"On Metonymy and Myth" by Hawa Allan
“My fury is apparently reserved for minor, work-related trespasses.” This is the small and seemingly innocuous admission of displaced feeling I posted on Facebook last month. More than 200,000 people in the United States have reportedly died preventable deaths on account of the reckless administration of public health. ICE officials have kidnapped child migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and overseen the forced sterilization of women detained under its jurisdiction. Black women and men continue to be killed with impunity by so-called enforcers of law. Then, in tandem with the press, law enforcement officials pick apart the characters of their victims, like vultures adding indignity to injustice. Militarized police and their federal cohorts target protesters who assemble to decry police brutality, descending upon them with tear gas and rubber bullets, then arrest them en masse, sometimes abducting one or more into unmarked vans. Yes, as often summarized in office small talk, “there’s a lot going on.” And yet, while these mounting atrocities continue to command my attention and concern, my emotional response to them has, so far, been delayed.
Or, perhaps, it has been transferred, as apparently all it takes is a certain kind of man (i.e., white) of a certain generation (i.e., the unfairly maligned “Boomer”) to speak to me in a certain kind of way (e.g., as if I am his secretary) and a primordial rage is summoned, suddenly switched on like the piercing blue flame of a burner on a gas stove. I realized not too long after such an encounter—the one that had inspired my Facebook post—that it was not merely the experience of being mildly condescended to, or casually interrupted or disrespected or dismissed, that made me especially angry. It was also the embodiment of the perpetrator. I realized, in other words, that any given person with such attributes and attitudes had become, in my mind, a stand-in for Donald Trump.
*
Trump is inescapable. This is not only a function of his current role as commander-in-chief, but his omnipresence on every news outlet. Resistance against the spectacle that is “Trump” is futile. However, I have, over the last four years, deployed a tactic to minimize his compulsory presence, if only within the confines of my consciousness. While I have widely read about Trump, tracked his official and unofficial activities through compilations of the written word, I have done my best to avoid watching him or listening to him speak on any medium. I have, by these means, withstood the onslaught of Trump by attempting to mentally confine him to an effect—on anything from border policy to incidents of white nationalist domestic terror.
Focusing on Trump as an “effect” has helped me to reckon with the violent impact of the administration’s policies on actual civilians while safeguarding my mind from Trump, the man, who—with his rotating cast of top-level advisors—forms the most recent cause of everything that has been “going on.” In this way, I have suppressed Trump, the man, like a traumatic memory from childhood.
But, as it turns out, “Trump” has nonetheless resurfaced in the dream-like field of my waking life, and the rage I might have had difficulty directing at governmental policies—abstract and technocratic until they are violently corroborated by legions of anonymous yes-men and, yes, women—finally had a face. And this face, I found, was often grainy and dimly lit, staring at me on the other end of a Zoom call.
*
For the last several years, it has been unclear to me whether I was a lawyer moonlighting as a writer or a writer moonlighting as a lawyer. While I’m now more likely to err towards the latter, I no longer experience the internal antagonism between the two roles. Like Bartleby’s employer, I am not one of those lawyers who “addresses a jury, or in any way draws down public applause.” I work, for the most part, with contracts, whether drafting, reviewing, commenting on, or negotiating them.
Frankly, when I first started reviewing agreements, I was offended by how boring they were. I was actually brought to tears when, not long out of law school, I was instructed to review ten that were each at least ninety pages long. But with time and repetition came facility and I no longer dread these documents. I now see each agreement as a doorway, an entry point to an orderly domain where language—even if understandably derided as legalese—is used with clarity and precision.
The typical agreement is constructed in accordance with widely shared conventions. Each document might be different, but they are all the same. The internal logic of the agreement is precise and, dare I say, “rational.” A change in one section reverberates throughout the entire document, and it is up to the meticulous attorney to locate each affected clause and make it consistent, once again, with the overall operation of the agreement.
At this stage, no lawyer cares about unequal bargaining power or the plight of some unlucky party who might later become surprised by the implications of what he has signed. These are problems for the messy and often incoherent world, where words have several connotations and meanings multiply, a world that does not exist within the four corners of the contract page.
While I find it sentimental when writers claim to “rest on” or “take refuge in” their pages, with my lawyer cap on, I have, of late, found the agreement page to be an escape from the surreal dystopia of a Trump-administered State. My escape, obviously, is not total, as “Trump” continues to appear, here and there, through certain characters I have been confronted with, often at work. This is not a new problem, of course, especially not for a Black woman who has endured a variety of professional environments. It is an age-old dilemma, only now I have bestowed it with a newfound association.
*
It isn’t lost on me that displacing the individuality of a given person with another concept entirely, even if that concept is of another person, is, in itself, an unfair thing to do. This very activity is among the functions of racism, where people are ritually conflated with concepts and “things” that may have nothing to do with them at all, and usually derogatorily so—with, say, anything from animals to inanimate objects, from criminality to viruses.
That said, I don’t have an iota of guilt about it. Unlike with centuries of systemic racism, and the firmly established relations of power that reinforce it, my petty associations will not deprive anyone of their material livelihood, their “freedom,” or their very life. In any event, I am entitled to my own private revenge for all those times I have been mistaken for another black woman. Or perhaps I am acknowledging that even if Trump loses the election, I will nonetheless never be free of “Trump.”
*
Recently, I broke my own rule and intentionally watched some online recordings of Trump performing at his rallies. I had caught snippets of these events every so often, usually before promptly changing the television channel or scrolling past a clip on my phone. From these glimpses, the events had left the impression of a carnivalesque atmosphere at a rowdy monster truck rally. However, after watching a few Trump rallies, uncut and uninterrupted by a news anchor’s funereal voice over, I was surprised by how . . . quiet the crowd seemed. Of course, there were the coordinated cheers and jeers and syncopated chants, but whenever Trump himself was speaking, the surrounding crowd seemed rapt, actually enthralled by his speech.
It was obvious to me that the seeming peace within the bubble of the Trump rally (that is, as long as no protesters were present) masked the violence executed beyond the convention to uphold the inflammatory declarations Trump was making inside. Even so, soon enough, I found that I too was being lulled by the repetitive tonalities of Trump’s voice, pitched upwards at the end of a given word or sentence and then slowly fading before gradually increasing in volume again. I found myself slipping into a somnolent state, adrift and rocking in the ebb and flow of clichés and lies.
In an April 2020 issue of The New Yorker, noted fiction writer Lorrie Moore blithely admitted that she sometimes found Donald Trump’s voice “soothing.” Specifically referring to Trump’s erstwhile regular briefings on the progression of the pandemic, Moore found his “primitive syntax” to be “reassuring,” writing that “the quality of his voice is that of a pet owner calming a pet.” The online backlash ensued, which I thought was justified at the time, but that was before I actually watched a rally, or, really, watched him speak for any significant stretch.
I can see more clearly how, when Trump speaks, he is not merely bloviating; he is drawing in his listener to a mythical place, a drastically simplified province where utterances made with conviction magically become true. Where nuance is non-existent and where all that is “good” or “bad” is self-evident.
Trump is painting, for his enthralled audiences, a portrait of the world that is apolitical. The convictions of his supporters are not mere partisan opinion, buttressed by ideological beliefs rooted in nativism or racism or homophobia or misogyny. Rather, such “opinions” are simply common sense. “Myth does not deny things,” writes Roland Barthes in Mythologies, “on the contrary, its function is to talk about them simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent again, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation, but of a statement of fact.”
To watch a Trump rally is to enter his small linguistic universe, to shoehorn your mind into a cramped space that is already replete with banal slogans. America First! (Yay!!) Make America Great Again! (U.S.A!! U.S.A!!) Such catchphrases, to his supporters, have an anodyne ring, at most overtly signifying a kind of jocular nationalism, expressing the same sort of passionate rah-rah of an avid sports fan. Who wouldn’t want to be “great” or “first”? A nifty way to signal fidelity to xenophobic white nationalism without having to explicitly say so.
Other phrases do similar work. When Trump boasts of “saving” the suburbs from low-income housing, the residential districts he explicitly names stand in for the persons imagined to inhabit them, so that Trump effectively claims to have “saved” white inhabitants of suburban enclaves from an influx of Black and brown neighbors.
The Trump rally, in its essence, is truly a sporting event. The key distinction is that the audience is all rooting for the same team. The enemy—whether “illegal aliens” or the “radical Left” or “rioters” or “looters”—is clearly defined, even if by widely accepted connotation. The enemy is also outside the Trump rally, out there somewhere, marauding beyond both the convention’s perimeters and the mirage of the American Dream his audiences refuse to dispel.
The trance of “Trump,” to borrow from Barthes, is that he deprives what is known as the “United States” of all history and naturalizes the status quo. This is not a profound revelation. Yet, the implications of this are profound, as Trump has continued to fossilize the regressive worldview that was already held by his millions of supporters, who existed before his election, and will continue to exist after this coming one.
*
I was being reductive when I defended my immediate association of the white Boomer-aged man who treats me like his secretary with Donald Trump. “Trump” knows no race. “Trump” knows no gender. “Trump” knows no borders. “Trump” is ageless. “Trump” is anyone who attempts to fit you into their small-mindedness, to assign you to a subservient role in their orthodox delusion.
It’s true that the phenomenon that is “Trump” is a manifestation of patriarchal whiteness—the ghost still animating imperial and post-colonial machines—and that its present incarnation carries the force of State violence to compel its attendant vision. And, yet, “Trump” is not merely based on appearance, but also on mindset. There will always be something widely seductive about simple-minded entitlement. Who wouldn’t want to be thought of as superior for absolutely no reason?
As with the conventionally beautiful or the congenitally rich, it takes an unusual and, dare I say, strong mind to attempt to distinguish oneself by anything other than that which was inherited. It also takes grit and a relentless capacity for reinvention to resist the lure of “easy” answers and expand one’s horizons in order to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. The trick, here, will be to continue to cultivate these qualities no matter what configuration of societal arrangements emerge out of the current wreckage.
I know I will be resisting “Trump” long after he’s out of office, but not only through the guise of exasperating co-workers or nosy neighbors or hesitant loan officers or skeptical recruiters or murderous police officers or the slow roll of armed tanks . . . “Trump” is not just a matter of the State, but of an altered state of mind. So, it will never be enough to suppress or un-elect “Trump.” Instead, the very concept of “Trump” must be exorcised from the body politic, expelled from our tongues as we collectively weave alternative myths.
Hawa Allan writes cultural criticism, fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared, among other places, in The Baffler, the Chicago Tribune, Lapham's Quarterly, and Tricycle magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Insurrection, a weaving of personal narrative and legal history, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
