I still had some writing to do and there was really no point arriving too early since I’d just be standing outside the classroom anyway.

            When our instructor, Scott Rayter arrived he came with a guest lecturer about his age or a little younger. She had tattoos that came out from under her top to her collar, from her sleeves to her wrists and from the bottoms of her pants to the tops of her feet, so I assume they all connected completely underneath her clothing. She put her information up on the screen and her name is Margeaux Feldman and she’s a PHD candidate in English and sexual diversity studies, so though I don’t think she’s one of our TAs, she’s certainly been a TA. She began by telling us that her dissertation explores hideous portrayals of teenage girls in literature and other media.

            She highly recommended a viral video called “Dirty Girls”.

            I watched it later and was surprised by how long ago it was shot but it fits into Margeaux’s area of study. The documentary centers on a group of 13 year old girls in a private school somewhere in the States who were following the Grunge movement and not trying to look attractive according to the mainstream standards. They were given the name “The Dirty Girls” by people that saw them from a distance. The film features interviews with the girls and with students that were critical of them. They also had a zine which they’d circulated featuring art and poetry, some of it Feminist and some deeply personal but a lot of their fellow students thought that was laughable as well.

            Her lecture was on Nella Larsen’s “Passing”. She began by asking, “Why does Irene continue to see Clare?” There is something perverse about Irene’s desire. She is ambivalent.

            The first section of the book is entitled “An Encounter”. What is an encounter? There is an element of aggressiveness to the meaning, of conflict and of meeting in battle. It comes from roots meaning “in” and “against”. There is something charged about the meeting.

            We were asked to do a deep reading of the first two paragraphs. This was mine: Irene’s pile of morning reading is “little” but Clare’s letter is “big”. The letter is a “thin, sly thing” like Clare. It stands out like Clare does and yet she also blends in with her ability to pass as White. The writing on the envelope was “illegible”, meaning hard to read. Clare is hard to read.

Other words are “flaunting” and “furtive” (flying below the radar). The ink is purple. The letter and Clare disrupt Irene’s routine. There is no return address. The letter is all appearance, foreign, excessive, too much, too large. Irene knows right away who wrote it. The letter creates distance.

The stranger is framed as an out of place other that does not belong and is almost not a subject. The stranger might pass as belonging. Irene disliked opening and reading the letter - There is a crisis of reading the other so as to place and mark them. Irene is not a good reader and she knows it. When Irene encounters Clare after ten years and says, “I can’t seem to place you” it’s a crisis of reading. Too remote to seize or define but familiar. A lack of recognition like with the letter. Irene is submissive.

No one is chill about passing. It’s a breach of the social and class orders.

Margeaux quoted Lola Young’s “Fear of the Dark”: Racial passing is a sign of duplicity that threatens to undermine the stability of racial categorization.

Passing is a breach of racial privilege. One can pass into space and buildings. For Irene, passing is a leaving of closeness.

When I looked up Lola Young I found that she’s actually Lady Lola Young and she’s a British baroness.

At the Negro dance a scholarly White friend of Irene’s asks her about the man named Hazelton that all the White women are dancing with and if she thinks he is “ravishingly beautiful”. She says that what the women are feeling is a kind of emotional excitement felt in the presence of something strange and even a bit repugnant. It’s something from the opposite end of the pole of customary notions of beauty. She is really talking about Clare.

Irene talks about people that pass and how one can’t tell by looking. She says that White people could not pass as Negro. In response to that Margeaux brought up the most famous example of a White person passing as Black. Rachel Dolezal for many years passed as Black. She was president of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. Margeaux said that Dolezal had been a professor of Black history and Dolezal herself had put the word “professor” in her profile but she was merely an instructor in Black studies and it had always been a temporary position.

When asked point blank if she was African American she said she didn’t understand the question. She clarified in a later interview that she was not African American but that she identified as Black, though she was born White. In 2016 she published a memoir entitled, “In Full Colour”.

Margeaux showed us a clip from a CNN interview with Dolezal. The heading read “Journey to Trans Blackness”. At age four, when asked to draw a picture of herself she portrayed herself as Black. Her aunt gave her a Black Raggedy Ann doll because she recognized that was what she would prefer. The interviewer compared her to Caitlyn Jenner.

I commented that, in the interview at least, she was honest and did not claim to be African American, but rather that she identified as Black.

Others said that she showed a lack of consideration for her own power and privilege. There’s a difference between appreciating a culture and appropriating it.

Later she changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo. She was later interviewed by Ijeoma Oluo, who was surprised that Dolezal had changed her name to “Nkechi” because that happened to be her sister’s name.

I made the comparison of people with body integrity identity disorder who perceive one or more of their limbs as being alien to their body and suggested that if doing so makes them feel complete, why not let them amputate? So if Nkechi wants to be Black, why not let her be Black?

Diallo has argued that everyone is passing in some way. The response is that universalizing passing is problematic.

Sarah Ahmed says passing is also about passing in or through. Not to pass as White means you could be stopped. Not passing as White is a sensory intrusion.

Sensation denotes a psychological state evoking a strong emotion.

In “Passing” Clare says, “Passing is frightfully easy if you have a little nerve.”

The definition of “pass” is “onward motion, going, moving, carried, drawn, driven, impelled.” The Latin is “Passus”, meaning a step or pace.

Drives are manifestations of desire. Freud says the pleasure principle is a drive to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. For Freud there are two main drives or instincts: The life instincts (Eros) and the death instincts (Thanatos).

Freud observed his 18-month-old grandson playing a game called “Fort/Da (Gone/Here)” whenever his mother was away. He would throw objects into places from which they could not be retrieved and say, “Gone”. Later he saw him toss a spool tied to a string and say “gone” when the spool was out of sight, then when he pulled it back into view he would say “here”. Freud concluded from this that the two drives are fused. Margeaux compared it to swearing off dating not nice people but then continuing to date them in the form of another person.

The stranger is both familiar and unfamiliar. Irene cannot only not read Clare but she can’t read herself either. She is not reason oriented.

Clare is about having and havingness regardless of danger. Clare is the embodiment of passing.

Frenemies can cause high blood pressure.

Freud says we are all ambivalent animals. I can’t find an actual quote in which Freud uses the term but he is said to have borrowed it from another psychologist to indicate the simultaneous presence of love and hate toward the same object. Clare’s death is ambivalent. When you are an element of two worlds you must decide or die.