Hannah Black puts calendar time back into messianic time, and also the reverse. An account of the last two disorienting years in history, in our lives, this intimate and funny and abstract fiction uses fable, and unreality, to flood a reader with the real, to remind her what is at stake

 

Hannah Black, Tuesday or September or The

End, Be Capricious, 2022.

Tuesday or September or The End by Hannah Black is an incisive and playful work of speculative fiction that explores the rupture year of 2020, when aliens finally invaded.

Tuesday or September or the End puts calendar time back into messianic time, and also the reverse. An account of the last two disorienting years in history, in our lives, this intimate and funny and abstract fiction uses fable, and unreality, to flood a reader with the real, to remind her what is at stake. — Rachel Kushner

Allegory and satire, alert and conscious, Hannah Black’s Tuesday or September or the End, is an existential novel. Narrative innocence is not the engine of this work; knowledge of life in the modern is. Bird and Dog, Black’s wide awake and dreaming characters, are electric and wise. This novel is fluent in our dystopia and utopia. — Dionne Brand

An acid calendar of planetary rot and revolt, Hannah Black’s new novel listens for that alien language of the future: total social transformation. Staging debates on communism and social democracy, or unraveling the double helix of race and capitalism, Black’s calendar is one that breathes and breaks, figuring the temporal hiccups of revolution. Suddenly it’s no longer endless winter and our narrator Bird, much like chirping in early spring, brings us to witness the reanimation of the world. — Greg Nissan

In Tuesday or September or the End, we see ourselves battered by time, which isn’t real, and chance, which is. But just as “the world resists its reduction to winter,” Hannah Black’s writing, in its passionate grasp of possibility, resists spiritual suicide. The book is deeply felt because the pain of attachment is close to its center and funny because life is currently absurd. But what I love most about it, reading its compact brilliant sentences in this sunless covid afternoon, is the way it makes an argument for clarity, which really can—partially, briefly, and when it matters most—sometimes be achieved. — Benjamin Krusling

Hannah Black is an artist and writer at work in New York City. Black’s latest book, Tuesday or September or the End (Capricious), is a novella written in the aftermath of the early months of the pandemic and the uprisings of summer 2020. If we experience daily life as “simulation or psychosis,” Black shows us throughout this book that it is “probably something much more drab, like the slow death of a form of society.” Black offers a chronicle centered on two characters, Bird and Dog, as they contend with rapidly changing political possibility and foreclosure during the pandemic while the run of Moley Salamanders (i.e., Bernie Sanders) concludes and aliens—who are real—come to earth. The book narrates what it is to let these beginnings and endings “scroll through you” and to participate in their coming about, both in the sense of the normal rhythms of capital and of riots.

The recent past was and is “a time of signs and wonders” in the most horrific sense, but Black tethers it to mundane continuity, an account of life in late-stage capital as time breaks down and goes “queasy and wrong” and all dates are “in retrospect, a monument.” Via a propulsive consideration of how the riots of 2020 might have turned revolutionary, Black offers a meditation on collective life. This crucial novella is about how we might know who we are when our normal referents are muted, deleted, upended.—Hannah Zeavin

Hannah Zeavin

Congratulations on this latest book. In Tuesday or September or the End, you give us a chronicle that shows the impossibility of chronicling “The Event” as separate from a four- or four hundred- or thousand-year history.

Hannah Black

I had a fantasy that I could write a book in a couple of months. I was on a residency on Fire Island and decided to spend the time writing a book really fast, the novel of 2020. I kept saying, “It’s a fictionalized version of the first six months of 2020,” as if you can fictionalize time itself. The temporality of writing was supposed to relate to the temporality of the book. Of course, that didn’t happen; in the end it took over a year to write it. The form of the novel itself disciplined me.

Uprisings are the only time you ever learn anything new. Then you have months, or years, or decades of aftermath during which you have to keep drawing on the moment of rupture. Intellectual, social, and cultural leaps forward happen at these moments of maximum collectivity; and then we’re just putting together the pieces, or singing praise songs, or wondering what exactly went down for a while after. I really wanted to be part of the attempt to try and understand what happened in 2020. The book is a contribution to that general effort.

HZ

Yet, for a few reasons, it is not only a faithful chronicle of that time. First there are aliens; and in the world of the book, aliens seem to be deeply real. But so much like the real virus, or the uprisings, the aliens are an object of watching and witnessing at a distance.

HB

It came to my attention at some point while I was working on the book that many people didn’t want to watch or read works of fiction that in any way referenced the pandemic. People felt strongly that it was best that contemporary storytelling unfolded in a vague, parallel present where there were no masks, no social restrictions. So the aliens were partly a technique to try and inject some totally different therefore protective substance into a painful retelling.

Everyone knows what an alien invasion narrative is, in the same way that everyone knows what a love story is. They are sort of similar: you are new to each other and have something huge to learn. The aliens were also a pun on alienation. In the book they are alienation’s opposite; they “erode the social base of fascism” and are “even further away from politics than love.”

When I first read from the book in public, at a Segue reading that Kay Gabriel organized, I was so relieved by the alien parts. Whenever I started to worry that I was being pointlessly hurtful to my audience, there were the aliens. And that’s what they do in the book too: they guarantee the possibility of something other than pain. But I’m still not sure if anyone actually wants to read a book about the first six months of 2020.

HZ

Well, I did—

HB

Okay, maybe a masochist. Or a sadomasochist.

Read more here:

Uprisings: Hannah Black Interviewed - BOMB Magazine

Hannah Black, Dark Pool Party, Dominica & Arcadia Missa, 2016.

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Dark Pool Party is a wide-ranging collection of artist Hannah Black’s essays, personal texts, and video/performance scripts. Black’s work reassembles autobiographical fragments to think about the relationship between bodies, labor, and affect. Drawing on feminist, communist, and black radical theory she explores sex, ambivalence, departures, history, and violence with characteristic wit and precision.

I am eating at a vegetarian restaurant called Vegetarian Restaurant. The food is not good, but my hands are dirty, and I am alive, reading Dark Pool Party by Hannah Black at a muted red picnic table yet unwarmed by early sun. “O girl or boy,” she writes, “life force in you, if you think you can take something from me I am flattered, and you can have it.”

Dark Pool Party features seven texts that blur the lines of fiction, nonfiction, cultural criticism, critique, and poetry. Many of the pieces enact a reedy line of space between the author and the character/s, noticeable immediately in “Celebrity Death Match,” about an unloving/unloved person searching for connection. The distinguisher is that the quote unquote real names of characters (friends, lovers) have been replaced with celebrity names like Rihanna, Justin Bieber, and Usher.

We know from context clues that the characters do not signify actual celebrities but distance the author from autobiography, a productive and constant manifestation in Dark Pool Party. Sitting there in that mostly sunny day, propelled by the force of Black’s work, I was splayed by the isolation and separation, from both the speaker and the speaker from the characters, this speaker who enacts the wall between her and the characters by denying the reader a chance to completely penetrate that Otherness through narrative:

I tried to be in love with Usher and so far it didn’t work out and now I am trying maybe to fall in love with Rihanna but I already know it won’t work out. I composed several sentences of an email to Usher in my head: We are not good for each other. I wanted to fall in love with you. You activate my tenderness. I want to look after you. I was moved by your strange combination of strength and weakness until I saw you were only a man.

I think of a book called Heroines by Kate Zambreno, a text I adore, and suddenly also of its total whiteness and its mostly-straightness. Heroines: a writer’s guide on how to be part woman (part girl) with an affinity for melancholy, living in the shadow-stain of man. Zambreno and Black share the anxiety that a woman writing narrative means readers assume it’s pure experience, unadorned with craft or artistic license. Zambreno explores ripping what really happened from the writing, and she thinks of that strategy as a gendered, male act. She believes what really happened is the feminine of the poem, a drama that men like Eliot and Pound wanted to stifle, delete. The male act: to posit that what really happened is bad writing.

Clipped of the superfluous what really happened, an image or concept resonates. It’s stark. It enacts. The question, confusion: is the hand that deletes what’s true from the text invisible, male? In conversation with Heroines, Dark Pool Party recognizes race, not just gender, as a factor in the author-genre anxiety: “God is not an autobiography, but nor is race or gender, though they threaten at all times to become the full extent of one,” Black writes. Riffing off the notion that a marginalized identity is only capable of autobiographical narrative, Black’s answer to Zambreno’s supposition is that it’s not the writer or the writing that’s the problem, but rather how the text is read.

In Dark Pool Party’s “Atlantis,” we understand that Atlantis is a cover for a specific place or generalized experience based on the “absolute truth” of the author’s experience. Black gives us that sticky, delicious window into “her life,” but also throws it in our face. She uses the tool of the canon to exploit the tool of the canon and to critique it, legitimizing a large body of work by people who struggle to write work that looks in some way like their life. In this way, Black’s book teaches us how to read narrative written with an intersectional lens, and her aesthetic of dealing with the slippery space between truth and fabrication is one of the pleasures of this book.

The narrator, speaker, consumable woman, moves through the book, acting and repulsed by her own actions: “We ate trash for breakfast, squeezing ketchup sachets onto strips of American bacon, the perfectly round egg, both of which signified: the unimaginable suffering of animals.” Dark Pool Party conflates woman and meat, men and farm animals, hamburger meat and the suffering of marginalized bodies. Humans eat for survival but also to fill the vacuous hole of past experience that manifests in the physical as shudder. Humans are imperfect animals, rooting around in modernity, looking sometimes to be ethical, intelligent, or mindful, in a time and place where no perfect action, art, or critique exists. “Perhaps critique is over and this is unexpectedly the era of joy, but I am still luxuriating in the interesting feeling of shame,” Black writes. Dark Pool Party is part critique, part shame, all sentence richness, a poetry of force, a book thick with ideas and essential cringes of yore. - Ally Harris

https://entropymag.org/dark-pool-party-by-hannah-black/

Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable, Life, Walther König, 2017

The book presents Black's ideas in collaboration with artist and musician Huxtable and is designed by artist and DJ Soraya Lutangu (aka Bonaventure). The science-fiction narrative is described as a "scenario of impending apocalypse [about] two risk analysts returning from retirement to attempt to avert the end of the world" and the title refers to a Wikipedia entry on Life/Leben. Black's exhibition revolves around the question of 'collective being', 'life' as an abstraction, and the uses of ancestry and lineage.

Hannah Black cowrote this science-fiction narrative with New York-based artist/musician Juliana Huxtable; in its pages each author plays the character of a risk analyst ‘returning from the dead’, somehow to accompany or prevent the apocalypse. ‘I have retired from risk, and now nothing can happen to me. I’m a single-celled organism carved out of the white bone of the world. Mind is a miracle,’ writes Huxtable. ‘You don’t have to tell me what you were by virtue of still being,’ answers Black.