| Summary: | In this article, I read D.S. Marriott’s readings of Frantz Fanon’s statement ‘I secreted a race’, in an attempt to perceive the secreting blackness of Marriott’s poetry. Secreting is understood in the senses of separation and secrecy, concealment and removal, particularly with regards to physiological processes involving bodily substances. Secreting blackness is understood as the historical, social, and psychological conditions of Marriott’s poetry: the lived experiences of race and racism; the increase of pressure that leads to rupture; the visible and invisible effects of violence and wounding in terms of bursting, bleeding, and staining. The article is structured around a close reading of Marriott’s poem ‘The “Secret” of this Form Itself’, by means of which I read Marriott’s critical and creative writings more generally. As suggested by the poem, with its expressions of blood, excrement, dying, and death, the secreting blackness of Marriott’s poetry reveals the substance and subsistence of black life and black death. I reference a selection of Marriott’s writings, including On Black Men (2000), Incognegro (2006), Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (2007), Hoodoo Voodoo (2008), The Bloods (2011), and In Neuter (2013).
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