The snow in Slow Mania has already fallen on the bodega sidewalk, on the half-dead lawn. In its depiction in the opening pages, dusted with dirt and litter, melting, is the snow transcending its form into liquid water, born free and everywhere in drains, or does the snow separate from itself, shrinking away into death? Is this dissolution an act of sovereignty and refusal of legibility, or of exhausted failure? Its refusal to exist, per se, pushes it towards the invisible liquid state, relieving itself from the world and relieving the world from its view.
In their latest collection of work, multi-hyphenate artist Nazareth Hassan walks the winter sidewalk of their world—a barren Truman Show-meets-Beckett stage set in Brooklyn, which is Everytown, USA, which is a projection of their mind. The setting splits the difference between surveillance state and existential void: we’re being watched, but we have no witnesses; we’re trapped, but there’s nowhere we were trying to go. Senses of both foreignness to the world and of aliveness structures the five-part work. Hassan deploys paratactic fragmentation: poems, sketches, hand-scrawled annotations, and photographs collide, variegated in focus, from oblique vignettes to discrete moments of stunning clarity. One fur pump on cracked cement, an out-of-focus zoom on skin. The writer leaves the reader to assemble so-called ‘meaning.’
The work asks questions that beget questions; it wants to take a fierce and diligent hammer to its surroundings until what’s left is raw material; it wants to deconstruct and arrive at the truth, with the cynical knowledge that that smallest unit is not enlightenment: it’s isolation. Atomization yields loneliness, futility, and exhaustion. “There are days when I live / and days when I can only project living,” one faceless figure announces to an audience of rats and flies. What remains is a desiccated observation of surfaces, outsides, and the observable, as well as the rare, visceral glimpse into the gruesome and sorry worlds inside our neighbors’ hearts and minds.
Isolation, decay, Blackness, and questioning recur as organizing pressures across Hassan’s work. They relish in the absurdity of the oppressive forces dominating them, and especially so in this work, somewhere between a sneer and a hat tip to the necropolitical Judeochristian capitalism they inhabit: “Then there will be money inside my wounds. / Love’s to be molded with / these scabs. Creation makes us God.” Writing from within the belly of the beast, Hassan asks if suffering is productive, resurrective. The narrator interweaves their interest in exposition—OnlyFans and details of sexual exploits, confession of the desire for death and bodily harm—with their embrace of the freedom and levity that comes with invisibility, unknownness.
While ordinary life keeps us from one another, moments of death, far from funereal, are like moments of intimacy, unifying and grounding. Boundaries and selves dissolve. Anonymity is a condition of collectivity. The two themes are interwoven and inseparable—death is dear, and intimacy is grim.
In “MASS DEATH POEM”:
The image adjusts its aperture smoothly, dizzyingly, from a statistical abstraction to a single corpse to a laborer. A character may witness another but might never grasp them, and by Hassan’s design, neither can the reader—a maximum of one interiority is displayed at a time, enforcing a rotational solipsism.
Instead, Hassan catalogs the varieties of death, lifelessness, and nonexistence—statistical, material, affective, and social. The text builds an early foundation with dead matter—cement and metal—and characters enter the settings as other states of that matter. Hassan extends Wilderson’s theorization of Orlando Patterson’s “social death” to everyone: undeadness characterizes all lives as all lives exist between deaths.
Whether seen or created, the people in this setting are as strange and hermetic to the narrator as the pavement, trains and cars. These people are numbers, meat-sacks, gasses, and apparitions. In “a choreography of avoidance,” the truth is modified and enhanced by recursion: “4 lets 3 yell in their face. / 4 cracks a sweet smile;” later on, “The 20 year old lets the 23 year old yell in their face. / The 20 year old cracks a sweet smile;” finally, “The white woman lets a black man yell in their face. / The white woman cracks a sweet smile.” This smile contains a Delphic, abstruse knowledge, but like the Cheshire Cat, the figure wearing the smile is hollow, a use of Wilderson’s “gratuitous violence.” Heuristics collapse as anonymous, fungible numbers give way to ages followed by races. The space echoes the feeling of a Motenian “hold,” a Black alienation.
Hassan establishes surface-level existence so thoroughly that when they subvert it—when they grant glimpses at insides, intimacy, and internal lives—I am wary and cynical. I picture Baconian distortions, wounds, gore and excrement; I don’t want it. Like the narrator, like A. R. Ammons before them in “Continuity” and like Lydia Davis in “New Year’s Resolution,” I want to be nothing. But these comparisons expose my own complicity: Hassan’s negation here is different—they are calculating negotiation against an antiblackness, a refused visibility.
Yet as life begets death, solipsism begs for connection. Intimacy appears in the lives of the poems’ leads on a spectrum from mundane to outré—innocent flirting in the street, brutally kinky sex, bored dialogue with a partner, assisting a strange stranger. None of these registers as connection. For Hassan, connection is not the fusing of two beings at the atomic level; connection is the rod holding together two entities at a fixed distance. Two bodies will always have tension—not communion but load-bearing isolation. Hassan wonders, “If only there were a challenge deep enough to fill the spirit alone: / comfort deserving chaos: making sweet at empty gestures of faith:”—they are hoping for hope, with repeated colons refusing syntactic resolution. Each clause negates the one before it: recursion without telos, a poetics wherein the fantasy of fulfillment cannot be realized.
Hassan’s craft in this work disrupts coherence: they paint their poems with bodily discharge; they juxtapose print, handwriting, sketch and photographs on the page; they toy with punctuation; they reappropriate contemptuous American antiblack language, refashioning connotations to terms. At points, Hassan deploys unremitting repetition of words and phrases to encourage an experience of “drift rather than depth,” epitomic of Claire Bishop’s “disordered attention.” The works refuse a focal point, a climax, hierarchy, or resolution. For Hassan, this is far from aesthetic: depth is a luxury we cannot afford.
Intimacy and death are not coming: they are the texture of the present. The snow is already melting, our constructions—language, identity, sociality—are deconstructing, and inhabiting non-existence is not acquiescence but freedom. Hassan knows we cannot enact that truly and totally, however hard we try. Desires and bodies persist. But rather than enforce nihilism, through Hassan’s mirthless gallows humor, they assure us of an identity that is necessarily ineffable and fundamentally internal. Refusal and opacity are resistance to the world. With their signature focus on disassembly and admission of the failure of language, Hassan apophatically builds in Slow Mania a world where this existence must aim to let itself out and achieve sovereignty in the necropolis. This is the slow mania: an endurance under the conditions through the predictably repeatable failure, towards nothing, towards connection, towards freedom.