Summer Detour III: Outcasts and Desperados

Exile is acute, massive, transformative, but secular homelessness, because it moves along its axis of departure and return, can be banal, welcome, necessary, continuous. There is the movement of the provincial to the metropolis, or the journey out of one social class into another. This was my mother’s journey from Scotland to England, my father’s journey from the working classes into the middle classes, my short drive from Durham to London.

For as long as I can remember, I had allowed myself to stand outside the umbrella that shielded or accommodated my contemporaries. Whether this was because I was genuinely different, objectively an outsider, or because I was temperamentally a loner I cannot say, but the fact is that although I went along with all sorts of institutional routines because I felt I had to, something private in me resisted them.

When I was thirteen,I left school and never went back. I don’t remember much about my last day. I don’t remember what lessons I had, or what I did when I got home. I only remember trying to make a mental recording as I walked down the corridors, into the foyer, out the automatic doors and onto the bus.

You wake up one morning, the whole world is grey, you have had enough of your cold, colourless life. You want to drop everything, escape, far away, where life is real. Who has not had this dream from time to time?

Being left out begins as tragedy, and tragedy, Freud suggests, is integral to development. So the developmental question – the moral question – is this: is there another and better solution to feeling left out than revenge? If we don’t retaliate, against others and against ourselves, what else can we do? 

The obliqueness of her position, her status as an outsider, gave her a freedom to think the un-thought, to force the unthinkable into the language of politics. I have long believed this to be one of feminism’s supreme tasks, what it has to contribute to political understanding. I now realise that, without knowing it, I got the idea from Luxemburg.

James Baldwin criticised Richard Wright for overlooking the traditions, rituals and family relationships that protect and fortify black communities in even the most appalling conditions. But Wright wasn’t interested in the structures of support or mutual aid that enabled black people to survive as a collective. He was drawn to outcasts and desperados who had fallen through the cracks to find themselves adrift, naked, in mass society.

A black-Hispanic graffiti artist, Basquiat acted the outsider with brio. His career opened in 1981; he became famous overnight; and died of an overdose in 1988 at the age of 27. In between, he painted wearing an Armani suit, collaborated with Andy Warhol, played bells and triangles in a New Wave band and rode in limos for the hell of it, or maybe because New York cab-drivers do not pick up black men. He also completed over five hundred canvases and many drawings.