Interrupted Attachments: On Rights, Equality and Blackness

Remaining attached to certain ideals even when – and sometimes, most especially after – privileges that accrue to such concepts have been pointed out and problematized, should force us to ask some serious questions about the relation of citizenship and subjectivity, the relation of citizenship as subjectivity, to ongoing processes of exclusion and violence. The questions would be something like: Who am I? Who do I want to be? Attachments to certain concepts rehearse, reiterate and revise – through an uninterrogated longing and desire to be an individual, a self-determined thing that seeks the power of the state for validation – the virulence of state power, its capacity to make of us all docile creatures waiting for an affirmation of what we already have, what we already do in perpetuity, as if we have nothing and do nothing without such recognition. And thus, we celebrated the announcement from the head of the United States – an historic, enduringly imperialist project of the uninterruption of violence, incorporating difference insofar as it consolidates the furtherance of capitalist inequity – while readily dismissing and setting at remove for a later date, a non-utopic future always approaching but never here. This is not about the possibilities of horizon, a queer manifestation of the liberational force of broken frame.

Attachments are deferral without demand, abeyance without appeal.

Attachments are the “wait until we have this,” which is never too far from hearts, minds and lips of uninterrupted celebratory posture, wherein what is continually inaugurated is an abstraction – in the name of a “we,” but in the service of nothing other than desired coherence, stability, stasis.

What is given here is an incrementalist approach towards citizenship rather than a radical commitment towards justice. We see trees but certainly, no forest. Incrementalist approaches are necessarily a solicitude of citizenship, and embedded within this approach is the implication that in just a few “short” years, we will all look back at the folly of what is now our present moment with derision, but also with self-satisfied joy. We need only wait. But the “we” who is called upon to wait is always a peripherality to, and obstruction of, thought.

This pic/meme of the opposition to interracial marriage and now gay marriage should be noted.

Noted not because of the framing similarities between the juridical discourse and public debate about gay marriage with interracial marriage; it should be noted because we have not yet dealt with – nor does it seem urgent for enough folks to do – the root causes of such inequitable distributions of rights in the first place. So in fifty years we will say how “backward” our now present moment was with regard to “gay marriage” but because we refuse to deal with the root – an imperialist political economy that necessitates inequities of all sorts – we’ll likely both be having this same conversation with a newly marginalized group while AT THE SAME TIME folks will still be discriminated against based on race, gender, sexuality and class. Because, you know, racism, sexism and classism aren’t really dead yet and aren’t promising to go anywhere soon. [This notion of the “backwards” has been stated about North Carolina and the overwhelming vote for Amendment One, lampooning the state as full of “rednecks,” “hicks” and conservative black Christians; this displacement does not even think about the exploitive political economy of the US, let alone NC – something like 2% above the national unemployment rate, for example. The self-satisfaction of those making the claim about NC, for example, while refusing to interrogate the political economy that creates the conditions of inequity is not a little bit intriguing.]

Anyway.

The normativity of monogamy married [pun? intended.] to the ability to receive financial aid and benefit and tax breaks, as well as the literal violence of the rhetorics of “same gender” / “same sex” to folks who are intersex, genderqueer and transgender compel the inquiry: who is this “we” and what is the “this” that is seemingly being attained? Of course, one could claim that a general public would need be educated about such queer variances and that what is most pertinent in our now moment is the celebration of the now moment, a prepositional displacement banishing the concerns of others for the now moment. But then the most we do is submit to – even if we’d rather critique – the power of the state, reinforcing its capacity to extend by excluding. It seems that everywhere, folks have aspirational attachments and none of us occupies a position where this could never be possible, though historical marginalization tends to be thought as shoring up against such aspiration. Thus, the case of the following curious picture should be noted.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that the first dude is white and the second anti-gay marriage dude is black. I think it’s the tight curly fro or something. [Even if he’s not, stay with me]. What this picture rehearses, beneath its very thin veneer is not simply the idea that black people in the US are more homophobic than others, nor simply the idea that blacks cannot see the connection between interracial marriage and gay marriage as both are concerns about civil rights. What is beneath the surface is an implicit, but more foundational, claim about the coherence of marginalized groups, about how historically marginalized peoples gain subjectivity: by the assemblage of fucked up things that have happened to them. The second panel of the image implies: “hey, black man! some bad things happened to you in the past and that bad stuff is the sum total of what, and – most importantly – who, you are!” The vivifying force of the image is the idea that that which marginalizes is that which makes or forms “subjectivity” [and I think subjectivity is a bad thing; more on that soon]. The implication in the image is that marginalized groups own that which marginalizes. When this attachment is operative, “community” [which some say is fiction, though I’ve not been convinced; I’m an agnostic who goes to church for a reason] is grounded in that which is offensive, that which wounds.

But blackness is not reducible to “bad shit”; black community did not subsist and thrive in the face of the violence of slavery and Jim Crow by gathering around and deciding to be more fucked up and by believing that those things that others pathologized in us were bad. Black community was and is an incarnation of blackness, characterized by the joy of living in the face of institutions and systems that seek to diminish the very possibility for joy, for life, for love. The image rehearses the iterability of the narrative that reduces blackness to discriminatory things done to black people, that regulates blackness to bad shit, as a particular kind of historicizing purity, a coherence at the heart of our definable moments [e.g., the violence of Middle Passage rather than mati, affectional bonds created during Middle Passage that exceeded the horror, exceeded the violence, and allowed thriving life]. And, thus, the critique of black folks by Robin Roberts in her interview with Barack Obama wherein she bespoke the “especiability” of black homophobia such that Obama’s change would be grave “…especially in the black community”; thus the critique of Barak Obama by black clergy like Jamal Harrison Bryant and by religious groups such as the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). The above image, thus, is the presentiment of the various critiques from multiple directions – both for and against “gay marriage” – as they each assume blackness is reducible to historic marginalization, and that those historic conditions are the grounds for a coherent, stable identity that can be easily and readily identifiable. In this formulation, blacks would have to be “more homophobic” just to identify the antithetical position of necessarily nationalist, patriotic sentiment, or as Hortense Spillers argued otherwise, this black homophobia would have to be invented [and in some ways, it seems to have been]. This is a problem of, fundamentally, attachments.

What is most vulgar about uninterrogated attachments is that it causes us to contend with institutions like COGIC and its restatement of their opposition against gay marriage, requires us to respond to Jamal Harrison Bryant’s statements about gay people, while leaving intact and uninterrupted the violence required for citizenship under these American skies. Roberts’s statement of black homophobic “especiability,” COGIC’s oppositional restatement, and Bryant’s resistance to gay folks all articulate, at bottom, a concern about what it means to have personhood in the face of uncertainty, incoherence and instability. However, the problem emerges from, and is an attachment to, the fact that subjectivity is created by a violent move out from the incoherent, it is an aspiration toward stability and certainty. In that way, Roberts, COGIC and Bryant simply participate in the ever-expansive goal for subjectivity. But as the very idea of subjectivity is sustained by the logics of self-determination, I fail to find the utility; these are western philosophical concepts, placing “European man” as theological-philosophical-spatial center, and the “others of Europe” (as Denise Ferreira Da Silva calls it) can only journey toward a determined “self’ … subjectivity is defined by the ability to be fully possessed of oneself, to be closed, stable, anti-social, to be wholly determined; it emerges through violence and violation, thus i’m not persuaded that it is a worthy pursuit. The attachment is to a particular mode of violation against the social, a violation that yields the articulability of the individual. We might say that “gay marriage” is articulable in our present moment as a desire for citizenship that necessarily moves out violently from the incoherence and instability of queerness, sets those who cannot easily be – or those who do not want to –  “same gender” or “same sex” in the zone of deferral and abeyance. No demands, nor appeals here.

Maybe detachment is what we need. But how can we get there? Is an anti-political politics possible that thinks the world differently? One possible reply, which here may show up as a peculiar conceit, is to ask – and daily inquire intentionally and diligently – who do we want to be? Certainly not a novel question though it is ever-pertinent. Do we want to perpetually reinstantiate the conditions of inequity, only ever-so-slightly increasing who gets to count as normal, enlivening and refreshing the violence of the state, allowing such violence and violation to go uninterrupted in some otherwise location [e.g., the Prison Industrial Complex; Palestine; Wall Street]? Or do we want to radically transform our world by asking tough questions about our own, personal, private propensities for comfort over and against the safety of others? What world have we been given and what world do we desire to make? Southerners on New Ground does this work: to make bonds that do not diminish difference but builds coalitions based on collective struggle for a world full of radical, affirming love. SpiritHouse, Inc in North Carolina does this work: to lament the loss of black life but, as importantly, to affirm the life still here: to care for this life through joy, song, prayer, dance. This affirmation, this coalition creation, comes about through asking: what do we want to be, today, everyday? This affirmation, this coalition creation, comes about by relinquishing attachments to ideas, philosophies and theologies that we – even if they would have us – should interrogate because they would not, nor could not, have us fully whole, fully human, fully alive without relegation or repression. And maybe detachment from certain violent and violative concepts would allow us to fully attach, both to our deepest and most foundational humanness, and thus, to the world in which we abide, with others, in joy, in love.

The Love of Black Mothers and the Care of Black Children

I

In august of 2011, I had to call my mother – on a cell phone with not a lot of power left because I had been checking Facebook and texting friends, hoping to be released from a CT Scan clinic at Duke Hospital – to tell her that in less than two hours, I would be under anesthesia and that there was a chance (50 percent, I later discovered) I might not wake up. Things, for me, felt as quick as this opening sentence: no time to think about what was happening: just hazy, blurry, rapid movement. It was difficult for me to tell: the forceful speed with which a visit to student health for what I thought to be a painful pulled muscle (and no need to inform my mother of such frivolity) turned into no less than 13 doctors visiting me in the Operating Room prep area within the span of 30 minutes, all saying “we’re surprised you’re alive!,” and hinting that had I waited another 24 hours to see about that pain – pain thought only to be the residue of a new Bikram yogi – I would likely have died. How to tell that to your mother on the phone when she is hours away in New Jersey; to receive a phone call from a nervous father not moments after speaking with said mother, attempting to explain to him that you don’t even know what the doctors meant while he sat at work, trying not to sound baffled and tear up a bit; to try to explain the severity of the issue at hand without understanding. This was the context of my visit to Duke Hospital in late August 2011. And there was a hurricane in the New Jersey area that made travel impossible so though I had a hospital stay of six days, it was not until the day after I was released that my mother made the trek to North Carolina to attend to me, to take care of me, to cook and talk and help me walk. Still, mostly I remember how I felt moments before I was wheeled into the Operating Room: on the phone with my mother while a friend from church held my hand, me laid out on the bed: and as my mother prayed that God would protect me and my theological convictions shattered because of my agnosticism, I cried like I was a five year old: confused: dazed: hoping, above all, that that would not be the last time I’d hear her voice.

Though unemployed at the time, “even if I had been working, I would have taken off to be with you,” is what my mother said, and what I knew to be true. She was with me for two and a half weeks and just having her here was of grave importance. The woman who changed my diapers and fed me in high chairs and with whom I made chocolate chip cookies while my older brother was at school when I was no more than three years old; the woman who potty trained me, who showed me how to tie my shoes – the blue Nikes with the yellow swoosh right before we walked to the Five and Dime store around the corner on South Orange Avenue – all this I remember about the interactions between a mother and her son. And all I could think about on that hospital bed not moments away from an incision and a very serious operation was, “I hope this is not the last time I talk to her.” But many recent events are making me revisit the love of mothers, the love of black mothers, for children, for black children. And I keep thinking that I, at least, had the opportunity to call my mother and say something before the unexpected erupted in our lives. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

 

II

The capacity for black women to be mothers is radically under attack presently. Of course, this is nothing new: from antebellum legal declarations that the “status” of children would follow the “status” of mothers because those persons were the reproductive force of degraded station; to the report of one such Moynihan that ostensibly blamed black matriarchy for the failures of black social life without ever interrogating the normative modes of family that Negroes “failed” to produce; to recently, the incarceration practices of black mothers who have the purported nerve to “steal” public education from municipalities.

Though Kelley Williams-Bolar of Akron, Ohio, lived with her father part-time and, thus, was within the lines of the of Copley-Fairlawn school district, she was sentenced to ten days in prison, having stolen “quality” education for her daughters. The school district’s stance was that the tax dollars needed to stay with “their” students. Of course, it did not matter that Williams-Bolar’s father paid the very same taxes to the very same municipality. What mattered is that the person who stole education was not a primary resident of that municipality.  The idea that Williams-Bolar, or anyone really, “stole” public education should give any of us pause because such claims, particularly when thought about as a theft of tax dollars in particular areas, do not take into account the economic structure that makes such declarations of theft possible. That is, ours is a political-economic system that necessitates inequitable distributions of wealth and, attendant to wealth, healthcare, educational and job opportunities. The desire to make out of Williams-Bolar an example is nothing other than a war against the poor who point out the fundamental injustices that persist in our political-economic system that makes a poor class out of the majority. For the Copley-Fairlawn school district to prosecute Williams-Bolar was nothing other than a claim that all persons are not worthy of equitable resources in educational practices but only those born, quite literally, in the right lines. Though pardoned, the very fact of the prosecution should tell us that something is fundamentally wrong with the way resources are hoarded by some and refused to others.

Unfortunately, Tanya McDowell has not been pardoned and has a mandatory prison sentence of five years with another five probation. Though homeless, with her most recent residence being Bridgeport, Connecticut, she enrolled her then five-year-old son in the Norwalk School District. She did not plead guilty, but rather entered a plea under the Alford Doctrine, refusing to admit guilt but conceding that the state had enough evidence to convict her [and when does the state not? especially when it can fabricate…but more on that soon]. We live in a world where the very concept, that someone could possibly “steal” education, is possible. This should force us to ask some serious questions about what is at stake in educational practice as it does not seem to be raising awareness, making people critical thinkers or the affirmation of the capacity to learn. When education can be “stolen” and one “convicted” of such action, it appears that education is nothing more than a commodity that participates in the inequities that many of us are committed to dismantling. This is especially preposterous for McDowell because the folks responsible for her conviction will not say that she “stole” from a fundamentally, foundationally inequitable institution. Robin Hood be praised; black women mothers be damned, so it seems. McDowell’s purported theft only shows just how discriminatory the structure of education is.

Both McDowell and Williams-Bolar illustrate what is, quite literally, class-based targeting … no one in “good” (economically viable) school districts would be accused of such theft because, at base, they would not need to “steal” these goods in the first place. And sure, they’d argue that their taxes provide for such an occasion for educational opportunities but then obscure the fact that these possibilities for economic viability are made from the same inequitable political-economic structures that animate the educational and judicial system. The residents within the lines of the “good” school districts are there because of inequity, not in spite of it.

Hannah Arendt, though sympathetic to the Negro cause for justice in the 1950s, could never bring herself to the American south and “even avoided occasional trips to Southern states because they would have brought me into a situation that I personally would find unbearable.”[1] This while she likewise stated that she could not understand how a Negro parent would allow the school to be a politicized space, how a Negro parent could send the girl in the photograph – Elizabeth Eckford – into conditions of such violence and violation. In another version of the same “reflections” about Little Rock, Arendt stated, “My first question was, what would I do if I were a Negro mother? The answer: under no circumstances would I expose my child to conditions which made it appear as though it wanted to push its way into a group where it was not wanted.”[2] When Mamie Till had an open casket funeral for her son Emmett and had the photographs published in the Chicago Defender and elsewhere because she wanted the world to see what had happened to her son, the response from some was ‘what kind of mother would do such a thing?’

In the cases of both Williams-Bolar and McDowell – and with the persistence of such queries; and with the excessiveness of punitive response to their maneuvers and choreographies rooted in a love for their children – at issue is the question: what kind of mother would do such things? Arendt, the critique of Mamie Till, Moynihan’s “report” all show that the Negro/Black/African American Mother is a general problem for theological-philosophical thought: just how do they do the thing that they do; just how do they show care, show love, give joy, give hope, in the midst of perpetual violence and violation? From what resource do these persons draw in order to move forward, and move ever forward, faces like flint, in joy, in love, given the brutal conditions under which these persons are forced to live? Williams-Bolar and McDowell are philosophers and theologians of black maternity and we do well to listen to their resistance to the given world. But not every black mother is so lucky to have an end-date to her suffering.

III

“Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name.”[3] Thus begins Hortense Spillers’s fascinating “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” focusing on the very specific, very particular material conditions of black people since historic passages through mediums and middles on bateaus, ketches and skiffs, named with conventions such as Jesus, or the Nina, Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Spillers prophesied the telling of Trayvon Martin’s murder to his parents: an unmarked, unnamed body, Trayvon’s father, Tracey Martin, “thought that he was missing, according to the family’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, but the boy’s body had actually been taken to the medical examiner’s office and listed as a John Doe” for a day.[4] Spillers’s being marked converges here with Trayvon’s being discovered, the normativity of the conflating of blackness and anonymity, enunciated and rehearsed by some people not knowing a name, by some people not giving a damn. It is important to note – as a sign of irrepressible, irresistible life – that Spillers says “not everybody” because if she is unknown, and if Trayvon is John Doe, this is limited and not absolute, no matter how pessimistic we may appear to become.

Being marked, being discovered. What we have here is an ontological set of concerns. What when your marking is the point of your discovering; what when the thing that you constantly manifest is the thing that constantly must be found elsewhere? The manifestation of Trayvon’s being marked by George Zimmerman occurred through the refusal to be earnest. Rather, Trayvon appeared as “a real suspicion guy,” Zimmerman’s was a gaze attesting the idea that Trayvon was “up to no good” and that he seemed to be “on drugs or something.” Though raining and night time, in Zimmerman’s mind donning a hood was nothing more than an accouterment to such criminal behavior, grounded in the fact of Trayvon’s presence: “he looks black.” Literally walking down the street looking around, basic behavior in which many of us participate daily, was criminally suspect to Zimmerman, enough so that he called 911, registered a complaint, trailed Trayvon in a car, got out the car, confronted Trayvon, scuffle ensued, ending in two shots: one in the air, one in Trayvon’s chest.

There appears to be a conspiratorial nature to the Sanford Police Department’s engagement with this particular case. No longer, even no longer primarily, is this operative at the level of the individual and interpersonal, and thus, Zimmerman’s claim for “self-defense.” The institutional practices of justice are being obscured and obstructed from even an initial movement into the search for justice. The PD at best appears to be misinformed, at worst lying, about what occurred, when it occurred, who said what, and how they said it. The PD is covering up the fact of Zimmerman’s past in favor of saying that he had a “squeaky clean record.” The PD is not even willing to arrest because they feel they have no “grounds” upon which to act, though their inaction is justified only by their refusal to be earnest, to be truthful.

It seems that the Sanford PD thinks that “self-defense” is only possible as a reasonable response when the force of such purported “defense” exceeds that of the one against whom such force is supposedly necessary. That Trayvon could not ask “what’s the problem?” to a dude who was slowly trailing him in a car did not register as a desire to guard his own personhood. It is only the continual elevation of force, turned fatal, that gave Zimmerman license to claim he was merely, only acting in “defense” of his “self” (not a little problematic category in the general, given the necessarily violent and violative history of such a concept in the west. Certain folks, through privilege, can claim such status, it seems and a black boy threatened such “selfhood”). Zimmerman’s theological-philosophical understanding of “self” is the problem and we find this out based on his discovery of a marked, suspicious boy.  What Zimmerman guarded, what he fundamentally defended, was his “right” to make a claim, here in this case, that someone was “suspicious” and his “right” to protection against the very appearance of that which bodied forth his claim. He was guarding against a general antagonism – a black boy walking home, not unlike Elizabeth walking to a Little Rock school, not unlike Emmett whistling.

How does one tell and tell a mother, a black mother, that a son, a black son, was murdered for suspiciously having Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea? Sybrina Fulton – Trayvon’s mother – knew Trayvon’s name. And each time, each and every time, I watch an interview of her, I am moved by her being moved, and angry by her being angry, and upset by her being upset, and confused by her being confused. Zimmerman, as of this writing, has not been arrested yet nor charged with any wrongdoing because he claimed self-defense. Fulton has appeared in several news conferences and interviews simply asking for justice to be done…for her son. The anger and rage, the sadness and melancholy of Fulton [and, but of course, Tracey Martin as well] must unfortunately be bottled up, be channeled into niceties, sitting in seats answering erroneous questions about Trayvon and if he enjoyed eating chicken.

But most poignantly, and most upsetting, is the way Trayvon’s voice will be, no doubt, etched in his mother’s mind: the release of a 911 call clearly has the cries, the pleas, the wailings from a young black boy for help seconds before the chilling sounding out of two gunshots. And then, silence. The cry for help, the plea for aid, the wailing for release is fundamentally on the edge between the particular and the general: it is his particular lament but rehearses and improvises a long history of such lament. Trayvon’s voice echoes and is echo; it reverberates and is a moment of previous reverberation. It is this haunting, chilling and quite simply, heartbreaking sound that his mother knows is the last sound he made. His shriek shares in, and gives, eternal force. But I understand something of his crying out in despair: hoping his mother would hear him, feel him, love him…still, even under such unequivocally horrendous conditions.

I want for Fulton what I want for Williams-Bolar and McDowell: justice. I want for these mothers, these black mothers, what I want for the world: an end to suffering that we cause by the inequities we set into motion and refuse to interrogate. Trayvon’s murder is part and parcel of a political-economic system predicated upon lack rather than abundance, hoarding rather than sharing.

IV

Tarrying. Having grown up in the Black Pentecostal sect of Christianity, I learned early on what it meant to tarry: to wait on the indwelling, the infilling, of the individual with the Holy Spirit, announced by the “initial evidence” of glossolalia, of speaking in tongues “as the Spirit gives utterance.” What so fascinates me about tarrying is that it literally means, “wait” but in that waiting, a sociality is both fashioned and in process of being fashioned, is both made and being made. The sounds of wailing and moaning, of “Jesus” and “have your way!” and of hand claps and foots stomps and tambourine jingles jiggling: cacophonous transcendence that is not always and everywhere loud but is dynamic, dramatic changes in volume and breath allow for the inhabitation of the Spirit. And then, one person breaks out, speaking in tongues. Then another. And maybe, and perhaps, another. And at the end of such tarrying is praise for those who “came through.”

I end by a brief discussion of tarrying because of a fundamental concern that Williams-Bolar, McDowell and Fulton presence for us: how long must we wait for justice to be done in the world, for justice to “come through”? They are but specific examples of an ongoing, general trend for certain lives to be treated as tenuous. But from our position, the position of the underground and submerged, the position of the marginalized, we know of our lives differently. The sorta political-economic world in which we exist needs for joy and love to be a limited resource rather than a radical commitment to allowing others to live, and thrive in that living. But this other position, we know of the joy of inhabitation, of the new song. We know it because we experience it daily but there are massive and strident attempts to make such abundant life unavailable. But we make this abundance life, not because of the brutal conditions of the world, but in spite of those conditions.

People would get frustrated and not a little angry if they tarried all night long and still not have an experience of glossolalia; it seemed – because of theological conviction – the Holy Spirit was refusing to indwell a particular believer. To have some folks speak of the joy and pleasure of the experience while others – pining and climbing and reaching for such ecstasy – have it refused is not a little bit disheartening. That same frustration and anger I carry against the radical assault on women in politics today, from reproductive health rights to incarceration for the theft of public educational goods asking: How long? How long must we wait? And though we create beautiful, radical sound and sociality in such waiting – as with the tarrying YouTube clip above – we still want for such waiting to break forth and burst free into the “coming through” from it all. Williams-Bolar had to fight to have her sentencing reduced from felony to misdemeanor. McDowell will be separated from her young son for five years. Fulton? Fulton does not know if justice will be served…she knows that her son has been murdered. At least I got to call my mother and hear her pray over and for me as I laid on the hospital bed. I want that for everyone.

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[1] Hannah Arendt and P. R. (Peter R. ) Baehr, The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin Books,, 2000), 232.

[2] Hannah Arendt and Jerome Kohn, Responsibility and Judgment, 1st ed. (New York: Schocken Books,, 2003), 193.

[3] Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color : Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2003., n.d.), 203.

[4] Charles M. Blow, “The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin,” The New York Times, March 16, 2012, sec. Opinion, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/opinion/blow-the-curious-case-of-trayvon-martin.html.

whitney: an attempt at tribute.

RIP Whitney Houston

i’m still in utter and complete shock regarding whitney houston. floored. very saddened. i left church this morning with some seething hope that i’d hear “it was an internet rumor” or a hoax or something. the weird thing is, my parents didn’t allow my brother and i to listen to “secular” music growing up and whitney was no exception. but as i heard of her passing last night, i teared up a bit. i began to think that even with the injunction against non-gospel music, i somehow still knew most of whitney’s songs, even when i was very young. her music made its way into school shows, everyone sang about children being the future, wanting to let them lead the way. everyone belted “and iiiii will always love you!”

but it was when she remade chaka’s “i’m every woman” that i got in trouble — a lot of trouble — for singing the song in my junior high school hallways. see, i must’ve been too flamboyant when i was 12 years old but i distinctly remember being reprimanded by my science teacher in front of the entire class when she said to me, without a hint of humor, “you’ve got some really feminine ways about you. if you don’t stop acting like that, people will think you’re gay” and she went along and finished her lesson or whatever. funny how some moments become etched in your mind.

i became not a little bit careful and surveilled myself with the hopes of repressing as much of those “feminine ways” as possible. but not knowing the grounds upon which my teacher made such a declaration, i was fighting a losing battle. anything i did i’m sure could have been construed to be in the “feminine” kind of “way.” and so it was that one day, after watching BET videos — likely video soul – i found myself in love with this “new song” called “i’m every woman.” and so it was that i’d sing this new song in the hallways of my junior high school: loudly, with much excitement and not a little bit of irony. but it just so happened that my science teacher’s attempt at public shaming gave others the license they needed to participate in a similar surveilling of my activities.

and so it was that a friend of mine [i will, of course, never forget who it was] said to me in the middle of a line, “ooooh, imma tell ms. burke! you actin like a girl!” and could not wait to return to the classroom to tell her that, indeed, “ashon was singing a girl song!” my teacher looked at me with not a little bit of disdain but also a hint of pleasure, “what did i tell you about that? people are gonna think you’re gay.” and that was that. it was an odd moment where the performance of gender, sexuality and song came together for me, even in a derogatory way. i’d been called a “faggot” in church for singing soprano but those school scenes — with classmates and teacher — seemed different. my voice was changing, puberty had already set in. so it wasn’t my voice that was the culprit. it was something other. of course, i still love, and sing, the song … whitney’s version of the song. but not again until after a very long period of waiting.

i found, with singing some non-gospel song, that the relationship between queerness and song that worried me since before puberty began was not relegated to the church … but that the performance of someone like whitney could also tattle. a choice had to be made: to continue to listen to her background ubiquity with pleasure, to sing anyway; or to stop, become quiet, and withdrawn. i chose the latter for a very long while because i could not untangle my sense of erotic, libidinal difference from such songs — sacred or secular. but in the background, in the underground, underneath, all this music still moved me. and moves me still.

whitney was just always there, always in the background singing clearly. for me, and with her performance of “i’m every woman,” she was an underground soundtrack for how performance pronounced all kinds of queer things about you, libidinal excesses. and her voice was always celebrated: they named a school after her in east orange, she continued to visit her church in newark, my high school prom date sang background for whitney all of the time. last night, it hit me: i share in all of these tangential connections to her work, to her voice. and i realized last night, as i was struck with the desire to cry, that whitney’s voice, her unabashed tone and clarity, her playfulness and depth of character created a performative space for me to be … whatever that being was and was becoming. like nina simone stated about the song “feelings” at the montreaux jazz festival, similarly, i am not mad at whitney making contemporary for me a “girl song” that i could sing … rather, i am mad at the conditions [all those institutional -isms] that produce the necessity and demand upon my science teacher to respond to my singing whitney – to singing a presumedly “girl song” in a decidedly “heterosexist land” — with such dismissal and chagrin.

because i realize: in me is every woman’s voice that has come before me, their life, their breath, their force, their vitality. the love of my mother and grandmothers is all in me. every woman is in every child ever born, a materiality of the refusal of alienation. black folks know something about an injunction of having to “follow the status of the mother” … but though the imposition was through a horrific condition, we celebrate the mother anyway. because it’s right. every woman. in all. each of us.

so i’m just sad. thank you, whitney, for your life.

Mamie Till’s Memorial

she wanted the world to see what they had done to her baby, Emmett. so as we quickly approach the day Emmett was violently violated and killed (August 28), i want to consider again the religious ethics that prompted his mother’s — Mamie Till-Bradley — desire for the world to experience the death of her son. of course, we already know that death is anything but uncommon. it is but a part of what we call life, it is the culmination of such lived experience and behavior. death is not unique of itself, so we must know that Till-Bradley was not celebrating the death of her son. thus when she declared that she wanted the world to see, it was not death itself, but a particular aesthetic, a specific mode of violence in which she and her son lived, that she wanted to display for the world. that is, she wanted the world to see the way folks would go about murder, the evacuative nature of such violence and the sorta havock it produced on flesh and blood. she wanted the world to see what violence does in the world, how it bloats and mottles, how it distends and reeks in order to prompt us to engage with others another way.

an active member of Evangelistic Crusaders Church of God in Christ, Mamie Till-Bradley was pentecostal and i want to consider her openness to what Anthony Heilbut describes as “the blackest of institutions,” i.e., black pentecostalism, opens up for Till-Bradley in terms of a very specific enactment of black feminist care [of her son, for her community [and community is not fictitious or mythical]] and critique of the world that would allow such violence and violation to occur.

can we think with her? experience her grief? Emmett’s mythic whistle turned

lynch
cotton gin
70 pounds
barb wire tied
noose neck
throw in water
sinksinksink
drowndrowndrown
clench teeth

(maybe he was dead already?  but)

clinch teech
underwater, underneath
the sound, the sound of
breath stolen
life stolen
mississippi?  goddamn.

1955 saw her son’s demise and it took several days, and several phone calls in order for Till-Bradley to convince the municipality of Money, to return Emmett’s body to chicago.  and we know that the return of the body to chicago was nothing short of an attack on the senses.  so much so that it is said that Emmett’s body could be smelled blocks away from where it emanated. can you hear her?  screaming?  crying?  the loss of her son.

mississippi?  goddamn.

she wanted the world to see what happened to her son, so she decided to have an open casket at the funeral: “There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see.”  what does this open casket and her pentecostalism have to do with each other?  hers was the same sorta pentecostalism that was only gaining a bit of popularity in 1955, from which many mainline black churches — baptists, ame zions, methodists — were distancing themselves.  this was the same sorta pentecostalism that was getting people kicked out of their homes for joining up with the “holy rollers” and the “sanctifieds…”  in other words, this wasn’t a popular sect at all, and the disdain often functioned by way of an indictment against the emotionalism, the tears, the running and shouting (not to be confused with hollering) around and in the church.  and of course, these emotive bursts are not reducible to pentecostalism, though i’d argue that in a cultural worldview, pentecostalism is thought to be constituted by these seemingly excessive physical, embodied practices.

what does this religiocultural experience for Mamie Till-Bradley have to do with her desire for a radical, excessive, emotional openness?  not just an openness to the horrors of the world?  she was, to be sure, a black mother.  and Moynihan’s report was soon to come, the “pathologies” he’d happen upon were previous to that “report” (1965).  black motherhood was always conceived as something of an impossibility.  she was also radically open to display, to showing that was at the same time, always already more than merely showing, more than merely visual. and if we think about the song that i oft deem egotistical for a church to sing —you can’t join it, you’ve got to be born in it-- with Till-Bradley’s public display of her son in mind, one wonders what the relation of this particular kind of seeing that necessitates hearing is to being born into a movement, rather than merely joining it.  that is, i do believe that the work of social justice is not about merely declaring yourself a part of it.  but it takes a transformative posture, an ennobling force, some state of ultimate concern that evacuates a sense of individualism and joins one to community to struggle together.

she wanted the world to experience what had been done.  the dismemberment, the disfigurement.  this was, in my estimation, a public theology of pentecostalism that became an important moment in the long history and tradition of black social upheaval.  to be sure, Emmett was not the first to be lynched and would not be the last.  but his moment served as a hinge of sorts.  Brown v. Board of Education took place one year previous but schools would not be desegregated until at least 1957 with the Little Rock 9.  i’d argue that Mamie Till-Bradley’s religiocultural, existential crisis that was bound up with an embodied religious experience is what made a movement that was already moving move further still.  that is, though movement for civil rights were underway before the picture of swollen, mottled body was circulated, that the desire for the world to see reverberated and echoed.  it made pentecostalism public, palpable, pleasurable.  it gave pentecostalism what it already had: the capacity to be transformative, to enact social justice.  but more, she gave the movement for civil rights an aesthetics that it already had.  pentecostal theology is about the emptying out of oneself in order to be filled with the Divine.  and this emptied fulfilling is noticed by way of movement, sound, dance, by the way one behaves and comports.  an aesthetic of excess is normative.  but the display of the image of her son was also about knowing that brutality does not take away the capacity to be filled and moved.  she should have been so hurt because of her son’s death that immobility would have been understandable.  but the capacity to move remained.  through it all…

of course, Till-Bradley was not happy.  she was not happy to have lost a son.  she was not happy to open a casket and have the world see.  but she did it anyway.  the old saints would call it “holy boldness.”  they’d say that in the face of the incalculable, regardless of the rejection from friends and family, that there was something down inside them telling them to go on ahead.  to keep moving forward.  i feel constrained to say i love this narrow way, glory hallelujah, i’m one of them today.

  

Till-Bradley knew something of a holy defiance that was not about happiness but that echoed pleasure.  of course, she loved her son.  she enjoyed her time with her son.  she wanted the best for him.  her display of his open face, by way of an open casket, was her giving the world the gift of her capacity to love.  she could not describe her love, so she gave something else: she gave the edge, the bruise, the image of what took him away.  she gave us the moment of her most ineffable and pointed coalescence of emotion.  the fact that she could not describe is not surprising.  so indescribable, words don’t go there, so maybe moaning will.  to give the world the image of her inability talk, to enunciate, to describe, to give the image of a moan?  it is to make visual the sound of moaning (and what i’m saying here, of course, is not new).

certainly, her love was not reducible to the photograph, or the image, or her tears.  but in those moments that we see of her, and in his stillness, his swollen body that she gave us to see?  therein we see the love of black mothers that Moynihan thought impossible.

what if we thought of excess as prompting thought?  Till-Bradley wanted us to see these images.  there is within them, i think, the energy of her love. there is within them, i think, the energy of her theological, existential position…a peculiar people, indeed.  something is internal to the image of Emmett that is also internal to Mamie Till-Bradley’s religious posture, a quickening and movement of the spirit, by the spirit towards justice. so, and of course, as we approach the day of Emmett’s death, the day when the love of Till-Bradley turned into a force of movement, we can not simply shed tears of a bygone time. James Craig Anderson’s recent death — in mississippi, goddamn — rehearses for us the ongoingness of racial animosity, hate and fear. times are still very urgent and i think Till-Bradley’s black feminist aesthetics of openness and movement still echo with us today, and still have the capacity to inform our resistance against these institutional and systemic forces that refresh and revise racism for a new era.

“I met a woman today …”: Concern as Aesthetic Practice

The reiteration :: we already have what we need in order to form a new world, a new world forged out of the material existence of that which already surrounds us. We have love, we have laughter, we have light. We have desire, we have depth, we have darkness occasioning the possibility of secretive and social movement against the grain of the constant, ongoing, perpetual imposition of the violent force of normalcy, hegemony. I write from the sea cost in South Carolina today. And I write because, having visited an open-air market selling boiled peanuts, peaches, squash and shrimp, an older black woman who grew up on St. Helena Island encouraged me. She encouraged me to continue to do the work I am doing without knowing what, particularly, I am doing. She does not know the rubrics of my research, does not know me – as is often said – from a can of paint.

My cousin, with whom I recently made reacquaintance, introduced me to this older woman because I was looking for a few of the local Praise Houses on the island. Upon telling the small band of three who work in and own the open-air market that I will be traveling to Sapelo Island, GA soon for more research, I was told to take copious notes. My response: “I’ll try!” to which I was told “no no no! Don’t try. Do it! Just do it.” And I smiled. Right before leaving, having been pointed in the direction of a Praise House, the older woman turned to me, “the next time you think you can’t do it, when you wanna waver, just remember that I told you you could do it!”

She wanted me to remember her as someone encouraging. So a few questions, of course. What prompts such a desire in another to show concern and care? What mode of social life creates the contours of her existence so much so that anyone so brought into the boundaries are likewise given the same ethic of concern and care? Why did she not merely smile, but intentionally insist on such words to me, compelling me to continue on a journey towards which she knows not where? Some theorists would have that such folks isolated on islands, descendants of enslaved folks, were fundamentally and ongoingly alienated from forms of kinship and love. But rather than some sorta alienation or relegation from establishing concern and care, I believe that particular forms of social life disperse those qualities curiously, refusing heteropatriarchy as the only [or even privileged] site where love and laughter, in all its genuineness and generosity, can be deployed.

This refusal to allow the idea that “blood” is the ground of being for “family” is what I think is necessary addressing the problems of our world today, and urgently so. The notion that concern and care can be distributed in queer ways is sorta cool to me; queer insofar as the forms of relationality established by the performance of something other than some sorta biological determinism also resist state formation and incorporation as citizenship. That is, the very real concern and care demonstrated me today is an aesthetic form that is no less theological, sociological and yes, musicological. This has everything to do with the woman’s knowledge of the locations of Praise Houses on the island. And, indeed, her concern and care is likely much influenced by the forms of sociality and togetherness encountered in those Praise Houses. It is a form, however, that many seek to escape for its purported primitivism, for its backwardness, for its bygone quaintness.

I think her demonstration of, let’s say, concern as an aesthetic practice is theological in that it is about the worldview of the creatures on the earth and in the sea, about a particular type of transcendence of the material world that stands before her in all of its fullness into the desirous, deep, dark recesses of an unknown cosmic field and mosaic of belonging. Or, more simply, her belief that there are powers unseen acting in the material world allow her to care for cans of paint, for dwellings built for the expressed purpose of praise and for some dude she just met today.

Concern as an aesthetic practice was also demonstrated sociologically in that she was concerned with how the work I am engaging connects me to her, how it connects me to humanity in general. She became excited when learning of my trip to Sapelo Island because she, too, had read the work of someone who lives there, Cornelia Bailey and found the writing exciting and inspiring. By the woman’s own admission, she’s never been to the island, so in some ways, I am going for her, which is why taking notes is of necessity [“don’t try! just do it!”].

Finally, concern as an aesthetic practice was also demonstrated musicologically. Victor Zuckerkandl wrote about musical tones as “vibrational affinities” wherein one is always on the way from one tone to the next, never in one tone then the next. That is, musical tone – the sounds we hear when one is singing or slipping up and down the scale – is a social event, done together with other tones. But more, musical tones are vibrational, they are the always moving and on the move results of rubs, caresses and frictions. She became animated when speaking with me today, full of laughter and a sing-song voice, clapped her hands a bit too.

So I began to wonder: what if the aesthetics we encounter are not something we seek to escape but become the occasion for resistance? What if – rather than being fundamentally embarrassed by the small, cramped, dark, hot spaces of the Praise Houses from which loud singing and shuffling feet can be heard for miles – we cultivated such aesthetic practices in the service of modes of flight and escape from the inequitable distributions of power and resources encountered daily by many of us?

To reiterate :: we already have what we need to make the world anew, one committed to concern and care, a world where each is loved and laughter is cultivated. We would do well to pay attention to laughing women, dancing children and the folks thought to mine the fields of death that is always social. Maybe the abundant life they experience daily, the exuberance in spite of the marginalization, the joy in the midst of sorrow is a gift to the world that we need only accept.

In Praise of non-Famous Black Women

As I ran on the treadmill this morning at Duke University, realizing that I am presently a doctoral student in the English program, preparing for my preliminary exams (some call them “comprehensive”) and teaching a course to a group of first years, I realized that I was literally not supposed to be there…on the treadmill…running…at Duke.  You see, while studying during my undergraduate days, I was horribly unprepared for the rigors of the institution, the culture shock that forced me to reconsider class – I thought I was “middle class” until I realized that my parents were much closer to less-than middle class; that money did not flow freely; that keeping up with the Joneses was simply silly for me.  I did not know how to survive, how to be happy.  I was a black, gay Pentecostal boy, founder of the New Spirit of Penn Gospel Choir who couldn’t seem to get my life together.  Academically, I was flailing.  There was that one semester when my GPA reached the depths of a 1.3 for the semester.

But anyway.  I thought again today how my survival at the various universities I have attended – University of Pennsylvania, Emory University, and now Duke University – would not have been possible if it were not for the love, support and guidance of those whom are generally overlooked, whom the university thinks expendable and easily replaceable.  As  my Facebook status attested this morning: had it not been for the administrative staff – black women – at these universities (secretaries, housekeepers, front-desk staff, card-swipers at cafeterias, etc), I would not have been able to graduate.  I think the people who have helped me survive need to be praised, need to be cherished for their ongoing and unseen (and unwarranted) contributions to the universities.

This is not sophisticated prose.  This is me trying to say thank you.

There is one such Ms. NameRemoved at Penn who made sure I ate even when I had no meal plan because I could not afford one.  She would take my school ID, slide it in the machine upside down to give the appearance that it was a legit validation and entry into the cafeteria.  She had knowledge of the inner workings of the institution that she was able to flout and a love of others that she wanted to sustain.  I appreciate her and what I would think of under the rubric of “ministry” (for when I was hungry, she fed me…seriously).

There is one such Ms. Cora Ingrum, an unsung hero at Penn both in the Engineering School and in the larger university system.  The head of the office of minority programming, Ms. Ingrum spoke to my parents roughly once a week during my first year because they were concerned for my well-being.  She never worried me by telling me my parents were worried then.  She waited.  She encouraged me…daily.  She hugged me a lot.  She was so much more than an advisor and counselor.  She embodied (and still embodies) the type of love ethic that I long to display to my students today.  I left engineering as a discipline a very long time ago but I still am connected with Ms. Ingrum because she showed me how to move through university systems caring for others and self.

There is one such Ms. Donna Hampton.  Words, literally, could not describe who she was and is to me.  I’m pretty sure she’s the first person I ever shared my fictional writing with, the first person who allowed me to be gay and black and Christian and contradictory all at the same time, all while loving me and listening to me and making me think I had a voice that should be heard.  I would walk into the office at Penn, see her sitting and would talk to her for hours.  She was a therapist before I knew that therapy was a good thing and a friend that I never knew I needed.

There is one such Jennifer Stiles.  I would walk into Du Bois College House and talk to her for hours at night.  And I mean hours.  From 4 until midnight.  She taught me so much more about being human, about recognizing the connections we make with others, about being truthful and honest with self and others.  She made me laugh a lot, made me angry a lot and made me think all of the time.  That front desk at Du Bois recounts too many memories.

There is one such Jamila Garret-Bell.  The first club I ever went to in Atlanta was with Jamila and she still tells me how I exclaimed (I was drunk) “this McDonald’s is the FRESHEST McDonald’s I’ve ever had in my life!”  That to say that I felt really comfortable around Jamila.  I’m a talker and I would sit in the chair next to her desk at Candler and talk about everything and nothing.  She was one of the first people at the seminary to know that I liked dudes and she never judged me for it, which was something I expected around every corner because “jesus school” was so problematic to me.  She showed me how to be graceful and gracious, how to have poise and tact.  She showed me how to smile in the face of hardship and how to move forward.

There is one such Ayanna Abi Kyles.  What could I say?  She did (and does) mean the world to me and I am forever grateful for encountering her, her love, her ministry.  I truly do believe Ayanna is the embodiment of self-love and exudes this with her dealings with other people.  If I’d sit and talk to Jamila for an hour, I’d leave her chair to go talk to Ayanna for hours more.  Ayanna saw in me worth and value that I could not see in myself.  Ayanna saw in me the desire to love others when I could not recognize myself in the mirror.  She would listen to me recount heartbreak after heartbreak, would allow me to be despondent, would let me be sad.  Ayanna would press against me when I was wrong (and I was wrong much of the time; most of the time?) but would never leave me thinking I was irredeemable.  She always let me know that she had my back, that she loved me and was there for me.  And when I was set to graduate from seminary, she told me that she wanted to be the one to present me with the stole during the “Sacred Worth” commencement ceremony because she wanted to honor and acknowledge the erotic life-world in which I exist and to give me strength for the world to come.

These stories, of course, are the tip of the iceberg.  I could say too much more about each of these women.  I post here because they enact for me what it means to be feminist, what it means to be womanist.  They are love, joy, peace, long-suffering in the flesh and they dwell among us.  They are the social world of the university that, many could attest, all others to survive.

Someone should write this book.  The book about auxiliary staff at colleges and universities whose kind smiles, warm hellos, and “meet me at this time in my office to discuss your financial aid” with a wink and nod allowed us to persist.

So this is an invitation.  Tell your story.  Pay homage.

I am interested in a project, quite literally, that lets us tell our story and lets us share our stories with those who have so effected us.  I am interested in having them tell their stories to us.  I am interested in critical dialogue because there is knowledge that they have that we need; they shared it with us implicitly and it’d be great to be explicit.

Some ideas:

• contacting the university alumni/ae publication and request space to share these types of stories; maybe a special edition
• an edited volume of sorts; collecting and sharing
• something like the New Orleans Neighborhood Story Sharing Project (http://www.neighborhoodstoryproject.org/) – localized, small, intimate but does the same work of collecting story and sharing with others
• something else?

What are your thoughts?

(Not) About Jamal Parris: A Premature Critique of BlackQueer Conservatism

this is a repost of some things i am thinking through and have been for some time now.  lest we forget that the eddie long “scandal” is far from resolved, that conversation needs to be ongoing and intentional.

So this is the weird me. Trying to think about my continual relationship and disavowal of what is called the Black Church and what I call BlackChristianity. Personal in reflection by some more general claims, hoping to get somewhere with this theorizing. So as much as I write against a certain BlackQueer conservatism, I write against myself.  This is a follow-up to another piece titled “(Not) About Eddie Long: BlackQueerness and Social Life” written shortly after the news of the lawsuits against Long first broke.

A claim: BlackQueerness is the condition of possibility for imagining a new world. Its seemingly erroneous underside: BlackChristianity cannot kill this possibility and a place like New Birth may be especially productive for imagination. Given the fascination with Eddie Long and his particular alleged infractions, it seems that mainstream media has been fairly successful with depicting him as a tragic figure, hypocritical of course, monstrous as well. Because I am not particularly fond of him in general, reading about the alleged acts was not surprising, and most certainly sad. But to linger in this moment as a crisis of BlackChristianity – by simplistic assertions about the seeming erratic, excessive homophobia of the Black Church – is to reproduce narratives of blackness as excess and, thus, dangerous, criminal, fugitive. Blackness might be all of these things, but unlike most news reports, I think this is cause for celebration. To continue to read the conspicuous consumption of New Birth’s tragic “David with five stones” as a special case of abuse of masculine power is to quite literally dance over the ways violent masculinist power is reproduced in the quotidian, mundane, ordinary, everyday occurrences of life. If some of us can continue to step in the name of love without flinching while claiming Long’s account as a more seriously egregious fault reproduces narratives of queerness as some extra-ordinary, non-quotidian erotics that is hella problematic.

So to ask a tough question: are there ways in which intense, intentional homophobic rhetoric can create the condition of possibility for social life? Or, more directly, does the zone of homophobia remove the agency of the person subjected to such virulent rhetoric? Though I fully recognize the problematics of such declarations – they are inconsistent with biblical notions of loving neighbor as self; they are hateful and display a lack of finesse when exegeting biblical text – rather than focus on the condition of the institution in which homophobia is a part and parcel, I would like to think about how life exists in that space, how people create a space in the horrible confinement. Does the oral rhetoric become the occasion for “opaque acts” that are “dark points of possibility” for agential enactment?[1] This is important to consider because the Black Church is a space where a lot of queer folks exist. And we do not only lament the fact that we are queer. We feel sad, yes. Melancholy, certainly. Feel the rhetoric is fucked up, of course. But we also laugh and dance in the spirit, we wink and nod at each other secretly, we exchange glances and phone numbers, we talk late into the night and have sex early in the morning.  All of this contradiction and complicatedness exists and is a sign of fecund, fertile life.

I have spent time trying to convince people to leave their churches because of the homophobia. Many will not. As much pain is there, there is also pleasure. The ability to have pleasure in the spaces that try to make it impossible is important. For me to desire everyone to leave the zone where they have pleasure isn’t too queer at all. Rather, that desire is just as Victorian and Puritanical as Evangelical Christians wanting to kick us out. So on the one hand, the homophobic rhetoric is supposed to subject queer folks to feelings of hurt, shame, loss, abandonment. And though it may do this, it just as often fails. Something like Moten would say: the consent we cannot give to hearing the rhetoric we can, still, withhold. We have the capacity to withhold in us a certain consent to the theological, emotional, psychical violence we are made to endure. And having the capacity to withhold, we have something in us that persists.

So I wonder if notions of self-hatred are not rhetorics of subjection, telling people what they are supposed to feel, giving them a path (right on out the church; to an “affirming” space) previous to their having felt any hatred of self at all. I mean, I was definitely confused as hell about my libidinal drive when I was a teenager. I definitely wanted to be saved and thought being gay was a sin. But I didn’t hate myself. I thought I had a future. There was a theology of “struggle” animating my relationship with my sexuality. I always thought that I could be delivered and, so, life was in abeyance. Life was in that suspended space between the libido of the present and the deliverance to come. We give a lot of attention to notions of deliverance as problematic and struggle as bullshit. But what about that space in the middle where all sorts of creativity is invoked for one to name oneself, for one to build relationships with others, for folks to think a way out altogether. Having a problematic theology of struggle was, at least for me, the condition of possibility to think I had a future with unbounded prospects. Theology of struggle let me suspend the worry about changing as a necessity today, let me put it off for some undetermined future. It created a space for me to exist. So another question: are affirming spaces always (if even primarily) safe? And are safe spaces always (even if primarily) affirming?

Popular media depictions of homophobia evacuate any possible agential potentiality, rendering intimacy in these particular zones of contact pathological and impossible concurrently. The homophobic rhetoric of BlackChristianity constrains us with no possibility for movement, for contestation, for resistance (and this is not a romance of resistance). But I wonders if self-hatred is the only way to be self-critical, if self-hatred is the only possibility for remaining in a problematic space. Having read a variety of critiques of the Black Church as an institution, usually in the form of missives telling people to escape the backwardness of the institution, I wonder about the anxiety animating these ideologies. There seems to be a particular worry about the impossible pleasure in the spaces that are deemed homophobic, a critique of enjoyment. We’ve gotta ask, though, “why do you like it here?” And, given the way the performative behaviors of what “Black Church” means (the dancing, sweating, long services, loud singing, hand-clapping, foot-stomping, etc.) are very often physically exhausting, embodied actions, I am speculating about how a liberal critique of the Black Church at some interesting nodal points parallels and revises the rhetoric of persistent critiques against queer people. Are there classist and elitist strains grounding the critique of the Black Church?

A Pew Research poll found that Atheists and Agnostics have more “knowledge” of religions than “believers.” Notwithstanding the fact that I do not find standardized tests regarding religion less biased than I do the SAT or GRE, what really intrigued me is the initial reaction by many non-religious folks on Facebook and Twitter. I imagined those non-believers printing the research findings and walking in the streets dancing, singing, laughing. I also imagined believers printing the findings and having bonfires. The polling data, of course, is taken to be truth; it is text believed to represent flesh. One’s gotta have a lot of faith in the truth claims the poll data is making. But more than that, I am intrigued by the ways strained knowledge comes to stand in for those who are knowledgeable. Declarations of the backwardness of these religious folks were rampant. If they only knew more, they’d behave differently. This means that religion is some sensual, bodily, primitivist thing and non-belief is a cerebral thing. But is religion merely about facts and figures? Nothing of community building or relationality? Nothing of prayer? Nothing of transcendence? I mention this research because the Black Protestants polled scored second lowest on all accounts.

Problematic, though, is the idea that knowledge is merely a cerebral thing, that religion is not as much about feeling as it is about facts. And I think the feeling is scary as hell…because it can be so pleasurable. As much as the Black Church offends us (and for many reasons, “it” should), at least some of the anxiety about it, I think is created by a seeming need to shore up against the sensuousness it offers (this, of course, could be said for all religious tradition). I can think about this with relation to Black Pentecostalism. Once I became “enlightened” and “knowledgeable,” enjoyment became so problematic. So I critiqued and wrote against other people’s enjoyment and pleasure in the space that was so problematic. Rather than asking about the effort and intentionality of pleasure in the most impossible of places, I wanted to curtail the possibility for pleasure in others. And that’s not cool. My particular anxiety made me wary of the space itself, not because of knowledge, but because of feeling. Hearing a Hammond B-3 organ still gets me. The arpeggios and bass runs, the notes at the high register and the pace of shout music began to worry me because not only could I not easily explain what it does to me, I would feel compelled to dance along with others.

So maybe instead of forcing people to leave spaces prematurely, we can think about the effort with which people sustain themselves in the most impossible of conditions. Or ask why is it pleasurable to exist there, in that contradiction of rhetorics and incongruous behaviors? What knowledge is carried in heads, in hearts, that allow for this sort of enunciation of personhood. Jamal Parris is one of the young men who alleges that Eddie Long coerced young men into erotic relationships, exploiting power by way of material possessions. Listening to Parris, he calls Long a monster, says that he still loves him and wishes he could forget the scent of his cologne. He declares that he is not gay but confused. Are these declarations homophobic? Hypocritical? Or are they declarations about the limits of language that cannot fully describe a relationship that didn’t feel right?

New words are necessary to indict the words which we tend to describe issues of power, religion, erotics. New worlds can be created in the midst of and in response to the given, known, hurtful worlds. It’s sorta like when a preacher is up talking and the musician is “padding” behind her or him, playing “nothing music” softly (for a PERFECT example, http://bit.ly/bdERq2). People may be giving attention to the preacher but they very well may be engaged in an underground conversation taking place in plain view. Phones that allow for text messaging, Twitter and Facebook just make more apparent the fact of communication that have always gone on while preachers ain’t sayin nothin, while the organist is padding softly and necessarily backgrounding sound. There is social life occurring right below the surface that emerges because of the apparentness of the surface. How can we attend to this sociality? How can we think feeling as a mode of knowledge? BlackQueerness can get us there.

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[1] Brooks, D. (2006). Bodies in dissent : spectacular performances of race and freedom, 1850-1910. Durham, Duke University Press.

On the possibilities for beauty; for love.

We live in a hurting and hurtful world.  News reports abound, of course, that makes nihilism a quotidian way of life.  But more than that, it is a viable option for moving through times that give us so little reason to smile, to love, to have joy.  But the beat drops and you see folks nodding their head in a hooptie in the hood.  You see a kid running, laughing, with the biggest smile on his, her or hir face.  And you begin to wonder.  And feel, maybe just slightly, wonderful.  There is beauty in the world, in this world.  Not because of what we do, what we create or our life situation; there is beauty because we are here, because we exist, because we are.

I remember the sermon I preached at Metro State Women’s Prison in Atlanta, GA in 2005.  Women locked up, behind bars, behind walls…away from family, with khaki colored prison uniforms, white socks and sneakers on.  To consider life within the compressed space of the prison is to think about the possibility for joy in the most constrained environments.  To think about the life, love and laughter there is to elucidate for me how there is the possibility for something new in situations that are rather horrific.  To linger in the condition of imprisonment would make us miss the humanity of the women altogether.  What can we learn from the incessant desire to remake the world, even in the confines of constraint?  The sermon I preached – “You Are Beautiful” – resonates with me even, if not especially, today because I do not think we hear it often enough.  So here, right now, to you, I say: you are beautiful.

In the biblical book of Genesis – that space where things began, where things were spoken, where things were called forth – is a simple mythic declaration from the deity figure: “let us make humankind after our image and in our likeness.”  Surely, this seems simple at first blush until we consider the context in which this initially oral tale was told.  Israel was a captive group, always in danger of being stolen from their land into diverse places and put to work.  The Egypt narrative – where they were enslaved and forced to labor – is one such space to consider.  Other religious traditions in existence during the time this Hebrew biblical story was being told posited that only the king or chief or leader was created in the image of the Divine.  As such, the status of the individual was the condition of possibility for beauty.

Beauty – in the way of image and likeness – is conferred upon us all.  Thus, the narrative of “let us make humankind after our image and in our likeness” democratizes the notion of beauty.  This beauty is not a function of what one does or what one’s labors produce.  Beauty is not limited to those who have a particular class, gendered or ethnic status but is opened up to all created being. Beauty resides in the very fact that you are an idea, an idea that exists…here.  Now.

To begin again.

In Beloved, Baby Suggs preaches in the clearing – the compressed space of the wilderness, the far far away, distant land – always in danger of being violated because the bodies populating the worship service were constantly surveilled.  It was there in that place that she told the people to laugh, cry and dance, to love their hands and hearts.  If there was a confession of faith it was in this: say that you love yourself.  Indeed, that is the prize.  Loving yourself indulges your beauty.

Loving yourself in the face of impossibility is the prize, it is the knowledge of beauty in the world of refusal.  There is a gap between love and the things deemed possible.  In that gap is desire for relationality, for love, for remaking the world.  In the gap between the fact of enslavement and the idea of freedom are those dancing, moaning bodies to whom Baby Suggs preaches.  In the space between the fact of imprisonment and the idea of liberation are the women of Metro State Women’s prison, having social, sexual, erotic lives when the prison would preclude this potential.  Evident is that we can inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously.  The world we perceive quickly  is not the only one available.  There is beauty in the world…this world.

I have been obsessing over the bass lines in songs lately because they do what I wish to do: extend the beat with playfulness, by the pluck of the string.  The virtuosity with which bass players perform is a primary example of the sorta play that intrigues me (listen to Musiq’s “Until” for an example: http://www.theregen.net/music/until.mp3).  Running and jumping and descending the scales, sometimes in succession, others in atonal intervals.  In between the bass notes plucked is, I think, the desire to stretch the meaning of that very infinitesimal pluck of the string, the hope that the vibration of the string which we hear can be ongoing, that it will allow us to linger just a little while longer.  I want to be in between these notes, to look around a bit, to explore possibilities unbounded, possibilities abounding.

Love, in my opinion, allows us to relate to one another.  It is what caused Harriet Tubman to think of freedom as a fundamentally social thing: she missed the people with whom she lived and laughed, felt pleasure as well as pain.  Freedom was a spiritual thing, and a community experience.  To be in New York alone was not freedom.  To escape with others…that was freedom.  Freedom was not in the place of New York.  Rather, it was in the space, in the between, in the movement back and forth.  Freedom was in her love, in her loving movements, in her loving escapes.  Freedom was in her capacity to have emotion and to find ways to enact them.

Relationships are the occasion for organizing and targeting toward specific objects, thoughts about love, happiness, joy, affection and care.  Emotion resides in us and is quickened when we meet someone towards whom we would like to explore the possibilities of expressing these feelings.  These emotions exist previous to their being enacted.  Love precedes the occasion or event, simply searching for a chance to be performed.  Our emotions exist as preface and many times there is the undesirable postlude (the break-up).  But we want the song.  The song is the in-between-ness that gives the chance for social interaction.

To love is to linger, to extend the feeling as long as possible.  Maybe this is why repetition in music is so powerful, why bent notes are so persuasive, why melisma is so enrapturing, why screams are so piercing.  These sounds go down, way down, deep down below the surface to infinite depths, exploring possibilities for life, love and liberty.

And Baby Suggs preached about love and beauty.  And in Genesis, we have a narrative about love and beauty.  We continually are reminded that even in the most horrible of conditions, love and beauty must be possible.  They are what allow us to relate to one another, what prompts our imagination toward the making of a new world.  So in this world of hurt and hurtfulness, love and beauty are not destroyed.  Rather, since they precede action and are organized according to situation, when they are compressed they are enacted creatively.

On Audience

*updated 7/11/10. the video was incorrect. see the correct video below*

To begin with an aside, a video:

I’m really not down with proselytizing and trying to get folks saved. No. The reason I am interested in this performance is because the singers are, of necessity, blind but there is a background noise – of hands clapping – that features only a female group. I want to be attentive to the gendered dynamics of such performance. On the one side, literally, there are male singers who cannot see the women occupying the other side of the stage. The women are there to applaud the actions of the men. It is this sort of gendered incongruence that I think is a feature of much black popular culture. The women in this performance serve as a repository, as an audience for the men who are blind (to them, to their posture) but nevertheless need the performance of the feminine for their own performance of song to cohere properly.  Of course, the genius of the “Blind Boys” was in the fact of their blindness, in the fact that we are an ableist world that privileges certain modes of bodily existence as normative.  This literal blindness was exploited by record companies who would utilize these voices while not paying the proper amounts of money.  I want to be attentive to the ways that blindness as a metaphor can work in the service of ableist normativity and say that this writing is against that sort of ableism.

As the necessarily constructed audience is female, I want to give attention to other constructions of audience. The problematic construction of audience that I detect in the performance of “Leaning” is the reason why I am bothered by Tyler Perry. The ways in which media constructs black audience has all sorts of resonances for the ways we think through and think about gender. So I want to offer a few words about how TP constructs his audiences and how a figure like Aaron McGruder – by way of the cartoon The Boondocks – works against these gendered problematics.

To begin again for the second time, another aside: when I talk to black women – if we’re on the phone, if we go to dinner, if we’re walking down the street – they often call me “girl…” you know, in that “sistergirlfriend” sort of way. Sometimes we’re talking about dating and relationships. Other times, we’re talking about food and football. But somehow, I – a male-identified, male-bodied subject – come to occupy the space of “girl” for these women with whom I am in such close relationship. What this hints at, for me at least, is that the ways in which “sistergirlfriend” is constructed has as much to do with the sorts of conversations that take place between folks as it does with the bodies who sit in front of or walk beside us. We don’t always agree but we converse. Because of the ease with which we can speak about issues, because of the comfort with knowing each other, because we glide in and out of a variety of topics, I can figure differently – as “girl”…and that’s real cool to me. (Though, I am always aware of the gendered dynamics of any conversational transaction between myself and women; I do not name this ease with relationship in order to declare that I am not still influenced by and must daily struggle against sexism, misogyny and patriarchy.) I name this relationship in order to recalibrate how gender and audience is conceived, not necessarily based on bodily construction but equally on the possibility for conversation between subjects.

And thus, Tyler Perry. We all know about and many lament the work he produces. Black women, for him it appears, are a monolithic group. They are either professionally successful but vindictive or professionally wanting but sweet. They are trifling or triumphant…all through the power of Jesus and a man who will serve as an erotic and romantic partner. His work is as homophobic as it is sexist, patriarchal and boring. Nuance is not the name of his game. TP constructs audience, it appears, based on lack: of a man, of success, of spiritual fulfillment. His construction of a female audience is the reproduction of the blind boys who sing and the seeing women who only clap. There is no transaction taking place – which is to say, there is no conversation between the blind boy (TP) and the mute but clappy audience.

As the uber-phallus, he gives women the images they want, or are supposed to want. Those who speak back are simply haters, or misguided or bourgeois. The only ones who figure for him are those who keep clapping as he keeps singing his song. Why is the construction of audience done in such a way to have TP performing and while the audience mutely claps along? What do these continual refrains mean when considering how gender is thought, how sexism, patriarchy and homophobia perpetuate? Normative ideology regarding women as receptacles is reproduced by these constructions of audience. We can clap but we can’t speak back. We can speak back but the ways we speak will be shut out because of the singing. And the blind boys will not see our posture because of the flashing lights of celebrity.

There has to be another way. I find Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks refreshing for just this reason. His construction of audience diverges from TP’s constructions because the audience – by way of his satire – are required to be critically distant to the work (as opposed to how TP dismisses critics). A cartoon that features anime styling and fight sequences, it could be argued (at least from one blogger’s point of view) that McGruder critiques the very sexist, patriarchal and homophobic folks that TP pacifies with his performances. Using the episode “Pause” (or, what has been affectionately dubbed “The Tyler Perry Episode”) as an example, McGruder’s usage of the phrase “no homo” and the term “pause” in the episode by the annoyingly sweet, misguided, faux-thug Riley as a declaration to distance himself from “gay sounding” phrases is a literal send-up of folks (from Cam’ron on down to Kanye) who use this sort of rhetoric. “How can I know you not gay if you don’t say ‘no homo’, Granddad” is what he says. Riley repeats these two phrases so much throughout the episode that they enter the realm of the ridiculous. The audience McGruder constructs must ask what the usage of these phrases mean by someone like Riley – a character whom many find humorous but silly – and then reflect on their own usage of such cornyass vitriol.  In other words, most people like Riley but few want to be Riley.  But Riley has literally exhausted all of the rhetorical possibility for explanations of “no homo” and “pause”; the explanations for such phrases he offers are evacuated of any coherence or depth.  For one to continue with this language means they have to figure out a way to do so without resorting to the types of rhetorical flourishes Riley proffers.  This is a difficult task.  McGruder allows his audience to think differently.

Of course, also in that episode are the ways in which Winston Jerome (TP?) slips between drag, effeminate and hypermasculine performance while still maintaining the language and sentiments of homophobia, sexism, patriarchy and religiosity. The plays produced by Winston Jerome in the episode force a consideration of the type of audience we are when we participate in his enterprise. Stretching Winston Jerome as a metaphor to his limits, the character implodes: hella sexist, homophobic and patriarchal while at the same time sometimes in drag, sometimes effeminate, sometimes hypermasculine, always in love with Jesus. Whereas TP constructs an audience that must sit, watch and clap along, McGruder creates a situation in which the audience cannot idly sit and watch but must create critical distance between themselves and all of the characters in order to assert their own personhood. That’s a lengthy way of saying that McGruder allows his audience to think, to challenge, to dissent.  Similar to the ways in which the audience must create critical distance between onself and depictions of Riley, audience must do likewise with depictions of Winston Jerome (or…TP).  The conflictual nature of ambivalence is protracted in such a way that in order to enjoy TP, one must figure out a way around the sexism, patriarchy, religiosity and homophobia found in those performances.

This is not to say that McGruder constructs a “masculine” audience. Rather, it is to say that McGruder’s audience has to engage listening practices in radically different ways than TP’s. We don’t just stand, listen and clap to the beat. We reorient it, we revise it, we refresh it.