Haunting and Haunted Queerness: Randall Kenan's Re-inscription of Difference in A Visitation of Spirits

Abstract

Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits isn't your typical novel about African American family and community. A Visitation of Spirits is, in fact, a text that explicitly revises the traditional American gothic novel; its demonic hero seeks salvation from the exorcising church, the heroines are all oppressive, and the only safe haven in the novel is a ruinous, haunted house. As a queer African-American novelist, Kenan performs revisions of the Gothic that prove particularly noteworthy and complex. Kenan uses the genre to reveal the archetypal depictions of racial, sexual, and gendered Others as constructions useful in the production of (white) patriarchal dominance. A Visitation of Spirits repeatedly illustrates how formulations of black identity based upon sexual othering are problematic and how contemporary black refusal to challenge these formulations perpetuates oppression within their community. The text suggests that contemporary black identity is still dependent upon defining and containing bodies marginalized according to sexuality, gender, and colorism. Kenan implies that black selfhood dependent upon policing boundaries between normative and monstrous identity proves oppressive to the Other the self is defined against. Such a definition of black self likewise perpetuates erroneous mythologies of normative identity that inevitably prove destructive for the entire community. A Visitation of Spirits narrates the events leading to and surrounding the suicide of Horace Cross, the text's homosexual protagonist. The novel alternates among Jimmy's narrative documenting the impact his young cousin's death has had upon him, the nightmarish adventures Horace undergoes the night of his death, and Horace's flashbacks to his life in Tims Creek. Briefly, Horace Cross is the youngest member of Tims Creek's founding family. Realizing that his homosexuality dooms him among his family and community, Horace attempts to cast a spell to summon a demon who will transform Horace into a bird.1 The demon, however, takes Horace on a nightmarish tour through his past; the night culminates with Horace's suicide in front of Jimmy. Jimmy's confession is interwoven with Horace's story, and the structure suggests that what we are really reading is Jimmy's own remembrance of Horace's death. Kenan never reveals whether Horace's nightmare with the demon is real or imagined-the text suggests its actuality doesn't matter because the nightmare points to the real, lived horror of Horace's existence among Tims Creek. Through the tragedy and terror of Horace's death, Kenan's novel interrogates the horror of being forced to align yourself with a group that demonizes homosexuality and that defines itself by a singular, stable identity. Horace's memories illustrate that any part of self that departs from the group's concept of its identity is banished into tortured silence,