:執迷於身份認同的一年2
Zink’s marveLing description of what blackness looks like implies that it could welcome anyone. She draws a phenotypic loophole through which a sympathetic impostor or a straight-up cynic can pass.
津克對黑人長相的精彩描述暗示了這一族是歡迎所有人加入的。她設置了一個顯型漏洞，讓懷有好感的冒充者或乾脆就是犬儒的人都能通過檢測。
Each of these books wrestles with the fact of race while trying to present it as mutable, constructed, obscuring. In Beatty’s novel, a young black farmer in modern Los Angeles reluctantly takes on a vulgar former TV minstrel star as his slave. Blackness, according to this book, is as much a scam as it is a cultural identity; the undercurrents of tragedy keep lapping at the harbor of farce. Row’s novel is also a satire, but an eerily calm one in which a white man has ‘‘racial reassignment’’ surgery and becomes black. Row, who like Zink is white, takes guilt to an astounding allegorical extreme: The surest cure for white oppression is to eliminate whiteness. Whatever else is going on with Dolezal psychologically, you can read into her proud reassignment a sense of shame.
所有這些書都在克服種族的現實，同時也表明種族是構建而成的，易變而模糊。在比蒂的小說中，一個現代洛杉磯的年輕黑人農民，拒絕讓一個粗俗的電視黑臉秀明星當他的奴隸。在這本書裏，黑是一種文化身份，也是一個騙局；悲劇的潛流不斷拍擊着滑稽的港灣。耶斯·羅的小說也是諷刺作品，但卻有着讓人毛骨悚然的冷靜，一個白人男性進行了“種族重指定”手術，成爲黑人。和津克一樣也是白人的羅，將負罪感推向一個寓言性的驚人極致：要消解白人壓迫，最有效的辦法是消滅所謂白人。不管多爾扎爾的內心是怎麼想的，從她驕傲的種族重指定選擇中，你能感覺到一絲羞恥。
But racial transgression works the other way too. ‘‘Hamilton’’ is a musical biography about the very white, very dead Alexander Hamilton, in which most of the cast is ‘‘other,’’ including Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s Nuyorican creator and star. Some of its audacity stems from the baldness of its political project: In changing the races of the founding fathers from white to brown, it pushes back against the currents of racial appropriation. It also infuses the traditional melodies of the American musical with so many genres of hip-hop and R & B, sometimes in a single number, that the songs themselves become something new. Political debates are staged as rap battles. Daveed Diggs’s Thomas Jefferson becomes the best good thing that never happened at the Source Awards. Artistically, Miranda has created a great night out. Racially, the show tags the entertainment industry status quo with color. It’s obviously musical theater. But damn if it’s not graffiti too.
然而種族忤逆也是可以反過來的。傳記音樂劇《漢密爾頓》主人公是一個死了幾百年、白得不能再白的白人，但劇中演員卻大多是“其他”種族，包括本劇主創、主演林-馬努艾爾·米蘭達(Lin-Manuel Miranda)，一個波多黎各裔美國人。如此大膽的安排，一定程度上是因爲它並不打算掩蓋自己的政治計劃：通過將國父的膚色從白變成棕，來抵制當前的種族挪用潮流。它還將傳統的美國音樂劇旋律與許許多多的嘻哈樂和節奏布魯斯流派混作一團，有時在一首歌裏就能盡數呈現，使歌曲本身成了某種新的東西。政客的辯論被設計成說唱對戰。戴維伊德·迪格斯(Daveed Diggs)飾演的托馬斯·傑弗遜，是Source雜誌大獎（嘻哈樂重要獎項。——譯註）上見不到的傑作。從藝術上，米蘭達創造了一個美妙夜晚。種族上，這部戲爲娛樂工業的現狀增添了一點顏色。它顯然是音樂劇。但說它是塗鴉亦無不妥。
Naturally, this new era has also agitated a segment of the populace that is determined to scrub the walls. That, presumably, is where Donald Trump comes in: as the presidential candidate for anyone freaked out by the idea of a show like ‘‘Hamilton.’’ Trump is the pathogenic version of Obama, filling his supporters with hope based on a promise to rid the country of change. This incarnation of Trump appeared not long after Obama’s election, determined to disprove the new president’s American citizenship. On Trump’s behalf, an entire wing of conservatism — the so-called birthers — devoted itself to the removal of a mask that Obama was never wearing. Part of Trump’s appeal is his illusion of authenticity. His blustering candor has currency in a landscape of android candidates. Yet his magnetism resides in paranoia, the fear that since Obama’s election ushered in this shifting, unstable climate of identity, the country has been falling apart.
這個新時代，自然也惹怒了一部分一心想抹殺它的民衆。這大概就是唐納德·特朗普(Donald Trump)的切入點：作爲一個總統候選人，他代表的是那些被《漢密爾頓》這樣的事物嚇着的人。特朗普是病原版的奧巴馬，他的承諾是讓這個國家免遭任何改變，憑藉這一點，他給他的支持者帶去了希望。特朗普是在奧巴馬當選後不久道成肉身的，他一心要證明這位新任總統沒有美國國籍。在特朗普的帶領下，整個保守主義陣營——所謂的出生地質疑者——一心要摘下一個奧巴馬從來沒戴過的面具。一定程度上，特朗普的吸引力在於他在幻想一種不存在的真。在一個個機器般的候選人中間，他那大呼小叫的率真是有市場的。然而他的魅力源自妄想狂，源自奧巴馬的當選所製造的恐慌，人們擔心在這場動盪不定的身份變革中，國家會轟然倒塌。
It’s a paranoia that pop culture captured first: In the last six years, Hollywood has provided a glut of disaster spectacles, armageddon scenarios and White House sackings. But the USA Network’s ‘‘Mr. Robot,’’ which ended its first season last month, might have gotten at that sense of social collapse best. Created by Sam Esmail, an Egyptian-American, the show pits technology against the economy and its unstable protagonist against himself. The plot concerns a group of anarchist hackers conspiring to topple a corporation; with it go the stability of world markets and everybody’s financial debt. But it’s also a mystery about the identity of its protagonist, a mentally ill, morphine-addicted hacker named Elliot. We think he’s obeying the commands of the show’s title character, the head of a hacktivist outfit, but it turns out that he has been commanding himself all along. Significant parts of this world are figments of his delusion. Elliot is at least two people. Some of the dark excitement of this show is that he might be even more.
流行文化首先捕捉到了這種妄想：過去六年裏，好萊塢呈上了無數災難奇觀、末世悲景和白宮浩劫。但在對社會崩塌的表現上，上月剛結束第一季的USA電視網(USA Network)劇集《黑客軍團》(Mr. Robot)也許是最有力的。這部由埃及裔美國人薩姆·艾斯美爾(Sam Esmail)創制的劇集讓科技和經濟站在了對立面，也讓反覆無常的主人公成爲自己的敵人。劇中一個無政府主義黑客團體密謀顛覆一個大公司；全球市場因此陷入動盪，所有人的債務被一筆勾銷。然而該劇主人公——患有精神病症、嗎啡成癮的黑客埃利奧特——也是一個身份成疑的人。我們以爲他是在執行劇名所示人物“Mr. Robot”（機器人先生）的命令，那是一個黑客活動團體的領導人，然而後來發現，埃利奧特一直在自行其是。這個世界有相當一部分是他憑空臆想出來的。埃利奧特至少是兩個人。而這部劇的其中一個黑暗看點在於，可能還不止兩個。
‘‘Mr. Robot’’ is worst-of-times TV, reflecting a mood of menacing instability. Over the course of its 10 episodes, almost no one was who they appeared to be. A straight married man seemed to think nothing of his sleeping with a gay work underling (and neither did his wife). A character who seemed, to my eyes at least, to be a transgender woman at some point appeared as a conventional man. Was that a coming out? A going in? Both? This isn’t a show I watched for what was going to happen but for who people were going to turn into, or who they wanted to turn out to be. It’s a show about the way your online profile can diverge from your real-life identity, yes, but also the way you can choose a self or a self can choose you.
《黑客軍團》是講述“最糟糕的時代”的電視劇，反映了一種令人恐慌的動盪氣氛。十集的劇情鋪陳下來，幾乎所有人都是表裏不一的。一個已婚異性戀男性，對自己跟男同下屬上牀的事似乎完全不以爲意（他妻子也是這樣）。一個看起來——至少在我看來——是跨性別女性的角色，突然以尋常男性形象出現。這算是出櫃？入櫃？兩者皆有？這部劇看的不是將發生什麼事，而是人將會變成什麼，或想變成什麼。它的確點明瞭我們的網上形象跟真實生活中的身份有怎樣的差異，但同時，它還關乎我們的自我選擇，或被自我選擇。
There’s also the choice to ignore the matter of identity — until, of course, it starts to aggravate your complacency. Not far into the flap over Dolezal, another alarming story took over the news, a story that challenged the myths white America tells itself about progress. This story was about Atticus Finch, the protagonist of Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, ‘‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’’ Atticus single-handedly fought racism in the fictitious Alabama town of Maycomb, and he became a window through which we could see a version of tolerance, someone holy enough to put on stained glass or money. But in ‘‘Go Set a Watchman,’’ the sequel to ‘‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’’ published in July, Atticus was given a scandalous status update: He had been aged into a racist.
無視身份問題也是一個選擇——當然，前提是不要到了加劇你的自滿的程度。多爾扎爾的事還沒平息，另一則警世故事又鬧了起來，這一次，故事挑戰得是美國白人自說自話的那一套進步迷思。故事主人公是哈珀·李(Harper Lee)的1960年經典小說《殺死一隻反舌鳥》(To Kill a Mockingbird)人物阿提克斯·芬奇(Atticus Finch)。在虛構的阿拉巴馬州梅康鎮，阿提克斯單槍匹馬對抗種族主義，他成了一面窗戶，讓我們看到了寬容的一種表現形式，一個足夠做成教堂彩色玻璃或印到鈔票上的聖人。但在七月出版的續篇《設立守望者》(Go Set a Watchman)中，阿提克斯的事蹟出現了一次不堪入目的轉折：隨着年齡增大，他成了一個種族主義者。
I can’t recall the last time the attitudes of a single fictional character led the national news. But there was bigoted old Atticus, on the front pages, being discussed on cable. One of the most iconic white antiracists had grown fond of white supremacy. It raised an uncomfortable question: If you had identified with the original Atticus Finch, did his Archie Bunkerization make a racist out of you too? The public hand-wringing was a perverse refreshment because, even if only for a few days, it left white people dwelling on race as intensely as nonwhite people. This new Atticus was a betrayal of white liberal idealism, feeding a suspicion that that idealism was less than absolute — that it could suddenly, randomly turn against the people it purported to help.
在我印象裏，還沒有哪個小說人物的態度能成爲全國性新聞。偏執的老阿提克斯上了報紙頭條，有線電視節目也在談論他。家喻戶曉的白人反種族主義者，變成了白人至上主義的信徒。這就帶來一個令人如坐鍼氈的問題：如果說原來的阿提克斯·芬奇曾經引起你的共鳴，那這個阿契·邦克爾(Archie Bunker)化的阿提克斯，會不會又喚醒了你心裏的一個種族主義自我呢？這場公衆焦慮是對思緒的一次反常的重啓，因爲現在連白人也要像非白人一樣，滿腦子想着種族問題了——哪怕只是持續那麼幾天。這個新阿提克斯是白人自由理想主義的叛徒，給那些認爲理想主義並非鐵板一塊的人壯了聲勢——在他們看來，理想主義會突然地、隨機地把矛頭轉向那些它號稱要幫助的人。
It was almost as if Lee knew, in 1957, about the mood of the country in 2015 — about the way a series of dead black men and women would further cleave apart the country; about the massacre of nine black churchgoers by a young white supremacist in a South Carolina church, and the ensuing debate over the Confederate flag; about the fear of inevitable, inexorable racial, gender and sexual evolution; about the perceived threats to straight-white-male primacy by Latino immigrants, proliferating Spanish, same-sex marriage, female bosses and a black president.
哈珀·李彷彿在1957年就已經知道，這個國家到了2015年會處在怎樣的氣氛中——她知道一系列黑人男女的死亡事件會進一步加劇種族對立；知道一個年輕的白人至上主義者在一座南卡羅萊拉州教堂裏屠殺了九名黑人教徒，隨後還引發一場關於邦聯旗的爭論；知道不可避免、不可阻擋的種族、性別和性革命；知道拉美移民、日漸普及的西班牙語、同性婚姻、女性上司以及一個黑人總統給異性戀白人男性權力構成的明顯威脅。
The yearning to transcend race keeps coming up against the bedrock cultural matter of separateness. But the tectonic plates of the culture keep pushing against one another with greater, earthquaking force. The best show in our era about that quake — about the instability of identity and the choosing of a self — has been ‘‘Key & Peele.’’ For five seasons, in scores of sketches, two biracial men, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, became different women and different men of different ethnicities, personalities and body types. They were two of the best actors on television, hailing from somewhere between the lawlessness of improv comedy and the high-impact emotionalism of Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman, zillion-character plays. ‘‘Key & Peele’’ granted nearly every caricature a soul.
超越種族的渴望，與族類有別的文化核心不斷髮生衝突。然而，文化的構造板塊正在以越來越強烈的、地動山搖的力量相互碰撞着。這場地震，這種身份的不穩定性和對自我的選擇，在《Key & Peele》中有着最完美的呈現。紀甘-邁克爾·吉(Keegan-Michael Key)和喬丹·皮爾(Jordan Peele)，兩個有雙重種族身份的男人，在五季的小品劇集中，變成了各種不同族裔、人格和體型的女人和男人。他們是當今最傑出的電視演員，風格介於毫無章法的即席喜劇和熾烈的安妮·迪佛·史密斯(Anna Deavere Smith)式感情主義一人多角劇之間。《Key & Peele》給幾乎所有誇張形象注入了一個靈魂。
The show started as a commentary on the hilarious absurdity of race, but it never fully escaped the pernicious reality of racism. The longer it ran, the more melancholy it became, the more it seethed. In the final episode, its anger caught up with its fancifulness and cheek, exploding in an old-timey musical number called ‘‘Negrotown,’’ which opens with a black man (Key) being arrested by a white cop one night while walking down a dark alleyway. He says he’s innocent of any wrongdoing and asks why he’s being arrested, intensifying the cop’s anger. Entering the police cruiser, he hits his head on the car door. Suddenly, a homeless man (Peele) arrives on the scene and offers to take the black guy off the cop’s hands. The cop gratefully acquiesces.
該劇是以評論種族問題中令人捧腹的荒誕性起家，但也從未迴避種族主義的嚴峻現實。隨着時間推移，劇集的氣氛變得越來越陰鬱，也越來越憤怒。在大結局中，這種憤怒混合了它的怪想和俚俗，在一個老式歌舞片片段http://https//中全面爆發，它的開頭是一個黑人男子（由吉飾演）在黑暗的巷子裏走着，結果被一個白人警察逮捕。他說他沒有任何不法行爲，問警察爲什麼逮捕他，這煽起了警察的火氣。在進入警車時，警察把他的頭往車門上撞了一下。突然，一個乞丐（由皮爾飾演）出現，提出把這個黑人從警察手裏帶走。警察萬分感激地同意了。
Taking the disoriented man by the hand, the homeless guy leads him through an alley door. They find themselves on the threshold of a sunny neighborhood. The homeless guy is now dressed in a three-piece suit the color of pink grapefruit meat, and he begins to sing in a camped-up, zero-calorie Paul Robeson baritone about this new place, ‘‘where there ain’t no pain, ain’t no sorrow.’’ Black people in bright clothes are dancing in the streets, singing in giddy verse about the special virtues of their town: You can get a cab to pick you up, have a loan application approved, even wear a hoodie without getting shot. Plus: ‘‘There’s no stupid-ass white folks touching your hair or stealing your culture, claiming it’s theirs.’’
乞丐拉着這個暈乎乎的人走進巷子裏的一扇門。轉眼間，他們來到了一個陽光明媚的社區。乞丐此刻穿上了一身葡萄柚色三件套正裝，開始用一種做作的、零卡路里的保羅·羅比遜(Paul Robeson)式男中音歌唱這片新天地，“這兒沒痛苦，沒悲傷。”黑人們身着色彩豔麗的衣服在街上起舞，用喜悅的辭句讚美他們的家園：在這裏你伸手就可以打到車，申請貸款能得到批准，穿上衛衣都不會中槍。還有：“不會有傻頭傻腦的白人來摸你的頭髮，把你的文化偷走，說成是他們的。”
But it’s clear from the start that the ‘‘neighborhood’’ is a studio backlot, and the dancers are costumed in the colors of Skittles, and their dancing involves a lot of grinning and spinning and stretching out their arms — shuffling. Black freedom looks like a white 1940s Hollywood director’s idea of it. At the end of the number, the dancers stand frozen with their arms raised in a black-power salute, as if waiting for someone to yell ‘‘cut.’’ No one does.
然而，從一開始就可以看出，這片“鄰里”只是一個攝影棚置景，舞者的衣服是彩虹糖色的，他們在舞蹈中滿臉堆笑，不斷地旋轉，伸展雙臂——跳的是曳步舞。這片黑人世外桃源，似乎是一個1940年代好萊塢白人導演設想出來的。在歌曲的最後，高舉雙臂擺出“黑人力量”禮的舞者們靜止不動，彷彿在等人喊“cut”。但一直沒人喊。
The dream melts away, and we’re back with the guy being arrested, passed out on the ground. The cop starts shoving him into the cruiser. ‘‘I thought I was going to Negrotown,’’ he says.
夢想漸漸淡去，我們重新回到那人被逮捕的場景，他剛剛暈倒在地上。警察開始把他往車裏塞。“我以爲我要去黑鬼鎮呢，”他說。
‘‘Oh, you are,’’ the cop replies, as the piano riff from the song starts to play and the car drives off.
“對啊，就是去那兒，”警察答道，在鋼琴彈奏的副歌旋律中，警車開動起來。
The show left us with a dream of Edenic self-containment as the key to black contentment — a stunning contradiction of all its previous sketches. It was a rebuke to both racial integration and ghettoization. It split me open. I cried with laughter at the joke of this obviously fake place as a kind of heaven. I cried with sadness, because if you’re in Negrotown, you’re also in a special ring of hell.
這一段歌舞，給我們留下的是一場夢，夢中那伊甸園式的自我桎梏，成了通往黑人幸福的關鍵——這和該劇集此前的所有小品都是背道而馳的。它在同時對種族融合與隔離發起譴責。我被猛地撕開了。面對這個明明是假造的、天堂般的地方上演着的笑話，我笑着哭了起來。我的哭泣是悲切的，因爲如果你在黑鬼鎮，你同時也就落入了地獄中的某個特殊地帶。
The bitterness of the sketch made me wonder if being black in America is the one identity that won’t ever mutate. I’m someone who believes himself to have complete individual autonomy, someone who feels free. But I also know some of that autonomy is limited, illusory, conditional. I live knowing that whatever my blackness means to me can be at odds with what it means to certain white observers, at any moment. So I live with two identities: mine and others’ perceptions of it. So much of blackness evolving has been limited to whiteness allowing it to evolve, without white people accepting that they are in the position of granting permission. Allowing. If that symbiotic dynamic is going to change, white people will need to become more conscious that they, too, can be perceived.
這則小品的苦澀讓我想到，“美國黑人”會不會是唯一一個永遠不會變異的身份。我是一個認爲自己有完全的個體自主權的人，一個感到自由的人。但我也知道，自主權中存在有限的、虛幻的、有條件的地方。從小到大我一直知道，不管我如何看待我的膚色，總會跟某些白人旁觀者是存在分歧的，這樣的事隨時會發生。因此我有一種雙重身份：我的身份，以及他人理解的身份。黑人的演化在相當程度上是被框限在白人容許的範圍內的，而白人同時又不承認他們掌握着這種發放許可的權力。容許。要想改變這種共生關係，白人需要更清楚地認識到，他們的身份也存在他人理解的版本。
It could be that living with recycled conflict is part of the national DNA. Yet it’s also in our natures to keep trying to change, to discover ourselves. In ‘‘Far From the Tree,’’ Andrew Solomon’s landmark 2012 book about parenting and how children differentiate themselves, he makes a distinction between vertical and horizontal identity. The former is defined by traits you share with your parents, through genes and norms; the latter is defined by traits and values you don’t share with them, sometimes because of genetic mutation, sometimes through the choice of a different social world. The emotional tension in the book’s scores of stories arises from the absence of love for or empathy toward someone with a pronounced or extreme horizontal identity — homosexuality or autism or severe disability. Solomon is writing about the struggle to overcome intolerance and estrangement, and to better understand disgust; about our comfort with fixed, established identity and our distress over its unfixed or unstable counterpart.
也許這個國家就是擅長忍受這種反覆重現的衝突。與此同時，我們又有一種不斷求變、求自我發現的天性。2012年出版的安德魯·索羅門(Andrew Solomon)代表作《那些與衆不同的孩子》(Far From the Tree)講的是爲人父母之道，以及孩子之間的差別，在書中，索羅門將身份分成了垂直與水平兩種。決定前者的是通過基因和規範與父母共享的性格特徵；而後者是由你跟父母不一樣的性格特徵和價值觀決定的，有時候是因爲基因變異，有時候是因爲選擇了另一個社交世界。書中許多故事的情感張力源於某種顯著或極端的水平身份得不到愛或同情——比如同性戀、自閉症或嚴重的殘疾。索羅門寫的是在偏狹與疏離中的掙扎；是我們對固定的、世俗認可的身份的貪戀，以及不固定、不穩定的身份給我們帶來的苦惱。
His insights about families apply to us as a country. We’re a vertical nation moving horizontally. We’re daring to erase the segregating boundaries, to obliterate oppressive institutions, to get over ourselves. Nancy Meyers knows it. Sam Esmail knows it. So, in his way, does Donald Trump. The transition should make us stronger — if it doesn’t kill us first.
他對家庭的洞察可以推演至作爲一個國家的我們。我們是一個在水平方向移動的垂直國家。我們敢於消除隔離的界線，廢除壓迫性的制度，克服自以爲是。南希·邁耶斯清楚這一點。薩姆·艾斯美爾也知道。連唐納德·特朗普也以他自己的方式表明他知道。這場轉變應該會讓我們更強大——前提是不被它殺死。
