The Liminal Michael Jackson

[Image Source: Rasha]

I’ve avoided the Michael Jackson-saga on purpose. What is there too add? Then I started to think* about what a liminal being Michael Jackson was.

Isn’t Michael Jackson the epitome liminal being? What is Jackson’s ethnicity, what’s Jackson’s gender, what’s Jackson’s “age”? Throughout his career, Jackson seemed to transcendent such labels. Of course he is African-American, but we all have to agree that it is not that simple. Jackson did not look African-American. Imagine an alien being visiting Earth and seeing the Pop-icon for the first time. Seeing Jackson’s ethereal white complexion, silky wavy hair and chiselled-coned nose, the alien visitor would never have been able to guess Jackson’s “ethnicity”. Although politically incorrect and slightly distasteful, there is a reason why we find the following humorous: “Michael Jackson was born a poor black boy, but became a rich white woman.” Regardless of having fathered numerous children, many people still question his sexual orientation. In fact, he is has become an almost asexual being. And towards the end of his life, it would seem that he refused to age, not merely outwardly, because of the many plastic surgeries, but rather inwardly; as if he became a psychological Benjamin Button.

The great essayist James Baldwin wrote in the essay “Here Be Dragons” the following:

The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael.

All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life and wealth; the blacks, especially males, in America; and the burning, buried American guilt; and sex and sexual roles and sexual panic; money, success and despair–to all of which may now be added the bitter need to find a head on which to place the crown of Miss America.

Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated–in the main, abominably–because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.

Indeed, Michael Jackson became a freak – a liminal being in who we projected “our most profound terrors and desires”; and that’s why we hated him so much. That’s why we loved him so much.


* My thoughts about Michael Jackson’s liminality was spurred on by an article I started writing recently on the similarities in liminal spaces in Samuel Taylor Coleridge epic poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Tales of the Black Freighter: Marooned”, the comic-within-a-comic, in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen. [Previous posts on Watchmen here and here.]