White Faces, Black Hands: Race, Counterhistory, and the Poetics of the Letterform

Abstract

White Faces, Black Hands: Race, Counterhistory, and the Poetics of the Letterform Nikki Skillman (bio) In the opening pages of her book Hollywood Forever (2017), harmony holiday reproduces a handbill the Citizens’ Council of Greater New Orleans distributed in the mid-1960s, when her father’s career as an R&B artist was at its peak. “NOTICE! STOP Help Save The Youth of America DON’T BUY NEGRO RECORDS,” the flyer proclaims, warning that “the screaming, idiotic words, and savage music of these records are undermining the morals of our white youth in America.” holiday’s choice to present a color facsimile of the document without commentary invites readers to examine it closely, while its reappearance in magnified excerpts interspersed among her poems requires us to keep looking at it throughout the book. It is as if, in the transparency of the text’s open hatred, holiday senses that there is more to see, or perhaps an end of seeing—a final inscrutability that is made all the more disturbing by the blandness of the handbill’s visual form. Embodying the ideals of clarity, order, proportion, and functionality that exploded into popular design at midcentury, the New Orleans flyer is set mostly in Futura, the iconically modern, neutral bearing of which credentialed it to appear on the plaque left on the moon to commemorate a mission “for all mankind.” The typeface courses [End Page 359] through Hollywood Forever in the reproductions of the flyer and in the titles of the poems, haunting the book’s interwoven pronouncements on Black celebrity culture at midcentury, white artistic appropriation, racial violence, and subversive Black art. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Back cover of Harmony Holiday, Hollywood Forever (Albany, NY: Fence Books, 2017). On the back cover of the book, Holiday transforms the New Orleans handbill into a substrate for her own inscription, mimicking its layout and typographic style in a superimposed text that dispels the flyer’s auratic power while maintaining its spectral presence. Issued by “HOLLYWOOD AFRIKANS & THE CITIZENS’ COUNCIL FOR REPARATIONS™ HOLLYWOOD, KALIFAS, CALIFORNIA” (Fig. 1), Holiday’s mock handbill urges “BIBLE BLACK” readers to “Help revive Black America from the artless stupor of celebrity culture” and to “BOYCOTT corporate imitations of black music on the radio.” “The screaming mediocre noise on those records,” she writes, “is packaging the suffering of American Africans to sell around the globe in the service of the false doctrine of white supremacy.” Like so many of the poems in Hollywood Forever that incorporate typography borrowed from archival ephemera, Holiday’s parodic graphic maneuver on the back cover of the book suggests that any act of writing involves inhabiting the page as a palimpsest of historical “misuse” (71), as she puts it, where public discourse meets private significance.1 “Call your father and tell him you love him,” she writes onto the document that so menacingly targeted her father and artists like him; “Séance if you have to.” Hollywood Forever demonstrates [End Page 360] that approaching inscription as a cultural practice implicated in histories of oppression and exclusion begets daunting expressive impasses, but letterforms also emerge in the book as formal proxies for repressive orders that the poet can in turn subject to symbolic reconstitution and counterfactual improvisation. Holiday’s allusive uses of marked typography to evoke archival traces of racist history suggest the tendency of letterforms to become racialized through patterns of use. The capacity of typography to accrue such cultural freight lends social and political significance to its manipulation as an element of literary form. Breaking with the prevailing literary “ethic of typographic invisibility” that persisted throughout the twentieth century and into the present, Holiday is one of a number of contemporary poets who deploy “visible” or “marked” letterforms to explore the racial valences of inscription as a cultural institution while also diverging from the experimental typographic practices of the white avant-garde tradition.2 Through visual allusions to the aesthetics of historical pages, these poets sound the depths we perceive, consciously or unconsciously, in typographic surfaces. They deploy conspicuous letterforms to reveal how racial meanings are woven into the “endless tapestry” of what Michel de Certeau calls...