Abjection and Strange Fruit

Davis Holden
Literature and Music
Professor Doug Murray
25 March 2019
Strange Fruit and Abjection
The poem Strange Fruit, was written and published in 1937 by schoolteacher Abel Meeropol, under the pseudonym Lewis Allan, about the lynching of black Americans in the south. It was sung by his wife and others in leftist activist circles, and eventually reached the ear of jazz vocalist Billie Holiday, who went on to record it for the first time in 1939. The song was an early cry for civil rights, and a demand for the oppression of black Americans to be seen and reckoned with.

1.	Lynching
	In the southern United States after Reconstruction, Whites found themselves in a crisis of identity. For centuries their economy, and thus their livelihood and sense of self, was rooted in the domination and subjugation of black Americans by means of chattel slavery. Previously, no matter how low on the social totem pole a white man found himself, he still “knew” he was better than a black man. For proof of this, he had to look no further than the institutionalized ownership of black Americans. After slavery was abolished (for those not in prison), whites found themselves suspended in an ambiguous state; their identity was uprooted by their lack of ability to position themselves socially in relation to black people. Whites used to be the only ones permitted to enter “civilized life,” but now the category of “civilized life” felt threatened by invasion, since the institutions which kept out those who were denied personhood had taken a massive hit. The objectification of black Americans had been put into a state of limbo, and thus so had the identity of white Americans.
	White Americans, particularly southerners, responded to this with mass lynchings of black Americans. Lynching had been used throughout the history of the United States as a system of vigilante justice, and didn’t previously have the racial connotation. It was called by historian James E. Cutler as “America’s national crime,” and he further described it as “The practice whereby mobs capture individuals suspected of crime, or take them from the officers of the law, and execute them without any process at law, or break own jails and hang convicted criminals, with impunity.” During reconstruction and throughout the first half of the 20th century, Lynching became white America’s way of telling black Americans, “we’re still in charge.” The lychings were ostensibly in retaliation for some crime, but the crimes were often fabricated or greatly exaggerated. One of the crimes most associated with lynchings was rape, and this was a result of white America’s fear of miscegenation. For a black man, any gain in civil rights, or move towards participation in “civilized society” was viewed by whites as a step towards the bedroom of a white woman.

2.	Strange Fruit
In the first stanza of the poem, Meeropol introduces the metaphor of “strange fruit” to describe lynched blacks hanging from the trees. This metaphor invites us to view lynchings not as isolated incidences of a group of people being racist, but as a natural result of a deeper systemic issue in southern society. Fruit doesn’t just pop out of a tree on a whim, it grows and is given nutrients by the roots and soil. In the same way, lynchings don’t just happen out of thin air, they are fueled by problems and anxieties at the root of society.  The second stanza addresses the dissonance in the South’s homely and innocent perception of itself and the brutal reality of the horrors it has committed. It sweetly evokes the “Pastoral scene of the gallant south” but immediately contrasts it with “The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” of the body of victim of lynching.  It conjures the scent of sweet flowers, and immediately contrasts it with the smell of burning flesh. This stanza highlights the South’s relationship of rejection to what it has produced. The last stanza describes all sorts of ways that nature acts on the fruit (black bodies). It conjures images of corpses in the rain, or rotting in the sun, or falling from the trees, and finally describes the bodies of lynching victims as “a strange and bitter crop.”

3.	Abjection
In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva speaks of what she calls “the
abject.” The abject is something which is neither subject nor object, it blurs the lines between identity. The abject is not an object because it refuses to be pinned down by subjectivity in the way an object is, because the one experiencing the abject is not a subject in relation to it. The abject is also not part of a subject because it is rejected by the one experiencing it. Abjection is something which happens during the developmental stage as an impetus for individuation, but it is something which is also a normal part of adult life. We find the abject horrifying, yet simultaneously fascinating. It is not a result of a simple fear or aversion, but a necessary and recurring development towards identifying with the father (in psychoanalytic terms) and accessing language. Examples of the abject are things like excrement, bodily fluids, food waste, and corpses. Kristeva puts it best in the first chapter:
		"The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses."

4.	Abjection in Strange Fruit
It is clear how the abject might be a useful tool in an analysis of Strange Fruit. The song features descriptions of corpses, blood, and rotting food, which are very evocative of the abject. The song also addresses the way the south viewed itself, and what it leaves out when describing itself. Furthermore, the song invites a political application. Strange Fruit discusses the lynching of black Americans, a historical phenomenon characterized by white anxiety over identity and a radical exclusion of black Americans who were viewed as repulsive.
	Strange Fruit most obviously deals with abjection through the topic of corpses. According to Kristeva, when seen without god and science, the corpse is the utmost of rejection (science and religion are ways to insulate us from abjection). Abjection often deals with borders: excrement blurs the border between ourselves and object, we expel it from ourselves, we refuse to assimilate it, but we cannot even bring ourselves to confront it and make it into an object distinct from our self. to Kristeva, the corpse is “the border which has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled.” We cannot make corpses into an object distinct from our self because we cannot help but see ourselves in them, yet we simultaneously reject them and refuse to see ourselves in them. Strange Fruit achieves the effect of seeing a corpse through language by describing both the lifelessness of a corpse and the aspects of a corpse in which we see life (eyes and mouth), and thus ourselves. The poem also conjures images of both rotting fruit and (through insinuation) bodies in the third stanza. This combines the abjection of food waste with the abjection of corpses in a particularly poignant way. We are also forced to confront the abjection of corpses through the line “for the trees to drop.” Through this lyric we are made to picture a lifeless body falling, unable to resist or in any way soften the fall. In this fall we are forced to see our lifeless self, and we are so horrified at this that we reject it and refuse to assimilate it.
	The abject is also present in the contrast which Meeropol highlights between the South’s vision of itself and the crimes it was committing. When the South thought of itself, it was practically incapable of considering lynching as part of its identity, but it could not be nailed down as an object apart from the South’s identity, so lynchings were abject. Lynching, like excrement, blurred the lines between subject and object. The South was able to neither assimilate lynching nor make it into an object distinct from itself. Lynching was “radically excluded” and drew the south towards the place where the meaning of its conception of itself collapses.
	The abject plays a role also in the whites’ development of a separate identity. Prior to the abolition of slavery, black Americans were an object to whites. Due to the laws which kept black Americans lower in the social hierarchy, whites could see themselves in black Americans without feeling threatened. White Americans saw themselves as “civilized society,” and that view of themselves was rooted in the institution of slavery. When the institution of slavery was, for the most part, abolished, this put whites in a crisis of identity. Black Americans, which had previously been object, were made abject in the eyes of white Americans because white Americans, confronted with the potential for equality, refused to assimilate black Americans. For Kristeva, abjection is something which propels one into conceptualizing oneself as a subject, distinct from objects. It is when the child rejects something the mother and father try to give.

"…nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me form the mother and father who proffer it. ‘I’ want none of that element, sign of their desire; ‘I’ do not want to listen, ‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. But since the food is not an ‘other’ for ‘me,’ who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that ‘I’ am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death, During that course in which ‘I’ become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects."

	In this discussion of skin on the surface of milk, we can see a parallel to the reaction of white southerners to the abolition of slavery. For the whites, black Americans were the skin on the surface of milk. They were the location of abjection. White southerners saw the north as proposing they accept black Americans into civilized society, the same way the mother and father propose the child drink the milk. White southerners reject black Americans, they do not assimilate them, they expel black Americans. But black Americans are not yet an ‘other’ for the new consciousness of white southerners after abolition. This is where lynching comes in. In the act of lynching, white America expels itself, it abjects itself in the same motion through which ‘it’ claims to establish itself. It is in the process of becoming an other at the expense of its own death, giving birth to itself amid the violence of black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, of the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth. White America refuses to become integrated in order to answer black Americans, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects.