Waterloo

Waterloo

OKAY YES I AM GOING TO TALK ABOUT WATERLOO.

—and all this so that a peasant can say to-day to the traveller: Monsieur, give me three francs, and if you like, I will explain to you the affair of Waterloo!

(This post seriously, seriously, seriously not helped by the way that Amazon’s compulsory “thoughtfulness” totally mangled all of my marginalia: public raspberries to you again, Amazon, fix your shit, do you think I will keep buying Kindle editions of public domain works from you when you do this to them? Not bloody likely. /cranky PSA)

Going behind a cut to spare you from mad walls of text.

My brick readthrough has hit a temporary halt at “The Atom Fraternizes with the Hurricane” because (1) work and (2) every single paragraph was reducing me to inarticulate flailing while Hugo was still in wide angle discursory mode and I feared for my sanity when named characters hove into view.

So I’m going to start out by talking about the year 1817, because this is where Hugo lights the fuse, and the barricades is where all of the oh dear god what are you on about now discursions come together after their long fuse has burned through Waterloo and argot down to the powder.

The Year 1817! Which chapter I read all the way back in Volume I when I was still feeling industrious about googling every obscure reference, and which broke me of that reflex after the second blinkety-blank paragraph, not least because the references were so obscure not even Google could make heads or tails of them. After enough pages of obscure historical color piled on obscure historical color, I had gone through “what? what?” to “ yes yes you’ve done your research I am duly impressed go on” to “YES FINE you are very connected I GET IT go ON” to “…okay, you know what, I am just going to let this wash over me and enjoy the sense of a vividly loved world, lost.” Which, it transpired two paragraphs later, was the point:

This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial,—there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,—are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed. In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged “a fine farce.”

And at the end of this chapter, this fine miniature of history as a mosaic of small and forgotten stones, Fantine and her friends embark upon a picnic, as one more small colorful stone among the many that make up Paris, that make up a brightly remembered summer in a world that no longer exists.

The year 1817 is made up of these accidental things, footed trousers and forgotten scandals and the casual, thoughtless betrayals of casual, thoughtless students; the disruption with the young family who lived in the yellow house next door, remember? They moved out, that pretty young woman and her little daughter, only you didn’t say goodbye properly because that was the month when your Michel had his toothache.

That’s history. Cosette will return to Paris in fifteen years, long after you have forgotten your neighbors and everything else about that summer except how hard your Michel had cried. History is Cosette as much as it is Carnot, and financiers waiting for ships, and the petty doings of ducs and cardinals.

Waterloo is about the same question. What makes history? What turns the tide of the battle? Hugo has two answers.

Well, he has more than two – the Waterloo chapters are his masterpiece of self-contradictions. But he has two kinds of answers. Answer the first: it is the will of Providence, turning its face from Napoleon. We’ll come back to that.

Answer the second: what makes history? it is the rain, that prevented the cannon from being moved to the front line, it is a ditch that Napoleon didn’t know existed, it is what the peasant whom Bulow hired forgot to tell him. It is small and trivial things, magnified by circumstance to fatality.

What makes history (says Hugo, on Waterloo) is one detail in one place, that turns one ankle: it is the one nail which, when missing from a horseshoe, makes an entire army fail. There are many nails that have been missing from many horseshoes, and most of the time the worst that happens is the rider stops, swears, and has to reshoe the horse. But sometimes that horseshoe really, really matters.

And, Hugo is at pains to show us: the unpredictable details that move battles are the same unpredictable, merciless details that move his human story as well. Sometimes the corpse you’re trying to rob really, really matters, though you never could have expected it at the time. History is the human and the human is history; there is no distinction between the great and the small.

Does Pontmercy’s indebtedness to Thénardier matter to history, considered grandly, considered as a matter for textbooks? No. What is one dead veteran more or less, especially when the battle has already been won? Even on the personal level, would it have made a great difference? Marius had already been born, Marius would be raised by his grandfather whether his father lived or died.

It matters to Marius, of course, and it matters to Georges Pontmercy, who went on to plant gardens and watch his son grow up, and it doesn’t matter to Thénardier. And because it matters to Marius, our story keeps happening, and because it matters to Marius, Waterloo matters to Marius.

We remember bloody hand prints.

So this, then, is Waterloo: history, the great history that gets written and commemorated, is the unpredictable, uncontrollable result of a concatenation of small stones in a mosaic. Because details matter. History is humanity magnified by circumstance, which is sometimes will and sometimes fluke, and the flip side of this is that what happens to individual human beings is history, too, whether or not it is written down.

What else is Waterloo? Because Hugo is not just here to inform us why Napoleon Deserved It.

Waterloo is the story of many people, not just Napoleon, and not just Blucher, or Wellington. The battle is the story of the dead men in the well, of the soldiers that died defending one redoubt or another, to whom Hugo gives as many names as he can; it is the story of the cavalrymen who charged over a ridge into a death trap; it is the story of valiant and dying Englishmen and Scotsmen and Prussians as it is the story of valiant dying Frenchmen; it is the story of conscripted peasant guides as it is the story of great generals; it is decades of strategic thinking brought low by an unforseen overhang of sod.

And it is about defeat.

This is two-pronged. Why did Napoleon lose, answer number one? (Answer number two being, the chaos theory of history, above.) Napoleon lost because in his arrogance he bled France dry and “annoyed God” with his solipsism, and this tyranny cannot be sustained forever. I said we’d come back to this, and here we are:

The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the brain of one man,—this would be mortal to civilization were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. […] Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,—these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear.

Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been decided on.

He embarrassed God.

Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the Universe.

Hold this thought a bit longer, and with it hold the thought of kings.

Waterloo is about defeat, second aspect: Who wins the battle of Waterloo, in Hugo’s rendition? It is not the English. It is the otherwise unremarkable soldier Cambronne who, when his ammunition has run out and his enemies have surrounded him, wields a gun like a club and stares into the mouths of cannons and invites the shots to kill him. And who loses? In fifteen minutes a thousand brave men die, on all sides, over, and over, and over again.

And here when I read about Cambronne I was already thinking of Enjolras folding his arms in the wreck of the Café Corinth. (And of Enjolras aiming deliberately at a man Combeferre calls his brother. Enjolras, both terrible and sublime.) The fall of Cambronne’s last French Legion is rendered in pointed and painful prefiguration of the fall of the barricade on the Chanvrerie.

And what remains of Waterloo? The mark of a cannonball, pointed out to tourists; a memorial, on a battlefield which has now been entirely transformed from its lost historic form (compare Paris, the whole city of Paris, loved and lost beneath Hausmann’s wholesale urban reconstitution); and an obligation, passed from father to son, the human legacy of Waterloo and the glorious, lost imperial past. History is detail, history is living, history is day to day accreted upon itself.

So now on to argot. Argot! (or: where my inarticulate squeakings start to really set in.) The major point of this digression is to hammer home that history is not just the daily doings of the great, it is the story of the anonymous and of small and common names, it is the aggregated will and experience of the unremarked.

No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the exterior also. The history of manners and ideas permeates the history of events, and this is true reciprocally.

As a modern amateur historian, I jump up and down and say, yes, yes, social history! As a reader - history is in the small echoes and grace notes as much as it is in the great thumping theme; history is every tiny stone in the great mosaic. History is Fantine as much as it is Louis-Philippe. The battle is every stone and every detail hurled together into a great and enduring storm of coincidence and loss.

History is a carpenter named Lombier, it is an argumentative worker named Mavot who died on a different barricade, it is Filspierre who is only remembered for distributing ammunition.

History is Mabeuf, gone out without a book.

History is an unnamed man with a red beard tasked with the responsibility to call for riot, it is an anonymous and well dressed man dispensing money to the men arming the barricades on Rue des Ménétriers.

History is an insurgent dubbed Apollo, executed in anger after a protracted fight, and a balding man shot dead next to a young man with a mirror, an insurgent stabbed to death while he was trying to doctor the wounded, a rebel who died without his hat, a spy shot unlawfully behind the lines, a slender young man shot outside the barricade.

History says (Waterloo says) the revolution of 1832 failed partly because it rained.

History also says (Waterloo says): no tyrant can stay enthroned forever.

Returning to 1817:

History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial,—there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,—are useful. It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed.

And so: les Amis de l'ABC are a group that only almost became historic; they are, as Fantine is, as Valjean is, as Javert is, small and unremarked stones in the great mosaic; but history is this, history is nothing more and nothing less than this, and nothing can possibly be greater, no Emperor, and no calling, than to love your fellow humans, and to be free.

This terrifying wall of text has been brought to you by my inability to turn the page and read about bright beloved characters going to march off and die.

The Importance of Writing Carefree Blackness™

Post-NaNoWriMo, I’ve volunteered beta-reading services. It combines my love of reading with my love of asking too many questions. The push for diversity in publishing has created attempts at diversity in writing, and thus requests for diverse beta-readers.

Of my eleven beta-reads, eight of them were given to me based on my blackness perspective. I am not upset about this at all. If you’re not black and you’re making an effort to include black characters in your things and want to make sure you’re not being the worst possible person about it, good on you. Of those eight manuscripts, five of them have black main characters, and four of those have struggle-based narratives. 

“The struggle™,” for anyone unaware is basically living life through the impacts of institutionalized racism. Sometimes this means arguing respectability politics and combating “too black” and “not black enough” lines in our own community. Sometimes it means dealing with the backlash of promoting our own standards of beauty. Sometimes it’s having to explain and defend our social justice movements. Sometimes it’s living through the aftermath of a race-based shooting. Sometimes it’s the politics involved in choosing a PWI vs an HBCU. And sometimes it’s swallowing the mountain of micro-aggressions and casual racism only we can see worked into our daily lives.

I’m noticing white writers seem to lump together slavery and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960′s. It’s probably because those are the standard narratives for the black experience as taught in grade school. And so writing black characters has become a reflection on the pain associated with blackness. And writing these things becomes a way to illustrate one’s own “wokeness” or “hipness” or “down-with-the-causeness.” You get my very uncool point.

Writing with a focus on this aspect of black life, while important on some level, is damaging on another. Black women especially are saddled with the resilience stereotype: that we have been through so much without our backs being broken and we can continue to do so there is no real rush to relieve us of our burdens. Our strength is a defining characteristic and without something to fight, it is useless. Without something to overcome, what remains of our personality?

It’s also true that many of our well-known pieces of literature are struggle-driven narratives. The Color Purple. A Raisin in the Sun. Beloved. Native Son. Literary culture (with its broad, white base) is endeared to them for their dramatic profundity, the skill with which these authors paint true ugliness so deep it becomes beautiful. And for some reason, we are stuck in this place. The only stories people know to tell about us, are about our pain.

Now if you’re really woke, you’ll notice the glee with which black women entrenched in the fight greet images of black whimsy. It goes beyond the standard-issue “the laughter of children is a joy forever” reaction. We are seldom represented outside of our own circles as people capable of happiness or frivolity. Watching us dance at a protest literally gives us energy. It’s why Lupita going from Patsey in 12 Years a Slave to Maz Kanata in The Force Awakens (and heavens to murgatroyd, John Boyega) gave black girl nerds LIFE. It’s why NBC’s production of The Wiz Live! was hailed in the community as it was. What a novelty to not see ourselves in roles where blackness isn’t an armor or a tragic diary entry. This is what it looks like to have fun. 

And it isn’t just about black people reading black representation. Allowing us happiness in literature is another way to humanize us to non-black audiences. This is a thing that shouldn’t need to be facilitated, but the world’s a hard place, so here we are. We live in a society where a white child’s obsession with a toy gun is treated as a sweet and perfectly innocent rite of passage in a beloved cinematic Christmas classic. A black child with a toy gun is automatically deemed a threat, and he is executed for it. Black lives are rarely envisioned innocently or without tension. As such, black children are seen as having no capacity for imagination what with all that serious, bitter blackness within them. The reasons for this are myriad and complex and deeply rooted in centuries of problematic racial depiction. But literature is in a unique position to address and aid in the repair without volatility.

So when you’re doing your research on how to write us, it shouldn’t be just on how to non-offensively write our dialect or describe our skin tone without food analogies or how many times is too many times to use “nigger.” If you’re going to write diverse characters, that means giving them the full spectrum of humanity and not just using them as statements and plot devices. And humanity for black characters – women and girls especially – means letting them dance or build airships or be alien pirate matriarchs or battle dragons for once instead of the patriarchy. 

Reblog if you say "Y'all"

On days like this Sam Wilson calls in Black to the Avengers and refuses to go into work.

I imagine he spends his days this week at the VA with Black vets and they sit and talk and cry praying they’ll be alive tomorrow and the next day because cops don’t really give a shit about a Black vet with PTSD.

What do y'all think the other Black characters are doing to cope today?

[non-black fans your only place in this post is to reblog and like, btw]

Sam had a really tough day.

It was going fine at first, great even. Got some flying in (for fun - which he doesn’t get to do a lot) hung out with Natasha and did some sparring but then he went to see Steve and something happened. Something Sam didn’t expect.

He felt it coming, it shot through him like cold water down his back. That sadness, the emptiness, the loneliness that wraps on him like a blanket. And even though Steve was in the middle of saying something Sam had to get out of there.

So he did the best he could to smile at Steve then got the hell out of there, but the feeling followed him. It always did. And even though Sam knew he didn’t have any reason to be sad today there it was. And there was nothing Sam could do about it.

So he went to his room and sat on the floor. His room in the avengers tower was always to soft when he got like this. But he did grab a pillow and his blanket his mom had sent him a couple months ago. Sam didn’t think, just held himself around his middle. Mentally rocking himself back-and-forth. Sam doesn’t remember when he started but he could feel them feel falling across his nose and down his cheeks.

Sam had no idea how long he had been down there when his door opened and light poured through the room.

“Hey, Sam, come spar with me. Steve is being an ass and -” Bucky’s words were cut short when his eyes found Sam on the floor, curled up on himself. “Sam,” he said again his tone so much softer than it was moments before.

Bucky and Sam, well, they were Bucky and Sam, they had a rocky relationship from the start (“they man pulled me out of the damn sky, ripped off my wing! That hurts man!”) but it had gotten better. They still taunt each other but pretty much only speak when they have too, and nod at each other when they don’t.

Sam tried to pull himself together “Hey, Man” he says but his voice is shakey and more tears spill out.

He hears Bucky take a deep breath in. “Come on now,” and suddenly Bucky is inviting himself into Sam’s room and sitting next to Sam before picking him up a little so they can look each other in the eye. Sam and Bucky both ignore that Sam flinches a little.

“What’s going on?” Bucky asks, he’s confused, he never ever sees Sam sad. He thought it just didn’t happen. So when Sam shrugs and tries to smile at him and more tears fall Bucky feels the strongest urge to protect him from everything.

“Just sad,” Sam mumbles out, looking everywhere but Bucky’s blue eyes. “No reason,”

“What can I do?”

“Just- fuck-” Sam still isn’t looking at him “can you just- h-hold me, please”

And Sam looks so ashamed of himself for needing someone Bucky couldn’t even think of anything to say. He just pulled Sam closer gripping at his sides and pulling him into his lap so Sam could straddle him and Sam gripped at his middle while one hand of Bucky’s (the flesh one) found the back of Sam’s neck and the other around his waist.

Bucky quietly sung a soft song he knew in Russian in Sam’s ear and knew Sam like it when he gripped him tighter. He could feel Sam’s tears but didn’t say anything, just continued to sing and hold him close until Sam fell asleep.

Video: Yesterday, Obama signed a bill known as PROMESA which will create an unelected colonial Control Board in Puerto Rico – a country that has been exploited through its people and resources for the past 118 years. The bill, which Congress alleges would help Puerto Rico deal with a $72 billion dollar debt - created by their colonial economic policies, hedge funds, banks and local politicians representing the 1% interests - will only makes things worse. ‪#‎PeopleBeforeDebt‬ ‪#‎NoPromesa‬