What does it mean to encounter black life through the whim of dominant white capitalist culture? What of the other(ed) or premature or damned Hartmans that surely can and have existed? How do we resist pedestals formed only of rubble and black Mass? This raises important questions of how we as black people, living beautiful and wayward and experimental lives, should or will reckon with such work.
Wayward Lives is Hartman’s third book, and commands our attention within the context of the sort of international acclaim that is available to a select group of black people about once every fifteen to twenty years when capitalism and white culture engage black creativity, knowledge and skill in a rare – if only so due to a chronic amnesia – and passionate embrace, a public display of consumption that is sold as affection and keen interest.
You would be hard-pressed to find contemporary radical black thought that is not the inspiration for or confirmation of her literary offerings. Her 1997 book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America, brought whole discourses into being with her urgent and expansive analysis of humanism, empathy and ‘the encumbrance of freedom’ for black people. The brilliance of Hartman’s work is in its wayward reach throughout the diaspora, its dedication to storying black life in relation to specific histories of transatlantic enslavement. How to honour the soft liquid rigour, the sharp vast tenderness, of a writer like Saidiya Hartman? Or, how might we honour any black woman, in all their loud unlovely nuance and careful wholeness?
It is hard to review a book of such gravitas and importance a text that refuses the boundaries we were meant to exist within.
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