The Evidence of Things Unseen: Experimental Form as Black Feminist Praxis

Abstract

The Evidence of Things Unseen: Experimental Form as Black Feminist Praxis Shelly Eversley (bio) Few have read the novel central to this investigation of black women’s experimental writing. The imperative to feature this novel is motivated by the absence of black women’s creative and critical contributions to most conversations about experimental literatures, the avant-garde, and about the ways in which black women’s narrative innovations disrupt and challenge linear formulations of knowledge and history that shape the very notion of black humanity and black existence. Carlene Hatcher Polite’s novel Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play (1975) tells the story of Arista Prolo—Sister X—an African American woman, who, the novel’s narrator explains, is deceased and mostly unknown and unremembered: Does it necessarily mean that, because You or I have never heard tell of someone, that this same “someone” has no claim to fame? . . . You are absolutely right about Arista Prolo; that because You never heard tell of the likes of her by no means that You are dumb, a country hick, a super-square, unaware of a superstar-born-over-night . . . please allow me to introduce her posthumously, or to freshen your memories; so that our memories and thoughts are able to collectively move with the same quickness as those of her old friends, who are seated silently and certainly remembering when . . . . [End Page 378] Sister X was a dancer, an exotic dancer, a tiptop tappin’ past master of the art of “interpretive” terpsichore, the darling of the beau-hawg grind, a rubber sole, the chic of shake, Princess Yasmina, Lottie the Body, La Bombie, Broadway Rose, the China Doll, Little Egypt, Alberta, New Caldonia, Alabama Mama (shake it up, shake it down, shake it all over town), all rolled into one. Aw yeah, Good People, the Sister would be doin’ it, doin’ it to death, in fact. But that’s cold, hunh? I mean, considering the fact that she really is dead. (51) This introduction announces consciousness of an extraordinary life buried beneath a history that has obscured it. It calls attention to certain failures of knowledge and it insists that Arista Prolo’s unknown status does not undermine her relevance as a “superstar-born-over-night.” The narrator’s invocation to readers who subsequently join the protagonist’s friends, Black Will and Abyssinia, situates the reconstructed memory of the dead woman as a performance, one in which memories “move.” Initiating a dramatic shift in temporal perspective, the posthumous introduction takes “You” backward in time, to a moment readers do not know, in order to recalibrate their understanding of how the past exists within the present. Philip Brian Harper, in his analysis of abstractionist aesthetics in African American art and literature, describes “a muddled temporality” that ultimately compels the reader to “participate in that figuration” and to “recapitulate its distinctive grammatical engagement, acquiescing in the alternate semantic order that it thereby promulgates” (173). In this context, Polite’s narrative provides an alternative conception of narrative time, one that disrupts and muddles the epistemological stability of a known grammar, and in Harper’s terms, “recruits us to an effectively world-making activity” (173). In Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play, the storyteller positions the friends like mourners at a wake; “seated silently” they witness and participate in the dynamic memories of the dead black woman’s life. The “You” whom the speaker addresses, also shares the friends’ attentions. The narrator’s opening question invites the opportunity for an object lesson about a life to which individual readers, now [End Page 379] friends, become collective witness. “You” and “I” join, shifting from “your memories” to “our memories” that finally sync to the “same quickness” as Arista’s friends’ remembering. For readers, called to become spectators and participants, this remembering is a praxis—movements and positioning—that make Arista Prolo conceptually possible, as if her living continues beyond death. As an experimental form, Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play is far outside the critical expectations for black women’s creativity since African American literary criticism has been plagued by the imposition of realism as the necessary form for telling the...