On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson

Author:Maggie Nelson [Nelson, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644450628
Google: UXMczgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1644450623
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2021-09-06T23:00:00+00:00

THE BLONDES

The literary genre of the “addiction memoir” has tended to be very white, and, even when it’s not, very male.9 The reasons behind such a situation are numerous and complex, and likely have something to do with white writers’ propensity to frame their experience as detachable from socioeconomic-political forces that tend to be glaringly obvious to others; such a propensity leads to the creation of works more easily classifiable as “addiction memoirs.”10 But while white addiction narratives may at first glance appear to be devoid of racial consciousness, upon closer inspection, most appear saturated with anxieties about whiteness, as well as with strategic (if unconscious) deployment of racialized tropes that “surface endlessly when one begins to look carefully,” as Toni Morrison has it in Playing in the Dark.

In the case of Crack Wars, one doesn’t even have to look past its title, whose aforementioned bait and switch highlights its own chaotic symptomology. For whatever horrors the transgressions of Emma Bovary/EB/Ronell may provoke, they fade in comparison with the brutal state-sponsored persecution and punishment of Black people, including Black mothers, that characterize the War on Drugs.11 Yet whatever unease, revulsion, and anger I’ve felt on this account has, over time, deepened my interest in Crack Wars. For by throwing EB into the combustible cauldron of the “war on drugs,” Ronell invites certain questions about the relationship between white girls and the racialized construction of drugs and transgression—questions that go mostly unanswered in Crack Wars, but which crack open the door to further inquiry.

Given their lack of access to public space and independent funds prior to the 1960s, many white women used drugs as patients—either as inpatients in residential settings (as was the case with Kavan), or by scamming drugs from medical settings (cf. the infamous pill-popping milieu memorialized in Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls).12 But as white women hit the street market, their literary accounts began to reflect the racialized dynamics that have long shaped the criminalized world of “drugs.” Some evidence a fetishizing enthusiasm, as in Ann Marlowe’s chiseled, chilly memoir How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z: “Copping feeds the middle-class fascination with the street. Finally you’re out there with the scary people, not cowering from them, but joining them.” (The combination of Marlowe’s enthusiasm for being “out there with the scary people” and her unabashed elitism—she was a Wall Street exec by day, Alphabet City crawler by night—is often perfectly revolting, with the debatable virtue of advertising that which others tend to euphemize.) For white girls with more social conscience and savvy, such as Michelle Tea’s first-person narrator in the autofictive Black Wave, there is more self-awareness and political discomfort, both of which are ultimately mowed over, for better or worse, by the power of the drug: “Michelle wondered for a second if there were diseases to be caught from the burned glass pipe of a career crackhead, but she had learned that fearful questions in such situations could lead to racism, to classism, to all sorts of unevolved and judgmental states of mind, and so one did not think too hard.

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