Trigger Warning: This article contains racist language.
1In April 1937, Virginia Woolf gave a talk on the BBC, which has since been published under the title “Craftsmanship”. In this essay, Woolf famously ponders on the fixity of words and wonders: “How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question” (Woolf 2008, 89).
- 1 Since 2014, Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri has been exhibited on several occasions, in Lond (...)
2Three quarters of a century later, young British multimedia artist Kabe Wilson devoted about five years of his life to providing an answer of sorts to Woolf’s question, as he recycled Woolf’s 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, by combining its 37971 words in a new order, thus creating a new story, the title of which, Of One Woman or So, is an anagram of Woolf’s most iconic title. Wilson’s novella, a portrait of the artist set in Cambridge in 2009, centres on Olivia N’Gowfri, a working-class, lesbian, and mixed-race woman. Through Olivia’s eyes, Wilson notably addresses the Euro- and androcentric dimension of our literary heritage and culture. As such, the novella depicts a young undergraduate student coming to terms with gendered, racial, and social bias both in Cambridge University and in the Western literary curriculum, but also, perhaps more surprisingly – though not quite so – in A Room of One’s Own, this early twentieth century text turned landmark feminist essay in the past few decades, whose feminism Olivia feels at odds with. By the end of the novella, Olivia’s sense of alienation will lead her, after having considered burning Woolf’s manuscript to ashes, to recycle it by cutting it up into pieces and reordering its words. This metapoetic mise en abyme echoes the final form Wilson gave to this unpublished novella, i.e. a 4x13ft collage.1
Figure 1: Kabe Wilson, page from Of One Woman or So by Olivia N’Gowfri, 2014.
Courtesy of Kabe Wilson.
3This brief presentation does no justice to Wilson’s brilliantly playful, poetic, and thought-provoking rewriting of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, but it enables me to emphasize the highly topical question at stake in Wilson’s work when one considers the protean concept of reception: how to engage with past texts and authors in order to make our own voices heard, without silencing them? Wilson’s answer to this question, I argue, is that we should engage with them, even embrace them, both creatively and critically, an idea that lies at the core of his recycling of A Room of One’s Own but which the artist also highlights in “The Dreadlock Hoax”, the performance art piece he created in order to reveal Of One Woman or So to the public.
4On Monday 19 May 2014, Wilson orchestrated a multifaceted artistic event entitled “Re-Rooming Virginia: Rewriting Woolf for the Twenty-first Century” (Wilson 2014d), which took place during the University of London’s Art Week. On that day, Wilson displayed for the first time his recycling of A Room of One’s Own in one of Virginia Woolf’s former Bloomsbury homes, in Gordon Square. As for Wilson himself, he stood in front of a lectern, as Woolf might well have done when she gave the Cambridge lectures on “Women and Fiction” which eventually became A Room of One’s Own. With his dreadlocks whitened, wearing a white blouse and a dark green cardigan which one could easily picture Woolf wearing, Wilson delivered a speech in which he evoked the whole process of writing Of One Woman or So, the creative and technological challenges it involved, the story the novella recounts, as well as the reflection on engaging with past literary texts it encapsulates. But this metatextual speech, which highlights Wilson’s highly self-aware and self-reflexive creative approach, was even more reflexive than the audience expected, as it turned out to be yet another recycling of Virginia Woolf’s words, this time an adaptation of Woolf’s 1937 essay, “Craftsmanship”, which Wilson reworked, thanks to what he calls a few “phonetic tricks” (Wilson 2014b), into a presentation of his own work.
Figure 2: Kabe Wilson, “The Dreadlock Hoax”, 2014.
Photography courtesy of Kabe Wilson.
- 2 I want to thank Kabe Wilson, whose generosity, kindness, and trust have accompanied me since I star (...)
5Interestingly, the artist’s website argues that “The Dreadlock Hoax” relied heavily on passing “not only in terms of race and gender, but also by arranging the language so that the audience sometimes thought they were hearing one word, when the artist was actually saying another” (Wilson 2014b). Wilson thus provides a conceptual entryway into his performance which invites me to explore the possible articulations between the practice of passing which, as contemporary author Brit Bennett points out, “is a performance that, like any other, requires an audience” (Bennett 2021, xv) and the notion of reception. If passing, be it in gendered, racial or literary terms, raises the issue of reception and, in the case of “The Dreadlock Hoax”, of those who will, or won’t, be hoaxed – that is tricked, deceived – by the performance, this article argues that Wilson’s multi-scaled and multifaceted creative passing enables him to talk back to Virginia Woolf in her own words and that Wilson’s performative art paradoxically relies on passing as a form of counter-interpellation. This tactic enables Wilson to reclaim his agency both as a reader and as an artist, and to question the contemporary relevance of Woolf’s words while recycling them for the twenty-first century.2
6Because of the recycling constraints which presided over the creation of “The Dreadlock Hoax Speech”, Wilson’s thematic centring on passing throughout this piece stems from the many occurrences of the term in “Craftsmanship”, in which Woolf uses the lexeme “pass” no less than ten times in the first three pages. Woolf notably highlights in that essay that “pass”, like many words, “besides the surface meaning […] contain[s] so many sunken meanings” (Woolf 2008, 87) and that it “suggest[s] the transiency of things, the passing of time and the changes of human life” (Woolf 2008, 87). But more striking perhaps, is one of the rare occurrences of the verb “pass” in A Room of One’s Own, which appears as Woolf’s persona states that “[i]t is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her” (Woolf 2015a, 39). Here, “passing” – as in “passing by” – becomes intertwined with the issue of race and with what can be perceived as one of these moments that testify to the whiteness of Woolf’s gaze, notably – as shown by Jane Marcus in her ground-breaking analysis of this passage in Hearts of Darkness (2004) – when Woolf directs her gaze towards other women, or as Kabe Wilson puts it:
And there’s this word ‘negress’. In context, it’s used in a very troubling sentence with all these colonial connotations, and the sentiment that now looks bizarre, that it’s commendable and a source of pride that a white woman can merely subject an unidentified black woman to her fetishistic gaze without seeking to take that any further. (Wilson & Friedman 2021, 59)
7Interestingly, it is this very sentence from A Room of One’s Own that prompted Wilson’s recycling of Woolf’s essay for, as Wilson argues: “not everyone can easily read past it” (Wilson & Friedman 2021, 59) or, to introduce a key concept of this article: not everyone can easily read past this interpellation. Wilson thus made a point of recycling Woolf’s use of this word while “inverting the uneasy furtiveness of how it’s used in the source text and […] mak[ing] it this explosive critical moment in the story” (Wilson & Friedman 2021, 59).
- 3 For detailed accounts of the “Dreadnought Hoax” see, for instance Lee 1997, 282-286, and Whitworth (...)
8Likewise, in “The Dreadlock Hoax Speech”, Kabe Wilson’s recycling of Woolf’s use of the word “passing” in “Craftsmanship” is a repetition with variation which points to a signification of the verb that remains sunken in Woolf’s text and gives it undeniable critical momentum. Indeed, both Wilson’s speech and Wilson’s performance allude to the social practice of passing – a practice through which a person is believed to belong to another racial or gendered group. Yet this semantic shift is not merely a sign of the passing of time, and it is worth highlighting that both the social practice and the literary theme of passing actually bring us back to the early twentieth century, and to the historical fact that both Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Nella Larsen’s landmark novel, Passing – which tells the tragic fate of a black woman who ventures into “the hazardous business of ‘passing’” (Larsen 2021, 24) – were actually published the very same year. Moreover, in terms of gendered and racial passing, Wilson’s performance itself can be perceived as another repetition with variation that emphasises, again, the issue of race in Woolf’s life and time. Thus, the title of Wilson’s performance “The Dreadlock Hoax” actually echoes another hoax, which took place in 1910, “The Dreadnought Hoax”, in which Virginia Woolf, then Virginia Stephen, and her younger brother Adrian took part, as they embarked on the HMS Dreadnought while wearing blackface and impersonating a delegation of Abyssinian royals.3 Perceived by most at the time, and by some today, as a playful and subversive critique of the British Empire, which indeed succeeded in fooling the Royal Navy, Wilson’s reversal of the hoax addresses the highly problematic aspect of inter-racial impersonation and caricature the 1910 “infamous Dreadnought hoax” relied on (see Snaith 2015, 28).
9Yet, beyond gendered and racial passing, literary, or phonetic, passing becomes the core modality of Wilson’s performance. Indeed, Wilson attempted to trick the audience into thinking that the words he pronounced were actually his and that they were actual words when, in fact, he relied on the audience mis-hearing some of the words he recycled from Woolf’s “Craftsmanship” and on their reassembling the phonemes he pronounced in order to co-construct the speech and its meaning with him. This is made clear when comparing the transcript of Wilson’s speech to what we hear – or seem to hear – when we listen to the recording of the performance, which has been made available online (Wilson 2014b). As such, Wilson’s performance heavily relies on the implication of its audience, until the very end of his speech, in which he reveals to his listeners that they have actually co-created the speech when they thought they were merely listening to it:
- 4 The underlined words or segments in the quotations taken from “The Dreadlock Hoax Speech” are those (...)
the talk eye [I] have been reading, the whole talk, meaning this sentence to [too], has been mate [made] with the words of ‘Craftsmanship’, which is the speech in which For genius head [Virginia said],
“How can we combine they [the] old words in new or does so [orders so] that they survive?” (Wilson 2014c)4
10But even more than a performance modality, passing becomes the central motif of “The Dreadlock Hoax Speech”, as Wilson highlights how passing was the ultimate goal he set himself when he started to recycle A Room of One’s Own, and that it eventually became Of One Woman or So’s crash-test of sorts:
[T]he test is passing. Passing is create in some thing [creating something] that the reader cannot tell is other words pinned together. We therefore cannot have unintelligible ramble nor erratic statements that seem like hollow poems. […] Doing it, the words that course [cause] doubt are the handful of disobliging words “pikestaff”, “stucco”, “Baedeker”, “vagabonds” – words that do not naturally belong. You think, are they passing? […] Only unconscious examinations will tell us. Thus, we take it to a person who knows nothing of the truth, ask their opinion, and wait for the moment they are done. If a sign rouses them to the lie and they finders [find us] out, then we have not fooled them. It is not passing. But the fact is passing is hardly ever in doubt, if their [there] is no suggestion of any reason to pause and separately consider the language, nobody will. So, do we pass? Yes. Easily. (Wilson 2014c)
11To borrow Brit Bennett’s take on successful passing: “[t]o pass successfully is to perform so seamlessly that nobody appreciates your craft” (Bennett 2021, xvi). And, indeed, it appears that Wilson’s multifaceted passing endeavour in “The Dreadlock Hoax” reflects how he intended the text of Of One Woman or So to pass “seamlessly”, by making the craft of the recycler unnoticeable. But if Of One Woman or So succeeds in passing for a novella of its own, far from being detached from Woolf’s text, Wilson’s narrative is first and foremost a contemporary answer to Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, just as “The Dreadlock Hoax” can be read as an attempt to talk back to Virginia Woolf in her own words.
- 5 See “I want to ask not whether that center [of feminist criticism and theory] (Woolf) can hold but (...)
12In her article entitled “Recycling Revolution: Re-mixing A Room of One’s Own and Black Power in Kabe Wilson’s Performance, Installation and Narrative Art”, the late Susan Stanford Friedman argues that “‘Wilson’s Dreadlock Hoax’ represents a much more complex relation to the British past than a simple writing back to empire’s racism” (Friedman 2019, 22). This statement implicitly highlights Virginia Woolf’s and, more generally, women’s complex position when authority or social and colonial hierarchy are concerned, for as Woolf reminds us in Three Guineas as a woman she was merely a “stepdaughter, not [a] full daughter, of England” (Woolf 2015b, 220). It also distinguishes Woolf’s prose and the racist overtones that can be located in her work from the racist colonial discourse of the Empire. Yet, I would argue that the conceptual framework and literary strategy of writing back should not be dismissed here. Indeed, Wilson’s literary and performative endeavour reminds us of “the tendency towards subversion” (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 2002, 32) that Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin have identified in postcolonial authors who, as Salman Rushdie put it, “write back to the Centre” (quoted in Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, i). But if Virginia Woolf’s centrality in feminist thinking and in the literary tradition has been decried, for decades now, in its propensity to silence other voices,5 perhaps another concept may be of use to characterise Wilson’s performance.
- 6 Incidentally, the notion of “talking back” makes two appearances in Of One Woman or So as Olivia pe (...)
13Indeed, Wilson’s recycling of Woolf’s words in “The Dreadlock Hoax”, and notably of the racial bias they carry to our contemporary eyes and ears is, I would argue, a technique that enables him to talk back to Virginia Woolf, a concept I borrow from bell hooks’s 1989 collection of essays entitled Talking Back: Thinking Feminist/Thinking Black.6 Recalling her experience as a young black girl growing up in a segregated town in Kentucky before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, hooks states in the first essay of the collection that, as a black woman, talking back means “speaking as an equal to an authority figure” (hooks 2015, 5), but also that it is “a form of conscious rebellion against dominating authority” (hooks 2015, 11), an authority that lies at the intersection of class, gender, and race. Applying this concept to Wilson’s creative endeavour and to its relationship with Woolf’s oeuvre implies a shift of perspective as well as the necessity to acknowledge that in this specific case, the issue of authority is not so much a gendered one, as a racial one, as well as a question of literary status and stature – though one cannot deny that the reception of Virginia Woolf and of her works has been marked by gendered, if not sexist, bias for about a century now.
14One could argue that in Of One Woman or So, Wilson’s autodiegetic narrator, Olivia N’Gowfri, writes back to A Room of One’s Own, this feminist classic of the early twentieth century and, by doing so, rewrites it for the twenty-first century, thanks to an intersectional perspective that enables her to question the universality and timelessness of the essay’s feminism. With “The Dreadlock Hoax” Wilson talks back to Woolf, this upper-class, white woman who has become for the past fifty years or so identified as the most prominent English woman writer of the twentieth century, as Wilson shows in Of One Woman or So when Olivia states that Woolf is “now thought of as the woman writer […] The Woman” (Wilson 2014a, 33). Interestingly, the choice of “Craftsmanship” as an essay to be reworked into “The Dreadlock Hoax Speech” highlights this dialogue across time between Woolf’s and Wilson’s voices, as “Craftsmanship” was originally, like many of Woolf’s essays, a talk and is now the only recording of Woolf’s voice that has reached us (Woolf 1937).
15This asymmetrical dialogue enables Wilson to assert his own voice through Woolf’s words and, by so doing, to reclaim his own creative and critical agency. As such, the actual racism that can be located in Woolf’s use of words that relay racialist conceptions and worldviews – be it “negro” in “Craftsmanship”, or “negress” in A Room of One’s Own – propels Wilson’s creative endeavour, a process that brings to mind the following reflection by Judith Butler, in Excitable Speech, A Politics of the Performative:
Thus the injurious address may appear to fix or paralyze the one it hails, but it may also produce an unexpected and enabling response. If to be addressed is to be interpellated, then the offensive call runs the risk of inaugurating a subject in speech who comes to use language to counter the offensive call. (Butler 1997, 2)
- 7 Both Butler’s and Lecercle’s conceptualisations take their origins in, and enter into dialogue with (...)
16Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s interpellation/counter-interpellation dialectic – which is partly drawn from Butler’s reasoning (Lecercle 2005, 66)7 – provides a generative framework to analyse Wilson’s response to Woolf, and his performance. Indeed, as Lecercle states: “bad words are disconnected […], aggressive naming or interpellation merely requires the single word” (Lecercle 2005, 67). As such, Woolf’s use of the words “negress” and “negro” works as an interpellation which situates some of her readers as others, a process Wilson points out in Of One Woman or So as Olivia reads A Room of One’s Own and feels othered by Woolf’s words, but which he also highlights in “The Dreadlock Hoax”. Indeed, in his performance speech, Wilson answers the oddly essentialist and racialised personification of words Woolf develops in “Craftsmanship” – “English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy” (Woolf 2008, 90) – by explicitly pointing at the sense of feeling insulted that Woolf’s use of racial epithets may provoke, and by putting the insult under a metalinguistic spotlight in order to better distance himself, and his audience, from it: “Consider ‘negro’ – to one of our writers [ie Woolf] it properly describes a dark person, for they [the] other [ie Olivia N’Gowfri] it is unflattering, a hindrance. Nowadays we pause at the term, it is a word of the past” (Wilson 2014c).
17It is this re-authoring of Woolf’s words or, more specifically, this re-addressing of Woolf’s offensive words back to her that acts as a counter-interpellation, even more so as Wilson confronts himself, head-on, to Woolf’s language, re-appropriates her words and re-connects them in order to assert the specificity of his own voice as an artist and as a subject. As Lecercle points out:
I counter-interpellate the language that interpellates me into what I am: I play with it, I exploit its virtualities of meaning, I reclaim the names by which it pins me down or excludes me, I send the bad words back to their original speaker […]. (Lecercle 2005, 118)
- 8 The phrase “little language” appears in several of Woolf’s texts, notably in the essays “Phases of (...)
18One may argue of course that Woolf’s words, no matter their potency, ought not to be compared to the hold language has on us as speakers and subjects. Yet Wilson’s recycling constraints, which one may consider, after Lecercle and Butler, to be “enabling constraints” (Butler 1997, 16; Lecercle 2019, 248-249), actually turn Woolf’s words and her texts into a language of their own, as is made quite clear in “The Dreadlock Hoax Speech” when Wilson argues: “Hence It is learn in [learning] a language, a little language we they [with a] very strange dictionary […] to the point that one can feel the language separate from full English in the mind” (Wilson 2014c).8
- 9 See “[E]n tant que locuteur, je contre-interpelle la langue qui m’interpelle. J’en fais un usage cr (...)
19But as Jean-Jacques Lecercle further highlights, if counter-interpellating requires playing with the language it may also involve “breaking” it: “[speakers] counter-interpellate the language that interpellates them […] by using the language with creativity, a creativity that not only conforms to the rules [...], but does not hesitate to break them” (Lecercle 2019, 236, my translation).9 And indeed it appears that Wilson’s counter-interpellating technique, which works via the recycling or the upcycling of Woolf’s words in Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri (see Favre 2021), reaches its apex in “The Dreadlock Hoax Speech”, in which Wilson not only breaks up Woolf’s words into mere phonemes but also breaks the most basic rules of grammar and syntax, a dismantling process Wilson sheds light on, not without a certain irony, in the speech itself: “Of course the craft of cut in [cutting] things and so in [sewing] them together as a patch work [patchwork] body has very self-conscious Marry Shall he [Mary Shelley] echoes – on the surface there, we may say, the monster is a live [alive]” (Wilson 2014c).
20To borrow yet somehow reverse Audre Lorde’s powerful aphorism, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 2007, 112), Kabe Wilson’s endeavour to literally dismantle Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own into a list of words to be rearranged in order to give them a new meaning or, in the case of “The Dreadlock Hoax Speech”, to dismantle “Craftsmanship” into units of sounds to be rearranged in order to produce with the complicity of his audience new words, could be read as an attempt to dismantle Woolf’s texts with Woolf’s own tools. Yet far from erasing Woolf’s words and works, Wilson’s endeavour is first and foremost an attempt to give them a new life, “for the new now”, as Olivia puts it in Of One Woman or So (Wilson 2014a, 131), in other words to “re-room” them in the twenty-first century.
21Centred around the highly Woolfian motif of the room, the title given to the artistic event during which “The Dreadlock Hoax” was performed – “Re-Rooming Virginia: Rewriting Woolf for the Twenty-first Century” (Wilson 2014d) – alludes to Wilson’s multifaceted, creative, and critical approach to Woolf and her texts. Indeed, the event’s title emphasises how, by taking place in Gordon Square, in the very house where Virginia Woolf lived from 1904 to 1907, Wilson’s performative re-embodiment of Woolf metaphorically invites “Virginia” to re-enter her own former room. Yet the polysemy of the term “room” also calls for a consideration of how Wilson’s work not only questions Woolf’s place in the Western literary tradition and in our feminist and cultural imaginaries, but also reflects on the means to accommodate – that is to adapt, to adjust – Woolf’s words to our contemporary needs.
22And yet, echoing Woolf’s reflection in “Craftsmanship” on words, their materiality, their signification, and their elusiveness, Wilson’s “Dreadlock Hoax Speech” testifies to the ever-lasting power of Woolf’s own words:
We pot [put] them in alphabetical order, but we are not rustling them up to but chair [butcher] them, they are cultivated so that not one of them perishes in transiency. Words have unreal power and when it is tapped they shine. The fact that the words themselves are so good is of course of great service, and we are therefore indebted to the dear writer who combined them at the beginning. By lecturing about women and literature with so much power and meaning, this glory is [glorious] novelist went on to change English criticism for good. Although most of a centuries [century’s] gone since that talk, we still hear it today, lectured and unlectured, […]. The words remain on minds and lips as if they are new, and because they seem so fresh they are useful for our craft. (Wilson, 2014c)
- 10 See also “Contemporary critics have also reconceived the social practice of passing, presenting it (...)
23As Kabe Wilson shows how Woolf’s words feel “new” and “fresh” to him as an artist, despite their having been written almost a century ago, he both highlights and subverts the border between past and present, just as Wilson’s passing endeavour, to borrow Pamela Caughie’s definition of passing: “at once reinforces and disrupts the binary logic of identity and identification” (Caughie 1999, 21).10
24Kabe Wilson’s performance actually relies on his identification with Virginia Woolf herself, beyond gender, beyond race, and beyond time: “I identified with [Woolf] as an androgynous hero, and […] my own racially-gendered or gendered-racial liminality drew me into a space to challenge/play with/reimagine the whiteness of the text” (Wilson, Email to author, 29 May 2019). The articulation between the ideas of “challeng[ing]/play[ing] with/ reimagin[ing]” that Wilson sketches here actually brings out the ambivalence that lays at the centre of his endeavour, his creative engagement with Woolf being both “[an] expression of adoration” and “[a] method of critique” (Wilson in McIntosh 2014, c. 11.30min).
25Indeed, Of One Woman or So and “The Dreadlock Hoax” are paradoxically both a celebration and a reconsideration, a tribute and a reassessment of Woolf’s works and words, through which Wilson asserts the necessity to keep engaging both critically and creatively with past literary texts, as he argues in “The Dreadlock Hoax Speech”:
the words of forward think in [thinking] writers live on further than most, meaning that they teach us about yesterday and we can use them to express the truth of to-day […] But like all books, if [A Room of One’s Own] is read as gospel, the words be come [become] transcendent truth, and then like God’s words they silence us […]. Live he a [Olivia] seas [sees] signs of that and then wishes to be untaught, uneducated in truth. She finally chops it all up to figure out how we can use the words of another to say something of our own. (Wilson 2014c)
26Talking back to Virginia Woolf and counter-interpellating her with her own words thus enable her readers, be it Olivia N’Gowfri or Kabe Wilson, to reclaim their agency and assert their own voices. But could this counter-interpellation be perceived as an interpellation of sorts? By laying emphasis on the racism present in Woolf’s texts and making those who may “easily read past it” (Wilson & Friedman 2021, 59), read it anew, and read it with a new awareness, I would argue that Wilson not only counter-interpellates Woolf, he also interpellates his white readers and spectators. Just as Woolf’s text interpellates and subjects its non-white readers by othering them, Wilson’s performance interpellates and subjects its white audience as white. Doing so, Wilson not only teaches his white readers and spectators about the whiteness of Woolf’s texts, he also teaches them about their own white privilege, both as readers, spectators, and subjects. Kabe Wilson’s work certainly taught me a lot – about Woolf’s whiteness and my own, about the blind spots in Woolf’s thinking and my own, and about the privileged position from which I read both his and Woolf’s words.
27In November 2020, Kabe Wilson published a deeply moving and poignant piece in The Modernist Review, entitled “On Being Still”. This diaristic essay covers the personal, national, and global events that unravelled between 7 March and 15 August 2020. It notably addresses the COVID-19 pandemic, the spring 2020 lockdown, the migrant crisis, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, and interweaves these with an intimate account of the creative project which Wilson pursued throughout this period: a series of ten stunning, hyperrealist paintings inspired by the Bloomsbury collection at Charleston, entitled “The Brighton Paintings” (Wilson 2020a). Mirroring the title of Woolf’s 1930 essay “On Being Ill”, Wilson’s haunting prose evokes the reflexive and melancholic dimension of Woolf’s text, as he explores in a highly confessional mode the anxiety, the perplexities, and the anger that he grappled with during these few months, while looking back on his past creative endeavours and his complex and ambivalent relationship, both as a reader and as an artist, with Woolf and, more generally, the Bloomsbury group.
28A pivotal entry, dated June 9th – merely two weeks after the killing of George Floyd – as Kabe Wilson was painting the Brighton Pavilion, reads as such:
- 11 This quotation is taken from a letter Virginia Woolf addressed to her friend Emma Vaughan on 19 Apr (...)
June 9th. Reading Woolf’s letters to find references to Brighton for the exhibition idea. Found this quote about being on holiday in Hove
‘The place is swarming with actresses and females of all descriptions; we go for walks along the Parade and moralise and look at the Niggers.’11
Completely throws me. moralise and look at the Niggers. So many painful twists of self-loathing and regret for attaching myself to and revering the work of racist white modernists. Yet feel grimly in awe of her prescience as ever. How could she so perfectly describe people’s use of the internet before it was even invented? Go online, moralise and look at the Niggers. Every newspaper every day, moralise and look at the Niggers. Take a job as a substitute teacher, moralise and look at the Niggers. You spend your life trying to understand how black people fit into this world and eventually have to face up to seeing that that’s what it is, just being a voiceless site of white moralising, then dying, early. Dying in the sea, abandoned by the state, sometimes lynched by the state. But still everyone wants to talk about you. Photograph you, write about you, protest about you. Make grand declarations on your behalf. I walked down one of the poshest streets nearby, ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ posters in most windows. A street on which I’ve experienced racial trauma. I don’t know how to read it. Who’s it addressing? I’ve been made painfully aware of the fact that they don’t matter, on that street. This year is too weird, I don’t know how to read any of it. (Wilson 2020b)
29The process of interpellation, across time, across the page, across the street, is here rendered in all its excruciating, alienating violence, while the question of counter-interpellation and of the possibility of talking back seems to disintegrate in the powerful image of the “voiceless site of white moralising” (Wilson 2020b). And yet, “On Being Still” also lays emphasis on Wilson’s reclaiming of his own voice and agency through painting and writing. In a later entry, as he had just finished working on the penultimate painting of the series, a view of the Channel whose title, “The Waves from Palace Pier,” echoes Woolf’s 1931 novel – the reading of which Wilson presents as “Life-defining” (Wilson 2020b) –, Kabe Wilson writes: “July 5th. […] We engage with history through art, rework it, face it down, make it our own. […] Make it new” (Wilson 2020b).
30From Of One Woman or So and “The Dreadlock Hoax” to “On Being Still” and “The Brighton Paintings”, Kabe Wilson’s multifaceted creative endeavour writes, talks, and paints back to Woolf, to the Bloomsbury group, and to the colonial and racist history of England, by “mak[ing] people see the heritage through [his] eyes” (Wilson 2020b) while highlighting how “We all share history, all share space. Differently” (Wilson 2020b).
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