Shoo bop shoo bop, my baby, ooooo: W.E.B. Du Bois, Sigmund Freud & Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight

Inspired by the recent Black Perspectives “W.E.B. Du Bois @ 150” Online Forum, SO!’s “W.E.B. Du Bois at 150” amplifies the commemoration of the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth in 2018 by examining his all-too-often and all-too-long unacknowledged role in developing, furthering, challenging, and shaping what we now know as “sound studies.”

It has been an abundant decade-plus (!!!) since Alexander Weheliye’s Phonographies “link[ed] the formal structure of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk to the contemporary mixing practices of DJs” (13) and we want to know how folks have thought about and listened with Du Bois in their work in the intervening years.  How does Du Bois as DJ remix both the historiography and the contemporary praxis of sound studies? How does attention to Du Bois’s theories of race and sound encourage us to challenge the ways in which white supremacy has historically shaped American institutions, sensory orientations, and fields of study? What new futures emerge when we listen to Du Bois as a thinker and agent of sound?

Over the next two months, we will be sharing work that reimagines sound studies with Du Bois at the center. Pieces by Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Kristin Moriah, Aaron Carter-Ényì, Austin Richey, Julie Beth Napolin, and Vanessa Valdés, move us toward a decolonized understanding and history of sound studies, showing us how has Du Bois been urging us to attune ourselves to it. To start the series from the beginning, click here.

Readers, today’s post by Julie Beth Napolin brings her trilogy to a close, exploring the echoes of black maternal sounding and listening she has amplified in Du Bois in Barry Jenkins’s Oscar-winning film Moonlight (2016).

Essay One: Listening to and as Contemporaries: W.E.B. Du Bois & Sigmund Freud

Essay Two:  (T)racing Mother Listening: W.E.B. Du Bois & Sigmund Freud

–Jennifer Lynn Stoever and Liana Silva, Eds.

The theory of the acousmatic—the idea of a sound whose source is unseen, as it comes to us from Barthes, Chion, and Dolar—rests upon the mother tongue and the Oedipal scene, the dyad of mother and father. There is in “Do ba – na co – ba”–his great- great- grandmother’s song Du Bois remembers hearing passed down through his family–a transmission from the mother, but what kind of transmission? “There is no one extant autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage,” Hartman writes in “Venus in Two Acts” (3). History becomes, she continues, a project of “listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words” (3-4). The word-sounds “Do ba-na co-ba” are not the translation of a misconstrued word and they bolster a song of survival, of living on.  But there is a silence there. “Do ba-na co-ba,” in a manner of speaking, survives the Middle Passage, and re-opens it as a primary channel of listening and receiving.

The Bantu woman was Du Bois’ grandfather’s grandmother, so many generations removed.

Returning to the vestiges of black motherhood in recent black cinema (including Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight), Rizvana Bradley argues that the loss of the mother “in black life more generally, as it repeats through cycles of material loss, … encapsulates racial slavery’s gendered social afterlife” (51). Bradley’s essay is crucial in retrieving the figure of the lost mother even in moments when the mother is absolutely elided as a character, not to appear visually. Horror more generally owes its immersive quality to the womb (enclosed spaces), but Bradley turns to black film form in particular to find in its mise-en-scène (such as in the gravitational field of the “sunken place”) maternal flesh and form.

In the compositional and formal strategies of The Souls of Black Folk, in the punctuated silences that open each chapter, there is a trace of the elided black maternal. The Bantu woman is lost not because Du Bois did not know her (he could not have), but because something of her song transmits a loss and theft that were not symbolic, but literal—a stolen and kidnapped maternal, rather than simply destroyed, as in the Oedipal mandate. It is crucial that the song that is at the core of Du Bois’ memory is transmitted along the maternal line. This maternal voicing is the unspoken wound of Du Bois’ text.

Spillers begins “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” from the premise of non-Oedipal psycho-biographies, and these include not only the single mother, but the kidnapped mother. The quotation marks that surround the figure of the “black woman” for Spillers are “so loaded with mythical prepossession” that the agents it conceals cannot be clarified. Spillers takes particular aim at the infamous conclusions of the Moynihan report of 1965 that trace the roots of African American poverty to the figure of the single mother, the underachievement of lower class black males being linked in the report to black women.

In this way, black culture is thought to operate in a matriarchal pattern essentially out of step with a majority culture where a child’s identity and name, by definition, cannot be determined by the maternal line (66). As Lacan insists, it is the Father who gives a child both the Name and the symbolic Law (language). According to this configuration, Spillers argues, the child of the black mother can only be left in a haunting dis-identity. The implications for psychoanalysis are radical: Spillers begins the essay with a “stunning reversal of the castration thematic,” one that displaces its structure “to the territory of the Mother and Daughter, [and] becomes an aspect of the African-American female’s misnaming” (66). Among these misnamings is that black women are often not seen as “women,” omitted from the category and its political inflections. She is left castrated, politically impotent. For in this displacement, the subject positions of “male” and “female” lose—or fail to adhere to—their traditionally conceived symbolic integrity, and this loss begins with the historical experience aboard ship.

“waves and shadows,” image by Flickr User Albatrail

For Spillers, then, it is essential to trace this misnaming and undifferentiation of black women to the physical and psychic conditions of the Middle Passage. When Freud begins Civilization and Its Discontents, he notes an “oceanic feeling” engendered by religion. The oceanic is the longing for return to a pre-subjective state where one is united with all that is, before the cut that is birth and then language (indeed, the oceanic feeling is often attributed to song). Spillers’ move is to read the oceanic literally and structurally at once: there is the Atlantic Ocean and its Middle Passage. The oceanic, in this way, is de-subjectivating; it casts the subject out of itself in a terror of undifferentiation that does not cease with landfall.

But Spillers also implies that, in that (sexual) undifferentiation, a radical political potential can be retrieved. It is not that black feminism retrieves for her a sexual differentiation after becoming an ambiguous thing. It would not be “woman” in any traditional sense, for that New World category rests upon the violence Spillers seeks to describe. Above all, it would not be easy to name.

Du Bois certainly takes up the Father in his poetic epigraphs. But in ending with the Bantu woman’s song—as it seems to anatomize all of the other songs he describes—Du Bois upholds himself as being named by the maternal line. He is unable or perhaps unwilling to make a clarified place for a black female political agent. If we listen with ear’s pricked, we find that she is the submerged, oceanic condition for his speech.

By way of an open-ended conclusion, we can recall the sound of the ocean that punctuates Jenkin’s stunningly lyrical and psychologically complex coming-of-age film, Moonlight. The ocean provides the anchoring location for the psychological action, but also its aesthetic locus, the beginnings of its cinematic language. The sound of the ocean continually marks a desire for “return” to maternal undifferentiation and oneness, and yet, it provides the space for two embodied memories that cannot be compassed by traumatic separation. In the first, a father-like figure, Juan, embraces a young boy, Little, to allow him to float in a nearly baptismal scene of second birth, and in a second scene at the shore, Little experiences with his friend, Kevin, sexual gratification, a coming into his body as a site of pleasure.

The conclusion of the film posits these moments as being in the past. We had experienced them as contemporary, but only later realize they are a well of memory for a now-adult subject who does not know himself. I want to focus, then, on the film’s conclusion, after Kevin and Little (now named Black, his adult re-renaming), meet again after many years. Kevin calls Little/Black on the phone, a defining gesture of reaching out erotically and acousmatically with voices. We later learn that he calls because Kevin has heard an old song that reminded of him of his lost friend. By this voice or call, Black is brought somewhere back to his moment of break to become Little again, as if something in the past must be recuperated for the present. As he drives down the open road to find Kevin, the music of Caetano Veloso soars.

We can’t be sure if this is extra-diegetic or diegetic music. To be sure, Black would never listen to such a song on his stereo. And yet, the song seems to emanate directly from its affective space. In the language of literature, it is a “free-indirect style,” part character and part author; the film is hearing Black/Little feel. He’s in a space of haunting melody, drenched in personal memory, whose principle scene had been the Florida shore, the ocean lapping providing a (maternal) containing motif for the film, now transmuted into song.

The oceanic, Spillers might remind us, is violent, echoing the passages that made it possible for these two black boys to be there. But the sound is also amniotic, a space of maternal longing, particularly for a character who, in Bradley’s estimation, is positioned as pathological, injured by the missing mother who is, in turn, indicted by the film’s imaginary. To some extent, Moonlight participates in the mother’s misnaming: it cannot see the structures that ensure her lostness. But the film does also push towards some mode of melancholia that, as Michael B. Gillespie argues of Jenkins’ earlier work, would cease to be depressive. Jenkins’ aesthetic practice is transformative, Gillespie suggesting that we use Flatley’s term, “antidepressive melancholia,” as it’s with a stake in the personal past but turned towards the collective future (106).

When the two boys, now men, meet again, several sounds punctuate the scene. They are not words or even phonemes, yet “speak” to provide a sonic geography of feeling that includes or “holds” the viewer, as Ashon Crawley might suggest. Among them is the sound of the bell on the door, which marks hello and goodbye, entry and exit, coming and going (­or “fort-da” in Freud’s lexicon). When Black enters the diner, he is still “Black.” It is only when remembering what happened at the shore, then to say that no man has touched him since, that he becomes Little. He discloses this truth on behalf of a potential in present and a still-nascent future. Kevin cooks for Black, and Jenkins’ is careful to amplify the sound of the spoon stirring. He provides for Black, the film locating Kevin, a male, within the coordinates of maternal care. The sonic crux of the scene—no longer primal, no longer traumatic—is when Kevin plays the song on the jukebox that had drawn him to call to Little/Black in the first place. “Hello, stranger,” Barbara Lewis croons, “it seems like a mighty long time. Shoo bop shoo bop, my baby, ooooo.”

In listening to a song that is from our past, Newtonian time collapses, a shock running from past to present. The film never discloses whether these two had once heard this song together before. It is more likely that its affective map impacts Kevin, that he hears in its melancholic sound a nascence, and with it, a longing to retrieve his own past and repair. Lewis herself, singing in the sixties, is a recalling an already eclipsed fifties doo-wop. The phonemes circle back to their beginnings in “Do ba- na co-ba.” Such sounds are to be opposed to the shot of Little’s mother yelling at him (presumably a slur). There, the sound had cut out of the scene, which recurs for Little in a traumatic nightmare.

In contrast to that violent naming, the boys’ intimacy was defined by, to use Kevin Quashie’s term, “quiet,” a sense of interiority Michael Gillespie explores in his analysis of Jenkins’ first feature film, Medicine for Melancholy.  Shakira Holt and Chris Chien called this dynamic in Chiron and Juan’s relationship “silence as a form of intimate conversance” in their 2017 post about Moonlight.  There is a queer intimacy revived apart from trauma, triangulated by a black woman’s voice, paired with male harmonies, that resonate acousmatically from the jukebox to hold and contain the scene. For psychoanalytic theories of voice, containment is the essential maternal gesture of song.

We begin to wonder what might be possible for the feminine were it to be separated from the maternal dimension, a potential that Jenkins does not explore in this particular film in his oeuvre (as he does in Medicine for Melancholy, for example); each of the women in Moonlight “mother” to some extent. Nonetheless, he disperses the maternal function across male and female subjects, particularly in moments when the film resists depression. In listening with ears pricked, as with Du Bois’ epigraphs, the voices cease to belong to an individual, to be male voices or female voices, but become plural and pluralistic. It becomes possible to ground a politics of listening to the past for remaking in the present in that sound.

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I would like to thank Michael B. Gillespie, Amanda Holmes, and Jennifer Stoever for their incredible scholarly assistance and comments in writing this essay trilogy.

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Julie Beth Napolin is Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at The New School, a musician, and radio producer. She received a PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work participates in the fields of sound studies, literary modernism and aesthetic philosophy, asking what practices and philosophies of listening can tell us about the novel as form. She served as Associate Editor of Digital Yoknapatawpha and is writing a book manuscript on listening, race, and memory in the works of Conrad, Du Bois, and Faulkner titled The Fact of Resonance. Her work has appeared in qui parle, Fifty Years After Faulkner (ed. Jay Watson and Ann Abadie), and Vibratory Modernism (ed. Shelley Trower and Anthony Enns).

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Moonlight’s Orchestral Manoeuvers: A duet by Shakira Holt and Christopher Chien

“A Sinister Resonance”: Joseph Conrad’s Malay Ear and Auditory Cultural Studies–Julie Beth Napolin

“Scenes of Subjection: Women’s Voices Narrating Black Death“–Julie Beth Napolin