(You can imagine a movie theatre where such a scene would have led to a standing O. I'm not big on horror, but I was okay with a scene where the would-be, beset-upon desaparecidos were rescued from the cheesy Jim Crow crackers by the vengeful Jesus forces When He Returns.)
It turns out that Ruff's novel title is ironic, in that the whole country is a place of horror - Lovecraft country -- for Black people trying to make their way, this way and that, from one Green Book safe inn to another without getting themselves lynched. There is no friendly North and evil South - it's all nasty.
Lovecraft's horror is unique; it is widely known for its excursions into existential zones that are akin to Twilight Zone experiences, but with monsters and the fantasial. As Lovecraft writes, in his short craft piece "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,"
I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best -- one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.
On top of such ordinary imprisonment, Blacks are doing integumentary time; the worst kind, for which there is no escape. How do you lose your skin?
An exploration of such "strange suspensions" and "violations of limitations" is a major engine of Lovecraft Country, which is full of magic; voodoo-esque spells, intoned with what sounds like Haitian French; time travel portals; and monsters -- all intertwined with the illusions of normal reality, which, for Blacks in the 50s (the period of the narrative), included sudden lynching in a Jim Crow world, South and North. It's useful to keep in mind that Lovecraft was himself a racist, "a product of his time," as some apologists have noted, but a white trying to break on through to the other side of his ignorance. For Lovecraft, it is time that is unfathomable, but probe-able. He writes,
The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.
Time is a constrict. And neither Lovecraft nor Ruff will let us forget it. History, memory are fragile and malleable constructs - another reason to worry about the hivemind ahead, speaking of horror.
Lovecraft suggests that the means to accessing the escape from time can be found in certain moods that remind us of our own alienation in the cosmos; we were barely the center of all things to begin with, relying on a bearded White Guy in the Sky to guide us (but mostly not help us), and we've discovered over time, especially in the postmodern period, that have never been more alone, given our prodigious planetary problems, with only each other to solve them. Lovecraft's mood seems to correspond roughly with what Freud referred to as the Uncanny experience. Freud writes in The Uncanny (1919), "The better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it." The Black experience is sometimes one of debilitating disorientation. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost (say, id) out of whack. There's a fissure of the unexplainable opened up amidst our ordinary existential alienation.
Zora Neale Hurston seems relevant here, too. She went exploring after certain Black-only phenomenon in Haiti, the Caribbean, and the Deep South, wanting to get to the core of certain mechanisms of coping, such as voodoo practices. While she performed anthropological analyses on her raw data in the field, in the end, when asked to explain voodoo, she said: "If you want to understand, believe." This simple approach could apply to White Man's capitalism, its introjections and zombie-like transformations of persons into rabid consumers - If you want to understand capitalism: believe. It will all have a patina of the wyrd and fetishistic, incomprehensible to those kept from its magic secrets by, say, the transformative power of equal opportunity.
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