UPB

An effigy of hate

In Wyoming four young people were convulsed by a violence that they could not understand and so they created an effigy. What an effigy does is to defer understanding from those who have made it to those who must view it. It is an emblem of convulsion over and above any crime or riot committed rationally for gain. Our term for the excess in effigy-making is hate, hence hate crime, a direct and even laudably simple term when you think about it and probably a necessary one in the prosaic world of the law. Similarly we have evolved the notion of war crime and fashioned settings like the Nuremberg Trials to deal with its excess.
Still, an effigy is not finally a term but a three-dimensional emblem. It turns victims into criminals and spectators into both. It is a taboo flayed open and turned inside out. It calls for the kind of understanding that the poet William Wordsworth imagines when "feeling comes in the aid of feeling."
In his autobiographical poem The Prelude Wordsworth called such searing scenes "spots of time." I myself recall seeing an effigy in childhood, a black man pictured in a news magazine lynched and bleeding in chains; and I recall my dread. Wordsworth suggests that we revisit such scenes by ourselves and communally until somehow "our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired." Maybe he's right.
In the poem the young boy clambers down "a rough and stony" hill "where in former times / A murderer had been hung in iron chains," an executed wife-murderer, his crime of gender violence on display. Here the effigy makers are agents of the law, a posse institutionalized; but the effect is strangely the same. And the "moorland waste" may as well be Wyoming:

The gibbet-mast had mouldered down, the bones And iron case were gone; but on the turf, Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought, Some unknown hand had carved the murderer's name. The monumental letters were inscribed In times long past; but still, from year to year, By superstition of the neighborhood, The grass is cleared away, and to this hour The characters are fresh and visible.

The boy Ñ later a young man in love, later still an older one writing and revising his poem Ñ tries again and again to "read" these "characters" in the grass, tries to get it right. "So feeling comes in aid / Of feeling": all that excess of hate, fear, fascination, determination, hope, love; the roles reversing, the blind leading the blind, as we try to leverage individual and communal gain from individual and communal loss. -Nanora Sweet,
English and Women's and Gender Studies