Blacks here, Blacks there, Blacks everywhere

‘Black Realms iteration 4'

“for Blackness, the danse macabre is not a surrender to death, but a choreography of survival; and like Camus’ Sisyphus, black existence transforms the absurd into freedom by choosing to dance, to imagine, to live stubbornly, joyfully, and against the world’s script.”

~Kitso Seti

The day I grieved a Black boy whom I had barely ever spoken to. The day I realized that the absence of a Black girl in my class was because she had been condemned to a child-marriage. The day I learnt that peoples’ uncles are held captive in the concrete jungles of Jozi — eGoli and are only spate out as lifeless bodies. The day I learnt that most Black people are only acquainted with wealth through an autopsy report. The day I learnt that we as Black people know gold only through the toxins left in our rivers and the yearnings for a heaven to come. There are many ways to be introduced to the fact of Blackness and for me it looks/feels like a series of days that cascade into the vortex of destitution we have come to know as blackness.

Yet this is not the only story of Blackness. Someone told me that they don’t like being called Black. They said being called Black is reductive. They said they were made to be black. That they are brown and would like to be called African. Yet ‘African’ is another invented category. They are not wrong though; Blackness has a burden of otherness. Its weight is not the ontological weight of being ‘human’ but that of being rendered the de-human. Yet… Yet in all of its burdensomeness, I stay with Blackness. I stay with Blackness because it is a register of unforgetting. I stay with Blackness because in Hugo Ka Canham’s terms it is a bottomless pit that heaves with the air of the undying even when their flesh is consumed. What Wanelisa Xaba perceives as the unkillability of Black people. What Li’Tsoanelo Zwane poetically conjures through asking “How can you kill what refuses to die? / How can you kill what cannot die?”

I stay with Blackness because it reminds me that those constituted as black live in ways that precede and exceed language — they alchemize black to Black. I stay with Blackness because it is a thinking and daring from the ruins. I stay with Blackness because it is an insistence on remembering as re-membering. I stay with Blackness because it venerates the spirits of those who hover over the ruins. I stay with Blackness because it is the form and substance of living ‘wayward lives and beautiful experiments.’ I stay with Blackness because Black is the fugitive of black. I stay with Black, as much as it rhymes with lack, it also sounds like break and make. I stay with Black because it can beckon dance through relational cadence. I stay with Blackness because it refuses to discipline through military instruments by insisting on conjuring jazz out of their dissonance. I stay with Blackness because, unlike white(ness), it is not seduced by bounded genocidal purities. I stay with Blackness because it is capaciousness enough to hold all who have been marooned on the islands of destitution.

I stay with Blackness because it stays with me. A reminder that my ancestors are owed justice because icala aliboli. A reminder that I owe Black people tenderness and care because in an anti-black world their lives are doomed to be an antiphony of negations. A reminder that the wrinkles in Black people’s faces are seams from elsweheres — crying/singing/smiling in destitution. A reminder to insist on liberation now! A reminder to write love letters and poems with one hand as we hold the gun with another — fierce loving/living. A reminder to fail. A reminder to refuse the temptations of perfection. A reminder that this life is an ‘ongoing rehearsal.’ A reminder to remain and insist on process. A reminder to keep the erotics of liberation pulsating through our Black blood. A reminder to keep with Black modes of convening that are anchored by impepho and blazing candles. A reminder to keep the fire of ancestral rage; we are the ‘fire this next time’, we are the fire this time. A reminder to remember that Black rage is a sacred poetics of making — a rambling towards freedom. A reminder to be intimate with our rage such that it becomes a smoldering fire that will burn for lifetimes until the debt of justice has been credited to us. A reminder that ‘while we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to overwhelming force, we must refuse to only know ourselves and each other by that force.’