Alloyed Labor, Automated Life: Racial Mattering in Muriel Rukeyser’s “Alloy”
november 1, 2024
this is a story about a mechanized flow of movements, lifting, piling, accumulation, raciality, intoxicated perspective, heat, and shimmering. about animacy, and visuality. about what is seen versus what is actually at play: what is said and what fades into the ambiance.
“Sloping as gracefully as thighs, the foothills
narrow to this, clouds over every town
finally indicate the stored destruction.
Crystalline hill: a blinded field of white
murdering snow, seamed by convergent tracks;
the travelling cranes reach for the silica.
And down the track, the overhead conveyor
slides on its cable to the feet of chimneys.
Smoke rises, not white enough, not so barbaric.
Here the severe flame speaks from the brick throat,
electric furnaces produce this precious, this clean,
annealing the crystals, fusing at last alloys.” (Rukeyser, 95-96)
Immersed in this visual scape simultaneously cloud-covered, smoky, narrow, and crystalline, shimmering white, enflamed, we step into the rift of silica production. This is a land impacted by bodies, and too, the landscape itself a body shaped and extracted from by laboring bodies. This is a bustling environment, with sonic effects: almost entirely silent here, except for the severity of the roaring flame which “speaks from the brick throat,” (Rukeyser, 96). Of course sound can be conjured by movement—by the “travelling cranes,” reaching into the earth, by the conveyor which “slides on its cable,” by electric furnaces crackling and the process of metallurgic fusion—but what we are offered in terms of language is absent of sonic description, and it is also absent of human life. This is an environment which would be animated by the extracted labor of racialized workers, but what we are given by Rukeyser in this poem is an automated environment, a body-like amalgamation of machinery, which sustains and reproduces the lethal conditions of extraction and toxicity which propel white modernity.
The “crystals” annealed (made malleable) here are the sparkling memory of silica gathering: that beautiful scene of glimmering potentiality which ends in the repeated deaths of those forced to precariously extract it, and the soil and sky it occupies after being blown from its rocky form. Like those absent bodies likely operating the extractive machinery which fills this poetic space, the toxic effects of silica exposure have also been absent from public discussion about the bodily impacts that the effervescent crystal has on those forced to gather it. Thinking once more about this excavated ground as running parallel to the excavated bodies of racialized workers (blasting silica from the earth, digging their own graves), Jill Gatlin offers up generative material with which to theorize. Gathering from the novel of Hubert Skidmore, one of Muriel Rukeyser’s contemporaries who wrote about the same tragic scene at the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel, Gatlin adds that, “Skidmore’s emphasis on body-environment interactivity anticipates and augments later twentieth-century discourses on pollution and toxicity by figuring the body as a porous and malleable space,” (Gatlin, 160). Again, it is worth rearticulating that as much as the earth is shaped by imperial devastation and toxicity, so too are the bodies asked to meet imperial demands shaped and devastated, rendered contaminated. “Annealing the crystals,” both silica and those most proximate to its transformation are made malleable, not generatively, but with the purpose of being shaped into the colonial world of the white imagination.
alloy (n.), “an inferior metal mixed with a precious one,” (Oxford Dictionary). [1]
Throughout Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,” it is possible to trace threads between materials and racial markers: the purity of clean, gleaming whiteness, precious crystal, sparkling snow; and the shadow of billowing smoke, “not white enough.” Attentive to where images conjuring shining light or long cast shadows intersect with connotations of whiteness and Blackness (or Otherness), it might be possible to more clearly trace the histories of imperial violence which radiate from sites of environmental devastation. But what is interesting here is that Rukeyser offers alternative ideas of raciality that run counter to those which are most readily found on the surface. The smoky residue of alloy creation turns out to be “not white enough, not so barbaric,” (my italics), whiteness rather than Blackness being most proximal to barbarity, this proximity resonating with the “white murdering snow,” where whiteness has the potential to kill. This uncovering of the lethal reality of white supremacy is quite valuable to consider, but this automated environment might be offering up yet another mode for thinking through the racial dynamics at play in the devastation of body-lands [2] and body-cities [3].
While whiteness maintains its incentive to kill—one possible reading of “the stored destruction”—an alternative possibility opens up when we notice that the “murdering snow” is not blinding but “blinded,” (my italics). Returning once more to the invisible animation of this constructed environment, is it yet another possibility that those who worked intimately with the machinery and their precariousness are not absent, but shined out of view? What happens when we notice the fragility that comes from the singularity of whiteness?
alloy (n.), “a metal made by combining two or more metallic elements, especially to give greater strength or resistance to corrosion,” (Oxford Dictionary).
Thinking of “Alloy” from the perspective of the definition above, the incompleteness of whiteness is even more palpable. White subjects, crystalline and glassy, are not only considered beautiful, but also rendered incredibly fragile. Knowing the inevitability of its breaking, whiteness seeks additive relationships with Black death to build strength (“resistance to corrosion”). This history of fragility runs parallel to twentieth-century attempts to counter the aesthetic impact of black soot and smoke from coal mining:
A clean, pure, well-planned, impressive, and white city set the standard at the turn of the century. Chicago’s White City, constructed largely from flammable materials painted to resemble stone, did not survive a series of fires over the next few years, and attempts at its replication in other cities, through the construction of impressive, neoclassical municipal buildings, did not survive years of soot. (Stradling, 26)
With new attention to flammable materials, Rukeyser’s “annealing” flame turns white substance into a malleable material with which to construct fragile worlds, ready to be shattered “finally” by the “stored destruction.” Here the potentiality for shattering earth is found in the smoke clouds which envelop the scene in darkness. The white world (which can never be sustained) is seemingly automated, but actually driven by combusted Black life as potential fuel.
One more set of questions from David Stradling’s “Smokestacks and Progressives” might offer kindling to imagine the futurity of contending with these racialities:
Here, in the dense and shifting clouds of carbon and sulfur, drifted visible evidence of the contradictions of progress, urban life, and the new civilization. And while the black smoke obscured the present, as urban residents squinted with stinging eyes, the smoke could also obscure the future. To what end would this dirty civilization progress? (Stradling, 22)
In a similar structure to these questions, I am wondering one more time about that “blinded field of white murdering snow,” which highlights the incompleteness of the colonial gaze. Might it be possible, in noticing that the white imaginary thrives on Black death as its fuel, that the potentiality of this fuel is not singular. The combustion of Black life burns so brightly that the Overseer’s [4] perspective is blinded. The white world can never be sustained. Soon these structures will be overgrown. Only “travelling cranes” will observe the wreckage.
alloy (n.), an additive property of white desire and Black death which results in the inevitable combustion of Black livingness [5], obliterating fragile white constructions.
Notes
1/ This usage of interspersed definitions is inspired by Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Duke University Press, 2016. She imagines these “italicized repetitions as a reminder, a refrain, and more,” (Sharpe, 135, notes).
2/ After Ana-Maurine Lara’s chapter “body-lands” in Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty, SUNY Press, 2020.
3/ After Elizabeth Grosz’s essay “Bodies-Cities” in Space, Time and Perversion. Essays on the Politics of Bodies, London: Routledge, 1995.
4/ The use of the term “Overseer,” which conjures plantation violence, is used in this perspectival sense in Kathryn Yusoff’s Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race, Duke University Press, 2024.
5/ The term “Black livingness” comes from Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021.
Bibliography
Gatlin, Jill. “An Epistemology of the Everyday: Occupational Health and Environmental Justice in Hubert Skidmore’s Hawk’s Nest” in Literature and Medicine 27 No. 2 Fall 2008. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Rukeyser, Muriel. “Alloy” in The Book of the Dead. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014.
Stradling, David. Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
