Personhood, Spirit, and Afterlife

This issue of English Language Notes focuses on the dynamic nature of personhood as it contextualizes, and is contextualized by, various notions of spirit and the afterlife through a curation of scholarship and creative work. As an interdisciplinary locus of inquiry that may lead to transdisciplinary study and dialogue, personhood operates beyond both empirical functionalism and ontological personalism. It extends empirical functionalism in its capacity to define who or what might be considered a person and afforded personal rights and privileges. It extends ontological personalism by including considerations about morality, reason, and awareness. Rather, the contributors to this issue are concerned with how constructions of personhood may be informed and influenced by the interaction of the material and immaterial. Where deliberated constructions of personhood reveal what collection of traits we privilege in the process of subjective individuation, the establishment of conceptualized identity within the context of spirit and afterlife presents the potential to supersede selfhood and outlive the corporeal and civic self. As posthumous legacy, personhood has wide-reaching social, economic, and political implications when predicated on cultural nostalgia, religious mythos, and competing spiritual belief systems. We mean to consider personhood within the context of a social “we,” that is, as a collective living body such as a nation of citizens or that “we” at the center of ancestral practice and spiritual communication between the material realm and what exists outside it.

My intent as the special issue editor in soliciting work toward the topic of “personhood, spirit, afterlife” is to bring into conversation scholarship and creative work that broadens our notions of identity and selfhood within the context of spirit and afterlife. As writers and artists turn to spiritual practice in times of increasing civil, economic, and personal uncertainty, they do so as a means to gain understanding of the generative capacity of a self mired in material limitations. In recent years, as secular paradigms of self falter in the face of political unrest and cultural upheaval, constructions of personhood increasingly reflect a refusal of what we might consider tangible existence, favoring what is posthuman, what is technological, what is otherworldly, and what is spiritual in a post-binary, post-pandemic, post–George Floyd reality.

In imagining the scope of this issue, I was very much inspired by the 2015 critical essay collection The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults, in which Joyelle McSweeney coins the term necropastoral as a foundational concept toward a poetics that is, as she says, “the manifestation of the infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion occultly present in the hygienic borders of the classic pastoral.”¹ In developing the concept of a necropastoral poetics, McSweeney reimagines an ecopoetic tradition that frames the poet/artist/scholar as medium and host whereby the creative artifact becomes an exercise in channeling, transmutation, and transcendence. In her readings of Harryette Mullen, Don Mee Choi, Leslie Scalapino, Andy Warhol, Wilfred Owen, Roberto Bolaño, and CAConrad, McSweeney examines creativity as an uncanny force. In the work that she’s contributed to this issue, McSweeney, like other contributors, grapples with personhood in our contemporary landscape. She interrogates personhood in absentia and an afterlife in ruins as she confronts the “electrical pain” that depicts the death of her child under the limits of poetry, of lexical destruction and artistic resurrection. She also investigates, within a context of ruin, the poetry of Sean Bonney, a Marxist UK poet whose work, Baudelaire in English, she characterizes as an “uncannily alert concrete translation palimpsesting . . . Les Fleurs du Mal onto the psychogeography of [his] London” of 2008, a site of “hyperbolic, macrocosmic collapse.” In McSweeney’s work, we see the importance of creative inquiry’s intersection with scholarly inquiry as one anachronistically expands the other, perhaps even spasmodically.

I’ve chosen work that I believe favors creative inquiry in conversation with scholarly inquiry as a way to arrive at a transdisciplinary articulation of personhood that considers both material and immaterial constructs that inform ways of being. I’ve asked contributors to consider what we make of ourselves, how we contextualize our material existence, how the context of otherworldliness relates to or is derivative of constructs of personhood. Given that afterlife, in a digital world, may extend beyond the spiritual to the archival in terms of our legacy, during our corporeal lives can we determine those constructs of personhood that survive us? In a contemporary field of knowledge and beingness, even within a framework of atheistic ideology, personhood is subject to afterlife, with or without consent. The implication of posthumous personhood means that the archive (and our ability to access it or not) potentially affects an afterlife that may exist in spite of us, despite us, as a reconstruction or reconsideration of our subjectivity to the secular world. I work to understand, within my own artistic practice, what of myself I am leaving behind in terms of archival remnant, cultural anchor, and civic legacy. I am particularly concerned with the civic legacy, given that my own personhood began as a construct of erasure in the mid-1960s prior to Loving v. Virginia, which legalized interracial marriage, legitimized interracial offspring, and consequently afforded those like me, who came after me, legally recognized personhood to which I was not privileged. At the advent of my birth, I was issued no legal birth certificate. No public announcement was made in any newspaper. No fingerprints or footprints were taken. No photographs of my newborn face slowly depuckering under the harsh fluorescent lights of an obstetric nursery were ordered by any county hospital personnel. My twenty-two-year-old unwed white mother wrapped me up and took me home with a name that she borrowed from her own mother and that would not exist in any legal record, in reference to me, other than my annual school registration for more than another decade. Five years later legal personhood would be widely debated as Roe v. Wade determined that point of viability whereby a fetus had rights beyond the rights of the mother and extended protection under the law as an individuated “person” to whom all applicable dignity should be extended.

Consequently, my interest in the construction of personhood is inextricably tied to my interest in constructions of race and identity, especially Black female identity as a Black body raised outside the context of a cultural, or familial, Blackness. The white family who raised me wanted most for me to feel a sense of belonging, to not feel difference, and to escape the shackles of racial subjugation via their well-meaning but wholly misguided attempts to dissociate race from identity. They feared, quite ironically, that my Blackness might hobble me. They imagined, I presume, that my own understanding of self could emerge outside, and despite, the context of Blackness my body presented, as though Blackness, itself, were the shackle. They failed to understand that whatever way we identify the shackle of racial subjugation, a denial of its existence has never served as the key that will free us from these shackles. I presuppose to understand what it was my parents were thinking when they raised me as a Black child in a white landscape without mentioning race or considering it anything more than an inconvenient truth to which I was subject, and they were not subject in any palpable way they could describe other than the discomfort they faced at the thought of race as consequential beyond their acknowledgment of it. In failing to understand their own racial subjectivity and the wide-reaching implications of whiteness as the only context for my Blackness, they never understood how their attempts to disambiguate race and identity denied me the necessary dignity Aquinas cites as crucial to personhood. In the last few years, I’ve worked to interrogate these circumstances of subjectivity and community in a project titled Notes on Whiteness, in which I mean to better understand their oversight through a close, generational examination of the particular brand of whiteness from which my parents emerged, one that in postcolonial America was predicated on the notion of cultural assimilation and national idealism. I trace my stepfather’s family in Pennsylvania back to some of the earliest colonizing settlers, who, after arriving in the New World to shoe horses, plow the land, and work as menial laborers, are still poor 350 years later, as though the whiteness afforded them has amounted to little more than the satisfaction of not being both poor and Black.

I would be remiss if I did not consider the consequence of gender in my near erasure, having inherited the legacy of American women who have had to write themselves back into history. The exercise of writing the self has been of particular importance to women in whose revisionist histories we find some mediation of historical truths in the simple act of inclusion. It is no surprise to me that the first “memoir” in English is credited to a woman, Margery Kempe, whose construction of personhood, as Ellen Stenstrom notes in her essay, “The Self-Fashioned Writer’s ‘Confession’: Margery Kempe, Sylvia Plath, and Me,” is an archival exercise of identity making, of individuation, voice, and being not unlike what we see in Plath and other women writers of her generation for whom language and archive mark the intersection of historical and confessional selfhood that allow them to establish personal legacy as counternarrative to patriarchal legacy. Stenstrom struggles with her own role as literary scholar in Plath’s legacy who might “resurrect and amplify” her voice. As I consider my own genesis in the context of the civil rights movement from which I was born, I imagine writing the self, writing myself, a critical aspect of personhood and identity making that may be more genesis than resurrection.

Around the time I began touring digital archives to locate records of my father’s colonial homesteaders, who were oblivious to the Indigenous genocide happening in the Western territories that, decades earlier, had depopulated the land they came to work, the country entered the early months of pandemic lockdown. Soon thereafter protests erupted from coast to coast following the death of Floyd, a forty-six-year-old unarmed Black man who had been seated in his car outside a convenience store and whom three police officers attempted to take into custody for reasons that remain unclear. I watched the televised protests grow in size and branch like a fractal from the intersection of Thirty-Eighth Street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis to every major US city, then to many minor cities, and then slowly but with great fervor to cities across the globe. I could not help but wonder, Why now? Why this particular Black man, after so many have been publicly brutalized by police in America? Even previously televised police beatings, like that of Rodney King in 1991, by officers whose acquittal a year later sparked the Los Angeles riots of 1992, did not ignite such a global response. Was it pandemic isolation that inspired people to leave their homes, without permission, and scream into the streets not only about the death of Floyd but also their own lost freedom? Was it simply an unmitigated eruption by the people, for the people, everywhere, fed up with living in the shadow of increasingly militarized police forces staffed with former soldiers returned home from conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of whom had suffered so greatly that any vocation that involved authority with a gun could only further suffering? I was sure of one thing—the protests were predicated on the death of a man of whom we knew little and whose loss of life might have gone unnoticed if not for the convergence of circumstances under which that life was taken—a national lockdown, an uncertain year ahead, a growing suspicion of civic leadership, and the empowerment that comes when the surveilled turn their cameras on those who surveil.

As protests spread, conservative news commentators seized on the virtual anonymity of Floyd in an attempt to construct and promulgate a posthumous personhood that warranted brute force on the part of the offending officers, with some suggesting that Floyd more likely died from the trace fentanyl detected in his system postmortem than by police brutality. Online forums were riddled with conversation threads with headers like “Was George Floyd a decent person?” and “Is it true that George Floyd was a career criminal?” As posthumous reconstructions of personhood proliferated, either to exonerate Floyd or to cast him as suspect and degenerate, the nation was plunged into a postbellum self-interrogation of civic legacy like no other period in our history. In a single year more than one hundred Confederate monuments across the country were either toppled over in protest or officially removed. Heralded civic leaders, founding fathers, local heroes, and politicians once lauded were identified as slave mongers and perpetrators of genocide. I watched this “great removal” on the nightly news day after day, week after week, as community regard for the individuals celebrated by these monuments not only waned but transformed as quickly as did our understanding of who they were aside from constructions of personhood predicated on a combination of historical myth and a cherry-picked collection of favorable facts. As John C. Calhoun’s descendants watched with blank stares the removal of the 115-foot-tall statue of him originally staged in downtown Charleston so his likeness could gaze over the street named for him, his legacy as a former senator, secretary of state, and vice president was superseded by portrayals of him as an anti-abolitionist, slaveholding, white supremacist—characterizations that were neither news nor revelatory. While the latter depictions of Calhoun were never disputed during his lifetime, by all archival accounts, the sudden necessity in the eyes of the public to remove Calhoun’s statue in the wake of Floyd’s death seemed to indicate that, in terms of posthumous personhood, we cannot mitigate bad truths and good truths simultaneously to any extent that justifies monumentalizing his legacy in its entirety. The contemporaneous juxtaposition of politically motivated (re)constructions of posthumous personhood associated with Floyd’s character and dignity due to him, or not, serves as an uncanny backdrop to the sweeping reassessment of American heroism and the revisionism of 2020 resulting in a plethora of bulldozers and cranes hoisting the bronzed likenesses of dead white men onto our collective heaps of forgetting.

All three officers involved in Floyd’s killing were found guilty of federal civil rights offenses in his death on May 25, 2020. Derek Michael Chauvin was singled out among the three offending officers as the perpetrator whose treatment of Floyd seemed most egregious after bystander footage captured him kneeling on the prone man’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds despite Floyd’s repeated pleas and expressions of duress. In the Minnesota Court of Appeals filing, State of Minnesota v. Derek Michael Chauvin, the court noted that Chauvin’s actions warranted “greater-than-double durational departure,” a prison duration to exceed recommended sentencing. The reasons cited included Chauvin’s “position of trust and authority” as a public servant, his failure to render aid to Floyd by rolling him into a “recovery position” after other officers had voiced concerns, and the proof these and other factors offered that he “treated Floyd with particular cruelty,” given the “prolonged use of force . . . causing asphyxiation.”²

Like most other Black Americans, I followed the protests, the media coverage, and the eventual trial in awe. The entire ordeal was a tragedy, yes, but I believed, like so many others, that Floyd’s death was a systematic failure located in the pervasive dehumanization of the Black body, the disenfranchisement of Black citizenship, and the moral failure to extend the dignity, without fail, to individuals and communities operating under racialized identity. As I researched my white ancestors, I considered whether, if they were alive now, I could depend on them for such an extension of dignity. Would my Blackness circumvent their Christian and humanist ideologies, as Blackness did for many generations of white folks who all believed themselves good, upstanding individuals despite four hundred years of chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide that afforded them the land on which they lived and worked? I scoured the archives looking for clues that might establish some moral foundation that might indicate something of them other than the rote details: the day they were born, to whom they were born, the parish in which they were baptized; the number of children they had; how many children lived and how many died; their manner of death and at what age; and whom, at the end, they’d left behind to endorse that personhood they’d established within their lifetimes. I searched for evidence of personhood that would allow me to exonerate them, at best, or affirm their guilt, at worst. I searched for their evident complicity in the instigation of racial trauma that characterizes my America, a Black woman’s America, rooted in a geospatial, political, civic, moral, and cultural past. I say past here instead of history because history, not unlike personhood, proves a construct beholden to its makers and subject to revision.

As I struggle to find resolve within a landscape of racial subjugation so pervasive that my own family and friends often seem to operate in blind collusion, I’ve valued the groundbreaking book Afropessimism, in which Frank B. Wilderson III asserts that “the spectacle of Black death is essential to the mental health of the world,” underpinning a new school of thought emerging at the millennium as a century of postbellum freedom fighting has yet to yield equity in either citizenship or personhood to the Black body.³ While Afropessimist scholars move to reframe our understanding of art, literature, and culture within a pragmatism that dispels the efficacy of principles inherent to social justice movements of the past, increasing numbers of Black Americans are embracing African traditional religions in light of the indisputable legacy of Christianity and other Abrahamic religions as tools for bondage and colonialism as well as the failure of secular humanism to ensure liberty beyond the reach of institutionalized religion.

In Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture, John Gatta asks, “What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, to form an intimate relation with discrete sites or dwelling places on earth?⁴ Gatta’s focus on theological phenomenology and cultural analysis presents an opportunity to reimagine American literature as a record of witness to a landscape devalued in correlation with elevated emphasis on privileged selfhood and the censorship of diverse spiritual modalities in light of what he terms settlement and pilgrimage. While I appreciate the sentiment of Gatta’s query, I question whether we are truly capable of reimagining our relationship with a landscape “existentially and spiritually” when we have yet to reconcile the tradition of American literary culture and our relationship to Indigeneity. I question how one forms “an intimate relation” with a landscape or recognizes the literature we produce as “a record of witness” to that landscape that we’ve devalued without first acknowledging that our disregard for its people, animals, water, and health amounts to more than “privileged selfhood,” warrants greater culpability than the admission of a “censorship of diverse spiritual modalities,” and cannot be remedied in any dialogic project privileging a soft lexicon of deferred accountability evident in terms like settlement and pilgrimage.

In contrast, Timothy Morton’s Realistic Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality calls for an ecology that leans toward a notion of a flat ontology that subverts the master-slave narrative that Morton notes is neither flat ethics nor flat politics but the understanding that a thing may exist and not be subject in any way to other things that exist.⁵ This kind of dispossession of a thing as both a preservation of its individuation and a means to harmonious equity seems nearly impossible to imagine simultaneous to the pragmaticism of Wilderson until one encounters the kind of creative expression that makes both seem at once disparate yet seamlessly aligned. This alignment occurs in the concrete visual poem “Atlas(t)” by Beau Farris, which I include here for the way it engages body and spirit with a simultaneity that allows the body itself to invoke legacy and continuum at that site where an evocation of language distinguishes human personhood from other aspects of being. Farris’s bibliomancy quite literally sings the body in a mash-up of the Whitmanesque self and a contemporary landscape of flat ontology where subjectivity equals disharmony. The human body suffers under the same reductionism whereby orange roughy are overfished off the coasts of New Zealand and Australia in a value economy that measures the general demise of the earth in glacier-mass balance. The disappearance of a certain genus of fish is termed a market collapse, not a spiritual loss. In the landscape of Farris’s visual poem, language is that magic which demarcates personhood from mere corporeal beingness and reveals the body’s capacity to outlive and survive us within a textual, archival, nameable afterlife. To this end, we should understand that a longevity of personhood exists with access to language texts and the archive so much so that the obliteration of personhood begins with a denial of access to the materiality of the archive.

I attest to these truths after pouring myself into the archived lives of my parents’ long-gone family, not so much reduced to, but still alive in, facsimile birth certificates dating back to sixteenth-century Germany and France and death certificates that miraculously documented the miracle of their octogenarian survival decades before the advent of penicillin. I found baptismal records that sometimes disclosed a child out of wedlock or a second marriage, communications with and excommunications from the church, census records, voter registration. Even my mother’s immigrant Italian family was well documented, their emergent whiteness evident as an Old World name that seemed to change a little in each generation, from Scalfatti to Scalferro at the time of their immigration, and then, from Scalferro to Scalfer after my grandfather enlisted to fight in World War I. His military records seal the fate of his personhood as a nondescript, light-skinned, blue-eyed American male of short stature and undisclosed ethnicity racially determined to be “white.”

As a way for me to understand personhood, having been relegated to archival anonymity at birth, my ability to come to some personal understanding through an investigation of my heritage has presented formal limitations from the beginning. While my parents’ ancestry reveals generation after generation of laborers and farmers, some of whom were illiterate, they remain searchable and so viable in some posthumous archival existence unlike my Black family, for whom the denial of personhood and dignity equates to a lack of archival access and so historical erasure. In my first year of research, I could not find a single document that I could attribute to any paternal connection. I recalled this lasting frustration as I read Julie Carr’s essay, “The Person: The Garden: The Guide,” in which she articulates, with some humor, that “personhood is very much in the air while the spirits of persons refuse to stay underground.” In reading Carr’s disclosure that her current writing explores “Jewishness, war, memory, and time,” I could not have felt closer to the impossibly vast landscape of her project, given an adult lifetime spent reading and writing on Blackness and the nature of Black identity, only for Blackness to remain a subject that, in my middle age, still seems nebulous at best. The moment of departure I experience in her essay arrives when she comes to understand, with clarity, what it is she hopes to find:

I read this passage over and over, trying to grasp this feeling of being altered but instead remained dumbfounded at how impossible it seemed that the archive could, itself, disclose the personhood I sought to understand through story, through collective stories, through narrative and voice, whether that came in the form of an epistolary love story or a personal journal. I’d imagined access to the archive to be a privilege of inclusion but had not truly considered how that privilege was itself a stratification of privilege that, for some filled in the details, recalled the color of a room, or even a beloved hymn. I have found myself fascinated with the dignity afforded archival personhood as a precedent construct of beingness such that, generations removed, one may learn enough of a person to confidently also understand an otherness that exists between them.

I don’t believe I’ve approached my own genealogy, or my study of race and identity, with real expectations of feeling altered, but I have been altered. As my personal history, my racial learning, and my racial experience continually collide in a national landscape whose civic narrative seems nearly dystopic, I find more questions than answers. I appreciate understanding the motivation behind Carr’s inquiry, or lack of inquiry, into the blood of it all, since I’d not imagined any investigation of personhood could benefit from fewer facts. I see it, though, only from afar, since my DNA, as a Black body, is all I have, given the consequences of dignity denied: archival absentia, generational erasure, and subjugated personhood. From the moment I submitted my DNA sample to a host of genealogy sites, my world began to open. What until that moment was a categorical Black identity became a qualified connection to a happening, or a series of happenings, each finally named—Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Senegal, their adjacency forming a half circle on the western shores of a continent from which they were forcibly removed and which they never saw again. I cried for them out of sorrow. I cried for myself out of joy.

And so, again, dignity and personhood forge parallel paths as a common thread among the contributors in this issue, whether it’s a loss of dignity, a reclamation of dignity, or a longing for restorative dignity. Saint Thomas Aquinas cites dignity to be foremost among considerations when it comes to whom we extend personhood. The long complicated and violent history of religious oppression at the hands of the Catholic Church in antiquity complicates Aquinas’s precedent factor, given that dignity has often been among the first things denied Indigenous cultures and one of the last restorations conceded to the colonized subject. In “Spiritual (Mal)practice: A Personal Devotion,” Rajiv Mohabir speaks of generational healing within a context of spiritual abuse. As an expression of creative inquiry toward the construction of personhood, Mohabir begins with spirit as a defining factor in the ways we distinguish spiritual healing from spiritual abuse, just as we may distinguish one state of personhood and another, especially in terms of well-being. Mohabir’s essay demonstrates that individuation, in the absence of spiritual autonomy, is futile—a generational eclipse in perpetuity. Generational erasure, in terms of cultural practice, negatively encodes value economies of art, literature, and intellectual thought in absentia. We cannot value what we refuse to acknowledge. To this end, spiritual practices such as ancestor worship and other practices that fall outside established, organized, civically entrenched institutions of Western religion may be most important as remedies for abjectification of the individual and the denial of dignity and so personhood. Might generational trauma indicate a spiritual practice whereby a spiritual sovereignty of personhood factors significantly in generational, generative success? It might be more apt here to say healing in place of success.

I have a deep hunch that spiritual healing may affect generational perpetuity and so serve as a victory over the Argon, that figurative keeper of the archive to whom all personhood is subject. If so, spiritual practice as precursor to generational healing may serve as a preferable alternative to erasure for those populations of people who have historically been denied the dignity of personhood. Mohabir’s spiritual healing subsequent to spiritual abuse functions differently from the generational healing Selah Saterstrom invokes in another selection for this issue, “On Ideal Suggestions and the Paintings of Matthias Grünewald,” where she revisits a text on mental healing handed down through generations, all of whom, as evident in the marginalia of the book, closely followed its instructions as each generation exercised great faith in the book’s promise as a restorative system. For Saterstrom, her inability to heal (as well as her sometime deviation from the exercises and instructions in the text) don’t indicate failure. Nor does the book itself represent any oppressive system with expectations of spiritual compliance despite generational (and postcolonial) spiritual abuse that may indicate why her work instead offers spiritual reconciliation: “Let us say that what we dwell on, we become, or at least God, if it be God, moves across the waters.” Saterstrom thwarts spiritual expectation and in doing so dispels the ensuing disappointment inevitable when expectations are not fully realized.

All the work included in this issue indicates the necessity of continuing the conversation with one another in regard to personhood, spirit, and afterlife. Mimi Khúc’s “Magicking into Being: The Asian American Tarot and the Book of Curses” articulates the “intersection of the scholarly and the literary” as a site where “a form of magic can begin.” I, too, am excited by that intersection where creative inquiry might be most accurately described as individual understanding derived through creative practice that informs our collective understanding and where scholarly inquiry, in turn, encourages community understanding derived through a scholarly interrogation that informs our individual understanding in transcendent ways. Nicole Callihan’s essay, “Cut To: A Woman in the Sun,” likewise captures the desire for transcendence when the body, and what becomes of the body, becomes an aspect of our constructed personhood as body trauma and being become inextricable. Alroy James Manahi Walker and Gareth Schott’s essay highlights transcendent rituals of Māori personhood as experienced by and archived on the body through tattoos that memorialize life’s journey, kinship, and death, across time and across lives, which echoes Zayla Crocker’s focus on memorial ritual in “They Will Say: Ritual Naming and Living beyond the Pale with Candyman.” As Crocker says of her antagonist, “Only when he is named does he live,” an evocation that we’ve heard in Black Lives Matters protests after the fatal erasure of Black bodies at the hands of police, as in the case of Breonna Taylor in March 2020 when the streets of Louisville echoed with the call of protesters to “Say her name.” For both Schott and Crocker, recollection counters grief—whether recollecting a living trajectory demarcated on the corporeal body or saying one’s name transcends the boundary between the immaterial and the material, the spirit from the body, and the sacred from the profane. Mirroring by way of recollection functions as “a memorial rite” for “existence” as well as “afterlife.” I am excited to share this issue and this work to which I mean to return again and again.

Notes

Works Cited