A LIFE AS CRIME

or JAVERT IN COPENHAGEN

Very early on in my American life – I must have been seven or eight – I became aware that I,  a poor Dominican immigrant of African descent, was considered a crime. 

Not just a criminal – a crime, as though my very existence was proof positive that a crime was in process.   Didn’t matter what I was doing, I could be standing around looking up at the clouds or quietly reading a book at the local library and people immediately assumed that I wasn’t just up to no good, that I was no good.  It seemed that my immigration (combined with my skin color, my face, my hair, my accent, my neighborhood (which abutted a landfill), and my unmistakable poverty) had rendered me crimogenic.      

In the US I was given a new name (YOU-NOT, how fittingly annihilatory), a new language, a new culture, a new race – but above all else, new flesh.  Crimogenic flesh that functioned like my very own “racialized scarlet letter” marking me “as bestial, as criminal, as inferior.”¹ I had become (to quote Kimberley Ducey and Ruth Thompson-Miller) “a perpetual suspect.”  In the US I always fit the description. 

It was a distressing experience to find oneself changed in such a manner, “to have one’s body confiscated without physically being placed in chains.”²   In fact, it really fucking sucked beyond all words, but what could I do?  I barely grasped what had happened, what was happening, didn’t have Fanon or Maldonado-Torres to help me understand.  With no real options and plenty of hurt, I did like a lot of kids around me: I tried to ignore it, brush it off.

But it’s not something that you can ever entirely ignore, is it? 

The shit just eats at you. 

So many examples:

Petting a stray puppy and some white person yelling down from their porch, demanding to know where I’d stolen the dog from. 

Pulling into a parking lot and people actually heading back to their cars to check to see if their doors were locked.

Being stopped so often on my commute to college by the NJ State Police that it became something of a joke – you know, the kind of joke that could get you shot while reaching for your registration.  Their favorite excuse for stopping me: improperly mounted license plate.  Seemed I was using the wrong bolts. 

At malls my bags were searched so regularly and unapologetically that forty years later I still feel uncomfortable carrying anything in stores.

And the never-ending “Are you illegal?” shtick which still plagues me to this day.

I remember when I read Les Miserables wondering if the inhuman prosecurial Javert-ness of the world could ever stop for people like me.  

I dreamed that it might, frail dreams I always woke up from. 

2

When I went to college, to graduate school, when I published my first book, when I won my prizes, did I hope that maybe the Javert-ness would abate?  Did I think I could achieve some way out of my crimogenic flesh?  Did I hope these things – not openly or directly – but quietly, subliminally, so as to not raise the ire of my staunchly activist self?   

Perhaps a small part of me did, I am ashamed to admit.  Perhaps a small part of me did. 

But white supremacy’s Javert-ness is as relentless as a Terminator: “It can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with.  It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop.”   And it sure don’t give two fucks whether you’ve published a book or won some prizes or wear a nice suit every day of the week. 

Something we all eventually find out, if we’re lucky-unlucky. 

3

In 2011 I participated in the Louisiana Literature Festival in Denmark, along with a pack of other writers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yiyun Li, Marilynne Robison, Gary Shteyngart etc.  

As literary festivals go, this was a memorable one.  The writers were swell, the audiences interesting, everything ran smoothly (the organizers had clearly worked their asses off).   After one of my events, I took the train into Copenhagen – because why the fuck not?  Copenhagen is one of my favorite European cities and on that sunny day it was straight glorious.  I had walked maybe two thousand steps when I spotted a festival poster with my name on it.  I guess I was feeling proud of myself because I lifted my phone to take a picture and right then a police car jumped over the curb and came to a violent stop inches from me. 

Someone from a nicer background might have assumed the cops were responding to a nearby crime, but I immediately knew who it was they were responding to.

Out jumped two cops³ like they had just stumbled on the number one criminal mastermind of the planet.  I mean, they literally fell over themselves to have me show them my hands. 

I’ll spare you the drear.  Long story short: cops claimed they were on high alert for terrorists (aren’t they always) and someone had reported me for suspiciously taking photographs.

Improperly mounted license plates, part nine billion and two. 

I guess I could have done all sorts of dumb courageous shit in that moment – but I got about as much desire to fuck around with cops as I do to fuck around with land mines.  I let them search me and pick through all my belongings.  Each time they asked me to show them something on my phone I secretly snapped a few pictures (the ones above).  They studied my passport and asked a billion questions and I kept repeating that I was a writer at the Louisiana Festival and they pressed me on why I wasn’t in Louisiana and I explained over and over because I had the afternoon off (had to resist saying “because I’m here, mama huevo”).   

In the end they called in my info and while the pedestrians gave us wide berth, we waited for High Command to radio back.  Rather than look at the people looking at me, I stared at the stupid festival poster, a poster I’d been so proud of but which hadn’t stopped me from being pulled up on.

Right then I started to laugh – a real laugh.

The cops of course took umbrage. 

You think something is funny? they demanded.  

I shook my head. 

But something was funny.  Not just the cops and their racist bullshit but me and my bullshit, too.  All those years trying to escape my crimogenic self, of striving to achieve exceptionality, in the hopes of propitiating the Imperial Monstrosity that could never be propitiated. 

What fucking nonsense. 

It was my I yam what I yam moment.  This could have happened anywhere and anytime, but it happened in Copenhagen in front of a poster with my name on it while cops hovered over me and strangers stared unsympathetically. 

And so, on the most beautiful day of summer thousands of miles from home, I put down a part of me that was no friend – and I felt, if not exactly reborn, then less chained.  I was finally realizing in a deep way that while Javert might have thrown himself in the river, the Javertness of white supremacy would never stop.  Not for one exceptional person or ten thousand, not even for Wakanda.  Either we, its victims, collectively end it, or it ends us. 

I didn’t yet have the language for what was dawning – I hadn’t discovered Fred Moten’s fugitivity or Saidiya Hartman’s waywardness – but at the very least I was no longer bending towards those who would always and forever categorize me as a crime; I was instead moving towards something else.     

Eventually the cops let me go. 

But it was too late: I was already on my way. 

To be marooned, a fugitive in flight, is not always a bad thing. It can only mean, at the best of times, that one is pursuing love.

– Joy James

1. George Yancy, I Am A Dangerous Professor. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/opinion/i-am-a-dangerous-professor.html

2. George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gaze. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442258358/Black-Bodies-White-Gazes-The-Continuing-Significance-of-Race-in-America-Second-Edition

3. After much deliberation I covered the cops’ faces because the internet loves cruelty way more than it loves justice.