Call and Response
by Hawa Allan
There is a caricature that is often hastily drawn by those seeking to discourage people from watching too much television. That is of the purely passive viewer, who sits slack-jawed and thoughtless as the tube’s cathode rays irradiate her brain. I, for one, have never formed part of this heap of straw women and men. While I can agree that binge-watching every Netflix original series is probably not the best use of one’s time, my engagement with media, in whatever format, has never been passive.
Growing up as an only child, I spent a lot of time watching television with my parents, whose commentary would be interspersed with the recitations of some news anchor, a game show contestant, or a carefully cast ensemble of method actors, among others. My parents were in constant dialogue with the television, which used to irritate me because I just wanted to hear what was being said without interruption. Yet what I was witnessing was not a mere cause of mild annoyance, but an ongoing refutation of the underlying premises, overt stances, and, effectively, authoritative representations presumed by mediated reality. Real-time cultural critique.
My parents were not born in the United States and their West African cultural context often clashed with what was being personified. What they were further demonstrating to me was a leveling of the field that subsumed the three of us, on the one hand, and the television, on the other. A given speaker on TV was merely one voice among many, including those of my parents, who democratized the otherwise one-sided communication by speaking back.
Years later, when attending college in the South Side of Chicago, my friends and I would sometimes go to the local movie theater, which many on campus pejoratively referred to as “Ghettoplex.” The moniker, directed at a cinema with a mostly black audience, was also said to refer to the fact that audience members often yelled back at the movie screen. I always liked going there because my viewing experience was never sullen and self-serious; instead, I was like a member of the British parliament in the ruckus of a heated debate.
Call-and-response, of course, is the interplay between a master of ceremony and his audience—one rooted in African customs that has been infused into such African-American musical traditions as gospel, blues, jazz, soul, hip-hop and rock-and-roll. This dynamic interaction came to mind when reading George Packer’s recent essay in the Atlantic, “Enemies of Writing.”
Adapted from an acceptance speech for an award commemorating his work in the spirit of late polemicist Christopher Hitchens, the essay begins with Packer’s recollection of his support for the Iraq war. Packer’s support was far less spirited than that of Hitchens—a marginal difference in intensity that led the two to become fierce adversaries on the page. Was this anecdote being recalled, I thought, to reflect on Packer’s and Hitchens’ advocacy of a war that was declared on false pretexts, that resulted in countless senseless civilian deaths, and a domino effect of disaster in the Middle East? No. Packer would go on to fondly recall that he and Hitchens managed to maintain amicable relations behind the scenes of their war of words, even becoming drinking buddies. No hard feelings. The bombs they’d both approved of weren’t dropping on their heads.
Packer goes on to identify “enemies” of writing, the first being the desire to belong to a group. More and more, Packer says, writers are writing as representatives of identity groups and less so as individuals with idiosyncratic ideas. Entire races, genders, and sexual identities, says Packer, are the “cliques” to which more and more writers are pandering, the choir to which they aim to preach.
Yet another enemy of writing is the fear that writers now must contend with being shunned by said groups. By espousing an idea that has not been rubber-stamped in advance by the clique, the fearful writer is exposed to censure, while the avoidant writer might succumb to self-censorship. Writers and editors alike, terrified of not expressing themselves with the “right” kind of moral certainty, enable a journalistic and literary atmosphere where “the mob has the final edit.”
The call, says Packer, is being stifled for fear of the response. While Packer certainly encourages writers to hold their ground in the face of this rising censorship-inducing “current,” the essay is essentially nostalgic for an age before social media, when writers like Packer and Hitchens would make the call and only hear their own echo.
What Packer seems to be bemoaning is not the fear of speaking one’s truth, but the fact that one has to contend with such a fear in the first place—a fear that is not inchoate and existential, rather, imposed by external forces. Packer’s so-called enemies of writing, in my interpretation, are not merely the abstract desire for belonging and the fear of being ostracized. The enemies of writing are the embodied “cliques,” the mobs, the hordes whose opinions differ from his own. The kind of difference of opinion that does not amount to a “rhetorical lash” about which one can share hearty laughs over pints, but over which actual lives are at stake.
Let’s put aside the irony of lamenting the fear of conveying unpopular opinions in an essay beginning with an anecdote about supporting the Iraq war—a very popular, if unfounded, opinion at the time. Let’s also put aside the barely passing mention of disappearing funding for journalism and Trump’s state-sanctioned animosity towards the press in an essay on the “enemies of writing.” Let’s also, for the time being, elide Packer’s implication that he and Hitchens and the fearful “writers” he worries about don’t have identities, which are relegated to the raced, sexed, and queered mob. What is interesting, here, is that Packer seems to pit the writer’s apparently newfound search for moral clarity against the writer’s inclination to speak her “truth,” as if the two are mutually exclusive. As if a sense of moral certainty isn’t ever hard-won, or the product of a long-standing internal and external inquiry, but always the tone-deaf bellowing of a blowhard. Packer suggests that such moral certainty is a placeholder for group-think, the consensus of the mob.
Let’s just say for the sake of argument that I am a member of this mob that is ruining writing with my assertion of moral certainty. Perhaps, just maybe, my presumed moral certainty is not an uninformed opinion being spouted to win popularity points. Perhaps such perceived moral certainty has been long-honed, day after day, week after week, month after month, by sparring with the received knowledge, purported wisdom, and the predominant yet implicit “moral certainty” of a previously unchallenged status quo that has continually misrepresented and/or erased my position. Perhaps my so-called moral certainty has not emerged, fully-formed, out of nowhere, but has been whet for years against the large once-immovable stone of a now-shifting hegemony.
As Packer bemoans the poor writer who has to contend with voices other than his own, I can’t relate. As a card-carrying member of the horde, I have never had the privilege of having only one voice echoing in my head. I have always had multiple voices singing in mine. The call, and the response. The never-ending cacophonous debate—the clarion call of a multiplicity of voices, all that have their say, and perhaps, sometimes harmonize into something that resembles “moral certainty.” If this is the case, then I can speak for all members of the mob, and they might even agree with me.
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.
