Walt Whitman's Corrupt Song to the Oppressed

Walt Whitman’s Corrupt Song to the Oppressed

“The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”- Karl Marx

           

            Heroes! Revolutionaries! Moderately liberal justdontaffectmyabilitytomakemonies! Evoke the creeds of Marxism and insist that Communism or Socialism are still viable methods in governing any society. The celebrated ideals of the oppressed amount essentially to lift your oppressive finger off of our oppressed heads oppressor and let us have a true opportunity to be just like you. A critical mass of the oppressed whose charge is led by a forceful, charismatic, and idealistic leader flanked on both sides by generals who represent different oppressed factions who must unite against the tyrant and once the tyrant is defeated they must figure out how to divide the resources afterwards; these figures are fetishized by history just as their followers swooned when these now infamous figures lived and breathed. Idealism is what attracts people to these rebel rousers. They offer a vision of society, of the world, of the universe that appears to be drastically better than their current conditions. “Think just like me, as if I am thinking for you, say what I say,” says the leader to his people. The people perform for the leader, and put the leader in power, then they look for another idealist to lead them to that better day. Walt Whitman’s idealistic vision of society, his evaluation of the world around him, and how all people should have a voice, is the beautifully all-inclusive liberal rhetoric that rallies the oppressed to a leader who may have ulterior motives and may not like it if you use your agency to do or say something against his vision. Glorifying individualism without any confines leads to a chaos of personalities that may only exist to ensure that there is only progress for themselves, their families, and their constituents, and that anyone in the way of their principles will be rightfully subdued.

            I am not trying to link Walt Whitman with dictators, tyrants, and genocidal maniacs like Joseph Stalin or Benito Mussolini, or to cult leaders like Jim Jones but I can imagine them reading the line “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from” and being touched and inspired personally (524). Walt Whitman is celebrated for his poetic prowess and revolutionary developments in the world of poetry and writing in the English language. Not just in his flowing lines of varying length, meter, and rhyme, or lack thereof that ushered in a century of formless poetry trapped in his newly invented form. Whitman thought it necessary to free himself of any formal poetic structure to write the beautiful descriptions and express the great differences that unite us as individuals in his poem, and arguably the most famous poem in the English language, A Song of Myself. In my reading of the poem, A Song of Myself is essentially about observing beautiful individuals and beautiful individualism.

Before I go any further I think I must explain that despite being literary criticism and writing taboo I will be attributing the words of the poem directly to Walt Whitman. A Song of Myself is his manifesto for a democratic individualism. Although he does not explicitly claim the poem in the first person he also does not distance himself from it when he writes, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, […] Whoever degrades another degrades me / Disorderly fleshy and sensual…eating drinking and breeding, / No sentimentalist… no stander above men and women or apart from them…no more modest than immodest” in the third person either (497-499). Coupled with the poems opening “I celebrate myself / And what I assume you shall assume,” the ambiguity is not an attempt to shield the author of the poem or the speaker in the poem but to ingratiate himself with the world he is describing, he wants the reader to know his thoughts as Walt Whitman, he does not only want the reader to know that Walt Whitman is speaking, he wants the reader to see and discover the world through the supposedly objective lens of Walt Whitman; white citizen of the United States, male, writer, and poet.

Walt Whitman possesses all of the incidental qualities that society ascribes to access to privilege and upward mobility in the United States, he is free, White, and a man. That oversimplification aside, Whitman lived a fairly modest life, changing jobs fairly frequently, all typically surrounding the printing and writing industries. By any measure he was a member of the working class. He was not free to sit and contemplate how to create the great American masterpiece. As is the want these days, rumors about his lifestyle can anachronistically be considered queer which adds an entire new dynamic not only to Whitman’s ability to relate to much anyone, especially the oppressed or downtrodden in the poem, but also to his expressions of sexuality. Lending hints to solidarity with Queerness over a century before their plight was to begin to be fought on political and cultural levels, Whitman writes, “Through me forbidden voices, / Voices of sexes and lusts… voices veiled, and I remove the veil, / Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured” (516-518). Sexualities taboo then, as now he announces them. He speaks up for them, what exactly those voices are saying still perplexes but the very act of offering your voice and it being heard offers presence to those in your proximity. Presence is a statement in itself but again, what is it that Whitman is saying for those voices? What words does he think the voices will want to say? Or does he want the voices to say what he thinks they want to say? Would he agree with any grievance these voices have with their treatment in society?

The forbidden voices of those veiled sexual taboos that Whitman speaks for. The questionable (the apocryphal owned by the anachronistic) notions of Whitman’s sexuality guide me to Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket In California” an ode to Whitman, a longing for a United States of America in Whitman’s time that has no basis in historical realities. Ginsberg writes in “A Supermarket In California”:

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon wuit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of the Lethe? (Ginsberg, 11)

What is this “America of love” that Ginsberg longs for? And is this an America that those voices that Whitman professes to speak for are longing? Does Ginsberg long for an America where sexual avarice and inordinate performance are outlawed? Does he long for an “America of love” where the natural inclinations and natural expressions of love portrayed by our modern LGBTQ community were thought to be character flaws and at its very worst, a mental illness? Does he wish that the sexual liaisons between all of humanity were as ambiguous as Whitman’s perceived and almost certainly verified homosexuality? I imagine that what Ginsberg is longing for is not only a necessary affront to hetero-normativity but also the secrecy that allows for those who are in the LGBTQ community to truly be themselves. Those intimate situations that do not have to be political, or known, and that most do not want to be political or known; for they are private and personal. They are wrought from love and incidence. The situations where humans need other humans for hedonistic pleasure and it does not matter what shape or form or idea that certain human manifests, and how they collaborate are not to be marred, slandered, or disparaged because of the ignorance of society.

    Is Ginsberg also longing for an America of slave rape and the inability for any grievance of white women to gain any social currency? Where he can enact all of his sexual pleasures and desires on certain human bodies in secrecy without any recourse or judgment? Is his the America that the white wives of slave owners who suborned the rape and mistreatment of slave men, women, and children and believed that that type of evil and degradation would not eventually be their reality, should be allowed to complain and gripe when their men treat them as horrible as they treat everyone else on the planet?

Whitman describes reality for,

The negro holds firmly the reins of his four horses…the block swags

   underneath on its tied-over chain,

The negro that drives the huge dray of the stoneyard…steady and

  tall he stands poised on one leg on the stringpiece,

His blue shirt exposes his ample neck and breast and loosens over his

  hipband,

His glance is calm and commanding…he tosses the slouch of his hat

  away from his forehead,

The sun falls on his crispy hair and moustache…falls on the black

  of his polish’d and perfect limbs

I behold the picturesque giant and love him and I do not stop

  there (219-223)

Whitman is fetishizing the Negro male and is engaging in a love that cannot possibly be reciprocated just as Ginsberg is longing for a United States of America that cannot possibly have existed. He longs for a time when their taboo sexuality would cry to be expressed, as Whitman admits, but it was necessarily shrouded in secrecy because of how the times treated homosexuals. Ginsberg as Whitman are witting proponents of oppression for Ginsberg longs for a time that Whitman simply describes. 

    When Michel Foucault wrote in We Other Victorians,

What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be; to utter truths and promise bliss; to link together enlightenment, liberation and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights. This is perhaps what also explains the market value attributed not only to what is said about sexual repression, but also to the mere fact of lending an ear to those who would eliminate the effects of repression. Ours is, after all, the only civilization in which officials are paid to listen to all and sundry impart the secrets of their sex: as if the urge to talk about it, and the interest one hopes to arouse by doing so, had far surpassed the possibilities of being heard, so that some individuals had even offered their ears for hire. (Foucault, 295, 296)

Foucault was unwittingly addressing Ginsberg’s want for the society Whitman describes, for Ginsberg is one of those voices who spoke for themselves and for their lifestyle and led a life as a member of the gay community, speaking up for their right to love and exist openly without fear of chastisement or abuse. Ginsberg’s voice would have been a voice that Whitman would naturally drown out with his God complex. Although, Foucault is possibly arguing that the voice that Ginsberg is using to espouse his feelings, thoughts, and experiences as an openly gay man to a specific audience that is more than willing to listen to him or buy his work. The fact that people paid to read, “Howl” (despite being prosecuted for obscenity, the subsequent prosecution undoubtedly expanded those willing and wanting to read and/or listen to his voice), his voice, naturally rose from his existential experiences, from the hidden compartments of society, forced hidden by the fear of shame, but uncovered by bravery and need for artistic expression. Moreover, despite Foucault’s argument that sexual repression is most often a discourse in our own heads and not something necessarily enforced on us by power, Ginsberg’s voice helped influence and encourage generations of LGBTQ to be unashamed of who they are. Something Whitman did do for Ginsberg, but as I will lie out, something he did not do purposefully or with hope for that consequence.

The poem labors proudly to this immense show of multiculturalism and the varied experiences of life in the United States, Whitman writes, “The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race” and some lines later, “the coon-seekers go now through the regions of the Red River or through those drained by the Tennessee, or those of the Arkansas” (273, 315). Whitman acknowledges sex workers as “The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck / The crowd laughs at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other” (300, 301). Whitman also professes, “Through me many long dumb voices, / Voices of the interminable generations of slaves. / Voices of prostitutes and of deformed persons, / Voices of the diseased and despairing, and of thieves and dwarfs” (508-510). Giving light to spaces and people who typically could not speak in a society that would not listen if they could. Whitman spectacularly and boldly lends his voice to the people in society who have been silenced because of the incidence that seemingly plagues their unique existences. Despite meaning well and having good intentions (we all know what kind of roads “good” intentions pave) he complicity denies that he is in a position to lend a voice, to have a voice that will be heard. That is why Whitman is compelled to speak up. That is honorable and typical of liberalism, but he refuses to expose what these voices are saying, he does not ask them what they want to say, or wonder what they want to say, or show any interest in what they want to say. Only his voice is heard but not understood for he does not have any substance or content for the voices he has taken it upon himself to speak up for.

Furthermore, that ambiguity, the lack of value, or substance of Whitman’s voice cannot be assumed to be on the side of the oppressed. The democratic notion that everyone has a voice is not inherent in this poem. It is only Whitman’s voice speaking and the dichotomy he expels is seen as universality and that dichotomies like “evil” and “good” should be embraced because they both exist. Lines like “In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less, / And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them” and “…am not the poet of goodness only…I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also” he embraces oppression, he also suborns and supports the forces who are responsible for the scarcity of resources, for the reasons blacks, women, homosexuals, the disabled and lame cannot speak and ultimately can be killed for speaking (399, 400, 465). As a representation of all, he is a representation of none but himself. He chooses not to take sides, to acknowledge the dichotomy, acknowledge the existence of all the forces and all of the substances, integral, intimate and incidental moments of life that the whole of oppressed humanity share, and he refuses to act on any of it. Which is not democratic, he tows the line, he wants humanity to be introspective and act on their own naturally wrought inclinations with no care of how they may affect others. This is maintaining the status quo it is an ode that excuses the terrible and problematic ideals and acts the United States was founded upon. A song that finds value in the individualism that is charged with causing harm. When speaking of ideas, dichotomy is necessary for better understanding and for intellectual growth, but when there are people being oppressed the voices of those people cannot ever consider the other side something Whitman would naturally do.

That type of inaction, that refusal to take a position, by accepting all positions equally does not celebrate Democracy; there should not be a place in a democratic society for those evil voices and ideas because those evil voices and ideas can want to prevent others by any means from enacting their democratic rights. They can keep them from being as free as Whitman to speak about their individualism. Whitman is engaging in a moral cowardice that allows him to hover over the poem like an indifferent, Laissez-Faire, god who can only see the chaos they have created as perfection so he chooses not to intervene.

This lends Democracy to evil. Democracy’s value, according to Whitman (according to me) is giving a voice to evil. Democracy professes that it gives a voice to the oppressed (is evil oppressed?) but Whitman’s Democracy permits calculated actions that purposefully take advantage of someone or something else. The voice being heard is necessarily drowning out the possible voices of others. That someone else exists in society but exists as someone who has easy markers for discrimination, markers that will garner the support of the dominant society as reasons to limit the stolen resources, someone who incidentally, with only an opponent’s vision and conception as reality, is oppressed because of how they cannot help but exist naturally in society, people who exist how they were born.

Even in this dialectical evil. An evil that is not necessarily the Western conception of evil or an evil that is based in the moral conceptions rooted in the Abrahamic religions, namely Christianity’s Jesus Christ versus Satan theology. This evil can be the Nazi’s murdering millions of people of the Jewish faith/Ethnicity or it can be Hitler writing about the evils of Jewish people in Mein Kampf. It can be the Alt-Right demonizing “The Left” for their want for a more fair society; a society that attempts to undue (I guess) what Capitalism has wrought. I explain evil in this way, even if it defeats my argument, to show that I understand that evil does not and cannot have a static definition rooted in any morals because that lends itself to abuse by those in charge of enforcing that morality, if you choose not to adhere to it.

I will try to explain this conception of evil in another way. The United States arrests and imprisons more people than any other nation on this planet and it is not even close. The vast majority of these people in prison are Black Men. I believe that the justice system has nefarious and evil motives for this, for it is an anomaly of human existence. No society has ever locked up as many people as our society. And considering that these men are in prime ages for reproduction and are being incarcerated during ages where they would do the most wealth building, the 700,000 to 800,000 black men in prison is a genocidal proposition that has been suborned by the entire planet because of the propaganda behind the evil Black Man. The Black Man is considered to be a brute, to be abusive, to be prone to violence and criminality.

The Black Man along with Native Americans are at the bottom of just about every socio-economic category in the United States and the continued genocide of Black Men is suborned because of the false propaganda labeling the Black Men as necessitating this kind of genocidal abuse and control. And there is absolutely no empirical information, outside of racist notions and stereotypes, for the propaganda against the Black Man. The Black Man has been vilified so much in this society and in the Western World that their oppression is almost championed and thought to be necessary. Anything can happen to a Black Man and in this society it will be justified. This society is filled with those Germans who were watching Jewish people being lined up for the gas chambers because they necessarily believed the propaganda of Hitler and his cronies so they, like Whitman did not have to face their own morality and intervene when evil is being done. “Good”, in the eyes of these gawkers, is being done.

It would be foolish of me to continue to use lines in a poem of 1331 lines that Whitman edited and added many times over many years after it was initially published in 1855, and attempt to find every instance where Whitman speaks for someone else as himself. To simplify this immense poem to simply Whitman speaking for oppressed people would also be a tremendous disservice to the poems chaos of diversity in the lives seen and expressed. Whitman’s own life disallows him any ability to be a valiant or true representation of an oppressed person, and even a true voice despite working and publishing many newspapers in his lifetime, and the rumors of his queerness. And if an oppressed person were to allow Whitman to be their voice, if they wanted to assume what he assumes would they want to live a life of modesty? I guess anywhere is better than an oppressed position according to Whitman. Whitman has not only alienated himself from the oppressed but from the whole of society. A Song of Myself is not a chant for those wanting to be free; it is a tune for those who want to keep the world, just as it is, forcefully unfair.

Bibliography

Marx, Karl, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass, "A Song of Myself"

Ginsberg, Allen, Howl, "A Supermarket In California"

Foucault, Michel, We Other Victorians