HANNAH BLACK
Hannah Black is a New York-based artist and writer who works across, or at the confluence of, installation, video, performance and text. In 2017 and 2019, she wrote open letters to the Whitney Biennial and the Whitney Museum criticising, respectively, the inclusion of a painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket, by white artist Dana Schutz and the involvement of the museum’s co-chair Warren Kanders in manufacturing weapons for police forces. Black’s novel, Tuesday or September or the End, was published in 2021 by arts foundation Capricious and details the initiation, breakdown and resumption of the relationship between a man and a woman called Dog and Bird. Along the way, aliens invade, the pandemic happens and the revolution unfolds. A work of speculative fiction, the novel builds its alternative political reality through a series of irreverent but deeply serious imaginings.
Interview by Nell WhittakerPortrait by Sam Penn
Nell Whittaker What is the relationship between Tuesday, September and the end?
Hannah Black There are two moments when the phrase appears in the book, one belonging to each of the dyadic main characters. It’s meant to evoke the radically unstructured and unmoored time-texture of the early pandemic era. The “or” is important in a book full of counterfactuals. It’s important for the political imaginary, such as it is, to insist that things could have been otherwise than they have turned out historically, though I often hurt myself with this habit of thought. I was also pleased that my book’s publication approximately coincided with two “or” books by poets I know and admire, Kissing Other People or The House of Fame by Kay Gabriel and Or, on Being the Other Woman by Simone White. I was the respondent to Simone at her Creeley Lecture at the University at Buffalo this year and although it’s clunky to quote myself – I apologise! – I said to her then: “it is still necessary to posit something else, to leave a door open, to pitch bend, or whatever. ‘Or’ is not moral like the word ‘because’, it doesn’t insist on causality, because it could be that things just happen alongside each other.”
NW The chapters are titled by the first six months of the year. What does the calendar offer as a framework? Why is there only half the year?
HB January through May approximately follow the events of 2020, at least as I perceived them, and then June departs from reality by depicting the George Floyd uprisings in New York as leading to the establishment of a new form of society. Then the book ends, because even though I keep doing it, I don’t actually want to write science fiction. The calendar structure was a way to reflect the experience of 2020, with the arrival of Covid-19 causing what felt like a rupture with previous reality, though of course, it turns out that reality is ultra-robust. January, February and March are the most narratively conventional, then aliens start speaking. After that it’s kind of anything goes. April, May and June all have distinct characteristics: April is a TV show and an excruciating shopping experience; May is interactions with aliens; June is revolution. I thought hard about what the experience of each of those months of 2020 was to try to make the chapters sort of approximately similar to my sense of what was going on then.
NW The story is interested in the idea that phenomena like electoral cycles and television seasons, don’t relate to the experience of living inside the day. Bird says that, “A god is just a concept that teaches a daily life.” What does the novel describe about time?
HB It tries to layer several registers of time: calendar time, capitalist time, geological time, historical time, psychological time, revolutionary time. When ordinary time is ruptured, with the pandemic, what appears through the newly-formed gaps is childhood and revolution. At least that’s the case in this book. That’s also what happened for me, in early 2020, though of course I didn’t get to talk to aliens or live through a revolution – but at times it felt a bit like that.
NW You’ve spoken about your interest in astrology, which is another way of charging the calendar with information.
HB I love my friend Constantina Zavitsanos’ description of astrology as a many-handed planetary clock. Astrology is just one way of historicising the present as it’s happening. A lot of astrologers are currently very interested in the US’ Pluto return, which Bird mentions at some point. That transit is happening now and has coincided with a near-genocidal loss of life during the pandemic, plus the reassertion of fantastical Cold War geopolitics and – not unrelatedly – the failure to address the climate crisis. Because Pluto is associated with death and rebirth, there were hopes that the Pluto return would mark the end of the US’ global dominance – Pluto first went back into Capricorn in 2008 around the time of the financial crisis. It does seem possible that the historians of the future will mark this whole period, 2008 to now, as the beginning of the end. What comes next will start to become clearer when Pluto starts to dip into Aquarius.
NW In the book, the aliens are a political catalyst: through reframing the human project through an external perspective then aligning with Cuba, they foment revolution and save the world, forcing the 2020 protests to be allowed to unfold into revolution. What do aliens make possible?
HB From early on I intended the book to end with a successful uprising in June. I began writing in September 2020, and there were no aliens at first, because I was still full of positive 2020 energy. During the uprisings, for example, I had the opposite feeling from the idea of a necessary external force: I thought that only the US could have a successful proletarian revolution because only the US wouldn’t have to deal with outside intervention by the US. But by the time I finished the book, in spring 2021 – it was a period of political reaction and I was personally having a very bad time – unfortunately I couldn’t imagine revolutionary change without something absolutely other than reality. I think if I had finished the book by the end of 2020, as I unrealistically originally intended, then it might have been possible to write it without aliens, but that’s not what happened. I know Cuba was an imperfect choice, by the way, but they all are. I try to signal that with Bird’s original, stupid suggestion of Iran, which only someone living in the US could imagine as having any oppositional potential. The stupidity of all possible choices of country as the place where the aliens should seek allegiance is one of the reasons it was necessary to imagine aliens.
NW Bird declares, “the dead stayed dead, but the living not yet – riot was the shining overlap of these two spectacular facts.” Does riot cause a crisis in capitalist temporality or does it simply make the impossibility of that temporality obvious?
HB I think a riot is an expression of the possibility of collective happiness. And happiness is related to happenstance. Most of the time nothing happens.
NW You write that, “The whole scheme of the human had to begin by making punishment immortal”; elsewhere, that, “In purgatorial time, like insurrectionary time, the present is a mirage of punishment hiding an open door.” What’s the relationship between punishment and the present?
HB The second line is from a Dante seminar I attended at university when I was 18 or 19, which I have mostly forgotten, but I really loved the professor’s observation that souls can leave purgatory as soon as they see that they could have left all along. The relationship between punishment and the present is such an interesting question! The present is the only place where you can be punished, perhaps? But you have to live there anyway? The first line’s “scheme of the human” is meant in the Sylvia Wynter sense, the instantiation of a false universality that’s then used to punish people who supposedly fall outside it. I shouldn’t have entirely conflated Christian ideas of divine punishment with capitalist discipline, because it also produces internal resistances, like the Spanish priests who refused to accept confession from the conquistadors because what they were doing was evil, but there are obvious overlaps. In many ways, we live in hell.
NW You’ve written widely on the couple form, on its allure and limitations. In an essay for The New Inquiry, you wrote that, “The principle of the couple – love as privacy – stands in opposition to the logic of [interpersonal empathy] which belongs to a swamp in which sensations are transmitted across lives.” What tensions were you exploring with the separation and coming-together of Bird and Dog?
HB On the most abstract level, I wanted to present a dyad of reform and revolution. You need revolution to get reform, historically. But is the opposite also true – what are the limits of “non-reformist reform”? Democratic socialism, of the kind that Dog is invested in, requires reconciliation with reality. That’s OK for Dog because he is fundamentally reconciled. Bird can’t accept how the world works, which is morally correct but also makes her crazy. She’s not realistic, and she’s magnetised by suffering – her own and others’ – in an unconstructive way. Her sensitivity to collective feeling makes her paradoxically kind of individualistic. Dog is able to participate more in social life because he isn’t as preoccupied by its negative preconditions. In order to make realistic gains, democratic socialism sometimes ends up taking a technocratic approach to the poor, which is different from a revolutionary praxis structured around collective self-becoming – achieving collective self-awareness as black people or proletarians or women or whatever. I think my affinities are obvious, but I hope I didn’t take sides too much: my starting position is that nothing works, but people are still moved to act, and that’s good. The love between Bird and Dog is both impossible and possible and in that way it resembles the problem of social transformation. On a less abstract level, the reason the book is structured around a couple is that I have been mostly single for the past couple of years and I didn’t want it to devolve into auto-fictional complaint. If I had written Bird without Dog, I would have felt less able to distinguish between her and me, though there was some blur: at times I imagined her as an adult daughter of mine, i.e., resembling me but with different capacities. I think there’s a more honest book I could write about love, not as dependent on symbolism and fantasy, but I would need to be in a different place to write it.
NW The aliens note that the “incest taboo” is a sign of “basic culture”. In that same essay I just mentioned, you write that you and your brother were “perhaps a kind of couple, too”, and in the novella, Bird and her stepbrother had a sexual relationship as teenagers. What is it about the incest taboo that makes it a fruitful site from which to consider culture?
HB It’s the principle of exogamy: that you have to look beyond where you begin. I love the Adam Phillips talk, “On Losing and Being Lost Again” about Anna Freud, who never got over her father. Philips says: “Children can of course get lost, but they always know where they want to be. Because there is an incest taboo, they have to realise something very difficult: that they know where they want to go but they must not go there. They have to discover, they have to invent, the experience of getting lost. Adults, because there is no place like home, because there is an incest taboo, are lost. Adulthood is exchanging and knowing the difference between getting lost and being lost… There’s only one mother and father but there are an unknowable number of objects of desire outside the family. Getting lost is our best defence against being lost. We get lost when we are lost in a way we can’t bear.” I am lost and I try to find and lose myself in writing. ◉