Dissonance(s): Rin Johnson’s Nobody sleeps better than white people

Language and the hierarchies it (re)produces have always conveyed power, and once you name something, it can become yours in true whitewashing fashion — for you to handle, for you to dispose of. And this is especially true when language is appropriated and used to silence the very people who got robbed of it in the first place. It’s also language that gets used so handily to cloak violence in the discourse of love, of assimilation for “one’s own good”, of colonizing one’s culture by using one of the sharpest, deepest-piercing mechanisms to the point where words lose their meaning altogether and can hardly disclose something anymore. When encompassed by all these additives, silence might come across as the only outbreak but it’s the kind of outbreak that cuts both ways because staying silent equals being an accomplice way too many times — keeping silent is actually a trap that only works in favor of top of the chain characters.

Rin Johnson’s Nobody sleeps better than white people bears precisely such an episode of silence, a breach to be captured and exposed through words and meanings that do not suffer from terminal “whiteness”. This one is a really condensed chapbook that seems built from small cuts, with verses and personal photos collated in an undertaking set to affirm the racialized, gendered, policed and targeted body — the black body, as still having a will and act of its own making, despite its criminalized movability. By queering this black body and generating narratives as a mean of escape from heteronormativity and the violence it entails, Johnson also withdraws from the performative breadth of “whiteness” that gets its own strengthening from keeping the black body captive and making it invisible, one way or another. It’s a kind of barbed withdrawal that also rules out the spectacular expected to be performed by otherness.

You know, I don’t like it there. I mean I’m a dog person but they
have all those wild black dogs and I walk around there and I can’t
stop thinking, where’s the master?
Mom Look,
Nobody sleeps better than white people.
They cuff us to hospital beds and then go home and sleep.
Anything can be a hospital bed, mom.
Fuck us is what they’re saying, mom.
I’ll cuss if I want to, mom.

Just like any other toxic construct, “whiteness” needs to institute otherness in order to dominate it, to have the perfect excuse to marginalize anything that does not conform to it in order to sustain its own power. And since desire has been grasped, more often than not, as something that can act on an already existing normativity, expressing black desire also means subverting the white, phallic one. Residing in a shrinking body and subjectivity, Johnson’s own queerness comes as a disruptive invisibility only to map out the violence of alienation experienced by black bodies that seem, once again, so easy to immobilize and incarcerate. It’s the kind of desire that also seeks to dodge any white expression of racist, sexist and ultimately neoimperial desires and create ground for new community well beyond the dominant gaze that tries to police the erotic manifested by black bodies and the viciousness of the stop-and-frisk practices. Nobody sleeps better than white people might be a private exercise in shaping the expression of queer black desire beyond the constraint of other people’s desires but it’s also something beautiful about something ugly. Because “whiteness” is anything but poetry.

Later, I am feeling nothing, because I cannot feel.
I touch my arms in the bathroom to make sure that they are there.
(They are but they are shrinking.)
I call my lover and she is ashamed for me.
She says over and over there is never a conclusion for black women.
I disagree with her but don’t have any legs to stand on because those shrank too.
(Bae, there is no conclusion for black men or I tried to disappear but it didn’t work.)

Rin(Don) Johnson is a photo conceptual artist and poet interested in the intersections of lived-space and memory. Johnson is the author of two chapbooks, Nobody sleeps better than white people from Inpatient Press and the forthcoming Meet in the corner from Publishing House.

Based in New York, Inpatient Press occasionally publishes books, chapbooks, and online-only works.

Images: Cover and photo extract from Nobody sleeps better than white people

Author bio courtesy of Inpatient Press