Maurice Wallace on Joshua Bennett’s *Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man*

Though Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press 2020) is the author’s first scholarly monograph, Joshua Bennett is a familiar name to many of us who read, teach, compose, or follow currents in Black poetry and performance. Today, Bennett is Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth University but Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man is hardly the 2016 Princeton PhD’s debut. Before Being Property, Bennett charmed many a live audience with dazzling performances of spoken word virtuosity at popular poetry jam/slam events across the country (including a 2009 performance at the White House) and, between performances, worked to publish two collections of verse, The Sobbing School (2016) and Owed (2020). Being Property issues from a different bent, though, even if it’s clear that a fine, expressive hand is behind it. Bennett’s book is a work apart and worthy, to be sure, of the two Black women figures inspiring/inspiriting it without whom it seems Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man could scarcely have even been dreamt up: the late US poet, Lucille Clifton; and the Jamaican novelist, dramatist and theorist, Sylvia Wynter.

While Clifton and Wynter inform the animal association accruing to Being Property’ s title and subtitle, this first monograph bears little trace of the strain many scholarly debuts (my own included!) betray to demonstrate their debts. By turns leading-edge and unaffected, revelatory and understated, Bennett appears much less concerned to prove that his chops as a critic and theorist are equal to his poetic abilities. Rather, Being Property is after something fully other than the sort of academic demonstration of intellectual lineage or bald erudition prizes and promotions often demand. Being Property proceeds by force of a position taken on the human category and the imaginative limits (i.e., Man’s “end”) beyond which so many African American authors, Bennett maintains, have “leap[t] into a vision of human personhood rooted not in the logics of private property or dominion,” but, identifying with the Animal—horses, rats, peacocks, mules, dogs, sharks—against a history of defensive disavowal in public life, “in wildness, flight, brotherhood and sisterhood beyond blood” (Bennett 2020, 4). In other words, Being Property aims to make the case that the “all-too-fraught proximity between the enslaved black person and the nonhuman animal—positioned here as twin captives” (Bennett 2020, 1) under modern world logics, far from eschewed in every case as one might expect in the interest of redressing white claims of black bestiality until even now, has afforded some black writers new post-human possibilities for “conceiv[ing] of black sociality and black feeling” (Bennett 2020, 4) in literary representation.

To surface what Bennett refers to as “the ongoing entanglements of blackness and animality in black social, civic, and psychic life” (Bennett 2020, 5) is, in Being Property, an abolitionist act and an act of poesis all at once insofar as the tradition outlined here not only subverts “the forms of antiblack thought that have maintained the fissure between human and animals” (Bennett 2020, 4) from the first but posits a new (or, better perhaps, a neglected) “poetics of persistence and interspecies empathy…in which nonhuman…life forms are acting up and out in ways we might not expect or yet have a language for” (Bennett 2020, 5)—which is to say in ways black poets and novelists have had to dream up language for. By way of close readings of some well-established, and a few wholly unnoticed, scenes of black/Animal apposition or relationality, Bennett’s Being Property shares in the ensemblic turn toward black ecological criticism and theory exploring blackness, animality, ground-life, and philosophical posthumanism broadly as taken up recently by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World), Alexis Gumbs (Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals), Bénédicte Boisseron (Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question), and, fleetingly, R. A. Judy (Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poi?sis in Black). Bennett’s is the most traditionally literary among these concordant researches in blackness and animality in the US.

Organized in five chapters, each one—including the book’s introduction—identified by an animal figure not only made black (or “black(ened),” as Jackson so often writes) by its historical material proximity to black life and death, Being Property proceeds, one chapter after the next, to explore what black cohabitation with horse-, rat-, (pea)cock-, mule-, dog-, and shark-life “might mean as part of a larger trend” (Bennett 2020, 59) in African American poetry and prose. Taking his cue from Frederick Douglass’s reflection in his Narrative of 1845 on the common condition of the bondsman and the horse under plantation slavery (“By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs” [Douglass 1845, 1]), Bennett reads animal representation in novels by Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward, and in the verse by Robert Hayden, Melvin Tolson, Caryl Phillips, and Xandria Phillips among others, to posit a zoopoetics of African American writing, a black Animal/Man onto-ecology that makes imaginable an otherwise world of human being-with the nonhuman other. “What does the Animal promise” the black in the black’s human nonpersonhood in centuries of legal precedence and practice? “Nothing short of another cosmos,” in other words (Bennett 2020, 4).

For Bennett, horses are “co-laborers” with the enslaved, sharing in a “radical form of sociality” with the slave existing, as “both inside and outside the parameters of plantation time (Bennett 2020, 2). Rats, on the other hand, are “escape artists” (Bennett 2020, 50), kinesthetic geniuses full of “pluck” and “refusal” (Bennett 2020, 57), animal projections of “how black folks survive,” Bennett says, “even when they are outcast and outgunned and outlawed and outstripped, …go[ing] about living through the everyday” (Bennett 2020, 57) insurgently, against their designed death. Whereas muleness, to take another example, has long been a sign for the doubly oppressive and exploitative conditions of black womanhood in black feminist social thought and expression, Bennett reads its abuse and sufferings through a comically Hurstonian frame to posit, by way of the death and last rites of Matt Bronner’s yellow mule in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a rather serious imagining of “a purposeful, countercapitalist linking of blackness and muleness, blackness and animality, that runs counter even to other moments in the novel when animals are deployed as means of illustrating the exploitative conditions of black life under the first of slavery’s long durée” (Bennett 2020, 135). In Being Property, we are called on to “think with” the (figure of the) mule in contemplating not only a politics but a poetics, too, of black/Animal relations in the service of “the most radical possible vision of black liberation” (Bennett 2020, 135), one that might be accountable equally to the black(ened) flesh of Man and the beasts in the field where said relations exist in and in excess of the world created by the plantocracy.

Away from the plantation, off land and out at sea, sharks, Bennet also argues, “are part and parcel of [the] collective resistance” (Bennett 2020, 176) of the blacks imprisoned in the slave ship. To be sure, sharks do threaten those who, loosed, would jump overboard, being thusly “the very embodiment of an antiblack social order” (Bennett 2020, 186), but from another point of view the “grinning tutelary gods” (Hayden) hail the captives into an alternate lifeworld below, beyond human dying. Unlike horses or mules, though, their work in this outline of a theory of inters-specific sociality is almost wholly symbolic, poetic but not at all practical or enfleshed.

Smart as it is throughout, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man is best when it treats animals as animals, as social actors in their own right, not mere “stand-in[s]” (Bennett 2020, 93) or metaphors for abstractions and structures of feeling singularly revelatory of the mind and condition of Man. Bennet’s “Dog” chapter is exemplary in this sense. Here Bennett takes up what seems fitting within the black tradition so full of signifyin(g) and tricksterism to call the dog’s capacity “to lie, to live in the home or lie in the bed of a human master simply as a means to its own unknowable ends” (Bennett 2020, 150).  In literary criticism, dogness is nowhere flattered on its own terms, in its own self-interested being-alongside the human, so excellently as Being Property on Caryl Phillips ‘s “White Dog” and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. If chapter two, “Cock,” exploits a double entendre as natural to a reading of black/Animal relationality in Morrison’s Beloved, it would seem, as to her Song of Solomon, only to dematerialize the white peacock in Song of Solomon whose specific name the chapter’s title shortens—it is but “bird imagery” (Bennett 2020, 88), finally, “an image of flight” (Bennett 2020, 92), that is, “an evocative stand-in” (Bennett 2020, 93), a “metaphor”  and “mirror” (Bennett 2020, 93), to put it another way, “a representative of normative white masculinity” (Bennett 2020, 93), Bennett concludes, a “symbol” (Bennett 2020, 96), “a signifier” (Bennett 2020, 97), a “site of aspiration” (Bennett 2020, 97), and therefore tending toward an animal function as distinct from being animal in some ontic sense—then chapter four, above all the rest, is Being Property’s own arresting corrective. Here symbolism yields to sociality, to an aliveness shared and “given flesh by the kids and beasts and broken things”—not least by poor blacks and pit bulls—“that have forged a kind of life underground, in the blackness at the bottom of the world” (Bennett 2020, 155) together.

All said, Bennett stands to add many more fans to the crowd of us who’ve relished his poetic talents over many years. In particular, his insistence “that we recognize the work of Afro-Diasporic ecopoetics, and black study more broadly, as species thinking” (Bennett 2020, 181) is not only erudite. It is imperative to viability of the new world we’re worlding above, below, and in between this bare-life here and now.