FLESH AND BODY HORROR FANTASIES IN AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS
By Max DuBois
Set aboard Matilda, a massive, self-sustaining spaceship where humanity resides three hundred years after a ruined Earth is abandoned in search of a new home, Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts uses the genre of science fiction to build a world that literalizes concepts and theories present in society. For example, the subjugation of black people in America at the hands of white systems and people is made visible in Matilda’s organizing decks by race: black people live in the low decks, where energy has been rationed by the Matilda’s all-white theocracy, the Sovereignty, so severely that the lowdeckers suffer hypothermia; in the upper decks, which are populated by white people, energy is provided so freely that the upperdeckers can enjoy ice skating rinks. This literalizing effect is frequently enacted via the body, as when the Sovereignty literalizes the concept of objectification with a plan to electrocute and reanimate black corpses to form worker zombies. Body horror enables a similar expression of the invisible/conceptual: through body horror internal trauma can be literalized and externalized onto the body. The ability to externalize is central to the subjectivity of the lowdeckers in An Unkindness of Ghosts. The violence facing lowdeckers creates an embodied perspective—they locate trauma and dominance in the body which they futilely try to escape/control through (violent) transformations, and the upperdeckers lose sight of the humanity imbued in the lowdeckers’ bodies. The treatment of lowdeckers on Matilda is analogous to slaves on American plantations—the guards, the Sovereignty, and upperdeckers act as white society and government—and can be explored under the same theoretical lens as the violence black Americans face and faced.
This essay breaks the violence against lowdeckers by upperdeckers into three different but interconnected/dependant forms: physical assault and rape, indirect policing of bodies, and narratives of inferiority. Throughout An Unkindness of Ghosts lowdeckers are subjected to beatings, imprisonment in tiny spaces without sustenance, and rape, sometimes as punishment for transgression against the Sovereignty, and sometimes at the random whims of sadistic guards, as “There was no system to their violence” (Solomon 64). These assaults form the backbone, the threat, which the guards use to police the bodies of lowdeckers with law. The location of the lowdecker bodies are controlled by curfews, daily headcounts, workshifts, and a pass system which renders many locations on Matilda forbidden for lowdeckers. What they can do with/put into/onto their own bodies is also regulated: the Sovereignty implements a bland and uniform diet, replacing the “spicy meat stews” which the lowdeckers cooked for themselves, and a dress code is partially implemented (243); a guard intrudes into protagonist and lowdecker Aster’s room and beats her female bunkmates Mabel and Pippi for their “nastiness” of lying together in bed (51).
To justify all of these violations of bodily agency, the guards employ narratives that animalize the lowdeckers. Lieutenant, the leader of the Sovereignty and arbiter of this narrative, explains to Aster that the lowdeckers are animals because “You can’t see the big picture, only the petty, small, meaningless pleasures and pains of your tiny lives… no better than the draft horses who stubbornly refuse to work when they’ve got a sore ankle” (241) and “pit bulls… a four- legged beast with a snout for a nose… [are] more beautiful than you” (242) In both examples he centers his decree on bodies . Creating the lowdeckers as less than human, perhaps less than animals, reframes their immoral subjugation by the guards as amoral. Perhaps even as morally righteous, as Lieutenant continues, “We tried to tame you, but there is no use taming vermin,” (242). The guard who beats Mabel and Pippi, when faced with resistance from Aster and after failing to best her physically, calls her a “daft animal” (54) to recement his power over her. In listing names she’s been called, Aster reveals how being animalized leads directly to being treated as less than human: “simple, dumb, defective, half-witted dog, get on all fours and spread,” and in combination with the bested guard’s insult, these examples demonstrate that this narrative can preempt or follow abuse to justify it (23). This animalism closely parallels the colonial European dichotomy of black/ugly/animal and white/beautiful/human. The Portuguese describe some of their African captives as “white enough, fair to look upon, and well-proportioned” and others as “black as Ethiops, and so ugly,” using “‘hideous,’ in its overtones of bestiality, as the opposite of ‘fair,’” (70). This appraisal, bestowing virtue upon the “beautiful” and vice upon the “hideous,” extended to other values so that “the ‘faithless’ and the ‘ugly’ transform… into a single figure… they become an altered human factor” (70). The focus on ugliness is meaningful not only as a dialectical connection between Lieutenant and “the Portuguese narrator” (70) but because it places an axiological and ethical significance on the subject’s body those with a “worse” body are worthless and deserve to be treated as less than human.
The goal of these three forms of violence is more complex than the allowance of rape or the surveillance of black bodies. Instead, it is to convince the oppressed subject of a separation between their mind or subjectivity and their body. To enact “a theft of the body—a willful and violent… severing of the captive body from its motive will” (author’s emphasis, 67) requires an assault on the subject’s motivation to maintain the ties between external body and internal subject. Violence is used to end the “profound intimacy” and native significances of the body and replace it with “externally imposed meanings and uses” to drive the interior subject away from their exterior (67). Through rape “the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality… for the captor” to enjoy; animalizing narratives use the body to deny its subject’s humanity, so that the body becomes “a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness;’” finally, laws that police these othered bodies exclusively make “the captive body… embody sheer physical powerlessness and slide into a more general ‘powerlessness,’ resonating through various centers of human and social meaning” such that lowdeckers learn that their bodies are the locus for their mistreatment (67). As a means of self-preservation, rather than constantly defend their bodies from dehumanization the lowdeckers separate their subjectivity from their endangered bodies.
This affects a body and flesh dichotomy, to borrow directly from the theorization of Hortense Spillers, in the minds of lowdeckers. The body is inherently connected to its subject; assault on the body is an assault on the subject, so the body is protected by the same ethical considerations as the subject. Thus, bodies are possessed by singular entities in “liberated subject-positions” (67), either free from such aforementioned violence or withstanding it. For the lowdecker in “captive… subject-positions” (67), meaning they face violence without an adequate defense, they are driven away from the body because if they consider their physical form’s abuse as assaults on their humanity’s ethical consideration they would find themselves devoid of ethics, and therefore humanity. Instead, lowdeckers possess the flesh, where “we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and its anatomical features,” so that humanity is absent/unaddressed, rather than targeted when the flesh is harmed (68).
An Unkindness of Ghosts provides a pellucid example through which to understand the difference between body and flesh through a combination of sci fi and body horror. The Sovereignty considers using electricity to reanimate lowdeckers’ corpses to become workers, but this idea is shot down because they “could not allow the degradation of a creature in the Heaven’s realm…. [this was] countered with a compromise. Via amputation, [they] could use body parts rather than the body whole” (Solomon 20). This compromise placates the Sovereignty’s ethical qualms so effectively that “These men had the means and opportunity to destroy evidence, to protect their legacy, but not one of them thought the earnest discussion of reanimating a person’s limbs for the purpose of manual labor warranted deletion from their official record” (20). The “body whole” is connected to the “creature” or subject, but an amputated limb transforms into flesh. When the abuse of flesh is considered “The anatomical specifications of rupture, of altered human tissue, take on the objective description of laboratory prose” (Spillers 67) which aligns non coincidentally with the observation that “procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory” (68). The breaking of the body into parts which are rendered flesh is central to “total objectification,” since the process of separating the body into parts allows for the separation of subjectivity with its ethical considerations from the body.
The way that the guards, the upperdeckers, and the Sovereignty come to comprehend the lowdeckers as things of flesh rather than body allows for the erasure of upperdecker abuse. The Sovereignty distinguishes the lowdeckers from the upperdeckers on seemingly religious grounds, claiming that the former come from the “Realm of Chaos,” the latter from “the Heavens” (Solomon 19). The basis for this, however, is not in any scripture, but in physiological differences: the lowdeckers are black, the upperdeckers are white, and lowdecker “bodies did not always present as clearly male and female” as upperdeckers’ (20). This places the Sovereignty’s explanation of difference in, in Spillers’ words, “a class of symbolic paradigms that 1) inscribe ‘ethnicity’ as a scene of negation and 2) confirm the human body as a metonymic figure for an entire repertoire of human and social arrangements” (66). Thus Matilda’s societally constructed black/white binary and inequalities are essentialized. If ethnicity creates society rather than visa versa, then ethnicity is not changed or influenced by society and is therefore unchanging. Under an essentialistic idea of ethnicity that “freezes in meaning, takes on constancy, assumes the look and the affects of the Eternal… the human body becomes a defenseless target for rape and veneration, and the body, in its material and abstract phase, a resource for metaphor” (66) since all social and material inequality is supposed by the privileged to have its source in the black body which suffers from the inequality. To upperdeckers, the black body serves as an explanation of and justification for its own suffering: it becomes a metaphor for a lesser being, for deserving suffering.
The strength of this metaphor becomes evident when, as Spillers writes, “These undecipherable markings [scars from white abuse] on a captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color,” for the white gaze, falling upon evidence of white abuse of black bodies, erases its horror and guilt (ironically) due to the severity of what it sees (67). Inhumane treatment of the black body creates markings which trigger cognitive dissonance—or rather, the white subject cannot imagine inhumane treatment against a human, so they remove the humanity from the black body, seeing flesh, and in doing so removes white guilt and black agency as well. A lack of agency implies “the Eternal,” the unchanging, the inevitable. The white gaze sees black scars and erases both the white abuser and the situation that led to the abuse: black scars simply are, they are without origin. To the upperdecker, the black subject, if she exists at all, is not found in her naturally mangled flesh.
But the way that, and process by which, the white gaze formulates the lowdeckers as flesh is different from the way that, and process by which, the lowdecker comes to see themselves as flesh. The violence the lowdeckers face directly leads to their conception of their own bodies as flesh as a defense mechanism, so that when their bodies are harmed they are not as harmed ‘themselves.’ Throughout the novel, Aster exemplifies the analytical and anatomical description of people endemic to language of flesh (67). When a grandmother smiles to Aster she doesn’t see the woman’s humanity, noticing instead “intermittent metal teeth, sloppily rooted… the decayed gingiva and posterior maxilla” (Solomon 21); her description breaks the woman into physical parts, flesh instead of body. The origin for Aster’s gaze is revealed to be in violence, committed against her by men who viewed her as flesh already, when she remembers her first traumas: “She was a child again. She was three and four and six and nine at the same time. She was sitting on a guard’s lap… She was thighs, knees, bellies, groaning, buttocks, ejactulate” (274); as a child she was ‘taught’ to see herself as parts, as flesh, and turned this learning onto others. Aster’s friend Giselle also comes to separate her flesh from ‘herself’ after being assaulted, saying “‘I’m not safe in this.’ … she meant her body. ‘I need a new one. I gotta shed the old one so I can get a new one,’” which indicates not only a perspective, but a praxis. The praxis lowdeckers develop by locating trauma in their flesh but not themselves is the idea that they can address trauma by targeting their flesh (243-244).
Spillers’ theorization fails to anticipate the usage of flesh by black people: flesh makes of captive peoples a “living laboratory” (Spillers 68), but they too can use this laboratory, to experiment on themselves in attempts to cope. Since the lowdeckers see trauma embodied, they attempt to literalize and cut it out through amputation. The novel begins with an amputation, of a young child’s gangrenous foot. The child, Flick, has been damaged by the cold, and so to fend off this trauma “Aster cut away the rotted flesh and muscle of Flick’s foot, gratified by the falling off of blackened and corrupted limb, shiny white bone revealing itself underneath. There was no sense mourning that which no longer nourished” (Solomon 17). The lack of grief, the practicality, the objectivity, Aster deploys here reveals her flesh mindset. She doesn’t see any of Flick in the foot, only the trauma. Later, after being severely beaten in the hand with a hammer, Aster attempts to cut the hand off rather than heal it. Even when it is her own body she uses objective, even medical language, to cope with the trauma: “She’d performed amputations before. It would hurt, but no worse than what she was feeling now, the unfathomable aching in her metacarpals” (303-304). Her idea is not necessarily to stop the pain, but to take control over it. By traumatizing herself she can wrest her flesh from the man who beat her by destroying the part of her he claimed through his violent assault on her. By using violence herself, she can be the traumatizer, the agent, rather than the victim.
This aspiration towards becoming the traumatizer is a crucial component of what makes the lowdecker body horror-as-coping mechanism fail to truly address trauma. This aspiration is almost explicitly expressed when Aster bathes herself in an attempt to escape the trauma of witnessing Giselle’s assault. She scrubs and soaps herself “until she smelled like medicine. Until she was a sterile thing no more sexual than a pair of sanitized scissors. That sharp too…. She was a brand-new coin,” then she cuts her hair off until its short enough that she can appear to be a man (209-210). Transforming through external cleansing/amputation, she wishes she looked like “one of those burly, rough-faced types who walked the passageways of Matilda like a conquistador, each step a flag in the nonexistent soil,” not only does she want to be the type of man who attacked Giselle, she uses the colonial rape metaphor of a flag in soil (210). She continues to explain this effect of her transformation via amputation:
The haircut… had unlatched and freed her…. She wanted to barrel headfirst into everyone, to cut them open with her parietal and frontal bones… The illusion of cotton was gone. They should be afraid. They would be split in two. Aster was obsessed with bifurcation. Wholes were foreign to her. Halves made more sense. A split nucleus could end Matilda’s tiny universe. She wanted to be the knife. She wanted to be knived. (212-213)
She identifies her subjugation with her blackness, “the illusion of cotton,” and realizes through the cutting apart of the self she can take the position of the white knife and exact the same violence she’s faced onto the “soft bodies” which have hurt her. The source of this destructive potential is the split that Aster has already experienced between her body and subjectivity (212).
When a captive subject has a mindset of flesh and body horror transformations there is an incredible potential for violence against others, more concrete than Aster’s ideations discussed above. After getting dressed as a man she enters a space occupied by aggressive men. Since they don’t attack her she decides to attack first. To resolve herself to this violence she utilizes her transformation, “She was someone else here. She had to remember that” (274). She instigates a fight with one large man, named Ty (whom she first identifies by a scar on his face, calling him “Scar-man”) (274). During the fight kicks and possibly breaks his knee, and as soon as she’s attacked/harmed his body, she puts herself in a position of power over him by identifying him as an animal, “His voice was like a hog’s”— the power-via-violence dehumanizes him to her (274). Through violence against herself, splitting herself physically and mentally, she can transform into someone who commits violence against others, simultaneously causing, justifying, and justified by the dehumanization of others. By identifying him by his scar, previous violence inflicted against his body, she creates a target that is non- human which she can hurt, and once she hurts him the dehumanization intensifies. As retribution a friend of Ty attacks Aster. He slaps her and “Half her face disappeared in an instant, like Ty’s” before attempting to castrate her, believing her a man (281). The violence of transformation and the objectification of flesh turns into a wicked cycle in which the captive subject is only further traumatized and further traumatizes others without gaining the agency they desire. After the retribution she is asked who she is and “She was going to respond, Aster, but then that seemed like a lie too. Orphaned and feral, she didn’t deserve a name” (282). The Sovereignty is keenly aware of the self-destructive (and I mean ‘self’ in both the collective and individual sense) aspect of violent aspirations which amputation enables, as Lieutenant identifies pacifism as the greatest threat in lowdeckers, telling Theo “A hound with no prey drive was no hound at all and should be killed” (103); in other words, a lowdecker without the capacity for violence can escape their flesh mindset which traps them in their subjugated position and is not dehumanizable.
But the fantasies of transformation that the lowdeckers enact through violent amputations, literal or metaphorical, fail to resolve their trauma even without outward violence. As a child, Aster created a doll as an idealized version of herself, and “Aster pretended the smartly dressed figurine was a clever, important scientist, and the doll-woman’s bunkmates had seen fit to host a ball in her honor, because they liked her, because they valued her, because they didn’t think her odd or unpleasant to be around” and this doll makes discoveries that make her the most important person on Matilda (29). Giselle joins in the game, but even with perfected, projected versions of themselves they still blow up Matilda in their fantasies because its systems and structures are still in place even if the dolls benefit rather than suffer due to them, even though it means the death of the dolls. The dolls represent a hypothetical: what if we truly could transform and create perfect bodies for ourselves that don’t bear trauma? Even in the hypothetical, it doesn’t work. This is finalized by Giselle, who “played with her dolls a lot” after she was sexually assaulted, “sometimes trying to light them aflame with a match” (immolation is her personal amputation motif) (256). Giselle herself locates trauma in the body, stating “I know what it’s like to have something bad in your bones that you can’t get out, something deep” but the doll, which doesn’t have her bones and represents as great a bodily transformation as is possible, is still burned—still amputated in an attempt to cut away trauma and transform—showing that the process is never fulfilling (319). This inevitable failure is predicted by a metaphor Giselle uses, seeing past the flesh and realizing how closely the self is tied to the body and how damaged the former becomes when the latter is twisted, “She’s glass. I’m glass. We’re all glass, busted up, unrecognizable from our original selves. We walk around in fragments. It’s a circus act,” the significance of this quote is in the pronoun usage—the subject and their body are not separated (324). Providing a counter framework to the idea that amputation cuts away trauma, Aster describes bodily transformation as a shuffling of parts that doesn’t try to address trauma, saying “Memories could not be unmemoried, only shuffled so as not to be in the forefront of things” (274). Body horror transformation is not a solution for the lowdeckers to escape either their oppressive system or their personal wounds.
Amputation ultimately fails to help the lowdeckers cope with their situation because it accepts the framework of flesh that they have been given. Labeled “Fit to Breed” by the Sovereignty, Aster has Theo, a half-black upperdecker, surgeon, and love interest, perform “a hysterectomy. Cut it out like a cancer”, but this amputation doesn’t cut out the trauma of being labeled under a system, it only changes her label within the system at the cost of her own body (43). Internalizing the Sovereignty’s ideas about her only makes her more vulnerable: “She felt Lieutenant was right about her. She didn’t understand, but when she thought about herself, she was repulsed, Aster was a vile fiend, a dyke, uglier than a dog. She was other things too, more dreadful things, things that were not so easy to say or admit. A bevy of parts cast off secondhand, to be used up by whomever had need” (emphasis mine), the worst of all the degradations is the idea that she is parts, that she is flesh ( 272).
The only way to escape the framework of flesh, An Unkindness of Ghosts suggests, is love. But the novel, in its deployment of this dystopian trope, specifies the necessary elements for the creation of the kind of love that can liberate, and analysis of these elements is valuable. The love between Theo and Aster is the only type capable of freeing Aster from her objectifying gaze, its flesh implications, and all the problems that follow. While she is completing medical tests on women—prime opportunity for dehumanization—one of them guesses at Aster’s affection for Theo, and the woman is transformed from thing to person, flesh to body:
“You’re smiling and biting your lip,” said Jay, grin wider now, seeming so much younger than she had half a minute ago. Like a proper sixteen-year old. Ready for gossip. Ready to talk about who liked whom. There was nothing harsh in that happy face. She was just a little girl, and in this moment it was impossible to believe she would die from cancer in a few years. (emphasis mine) (91).
Aster’s description turns more general and subjective, and the ability to normalize and accept violence and trauma vanishes with the recognition of humanity. There are a few aspects which allow for the creation of this powerful, almost magically affecting love, all of which are extensions of trust in safety. What makes Aster and Theo’s love unique is explicitly cited as trust that they won’t hurt each other. When pressed, she realizes that “she did not believe he would hurt her. There was no one else she felt that way about. Not even [her mother figure] Ainy,” and, keeping in mind all the ways that control over another(‘s body) and transformation are linked to violence in the text, hurt is a complex term, and to not hurt is at the heart of what love is (211-212). She comes to this realization as Theo is cutting her hair—performing an amputation and transformation on her. Rightfully, this frightens her, and after nervously snapping at Theo with numerous demands and being hushed, “She gripped the arms of the chair, refusing to confront the image in the mirror. ‘You think I would hurt you?’ Theo asked,” and she realizes he would not (211). If trauma is “shuffled so as not to be in the forefront of things” by flesh- thinking, then that this scene representing a direct confrontation of trauma shows that love keys into something else (274). There is a vulnerability in the facing of doubts and repressed fears, and as Aster reveals, the idea that she is “A bevy of parts cast off secondhand” is “not so easy to say or admit” even to herself, let alone to another (272).
In the inevitable liberating sex scene, she names the fears that surround her with Theo, an accomplishment predicated on trust, saying “I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn’t decide what it wanted to be?” and in this moment when she opens herself up and asks for his input he comforts her embodied doubts, responding “I think it doesn’t matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not” (308). Self-determination—or rather, the lack of an other trying to determine the self—is central to the love at work here. She knows that she is supposed to look into his eyes during this romantic situation, but she “still hated to look people in the eye,” and since she is used to the flesh system where subjects try to control and change one another, she asks “Please do not tell me to look at you,” and he doesn’t (308-309). He responds, “‘I wasn’t going to.’ ‘Then what?’” Aster asks. He replies “‘I… care for you very much’” and this juxtaposition almost explicitly demonstrates the contrast between love and the desire to control—a distinction that is crucial to An Unkindness of Ghosts’ liberating love (309). Finally, they progress slowly into sex and Theo asks for her consent and listens to her, asking “Is this alright?” She immediately replies “‘Yes. It is all right… ‘I do not wish to be penetrated.’… He nodded his head,” (309-310). Through Theo’s acceptance of Aster’s body, behavior, and desires, and by not attempting to change any of them Aster is freed from the system that creates her as flesh. This is ultimately signified by the simple comment that “She wanted [to be pretty], and Theo made her feel like it was already so” (310). In accepting her, in valuing what she is despite her deviation from normalcy in making eye contact, he is removing both violence and inferiority narratives, which favor an idealized white subject, from this situation. This allows her body to retain her humanity, so that the doubly careful treatment of her body once again represents the treatment of her. This love is not described as healing her trauma outright, but it allows her to face it without try to shuffle it away or cut it off, which signifies the destruction of the cycle at the core of 700 years of colonial frameworks and tears away the premise and praxis which used her body to make her less than human.
Works Cited
Solomon, R. (2017). An Unkindness of Ghosts. Brooklyn, NY, USA: Akashic Books.
Spillers, H. (2006). Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe. Diacritics,17(2),
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Max DuBois is a junior majoring in English and working towards a teacher’s certificate. As President of Vassar’s No Such Organization he organizes and attends events about board games, video games, card games, etc., which demonstrably makes him Vassar’s biggest nerd. He loves low artforms like genre fiction, comics and graphics novels, fan fiction, and video games, and is excited to become a teacher and assign a video game as home work.