Gregor Samsa is OMG so Cute
Well, it was bound to happen. Quirk Books is digging into the public domain for its cutest literary remix to date. Franz Kafka‘s The Metamorphosis becomes The Meowmorphosis. According to Quirk, through the “haunting illustrations and a provocative biographical exposé of Kafka’s own secret feline life, The Meowmorphosis will take you on a journey deep into the tortured soul of the domestic tabby.”
Cute as deformity. Cuteness as existential dilemma. Cute as allegory. Cute as catastrophe. Cuteness as borderland identity.
How exactly might the cute kitten figure in Kafka’s existential template? In the original text, Gregor Samsa is transformed into a horrible giant insect, a loathsome creature from which all human beings feel utterly alienated. As Gregor becomes more and more disgusting to those around him and increasingly unable to communicate, the limits of human toleration are reached and Gregor must find peace within the confines of his disgrace. As a cuddly misfit par excellence, ridiculously vulnerable in its state of motherless destitution, the cute kitten reigns supreme in the anthropomorphized universe of loveable outcasts and inferiors.
The literary mashup of Kafka’s classic is due out this Tuesday.
How Racists Cynically Exploit “Cute”
This anti-abortion billboard targets a black community in Oakland, California. It’s just been recently covered over because the actual mother of the little girl featured in the ad complained so much to the press that it led to a bit of an outcry. The mother of this child obviously didn’t think she was signing up to support the suggestion that her child is in any way unwanted (though she gullibly signed the modeling release form).
Similar billboards have appeared in Atlanta, Georgia and Brooklyn, New York too. I can see why the mother was so offended. It’s a slick political tactic that appeals to certain religious and nationalistic discourses promoted in the African American community. The idea that black people are endangered or are otherwise inherently self-destructive (as though there is some perfectly coherent racial “self” to destroy in the first place) is a common white supremacist trope that — perhaps not too surprisingly — circulates throughout some all-black discursive communities, like barbershops and beauty parlors, not to mention far too many black churches.
Of course, blacks are no more endangered than the rest of humanity, but it’s hard to convey that to our folk when we only see social disintegration on a daily basis while, unfortunately, lacking a critical analysis that myopically attends to a world view which highlights personal agency as the end-all-be-all of human interactions. Such assumptions are mistaken because they ignore the various forms of structural and social violence that occur routinely within and across black communities — of which this billboard is a perfect case in point.
Most insidious about this billboard campaign is the suggestion that black people don’t love their children like everyone else (and by “everyone else” I mean white people). And because of this underlying pathos, I believe the billboard’s combination of words coupled with this particularly cute image is patently racist. Moreover, this ad is clearly designed to garner culturally conservative votes from the typically liberal African American voting block. This is a wedge issue similar to that of gay marriage, which has proven to be an effective political ploy to encourage portions of the African American electorate to vote against their own social and economic interests.
Unfortunately though, too many black voters are duped by the disingenuous politics of this conservative agenda. By feigning a concern for the lives and well-beings of black women and children, the right wing can claim to subscribe to a “colorblind” concern for the life of “all humans” when, in fact, they couldn’t care less. Indeed, if the right wing anti-choice lobby really cared about the lives of women and children — regardless of race — they would make gestational and infant nutrition measures, as well as early childhood education and daycare an integral part of their political platform. If they really cared about women and children, they would make extended parental leave the norm and not just a luxury for the well-situated few and no woman would ever get fired from her job for being pregnant. Ever.
In the end, it would stand to reason that the only way to reduce abortions is to assure expectant mothers that they will be able to safely bring children into the world without jeopardizing their own futures as well as those of their already living children. Instead, the right wing engages paranoia and fear tactics in order to impede a woman’s right to determine her own outcomes and not be condemned to breed against her will.
The poem below is from 1945 and is called “The Mother.” The Poetry Archive has posted a beautiful recitation of it in Gwendolyn Brooks‘ own voice.
Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye. I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?-- Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, You were never made. But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All. |
kitschy kitschy yaa yaa yaa
I snapped this jpg at the antique store in Pendleton, SC — not more than 3 miles from campus. These cast iron coin banks cost $35.00 each. I’m not sure when or where they were made.
Check out the gestures. The nourishing Negress (as Barthes would call her) looks like she’s ready to pitch an epic niggerbitchfit based on the way she’s got her hands on her hips. And the male one — well, I guess he had better have his hat in his hands.
For some reason, this arrangement of these three objects reminds me of “Trueblood and his women” in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Throwbacks of the most grotesque design, they are. (I’m talking about the Truebloods AND the figurines, by the way.) The genius of the Trueblood scene is the way Ellison writes Truebloods’ intricate testimonial as a thing that functions for commodified exchange. It’s brilliant where Trueblood says, “But what I don’t understand is how I done the worse thing a man can do in his own family and ‘stead of things gittin’ bad, they got better” (68). In uniting a critique of Freudian oedipal desire and Marxian material analysis, Ellison depicts the notion of a/cute monopoly. These incestuous circumstances of “keeping it in the family” is taken to extremes and allows Trueblood to capitalize on the sentiments held by Norton, the wealthy white donor to the invisible man‘s college.
These themes connect very closely to the daddy-mommy-me trinity as described in Anti-Oedipus.
A “Cute Kitten Theory” of Race
“‘You think you so cute!’ I swung at her and missed, hitting Pecola in the face. Furious at my clumsiness, I threw my notebook at her, but it caught her in the small of her velvet back, for she had turned and was flying across the street against traffic.
Safe on the other side, she screamed at us, ‘I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute’”(Morrison 73).
“We were sinking under the wisdom, accuracy, and relevance of Maureen’s last words. If she was cute – and if anything could be believed, she was – then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser” (Morrison 74).
Of course many of you will recognize this excerpt from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. It’s the frequently anthologized scene, sometimes referred to as “The Coming of Maureen Peale.” I believe this scene from literature really illustrates my conceptualization of cuteness as a racial rhetoric.
A desperate chain of events ensues because of Pecola’s wish for her eyes to magically turn blue like Shirley Temple and the white baby dolls molded in the screen idol’s image. And, along with Claudia and Frieda, having to constantly hear all the surrounding adults describe the little white girls as perfectly lovely, the fragile Pecola is pushed to the breaking point. The arrival of the wealthier and lighter skinned Maureen Peale exacerbates the situation because of the way she is shown favoritism by the teachers and parents in Morrison’s semi-autobiolgraphical Ohio community in which the novel is set. The girls in the schoolyard are stunned when the favored newcomer proudly and maliciously asserts the ostensible fact that she is cute and they are not.
My dissertation is about how, similarly to Toni Morrison, this issue of “cuteness” served as productive motivation for Carl Owens and other African American artists of that generation. Owens was an African American artist and illustrator, known for a certain genre of printed paintings. I think of his most famous image “Little Flower” as the epitome of cute kitten blackness. That the above image could be viewed as agitprop is not necessarily problematic for me. At least not, if we think about agitprop in a nuanced and more complicated way.
