BLACK

ALIVENESS,
OR
A POETICS
OF BEING
black outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study
A series edited by J. Kameron Car­ter and Sarah Jane Cervenak
BLACK
ALIVENESS,
OR
A POETICS
OF BEING

KEVIN
QUASHIE

Duke University Press Durham and London 2021

© 2021 Duke University Press. All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞
Designed by Courtney Leigh Richardson
Typeset in Portrait and Avenir by Westchester Publishing Ser­vices

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Quashie, Kevin Everod, author.
Title: Black aliveness, or a poetics of being / Kevin Quashie.
Other titles: Black outdoors.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2021. | Series: Black
outdoors: innovations in the poetics of study | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021669 (print)
LCCN 2020021670 (ebook)
ISBN 9781478011873 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781478014010 (paperback)
ISBN 9781478021322 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics, Black. | Blacks—Race identity. | Aesthetics in
literature. | Identity (Psychology) in literature.
Classification: LCC BH301.B53 Q37 2021 (print) | LCC BH31. B53 (ebook) |
DDC 809.1/9896—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021669
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021670

Cover art: Prayer for Grace, 2020. © Shinique Smith. Courtesy the artist and
SAS Studio.
CONTENTS

Introduction Aliveness 1

1 Aliveness and Relation 15

2 Aliveness and Oneness 31

3 Aliveness and Aesthetics 57

4 Aliveness in Two Essays 83

5 Aliveness and Ethics 107

Conclusion Again, Aliveness 141

Acknowl­edgments 155

Notes 157

Bibliography 219

Permissions 227

Index 229
This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION

ALIVENESS

What would it mean to consider black aliveness, especially given how readily—­
and literally—­blackness is indexed to death? To behold such aliveness, we have
to imagine a black world . . . ​we have to imagine a black world so as to surpass
the everywhere and everyway of black death, of blackness that is understood
only through such a vocabulary. This equation of blackness and death is indis-
putable and enduring, surely, but if we want to try to conceptualize aliveness,
we have to begin somewhere ­else.
This is a story of us, a story of black aliveness as the being of us.
Imagine a black world: The invocation of a black world is the operating as-
sumption of black texts, a world where blackness exists in the tussle of being,
in reverie and terribleness, in exception and in ordinariness. This black world
is not one where the racial logics and harming predilections of antiblackness
are inverted but one where blackness is totality, where e­ very ­human question
and possibility is of ­people who are black. It is what Toni Morrison, our ­great
thinker, describes as “a sovereignty” of “race-­specificity without race preroga-
tive” (“Home” 3, 5). Such a world might not exist in modernity, though it ra-
diates in the ­will to make a poem, an essay, a song . . . ​it radiates in the text’s
imaginary as a philosophical audacity, as an embracing generative quality of
indisputable aliveness.
What makes “imagine a black world” so necessary is the exemption of black
humanity from our commonsense understanding, the world’s lack of imagina-
tion for black being that is also its brutal enactments against such being. ­There
is no outright assumption of black humanity in the world (the potency of “Black
Lives ­Matter” as an emblem confirms this), and indeed black humanity has to be
argued over and again. And yet we might suppose that ­every black text rests on
a quiet premise of black humanity—­that the text and its aesthetics assume being.
I am interested, then, in the quality of aliveness notable in the worldmaking
aesthetics of poems and essays, in how ­those poems and essays can be read for
what they tell us about our being: about how we are and about how we can be. I
am interested both in the ways that the world of black texts constitutes our right-
ness of being as I am interested in the ethical implications of such a constituting.1
The best example I know of aesthetics as aliveness is Lucille Clifton’s poem
“reply” first published in her 1991 collection Quilting:2

[from a letter written to Dr. W. E. B. Dubois by Alvin Borgquest

of Clark University in Mas­sa­chu­setts and dated April 3, 1905:

“We are pursuing an investigation ­here on the subject

of crying as an expression of the emotions, and should
like very much to learn about its peculiarities among
the colored p ­ eople. We have been referred to you as a
person competent to give us information on the subject.
We desire especially to know about the following salient
aspects: 1. W
­ hether the Negro sheds tears. . . .”]

reply

he do
she do
they live
they love

2 Introduction
 they try
they tire
they flee
they fight
they bleed
they break
they moan
they mourn
they weep
they die
they do
they do
they do (337)

Notice first the dancing waltz of the anaphora, as if this is a drum-­or heartbeat
of paired stressed syllables, how this sequence creates a deliberate formation
in what might other­wise look like a random gathering of actions, such that
“live” precedes and parallels “love,” “moan” yields to “mourn.” The alliteration
guides our recognition of the connection between the poem’s verbs, just as the
assonance—­those rich, deep vowel echoes—­threads together another relation
of ­things: the long e of “flee,” “bleed,” and “weep”; the i of “try” and “die”; the
extended plea­sure of the long u in “do,” “do,” “do,” especially in closing. T ­ hese
threaded sounds manifest something larger than a s­imple cata­log; they are
worldmaking, a cosmological arc of being.3
Notice, too, how the poem’s speaker directs us where to look and assumes
that we can and ­will know how to look rightly; that is, pay attention to how
the poem negotiates the politics of looking via its pronouns, by casting the
speaker awry from and as observant of black collectivity. Beautifully, Clifton
uses the objectification of the third person to relish in distance and plurality:
“he,” “she,” “they,” t­hose ­people. (Even the singular pronouns, via vernacular
phrasing, are sutured to plural action: “he do / she do.”) This syntax invites the
reader to behold the other, and in this way, the poem refuses the specular as a
site of black abjection; rather, it instantiates looking as a shared relationality,
especially since the looking is something that the reader does in concert with
the speaker’s prudent guidance: “Look at this,” the speaker seems to intone,
“and now that—­look at that.” Clifton’s astute use of the third-­person plural posi-
tions the speaker as observer and chronicler, and re­orients the practice of looking
beyond its destructive intent to secure racial difference. We know well the peril
of such terrible visuality, what phi­los­o­pher Frantz Fanon codified aptly with

Aliveness 3
the phrase “Look, a Negro!” where the imperative “Look” is one and the same
as the name “Negro,” where the invitation to look at once invents a category
and performs its denigration.4 Importantly, then, Clifton uses the distance of
“they” to encase the scene in its own world; ­doing such amplifies the potential
to behold the humanity of the poem’s black ones.
Said another way, the poem’s dynamism resides in its elision of the easy al-
liance between the speaker’s roll call and the black us who are exemplified by
the calling. The elision is pos­si­ble ­because the poem’s scene is a black world,
full of the blackness of the presenting one and the ones being presented. Master-
fully, the speaker stands as an emcee, a host who seems to revel in what it is
to look at all this quotidian magnificence rendered via the expansive line of
words ambling down the page, staircase or waterfall or slideshow of being a­ fter
being ­after being, linked in ­music and gesturing ­toward what cannot be said
fully since, a­ fter all, it is not pos­si­ble to pre­sent ­every instance of black being
in a pantheon or to map it in the sky or track it over all the edge of the earth.
Through third-­person plurality, Clifton’s speaker reorganizes our gaze, an ex-
ample of what cultural theorist Daphne A. Brooks describes as the critical use
of distance to navigate black alienation. Being looked at is a horror for us, and
so I love that this poem marshals looking as a constitutive act of black being.5
I cannot overstate how crucial it is that the speaker ­doesn’t say “we,” as
in “we live,” “we love,” since that pronoun would cement the poem’s stance
as being against the hateful question—as a black voice speaking to resist the
harmful overtures of white volition. Clifton’s speaker witnesses, such that the
reply is not t­oward white vio­lence but instead recognizes the capaciousness
of being; ­here the speaker stands not on a side but in the midst of the ­whole world of
black being. The poem, so gorgeous, unfurls as a text of black world relational-
ity where the difference between the (black) one saying “they” and the (black)
ones indicated by “they” reflects the breadth of our humanity. Difference not
as a calculus of inferiority but as of our totality.6
This is a worldmaking poem: Notice the way its aesthetics negotiate repeti-
tion and time, how the verbs (“love,” “flee,” “weep”) are enduringly pre­sent,
timeless and not anchored by historical sociality. Indeed, the poem’s time reg-
ister moves t­oward the infinity of the last three lines, which mimic the or-
thography of ellipses: “they do / they do / they do,” eternally and into a f­ uture
we cannot see. Repetition fuels this infinity, repetition that works according
“to miracle rather than to law . . . ​an eternity opposed to permanence.” 7 “Repeti-
tion is holy,” poet Nikky Finney tells us, and the repetitious d ­ oings in Clifton’s
“reply” are, exhibit, and make a black world, an inhabiting where blackness is

4 Introduction
totality, where every­thing is of p
­ eople who are black—­every capable ­thing, ­every
small or harming ­thing, ­every extraordinary ­thing or ­thing of bad feeling . . . ​all
of it is of blackness. This worldness exists in Clifton’s beautiful verbs, t­hese
quotidian deeds that generate something of a utopia and that render the material
excellence of a “they” who spin off the page and outward t­ oward a somewhere,
beyond the racist order of the world.8
We are supposed to not-­see ourselves or to see ourselves through not-­seeing;
we are, indeed, supposed to fear—­and hate—­our black selves. But Clifton’s
poem invites us into a practice of encountering black being as it is, in its be-
ingness, in its terribleness and won­der and particularity.9 Beautifully, Clifton’s
range of verbs marks a black world as one which hosts pain and love and life,
the effects of strug­gle where strug­gle is not singularly defined as a condition of
oppression. Strug­gle in being alive. (The sustained inflection of action, “they
do” in triplicate, reminds us of this.) A racist happening prefaces the poem,
and racist happenings surely linger in ­every indicative verb in the verse. But
in a black world, the racist ­thing is not the beginning or the end of being, and
what ­matters is not only what is done to the subject but also how the subject
is. Antiblackness is part of blackness but not all of how or what blackness is.
Antiblackness is total in the world, but it is not total in the black world.
In this way, the paratext might be a scene of subjection, but Clifton’s poem
proper is a scene of aliveness, a world of us told in a reply.10

We can think about black worldmaking in regard to the proj­ect of black stud-
ies. That is, as phi­los­o­pher Sylvia Wynter argues, black studies’ intellectual
ambition wants to reject the world of antiblackness and to or­ga­nize, instead,
ideologies of and for a world that could embrace blackness. Such worldmaking
manifests also in the declarations of the Black Arts/Aesthetic movement, which
emphasizes blackness as an idea that could be remade beyond the limits of a racist
discourse. This investment in the possibilities of ideation—­what literary histo-
rian Margo Natalie Crawford smartly describes as a “black post-­blackness”—is
vital to conceptualizing an overhauled universe realized through aesthetics.11
Such dynamics are at stake in Amiri Baraka’s 1966 ars poetica “Black Art”:

Poems are bullshit ­unless they are

teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies ­dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down. Fuck poems
and they are useful . . . (219)

Aliveness 5
The poem seems like a formless ranting cata­log, though even in t­ hese few lines
one can recognize aesthetic formality via the doubling irony where “Fuck
poems” is followed by a cele­bration of poetry’s utility or as the expletive works
as both an adjective and an imperative. ­There is formfulness, too, in the de-
ployment of conjunctions to create a propulsive rhythm and in the astute line
breaks. As such we can see that “Black Art” is rife with deliberateness as it de-
termines what a poem is and how a poem should work. “We want poems / like
fists . . . ​/ Assassin poems, Poems that shoot / guns” (219), the poem declares of
its ideal verse and its idealized black subject. Baraka’s text becomes animated
with combativeness, a ferocious textual explicative that enacts and material-
izes fury: “Put it on him, poem. Strip him naked / to the world!” (219–220). Its
attack names biracial black w ­ omen, Jewish p­ eople, gay men, civil rights lead-
ers, police officers . . . ​a wide-­ranging and rangy pugilism intended, perhaps, to
strike e­ very oppressing t­ hing. The intensity of its poetics is so high that one
almost misses the breakneck turn three-­quarters of the way through:

Poem scream poison gas on beasts in green berets

Clean out the world for virtue and love,
Let ­there be no love poems written
­until love can exist freely and
cleanly. Let Black ­people understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of lovers and warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness ­here in the world

We want a black poem. And a

Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black ­People Speak This Poem
Silently

or loud (220)

The casual movement from “Poem scream poison gas” to “Clean out the world
for virtue and love” constitutes an astonishing change in tone, syntax, rhythm,
sentiment, and ideology, a deviation that gives way to a lyrical invocation that
mimics God’s call for illumination in Genesis. This is Baraka’s speaker at his
magical best, summoning restoration a­ fter having authorized the decimation
of the world that demeans blackness. We should notice especially that this
glorious transubstantiation is incited by the repetition of “let,” an imperative

6 Introduction
verb that functions subjunctively to indicate the t­ hing that ­hasn’t yet but still
might happen.12
If you know “Black Art” in full, you know that I have sidestepped the hefty
­middle of the poem, which is where its vulgarities lie—it ­didn’t seem necessary
to repeat them. One might notice, too, that the world conjured at the end cites
“sons” but ­doesn’t articulate the possibility for d ­ aughters or even just ­children,
thereby keeping a masculine prerogative intact. My point ­here is not an indul-
gence of the poem’s ideological limitations but an exploration of one specific
aspect of its working: its invocation of a black world. That is, I am struck by its
inclining ­toward capaciousness, yearning, possibility, ideas that recall the case
Baraka—as LeRoi Jones—­makes about imagination in his essay “The Revolu-
tionary Theater”: “What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic,
magician, ­etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. . . . ​The imagination is the projec-
tion of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as ‘­things.’ Imagination (Image) is all possibil-
ity, ­because from the image . . . ​any use (idea) is pos­si­ble. . . . ​Possibility is what
moves us” (Home 239; emphasis added). This declaration of being transformed
by possibility matches the ambition that coalesces in the ending of “Black Art.”13
Sigh: I am trying to read Baraka’s poem through the surrender and magic of
its conclusion. In such a reading, the speaker’s politics are impor­tant to but not
determinative of the world to come, since the world is not yet ­here and the poem
breaks open, at its end, into the new ­thing that is not constrained singularly and
ideologically by its beginning. And still, such a reading is complicated by the case
that literary scholar Phillip Brian Harper makes about the conundrum of audi-
ence in Black Arts poetry, where the goal of speaking against white vio­lence is
conflated with the delicate work of trying to call blackness into formation.14 This
conflation fuels the narrowing of the idealized black world and homogenizes
which kinds of blackness are presumed to fit in that world habitat.
And yet, the imagining of a world of black aliveness cannot be narrow. In-
deed, in trying to reckon with Baraka’s invocation at the close of “Black Art,” I
turn again to the logics of address in Clifton’s “reply,” the gorgeousness of her use
of “they,” that sly, embracing, worldmaking syntax that seems to work differently
from Baraka’s “we.” Clifton’s capaciousness establishes openness as the ethos of
black worldmaking. The worldness of her aesthetic formation is not a contract-
ing imaginary that reiterates normativities or secures bound­aries of who we are
but instead beholds an expansive relationality where “­every form of life that has
ever been ever enacted, is a part of us.”15 This is a world of heterogeneity whose
only cohering value is the rightness of black being, the possibility of black be-
coming. If we read Baraka’s speaker as a figure immersed in evolution rather than
as one entrenched against a dominant audience, we can appreciate “Black Art”

Aliveness 7
for its inclination ­toward black totality, its closing call which collates the poem,
the world, and the one as a praxis of becoming—­“Black Art” as an enactment of
verse imagining.16

The thinking on black being always has to countenance death, as the field of
black pessimism makes clear. And perhaps no one has taken up this figuring
of being and death more extensively than literary scholar Christina Sharpe,
whose In the Wake: On Blackness and Being characterizes “wake” as an idiom not
only of consciousness but also of life’s deathness: “In the midst of so much death
and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend to physical,
social, and figurative death and also to the largeness that is Black life, Black
life insisted from death?” (17). This attending to life is what Sharpe theorizes
as “wake work,” the materialization of being through death such that “even as
we experienced, recognized, and lived subjection, we did not simply or only live
in subjection and as the subjected” (4; emphases in the original). In the Wake is
Sharpe’s pursuit of “the modalities of Black life lived in, as, ­under, despite Black
death” (22). I read Sharpe’s study as a definitive articulation of black pessimism
as a field, especially its exploration of what cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman
describes as the enduring afterlife of slavery and coloniality.17 Indeed, by plac-
ing the terms of death (including “abjection,” “negation,” “terror,” and “nonbe-
ing”) at the center of thinking about blackness, black pessimism has reenergized
a critique of liberal humanism’s uncritical faith in pro­gress and its fallacies of
freedom. The meaning of black freedom, ­these scholars remind us, cannot be
indexed to the Enlightenment and cannot be mapped in the syntax of Western
norms; ­there is no end to the condition of coloniality and captivity—no end,
but ­there is life in the midst and aftermath of ­those interminable conditions.
Cohering black pessimism as a field is challenging, especially ­because some
scholars whose ideas are taken up in its name ­don’t identify precisely with its
proj­ect. And still, I want to highlight ­here black pessimism’s construction of
black ontology both as an impossibility in the logic of the antiblack world and
as a possibility that requires perceiving differently what the world is or looks
like or can be—­worldmaking.18 I believe as black pessimism does that the world
of antiblackness excludes black humanity in at least two ways: the antiblack
world is built to be against the ­human, and the idea of the ­human it permits
is built to be against some of us (black ­people) who are exactly that—­human.19
And though we might be inclined to emphasize death as a feature of black pes-
simism, the truth is that terms of life are legible in the field’s critical explorations:
in the foregoing quotations from Sharpe; in the phrase “the social life of social
death,” which Jared Sexton uses to frame the field (“Ante-­Anti-­Blackness”),

8 Introduction
theorizing that he calls “an ars vita” (“Afro-­pessimism”); in the poetic clar-
ity of Hartman’s “I, too, am the afterlife of slavery” (Lose Your M ­ other 6); in
Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s exposition of exorbitance; in the vivacious speaker
in Frank B. Wilderson’s theoretical memoir Afropessimism. We might say, as
Terrion L. Williamson has, that black social life is “the register of black experi-
ence that is not reducible to the terror that calls it into existence, but is the rich
remainder, the multifaceted artifact of black communal re­sis­tance and resil-
ience that is expressed in black idioms, cultural forms, traditions and ways of
being” (9). An overemphasis on death simplifies the nuanced insights of black
pessimism and its related discourses and, in this way, my argument for aliveness
is not a sharp detour from this field of con­temporary theoretical thought.20
My difference from black pessimism might be in my attempt to displace
antiblackness from the center of my thinking. That is, though I ­don’t deny the
terribleness of the world we live in, nor its antiblack perpetuity, I am interested
in conceptualizing an aesthetic imaginary founded on black worldness. Death,
nonbeing, the “ontological terror” aptly named by theorist Calvin L. Warren—­
these are conditions of black being, but they are not total in my appreciation
of aliveness. I d­ on’t mean to make the distinction sharper than it is, since I ac-
knowledge how diverse the field is and how much terms of life circulate through
it. Perhaps the keenest point of contention for me is the specific register of black
pessimism’s declaration of totality: it is true that ­every black one of us lives ­under
the legacied terror of modernity and coloniality—­that no m ­ atter how differently
we perceive or respond, terror is a condition of ­every black life. Or as Wilderson
describes it, “vio­lence precedes and exceeds blacks” (Red, White and Black 76). My
quibble is that the definitive fact of black subjection, true as it is, is not exactly
sayable ­because no statement about ­every black person can be genuinely sayable.
Such a claim might be ideologically or conceptually or theoretically or structur-
ally factual, but its truth is and should remain an opacity.21
I am cautious about the declarative assertion of nonbeing and its slippery
poetics.
I know that theoretical study produces claims that are as broad and meta­
phorical as they are generative—­they work as provocations; as such, I know that
“nonbeing” is a meta­phor for the pervasive condition of subjection more than it
is a literal description of black being. Simply, ­every ­human is of being. I am try-
ing, then, to elide what is elided by hefty terms of subjection, or at least as t­ hose
terms move beyond the specific nuanced interrogations of their authors. It may
be true that subjection prefaces every­thing in an antiblack world, but in thinking
through a black world, I am trying to surpass terror as the uninflected language
of black being, as well as to suspend the anti/ante position of blackness. In that

Aliveness 9
surpassing and suspending, I am trying to articulate the aesthetics of aliveness.
What I want is the freeness of a black world where blackness can be of being,
where ­there is no argument to be made, where ­there is no speaking to or against
an audience ­because we are all the audience ­there is . . . ​and, as such, the text’s
work can manifest an invitation to study and to becoming for the black one.
What I want is the wayward world made through Saidiya Hartman’s method in
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, the way
that Hartman’s close narration deepens the past’s historic scope by being as local
as pos­si­ble: by residing in the figure of h
­ uman life evident via the traces of the
one who lived that life. In the prefatory “A Note on Method,” Hartman describes
this d­ oing: “At the turn of the twentieth ­century, young black w ­ omen w­ ere in
open rebellion. . . . ​This book re­creates the radical imagination and wayward
practices of ­these young ­women by describing the world through their eyes. . . . ​
To this end, I employ a mode of close narration, a style which places the voice of
the narrator and character in inseparable relation, so that the vision, language,
and rhythms of the wayward shape and arrange the text” (xiii–­xiv). Hartman’s
use of close narration is genius, ­because it instantiates a sense of presence and
presentness—it instantiates a live and lively now to the histories it tells. And
in ­doing so, Hartman eludes the discursive trap of the black historical past as a
monolith of terror wrought by the structures of modernity. That is, Hartman
offers us a past that, in its aliveness, holds relation to our being now. Hartman
is not alone in this praxis of reckoning with the past and the scale of being (of
harm, of living) sometimes illegible therein—­one could look ­toward Stephen
Michael Best, Sharon P. Holland, Tavia Nyong’o, Robert Reid-­Pharr, Jared Sexton,
and ­Michelle M. Wright, just to name a few con­temporary thinkers. Sigh: What
I want is the ethos of a world like the one Hartman reveals, like t­ hose in Lucille
Clifton’s poems, worlds where black living is compassed by being alive, where
aliveness sets the par­ameters for understanding loss, pain, belonging, for coun-
tenancing love, grace, healing. Surely, Clifton’s poems can be used to consider
antiblackness, but their habitat is not essentially of this.22
I am embracing the luxuries of thinking with and through the materiality
of texts. That is, in a black world, in what­ever manifestations of black world-
ness texts create, blackness (not antiblackness) is totality; in such a world, black
being is capacious and right—­not more-­right-­than, just right-­as-is. Life-­as-is.
I believe that the worldness of black texts, if one reads with such a tempera-
ment, makes it pos­si­ble to withstand black being as ­human being, to behold
blackness as one’s ethical reckoning with being alive.
An antiblack world expects blackness from black p ­ eople; in a black world,
what we expect and get from black ­people is beingness.23

10 Introduction
 In a black world, e­ very black being is of being, the verb that infers a pro­
cess of becoming.24 Near the conclusion of Red, White and Black: Cinema and the
Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, Wilderson writes, “To say we must be ­free of air,
while admitting to knowing no other source of breath, is what I have tried to
do ­here” (338; emphasis in original), an admission that resonates both with the
impossibility of imagining a black world and with the sheer urgency of d ­ oing
just that. I am writing out of that urgency, trying to conceptualize a black
world as an aesthetic totality that is f­ ree of air and full of ways to breathe. It is
why, throughout this work, I hardly use the term “nonbeing”; the h ­ uman who
is black is a being, is of being. The gambit of Black Aliveness is that the black
one’s ontological dilemma is not in regard to not-­being or being-­against; the
ontological dilemma, as such exists, is being.25
I ­will say it once: antiblackness and white supremacy, as they live in and are
enacted by any person in implicit or explicit or structural registers, both are
sins against the ­human. I want to be clear that a call to aliveness is not contra-
dictory to this ­thing I understand to be true.
One further reinforcement: the idiom “a black world” names an aesthetic
imaginary that encompasses heterogeneity. I take inspiration, as ever, from the
worldmaking conceptualized prominently in black ­women’s feminism. When
the Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement” announces that
“our politics initially sprang from a shared belief that Black ­women are inherently
valuable” (15), it signals not only the enduring marginalization of black ­women in
the world but also an imagining determined to locate philosophical and po­liti­cal
meaningfulness through the specificity of black femaleness. ­There is a similar ca-
paciousness in Hortense J. Spillers’s argument about black femaleness in the iconic
“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” or in Alice Walker’s
womanism, with its ever-­widening pool of ­human insight cultivated from a black
female vernacular idiom. ­There are other examples too: Anna Julia Cooper’s
epiphanic “Only the black ­w oman can say ‘when and where I enter, in the
quiet undisputed dignity of my womanhood, then and ­there the ­whole Negro
race enters with me’ ” (63; emphasis and capitalization in original); Toni Morri-
son’s telling of the entire story of modernity and coloniality through Sethe and
her ­daughter Beloved, which Saidiya Hartman repeats—­revises, elegantly—in
Lose Your M ­ other: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route; Audre Lorde’s belief
that a queer black m ­ other’s body could be enough to conceptualize what it is to
know (“Poetry Is Not a Luxury” or The Cancer Journals). Black feminist think-
ing might be specific in naming black w ­ omen, but its ambition has always been
the breadth of being alive, the princi­ple that the lived experience of one who
is black and female is comprehensive enough to manifest totality. Indeed, we

Aliveness 11
might call this work feminist black studies, where the commitment to a feminist
orientation determines the entirety of what black studies might be.26
The world of black aliveness is gendered, binarily and other­wise. It recog-
nizes gender as a site of ­human beingness but also as a violation. Moreover, the
invocation of this world should not be confused with “calling all black ­people,”
especially if such hailing intends to exclude or regulate certain habitats of
being. In a black world, ­there is no need—­would be no need—to call in or to
exclude anyone. The solicitation of a black world is replete with eccentricity
and is allergic to the imposition of normativity or authenticity. Blackness ­here
“is . . . ​broad enough and open enough to encompass, but without enclosing”
(Harney and Moten 158), blackness as a commonwealth untroubled by needing
to speak to or for. Such conceptualization liberates us from blackness as dif-
ference so as to be able to see—to be—­all the black intraracial difference ­there
might be. The black world is an assemblage, an open collective of dynamism,
of pull and tug and relationality; this characterization recalls what Hilton Als,
in “Ghosts in the House,” writes of Toni Morrison: “Situating herself inside the
black world, Morrison undermined the myth of black cohesiveness.” Exactly.27
Since blackness cannot exist fully, humanly, in the world, we w ­ ill imagine a
world where the condition of being alive is of us. In a black world, the case of
our lives is aliveness; not death, not even death’s vitality, but aliveness. We are
alive, we are alive, or, as a poet once put it, “This is the urgency: Live!”28 Such
aliveness is relational and it moves one into other habitats of (one’s) being, into
and ­toward more, akin to the stringing together of being in Clifton’s “reply.”
In Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being, I am interested in theorizing aliveness
through poems of relation and first-­person essays, especially in considering the
philosophical work of pronouns (“one,” “me,” “I”) and verbs (imperatives, sub-
junctives). I believe that an aesthetic of aliveness makes pos­si­ble an encoun-
ter with the ethical question “how to be.” That is, though an antiblack world
would to foreclose ethical possibility for the one who is black, in the totality
of a black world, we can conceptualize “how to be” as a reckoning of ­human
capacity, as the right and burden of being.29
A note to the reader: In ­these pages, I am trying to create a clear, readable
line. As such, I have privileged the creative works (poems and essays) as well as
a par­tic­u­lar genealogy of thinkers who are mostly black and female, though the
breadth of my scholarly debt is indexed in my endnotes.30

(­Today I am sad, mad, wild, full of rage in and out. ­Today is a day in June 2020,
summer of racism’s recurring pandemic. ­Today, I am of molecular rage about
Ahmaud Arbery, killed by white vigilantes while he was jogging; George Floyd,

12 Introduction
killed during a police arrest in Minneapolis; Breonna Taylor, a health care
worker killed by police fire. And o­ thers, many o­ thers, including Dominique
Fells and Riah Milton, two black transwomen whose murders add to the par­
tic­ul­ ar vulnerability of our black transgender folks; like Tony McDade, a black
transman killed by police in Florida. And more, including the disregard for
black life that manifests as everyday menace: in this season, a black man has
been harassed and threatened while birding in a city park, and an eleven-­year-­
old black girl has been assaulted by a white ­woman while trying to collect her
grand­mother’s mail.31 ­Today, when I am thinking about black aliveness, I am
exhausted by black death; today I am sad that I am exhausted. Racism is mur-
derous, and its murderousness travels and compounds insidiously and without
impunity. By the time this paragraph is published, by the time one reads it,
­these names and incidents ­will be old news, replaced by another incalculable
cata­log of harm. That certainty exhausts me ­today.
As necessary as “Black Lives ­Matter” has proven to be, so efficient and beau-
tiful a truth-­claim, its necessity disorients me; to hear it said or see it printed as
an emblem is existentially disorienting. I want a black world where the ­matter
of mattering ­matters indisputably, where black mattering is beyond expres-
sion. I want to read and study in the orientation of a black world.
­Today ­there is no reconciling the facts of our lives, which seem tethered to
death, and the case for black aliveness. Both have to be true at the same time.)

This work begins with a single premise, an instruction, ­really: imagine a black
world. Such a directive acknowledges that the New World plunder of moder-
nity and coloniality enacts a destruction of the world as it was and might have
become, that the New World unorders the relationship of the ­human to place,
time, other ­human. Or we might say ­there never was a world, that imperi-
alism’s destructiveness is that it imposed a world logic. ­Either case describes
world-­failure that, among other horrors, mobilizes blackness as an antithesis
to ­human life.32
In the face of failure that is so unspeakably broad, I use “imagine” as a turn
­toward the small, an opportunity to understand black worldness as what black
texts do . . . ​as the aesthetics of black art. Reading this way scales the m
­ atter
of world-­and-­being to a level I can manage, and though it may not resolve
catastrophe, it moves away from summoning black lit­er­a­ture to teach about
black humanity. (What is ­there to learn? The ­human is ­human.) “Imagine”
postpones the logics of address, dominance, and misrecognition—­the terms
of an antiblack world—­that interfere with beholding both black aliveness and
a black ethic of relation. This study of aliveness rests on the inclination to

Aliveness 13
imagine that the black text speaks to and in a black world, subjunctive and
imaginary as that is, away from the false and damaging expectation that black
texts have to speak universally, which means that they speak to the larger racial
proj­ect or conversation—­that is, to p ­ eople who are not black . . . ​which indeed
they do (a text speaks to any reader who reads it). Simply, I want to elude the
imposition of the generic nonblack reader, an imposition that potentially cor-
rupts how we regard the aesthetics of black art, or, at the very least, excludes
a black reader from being the “one” who is referenced and ­imagined as the
­human person reading, learning, becoming. “Imagine” installs the possibility
that a black one might be the reader who could find themself t­ here, beheld in
the suspension of literary worldmaking.33
“Imagine a black world” is both a way to read texts and a way to understand
what is instantiated by the text itself, a choral subjunctive that exemplifies
but does not plead. This undertaking is Cliftonian and Morrisonian, since no
thinkers or writers have advocated for the textual world of black being like
Lucille Clifton and Toni Morrison.
This is a story of us—­there are and could be many stories, and this is just
one, a story of aliveness rather than of life, since I am determined to avoid the
trou­ble that comes in trying to represent life’s unrepresentability. The word
­here is “aliveness,” a quality of being, a term of habitat, a manner and aesthetic,
a feeling—or many of them, cir­cuits in an atmosphere. Like breath. We are
totality: we are and are of the universe; we are and are of a black world, this us
who are cited by that ­great poetic riff—­“they do / they do / they do.”
This is a conversation of us, black us and our aliveness.

14 Introduction
 1 ALIVENESS

AND RELATION

“Can I say again how alive your being alive makes me feel!?!”
Every­thing that I might pursue about a concept of aliveness is legible in this
sweetness that literary theorist Barbara Christian wrote to poet Audre Lorde
­after Lorde’s pre­sen­ta­tion at the 1978 mla convention: “Can I say again how
alive your being alive makes me feel!?!”1 ­Here, in this declaration, aliveness is
constituted in repetition and therefore is unfurling, an experience one encoun-
ters rather than possesses—­a relational capacity manifested through the speak-
ing one’s sensibilities, her feeling, her intelligence. H
­ ere, too, is the ordinary
quality of aliveness, its inherence (the language is common, but so, too, is the
feeling, even as its particularity means that its meaningfulness has never been
known before) as well as its exclamation of force and openness (it is framed
as a question; the question mark is encased by exclamation). Fi­nally, ­here is a
message about and sent to another that casts attention on the messenger; that
is, if we are reading Christian’s missive conceptually, we ­will notice how the
messenger is being suspended in a scene of tingling astuteness. This suspended
shimmering is her being in the world, which is also an orientation to being.
Again, every­thing in this and the next chapter leans on what is said finely
in Christian’s sweetness, which I am invoking as an embedded epigraph: “Can
I say again how alive your being alive makes me feel!?!”2

“Aliveness” can be an unwieldy notion ­because it is commonsense but also

­because it is hard to describe aptly. We might return to Lucille Clifton’s poem
“reply,” especially its fluency of verbs, as a way to start this thinking. Notice
­there, for example, that the concluding repeated phrase “they do / they do / they
do” recasts the poem’s other verbs as eternal capacities, ­doings that have hap-
pened, are happening, ­will happen ever again. ­These ­doings are not appraised
by quality (how they are done), nor by their object (to whom they are directed),
but instead they iterate the idea of existence, the manifestness of the “they” who
“do.” Impor­tant, too, is the fact that Clifton’s verbs extend beyond a simplistic
notion of action or agency. For example, her cata­log includes verbs that are nei-
ther singular nor discrete acts (“try,” “tire,” “break,” “mourn”), verbs that are
exceptionally intransitive through being involuntary (“bleed”), verbs that suggest
inhabitance so as to exceed characterization (“live,” “love”). Aliveness, then, is not
action but something ­else, perhaps what po­liti­cal theorist Jane Bennett describes
as vibrant ­matter, “a liveliness intrinsic to the materiality of the ­thing” or the
power that constitutes “the force of ­things.”3
Aliveness as inherence.
The complexities of this term abound in scholarly discourses, so I want to
be clear that I d
­ on’t mean “aliveness” as an exact synonym of “life,” as a distinc-
tion between animal forms and inanimate m ­ atter. Nor do I mean the condi-
tion of exile or belonging conferred by a state, a king, or a community; nor the
specificity of blackness as an antithesis or prob­lem to life; nor any discourse
that implies hierarchies of worthiness. Moreover, like cultural theorist Alex-
ander Weheliye, I am not interested in taking the h ­ uman or its categories of
life for granted, since I understand black studies to have exposed the h ­ uman as
a heuristic (8), as a category and method of analy­sis that reveals much about
the structures of the modern world. My interest is in an idea of aliveness that
eludes quantification and qualification, since one could not be of more or less
aliveness nor could one be redeemed by one’s aliveness.4
Let’s assume that aliveness is of ­every being in a black world—­again, inher-
ence. Let’s assume aliveness as the force of and in being, akin to the mode of

16 Chapter 1
existence that black queer theorist L. H. Stallings defines as “stank ­matter”: “a
form of creative energy generated by the self and the self ’s relationship to sa-
cred forces. . . . ​Imaginative freedom for a sacred subjectivity that exists before
the narratives of gender hierarchy and sexual pathology can coerce it into a
social and po­liti­cal subject” (123–124). I am compelled by Stallings’s descrip-
tion of stank as a materiality, in regard to embodiment, as I am by her claim
of it as a sacred habitat of being. That is, she describes an inhabitance that is
material and immaterial, and that exceeds repre­sen­ta­tion, which is not the
same as arguing that the inhabitance itself is excessive.5 I read in Stallings’s
characterization a notion of aliveness as a condition of ­human knowing, which
is precisely the territory Audre Lorde travels in her 1977 masterwork “Poetry Is
Not a Luxury.” This is how the essay begins:

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing
upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to
bring about through ­those lives. It is within this light that we form ­those
ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry
as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to ­those ideas
which are, ­until the poem, nameless and formless—­about to be birthed,
but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry
springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as
knowledge births (precedes) understanding. (­Sister Outsider 36)

Sigh: Lorde’s thinking is so dazzling, it could withstand repetition and trans-

literation, especially the first sentence: “The quality of light by which we
scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and
upon the changes which we hope to bring about through t­hose lives.” Inci-
sively, Lorde declares that the manner and sensation of how we pay attention
to our being constitute our being itself, as well as informing what our being is/
becomes in the world. From the outset, in that gorgeous first sentence, Lorde
theorizes being as embodied and experiential and reflective and aspirational;
she describes feeling and sensation as kin to thought and reason, all in one sen-
tence. Said another way, her claim links reason (the word “scrutinize”) to other
capacities of knowing, especially habits of the body. And vitally, imagination
does not precede experience; instead, the engagement of experience (“distilla-
tion”) constitutes imaginative potentiality. Lorde’s thinking h ­ ere is an argu-
ment about how we understand being, especially ­because she situates knowing
(knowledge) as an enterprise ordinated by sensation and embodiment: “For
each of us as ­women, ­there is a dark place within, where hidden and grow-
ing our true spirit rises. . . . ​Within ­these deep places, each one of us holds an

Aliveness and Relation 17

incredible reserve of creativity and power” (36–37). Lorde advances an idiom
where the metaphysical ­isn’t before or separate from the physical, where the
physical is not figured only via the body in its con­temporary time. To me, this
articulation of materiality as the name for one’s apparatus of knowing, this
explication is a theorization of aliveness.6
I am toggling between the terms “embodiment” and “materiality” so as to
avoid some of the discursive narrowness of the body as a racialized and gendered
notion. That is, ­because of the pervasiveness of body-­mind dualism, Lorde’s ideas
imply the body even as she d ­ oesn’t specifically deploy that term in “Poetry.” This
is a crucial observation ­because it asks us to recognize that Lorde is advancing
an argument about the body as the materiality of and meta­phor for experience,
experience that—as the site of knowing—is material and immaterial.
­There are two hitches ­here. One is that claims of the body are often feminized
and racialized, as if ­matter ­were a distinct and impoverished kind of intelligence.
Lorde describes this dynamic well in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,”
a 1978 essay where she writes that “the erotic is a resource within each of us that
lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our un-
expressed or unrecognized feeling,” and then ­later, that as “­women we have come
to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge”
(­Sister Outsider 53). This accent on feeling highlights Lorde’s investment in the
body as a geography of intelligence, her phenomenological argument about how
we know. Every­one lives in and through a body, her thinking seems to say, even if
only some of us are apprehended via narrow terms of embodiment.7
The second hitch relates to the body as singularly material, as the seemingly
natu­ral, biologically confirmed textuality of the ­human. We know this conclu-
sion is false, ­because ideas about the body have been in­ven­ted to support differing
notions of humanity—­that is, since the ­human body becomes known through
narrative and rhe­toric, t­ here can be no ideological zero-­degree claim made about
it. (Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter make this point superbly clear.) Impor-
tantly, then, Lorde refers to embodiment, but she is not interested in an essential-
ized idiom of the-­body-­is-­female-­and-­has-­superlative-­integrity. Instead, Lorde’s
turn to the body articulates a force of being, a capacity of knowing that ­doesn’t
accede to binary logic; for Lorde, the body is both immanent and transcendent,
a phenomenological sensation of being that incorporates inside and outside.
Again, the body is a syntax for describing the aliveness of a h ­ uman one, or, in
Toni Morrison’s language, “the body is the vehicle, not the point” (Jazz 228).8
We might notice, then, that Lorde moves between references that specify
femaleness and ones that are more generic. For example, in the foregoing sen-
tence from “Uses of the Erotic,” she acknowledges the erotic as “a deeply female”

18 Chapter 1
plane in “each of us.” One way of understanding this fluctuation is to recall
that the essay originated as a speech to a convention of w ­ omen historians; in
that regard, ­there is no distance between “each of us” and the “female plane”
of erotic consciousness, since the idealized subject of Lorde’s theorizing is gen-
dered female. Literary scholar Lyndon K. Gill reminds us that Lorde’s work
commits to thinking about ­human capacity through (black) female specificity.
As such, her existentialism avoids the ideological trap of binarism and minori-
tization, and her claims instantiate the (black) female as an appropriate figure
for philosophical imagining.9 Out of this audacity, Lorde, in “Poetry,” writes,
“For w ­ omen, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our exis-
tence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes
and dreams ­toward survival and change, first made into language, then into
idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to
the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes
and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our
daily lives” (37). This praisesong dissolves the boundary between the magical
and the tangible, the sensible and the intelligible, and defines consciousness as
a habitat where transcendence and immanence converge. ­There is a striking
parallel between Lorde’s language ­here and that of classic American transcen-
dentalism, especially as articulated in the opening of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Nature: “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradi-
tion, and a religion by revelation to us?” (35). A transcendent ­matter, indeed.10
I love the way that Lorde’s theorizing is at once epistemological (about the
way we know) and ontological (about what being is), a black feminist take on
the materiality and immateriality of consciousness. And it is in this regard
that I invoke her thinking to characterize what I mean by aliveness in a black
world: the becoming of beingness, the sensations that inhabit one’s body in its
existence and that constitute intelligence, the way that “bodies think as they
feel” (Massumi 211). This recourse to feeling situates aliveness as a plenitude
that compounds without pattern, aliveness as a poetic, an affective aesthetic
beholding of being, an ars vitalia as in an instance—or series of instances—of
being alive. And h ­ ere, Lorde’s warning that “poetry is not a luxury” becomes
clear as a declaration of the inevitability and seriousness of aliveness, of poetic
becoming as a necessity for being in the world.11
It is hard to express precisely a notion of inevitability without seeming naïve,
though perhaps this impasse is a failure of repre­sen­ta­tion, since the terms of
aliveness c­ an’t be articulated fully or clearly. That is, I ­don’t want to make any
possessive claim about aliveness as a ­counter to the dispossessing dimensions

Aliveness and Relation 19

of life in the world. Aliveness is of and in the one who is alive. I know that society’s
structures inflect the concept and experience of a life such that “­there is no life
without the [social] conditions of life that variably sustain life.”12 And still, what
I am trying to do is to write about aliveness in a black world rather than life in
the world as we know it—to write about aliveness in the aesthetic imaginary of
black thought, which might help us attend to the poetic aliveness inevitable in
each black ­human being. Again, I mean aliveness as instance(s) of being, which
is how it is characterized by Celie’s statement of ordination and instantiation
in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: “I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and c­ an’t
cook, a voice say to every­thing listening. But I’m h ­ ere” (176). I love how precisely
Celie locates being in the phenomenological claim of the adverb “­here,” a deixis
that points imprecisely to a precise, beautiful state: “I’m ­here.”13
Aliveness is quiet, at least in the way that I enunciate the latter term in The
Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Re­sis­tance in Black Culture. In that book, I argue for
quiet as a meta­phor of black interiority, a stay against the social ideas of black-
ness. But in making the case through interiority—in trying to refuse publicness
as the totalizing denominator of how blackness is figured and represented—­I
might have overemphasized the inner life at the expense of thinking through
what it means to be alive in the world or, better still, what it means to be of
aliveness in a black world. Consider this another attempt, then, this trying to
attend to black aliveness, impossible as it is to characterize it fully, noxious as
it is to try to put such aliveness into any ser­vice. Aliveness is quiet and interior,
yes, but remember that “despite its name, the interior is not unconnected to
the world of t­ hings (the public or po­liti­cal or social world).”14 Indeed, by in-
voking a black world and suspending antiblack logics, I can loosen my invest-
ment in the interior as a guiding meta­phor. Aliveness, as phenomenological
consciousness, collapses the distinction of inside from outside, which collates
with Lorde’s description, in “Uses of the Erotic,” of knowing as an immanence
that transcends outward:

When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external direc-

tives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we
live away from t­ hose erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives
are ­limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a
structure that is not based on h ­ uman need, let alone an individual’s. But
when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic
within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions
upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deep-
est sense. (­Sister Outsider 58; emphasis added)

20 Chapter 1
Unerringly, Lorde advances a case for the excellence of feeling where being “is
not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we
can feel in the d­ oing” (54). She argues for full feeling as a h
­ uman astuteness, a
“self-­connection shared [that] is a mea­sure of the joy which I know myself to be
capable of feeling” (57). This theorization of feeling-­as-­knowing coheres “Uses
of the Erotic” and “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” and the thinking climaxes when
Lorde, in “Poetry,” declares “I feel, therefore I can be ­free” (38). In this maxim,
an embodied poetic habitat is not an enclosure but an opening, and feeling is a
praxis through which one can meet and be met. What emerges in Lorde’s poetic,
to borrow Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s language, “is an unruly sense of being/know-
ing/feeling existence” (2): this is aliveness, this contagious being through open-
ness, this tingling consciousness or habitat of sense that is being in the world,
or, as Barbara Christian expressed it, “Can I say again how alive your being alive
makes me feel!?!”15

I read “aliveness” as a term of relation where the focus is on one’s preparedness

for encounter rather than on the encounter itself. In this way, to be in relation
is to be in the embodied sociality of one’s readiness.
My framing of relation as readiness recalls Martin Buber’s classic work pub-
lished in 1923, I and Thou, which argues that t­ here are two ways of being in regard
to the world, a subject-­object orientation that Buber calls I-­It and a subject-­
subject orientation, I-­Thou or I-­You, which is of superlative excellence.16 In an
I-­You orientation, one ­doesn’t understand or know a tree, the weather, another
person, but rather one comes into being through an open relation with the tree,
weather, person. Such inhabiting upends the self ’s authority as one relinquishes
the preface of knowing anything or anyone; instead, consciousness arrives in
the happening of being open. “The relation to the You is unmediated. Nothing
conceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagi-
nation,” Buber intones (62), a statement that summarizes his e­ arlier claim: “I
can neither experience nor describe the form which meets me, but only body it
forth. And yet I behold it, splendid in the radiance of what confronts me, clearer
than all the clearness of the world which is experienced” (10).17 Buber’s thinking
is a thesis on being and being alive, and his ideas collate to Lorde’s arguments
for feeling and materiality. Centrally, relation is a princi­ple of intersubjectivity,
of riskful surrender to being in shared otherness: “The You encounters me by
grace—it cannot be found by seeking,” and then ­later, a vital repetition: “The
You encounters me” (Buber 62). And even this language is inept, since Buber’s
arguments warn against abstracting the other or the self, a warning that under-
mines the sentence “The You encounters me.” (If neither the You nor the I is

Aliveness and Relation 21

knowable, neither can be spoken of.) Relational inhabitance is aspirational—­
that is, one never achieves it, nor can one determine to live in it fully. Buber
declares this much in the closing of his argument’s first section: “And in all the
seriousness of truth, listen: without It a h ­ uman cannot live. But whoever lives
only with that is not h ­ uman” (85). This contradiction is a necessary acknowl­
edgment of the impossibility of living in a preconscious state; and still, Buber is
sure to remind us that the yearning for and through relation is our salvation.18
In our common consideration of relation as a theory of twoness, we emphasize
the meeting (with the other) and idealize the other as the site of encounter. But
I want to privilege the m ­ atter of orientation, that quality of presence or habitat
of readiness formed not by the expectation of the other but by the shedding of
­expectation. Readiness h ­ ere allies with dance scholar Danielle Goldman’s I Want
to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom, which describes improvisation
as a collusion of preparedness, intention, and surrender that ignites “practices of
freedom” (4). Goldman’s framing accentuates my emphasis on the thresholding
aliveness of relation as the capacity to meet and be met rather than the ­actual
meeting.19
We might think of relation as a poetic of alive-­being, as exemplified in
Édouard Glissant’s own classic work, 1990’s Poetics of Relation. I am compelled,
especially, by Glissant’s combination of the two terms—­“poetics,” “relation”—­
into a schema for theorizing New World blackness. Specifically, Glissant con-
ceptualizes the abyss of Atlantic slave history as an aesthetic, po­liti­cal, and
spiritual state of undoing, a terrifying opening that potentially surpasses “the
ontological obsession with knowledge” (19). For Glissant, being in the world
is an opacity, an inhabitance that is indescribable and, as for Buber, that does
not yet exist: a “totality in evolution, whose order is continually in flux and
whose disorder one can imagine forever” (133; emphasis added). Such totality of
aesthetic possibility resonates with Lorde’s notion of embodied intelligence;
indeed, in a moment of flourish, Glissant offers an explication of totality that
seems eerily resonant with Lorde:

The world’s poetic force (its energy), kept alive within us, fastens itself by
fleeting, delicate shivers, onto the rambling prescience of poetry in the
depths of our being. The active vio­lence in real­ity distracts us from knowing it.
Our obligation to “grasp” vio­lence, and often fight it, estranges us from
such live intensity, as it also freezes the shiver and disrupts prescience.
But this force never runs dry b­ ecause it is its own turbulence. Poetry—­
thus, nonetheless, totality gathering strength—is driven by another poetic
dimension that we all divine or babble within ourselves. It could well be

22 Chapter 1
 that poetry is basically and mainly defined in this relationship of itself
to nothing other than itself, of density to volatility, or the ­whole to the
individual. (159; emphasis added)

Glissant d ­ oesn’t ignore the sustained destructive real­ity of vio­lence—­his opac-

ity is an anticolonial argument against the racist construction of black Atlantic
being—­but he also remains invested in an energy, an errant force that corre-
sponds to the depths of a ­human being. And poetry, he argues, is a frame for
explicating and enacting this totality, this aliveness that is everywhere and
every­thing.20
Aliveness is inevitable ­because it is totality, a black world rendering that
implies neither universality nor prescription (the word is not “totalitarian”),
but instead refers to the every­thing of being in a black world. As such, t­ here is
no being other than being-­in-­relation, no being other than being-­of-­aliveness.
And despite my attempts at summary, Glissant is right that “the idea of to-
tality alone is an obstacle to totality” (192), which means that totality cannot
be understood or corralled. Suffice it to say that totality idiomizes being as a
“circulation [that] goes in all directions at once, in all the directions . . . ​opened
by presence to presence: all ­things, all beings, all entities, every­thing past and
­future, alive, dead, inanimate, stones, plants, nails, gods.” This “totality of all
being” is the aliveness of a black world (Nancy 3).21

What does black world relationality look like in a poem? For an answer, we
could think with another example from Lucille Clifton, her untitled verse
known widely by its iconic first line:

­ on’t you celebrate with me

w
what i have s­ haped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and ­woman
what did i see to be except myself ?
i made it up
­here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed. (427)

Aliveness and Relation 23

This poem generates into full bloom from the invitation of its initial question,
which sets forth not a relation between the speaker and the addressed but a
call to the speaker’s instantiation.22 We can appreciate this formation better
by reading the poem literally and linearly, and by paying attention to its vacil-
lation between question and answer. Notice, for example, how the opening
question bleeds into the brief declaration, “i had no model,” the shortest, sim-
plest, most direct statement in the entire verse, one that is emphasized by a
period and a line break. The definitiveness of this statement shifts the opening
query (“­won’t you”) from being a plea to an ­imagined reader into being a plat-
form for the speaking one. In fact, “i had no model” is so assured that it nearly
forecloses continuance since ­there might not be anything ­else to be said ­after
such a conclusion. Of course, to stop ­here would be to exist as the foreclosed;
Clifton’s speaker is too alive, too keenly of pursuit for that. She, the speaker,
expands from the declaration of modellessness, asking, “what did i see to be ex-
cept myself ?” Notice that this second question, especially in its irony, is aimed
by the speaker ­toward herself, and in keeping with the poem’s dialogic pattern,
the answer is another four-­word declarative statement, “i made it up.” The line
break h­ ere isolates this claim and emphasizes “i made it up” as the poem’s ful-
crum, its center. And yet in a poem of such volatility, the center cannot hold.
Clifton’s “­won’t you celebrate with me” is a slim and s­ imple poem, but its dy-
namics are exceptional. Indeed, I am trying to highlight Clifton’s exquisite use of
invitation as a volatile form of the speaker’s aliveness, the speaker who is the one
who both poses the questions and offers the replies. This interchange exempli-
fies the speaker’s relationality, her being called by/toward a practice of knowing.
Clifton aestheticizes the speaker’s pursuit through the use of line breaks that
amplify the compounding meaning within and between phrases. That is, the
enjambment tethers each insight to the next, asserts a definitive t­ hing only to
undo it. Notice the striking example of “my one hand holding tight / my other
hand,” where the line break seems to imply the image of a fist, though what is
being regarded is not only a tautness and a posture of strain but a haptic relation,
the world made in the small space between one hand and another. (For example,
the image is ­either of one hand holding the other or of one hand that is tight
while the other is accounted for as “my other hand”—in both cases, the image
multiplies.) Enjambment propels and animates “­won’t you celebrate with me” as
a poem of swerve, surprise, and discovery. And to behold its praxis of relation, we
have to read with and as the speaker, to be capable of the poem’s unfolding not as
a lesson to the “you” but as an instance of the black female speaker, her becoming-­
oriented in ­these verse moves.23

24 Chapter 1
 What a fantastic excellent ­thing, this poem of relation that chronicles a
sequence of becoming—­“­won’t you celebrate with me / . . . ​/ . . . ​i had no model
/ . . . ​/ i made it up”—­and that, in conclusion, morphs the opening question
into a gentle command, “come celebrate / with me.” To whom is this offer
made, this scene of regard that is astute to threat and that is still tender? To
the speaker herself, the one whose capacity for becoming is being signaled
through the poem’s unfurling. Notice, for example, the image of “starshine
and clay,” where starlight is not adequate heat to set clay, where a star’s quality
of light and clay’s quality of materiality indicate potential . . . ​all of which is
reflective of the idiom of becoming. (Even the words “bridge” and “between”
cohere with this notion as further evidence of Clifton’s verse prowess.) Notice,
fi­nally, the present perfect tense—­“has tried,” “has failed”—­which infers that
tomorrow, the relating begins again, this sustained work of being alive. I love
the philosophical intelligence of Clifton’s ode for cele­bration, how its speaker
encounters herself as a site of knowing, how her inhabitance radiates through
a lyric approximation of voice such that the speaker surrenders to feeling so as
to be transformed by feeling.24
I am trying to untangle this poem from its common interpretation as an an-
them of opposition. Surely the speaker reckons with the harm of an antiblack,
antiwoman world. And still, if we read “­won’t you celebrate with me” through
its aliveness, we can behold its rendering of the speaker’s knowing as happen-
ing through unknowing—an idiom of knowing as commencement, not conclu-
sion. In a conceit of aliveness, we can appreciate Clifton’s speaker as speaking
in and to the world of herself, as a figure figuring (again, reckoning with harm,
among other conditions), as a black female voice in thought. The poem renders
this black female knowing as a wellspring capacity, an ontological case that
moves not against but ­toward. I love the world and worldmaking of this poem,
its self-­oriented relationality where the speaker is also the addressee, such that
when she says, “come celebrate,” she is invoking herself as one who can with-
stand the invitation, what­ever it may yield.
I love discerning and thinking with the work that Clifton’s speaker does
through the poem, work that is akin to the miracle of surviving e­ very daily kill-
ing threat. “Come look at us,” the speaker seems to whisper to herself as a being
of multiplicity, a call that echoes the moment in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their
Eyes ­Were Watching God when Janie has finished telling her story to Pheoby and
she, Janie, sits alone in her bedroom, remembering the telling and its won­der:
“­Here was peace. She pulled in her horizon like a ­great fish-­net. Pulled it from
around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life

Aliveness and Relation 25

in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see” (184). Clifton’s poem is a
discourse on this call to study what one has endured, what one has become and
is becoming through the enduring. In her slim, spare poem, we can glimpse the
speaker’s force of being, the surprise of her breadth as she is “sent” by herself to
herself in the way Fred Moten means that term: “To be sent, to be transported
out of yourself, it’s an ecstatic experience, it’s not an experience of interiority,
it’s an experience of exteriority, it’s an exteriorization. And so ­we’re sent. ­We’re
sent to one another. We are sent by one another to one another. . . . ​­We’re sent
by one another to one another u ­ ntil one and another ­don’t signify anymore”
(“Interview”). I might take mild exception with Moten’s characterization of in-
teriority, since I understand this invocation as a princi­ple of Lordean knowing,
which means it is interior and beyond. And still, I am compelled by his “being
sent” as an apt notion for thinking about “the fugitive being of ‘infinite human-
ity’ ” (Moten, “The Case of Blackness” 214), as a synonym of aliveness: in a black
world, we can be sent to one another and this being-­sent characterizes not only
how we are oriented to another but how we are oriented in our breadth of being.
I am being-­sent in myself, which is the aliveness of a poem that permits a
speaker to say “come celebrate.”
The consideration of black aliveness is a consideration of knowing, about
how we navigate knowing through terms other than reason or the binaried con-
ditions of interior-­exterior—­aliveness as a fuller habitat for being in regard to
one’s being. Aliveness is an argument for blackness oriented ­toward towardness,
and its case can only be made through a discourse of relation and in the terms
of material habitat enacted within the poetic. “The highest point of knowledge
is always a poetics,” a leaning ­toward and an opening, Glissant tells us (Poetics of
Relation 140).25 Such poetics is a scene of relation, as it is for Lorde, Clifton, and
­here again in June Jordan’s “­These Poems,” an ars poetica from her 1977 collection
­Things That I Do in the Dark:

­These poems
they are t­ hings that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?

­These words
they are stones in the ­water
­running away

26 Chapter 1
 ­ hese skeletal lines
T
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are

whoever I may become. (2)

I am interested especially in Jordan’s characterization of the poetic as

­materiality—as “skeletal lines” and yearning arms, as “stones in the ­water /
­running away,” where the awry movement could describe the ­water, the stones,
or both together as one propels the other. We might notice materiality also in
the opening meta­phor, poems as “­things that I do,” particularly the speaker’s
use of that enduring verb of ­human enactment and aliveness, “do.” This descrip-
tion enlivens the poetic not as a t­ hing written or made but as a t­ hing one does.
Furthermore, Jordan’s first three lines collate together synonyms of poetry such
that “­These poems” is enjambed with the superfluous pronoun “they,” which
is followed by a meta­phorical referent for poems. It is as if the speaker ­were
saying poems (“­These poems”) poems (“they”) are poems (“­things I do”)—­and
if we read darkness as an oblique idiom of the poetic, then the speaker’s mani-
festo commences with a four-­part chant: poems poems are poems are poetic.
This tumbling opening sets up the deployment of relation as an invitation
to surrender. In Jordan’s poem, the second person materializes as a corpus
of abundance for the speaker, who beckons ­toward an other who is not yet
known or met. The yearning is ­toward the intensity of being and of prepared-
ness, an orientation marked by the query, “and / are you ready?” This question
might seem undirected, but it belongs expressly to the speaker, especially in
light of the first-­person exposure in the poem’s fourth stanza: “I am a stranger,”
the speaker asserts, privileging her own vulnerability, “I am a stranger / learn-
ing to worship the strangers / around me.” I have repeated the stanza’s first de-
clarative line to emphasize the speaker’s admission of transience, that rather
than marking the other as a stranger, Jordan’s speaker situates otherness as
her relationality and announces herself as a subject of hesitant becoming. “I
am a stranger,” says the poet, since what ­else is poetic inhabitance but a sum-
mons to yield to the sentiment of being alien? Appropriately, then, in the
beautiful closing couplet, it is the speaker whose capacity is capacious, a dis-
position most notable via the subjunctive verb in the last line: “whoever you
are / whoever I may become” (emphasis added). The poet-­speaker ­here is left

Aliveness and Relation 27

alive in the poem, the one who w ­ ill be made and unmade, the one oriented
by becoming through a relational habitat. In Jordan’s poem, the speaker oc-
cupies the subject position of both I and you, and the poetic is a “form-­of-­life,”
a genre for black being.26
Jordan’s use of the stranger as an idiom of aliveness calls to mind Toni
Morrison’s “Strangers,” her first-­person narration of an encounter with an un-
known fisherwoman. The essay is a relational marvel for its meditation on the
borders of being—­and the necessary, terrifying trespass of t­ hose borders—­but
also for the way that Morrison’s prose unveils the speaker, Morrison herself,
as the object of study; that is, the stranger ­here is not the fisherwoman who
appears at the edge of the backyard and dis­appears ­after a single promising
meeting, but is Morrison and the affective register revealed in her longing
to embrace this strange ­woman’s otherness. Morrison uses the encounter to
figure through the upheaval of relationality: “To understand that I was long-
ing for and missing some aspect of myself, and t­ here are no strangers. T ­ here
are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of
which we wish to protect ourselves from. For the stranger is not foreign, she is
random, not alien but remembered; and it is the randomness of the encounter
with our already known—­although unacknowledged—­selves that summons a
­ripple of alarm” (70).27 This distilled clarity reprises the relational materiality
in Jordan’s “­These Poems,” the lurching ­toward the reckoning lurking within
a poetic inhabitance. I read it as an articulation of the knowing to be had in a
black world invitation to “come celebrate.”
At stake in my study of Clifton and Jordan and Morrison is a claim about
the second person not as an encasement of the other where the authority re-
sides with the speaker, but as an occasion to consider the tender becoming of
the speaking one, the one who calls the scene into being, the one who yields
to the risk and possibility of venturing to say “you.”28 Again, relation’s move-
ment, its directionality, is an opening ­toward: “Relation is a direction which
is not the direction t­ oward unity but which remains a direction in any case”
(Glissant, Poetics of Relation 10).29 This towardness describes the aliveness I am
conceptualizing through black poetics, the pulse of being and happening, the
characterization of becoming that exists all over the world of black texts. In the
relation of a black world, one can say “you” and can be undone by the saying.
This is aliveness, poetry as a knowing, as epistemology, “a revelatory distil-
lation of experience” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 37): the poetic, which
invites us to live in subjunctivity, which casts subjunctivity as an essential con-
dition of being alive; the poetic, which as an ontology asks “what if.” Indeed,

28 Chapter 1
what I am naming as a poetic might properly be characterized by the ancient
Greek term poiesis, “the activity in which a person brings something into being
that did not exist before.”30 In a black world, such ontological making consti-
tutes the intelligence to be had in being through relationality, an aliveness that
is of us and of the textual worlds we make.

Aliveness and Relation 29

This page intentionally left blank
2 ALIVENESS

AND ONENESS

In a black world imaginary, t­ here is aliveness, blackness that gushes with ex-
istence, the knowing that Audre Lorde theorizes as embodied consciousness.
Such aliveness carries the relational name of “oneness.”
“One” is the pronoun case in which a h ­ uman conceptualizes being through
the capaciousness of herself, through the act of rendering herself as the figure
of the impersonal. It is the syntax of philosophical self-­projection where the
speaker throws herself into question and possibility, imagining the instance
that she is and is not (yet). As such, “one” is a fictional case and a habitat of ap-
prehension; the person speaking through “one” makes herself into an object of
specificity and breadth—­she multiplies through this imaginary praxis. This is
oneness, which is not synonymous with terms of individuality: oneness where
the subject is always relational. The language ­here may be slippery, but I mean
simply to advance oneness as the name for the praxis of beholding one’s self,
of engaging one’s being as the basis for existing in and existing with one’s ques-
tions of being.1
Oneness as a grammar of the materiality and immateriality of consciousness.
To be clear, oneness is not akin to individuality. The individual, as such
circulates in the Western imaginary, is an incompatible and bankrupt idea for
my study of black aliveness. For one, the notion of individuality is not pos­si­
ble for a black subject in an antiblack world, since blackness is always not only
a collective designation but a collective indictment. ­There is no conceptual
individuality pos­si­ble for one who is black in an antiblack world. And indeed,
the idea of individualism is too entangled with racial capitalism to infer the
relational—­the spiritually philosophical—­register I mean by oneness.2
Oneness belongs, or should belong, to one who is black. And yet, the idea
of oneness as an essential, even sacred, quality of being is antithetical to
our common discourse of blackness. ­There is no one for blackness, no one of
blackness—­“What is missing in African-­American cultural analy­sis is a con-
cept of the ‘one’ ” (394), Hortense Spillers asserted in 1996. Following Spillers,
we can understand this conceptual absence—­though it is only conceptual
­because each ­human is, in fact, a one—­partly as a feature of New World slavery,
particularly the gendering of the enslaved subject as both ideologically ungen-
dered and ideologically feminine. This gender calculation produces the idea of
blackness as nonbeing, as failed being in the terms of modernity. Said another
way, the black exemption from oneness travels through black femaleness.3
I want, then, to consider oneness through black female figuring, via occa-
sions where black female speakers inhabit the philosophical assumption of
first-­person expressiveness, where their “I am” constitutes instances of behold-
ing the immanence and transcendence of being. I am interested in the ways
that a black speaker’s articulation of “I am” enunciates a state of worldness as
well as an instantiation of her possibility. I know that t­ hese terms—­“oneness,”
“immanence,” “transcendence”—­might give pause if we think of them as being
conversant with individuality, transparency, overcoming. But all I mean ­here is
the rightness of being that brings about one’s becoming—­the being that oblit-
erates being. We might be anxious about oneness as a betrayal of community,
though we should remember that the essentializing of community is a func-
tion of an antiblack real­ity. In a black world, one can be of relational oneness,
relation as a world of one’s becoming that includes being more than one.
I am in search of a oneness articulated through black femaleness, in par­tic­u­
lar statements of black female audaciousness—as in Lucille Clifton’s speaker in
“­won’t you celebrate with me,” who announces, “i had no model.” In Clifton’s

32 Chapter 2
poem, this modellessness conspires with the invitation “come celebrate / with
me,” unfurls as a case of possibility realized through the audacity of being. And
embedded in the claim “i had no model” is the speaker’s contestation with her
difference, her exemption from the scene of mattering:

. . . ​i had no model.

born in babylon
both nonwhite and ­woman
what did i see to be except myself ? (427)

The poem’s reference to difference and exception recalls the title of Gloria (now
Akasha) T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s 1982 anthology—­All
the W­ omen Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave.4 In both
examples, the troubling calculus of difference is used to generate righteous self-
regard. That is, a pernicious idea of difference, where black femaleness marks
degrees of the (non)­human, confirms black exclusion from the open idea of
being. And yet difference, as a concept, cannot be discarded easily, especially
since nonhierarchical differentiation is a feature of relation and relation is es-
sential to conceptualizing oneness.5
This entanglement means that the notion of difference has to be refigured in
light of black female regard, which is precisely what happens in The Cancer Jour-
nals, Audre Lorde’s reflections on her experience of cancer. The collection opens
with a speaker poised in existential awareness: “Each ­woman responds to the
crisis that breast cancer brings to her life out of a w ­ hole pattern, which is the de-
sign of who she is and how her life has been lived” (7). H ­ ere, the speaker explains
that the particularity of one’s life is the basis on which one has experience, that
one’s living is a theoretical model (“a w ­ hole pattern”) for beholding each hap-
pening. I know this is a commonsense idea, but its straightforward conceptual
clarity resonates with Lorde’s e­ arlier arguments about consciousness and ex-
tends the philosophical inflection of the notion of self-­regard. In­ter­est­ing, too,
is how Lorde’s pronoun case moves from the impersonal idioms “each w ­ oman”
(as in the foregoing quotation) and “some w ­ omen” (­later in the paragraph) to
the first person: “I am a post-­mastectomy w ­ oman who believes our feelings need
voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use” (7). This movement re-
flects the capaciousness of the speaker, who expresses herself through a mix of
personal and impersonal, through the plural (“our feelings”) and the singular.
­Later, in the third journal entry, this world of self-­centeredness becomes
explicit: “I feel so unequal to what I always handled before, the abominations outside
that echo the pain within. And yes I am completely self-­referenced right now ­because it
is the only translation I can trust, and I do believe not u­ ntil ­every ­woman traces her weave

Aliveness and Oneness 33

back strand by bloody self-­referenced strand, w­ ill we begin to alter the ­whole pattern”
(9; italics in original, emphasis added). Lorde’s speaker might well have said
“­alter the whole world,” since her stance is against patriarchal disregard for
­women’s experience and intelligence. And yet the repetition of “­whole pat-
tern” works to collapse the world of one’s being—­what is implied ­earlier—­with
the social world. In making this claim, Lorde constructs first-­personness as a
subjectivity of exception and exemption, a ­human case that orients through one’s
singular differences. This is the theoretical apparatus of her encounter with can-
cer, a philosophical first-­person subjection that she designates as “­sister out-
sider” and explicates in an October 1979 entry: “I am defined as other in ­every
group I’m a part of. The outsider, both strength and weakness” (11; italics in original).6
Exemption and exception: in The Cancer Journals, autobiographical study,
even something as episodically casual as journal entries, swells with conceptual
insight.7 The intellectual character of Lorde’s first-­person thinking is evident
in an entry dated just ­after her mastectomy:

March 25, 1978

The idea of knowing, rather than believing, trusting, or even understanding has
always been considered heretical. But I would willingly pay what­ever price in pain
was needed, to savor the weight of completion; to be utterly filled, not with convic-
tion nor with faith, but with experience—­knowledge, direct and dif­fer­ent from all
other certainties. (23; italics in original)

Lorde advocates for the supremacy of knowing that comes through experi-
ence (“knowledge, direct and dif­fer­ent from all other certainties”), seeming to echo
Michel de Montaigne, who, in “Of Experience,” acknowledges that in the pur-
suit of knowledge, “when reason fails us, we use experience” (407).8 Moreover,
she aligns her speaker with the biblical Eve, whose yearning to know exceeded
faith and initiated a fall into ungrace. Again, as Lorde does in “Poetry Is Not a
Luxury” and “The Uses of the Erotic,” she collates true knowing with embodi-
ment. And throughout Journals, Lorde’s intellection appeals to her exquisite
practice of self-­reflection:

Once I accept the existence of ­dying, as a life pro­cess, who can ever have power over
me again? (25; italics in original)

Where are the models for what I’m supposed to be in this situation? But
­there are none. That is it, Audre. ­You’re on your own. (28)

The enunciation of singularity, another instance of modellessness, is not literal

as much as it is intended to incite and express the speaker’s understanding,

34 Chapter 2
to authorize a dif­fer­ent conceptualization of her capacity. ­These ideological
investments are realized beautifully in the speaker’s comments upon leaving
the hospital:

In that critical period, the ­family ­women enhanced that answer [to the
question of death]. They w ­ ere macro members in the life dance, seeking
an answering rhythm within my sinews, my synapses, my very bones.
In the ghost of my right breast, ­these ­were the micro members from
within. ­There was an answering rhythm in the ghost of t­hose dreams
which would have to go in ­favor of ­those which I had some chance of
effecting. . . .
For instance, I ­will never be a doctor. I ­will never be a deep-­sea diver.
I may possibly take a doctorate in etymology, but I ­will never bear any
more c­ hildren. I w­ ill never learn ballet, nor become a g­ reat actress, al-
though I might learn to r­ ide a bike and travel to the moon. But I ­will
never be a millionaire nor increase my life insurance. I am who the world
and I have never seen before. (47–48; emphasis added)

This passage leaves me breathless, how it travels ­toward that striking crescendo
of instantiation: Notice how the speaker begins with “the f­amily ­women,” a
cohort of her friends, her lovers, and her d ­ aughter that is fused to her body
and metabolized as her removed breast. And ­after a random cata­log of dream-
ing and loss described in the ­future conditional tense (“I ­will never . . . ​I ­will
never”), the speaker declares herself—­singular but also composed of many
­women—as totality and impossibility: “I am who the world and I have never
seen before.” Her accounting of possibility marks the limits of cap­i­tal­ist real­
ity for her black female self (“I ­will never be a millionaire”) and then surpasses
such valuation with a surrender to her becoming. Has ­there ever been a state-
ment that articulates the risk and surety of aliveness as clearly as this one; that
conceptualizes a poetic calculus of being h ­ uman as finely as this declaration of
being-­as-­poiesis? Maybe not.
“I am who the world and I have never seen before.” What compels me are
three ways that this definitive expression of exceptionalism functions: For one,
Lorde means the statement literally as a characterization of the repre­sen­ta­tional
invisibility of black queer ­women, as in “Where ­were the dykes who had had
mastectomies?” (50). Second, this statement is epistemological since it theorizes
how knowing happens—­that one knows through surprise, ignorance, the upend-
ing of clarity. And third, most vitally, Lorde’s exceptionalism is ontological, an
enunciation of being through a revision of God’s statement of immanence to
Moses (“I am that I am”). Not even the speaker herself has encountered herself

Aliveness and Oneness 35

in this manner, this capacity, so new and alive she is, so rife with knowing “di-
rect and dif­fer­ent from all other certainties” (23).
“I am who the world and I have never seen before,” this idea of a black-­
female one, an idiom of certainty that dissolves into terrifying uncertainty,
an audacious subjectivity that is at once of immanence and of transcendence.
In Lorde’s writing, black femaleness is the position of thought—­this is its one-
ness, where oneness is relationality, the “being singular plural,” “the moment
when one consents not to be a single being.”9 My pursuit of an idea of oneness
co-­opts the first person as a philosophical grammar of being. Philosophy, a­ fter
all, can be described as “life itself—­the life of an individual,” or more precisely
the questions about being alive considered through the life of a one.10 As such,
philosophical inhabitance is less the par­tic­u­lar case of “I” and more the audacious
habitat of one, an engagement of righ­teous query: to bear the weight of being that
includes beholding oneself as an object of and for one’s study. We can recognize
such audacity in the long arc of black ­women’s thinking across vari­ous genres:

— Sojourner Truth’s 1851 Akron, Ohio, convention address testifies

through her first-­person singularity, summarized by the misattrib-
uted refrain “arn’t I a ­woman.”
— Anna Julia Cooper announces in 1886 that “only the black ­w oman
can say ‘when and where I enter . . . ​then and t­ here the ­whole Negro
race enters with me’ ” (63).
— Hortense Spillers’s 1987 speaker proclaims indispensability at the be-
ginning of “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”: “Let’s face it. I am a marked
­woman, but not every­body knows my name. . . . ​My country needs
me, and if I ­were not ­here, I would have to be in­ven­ted” (203).
— Trudier Harris begins From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black
American Lit­er­a­ture (1982) with this brilliance: “Called Matriarch,
Emasculator and Hot Momma. Sometimes ­Sister, Pretty Baby, Aun-
tie, Mammy and Girl. Called Unwed ­Mother, Welfare Recipient and
Inner City Consumer. The Black American W ­ oman has had to admit
that while nobody knew the trou­bles she saw, every­body, his b­ rother
and his dog, felt qualified to explain her, even to herself ” (4).
— Patricia J. Williams’s The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law
Professor, a 1991 book of American l­egal theory, opens thus: “Since
subject position is every­thing in my analy­sis of law, you deserve
to know that it’s a bad morning. I am very depressed. . . . ​So you
should know that this is one t­ hose mornings when I refuse to com-
pose myself properly; you should know you are dealing with someone

36 Chapter 2
 who is writing this in an old terry bathrobe with a ­little fringe of blue
and white tassles [sic] dangling from the hem, trying to decide if she
is stupid or crazy” (4). This finely rendered theorizing operates on
the premise that black female being is being.
— Barbara Christian’s enduring essay “The Race for Theory” (1987) states,
“I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done
in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally. For me lit­er­a­ture
is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that what­ever I feel/
know is. It is an affirmation that sensuality is intelligence, that sensual
language is language that makes sense” (61; emphasis in original).

I am struck, always, by the repetition of self-­regard as an essential component

of black female relationality, self-­regard as an inauguration of philosophical en-
deavoring: from Clifton’s “no model” to June Jordan’s “we are the ones we have
been waiting for” to Ntozake Shange’s choral “i found god in myself / & i loved
her/ i loved her fiercely” to Alice Walker’s womanist who “Loves herself. Regard-
less” to Maya Angelou’s “phenomenal w ­ oman” and Nikki Giovanni’s abiding
“I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal / I cannot be comprehended /
except by my permission”—­this from a poem that begins with a speaker full of
capaciousness who proclaims, “I was born in the congo / I walked the fertile
crescent and built the sphinx,” and concludes her self-­invocation with “I am
bad.”11 ­These citations are a small sample of a canon of intellection that dares to
imagine a black female subject as first person, where that term d ­ oesn’t imply in-
digeneity (as in the case to be made for First Nations p ­ eoples), Enlightenment
rationality, or integrity of voice; first person ­here is the syntax of relational
inhabitance, the possibility that the surprise and incommensurability of being
could belong to one who is black and female, the “monumental first person” of
the one who dares to say, I am and I am becoming.12
The particularity of this conceptual move requires that I be repeatedly ex-
plicit about the quality of surrender—of openness and fluency—in black female
first-­person instantiation. Specifically, I am thinking of the argument Stephen
Michael Best makes in None like Us, especially his critique of the historical con-
flation of voice and community as a black studies imperative. Voice, he suggests
rightly, becomes something of a cult, a rigid compulsion that disregards other
aesthetic dimensions at work in black art, especially a recognition of an “aesthet-
ics of the intransmissible” that strives not to represent or assert blackness but
rather “to ­either close itself off or use itself up” (22). Con­temporary visual art-
ists are “in the pro­cess of enacting a kind of thought that literary critics are not
yet willing to entertain, that they [artists] may be enacting a ‘style’ of freedom:

Aliveness and Oneness 37

freedom from constraining conceptions of blackness as authenticity, tradition,
and legitimacy; or history as inheritance, memory, and social reproduction; of
diaspora as kinship, belonging, and dissemination” (22–23). Best wants us to ex-
plore the possibility of one’s “beautiful elimination,” the capacity to encounter
erasure and obliteration (29). His provocation delineates the limits of voice—­the
first person—as a trope of recuperative black aesthetics, a limit that is inflected
by collectivism as a response to pervasive antiblackness. Inspired by Best, I want
to insist on reading the vocative in a black world imaginary and as a term of relation,
relation that encompasses risk, surrender, obliteration, relation that operates not
on the security of being but on the openness of becoming. I am trying to recog-
nize the fluency and nuance in black first-­person vocative instances. Take, for
example, Giovanni’s ego trip mentioned ­earlier, which closes,

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal

I cannot be comprehended
   except by my permission

I mean . . . ​I . . . ​can fly

like a bird in the sky . . . (126; ellipses in the original)

If we look critically, we can appreciate Giovanni’s speaker’s voice searching for

its right to know so that it might surrender into what it d ­ oesn’t yet behold,
especially ­there in the ellipses, which break open the speaker’s unrepresent-
able being, a chasm to which the egoed one has surrendered. I am reading this
example of the first person, and the ­others cata­loged ­earlier, as lyric inflections.
That is, the lyric idiomizes voice as subjectivity and subjection; in the lyric, the
speaker speaks fully—­declaratively—­without betraying the vulnerable hesi-
tancy of their knowing. The vitality of the lyric voice is ­toward the speaker’s
surrender to the energy, the rambunction, of voice. We often misread the lyric
via “the assumed solidity of the speaking, universal ‘I,’ ” and, as literary scholar
Anthony Reed argues, in ­doing so, we miss the ways in which the form has
evolved, especially in regard to black poetics (99).13
Poetic being is experimental being (or being experimental), and what I in-
tend to recognize via the first person is an idiom of our oneness through rela-
tionality, to use relation to license a black (female) philosophy of self-­regard.
I intend to remember that “one” is a fictional case, a projection for being in
the world, an “Afro-­fabulation” thought experiment, in the phrasing of per­for­
mance studies theorist Tavia Nyong’o.14 Oneness ­doesn’t belong to the repara-
tive work of black community instantiated by antiblack terror. No, oneness
resides with the one and the world of the one’s becoming. Moreover, no one,

38 Chapter 2
truly, can be excluded from the capacities of oneness, just as no one can pre-
sume to possess or be in possession of it.
One, the proper impersonal pronoun that casts its speaker not as an indi-
vidual secured against other individuals but as a figure of being, a projection
for conceptualizing being. As such, my consideration ­here is of the lyric “one”
rather than the lyric “I.”15

Of course, if we are talking about oneness as a dialectic of being, then we must re-
visit Toni Morrison’s abidingly impor­tant 1973 novel Sula, especially its title char-
acter, whose audacity is totality, whose orientation beholds oneness as an ordinary
feature of her consciousness. We could consider being and relationality through
the novel’s many couplings, including a girlhood friendship between Sula and Nel
that lasts beyond death; romantic partnerings that seem to break ­under stress
(including between Nel and Jude, Eva and Boy-­Boy, Hannah and vari­ous men,
and Helene and Wiley Wright); and platonic alliances that, in their intensities,
prompt some kind of reckoning (for example, Plum and Eva; Sula and Hannah;
the grouping of boys named the Deweys; Eva and Sula; Eva and Hannah; Sula
and Ajax; Sula’s dalliances with random men; and Sula and Shadrack). In this
landscape of relations, the common wisdom is that “Sula never competed; she
simply helped o­ thers define themselves” (95), though such an assessment invites
us to overlook Sula’s own intersubjective vitality. Indeed, Sula is not merely the
figure who animates the novel’s dynamics, but instead her being is in-­process . . . ​
Sula is one of relational becoming: “She had been looking all along for a friend, and
it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never
be—­for a w ­ oman. And that no one would ever be that version of herself which
she sought to reach out to and touch with an ungloved hand. ­There was only
her own mood and whim, and if that was all t­ here was, she de­cided to turn the
naked hand t­oward it, discover it and let ­others become as intimate with their
own selves as she was” (121; emphases added). This exposition comes soon ­after
the townspeople render judgment of Sula’s selfish ­doings, especially her affair
with Nel’s husband and her decision to put Eva, her grand­mother, in a nursing
home. Notice, then, how the verbs (“had been looking,” “discover”) focus our
attention on Sula’s subjectivity-­­in­formation; that is, against any easy dismissal of
Sula’s motivations, the passage privies us to her pro­cess of discernment. Notable
also is the way the voice ­here nearly slips from narrator to character, especially
via the em dash, which delays and highlights the phrase “for a w ­ oman.” In this
syntax, the tag comment collates Sula’s and the narrator’s ironic emphasis on
the difference between a generic conception of being where relationality might be
pos­si­ble, and the restricted subjectivity that is i­magined for w
­ omen. It is a shared

Aliveness and Oneness 39

verbal exclamation, “for a ­woman,” nearly as exasperated as it is definite. As such,
the narrator is allied with Sula, and the narrative positions us to appreciate the
thinking that underpins her resolve ­toward self-­regard. A close reader of the
novel ­will likely remember a similar realization of exemption-­and-­exception that
coheres Sula’s friendship with Nel: “So when they met . . . ​they felt the ease and
comfort of old friends. ­Because each had discovered years before that they ­were
neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them,
they had set about creating something ­else to be” (52). The novel brims with dis-
cernments like this one that portray a black female subject philosophizing life
through her life, a one engaged in being and becoming.16
Since Morrison’s novel is an ars erotica, it pre­sents Sula’s relationality through
encounters with the erotic:

Although she did not regard sex as ugly (ugliness was boring also), she
liked to think of it as wicked. But as her experiences multiplied, she realized that
not only was it not wicked, it was not necessary for her to conjure up the
idea of wickedness in order to participate fully. During the lovemaking she
found and needed to find the cutting edge. When she left off cooperating with
her body and began to assert herself in the act, particles of strength gathered in her
like steel shavings drawn to a spacious magnetic center, forming a tight cluster that
nothing, it seemed, could break. And ­there was utmost irony and outrage lying
­under someone, in a position of surrender, feeling her own abiding strength
and limitless power[,] . . . ​the postcoital privateness in which she met herself,
welcomed herself, and joined herself in matchless harmony. (123; emphases added)

At the end of this passage, notice especially the verbs—­“met,” “welcomed,”

“joined”—­which usually indicate connection between one and another one
but which are attached, each time, to the reflexive pronoun “herself.” This
syntax reinforces the “matchless harmony” of Sula’s experience, an electric
habitat of contemplativeness as a conflation of embodiment and intellection.
Said another way, Sula’s inhabitance of being navigates through a lyric concep-
tualization of materiality (a “cluster”) that ­doesn’t last (it dissipates) but that
nonetheless informs her understanding of herself as a one of relationality. We
are watching Sula conceptualize and enact capaciousness through the impera-
tive for beholding herself.17
What follows this determination is Sula’s coupling with Ajax, perhaps a cul-
mination of interest piqued twenty years ­earlier when Sula was an adolescent
girl. As adults, Ajax and Sula have sex that is so sublime, it initiates in Sula a
postcoital desire to rub or scrape off his skin layer by layer so as to study the
body’s materiality. “If I take a chamois and rub real hard on the bone, right on the ledge

40 Chapter 2
of your cheek bone, some of the black w ­ ill dis­appear” (130; italics in original), the pas-
sage subjunctively begins, before extending for nearly a full page of italicized
meditation. It is in this relationship with Ajax that “Sula began to discover what
possession was. Not love, perhaps, but possession or at least the desire for it. She
was astounded by so new and alien a feeling” (131; emphasis added). Morrison’s lan-
guage parallels Lorde’s statement of exception, “I am what the world and I have
never seen before.” Sula is inquisitive and of discovery, so of course she would sur-
render to this foreign, thrilling feeling. And yet, what complicates this moment is
that Sula’s surrender includes performing acts of domesticity that seem contrary
to her e­ arlier self-­belief: she anticipates and prepares for Ajax’s arrival by putting
her hair in a ribbon, cleaning the h ­ ouse, setting the ­table with a ­rose; she indulges
his whininess about life’s difficulty by telling him, “Come on. Lean on me” (133).
If we forget that Sula is in pro­cess, then we might read this happening as a lapse
or a confusing self-­betrayal. But Sula is relational, and being with Ajax offers her
a chance to refine what being is. She is f­ ree to risk inquisitiveness about this new
feeling, rather than only to conserve or protect herself in keeping with a notion
of female frailty. Indeed, since it is true that “during the lovemaking she found and
needed to find the cutting edge” (123; emphasis added), Sula is almost compelled to
pursue the risk. What ­matters more than Ajax’s presence and his eventual absence
is the inquiry ignited by her d ­ oings. As such, her display of domesticity is a scene
of play, a fantasy akin to her daydream of dissecting Ajax’s body, another opportu-
nity for Sula to deepen her study of her life. Sula feels herself, feels in and through
herself, and becomes other-­than-­she-is through this encounter.18
To be “astounded by so new and alien a feeling”—­this is black female au-
dacity, a relational inhabitance of being oriented ­toward one’s becoming new.
Such a disposition is reinforced in the chapter’s conclusion, a­ fter Ajax is gone,
when Sula wakes up with

a melody in her head she could not identify or recall ever hearing before.
“Perhaps I made it up,” she thought. Then it came to her—­the name of
the song and all its lyr­ics just as she had heard it many times before. She
sat on the edge of the bed thinking, “­There ­aren’t any more new songs
and I have sung all the ones ­there are. I have sung them all. I have sung
all the songs ­there are.” She lay down again on the bed and sang a ­little
wandering tune made up of the words I have sung all the songs all the songs I
have sung all the songs t­ here are ­until, touched by her own lullaby, she grew
drowsy, and in the hollow of near-­sleep she tasted the acridness of gold,
left the chill of alabaster and smelled the dark, sweet stench of loam. (137;
emphasis in original)

Aliveness and Oneness 41

I love how this passage describes Sula’s totality, she who countenances small-
ness and obliteration with inventiveness—­with a self-­made song of songs, sung
without audience; she whose orientation is of oneness—­supreme and wide
open, full and emptying, a being the world and herself has never seen before,
“a new dimension of being,” as Spillers termed it in an early reading of the
book (93).19 We should note that Sula’s totality is inflected by the subjunctive,
by possibility and risk and becoming; for Sula, “[a] conditional subjunctive re-
places an indicative certainty” (Spillers 95). Moreover, this deathbed oneness
resonates with my claim for an expansive understanding of the black female
vocative; consider the case Spillers makes about the black female singer:

To find another and truer sexual self-­image the black ­woman must turn
to the domain of ­music and Amer­i­ca’s black female vocalists, who sug-
gest a composite figure of ironical grace. The singer is likely closer to
the poetry of black female sexual experience than we might think, not
so much, interestingly enough, in the words of her m ­ usic, but in the
sense of dramatic confrontation between ego and world that the vocalist herself
embodies. . . . ​In this instance of being-­for-­self, it does not m ­ atter that the
vocalist is “entertaining” ­under American skies ­because the ­woman, in
her par­tic­ul­ar and vivid there­ness, is an unalterable and discrete moment of self-­
knowledge. (165; emphases added)

Yes, yes, yes: black female oneness is this vivid “there­ness,” “unalterable and
discrete,” a won­der of consciousness materialized through the metaphysics of
being in one’s voice.
Morrison’s Sula is a superb philosophical meditation, especially in regard
to Sula’s audacious conceptualization of herself as a one through whom life
can be understood. This imagining of oneness turns on Sula’s appreciation
of her distinction (black and female), as well as on her willingness to give up
the distinction in f­ avor of being and becoming totality. That is, oneness, as an
imaginary—as a fictional case and a projection—­sustains Sula in her embrace
of the every­thing and nothing of existence. We see this existential breadth in
an exchange with Nel when Sula is near death: ­after Nel cautions her against
the arrogance of her thinking—­“You ­can’t do it all. You a ­woman and a col-
ored ­woman at that. You ­can’t act like a man”—­Sula responds, “You repeating
yourself. . . . ​You say I’m a w
­ oman and colored. ­Ain’t that the same as being a
man?” (142; emphasis in original). Sula’s statement of difference refuses Nel’s
construct of black femaleness as a diminishing mark of otherness. Instead, in
Sula’s worldview, a person who is black and female is also a ­human being and
therefore is capable of figuring being through the specificity of her difference,

42 Chapter 2
which is, ­after all, no difference at all. Akin to Audre Lorde’s relationality, Su-
la’s difference exists within the subject rather than as an ideological discourse
outside and against the subject.
Sula, this mighty rendering of black female being through which we can
study black existence, Sula, where freedom already is in and of the one.
I have leaned on Morrison’s character to explore what is essentially a ­matter
of ethics—­how to be—­even as literary scholars like Alex Nissen have argued
that Sula, in her self-­centeredness, “is not fully a moral agent and cannot be
a model for emulation” (276). Such a conclusion fails to appreciate Sula’s rela-
tional orientation; indeed, the full regard Sula tries to have for herself is the full
regard she wants to have for other ­people—to engage ­others as if they are of
full regard. Her worldview depends on the mutuality of encountering ­others
as ones of their own unfurling totality. (Remember that she is described as hav-
ing “no ego and no greed” and that she wants to “let ­others become as intimate
with their own selves as she was” [119, 121]). Embedded in relationality is an
invitation for open being where fullness inclines t­ oward and inspires fullness.20
The reluctance to acknowledge Sula’s deep ethicality might derive partly
from the specificity of her being black and female—it is unusual to encounter
the question of existence articulated so clearly through a black female subject for
whom pure existence, the rightness of her existence, is never r­ eally in question
(in pro­cess, yes, but not in question). As such, Morrison’s novel rests on the gam-
bit that a black ­woman could proceed in life as if she w ­ ere the idiomatic h­ uman.
For Sula, being alive and being of a righ­teous ­human inhabitance d ­ oesn’t depend
on commonsense ideas about possessive individualism, nor is it hampered by
disproving nonbeing. No, Sula’s oneness is a relational totality, a black world in-
stance where “How do I live ­free in this black [female] body?” becomes a question
of oneness.21 Again, oneness authorizes one to be more and more ­human, to seek
more and more capacity for good(ness) and right(ness), an ever-­widening pool
of being that surpasses narcissism. Our challenge, then, is to imagine oneness as
the plurality pos­si­ble through the specificity of one’s open inhabiting of the world.
And Sula’s example makes me want to be clear about abstraction and transcen-
dence as features of relational oneness. That is, the very notion of becoming
infers projection, idealization, transformation. I know that classic relational
theory argues against abstraction, an argument expressed well by Édouard Glis-
sant’s claim that the universal “is a sublimation, an abstraction that enables us
to forget small differences; we drift upon the universal and forget ­these small
differences, and Relation is wonderful ­because it ­doesn’t allow us to do that”
(“One World in Relation” 9). But this insight conflicts slightly with the tran-
scendence inherent in relation, the fact that in relation, one is called to surpass

Aliveness and Oneness 43

and trespass—­transcend—­the ­imagined bound­aries of one’s being. Relation, as
cultural phi­los­op ­ her Lewis R. Gordon argues in Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism,
is at once immanence and transcendence, where transcendence is a deepening
of the surprise of one’s being, rather than a transcendence that moves the self
into a metaphysical that has no connection to embodiment or experience. In
refining this point, it might help to emphasize that Sula’s oneness is established
via the erotic; as such, her transcendent postcoital meditation ­isn’t an instance
of overcoming as much as it is a surrender into being every­thing and nothing,
an occasion of breadth. Transcendence ­here commingles with immanence, im-
manence with transcendence.22
Describing oneness is complicated. Better, perhaps, to say that aliveness
is of a black world orientation where oneness is “inglorious,” as theologian J.
Kameron Car­ter means the term to describe “God’s being as a unified differ-
ence of persons [that] already contains e­ very pos­si­ble difference, including the
difference of a created, ‘exterior’ world” (78). Such an idiom of godliness helps
us to appreciate Sula’s oneness, an ethos that surges from the wildness of feel-
ing, a worldliness of inhabitance that cannot properly be called a model—­a
prescription or rubric—­since it is an invocation into dynamic being. Indeed,
when Clifton’s speaker says, “i had no model,” we might well understand this
confession for its ideological astuteness—­that t­ here is no model, ­there is just
the knowing in living and the living through.
Oneness is a practice of knowing that could be described as I-­am-­knowing-­
as-­I-­am-­knowing. In this compounded phrase, the first clause establishes cer-
tainty and the second revels in dissolution. The ethos h ­ ere is a fidelity to what
one knows so as to deepen and then surpass that knowing.
I am knowing as I am knowing.
­There is no better study of this notion than Sula, which asks us to con-
sider that the world of being lives also in ­people who are female and black.23
Sula, who encounters and is remade, who encounters and becomes; she who
reminds us that relation is not a dissolving into the other but a capacity to
become more and more through the relation. Relational being is like being a
poem, a textuality that is itself and that also unfurls as more ­every moment.24
Ah: in relation, you are a poem, are poiesis—­being brought and bringing
one’s self into being. This is oneness, is subjunctive inhabitance.
“One” is a fictional case, it is imaginary; it works properly, perhaps entirely, via
abstraction: the self abstracting itself. I am enthralled by “one” as a pronoun for
an aliveness that constitutes specificity, materiality, and breadth; consider this ex-
ample from Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha: the scene happens in chapter 30,
titled “At the Burns-­Coopers’,” and narrates the brief time Maud Martha spends

44 Chapter 2
as a domestic worker for Mrs. Burns-­Cooper, a character described as “a ­little red
and white and black w ­ oman” (158). Like the novel as a ­whole, this chapter is brief
and episodic, refracted through the interior consciousness of Maud Martha, who
­doesn’t say much in exchanges with other characters but whose voice, habitat,
and urgency radiate through Brooks’s poetic language and through f­ree, indi-
rect narration that allies narrator and protagonist. Maud Martha’s is a relational
world, and none of its thirty-­four vignettes could be said to be more or less vital
than any other; it is, r­ eally, a gathering of happenings that elides sequentiality or
causation, privileging instead the intensity of its title character’s experiences. At
the close of this scene, Maud Martha decides to quit the job:

I’ll never come back, Maud Martha assured herself, when she hung up
her apron at eight in the eve­ning. She knew Mrs. Burns-­Cooper would
be puzzled. The wages ­were very good. Indeed, what could be said in
explanation? Perhaps that the hours ­were long. I ­couldn’t explain my ex-
planation, she thought.
One walked out from that almost perfect wall, spitting at the firing
squad. What difference did it make ­whether the firing squad understood
or did not understand the manner of one’s retaliation or why one had to
retaliate?
Why, one was a h
­ uman being. One wore clean nightgowns. One loved
one’s baby. One drank cocoa by the fire—or the gas range—­come the eve­
ning, in the wintertime. (163; emphasis in original)

The abstraction h ­ere is fantastic, even radical, as the speaker forgoes

explanation—­transparency—­and lapses into a meditative tableau where her
decision emerges as a dramatic scene of death, judgment, and the clarity of
being before a firing squad. And though I love the last sentence’s insistence
that cocoa can be made by gas range, it is the philosophical shift from first-­
person singular to third-­person impersonal that takes my breath away—­the
ideological pro­cession from “I” to “one.” In this move, Brooks’s characteriza-
tion bypasses the presumed authority of the first-­person voice so as to imagine
her black female speaker—of interior voice—as the case of a “one,” the address
of the ­human engaged in exemplary study. Maud Martha throws her voice,
an astute deployment of distance and self-­abstraction ­toward discerning more
clearly the depth of her feeling and knowing. The abstraction is not a deferral
of feeling or particularity, but a deepening of precisely that: “One was a ­human
being. One wore. . . . ​One loved. . . . ​One drank. . . .”
In Brooks’s idiom, the referent for Maud Martha’s speaking moves from
“I,” the authoritative singular first-­person pronoun, to “one,” the impersonal

Aliveness and Oneness 45

pronoun. And yet, what is achieved in the movement to “one” is the force of
personal reckoning, the speaker’s encounter with her ontological condition. As
such, one is not individual but is personal, an instance of aliveness. What a
beautiful rendering of a beautiful instance of a ­human being being of and in
her oneness.25

In “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” Hortense J. Spillers argues that “the

fact of domination is alterable only to the extent that the dominated subject
recognizes the potential power of its own ‘double-­consciousness.’ The subject
is certainly seen, but she also sees. It is this return of the gaze that negotiates
at ­every point a space for living” (163). H
­ ere, Spillers advocates for one’s act of
seeing as a profound agency, and I want to extend seeing not only as a “return
of the gaze” but as a calculus of self-­orienting: of seeing one’s self, of being en-
gaged in the act of beholding one’s self as a one. Or, to be the object and subject
of study, to be the theorist of one’s being as well as to be the t­ hing made in the
theorizing of being: again poiesis, where ideation constitutes the breadth of
aliveness rather than inaugurating the denigration of breath. This character-
ization resonates with the lyric poem, a domain of being where a speaker can
render themself as object for the sake of beholding experience and feeling. In
this way, the lyric is a “textural and textual” world (to borrow from Anthony
Reed), not “the assumed solidity of the speaking, universal ‘I,’ ” but the subjec-
tive consciousness of one multiplying, dissolving, even extinguishing, one f­ ree
to withstand their intimacy intimately. (Remember that the lyric’s condition
of objectification operates on ecstasy, which, in the Greek, means standing
outside oneself.)26
I know that the m ­ atter of objectification is endemic in antiblackness,
though in black critical studies, ­there is an inspiring engagement of being-­
object—­DuBois’s “How does it feel to be a prob­lem?,” Fred Moten’s re­sis­tance
of the object, Spillers’s black femaleness that awaits a proper verb, Frantz
Fanon’s “Then I found I was an object in the midst of other objects,” Margo
Natalie Crawford’s exploration of the “strategic abstraction” in the Black Arts
movement. This engagement extends to con­temporary black poetics: Lucille
Clifton’s “homage to my hips,” Tracy K. Smith’s “Flores ­Woman” (as well as
much of Duende), Dionne Brand’s “Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater,” nearly
all of Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus, Jericho Brown’s “Colos-
seum,” Nikky Finney’s “Aureole” and “Head Off & Split,” Danez Smith’s [in-
sert] boy, Rita Dove’s “Oriental Ballerina,” Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge,
Lyrae Van Clief-­Stefanon’s Open Interval, Marlene Nourbese Philip’s idiom of
the tongue in She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. My prejudice ­here is

46 Chapter 2
the poetic, and I could stretch this random list for pages. Or I could limit my
scope to poems that attend to examples of exceptional objectification, poems
about Saartjie Baartman, the black ­woman misnamed as the Venus Hottentot
(for example, Finney’s “Greatest Show on Earth,” Elizabeth Alexander’s Venus
Hottentot). Or all of Bettina Judd’s Patient., that exquisite rendering of black
­women’s harming “ordeal” with the science and economies of display, ­women
like Anarcha Wescott, Betsey Harris, Lucy Zimmerman, Joice Heth, Henrietta
Lacks, and Bettina Judd herself.27
Sigh.
­Here’s the point, at least the place where I want to focus for now: as with
Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, I want to consider how texts exploit the elec-
tric vagary of materiality, how they explicate knowing through the language
of being-­object. I am interested, especially, in seizing ­these lyric renderings
as instances of the personal-­impersonal inherent in first-­personness. In this
pursuit, I am following Elizabeth Alexander’s insistent question from The Black
Interior: “Where is our abstract space, our space of the real/not-­real, our own
unconscious?” (7). Or, more expansively, the argument Phillip Brian Harper
undertakes in Abstractionist Aesthetics: “Abstractionism . . . ​entails the resolute
awareness that even the most realistic repre­sen­ta­tion is precisely a repre­sen­ta­tion,
and that as such it necessarily exists at a distance from the social real­ity it is
conventionally understood to reflect. In other words, . . . ​any artwork whatso-
ever is definitionally abstract in relation to the world in which it emerges”
(2; emphases in original). This declaration of abstraction articulates a frame-
work for locating oneness in the aesthetics of objectness, a ­doing that is (more?)
pos­si­ble in a black world imaginary. And though neither of the two examples that
follow uses the pronoun “one,” in each case, the projection of the speaker as sub-
ject, object, god—­the inglorious of Car­ter’s characterization e­ arlier—­manifests a
compelling abstraction that is consonant with the language of oneness.
First, Evie Shockley’s “my life as china” (5) from her 2011 collection The New
Black:

i was imported : : i was soft in the hills where they found me : : shining
in a private dark
: : i absorbed fire and became fact : : i was fragile : : i incorporated burnt
­cattle bones’
powdered remains : : ashes to ashes : : i was baptized in heat : : fed on
destruction : :
i was not destroyer : : was not destroyed : : i vitrified : : none of me was
the same : :

Aliveness and Oneness 47

 i was many : : how can i say this : : i was domesticated : : trusted : :
­trea­sured : : i was
translucent but not clear : : put me to your lips : : i ­will not give : : i ­will
give you what
you have given me

I love the double colons ­here, how they punctuate the poem’s prose lines with a
syntax of analogy, making explicit the one-­to-­one correlation between the sub-
jected black female and the enamel material object.28 But the punctuation also
implies the relationality of the speaking one, each colon appearing as a visual ap-
proximation of the self meeting herself. I want to start, then, with the idea that
the poem’s doubleness multiplies the speaker’s capacity, she who is figured as a
porcelain object and ­violated ­human, and who narrates the scenes of her being.
Notice, for example, how the speaker’s voice becomes atmospheric in the se-
quence, “i was soft in the hills where they found me : : shining in a private dark.”
The second clause abandons the first-­person referent so even as we understand it
to mean “[i was] shining in a private dark,” the absence of noun and auxiliary verb
disconnects the act from a specific subject. As an elliptical phrase, “shining in a
private dark” emanates broadly as if it ­were a description of something spiritual.
A similar expansiveness and unmooring happen with “fed on destruction” and
especially “was not destroyed,” where the speaker’s referent again eludes and sur-
passes the specificity of “i.” We are to understand, via the rules of grammar, that
the first-­person refrain, and even the auxiliary verb, applies sylleptically (syllep-
sis: a phrasing in which one word inflects two o­ thers differently). But the poetic
moves in “my life as china” ask us to attend to the vagary of voice.
In this regard, the poem’s center is the dramatic clause “i vitrified,” where the
lack of an auxiliary verb intensifies the action as a statement of immanence and
transcendence. The speaker w ­ asn’t made into glass by something external but be-
came glassy substance. I d ­ on’t mean to preclude the harmful impact of external
forces but more to displace the sequence of impact as operating from external
to internal, as if the world of happening changed the speaker. The subject-­verb
pairing ­here instantiates the speaker’s willfulness, a god-­minded force who in-
corporates force (against) into more force (of being): “i vitrified.” And as if to re-
inforce our sense of her multiplicity, the speaker says “i was many” as a prelude
to articulating her right to opacity: “i was translucent but not clear.”
Such willfulness exists in tension with the fact that ­things happened to—­were
imposed on—­the speaker, as in “i was domesticated : : trusted : : trea­sured.” But
even h ­ ere we have to read through the syllepsis to appreciate the relationship
between “trusted” and “trea­sured” and the phrase “i was.” That is, domestication

48 Chapter 2
stands firmly as a term of harm (“i was domesticated”), which inflects how we
understand “trusted” and “trea­sured” but not entirely, ­because ­those words
float untethered from the syntax. In this short sequence of five words, the
speaker agitates between being subject and being object of the three happen-
ings (the three verbs) described.
Shockley’s doubled aesthetics amplifies the oneness of the poem’s speaker,
the vast terrain of her harsh and vibrant encounter with being. Indeed, the
poem’s doubling (in its logic and its language) encourages us to recognize the
speaker’s speaking as an encounter, as her facing herself. It is in the context of
oneness, then, that I read the poem’s shift to the imperative and to the second
person: “put me to your lips : : i ­will not give : : i ­will give you / what you have
given me.” We have seen already the capaciousness of the speaker engaged in
the act of narrating her living, and this closing directive reinforces that capac-
ity. Again, the verbs do superlative work in ­these last three lines, moving from
a demand or a dare (“put me”) to a refusal (where “give” means e­ ither “provide”
or “yield”) and fi­nally to a remarkable threat of relational openness. The final
declaration ripples as the habitat of the speaking one, her compounding claim
that is directed to the cosmos that she is and has become.29
The instances of doubling in Shockley’s “my life as china” unfurl a world
of the speaker’s becoming through the paired colons and the sylleptic syn-
tax, the work of being-­object. The speaker’s oneness intensifies through all
this object work that is neither loss nor exchange (not one t­ hing for another)
but an accumulation. As such, Shockley’s speaker d ­ oesn’t possess herself, her
china-­made life, as much as she is possessed by the force of being in relation
with herself.30
In “my life as china,” the question is about being of the force of one’s life as
object, or, said another way, “The / question is: once made into an object-­for-­/
the other, how can the thing-­for-­itself survive?” (16). This is the way that Cameron
Awkward-­Rich announces the relationality of black being in a poem from Sym-
­ ittle Monster, a collection that studies object relations via a transgen-
pathetic L
dered subject caught in the perils of identification. In the face of (un)ordinary
gendered encounters, Awkward-­Rich’s speaker suspends in transit, a being flung
and in flight through the social prerogative of identity. But the travel ­here—­and
Transit was the title of his first verse collection—is not necessarily between two
places but through states or genres of being. That is, rather than constructing a
black trans speaker as a symbol of binaried gender, Awkward-­Rich’s poems in-
stead characterize the speaker’s being as a state of traveling through. In this way,
he instantiates a black transgendered figure of oneness, a speaker who encoun-
ters their own difficult self and who is object and subject of their study. It is a

Aliveness and Oneness 49

centering of the speaker as a one of relational becoming, a black world where
the m
­ atter of gendering is of the one.31
This undertaking is supported by the book’s explicit structure, including
poems that are called essays (as in “Essay on the Awkward / Black / Object”);
poems that sometimes exile each stanza to a single page such that one poem
takes up eight or ten pages, as if each stanza is a metaobject or an image in a
stop-­motion film or an island in a string of islands of being; poems that cite
James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon, film and photography theory—­poems that
name themselves as theory (­there are five pieces ­here differently titled “Theory
of Motion”); poems that use the slash, double and single, as both an excessive
separation of line or phrase or stanza and a conceptual rendering of the book’s
thinking about identity and subjection. And ­these dynamic formal qualities
are balanced by clear-­line prose language—­nearly half the poems are prose
poems where the break of line is an accident of the order of the page. What is
hard to summarize ­here is how much Sympathetic ­Little Monster’s form resonates
with its exploration of states of being object, how much its play with poetic
genre questions the category—­the genre—of being itself.
Take, for example, the book’s fourth poem:

The ­Little Girl Dreams of ­Dying

& wakes up in a world where she does not

exist. At school she read about a man with
two f­aces. Every­ thing in life is somehow
twinned. The man looks back & forth back &
forth back & forth at the exact same time. I
wake up floating out to sea. The sun is falling
into the ocean staining the ­water red. The first
sentence is a lie. The ­little girl flies to all the
wrong conclusions. Let her try again. The ­little
girl dreams of ­dying & wakes up an image. She
reads about a god & sprints into his shadow.
The ­little girl splits the terms of the world.
Splits the world. Splits. (5)

The poem begins in motion—­and on the ampersand, a graphic rather than a

word—as the bridge title bleeds into the verse’s first line. Such bridging is a
meta­phor for the practice of wrestling with image, body, and being. (“Bridge”
is also the title of a poem that comes two pages a­ fter this one.) Indeed, the
speaker bridges his observation of the dreaming l­ ittle girl spoken of in the third

50 Chapter 2
person, who is an iteration of the speaker himself. That is, in this poem, as
happens throughout the collection, the speaker multiplies as a subject and also
multiplies the subject. (For example, in Sympathetic’s first poem, the speaker is
referenced via “I,” “she,” and “you.”) This compounding sustains the speaker’s
gendered subjectivity—­he—­even as he encounters scenes of having been seen
and known as a girl. In “The ­Little Girl Dreams of ­Dying,” the speaker is ­either
recalling a moment from his young life or dreaming the moment himself. As
such, when the poem proclaims, “Let her try again,” the call is being autho-
rized by the speaker in regard to a version of the speaker. “Let her try again”
becomes, then, an exceptional articulation of oneness, the speaker refracted
into his multitude.32
This refractivity is centered in gendering, and in lieu of being able to study
the entire collection, I want to highlight the speaker’s declaration of flux as
the habit of his embodied consciousness. In “Essay on the Theory of Motion,”
which follows “The L ­ ittle Girl Dreams of D
­ ying,” the speaker repeats the in-
sight of a queer theorist who feels “most at home in airports, / ­because ­there
every­one is in transition” (7; emphasis in original). The gendered specificity of
this claim is reprised in the very next stanza, embedded in parentheses for em-
phasis and modulation:

(Let’s get the obvious out of the

way—­you w ­ ere a girl & then you
weren’t. You moved into a boy & the
girl moved into misplaced language,
into photo­graphs.)

Such clarity about unsettled inhabitance organizes the poetics of Sympathetic

­Little Monster. And to appreciate fully the refraction in “The L
­ ittle Girl Dreams
of ­Dying,” we might read the imperative, “Let her try again,” as a turn—­a
volta of sorts—­where the speaker starts over or shifts voice, as a moment of
re­orientation that enunciates and incites the speaker’s ethos of revision. The
poem’s language is cosmic, worldmaking in its small tenderness ­toward the girl-­
being, and it exposes an investment in the instability of image: not only the
horizonal trick of a sun “falling into the ocean” but the fantastic doubleness of
“The ­little / girl dreams of d
­ ying & wakes up an image,” where the word “wake”
could mean “becomes” but could also mean “revives.” With such fluency,
Awkward-­Rich is putting pressure on ideation, ideal, image, attending to a black
gendered subject facing the obliterative condition that is being-­made-­object. I
­don’t only mean objectification as a harming antiblack and gender-­oppressive
condition but also obliteration as the inevitable everyday being alien to one’s

Aliveness and Oneness 51

self, where selfhood exists as a practice of gathering and appraising and dis-
carding or, more precisely, selfhood as being possessed by and dispossessed of
being. Or, as gender theorist Gayle Salamon describes it, “The body as it exists
for me . . . ​only comes to be once the ‘literal body’ assumes meaning through
image, posture, and touch” (25; emphasis in original). I am compelled by the
way Awkward-­Rich’s verse makes gendered subjection a site of object-­thinking,
including the ampersand that is the official first word and that points atten-
tion to the impossible act of looking “back & forth at the exact same time.” I
am compelled, even more, by the ecstatic and excessive disintegration of the
final sequence: “The l­ittle girl splits the terms of the world. / Splits the world.
Splits,” as if the sentence devolves to its most vital word, “splits,” which seems
singular but could mean e­ ither to leave or to cleave. In this sylleptic moment,
the final single word has no subject, such that the one who splits could only
properly be beheld as a one. One splits, becomes a self-­in-­motion looking at
the self-­in-­motion, animated both by the logics of harm and by the terms of a
­human becoming, a ­human shattering into his manyedness.33
In “The L ­ ittle Girl Dreams of D ­ ying,” the black transgender male speaker
who once was and was never that l­ ittle girl becomes both subject and object to
himself, a world of being in himself, a one. That concluding declining sequence
eludes completeness as would be apt for oneness that is not ­after authority—­
authority is not enough; what oneness promises and alerts is the freedom to be
and to become. Not authority but surrender: “The l­ ittle girl splits the terms of
the world. / Splits the world. Splits.”34
The right to be of one’s knowing, however incomplete knowing is, this right
is the t­ hing being for itself, a relationality of self—­relation, which differs from
identity and its suturing to “the terms of the world.” Again, to be the object
and subject of study, to be the maker and theorist of one’s being, as well as to
be the ­thing made in the acts of being: you being, you becoming. Awkward-­
Rich offers up a poem of self-­study, and “­isn’t that what / a poem does—­studies
a ­thing with two hundred ­faces, then severs all / but one?” (48). I love the
way that ­these poems, in their lyric domain, operate through the subject who
renders himself/themself as object, for the sake of conceptualizing experience,
feeling, states of becoming. And how fantastic it is to watch this unfurl with a
black transgender male subject who is of a “sometimes plural and always vola-
tile self-­center.”35
­These poetics of objectification fulfill the idea of being-­as-­force (­will? soul?),
an aliveness that ­doesn’t capitulate to terms of bodily integrity but that re­
imagines materiality—­feeling—as an inauguration of one’s immanence and

52 Chapter 2
transcendence. It is for this reason that the lyric idealization of voice, ragged
and rangy and hungering—­pursuant in its diffusion, diffuse in its pursuance—
is useful throughout my conceptualization of black poetic inhabitance. In
studying aliveness, I am interested in a thinking-­speaking subject whose think-
ing and speaking are not in opposition to feeling, a thinking-­speaking subject
whose d ­ oing is the intelligence of being and becoming.
To be clear, again: oneness is not akin to individualism, not even close.
Think of Sula, she of oneness, on her deathbed, finding relation through her
reencounter with the cata­log of songs she has heard and has sung. Such reen-
counter constitutes connections with the songs and their singers and writers,
with ­people who ­were pre­sent when she first heard the song. (In the novel,
Sula’s life and death are a connective thread through the community.) Or think
of Maud Martha, whose shift in pronoun from “I” to “one” not only allows
her to imagine the broad case of her being but also proj­ects ­toward the case of
other p ­ eople who might crave the comfort of cocoa made by fire or gas range.
Oneness is relational, and the aliveness made pos­si­ble through being figured
as a one is relational—it enables more and more relation. The poverty of a
racial cap­i­tal­ist logic wants to dominate how we understand oneness as if it
­were synonymous with individuality, but antiblack thought cannot withstand
blackness or oneness. Oneness belongs to the h ­ uman, and in antiblackness, the
black one is neither a ­human nor a one. In studying aliveness, I am thinking in
a black world imaginary, where oneness is relational, where oneness is a right
of and lives in the one who is black.
In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde writes, “The quality of light by
which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we
live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through ­those lives.
It is within this light that we form ­those ideas by which we pursue our magic
and make it realized” (­Sister Outsider 36). I have used this declaration to theo-
rize aliveness in the previous chapter, and it works also to explicate oneness,
since Lorde’s claim about “the quality of light” is an invitation that depends
on the one d ­ oing the perceiving. Oneness is the case of subjectivity for one in
self-­study (studying ­will become relevant ­later in regard to ethics), as if a black
one could say unquestioningly, “I study myself more than any other subject.
That is my metaphysic, that is my physics” (Montaigne 413). In that quota-
tion, Montaigne celebrates experience as embodiment and as a philosophical
­matter, the knowing to be had through the personal impersonal of the case
“one.” All of this is holy work—­remember Lorde’s references to immanence and
transcendence, or Sula’s inglorious godliness—­all of this is figuring the one as

Aliveness and Oneness 53

the beginning of the making of the world. Such audacious inhabiting of being
is poeticized in Lucille Clifton’s “testament”:

in the beginning
was the word.

the year of our lord,

amen. i
lucille clifton
hereby testify
that in that room
­there was a light
and in that light
­there was a voice
and in that voice
­there was a sigh
and in that sigh
­there was a world.
a world a sigh a voice a light and
i
alone
in a room. (243)

­ ere, in this poem, voice is set into relief as an apparatus of worldly being,
H
voice as an idiom of relational becoming—­notice, for example, the resonant
repetition of “room,” “light,” “voice,” “sigh,” “world,” “i,” repetition that sets
­these terms as equivalences of each other. The aloneness is multiple, for even
the line break cannot separate “i” from the compounded sequence of “a world
a sigh a voice a light.” Notice, too, that the conjunction “and,” like Awkward-­
Rich’s ampersand, bridges to the more that one is and is becoming. Clifton’s “i”
is a relational grammar, a pronoun of oneness whose cosmology is to be found
in the world of a room.

“All the w ­ omen are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave”—­
this aphorism that serves as the title of an iconic book of black ­women’s studies
is ­really a poem and a statement of immaculate theorizing. Notice, for exam-
ple, how the declaration sidesteps identity and instead signifies black female-
ness as a h ­ uman characteristic, “brave.” In this assessment, black femaleness is
a manner of being alive that eclipses the social logics of identity. And though
difference and exclusion reside in the calculation, this conceit of black female-

54 Chapter 2
ness is not marginal but instead is righ­teous, a rightness of being akin to the
Combahee River Collective’s determination that “Black w ­ omen are inherently
valuable” (15).
“. . . ​but some of us are brave”—­appended next to the signifying “some of us,”
they said “brave,” that adjective marked by racial and gendered and national
specificity, a term that is at once poetic and po­liti­cal, describing character and
consciousness and w ­ ill. Brave, as in audacious and ordinary and alive, frail and
full of need. Ready and of surrender. Adjective, yes, but also a name, even more
radical than that—­a statement ontological and imperative: Brave. Undeniably
­here. Not w ­ oman, not black, not authenticity, but something e­ lse: ­human, a
maker of t­ hings, a god of ideas, a one in and beyond the world—­a knowing that
being d ­ oesn’t reside in identity but instead arrives in relation.
Again and fi­nally, if we attend to it, we might notice how some writers use
black femaleness as a philosophy of aliveness. And, if we attend to it, we might
use t­ hese models of black female intellection for thinking about blackness in a
black world, blackness that belongs to the black one and that demands of the
one their regard for their oneness.36

Aliveness and Oneness 55

This page intentionally left blank
3 ALIVENESS

AND AESTHETICS

In a black world’s rightness of being, one can be—­can yearn to be—­moved,

devastated, broken. Such an orientation of worldness is realized in the made-­
text, in attending to the aesthetics of the created ­thing: its shape and form, its
poetics, its effects and affects rendered via language.
The terms of aesthetics sometimes seem antagonistic to racial ­matters, as if
blackness itself w­ ere formless, as if aesthetic discourse ­were contrary to the po­
liti­cal contexts of black arts. ­These disavowals are flawed since, as phi­los­o­pher
Monique Roelofs argues, “racial formations are aesthetic phenomena and aes-
thetic practices are racialized structures” (83). Simply, as per­for­mance studies
has shown us, attempts to segregate aesthetics from politics misunderstand the
mutual conditions between lived life and art; such attempts also misappreciate
the philosophical bearing of repre­sen­ta­tional practices.1
 This is aesthetics as a form-­of-­life, aesthetics as a schema for considering the
aliveness of phenomena and the phenomena of aliveness, the “quality of light
by which we scrutinize our lives,” in Audre Lorde’s language (­Sister Outsider 36).
Or, to cite Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture, “We die. That may be the meaning
of life. But we do language. That may be the mea­sure of our lives” (203).2
In linking aesthetics and aliveness, I am trying to turn ­toward the animat-
ing capacities evident in the art object, following media studies scholar Amit S.
Rai, who calls for antiracist politics that “move beyond reactive dialectics and
repre­sen­ta­tional strategies [and ­toward] something ­else, experimenting with
duration, sensation, resonance, and affect” (64–65; emphases added).3 This com-
mitment to sensibility echoes the case that LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) makes
in his 1967 essay “The World Y ­ ou’re Talking About”: “The Black Poetry is a
sensitivity to the world total, to the American total. It is about, or is feeling(s).
Even governmental structures are made the way p­ eople feel they should be
made. The animating intelligence is a total of all existence. . . . ​Ways of making
sense, of sensing. . . . ​Worlds. Spectrums. Galaxies. What the god knows” (n.p.
[first page]; emphases in original). Jones’s title and argument advance precisely
an understanding of black feeling as an instantiation of textual sociality, “a
world of h­ umans and their paths and forms” (n.p. [first page]; emphasis added).
And in collating animacy, intelligence, and existence, Jones articulates aesthet-
ics as the aliveness of worldmaking.4
In my engagement with poetics, I am interested in aesthetics as a means to
explore the specificity of aliveness. And though I have emphasized the syntax
of pronouns and point of view, we can also consider aliveness through the qual-
ity of verbs. Think again of Lucille Clifton’s “reply,” where being is particular-
ized through the poem’s sustained pre­sent tense:

he do
she do
...
they try
they tire
...
they moan
they mourn
...
they do
they do
they do

58 Chapter 3
Notice the work t­ hese verbs do to enunciate blackness as phenomena, this se-
quence of being that is at once definitive and untrackable, pre­sent and of pres-
ence. The poem’s s­ imple and marvelous sequencing reinforces why it m ­ atters
to read aesthetically, since without attention to the sensible, Clifton’s cata­log
of ­doings might appear only as antiracist counternarrative. Which would be
a loss, ­really, since her exceptional ­music (“moan”/“mourn,” “try”/“tire”) and
her rendering of quotidian excellence deserve to be appreciated more wholly.
We could explore how the temporalities of verbs constitute worldness, es-
pecially in the instance of the subjunctive, the syntax of imagining. We know
subjunctivity as an expression of desired or conditional action. As such, subjunc-
tive utterances, through their wishfulness, seem to create or manifest a scene for
happening, as if the subjunctive is a spell that casts its subject into the suspen-
sion of an imaginary. This claim recalls the consideration of being-­object in the
previous chapter, where a habitat of introspection yields a moment of prospection,
though now I want to highlight time as a feature of prospection, how subjunctiv-
ity conceptualizes experience as a toggling between then (past), now (pre­sent),
and what may come. That is, even though the subjunctive is more properly a
mood rather than a verb, it inflects a condition of dynamic time via the one
speaking through its syntax.5 ­There are plentiful examples in Terrance Hayes’s
American Sonnets for My Past and F ­ uture Assassin, a collection that signals its tem-
porality in the title and that throws its speaker(s) into suspension via the rubric
of the-­slaughter-­to-­come. Throughout the seventy sonnets, Hayes puts forth a
black male speaker who is a poet or singer or songmaker, a speaker whose bid to
sing is animated by the assassin trained on his life. That killer, in one sense, is anti-
blackness, and repeatedly the speaker encounters the ideation of blackness that
renders him both as a feared force and as a shadow of/to himself, an immaculate
agent who is also powerless. We might think of American Sonnets as a study of
poetic ontology, an aesthetic materialization of the speaker’s feeling asunder in
existence.6 And as Hayes’s poetic invites the speaker to behold who he might be
in regard to the rapture of killing possibility, the temporality remains super-
latively in the pre­sent: the speaker recalls past happenings and proj­ects into
the ­future, but the existential tremor of voice, sustained from poem to poem, is
of a one figuring now. ­Here is an example from sonnet 55, titled as are all of them
“American Sonnet for My Past and ­Future Assassin”:

My ­mother says I am beautiful inside

And out. But my lover never believed it.
My lover never believed I held her name
In my mouth. My ­mother calls me her silver

Aliveness and Aesthetics 59

 Bullet. Her mercy pill, the metal along her spine.
I am my ­mother’s bewildered shadow.
My lover’s bewildering shadow is mine.
I have wept listening to a terrible bewildering
­Music break over & through & break down
A black w
­ oman’s voice. I talk to myself
Like her s­ ister. Assassin, you are a mystery
To me, I say to my reflection sometimes.
You are beautiful ­because of your sadness, but
You would be more beautiful without your fear. (65)

The meditative formality of the sonnet, its inclination to exaggerate or resolve

a question, resides in the repetition we see early in the poem, as the speaker
toggles between the m­ other’s and the lover’s (dis)belief. That repetition gains
intensity through three successive iterations of the word “bewilder,” as in “be-
wildered” (line 6) and “bewildering” (lines 7 and 8), iterations that are the first
volta in the poem:

I am my ­mother’s bewildered shadow.

My lover’s bewildering shadow is mine.
I have wept listening to a terrible bewildering
­Music break over & through & break down
A black w
­ oman’s voice. . . .

Let me pause to unpack what I think happens h ­ ere, since its occurrence w­ ill
animate how to apprehend time and subjunctivity in the poem’s conclusion.
First, as is the case throughout American Sonnets, the speaker often reckons with
his being through femaleness. (Hayes uses the idiom “a black male hysteria” to
open five poems, revising the common designation of hysteria as a dismissed
female condition of somatic trauma.) Notice, for example, the speaker’s nego-
tiation of his being vis-­à-­vis the female shadow; notice, also, that the speaker
moves from intense abstractions about m ­ other and lover t­ oward a specific en-
counter with breaking—­his being brought to tender terror through identification
with a black female singer: “I have wept listening to a terrible bewildering / ­Music
break over & through & break down / A black w ­ oman’s voice.” I am struck
­here by the compounding terms of undoing articulated via prepositions of
movement (“break over & through & break down”) and by the intensification in
the rhyme (the r’s, b’s, l’s and d’s in “terrible bewildering”), as I am by the subtlety
of the speaker’s relationality with the singer. That is, rather than being moved
by the singer’s singing, what Farah Jasmine Griffin describes as the facile idiom

60 Chapter 3
of black w­ oman singer-­as-­muse, the speaker is transformed in recognizing the
singer’s own affective vitality—he is moved ­because he beholds that the ter-
rible beauty in her song is also a terrible beauty in her experience of rendering
the song.7 This relationality, enunciated via the present perfect tense (“I have
wept”), propels the speaker to a more acute sensibility in the pre­sent, a further
identification through femaleness: “I talk to myself / Like her ­sister.” We might
call this, as Hayes does, being bewildered, where the word means not confusion
but being taken out of one’s sense of commonsense—­being made wild or being
lured into the wild.
“I talk to myself / Like her s­ ister”: The speaker is thrown by the singer’s thrown-
ness. And ­here is where the poem registers subjunctive time, via the direct ad-
dress of line 11 as the speaker proj­ects himself through looking at his reflection:

. . . ​Assassin, you are a mystery

To me, I say to my reflection sometimes.
You are beautiful ­because of your sadness, but
You would be more beautiful without your fear.

The lines of address multiply as the speaker announces himself as ­sister and
then as the killing one he has internalized. Moreover, the sweet closing rec-
ognition ­couples the temporality of the speaker beholding his (now) beautiful
sadness with the possibility that he or his sadness might be something more in
another (­future) instance. This is subjunctivity, the doubt and vitality of lean-
ing into one’s relationality, the animating of being through the expressiveness
of might-be.
Consider again the temporality in the closing couplet, not just the gap
between the speaker’s now-­beauty and that which may come but the tempo-
ral sensibility of the implied if-­then phrasing in the final line: if you ­were of
less fear, then you could be of more beauty. Reading through the syntax of if-
then heightens the prayer quality here as the declarative statement hesitates
­because it is not yet achieved.
The ­matter of subjunctivity and poetic time relates to my consideration of
aliveness, especially b­ ecause the phrase “imagine a black world” is a subjunctive
clause—an imperative one too. Notably, ­the keenness of temporal suspension
is different in examples where the subjunctive coheres with the imperative, where
­there is no disjuncture between the wish, the command, and the achievement.8 In-
deed, the subjunctive-imperative of “imagine” yearns and instantiates at the same
time; the one who says “imagine” expresses a still-­to-­come authority in the pre­
sent. This attribute constitutes another aestheticization of aliveness, as is the case
with Nikky Finney’s “The Making of Paper” (The World Is Round 100–102):

Aliveness and Aesthetics 61

 for Toni Cade Bambara, 1939–1995

In the early 1980s I spent two years in a writing workshop that the writer Toni Cade
Bambara held in her ­house in Atlanta e­ very first Sunday. Anybody in the community
who was writing was welcome: students, bus d­ rivers, carpenters. I adored the opportu-
nity to sit at this ­great writer’s feet. She knew so much about so much. She ­later moved
to Philadelphia. She was l­ater diagnosed with cancer. We talked on the long-­distance
line when we could. I would always ask was ­there anything she needed that I could
send. She usually answered no. But in out last conversation, which took place one week
before she crossed over, she held the phone a ­little longer. “Maybe . . .” she said, “. . . ​
maybe you could send some paper, and what about one of t­ hose fat juicy pens?”

Imagine that,
you asking me for paper.

For the rec­ord let me state:

I would hunt a tree down for you,
stalk it u
­ ntil it fell
all loud and out of breath
in the forest.
Much as I love a tree;
fat, tall, and f­ ree.
As antiviolent and provegetarian
as I am.

Never much
for strapping a gun
to any of my many hips,
for any reason whatsoever,
but on the copper penny eyes
of my grand­mother, I tell you
this: I would hunt a tree down for you.

And when found

I would pull it all the way down the road
through congested city streets all by myself
and deliver it straightway
to your hospital bed,
one single extra-­large floral arrangement,
something loud and ­free,
with red and purple bow.

62 Chapter 3
Or better yet,
this tree-­loving
gun-­hating Geechee girl
would strap a Wild West
gun belt-­machete
around her hips
enter the worst part of the woods alone
and go trunk to trunk
­until the right one appeared
growing peaceful in its thousand-­year-­old
natal pot.

Look it
right in its
round rough ancient eyes
and confess away,
tell it straight to its woody face
my about-­to-do deed.

I’d even touch it

on its limbs,
fin­gers begging forgiveness,
give as much comfort to it
as I could, while trying to
explain the necessaryness
of its impending death;
me standing t­ here,
my Gorilla, My Love eyes
spilling all over every­thing,
sending up papyrus prayers
that all begin with,
“I’m so sorry but Toni Cade needs paper.”

Only then would I slash its lovely body

into one million thin black cotton rag sheets,
just your uncompromising size.

Send you some paper?

Oh yes,
paper is coming Toni Cade
wagonloads

Aliveness and Aesthetics 63

 in the name
of your sweet Black writing life,
from Black writers everywhere
refusing to leave
the arena
to the fools.

Paper is on the way.

Though an elegy, the poem’s proper subject is not Toni Cade Bambara but the
speaker, the speaker’s twitching ­toward being through the poem’s length. The
subjunctive-­imperative first line, “Imagine that, / you asking me for paper,”
initiates the speaker’s voice, since the expression is performative, a thought
of surprise that is said out loud. H­ ere, the praxis of make-­believe animates the
speaker’s voice immediately with force and d ­ oing, closing the gap between
­here and the wherever of Toni Cade. We see this animation in the way “Much
as I love a tree” and “Never been much” approximate the urgency of everyday
speech. Yet even in haste, the speaker lingers on the tree of her imagination,
as in “Look it / right in its / round rough ancient eyes”—­the briskness is ­there
in the clipped syntax that replaces the full subject-­verb clause (as in, “I would
look it”), as well as in the double use of “it” . . . ​both are features of spoken ex-
citability. But notice, too, how the speaker materializes the tree and material-
izes the moment of contending with its shape, particularly via the alliterative
compounding of adjectives that attend deliberately to the tree’s eyes: “round
rough ancient.” In Finney’s poem, we are in the midst of a conjecture that has
the heft of presence as the speaker imagines and exists in suspension with this
tree. The poem teems with dynamism, the tingling of the speaker’s instance
of being in becoming, her wish that arrives as an achievement. “Imagine that.”9
“The Making of Paper” showcases the speaker’s capacity to make some-
thing happen, to be and become the happening of relationality. Importantly,
the speaker ­doesn’t try to idealize or conjure Toni Cade, who is addressed di-
rectly and who is referred to in regard to her art (“your sweet Black writing
life”). Instead, the poem figures the speaker, her expressiveness and energy and
ferocity, her being a one in devotion. I love the way that the time of relational-
ity in this poem is radical, as much now as it is also timeless. I am reluctant to
use that term, “radical,” though I ­can’t think of another word that character-
izes how the habitat of “Imagine that” animates the speaker’s becoming not
as an occurrence in the f­ uture but as a scene in the pre­sent. Said another way,
this relationality achieves a sublime expression of wish through an idiom that
brings the wish into being.10 If “The Making of Paper” enacts devotion, it is

64 Chapter 3
the speaker who is revealed as the subject of its devotioning, the speaker whose
vocal vitality tingles on, off, and beyond the verse page. In regard to ­these po-
etics, we might recognize three closing ­things: One, that Finney merges the
speaker’s voice with Bambara’s, since the injunction “refusing to leave / the
arena / to the fools” is one that Bambara wrote on a postcard to Finney. This
merger maps one voice on the other through shared speech that surpasses time
and space. Two, we might read the poem’s last line as a temporal reiteration
of its title—­not “the making of paper” but the promise, “Paper is on the way.”
Both the dramatic widowing of this final line and its declarative spoken quality
imbue the phrase with the force of imperative, the forever capacity of one say-
ing a ­thing that ­hasn’t occurred but that ­will happen shortly and surely—­the
­will of the one to breech the gap between now and tomorrow. That final line
enhances the timelessness announced in the title and stands as a perfect ac-
complishment of the aesthetics of worldmaking. And fi­nally, as an extension of
my insistence that the poem is not, precisely, about Bambara, we might appre-
ciate how much the speaker’s rambunctious poetic materiality (the voice, the
imagining, the fidelity to accomplish) amounts to an activism that is roused
by and partner to Bambara’s legacy—­the poem is the materialization of the
speaker speaking out in honor of Bambara and against legacies of vio­lence and
exclusion, as if the speaker comes into her voice through speaking about and
speaking to her elegiac subject. Said another way, the speaker’s verse urgency
makes literal the relationality of aliveness conceptualized in one black w­ oman
saying to another, “Can I say again how alive your being alive makes me feel!?!”11
I love the way Finney’s “The Making of Paper” uses the subjunctive-­
imperative to reorder time and to execute a heightened expressiveness that
such warped time permits. I love the poem’s animacy of performative language
achieved through a wish that is also a command. The poem’s instantiations are
of timelessness, since the work to be done (make paper) is being done (in the
poem by the speaker) and what remains is the sweet devotional promise one
must steadily bear: “Paper is on the way.”12
Subjunctivity in this way, entwined with the imperative and animating of
being, comprises an aesthetics of aliveness. Indeed, I am reminded of the call in
the opening passage of Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”; again:

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon
the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring
about through ­those lives. It is within this light that we form t­ hose ideas
by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illu-
mination, for it is through poetry that we give name to t­ hose ideas which

Aliveness and Aesthetics 65

 are, ­until the poem, nameless and formless—­about to be birthed, but al-
ready felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs
births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowl-
edge births (precedes) understanding. (­Sister Outsider 36; emphases added)

It is nearly counterintuitive to consider experience as a praxis that ­houses pos-

sibility, but in Lorde’s thinking, experience is subjunctive ­because it merges what
is deeply felt with what has not yet occurred. Experience, then, is a state of suspen-
sion in the intensity of presence and possibility, a state of readiness and surrender.
This framing of subjunctivity—as relational surrender, in regard to the
thrall of experience—­reaffirms aliveness as a call ­toward dispossession. That is,
following the work of Fred Moten and ­others, I think of aliveness as an inhabit-
ance that runs c­ ounter to possessive investments of subjecthood. The alive one
does not possess herself, even as her aliveness animates her being in the world.
(Think again of Sula.) In a black world orientation, we could countenance risk
and threat as if one ­were ­free to be suspended in ­human happening.13
Such a study of particularized dispossession exists in Ruth Ellen Kocher’s
domina Un/blued, a book-­length collection on domination and submission as
terms of erotic sexual desire as much as they are terms of empire and colonial-
ity. The subjunctive is all over domina Un/blued and its investigation of sub-
jection. We know, following Patricia J. Williams, that enslaved ­people “­were
­either owned or unowned, never the owner” (156). It is this fault line that Ko-
cher brings alive on her pages abundant with white space, pages where lan-
guage is sometimes subsumed below the footer’s bar:

Exercise 3.

Possessive case for the word ‘slave’ does not exist in Italian.

The slave owned not own nor owns

Nor evolves. Nor provision any make consonant belonging. (4)

This insight, appropriately named an exercise since it has to be practiced into be-
coming, is from “D/domina: Issues Involving Translation,” and it exemplifies the
wild and wide-­open materialities in Kocher’s book, the way that words float unex-
pectedly in columns and at the bottom of pages and unpredictably across horizon-
tal planes. Kocher’s poeticization of owner­ship continues in “Exercise 4,” which
asserts that “black is only a ­thing the slave owns that is nothing” and then ­later,

the writing done by the slave in a notebook belongs to no one

no one belongs to the slave (9)

66 Chapter 3
In this sequence, Kocher’s use of “done” as a verb keeps the black one in a
syntax of subjection, object even to one’s own writing. Her book’s early poems
acknowledge the complex racialized landscape of domination, and yet Kocher
does not shy away from thinking through dominion as a feature of human-­
to-­human erotic exchange. Indeed, throughout Kocher’s poems, small scenes
of complicated hunger for another, of sexual rapaciousness, become moments
of meditating on being. For example, consider how she takes up possession—­
through the subjunctive and the imperative—in the poem “Domina”:

What boy in leather pants

to gaze but O the long hallway that wields you fi­nally

wild breasted ­thing.

Imagine he cries He stiffens The carcass of a derailed train that

sits
at an ­angle to its track

so together you make an arrow pointing away.

Imagine he walks into the club & the purple ­lasers him into two so
one eye

belongs to the him coming ­toward you and one

stays just a step b­ ehind mea­sures the pace stalks the beat
   him coming

t­ owards you his reflection pooled across ­every mirrored wall

Mercury’s quick desire but O only him wantless to look at ­others

as they look at him but O if he could see—­and to see to see

to see them see him see

Sweet brute

drop

to your knees. (28–29; emphases in the original)

Though small, this poem is dense—­even difficult—so let’s focus on the first
five lines: For one, notice that the poem’s politics of dominion depend on the

Aliveness and Aesthetics 67

complicated locality of voice, such that the speaker, the one who beholds the
“boy in leather pants” and who exclaims via apostrophe, is and is not necessar-
ily the same as the dominant/dominating subject. That is, the intimacy of the
apostrophe and the switch to the second person (“the long hallway that wields
you”) suggest that the positionality between speaker and dominant could
shift. This volatility exemplifies Kocher’s nuanced exploration of dominion—
of power as a generic term as well as power as a term of colonial and racialized
harm. The poem’s flux heightens via the phrase “Imagine he cries,” which is
followed immediately by the direct pre­sent tense, “He stiffens”: in one sense,
the point of reference seems to move from a voice that is outside the scene to
one that is enmeshed in the materiality of his stiffening. Or, in another read-
ing, the subjunctive-­imperative “imagine” slips so as to modify both the crying
and the stiffening. What­ever the case, in five quick lines, Kocher enacts a scene
of charge and intensity where status is not static.
Even more compelling is the dynamism in the exclaimed word “O,” which is
an expressive sign that marks both a speaker’s articulation of feeling (surprise,
pain, joy) and a direct address to an elevated someone or something. This latter
use is the vocative quality of “O,” its elegiac and romantic speech capacity. In
“Domina,” the direction of the address is not defined—­the speaker ­doesn’t say
“O boy,” for example—so the exclamation dangles as an expression of feeling
(experience) as well as a call ­toward something or someone beyond the time of
the scene. As such, the apostrophe seems to indicate the making-­present of the
pos­si­ble, and every­thing hangs in exquisite subjunctivity.14
This aliveness that decomposes easy subjectivity occurs also in the poem’s
repetition, especially “if he could see—­and to see to see / to see them see him
see,” where the reiterated word (“see”) unsettles the authority of looking and
codifies a fun­house of desire and being. Who is seeing, we are left to won­der,
and the answer becomes no more clear in the poem’s closing lines: “Sweet brute /
drop / to your knees.” Who speaks this tender call, and who is the tender one?
It is as likely that the submissive boy makes this command as it is that the
speaker—­who inhabits the dominant role as narrator of the happening—­has
succumbed to the tension and entered the plane of t­ hings. I love, too, how the
tenderness of “Sweet brute” recalls the honored attention of the opening phrase,
“What boy,” since in both instances the adjectives (“sweet,” “what”) indicate
a kind of affection, a specialness. This is subjection as holiness, what Darieck
Scott names as “extravagant abjection,” that trail of Os down the page, where
begging and demanding and experiencing become indistinguishable. All of this
intense feeling and suspension that yields prayer is subjunctivity, the aesthet-
ics that render blackness as small, tingling inflections.

68 Chapter 3
 Kocher’s bewildered poem thrives on its scene of smallness. Indeed, the
capacity-­in-­smallness is the reason why, throughout Black Aliveness, I have em-
phasized short poems (with the exception of Finney’s “The Making of Paper”)
rather than ones of epic scale; I want poems that are portable, poems that dare
to try to carry the world of worldmaking in scant space, poems that conjure
aesthetics to materialize cosmologically. By focusing thus, I am interested in
the text’s aliveness, the text as an object of animacy that invites encounter. The
truth is that ­every made text, ­every song or poem or story, is alive; it has a voice
or a speaker who is alive, and it beholds the world of aliveness. Said another
way, the made-­text is evidence of aliveness in at least two ways: in its own ma-
teriality as a t­ hing made by an alive one, and in the world of being it imagines.15
“­Every story is a travel story—­a spatial practice,” which means that e­ very
telling holds traversal and, as such, can incite relationality and worldmaking.16
­There is no genre more capable of this d ­ oing than the first-­person or personal
essay, that superlative form of relation and self-­study.
As a genre, the essay installs both a scene of happening and a one immersed
in the happening. Commonly, we know the essay as a brief composition “from
a ­limited and often personal point of view,”17 though more formally, in “The
Essay as Form,” phi­los­o­pher Theodor Adorno historicizes the essay as a hy-
brid between science and art: “Instead of achieving something scientifically,
or creating something artistically, the effort of the essay reflects a childlike
freedom that catches fire, without scruple, on what ­others have already done.
The essay mirrors what is loved and hated instead of presenting the intellect,
on the model of a boundless work ethic, as creatio ex nihilo” (152). For Adorno,
the essay arrives as if made out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) other than the being
(the experience) of the self. In this way, the essay constitutes m ­ atter, material-
ity, in three ways: as a form of being, as a form of being-­in-­the-­world, and as
a form that makes a world out of being. And yet, as dynamic a habitat as the
essay might be, we should remember that the essay’s capacity resides in what
is small, even piecemeal.
We might think of the first-­person essay, then, as a genre that generates
from the declaration, “Let me tell you something that happened to me.”
This inclination to tell of an experience is deceptive ­because it seems to
initiate a listener, an audience or reader to whom the essay’s working is di-
rected. But the full energy of the essay ordinates ­toward self-­study. Simply, the
essay aestheticizes the speaker, privileging the ­will and wandering and affective
intensity of the one who is of the happening. The author is the essay’s hero,
writer Carl H. Klaus argues in a fantastic survey of the genre and its classical
figures, though I might modify this claim to suggest that what is found in the

Aliveness and Aesthetics 69

essay’s terrain is the writer’s proxy, the speaker, since we c­ an’t properly access
the writer themself.18 Indeed, focusing on the writer might ignite biographi-
cal expectations of repre­sen­ta­tion and authenticity that cohere too readily to
blackness. I w­ ill come back to this question of audience l­ater, but for now I
want to be clear that my investment lies in highlighting the speaker persona as
an iteration of the essay’s aesthetic and material abundance, the speaker as a
figure through which telling and encounter happen.19
Let me extend this point a bit: with the essay, what we get on the page is the
speaker’s voice, a mess of feeling and aching and raging and thinking, a sliver
of the capaciousness of being; the essay, properly, is the speaker’s dwelling, a
pursuit of discovery that marries ignorance and arrogance. Again, one turns to
Adorno, who writes, “The essay becomes true in its pro­gress, which drives it
beyond itself, and not in a hoarding obsession with fundamentals. Its concepts
receive their light from a terminus ad quem hidden to the essay itself, and not from
an obvious terminus a quo” (161). Adorno reminds us that the essay is motivated
by something beyond its own completeness, and that its dynamism rests in its
capacity to inspire a point of mysterious ending rather than its serving as a clear
beginning. More important, the time quality of the essay is ­after (terminus ad
quem), not before, and the speaker suspends in the aesthetic habitat; that is, the
speaker is not in control of the essay’s working (the essay is not about transpar-
ent conclusions) but rather the speaker arrives through the telling. I know that
this claim might seem contradictory to common understandings of authority
over one’s story, though in advocating for the essay as a relational praxis, I want
to emphasize that the drive to narrate, which might imply control and mastery,
exists in negotiation with the surprise that narration exposes.20
The essay is a genre of black oneness, a relational textuality of the speaker’s
preparedness to surrender to their becoming, site of the speaker as a rhetori-
cal revelation. If ­every first-­person essay conceptually begins, “Let me tell you
something that happened to me,” the act of telling is not about the happening,
but the act of telling becomes a happening in itself. In this regard, the subject of
the invitation is the speaker—­the speaker is the essay’s you. The keenest word
in this characterization might be one I used ­earlier, “aestheticization,” which
anchors the notion that the essay enacts an aestheticization of the black one in
and as aliveness, the essay as a case for rendering the plea­sure and intelligence
of the words for the saying.
The essay is neither argument nor conclusion but a genre for encounter, a
form for “an everyday abstraction of blackness,” in film scholar Michael Gil-
lespie’s language (9).21 As such, it asks, “What is experience?” as writer John
D’Agata notes. I love D’Agata’s clarity h ­ ere, since he reminds us that the essay

70 Chapter 3
is a schema of discovery that questions rather than confirms the definitiveness
of experience.22 In accord with its etymology, the essay stages a display of the
speaker’s trial, their encounter with being, even though this performativity
can be hard to recognize given the genre’s use of conversational language that
mimics common speech. Indeed we should not interpret this performativity
as an antithesis to the essay’s oneness, since w ­ e’ve seen already the value of
projection as a feature of alive being. 23

This is the essay as poetic subjunctivity.24

Though D’Agata does not make specific reference to black aesthetics, his
claim that the essay uses experience to explore the nature of experience is es-
pecially relevant in a world of blackness. As theorist Stuart Hall observes, “We
tend to privilege experience itself, as if black life is lived experience outside
of repre­sen­ta­tion. We have only, as it w­ ere, to express what we already know
we are. Instead, it is only through the way in which we represent and imagine
ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are” (30).
Like Hall, my investment is against an easy conflation of blackness with a sim-
plistic notion of experience. In reading the essay as a genre of black aliveness, I
am emphasizing the aesthetic dynamism that Patricia J. Williams describes as
the always “rhetorical event” of rendering experience (11)—­the dramatization
of the speaker, the exhibition of flourishes of syntax, diction, repetition . . . ​all of
the techniques of making and unfurling, techniques of rendering one’s being
in experience that are also how experience comes to be and comes to mean.
(Again, Lorde’s “the quality of light. . . .”)25
­There is an instructive example early in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door
of No Return, where, in a meditation on the heft of history, the speaker de-
scends into feeling as knowing: “One enters a room and history follows; one
enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in
the empty room when one arrives. Where one stands in a society seems always
related to this historical experience. Where one can be observed is relative to
that history. All ­human effort seems to emanate from this door. How do I know
this? Only by self-­observation, only by looking. Only by feeling. Only by being
a part, sitting in the room with history” (24–25). In the syntax, the speaker
moves between “one” and herself in the first person and, as such, the location
of authority about one, history, diaspora is sutured to the clean specificity of
a room, a chair, a black female subject’s feeling. Even the question, “How do I
know this?” could be read as a moment of self-­interrogation, as if it is whispered
by the one to the one about the one, as if manifesting a figuring of experience.
“How do I know this?” she asks, that enduring question of aliveness. I love
the first-­person essay as a prompt for imagining that a black one could sit in

Aliveness and Aesthetics 71

won­der and ask, “What is experience?” in the full iterative complexity of such
a query.
Before turning to an example, let me assert again:

—­ The idiom of the essay is of autonomous passage for the one. That is,
if the essay’s vibrant rhe­torics can correlate to authenticity, it is in
regard to the ethos of au­then­tic movement as choreographer Romain
Bigé has explained it: “to sit with the (in)authenticity of one’s self.”
Bigé’s terms remind me that dance as a practice is of relation (again,
Danielle Goldman’s I Want to Be Ready), each dance as an occasion of
embodied consciousness where the dancer is a one enacting move-
ment as a locus of intelligence. In dance, the dancer is (being) and is
(becoming), so perhaps the essay, as a habitat, is like dance.26
—­ The essay’s relationality lies in performativity, in its functioning as
a site of disidentification for the speaker who is both the one who is
telling and the one who is the subject of the telling.27
—­ “Distance,” “disidentification,” and “orientation”—­these are terms of
phenomenology and are vital to how we understand the dynamics of
the essay. Indeed, in this way, my suggestion that e­ very first-­person
essay conceptually begins, “Let me tell you something that happened
to me,” is apt for not using the word “about” (that is, the phrase is
not “Let me tell you about something that happened to me”). As it is,
the statement emphasizes a narrative that is embodied and imminent
and in pro­cess: the telling is not about the happening; the telling is the
constitution of the ­thing itself.28
—­ The essay invokes and appropriates the scene as a moment of being
object and subject, staging “the act of being seen and being seen in
the pro­cess of being seen” (Thompson 10).
—­ As a materialization of being, the essay is a volatile embodiment; an
instantiation and incantation, a magic ­thing where words are sub-
stance and are capable of making substance; a corpus of transforma-
tion or crossing, like the rhetorical trope of chiasmus that enacts
becoming, exemplified well via the narrator’s yearning at the end of
Toni Morrison’s Jazz: “Make me, remake. You are ­free to do it and I am
­free to let you” (229). The essay offers an “aesthetics of existence.”29
—­ The essay is a call to and of the one, an aliveness in aesthetics that sur-
passes repre­sen­ta­tion. Not evidence or authority but the being alive, a
collation of experience and existence that confirms its phenomenology
since “from a phenomenological perspective, ­every act of description is

72 Chapter 3
 at the same time an act of constitution; that is, whenever we describe
the world, we are, in a very real sense, remaking it” (Fryer 228).30
—­ Fi­nally, the essay levitates as a nuanced privacy, akin to what Eliza-
beth Alexander—in reading Michael Harper’s Black Arts poetry—­
describes as a “pride [that generates] from an ­angle of profoundest
intimacy, as though nothing is worth saying loudly ­unless it is felt
from a place” of depth (80–81). Yes, yes, yes, as though nothing but
one’s black intimacy is worth saying loudly.

In “Of Practice,” Michel de Montaigne makes the essay’s ethic clear: “My
trade and art is living,” he writes, and then l­ater, “I expose myself entire. . . . ​
It is not my deeds that I write down; it is myself, it is my essence” (189, 191).
Or Patricia J. Williams, in The Alchemy of Race and Rights, who enacts the black
self as a “floating signifier” in a first-­person speech act, and who confesses, “I
deliberately sacrifice myself in my writing” (7, 92). This is the essay, which, like
Lucille Clifton’s speaker, says “come celebrate” and mobilizes subjunctivity on
behalf of a one of black aliveness.
To further the case for a poetics of the first-­person essay, which could also
be called the lyric essay,31 I want to consider an exquisite example, Jamaica Kin-
caid’s exploration of colonialism, tourism, and Ca­rib­bean modernity in A Small
Place. We ­don’t often think of this book through the aesthetics of the personal
essay. Indeed, since its publication in 1988, A Small Place has been read ­either
as a searing condemnation of white (American and Eu­ro­pean) tourism or as
a misguided critique of Antiguans. ­These critical assessments privilege the
text’s arguments and also tend to lean heavi­ly on psychological interpretation
of Kincaid’s biography; as such, ­these readings collapse the writer with the au-
thor function, her narrative persona, and overlook the book’s aesthetic ­doings.
Given this, I want to attend both to the speaker who materializes (in) the tell-
ing and to A Small Place as a scene of the speaker’s undoing, of her being both
subject and object of the essaying. I want to read as if the speaker’s becoming
on the page constitutes the book’s revelatory dynamics.32
Central in A Small Place’s aesthetics is the pre­sen­ta­tion of unsettledness, first
in the way the speaker seems to disorient the reader and then in the speaker’s
own tumble into ambivalence that reflects a depth of black feeling about and
within the colonial condition. “If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what
you w ­ ill see” (3) is the book’s first sentence, a dare of a phrase that ensnares
the reader and establishes an antagonism that ­will energize the arc of what
follows. Immediately, the speaker asserts herself obliquely and aggressively by
overdetermining the reader, who is co-­opted into a discursive world via the

Aliveness and Aesthetics 73

command “you.” Notice, too, that the second-­person invocation consists of
both a subjunctive (“if you go”) and an imperative (direct address)—­that the
essay begins in the aesthetic of “imagine.” We know, then, that we have to
read this provocation thoughtfully so as to keep the textuality of the speaker
in view. That is, we ­can’t infer only that the address is directed to a (white)
reader, especially since the speaker herself is also revisiting the island ­after a
long absence. If we engage the book as a relational inhabiting, then the open-
ing’s invocation via the subjunctive includes the speaker in its command, a call
of worldmaking that arrests the speaker in her conjured scene of small island-
ness. In this claim, I read “if you go” as a disorienting rhetorical function, one
that cues us to notice the speaker’s unsettled subjectivity. What we gain from
such a reading is the capacity to attend to the speaker’s anger and regret and
confusion and ambivalence, her exasperation and her embarrassment for hav-
ing such conflicted feelings; what we gain is a sense of the essay as a home
of the speaker’s grappling with experience and an appreciation for Kincaid’s
deployment of the force of the genre.33
I am interested in A Small Place as a textual landscape of the black speaker’s
relationality.
Kincaid’s essay is composed of four untitled sections, each a meditation
on being in Antigua. While the first section, just referenced, uses the second
person almost to the exclusion of explicit reference to the speaking “I,” parts
2 and 3 rely principally on first-­person disclosure. The last section, which is a
brief poetic reprisal of Antigua’s colonial history, deploys an omniscient third-­
person voice to reinforce the speaker’s intimacy.34 But I am getting ahead of
myself in summarizing the essay’s narrative kinetics: we can recognize relation
as a praxis in A Small Place by paying attention to the pronouns in the essay, how
the direct address ensures the first-­person speaker’s authority of voice without
having to say “I.” It is an act of control, or delay, maybe even a gambit to orient
the scene of colonial happenings appropriately. Throughout the initial pages,
the speaker assails the ­imagined reader through second-­person conjecture:

You are a tourist. . . . ​You disembark from your plane. You go through
customs. Since you are a tourist, a North American or European—to
be frank, white—­and not an Antiguan black returning to Antigua from
Eu­rope or North Amer­i­ca with cardboard boxes of much needed cheap
clothes and food for relatives, you move through customs swiftly, you
move through customs with ease. Your bags are not searched. You emerge
from customs into the hot, clean air: immediately you feel cleansed, im-
mediately you feel blessed (which is to say special); you feel ­free. (3–5)

74 Chapter 3
The speaker’s assumptions about the reader multiply, even to the level of pro-
jecting what the you feels: “You are feeling wonderful” (5). L ­ ater, the speaker
summarizes the power of the colonizer with another astute accusing projec-
tion, “You see yourself, you see yourself ” (13), the repetition emphasizing the
insight and the authority of its saying. Not only do ­these summations codify
the reader, the white you, but they secure the speaker as part of a black col-
lective (“we Antiguans, for I am one . . .” [8]), at least momentarily. Moreover,
this second-­person encasement establishes a clear distance between the one
speaking and the ones held captive in her lure. And still, even in this torrent of
clear address, the speaker seems distanced from herself—as if she were a voice
offstage that is describing a scene of ridicu­lous actors in ferocious syntax.
The rhetorical intensity of the direct address is so total in the first section
that the use of “I” at the start of part 2 is startling: “The Antigua that I knew,
the Antigua in which I grew up, is not the Antigua you, a tourist, would see
now” (23). This is a statement of exposedness, of the speaker entering the stage
explic­itly as opposed to being shrouded in the authority of the second-­person
capture; in this ­doing, the speaker inhabits a tone that is more vulnerable and
hesitant (notice how the repetition and commas create that pause: “The An-
tigua that I knew, the Antigua in which I grew up, is not the Antigua you, a
tourist, would see now”). We can recognize an affective shift in the relational-
ity of the speaker’s speaking, as in “Let me show you the Antigua that I used to
know” (24), which is how she prefaces this section’s telling of small incidents
that track a history of colonial wrongdoing. Such an offer opens up a narrative
intimacy that is not quite mutuality since the speaker is cajoling the reader
into accountability and maybe even remorse. We see this affective dynamic in
the speaker’s interrogations:

Do you ever won­der why some p ­ eople blow ­things up? I can imagine that
if my life had taken a certain turn, ­there would be the Barclays Bank,
and ­there I would be, both of us in ashes. Do you ever try to understand
why ­people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot
forget? (26)

Have I given you the impression that the Antigua I grew up in revolved
almost completely around ­England? . . . ​Are you saying to yourself, “­Can’t
she get beyond all that, every­thing that happened so long ago . . . ?” (33–34)

Have you ever wondered to yourself why it is that all ­people like me seem
to have learned from you is how to imprison and murder each other, how
to govern badly, and how to take the wealth of our country and place it

Aliveness and Aesthetics 75

 in Swiss bank accounts? Have you ever wondered why it is that all we
seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our socie­ties and how to
be tyrants? You w
­ ill have to accept that this is mostly your fault. (34–35)

Reading through this sequence of indictment, it is clear that the speaker seeks
from the reader neither answer nor reparative gesture; instead, the persona
seems to revel in the chance to feel the wild, hot anger of being harmed by
colonial plunder, of having to do that reveling in a language that is unyielding.
(“For ­isn’t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime
is the language of the criminal who committed the crime?” she concedes in a
parenthetical notation [31].) The case I am pressing is to notice the speaker, the
intensity of her difficult feelings, the impossibility that the discursive would to
make of her being. The speaker’s voice ­here is almost oxymoronic (deictic?) con-
ceptually, speaking imprecisely from a precise location of feeling, addressing impossibil-
ity with crisp insight. It is not the claims against history that seem aesthetically
compelling as much as the emotional ache articulated as she, the speaker, moves
through telling this ­thing that happened—­and is happening—to her, this terrible
unsettling happening . . . ​and d ­ oing so in a dialogue that is and w ­ ill always be of
one, since the addressed cannot possibly respond or engage. As such, rather than
try to assess the speaker’s politics, we might instead ask, “Who is this speaker,
and who is she becoming in this narrative?” That is, I am trying to implore us to
read this essay as an essay, as home for/of its speaker. This orientation, of behold-
ing the speaker as a one who is being figured through the narrative, is essential
to discerning the laced comments in this section, including this intense claim:
“Even if I ­really came from ­people who ­were living like monkeys in trees, it was
better to be that than what happened to me, what I became ­after I met you” (37).
This sentence registers as a sigh, as if the speaker is momentarily exhausted in
struggling through the w ­ hole world of her feeling and thinking. We might want
to read this sentence for its declaration against colonial terror or for Kincaid’s
complicity in not dismissing the racist claim (the “even if ” clause), though
such interpretations miss the affective textuality ­here, the tumbling suspen-
sion of the speaker’s inhabited sensibility. Or, as Audre Lorde told us, “I feel,
therefore I can be f­ ree” (­Sister Outsider 38).
“I feel, therefore I can be f­ree”: Again, I d ­ on’t mean to suggest that t­ here
are no ideological dimensions to A Small Place; I mean, instead, to focus on the
essay as a habitat of a black one’s navigation through being subject and object
of the essaying, what literary theorist Phillip Brian Harper might call “the ab-
stractionist aesthetics” of pronouns.35 As a genre, the essay is not of argument
or proof or even evidence; it is instead of the experience of black being, the flight

76 Chapter 3
into one’s variousness. In this regard, Kincaid’s speaker is the hero of the essay,
she who makes the scene for her own encounter and feeling.
Such appreciation allows us to acknowledge a vital moment that begins the
book’s third section:

And so you can imagine how I felt when, one day, in Antigua, standing
on Market Street, looking up one way and down the other, I asked my-
self: Is the Antigua I see before me, self-­ruled, a worse place than what it
was when it was dominated by the bad-­minded En­glish and all the bad-­
minded ­things they brought with them? How did Antigua get to such a
state that I would have to ask myself this? For the answer on e­ very Anti-
guan’s lips to the question “What is ­going on ­here now?” is “The govern-
ment is corrupt. Them are thief, them are big thief.” Imagine, then, the
bitterness and the shame in me as I tell you this. (41)

This in medias res instance of the first person is par­tic­u­lar ­because it is so

wrought with tender confession. ­Here, the speaker turns the performativity of
“imagine” upon her own affective constellation, inventing a scene capable of
her ambivalence. This is not just a citation of shame, but something else—­the
meeting of an intractable terribleness in an attempt to travel the small place of
her black life with some modicum of fearlessness. It is an astonishing intimacy,
the habitat for which the speaker has made through the praxis of her telling.
Scholars readily note that Kincaid’s writings exhibit “a very personal politics”
(Bouson 89), though this display surpasses and dispenses with politics by its or-
dinary name. No, this sublime invocation, “And so you can imagine,” ascends
to a level of being beheld in deep feeling.
More than all this, however, is the fact that this moment is the proper an-
ecdote of A Small Place. Conceptually, the anecdote works as an essay’s most
specific materiality, the unremarkable incident animated via telling. In this
regard, the anecdote constitutes the “something” of the phrase “Let me tell
you something that happened to me,” the something that might be humorous
or trivial, that is unreliable ­because it is casual and is uncorroborated by social-
ity: the anecdote is the materiality around which a speaker can flutter since it
is small, unremarkable, compelling. Intimately unreliable.
I come to thinking of the anecdote through the genre of the personal essay
but also through David ­Wills’s writing about lit­er­a­ture and public function.
­Wills defines the anecdote as “the explicit but secret other side to narrative . . . ​
and conversely, as the becoming literary of any text” (22; emphasis added). ­Wills
is right to designate the anecdote as a surfeit, an intimate but casual textual-
ity that can support a dynamic relation. And the potential or energy of the

Aliveness and Aesthetics 77

anecdote is not truth or precision; indeed “the anecdote is most often . . . ​con-
signed to a discursive structure in which truth and certainty are not at issue;
where disbelief is willingly suspended to enable the gratuitous, the frivolous,
the autobiographical, the fictional to be given ­free rein” (­Wills 24). One could
say that the anecdote is virtual, in Deleuzean terms—­that which is real but not
fully actualized. Not pure or raw, but a buzzing, nearly ­there ­thing that exists
on the edge of the limits of repre­sen­ta­tion or capture.36
At the heart of ­every essay, ­there is an anecdote, the narrative of a specific
happening that is flush with feeling though it remains ordinary u ­ ntil scruti-
nized (and remains ordinary afterward). The anecdote is a site of transforma-
tion, in that it is a materiality that the speaker manipulates but, ultimately,
­doesn’t control. Something happened, and now t­ here is the telling, and in the
telling ­there is becoming. The anecdote d ­ oesn’t supplant the happening—it
could not possibly do that—­but it is perhaps a ­viable site for the speaker’s being
in regard to the world of her being. Said another way, the speaker and the an-
ecdote exist in relational encounter.
Again: “And so you can imagine how I felt when, one day, in Antigua, stand-
ing on Market Street, looking up one way and down the other, I asked myself:
Is the Antigua I see before me, self-­ruled, a worse place than what it was when
it was dominated by the bad-­minded En­glish and all the bad-­minded ­things
they brought with them?” And then, “Imagine, then, the bitterness and the
shame in me as I tell you this” (41). Not only am I thoroughly moved by the way
the speaker’s anecdote begins in full stream of a sustained self-­conversation,
but I am taken by the way in which this anecdote is rendered as an unspecific
specificity. We can imagine it, a moment on a random day when, caught in a
certain sunlight, the speaker comes upon a thought that she might have had
before but without conscious notice: How did it come to this, and do I belong
­here? Such questions might have been related to an incident—or not, since
what­ever spurred the questions has been lost to memory. (It is almost too ordi-
nary to remember.) The point is that this textual moment triggers deep feeling
and crystallizes as the speaker’s reckoning. We should notice, too, that this an-
ecdote is prefaced by two sections (nearly forty pages) of deliberate rage-­work.
To me, this deferral enhances the drama of the anecdotal moment that is not
presented specifically but that is felt specifically—­intensely—by the speaker.
The thrilling diffuseness of the small happening: I love that Kincaid’s anec-
dote is encased in a call to imagine, since this call gestures to how impossible
the happening is to describe and share, how difficult it is for the speaker to be
of regard to the happening for herself (never mind to try to relay it to a reader),
as if it can only be instantiated by a world other than this one. “Imagine . . . ​the

78 Chapter 3
bitterness and the shame in me,” the speaker says as she conjures up a capacity
to be of bitterness and shame. I love that the speaker, in thrall of the essay’s
aesthetic, sets a scene not to criticize white wrongdoing but for her own en-
gagedness with the difficult. This is the capacity of the personal essay, where
the black one can invoke a habitat for being and then can surrender into that
habitat ­toward her becoming.
The essay lets the speaker do the work that is hers to do in the best way she
can imagine.
It is not a surprise, then, that this section and its intimate anecdote fea-
ture prominently when scholars question Kincaid’s racial politics. For one, the
speaker’s reencounter with Antigua does not shy away from addressing her dis-
sonance with her kin. And the acknowl­edgment of embarrassment seems di-
rected to the book’s generic reader, who has been signaled as white (the “you”
of the opening), which means that A Small Place appears to denigrate blackness
while pleading to the virtues of whiteness. Literary theorist Greg Thomas sum-
marizes a common sentiment in arguing that “when attention is drawn less
to what Kincaid says explic­itly to white tourists, and more to what she says
about black Antiguans, her po­liti­cal outlook is exposed for its crude conserva-
tism” (118). Thomas’s claim is about the book’s content, though he minimizes
that A Small Place begins with a critique of whiteness and of the destructions
made by colonialism, at least as such destructions are experienced by a speaker
who herself is something of a tourist. Moreover, in my reading, Kincaid’s po­
liti­cal undertaking exists not only in the essay’s content but especially in its
aesthetics, her deployment of the genre’s form t­oward instantiating a black
diasporic speaker in the midst of a complicated affective subjectivity. Kincaid
the writer—­and her persona, the speaker—is trying to reckon with her feelings,
their messy and necessary rightness; she is trying to make a world for being
where she can think-­feel her rightness.
Sigh: I am uneasy about trying to defend A Small Place in regard to its ideas
about antiblackness and its overtures t­ oward a dominant (white) reader, not
only b­ ecause I understand ­those overtures as an aesthetic apparatus of the
speaker’s relational d ­ oing but also ­because in a black world, the book and its
speaker (never mind its writer) do not need defense. In mounting this defense,
I am enacting an anxiety of audience that works awry of the aliveness of the
essay form.37 Simply, if the essay is the terrain of the speaker, then what is being
assayed by A Small Place is the speaker’s exploration of the ambivalence of home
in the enduring harmful legacy of colonization. She, the speaker in this book,
feels the dissonance and disorientation of Antigua, and the essay constitutes
a space for her trial, as in to try to encounter the world of her affective being

Aliveness and Aesthetics 79

in regard to this small place. “Let me tell you something that happened to
me,” the speaker says, which means that we must acquiesce to her right to
understand—to experience—­the ravages of colonialism on her own terms. And
through the telling, the speaker establishes and traverses a scene of mattering,
an erotics of feeling and of becoming.
Surely A Small Place is not only a private conversation, but what if we read
its speaker as having a relational encounter with herself, including the ambiva-
lence of return to a place that she cannot now bear? What if we permit that
the world made by the speaker’s act of telling is one where, rather than only
articulating pride or self-­assuredness, the speaker gets to countenance shame
as a part of black being? In a black world, we could countenance shame.
The first-­person essay is a display of a speaker’s inhabitance of disorienta-
tion in regard to the ­thing that happened—­disorientation that, as Sara Ahmed
argues, is a relational condition. As such, the pronoun of Kincaid’s first-­person
essay might not be “I,” at least not conceptually, since “I” indicates more con-
trol than resides in the essay’s worldness. No, the subjectivity of the first-­person
essay h­ ere might be “me,” the singular object case, or at least the oneness in-
voked in asking, “How am I me?” as a question of being subject and object at
the same time. I find this conclusion useful in tracking the arc of the speaker
in A Small Place, where the heft of direct address gives way to the subjectivity of
beholding shame’s oneness.38 Indeed, in the book’s final brief section (it is five
pages), Kincaid’s speaker mobilizes her me-­positionality into a sense of oneness
and offers a stunning call of relationality:

Again, Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by

twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not
too long ­after, it was settled by ­human rubbish from Eu­rope, who used
enslaved but noble and exalted h ­ uman beings from Africa (all masters of
­every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of e­ very stripe are noble and ex-
alted; t­ here can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth
and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they
could be less lonely and empty—­a Eu­ro­pean disease. Eventually, the mas-
ters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves w
­ ere freed, in a kind of way.
The p ­ eople in Antigua now, the ­people who ­really think of themselves as
Antiguans (and the p ­ eople who would immediately come to your mind
when you think about what Antiguans might be like; I mean, supposing
you ­were to think about it), are the descendants of t­ hose noble and exalted
­people, the slaves. Of course, the ­whole t­hing is, once you cease to be a
master, once you throw off your master’s yoke, you are no longer h ­ uman

80 Chapter 3
 rubbish, you are just a ­human being, and all the t­hings that adds up to.
So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are ­free,
they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just ­human beings. (80–81)

This passage exhibits A Small Place’s characteristic syntax, especially its long con-
versational sentences full of the speaker’s lively and casual—­nearly flippant—­
ease (“Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way,” “I mean, supposing you
­were to think about it”) and its deployment of parenthetical asides. The voice
­here resolves the philosophical question of master-­slave relation with the loose-
ness of the phrase “of course.” Such flourish reminds us that the essay’s grappling
works through the specificity of the speaker, her me-­ness, that the historical
­matters at hand are indexed to the particularity of their relation to her every-
day experience and her ordinary language for that experience. Indeed, it is this
ordinariness, this intimacy, that contextualizes the passage’s turn t­ oward uni-
versality, a turn that is not a naïve notion but that carries the weight of the
speaker’s rugged essay-­work.39
A Small Place is of a black one who is navigating the intimacy of happen-
ing, a subject who can speak broadly through the specificity of her encounter
with herself. And in the ­doings of Kincaid’s mighty book, we remember that to
be able to say one, to be of or as “one,” is not to be deferent or imperial; it is to be
rendered as a being via cosmological terms, of being open(ed) to textures of one’s
inestimable totality that is and is of a world.
Kincaid’s speaker ­isn’t organ­izing a communal affective encounter—­this
might be what some critics read as a failing. But perhaps the orientation of the
black essay is t­ oward what literary theorist Darieck Scott calls a politics with-
out defense: “a politics that does not or­ga­nize itself around a stance of defense
or aggression, a politics that assimilates to itself racial identities and histories
but choosing not to b­ attle against them but rather to let them, as it w ­ ere, flow
through the self—­even overwhelm the self—­and yet become transformed”
(245). Scott argues for a capacity to exist within the po­liti­cal undefensively,
akin to what I have explored in the aesthetics and affect of Kincaid’s speaker,
she who is not responsible for a politic against whiteness nor a politic in suste-
nance of black ­people (Antiguans or other­wise). A Small Place is hers, her world
of feeling, and its force of being might well inspire other encounters that ­will
have their own force of black being. (Such might be its sustaining work.)40
The essay is of the one of blackness, the voice speaking out t­ oward its own
(­imagined) self, which is an act of worldmaking.41
The personal essay is superlatively of affect (emotions are “a form of . . . ​
world making” Ahmed argues),42 of the being of experience that is pos­si­ble

Aliveness and Aesthetics 81

through aesthetics. We should read this form as a black world; other­wise we’d
be inclined to look for its argument about antiblackness rather than honor its
embodiment of blackness.
Again, the black world of the black essay constitutes and inspires a hetero-
geneity of us, not respectability or fidelity to community but a world of black
particularity—­the heterogeneity of blackness. In the essay, then, we encounter
not a text of evidence but an aesthetic of experience, “the work of art [as] a
being of sensation and nothing ­else: it exists in itself.” 43
The essay, this poetic of subjunctivity that beholds blackness as a capacity
of wandering and wondering, f­ ree, as in the way one is in knowing that “God is
a question, not an answer.” 44

82 Chapter 3
4 ALIVENESS

IN TWO ESSAYS

Black aliveness is of the heterogeneity of us, and the praxis of the essay lo-
cates heterogeneity through one voice at a time in the worldliness of its being.
The essay displays and approximates the experience of being, but it does not
corroborate or confirm or argue—it aestheticizes and beholds the thrill of in-
habiting aliveness. The essay is a black ecstatic as literary theorist Aliyyah I.
Abdur-­Rahman defines such: “The black ecstatic is an aesthetic per­for­mance
of embrace, the sanctuary of the unuttered and unutterable, and a mode of
pleas­ur­able reckoning with everyday ruin in con­temporary black lives ­under
the strain of perpetual chaos and continued diminishment” (345). Yes, and in
its black worldness, the essay’s attention to ruin and strain is part of rather
than the totality of its ecstatic enactment.1
The black essay as a textuality, a materiality, of black being and becoming.
 I want to consider two examples, each by a poet who is also a superlative
essayist. Indeed, over the next few pages, I ­will linger deliberately with two
essays to try to render them nearly as fully as one could a short poem, residing
thoroughly in their poetic habitat.
First Reginald Shepherd’s singularly dazzling “On Not Being White”: Shep-
herd is known for five award-­winning poetry collections published before his
death in 2008, including Some Are Drowning, Otherhood, and Angel, Interrupted,
though “On Not Being White” remains notable ­because of its inclusion in
Joseph Beam’s 1986 In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. The best I can do to sum-
marize “On Not Being White” is to say that the essay travels along a speaker’s
meditation through vari­ous anecdotes of his desires for erotic and affective
connection with white men, particularly gay white men. In its focus on desires,
Shepherd’s text navigates both a yearning for recognition and the incomplete-
ness of the articulation of yearning, especially this unspeakable interraciality.
It is a tumultuous, luscious undertaking that requires the capaciousness of a
black world orientation.
­Here is how the essay begins:

I’d like to speak of a young man of my acquaintance. All his friends call
him ­Little Wing, but he flies rings around them all. That’s not my line,
of course. I’m just searching for the words to make him real to you, an
objective correlative to give ­these aimless desires some sense of shape.
They have object but no reason for existing; he’s beautiful but I d ­ on’t
know him. His name is Pablo, he looks younger than he is. He lives in my
neighborhood. All of this means nothing to you; it’s every­thing to me. I
want you to know how this comes about. His name could be anything,
David or Ross or anyone. I could list his names but ­they’re only words.
Hugh. Shane. Arthur. Eric. I write down the names of my desire to make
them real, tokens or talismans. T ­ oday his name is Pablo. L­ ittle Wing,
­don’t fly away. I must set you down in words and keep you ­there, the only
way I ­will ever have you. The way I keep you in desire, what­ever your
name this time. (46)

­ here is so much liveliness in the persona ­here, this voice that opens in invoca-
T
tion, as if calling to order an audience for an occasion. Almost, but not quite,
since the first sentence d ­ oesn’t say “you” and thereby leaves the direction of
address wide open: “I’d like to speak of ” rather than “I’d like to speak to you
of.” This slyness seems to acknowledge the likely failure of speaking (“I’d like to
speak” but I ­can’t) even as the hesitancy clears a space for exploration without
sanction. Moreover, in this case, “I’d like to speak” also means I am ­going to

84 Chapter 4
speak regardless. The complexity of address amplifies how we might read the di-
rection of voice h ­ ere. That is, as the speaker uses the second-­person pronoun—­
particularly in the strikingly direct “All of this means nothing to you” in the
paragraph’s ­middle—we could recognize that the rhetorical effect is of a subject
thinking out loud to himself through an ­imagined scene. Notice, for example,
that by the end of the paragraph, the speaker is in conversation with Pablo, the
idea and ideal of his affection, the one he is trying to keep, capture, remember.2
­These aesthetics of address allow the voice to slide around the paragraph
and dislocate the expectation of audience. I might even say that this opening
constitutes the speaker’s dialogue with himself, his asking permission to speak
of himself and his desires: to explore this ordinary t­ hing of his being that is not
necessarily ordinary in its politics. Indeed, the speaker articulates this query
through the subjunctive (“I’d like to speak”), which heightens this moment as
an imaginative inhabitance. The essay’s beginning sets a scene of exceptional
awareness, of fraughtness, especially when Shepherd writes, “Call this a defini-
tion by example of the difficulty I find in expressing myself directly on a topic
so fraught with dangers” (47), this directive that vocalizes the speaker’s self-­
consciousness in the midst of the exposure.
What a tender deliberateness, this “I’d like to speak of,” tender for all the
obvious reasons, deliberate ­because the speaker is aware of the essay genre and
its perfect inarticulateness: “The ­things I have to say in this essay are not all
­things I would wish to say; they are certainly not ­things many would wish to
hear, or if so, they wish to hear them for the wrong reasons. But I want to be honest
this once, if only for my own sake” (47; emphasis added). This statement declares the
speaker’s cause, his deploying of the essay as a trial where truth is fleeting and
where experience—­the being in the happening—is supreme: “But this is only an
attempt, the root of the word essay, an attempt at definition which can serve
as a self-­definition, an identity with which I can live. So h ­ ere I am thinking of
myself on paper, in the hope that some of my obsessions might fruitfully pro-
voke a response in a pos­si­ble reader” (47). ­Don’t be distracted by this reference
to the reader, since the critical point is the conceptualization of the essay as a
genre of relation and subjunctivity, as a text of encounter between the writer
and himself. Shepherd’s “On Not Being White” materializes a speaker whose
telling creates and invokes a version of himself, such that the speaker gets to in-
habit the happening by encountering his ­earlier self. (The speaker, then, is also
his own reader.) The essay instantiates and installs the speaker as both subject
and object of being who exists in the expansive nowhere of the textual world.
I love “On Not Being White” for the ways Shepherd exemplifies the phenom-
enon of aesthetics, the aliveness in using the first person to enact and inhabit

Aliveness in Two Essays 85

the poetics of distance. For example, this is how the paragraph quoted ­earlier
concludes:

“Myself ” being in this context a twenty-­two year old black gay man (how
odd to think of myself as a “man”; ­isn’t it always the ­others who are men?)
with an obsessive attraction to white men. A black man who deeply fears
most other black p ­ eople, primarily other black men. A black man, also,
afraid of white men and deeply resentful of their power over me both
sexual and social. A gay man afraid of men. Naturally concomitant is
that I’m afraid of myself. E
­ very fear is a desire. E
­ very desire is a fear. (47;
emphasis in the original)

The speaker sets the reflexive pronoun (“myself ”) in quotation marks, exag-
gerating the citation not only for the sake of troubling identity but also ­toward
extenuating the relational praxis of his self-­study. To my reading, this relation-
ality authorizes the speaker’s vulnerability of looking at himself; and in this
regard, one d ­ oesn’t have to make a defense of his desires since the speaker him-
self names the fear that constitutes his most definitive subjectivity: “I’m afraid
of myself,” a fear that includes but surpasses the terms of gender or race or
sexuality, a fear that belongs to a deeper register of being.
Shepherd’s essay is a masterpiece of exposed being and indulgent interro-
gation, a text that co-­opts the reiterative practice of telling so as to uncoil its
speaker into vital feeling. Such expressiveness coheres partly through repeti-
tion, as in the case of the chiasmus that closes the foregoing paragraph: “­Every
fear is a desire. ­Every desire is a fear.” More than a statement of ambivalence or
equivalence, this chiasmus reflects the intersubjective dynamics of the speaker’s
encounter with himself, the possibility of transcendence to be had in the imma-
nence of self (now) meeting self (then). Chiasmus, the literary scholar Dagmawi
Woubshet tells us, is a rhetorical idiom of crossing or magic, where one ­thing
gives into and becomes another. Indeed, as the terms of Shepherd’s chiasmic
equation intersect, the speaker’s fear of self translates as a desire of self.3
The excellence of “On Not Being White” resides in its lavish aesthetics,
its abundant form-­moves that animate the speaker’s being-­on-­the-­page. The
performativities are plentiful: in the essay’s title, which embraces display and eli-
sion, where “on not being” enunciates pre­sen­ta­tion and absence; in the defer-
ral legible in the syntax “I’d like to speak of,” which opens the work; in the way
the speaker regales in an accomplished conversational tone that ­ripples with
wryness and exaggerated confession (“Actually, Pablo’s not ­really white; he’s
Hispanic. So I’m making pro­gress ­after all” [46]). Shepherd’s performativity
lives also in the way he riffs through literary allusions to Audre Lorde, Susan

86 Chapter 4
Sontag, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner, allusions that are at once organic to
and self-­conscious for one who notes that Hades and Sybil are “words [that]
are supposed to be alien to [him]” (48).4 Or in the superlative artful artifice as
the speaker proclaims that to survive not being white, he “sought . . . ​to shed
the few ghetto idioms [he] had,” followed two sentences l­ater by a vernacular
idiom, “Yesterday ­don’t m ­ atter if it’s gone” (49).
This is high aesthetic style, a revelry in prose mastery. But style and mastery
should not be equated with control, at least not exclusively so, especially since
the essay exemplifies the speaker’s encounter through and with language as a
praxis of self-­pursuit. The aliveness of style ­here represents play and plea­sure,
a fantastic inhabitance that transports the essaying one into another field of
being, another register of experience. I think of such d ­ oing as in accord with
the right to revel in the saying, to be of and become through the word, the plea­
sure of “living as an aesthetic being.”5
The most striking formal move in “On Not Being White” might be the use
of repetition, not only the chiasmus quoted ­earlier but a dramatic moment
when the speaker reprises himself:

Perhaps I have been too abstract; if so, it is only in self-­defense. Let me

begin again, attempt this time to provide a context for my ramblings.
What contextualizes more than history? What traps us more irredeem-
ably? I’ve learned something since I was a child.
I was born and raised in New York City, afraid of every­thing. Spe-
cifically (yes, let us be as specific as pos­si­ble), I was raised in the Bronx,
never the South Bronx but bad neighborhoods nonetheless. I suppose
my home was ste­reo­typical for a gay youth: I was raised by my ­mother,
my f­ather was an occasional negative mention and ­every few months
a “weekly” child support check. The overriding facts of our lives, the
shadow that determined every­thing we did or did not do or longed to
do, was poverty. Though we did our best to ignore or deny or transcend
it, . . . ​we w
­ ere poor and we ­were black and all our efforts could not over-
come t­ hose conditions. (50)

In this instance, the speaker seems to confess against and apologize for his ab-
stract meditations on fear and desire, and offers another telling that is more
conventionally and concretely biographical (“ste­reo­typical”) even as he seems
to question the utility of biography (the ironic question, “What contextualizes
more than history?”). Of course, the expression of regret is performative, since
Shepherd could have started the essay with precisely this reprised narrative.
The performativity, then, dramatizes a delicate nuanced ­thing the speaker is

Aliveness in Two Essays 87

trying to do: to introduce the particularity of his experience of black life with-
out that particularity being consumed by a generic ideology of black privation.
Imagine, for example, that Shepherd had begun the essay with the paragraph
that begins, “I was born and raised in New York City. . . . ​I was raised by my
­mother, my ­father was an occasional negative mention.” Such an opening,
however honest, would conflate his story with ready narratives about black-
ness, overwhelmingly so, and would almost foreclose the worldness of a singular
black speaker set loose in revelry and aesthetic wildness.
In this way, the reprisal privileges the speaker’s oneness. That is, if the ab-
stract telling and the more concrete one are both ­matters of his essaying, then
this reprisal is chiasmic—­one version of being erases and becomes another as
the speaker gets to be of h ­ uman breadth rather than being hampered by the
treachery of discourse. “Let me begin again,” he says, a performativity that in-
spires another unfurling, like a palinode—­a poem that revises a view expressed
in a previous poem. “Let me begin again,” he says as he abides the pro­cess of his
essay packed full of aliveness, his voice shimmying all over the page and into
the air, twirling.6
The dynamism in “On Not Being White” reflects the fact that transparency
eludes the speaker himself, and the sequence of repetitions and evasions con-
stitutes subjunctivity. Indeed, Shepherd’s speaker directly references subjunc-
tivity in a passage where he considers further the idea of the past:

I sought to shed the baggage of history as easily as I shed the few ghetto
idioms I had, to shed even the baggage I d ­ idn’t even know I carried. I
wanted to erase the past and the pre­sent and live in the f­ uture. It w ­ asn’t
my past, ­after all: all ­those dead ­people. ­Things are dif­f er­ent ­today. Yester-
day ­don’t ­matter if it’s gone. The operative word is “if.” William Faulkner,
that closet Confederate apologist, wrote that “the past is never gone. It is
not even the past,” but I have always been an adherent of the philosophy
of “as if,” more so than of “if only.” But black ­people ­don’t read Hans Vai-
hinger, do they? (49; emphasis in original)

Characteristic of the essay, a lot happens in this brief moment, though I am in-
terested centrally in the citation of “as if ” as a way to navigate the impositions
of a collective black past. This “as if ” is drawn from the work of German phi­
los­o­pher Hans Vaihinger, whose monograph A Philosophy of As If (1911) argues
that p ­ eople invent narratives and discourses—­ideological realities—so as to or­
ga­nize what is incomprehensible and unknowable of the world.7 In one regard,
the speaker’s casual reference to obscure philosophy is another example of per-
formativity. And yet, it is not merely performative, since the speaker’s ethos—­

88 Chapter 4
using rhetorical inventiveness to sustain unknowability—­seems like an inverse
of Vaihinger’s hypothesis. (I love, too, how Shepherd explicates the philosophi-
cal formality of “as if ” through a distinction with the commonplace—­and
vernacular—­“if only.”)
Overall, the subjunctive in “On Not Being White” reinforces the speaker’s
rejection of authenticity and his engagement of blackness as a conceit, as the
fascinating floating signifier it is.8 We see an example of this interface with
blackness-­as-­idea in the conclusion of the foregoing passage; again:

But black ­people ­don’t read Hans Vaihinger, do they? They prob­ably
­don’t even read Faulkner. Black ­people are poor and uneducated and
shiftless and poor (again) and are never ­going to get anywhere. I d
­ on’t know
where I’ve gone but I ­don’t live in the proj­ects anymore. So I ­couldn’t
be one of them. So (the logic is impeccable) I ­will behave as if I ­were not.
Not that it ever mattered; every­one at my vari­ous private schools knew
I was dif­fer­ent: black and poor, and weird too. Every­one knew what I
­couldn’t admit to myself. ­Don’t talk about it and it ­will go away. “­Don’t
look, it’s ugly. It’s a monster.” The monster in my mind was always me.
(49; emphases in original)

I’ll come back to the four concluding sentences ­later on, though I quote this
in full now ­because of the elegant rhythm of Shepherd’s study in distance. No-
tice, for example, how the speaker articulates ­these ideas about blackness in
plural, such that “black ­people” become characterized idiomatically as a lot
of depravity. This pluralization idealizes ­these ideas, sets them in relief so that
the speaker can encounter them; notice also how this dynamic is enhanced by
sarcasm (the tag “do they?”), repetition (of “poor” for emphasis and distinc-
tion), and italicization (which materializes antiblack pejorative). All of t­ hese
aesthetic moves indicate a speaker who is citing his pro­cess of distanciation
and objectification.
“I ­don’t know where I’ve gone,” the speaker proclaims, but he is, regardless,
becoming.
In the spirit of the essay genre as a black world, we are less likely to misread
this passage as self-­hatred, since the speaker is f­ ree to do what perhaps e­ very
black person does and has to do: to grapple with the annotations of our racial
name. Shepherd’s speaker ­doesn’t control his encounters with the ideas of him-
self, be they biographical or historical; but neither does he have to be represen-
tative of or sustain fidelity to any of ­these ideas. Instead, the speaker of “On
Not Being White” is held in suspension with himself, not t­ oward resolution,
but simply t­ oward the bombard of encounter and the discovery it affords.9

Aliveness in Two Essays 89

 Identity and its seemingly easy politics are not akin to the habitat of
relation—­this Shepherd’s speaker knows and enacts.
And where are the anecdotes of this essay? They are told obliquely and
vaguely, through high-styled feeling. Consider again the opening meditation
on Pablo / ­Little Wing that flits around the page as a wispy description of a
happening between the speaker and another man. Sure, t­here is no framing
that indicates the heft of a specific incident, nothing that sets a scene as might
occur with a proper anecdote, but the iteration seems like a piecemeal recall.
Or consider this moment from the essay’s second half:

It’s strange how willing white men become to approach me or be ap-

proached by me once they have seen me with another white man: if I like
one I must of course like them all. The reverse is true as well; often when
I have once seen a man with a black man he becomes more attractive or
at least more in­ter­est­ing to me, simply b­ ecause he has thus entered the
realm of the possibly available: if he likes one he must of course like them
all. Of course, I am not “black” enough for some of them: nothing cools
the ardor of some white men “attracted” to black men more quickly than
a large vocabulary. Then again, this is Boston; I have eyes. The ­great ma-
jority of the black men I see in clubs are with white men, and conversely
far too many of the white men I see in ­those clubs look at me as if to say,
“I ­couldn’t sleep with you. ­You’re black.” (54; emphases in original)

One almost misses that this is an anecdote writ large except, perhaps, for the
specificity of “this is Boston,” which signals the speaker’s inhabiting a par­tic­ul­ar
place and time. Reading the passage closely, one notices the narrative frame of
the opening sentence, something specific in the description of queer interracial
approach. But the speaker d ­ oesn’t offer details and instead leans on repetition
(again, chiasmus) to expose the thinking to which he himself acquiesces: if I/he
like(s) one, he/I must like them all. I love that Shepherd avoids making an argu-
ment ­here and lets the speaker remain entangled in the scene of objectification
as the recollection moves in and out of his awareness of his hy­poc­risy. This entire
sequence reeks of the speaker’s pro­cessing through his existing in a happening,
such that “It’s strange” gives way to “The reverse is true”—an acknowl­edgment
that seems of surprise—­followed by “Of course” and fi­nally “Then again.” The
speaker is pro­cessing experience—­its harms, its meanings, its conundrums.
In Shepherd’s essay, the anecdotes are stylized into eluding strokes that sus-
tain tension, facilitating the speaker via a poetics of force, movement, capti-
vation, and especially abjection. Such attention to the negative embraces the
speaker’s commitment to behold his ugliness and to use distance so as to be of

90 Chapter 4
his own terribleness. Indeed, what ­else is “On Not Being White” (the title, the
essay) but an extended encounter with the vulgar and terrible? What e­ lse are
­those chiasmic phrases but the terror of being undone and remade through the
holy syntactical exchange of one name for another? We might want to read
­these undertakings as po­liti­cal naïveté or something worse—­racial treachery—­
but they might also be understood as the electricity of doubt manifest. The
speaker, he who is on the make and replete with a per­for­mance of display, he
is the hero of this essay, which studies through his bad and “ugly feelings”—­
ambivalence, reluctance, indifference, cowardice, and embarrassment.10
I love this essay’s fine black aesthetics as I love its audacity. ­Every black one
of us has a right to face the terror and beauty of blackness in our own way. And
if we are to be able to behold Shepherd’s speaker, we must be willing to give
him room to be in and of relation with blackness, his delicate despairing dance.
Such a ­thing could not be called self-­hate since it is obsessed with—­even in love
with—­blackness.
Shepherd’s singular essay is home to a speaker who negotiates the hap-
penings of blackness personally, even as the personal might be an insufficient
reckoning. I d ­ on’t mean to imply anything careless or naïve or superficial ­here
(again: the personal is not the individual), but to say that the speaker orients
­toward his becoming such that the elisions and evasions sustain his alive being
rather than support an argument.11 His is a lyrical inhabitance. Consider this
early and impor­tant moment in the essay:

I’ve had notions, negative each one, images of what it is to seem black:
to look black, to talk black, to walk black, to dress black; need I list the
stigmata further? The language of culture and education was not among
­those seemings. I’ve ­shaped for myself a manner of appearing quite other
than ­those seemings. If one ­didn’t say ­those ­things, wear ­those t­ hings,
if one ­didn’t do ­things that way, then one would never, could never, be
branded with that word, that awful word; though of course one was.
That word does not appear in this essay. (48–49; emphasis in original)

It is that last sentence that ­matters most, the astuteness of the speaker to his
own rightness and the refusal to name that word out loud. Another person
might well feature that word as an epithet in their engagement of being—­this
­doing might work for another person, but not in this speaker’s pro­cess. The
statement, “That word does not appear in this essay,” pulls the speaker out of
his voice and into the realm of direct address, but notice, too, that the address
is capacious, divine, even—it is said definitively by the one in authority, ad-
dressed to no one and meaningful to all.

Aliveness in Two Essays 91

 This moment always breaks my heart: I love the exquisite tenderness of the
speaker ­toward himself, how his not-­saying declares the direction of his per­
for­mance. In this moment, “On Not Being White” clearly exists as the black
speaker’s habitat—an imperfect belonging, sure, but one that is inclined ever
­toward the essential privacy of a black one. That word is a public term with
historical stakes and a legacy of grievances; it is not capable of the grief and
beauty that bespeak this precise moment.12
What gorgeousness.
­Earlier, I quoted a passage where the speaker names his own monstrosity, a
proclamation that comes right before he restarts the telling: “Every­one knew
what I ­couldn’t admit to myself. ­Don’t talk about it and it ­will go away. ‘­Don’t
look, it’s ugly. It’s a monster.’ The monster in my mind was always me” (49).
Again, the speaker aestheticizes the terrible, this time by rendering it as exter-
nalized speech. This ­doing enlivens the scene and lets the speaker reside as a
character in its moment. Moreover, one ­isn’t sure of the referent for the pronoun
“it,” which eludes clarity even in context of the full passage: Is “it” racism, or
blackness, or the speaker as a young person in the world of whiteness? Is it weird-
ness, or queerness? What seems exceptionally clear is the declaration of kinship
with monstrosity, which holds the speaker in the intimacy of his encounter with
his own ambivalence, holds him in all the difference that is his oneness.13
In “A Politics of Mere Being,” poet Carl Phillips argues for “an instancing—an
enactment—of being as not only mere, but wildly vari­ous.” We might think of
mereness as the habitat of the essay, the essay as the approximation of black expe-
rience as merely aliveness. Such is Shepherd’s attempt in “On Not Being White,”
where t­ here is no triumph or completion to be had via the telling: just a scene of
being. ­Here, then, is how the essay ends, falling into dissolve and into the very
modest confession that, indeed, the speaker is not healed in the journey:

I just want to be me, but who would that be? So I c­ an’t live ­there, in that
other realm of freedom. Freedom’s just another word for being nothing.
What and who would I be without the burden of the past, the past which
I am constantly attempting to discard but also the past which I must
reshape into something with which I can live, from which I can draw sus-
tenance? Without it, I certainly ­wouldn’t need my shining blond knight,
and how could I live without him?
I read a very moving response to a question in The Hite Report on Male
Sexuality of all places, a response to the section on gay men: “I used to call
it ‘love’ when I was feeling pathologically afraid and inferior to another
person. Now I call it love when I feel ­free and comfortable to be myself

92 Chapter 4
 with another person, and the emotion is joy instead of fear.” I’m afraid I
have yet to reach that point, though I hardly spend my life in sackcloth
and ashes. The Special aka sing: “If you have a racist friend / Now is the
time for your friendship to end.” I have a friend like that, a friend I call
desire. Sometimes I ­don’t know where he ends and I begin. Sometimes I
wish I could forget his name, but it sounds too much like mine. (57)

The personification at the end converts the speaker, fi­nally, into desire and
its trembling messy porousness . . . ​its hungry entangled illogic. The speaker
maintains a certain incomprehensibility even to himself, appropriate enough
since “each individual is essentially strange. T ­ here is . . . ​a portion of ourselves
that we never fully comprehend.”14
“On Not Being White” honors its black speaker’s aliveness. All of its
dynamics—­the chiasmic repetitions, the negations, the high-style performativity—­
all of ­these can be read as attempts to authorize the speaker’s own authen-
ticity, not authenticity for the sake of corroborating one or another idea about
blackness, but authenticity as if to say: ­these are my wicked and incommensurate
coordinates; this is all the h­ uman I am. What a fantastic textuality, a black essay
where the speaker is the ideation of blackness on behalf of the being who is black,
where the aim is not to be ­free of blackness—­being f­ ree of blackness might not
be pos­si­ble or even desirable—­but to be ­free within it, to be ­free in one’s regard
to being of blackness.
One could call it a kind of exploitation—­that the speaker exploits the idea of
blackness for himself. The word “exploit” might seem harsh or even dramatic,
but it also recalls Patricia J. Williams’s description of her writing: “I deliber-
ately sacrifice myself in my writing” (92). “Exploit” is the precise word, espe-
cially in regard to ravishment, exploiting as a reckless appreciating that leaves
every­thing pos­si­ble, as in, that, too, could be me . . . ​exploiting as a textuality
of blackness through the capacious imaginary alighted by the imperative “Let
me tell you something that happened to me.”15
The black essay as I am explicating it h ­ ere does not pursue optimism or
achievement; it does not respond urgently to the social peril of blackness; it is
not a cele­bration of the yield of hard work, since t­ here is nothing promised by
hard work other than more hard work.16
It is of the working that is of plea­sure, just the d
­ oing . . . ​the difficult beauty
of being, the beauty of ­doing one’s work.
If ­there are reservations about the freedom I am advocating via the essay as
a black genre, perhaps they generate from the anxiety of audience and repre­
sen­ta­tion. In “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison describes this anxiety as

Aliveness in Two Essays 93

an exemplary burden of black American literary history, especially in regard
to the position of the speaker of a slave narrative: “What­ever the style and
circumstances of ­these narratives, they w ­ ere written to say principally two
­things: One: ‘This is my historical life—my singular, special example that is
personal, but that also represents the race.’ Two: ‘I write this text to persuade
other ­people—­you, the reader, who is prob­ably not black—­that we are ­human
beings worthy of God’s grace and the immediate abandonment of slavery’ ”
(66). In Morrison’s estimation, the black speaker is inaugurated via the expec-
tation of representativeness and is i­magined to address a reader suspicious of
the speaker’s humanity. Morrison further argues that such burdened narra-
tives deploy an aesthetic of modesty, a veil, refusing to be explicit in describing
horrible happenings.
Morrison’s thesis confirms that it is nearly impossible for the black first per-
son to be able to enact full immersion into the essay genre’s freedom, into the
­free being of voice. Indeed, t­ here is another complication for the black writing
subject, which Morrison explains in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Liter-
ary Imagination: that the very words we might use to portray transformative ex-
perience are racialized, that “blackness” itself becomes a meta­phor of encoun-
ter for the nonblack subject. Conceptually, blackness functions as “excitable
speech” and therefore is always addressable externally, a figuring that warps
how we understand black writing as an encounter with chaos, ignorance, inex-
pressibility.17 ­These entanglements of audience leave l­ ittle room for relational-
ity in the personal essay, a genre that scholar Gerald Early describes as being
overwhelmed by the doubleness of insider-­outsider as well as of writer-­reader:
“The black essayist is caught between acting and writing, between seizing the
instrumentality and being trapped by the fact that he is inescapably an instru-
mentality” (Tuxedo Junction xii–­xiii). In the wake of this conundrum, Early cel-
ebrates the black essay’s capacity to elude the nonblack reader or, alternately,
as a text that brings the nation to racial reckoning.
Figured as a public intellectual, the black essayist is indeed “caught” in-
eptly in regard to the genre’s vitality. In the excellent On Freedom and the ­Will to
Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay, Cheryl A. Wall is clear that even as
“the essay offers its creator intellectual freedom—­the freedom to work around,
with, and through an idea” (1), the black essayist always has to reconcile the
public m­ atter of antiblackness and racial subjection. As such, the genre ­doesn’t
necessarily offer its writer freedom but instead operationalizes a consideration
of freedom for the race. Gerald Early confirms Wall’s assessment in the intro-
duction to his two-­volume Speech and Power: The African American Essay and Its
Cultural Content from Polemics to Pulpit:

94 Chapter 4
 (Few black writers have written what might be strictly called belles lettres-­
style essays.) The conditions ­under which many black writers felt they had
to write (and live), and their coming to terms with ­these conditions, have
constituted their most driving intellectual obsession. Thus, the black essay
has been, in truth, a po­liti­cal provocation and a flawed example, if not a
full repre­sen­ta­tion, of a philosophical rumination even if the work itself
was sometimes entangled in a thicket of so­cio­log­i­cal detail. Black writers
could not help but see their writing as po­liti­cal, since they saw their condi-
tion in ­these terms and their writing and their condition have been largely
inseparable. (“Gnostic or Gnomic?” x; emphases in original)

Early’s and Wall’s hedging of the black essay’s capacity for wild freedom reso-
nates with Vinson Cunningham’s argument for the American essay as a partic-
ularly combative genre.18 In “What Makes an Essay American,” Cunningham
pushes against John D’Agata’s declaration of the essay as “neutral attempt” and
advances the argument that “most of us Americans are Emersons: artful ser-
monizers, pathological point-­makers.” Cunningham makes the case that “con-
flict is elemental to Amer­i­ca and to its creative expression; that a well-­crafted
argument is art, not its opposite; . . . ​that the more fiercely . . . ​our sensibilities
clash, the better off our country might be.”
In their appraisals of American literary tradition, Cunningham, Early, and
Wall rightly declare the (black) essay as the domain of the public intellectual.
And yet in this framing, they seem to surrender the capacity of the essay to
po­liti­cal imperative, conscripting the genre as only (or largely) a surrogacy of
racial politics, rather than attending to the essay as a potential cir­cuit of wan-
dering. This construal is overdetermined, I think, by the impositions of audi-
ence in and beyond US constructions of blackness and antiblackness.19
I ­don’t mean to be obstinate to the fact of literary history where black essay-
ing exists coterminously with the exigencies of social and po­liti­cal freedom. In-
deed, in the enduring state of the world, it is hard to imagine—­and even harder
to manifest—­the right of neutrality for a black speaker (writer) in the essay
genre. But that imagining becomes more pos­si­ble in reading as if in a black world.
Essayists as varied as James Baldwin, Marita Bonner, Ta-­Nehisi Coates, Ralph
Ellison, Roxane Gay, Zadie Smith, and Patricia J. Williams all argue, in their
own ways, against the burden of audience and representation—­and all, vari-
ously, try to inhabit the freedom of essaying on the behalf of a black speaker,
­toward the philosophical oneness that is constitutive of the ­human.20
Could we undo audience as the fundamental instantiating princi­ple of black
expressiveness, not only audience as an interracial imprisonment but also the

Aliveness in Two Essays 95

expectation that a black speaker speaks to and for a black audience? Could we
imagine that a writer could sometimes—­just sometimes—­admit, “I d ­ on’t know
what po­liti­cal discourse needs but I know the need of this speaker (me) to feel
through this t­ hing”? Could we use the “imagine” of the essay to make untrue
this gospel from the poet Cornelius Eady: “Presenting one’s emotional truth is
difficult enough. But unlike white writers, black writers are also expected to
solve the prob­lems they pre­sent in their work”?21
I am advocating for the heterogeneity of us that is pos­si­ble in a textual world
where ­there is no imperative of audience—at least not audience as such is over-
determined by the needs of racial fidelity established in regard to antiblackness.
In such an imaginary, the speaker tries to speak on their own behalf. A blackness
without audience, where the display is not of the speaker and for the reader,
but is display of and for the speaker, display of the speaker’s undoing and
beholding . . . ​of a figure of black being, open and subjectable to trial, where
“trial” infers neither indictment nor conviction nor harm but simply means
effort without conclusion. To try, which is the h ­ uman praxis of being, e­ very day
to try; that is the habitat of the essay, and it can also be proxy for and of black
being.
I am describing the idea of an essay’s speaker as witness of a self, the speak-
er’s own, on the page. As such, the speaker is writer and reader of the self who
unfurls in the telling, which is a way to conceptualize the essay’s “contradic-
tory desires for recognition and freedom,” what literary scholar Francesca T.
Royster might call its performative black eccentricity (40). That is, in the ethos
of the essay, the impetus for recognition is not necessarily exterior—­not a pub-
lic negotiation of worth—­but instead the recognition that is pos­si­ble via the
vagary of relational oneness.22
The essay is the office of oneness, a scene of poetic inhabitance in the ways
it lurches t­ oward feeling and the incommensurate, its ecstatic use of language
that exists as and creates a world for delicious, terrifying knowing. This com-
mitment to the essay’s poetic intelligence revives Audre Lorde’s arguments
about embodied knowing—­Lorde, who, like Shepherd, was a poet. Indeed, one
excellence of poetry rests in its mobilization of voice, “the way that the inti-
macy of a single voice speaking across time and space can become a call to
empathy,” in Natasha Trethewey’s formulation.23 This phrasing, “intimacy of
a single voice speaking across time and space,” appoints the essay’s praxis of
telling, how the speaker is reaching t­ oward their own self-­in-­imagination, and
how this reaching is dynamic in its travel and compounded in its intimacy.
Yes, this is it. At its most capable, most affecting, most transformative, the
first-­person essay is a genre that revels in the whirlwind of that “single voice

96 Chapter 4
speaking,” the dervish-­like mess and grace of self-­study. The essay might be a
prose genre, but its logics are poetic, a bite-­size affective fleshy ­thing that is
awry of argument and replete with voice . . . ​and it can belong to a black one.24
The memoiristic essay c­ an’t sustain the needs of the collective. Maybe if we
put together one thousand such essays by each writing person we’d have . . . ​
one thousand essays by each person. The essay gives nothing but its scene to
the speaker; it cannot be expected to give anything but its scene to the speaker.
(It can be affecting to the reader, but we should not displace affect with intent
or expectation. That is, its ­doing is beautiful and ­will inspire but it ­ought not
be judged on its capacity for that.) The essay’s happenings—­its encounters with
shame or fear or heatedness or doubt—­are scaled to the world of the one . . . ​this
is its aliveness.
The essay as an intimacy of black being, an openness of self-­study that is not
authority but something wilder and more fragile.25
I know that the legacy of racial blackness makes it nearly impossible to
imagine a black speaker engaged in being without constituting that being as
an argument in regard to antiblackness. That is, it is hard to imagine the black
speaker being of the “neutral attempt.” But it must be pos­si­ble that if black
­people live lives full of everyday h ­ uman confusion, then it is also pos­si­ble that
a black speaker, on the page, might be of or be oriented ­toward being in the
trial . . . ​not as a one ­free of blackness but as a one who is ­free within blackness—as
a figure who is able to be ­free within their regard to being of blackness.
Like the speaker in Toi Derricotte’s “Beds.”
Derricotte is the author of five poetry collections, most notably 1999’s Ten-
der, and cofounded Cave Canem (with Cornelius Eady), that superlative black
poetry workshop. She also wrote the memoir The Black Notebooks: An Interior
Journey, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1997, so her foray into
prose is not a detour. Indeed, Derricotte’s oeuvre delights in the interior, in
the affective trajectories of shame and regret and fear that she narrates as “poi-
gnantly realized details of feeling.”26
“Beds,” anthologized in the 2011 edition of The Best American Essays, is a colla-
tion of twenty-­seven brief scenes each indicated by a Roman numeral. (­There
is also an italicized afterword.) The title as much refers to the fact that some of
the episodes occur in sleeping quarters as it represents the essay’s attention to
the threat in seemingly innocuous domestic settings where full-­bodied trauma
is afoot. Derricotte’s anecdotal telling, then, sketches life in a ­house­hold where
a ­father’s vio­lence terrorizes ­mother, d ­ aughter, and dog, though the focus is
on the speaker (the d ­ aughter) as a narrating witness to her becoming. Indeed,
this attunement is signaled by the essay’s epigraph from Franz Kafka: “You say

Aliveness in Two Essays 97

I should go down further still, but I am already very deep down and yet, if it
must be so, I ­will stay ­here. What a place! It is prob­ably the deepest place ­there
is. But I w
­ ill stay ­here. Only do not force me to climb down any deeper.” Kafka’s
speaker strug­gles against the call to go deeper, a call made by an unnamed
other, though in truth, the speaker and the authoritative voice are r­ eally one.
As such, the speaker names the fear that fuels and impedes essaying—­that de-
scent, falling and falling into, takes effort. It does not just happen; one also has
to do it. Such is the context that frames our appreciation of the young black
female speaker in “Beds.”27
The essay proper begins with an impossible memory:

I.

The first was a bassinet. I ­don’t remember what it was made of; I think it
was one of ­those big white baskets with wheels. When I ­couldn’t sleep at
night, my f­ ather would drag it into the kitchen. It was winter. He’d light
the gas oven. I remember the room’s stuffiness, the acrid bite of cold and
fumes.
My ­father ­didn’t like crying. He said I was ­doing it to get attention.
He ­didn’t like my m ­ other teaching me that I could cry and get atten-
tion. Nothing was wrong with me, and, even if I was hungry, it ­wasn’t
time to eat. Sometimes, I screamed for hours, and my ­father—­I do remem-
ber this—­would push his chair up to the lip of the bassinet and smoke, as
if he was keeping me com­pany.
­After a few nights, he had broken me, but when he put the b­ ottle to
my lips, I was too exhausted to drink. (49; emphasis added)

­ ecause the opening sets the speaker as a baby in a bassinet, it amplifies the im-
B
precision of remembering, particularly any recollection done through f­amily
happenings. The authority of the speaker’s telling wobbles further ­because of
the f­ ather’s voice, which crowds in through f­ ree indirect speech: “Nothing was
wrong with me, and, even if I was hungry, it ­wasn’t time to eat.” As the speak-
er’s voice mingles with the ­father’s in a kind of ventriloquism, ambivalence
permeates the memory. Surely the child experienced t­hese happenings, but
how much could she remember in this precise language? “Beds” commences
with this tussle between the infant speaker and her recalcitrant surveilling
­father, though the speaker interrupts the ambivalence to assert the authority
of her becoming: “I do remember this.” This declaration is vital, and it reminds
us that the (adult) speaker is watching as well as reinhabiting the threshold
scene of her baby-­self, that it is the speaker’s mattering that ­matters.

98 Chapter 4
 The next episode confirms the speaker’s reflective viewpoint: “My second
was a crib in the corner of my parents’ room. We moved to the attic when I was
18 months old, so it must have been before that” (49; emphasis added). In this
moment, framed by archival doubt, the speaker recalls her sleeplessness and
imagines the ­father as a gray monster and a tree. From t­ hese first two episodes,
we almost expect a sequence of tellings marked by one bed and then another
(“the first was,” “my second was”), but what becomes apparent by the third
sequence is that the idiom bed is meta­phorical, an item of furniture that con-
jures a spatial concept of repose, rest, fitfulness, vulnerability, dreaming, perhaps
the innermost intimate locale in a home:

III.

My aunt brought home a pre­sent for me ­every day when she came from
work. I’d wait excitedly by the kitchen door as soon as I could walk.
Sometimes, ­she’d fish down in her pocket­book, and the only ­thing she
could find was a Tums, which she called candy. But mostly ­she’d bring
colored paper and pencils from the printing press where she worked.
When I was 2 or 3, I began to draw ­things and to write my own name.
I wrote it backward for a long time: “I-­O-­T.” I drew ­houses, cars, money,
animals. I actually believed every­thing I drew was real; the ­house was a
real ­house, as real as the one we lived in. I held it in my hand. It belonged
to me, like a chair or an apple. From then on, I did not understand my
­mother’s sadness or my ­father’s rage. If we could have what­ever we wanted
just by drawing it, t­ here was nothing to miss or to long for. I tried to show
them what I meant, but they shrugged it off, not seeing or believing.
(The sideways escape—­the ­battle between my f­ ather’s worst thought
of me and this proof, this stream of something, questioned and found
lacking, which must remain nearly invisible—­pressed into what leaks
out as involuntarily as urine, a message, a self, which must be passed over
the coals, raked, purified into a thin strand of unambiguous essence of
the deep core.) (49–50)

­ here is no bed portrayed ­here, though we get the first characterization of

T
female subjects other than the speaker—­the aunt and the m ­ other—as well as
the implication that bed is an idiom of the speaker’s interior and creativity.
Notice, for example, that in addition to recalling the aunt’s inventiveness such
that Tums become a gift of candy, the speaker slips into a parenthetical voice
to describe her “sideways escape”; that is, the speaker narrates her creativity in
a performative syntax of creative indirection.

Aliveness in Two Essays 99

 Increasingly, Derricotte recounts the speaker’s subjectivity in terms of
creativity, resonant of Kafka’s notion of descent-­as-­encounter. In this way,
Derricotte’s essay becomes a meditation on discovery, and it elevates the
speaker’s thinking as an act of divination:

Thinking was the ­thing about me that most offended or hurt him, the
­thing he most wanted to kill. (Episode VI, 50)

Sometimes, I believed that the ­things in the world heard your thoughts,
the way God heard prayers. When I was very young, not even out of my
crib, I’d ask the shades to blow a certain way to prove they heard me.
(Episode XI, 52)

­ hese passages showcase a persona who revels in the exploration of her irre-
T
pressible wandering thoughts on all that happened, whose ambition is to pur-
sue intimacy. The speaker tells us as much in episode VIII, ­after a quotation
from a newspaper article on abused ­children who abuse animals (the newspaper
reports that “such ­children can only achieve a sense of safety and empower-
ment by inflicting pain and suffering on themselves and ­others”):

I am trying to get as close as pos­si­ble to the place in me where the change occurred:
I had to take that voice in, become my f­ ather, eternally vigilant, the judge
referred to before any dangerous self-­assertion, any thought or feeling. I
happened in reverse: My body took in the pummeling actions, which went
down into my core. The voice is no longer his. It is my voice asking, be-
fore any love or joy or passion, anything that might grow from me: “Who
do you think you are?” I suppress the possibilities. (51; emphases added)

This moment articulates the trial of the essay, the attempt to develop proximity
to a discursive pro­cess animated by distance, deferral, and delay. “I am trying
to get as close as pos­si­ble,” the speaker exhales as an homage to her thinking,
suppressed ­thing that it has been in the past and still is now. But the real gem of
the passage is the encapsulation “I happened in reverse,” a terrific equivocation
that reminds us that the speaker is mobilizing distance on her behalf. That is,
this phrase of orientation could refer to the speaker’s contemporaneous hap-
pening in the face of revisiting ­these sequences of childhood being. Or it could
be synonymous with the “sideways escape” of e­ arlier, as a term of an indirect,
circular, irregular route of coming into one’s relation. What­ever the case, “I
happened in reverse” declares the speaker’s becoming through the object case,
as a subject displaced from the center of her own being (the displacement is

100 Chapter 4
both in the happening and in regard to telling the happening). This sense of
displacement connects to all the ways the speaker is set, and sets herself, in
relief through vari­ous instances of pervasive domestic danger. Moreover, Der-
ricotte’s description of delay—­the “reverse” of the speaker’s happening—­makes
us aware of the essay as a habitat of time, where the speaker encounters a past
self in a pre­sent.28
­These aesthetics of distance and displacement frame the domestic peril
in “Beds,” particularly the erotic tension and vio­lence cultivated through the
­father’s harming be­hav­ior ­toward his d
­ aughter. Rather than criticize or ratio-
nalize such awfulness, the speaker exists in regard to the happenings: “Life is
something you have to get used to: what is normal in a h ­ ouse, the bottom
line, what is taken for granted” (episode XIV, 53). Which is precisely what the
speaker is d
­ oing—­becoming familiar (“get used to”) with the experiences of her
being, engaging in reading herself as she thinks through the past. Such an open
orientation reinforces the episodic quality of the essay’s intensities:

He was the ruler of my body. I had to learn that. It had to be as if he ­were

deep in me, deeper than instinct, like the commander of a submarine
during times of war. (Episode V, 50)

My ­father and I shared a new bedroom, and my m ­ other slept on the

pullout in the living room so that she c­ ouldn’t wake us when she got
dressed in the morning for work. We slept in twin beds, pushed up close
together, as if we ­were a ­couple.
I could have slept with my m ­ other in the bedroom. . . . ​I could have
slept on the pullout. (Episode XV, 53)

My ­mother shopped a­ fter work e­ very Thursday, so my f­ ather would come

home and fix dinner for me. . . . ​He’d bring it [the steak] home and unwrap
the brown paper . . . ​like someone ­doing a striptease. (Episode XVI, 54)

I was never happier than when I was with my ­father and he was in a good
mood. . . . ​He was so handsome that I felt proud when p ­ eople noticed
us. . . . ​I had dressed up as if I ­were his girlfriend. (Episode XVII, 54)

The sequence h ­ ere is progressive without being cumulative, such that t­ here
is no conclusion that sexual abuse occurred, even as the speaker resides in the
clutch of t­ hese influential occurrences. We might want a more argumenta-
tive case made in defense of this black girl, but what organizes the voice of
the essay is the speaker existing in the poise of watching her exposedness, as

Aliveness in Two Essays 101

 in a moment from episode XIX where she describes offering to dance for her
­father:

I thought, maybe, if he saw I was almost a ­woman and could do what

beautiful w
­ omen do, he might find a reason to love me.
At the end [of the dance], I spun around and around u ­ ntil most of
the drapes, towels and my ­mother’s nightgown fell to the floor. I ­don’t
remember what remained to cover me. (55)

This is a dreamy and discomfiting scene, iterative of fantasy. ­Here, the speaker
­doesn’t resolve the moment and instead leaves her (young) self exposed in that
last line, “I d
­ on’t remember what remained to cover me,” where the forgetting
resonates with the elusive covering and with the connotative heft of the word
“remained”: something left, abandoned, lost; something resilient. She, the
speaker, watches herself t­ here, remains to watch herself; her force materializes
in the recognition to be had in the telling of this pointed scene. Said another
way, the speaker watches; she becomes a one in the object case, an example of
third-­person being in the first-­person essay.29
Derricotte’s “Beds” exemplifies the essay genre as a habitat of black aliveness:
the dramatization of the world of a black one, of the encounter between self
and other self that manifests relational being; the negotiation of past (something
happened) and pre­sent (I am happening) into a subjunctive fabulation that sur-
passes the logics of chronology and argument; the capacity to tingle in the cre-
ativity and surprise of being. In ­these ways, we might understand the essay as the
opulence of a black mind . . . ​a speaker’s thinking that is reflective of one’s embodied
intelligence, that encompasses the world scale of happening such as is pre­sent in
this sequence of twenty-­seven scenes that think through and reckon with experi-
ence. Moreover, Derricotte’s d ­ oing renders the first-­person essay as an approxi-
mation of a speaker’s interior, where the term “interior” resonates more with
Édouard Glissant’s opacity than with any fallacy of integrity or transparency.
Yes, the essay tries to stylize thought as a materiality of one’s being, as if lines of
thinking, on the page, would be put in quotation marks just as lines of speech
might be.30
I love how “Beds” gathers as an imperfect site of holdings and a site where
beholding happens—an archive of the impossible. That is, in light of confron-
tations with the inevitable failure of archives, the essay generically bypasses
historical telling and coheres as a repository of something undone. I read Der-
ricotte’s cata­log, this store­house of knowing, as a useable stash of memories
that assumes incompleteness. We see this incompleteness in the adverbs that
temporalize some of the scenes—­for example, “once,” which opens episode

102 Chapter 4
XIX, and “sometimes,” which commences episode XX. We see it also in the
speaker’s dynamism near the essay’s end, first speaking of herself in the third
person universal—­“You would think that the one treated so cruelly would ‘kill’
the abuser, throw him out of the brain forever” (episode XXVI, 58)—­and then
admitting how entangled her ­father’s worldview is with her own:

In the deepest place of judgment, not critical thinking, not on that high
plain, but first waking judgment, judgment awakened with perception,
judgment of the sort that decides what inner face to turn ­toward the morn-
ing sun—in that first choosing moment of what to say to myself, the place
from which first language blossoms—­I choose, must choose, my ­father’s
words. . . . ​­There is no inner loyalty, no way of belonging. I cannot trust
what I feel and connect to. . . . ​I do this to myself in remembrance. (59)

This reflection on judgment, perception, and language, ­these essential ­human

­doings that have consumed phi­los­o­phers over time, come to no resolution ex-
cept perhaps a fidelity to the state of being unfinished. “I do this to myself in
remembrance,” the speaker proclaims, since to assay through this archive is to
hold one’s being in regard, in suspense, in ordinary honor.31
The incompleteness is amplified by Derricotte’s final episode, which re-
turns to a scene from her youth—­“The time I had the migraine, ­after my ­father
had beaten me, he made me bathe”—­and which the speaker summarizes thus:
“Maybe he had some idea of how much he had hurt me. I knew that, some-
times, men beat their ­women and then make up. I ­didn’t know what to believe”
(episode XXVII, 59). The essay ends with enduring confusion, a speaker who
remains immersed in this (past) feeling observing a girl child who is ensconced
in a domestic idiom of female subjection. The openness h ­ ere (“I ­didn’t know
what to believe”) is vocalized in past tense but resides in the speaker’s contem-
poraneous time—as a pre­sent happening—in the italicized afterword, where
the speaker’s voice sits in exceptional relief: “I hear in myself a slight opposition,
a wounded presence saying, ‘I am me, I know who I am.’ But I am left with only a narrow
hole, a thin tube of rubber that the words must squeak through. Where words might have
gushed out as from a struck well, I watch it—­watch e­ very thought, e­ very word. It w ­ asn’t
my ­father’s thought that I took in; it was the language. It is the language in me that must
change” (59). H ­ ere, fi­nally, the speaker renders her watching in theatrical and
embodied terms, and describes her essaying as a pageant of gushing, squeaking
words, vis­i­ble and tangible. If this afterword resolves, it does so as a moment of
relationality where the speaker suspends in regard to herself, where the con-
clusion remains eternal as a charge for now: to think and inhabit the pre­sent,
vivaciously, vis-­à-­vis the past and what may come.32

Aliveness in Two Essays 103

 There is no meaning to deduce from this essay except that it was written,
that its aesthetics are superb, that its speaker speaks dynamically. (The writer
might have something to say about the “­after” of the essay, but that is dif­
fer­ent from our beholding its worldmaking aesthetics.) So Derricotte’s “Beds”
arrives as a textuality that figures the tender being and becoming of a black
female speaker, a terrain through which the speaker can proceed, not necessar-
ily forward or upward . . . ​descent, as Kafka might say, as an instance of one’s
deepening. (“I happened in reverse,” she says.) In Derricotte’s scene-­scape, the
anecdotes exist as a sequence of shimmering bits and the speaker becomes un-
recognizable as a self, maybe even unrecognizable to herself, at the center of
­these instances of her invention and inventiveness.33
(What a joy it is to engage essays up close, to perceive their structural fineness.)
Simply, and not so simply, the essay aims to tell a story around a ­thing that
happened. The story is not meant to be representative, or prescriptive; it is,
­after all, just one story, and ­human life cannot be reduced to signs on a page.
Instead, each story’s value is found in its telling, its speaker’s surrender to the
world pos­si­ble in her specificity. The essay, then, is an invitation to look at and
through the idiom of one’s self, a thrall, a performative act of black rightness.
And the freedom to be had through the essay is the freedom to be of encounter,
freedom as the orientation of the one who is object, subject, author.
Of course, the difficulty of ­these ideas lies in their breadth—­freedom, even
as we know better than to think any ­human in the modern world is ­free; the
fallacy that the essay can manifest as space of unfettered being, given its per-
formativity and its display (it is, ­after all, a genre of publicness). I ­don’t mean to
disregard this complexity, though I mean to suggest that we can read the essay
through oneness, and that such a reading can be meaningful to thinking about
black relationality as such is pos­si­ble in a black world orientation.
The speaker of the essay begins her thinking thus: I am alive. No ­matter what
­else can be said about the condition of my being, I am alive. Aliveness is of me. Even
if this preface is performative, it is an enunciation that aims to establish the
speaker as one to whom ­things happen, as a one who happens. Again, to be f­ ree
in blackness, to be ­free in regard to one’s alive being of blackness.
­Every h ­ uman animal has in them perfect intelligence; that is, in ­every ­human
is full feeling, hunger and ripeness and lethargy and unease, all of it in a rhythm
that is as it is. Such intelligence is perfect in that it is rightly of the being—­again,
it is as it is, and one can know through it. For this reason, in “Form-­of-­Life,” phi­
los­o­pher Giorgio Agamben argues for thought as the habit or character that con-
stitutes what is indefinable about life. Not thought as “the individual exercise of
an organ or of a psychic faculty, but rather an experience” (9; emphasis added).

104 Chapter 4
Agamben advocates for thought, thinking, as a phenomenological act, an unrep-
resentable case of being h ­ uman. And in this way, life is of one who thinks, where
thinking is not a privileged intellectual act: life is of one who thinks; one who
thinks has and is of life. What disturbs the rightness of this knowing and think-
ing is the need to try to communicate with or cohere through sociality (even
as sociality, via relation, also makes pos­si­ble more knowing).34
The essay is of the open totality of this knowing. It swoons in the imperative-­
subjunctive of “imagine this,” that worldmaking invocation, the immanent
and transcendent self-­ensnarement. I find inspiration in the way that the first-­
person essay tries to dispense with argument and tarries instead in the study
of a moment. (Sigh: I am aware of the irony of making an argument using the
example of essays.) I find inspiration in the way that the essay ­doesn’t explic­
itly substantiate (evidence) though its aestheticization and approximation of
experience make—or try to make—­something evident.35 The essay, this genre
of black thinking rendered as a thrilling materiality; the essay as aliveness, as
a practice of aliveness that holds ethical implications ­because it is a deepening
of one’s capacity of being. Indeed, in paying close attention to Derricotte’s and
Shepherd’s speakers, I am trying to highlight the exquisite work of studying,
their trying to stay with their version of the h ­ uman question, how to be, a
question that cannot be asked from a place of deficit, a question that has no
predetermined answer and that cannot be fulfilled by identity, a question that
must be pursued from the grace of one’s capaciousness.

(This chapter is dedicated to Hilton Als, whose cultural criticism works

through the essay form superbly, whose narrative personas try to engage the
black freedom pos­si­ble in the genre.)36

Aliveness in Two Essays 105

This page intentionally left blank
 5 ALIVENESS

AND ETHICS

“It was the right ­thing to do, but she had no right to do it.”1 This is the borrowed
line that Toni Morrison uses to summarize Sethe’s consequential action from
Beloved, the attempt to kill her three young ­children rather than see them re-
turned to the horrors of slavery, an unsanctioned sanctified act that succeeds
with one child, the ­middle ­daughter. I love how Morrison’s chiasmus expresses
the unresolved and unresolvable ­matter of ethics, the impossibility of Sethe
being able to orient herself rightly in an antiblack world. And yet Morrison’s
comment also maintains that the disavowal of black ethical possibility does
not surpass the importance of understanding Sethe as an ethical subject. Pivot-
ing on two dif­fer­ent meanings of “right,” Morrison’s summation acknowledges
the terrible fate for enslaved c­ hildren (what makes infanticide potentially a
right ­thing) as it asks us to behold Sethe as ­human and, as such, responsible
to questions about being—an imagining where Sethe’s thinking and ­doing are
philosophical in caliber.2
“It was the right ­thing to do, but she had no right to do it.”
In an antiblack world, the black subject is essentially nonrelational. In an anti-
black world, ­there is no ethical possibility for the one who is black: t­ here is no
figuring through one’s humanity b­ ecause one’s humanity is figured already as
marginal, subjected, diminished. Said another way, if the ethical conceptually
depends on one’s instantiation as a one, the discourse of antiblackness hinders
such instantiation, for as James Baldwin reminds us, “the American triumph—
in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—­was to make black
­people despise themselves.”3 In the face of an imperative for self-­despisal, the
only orientation pos­si­ble is ­either acquiescence to being wrong or antagonism
to the hypothesis of wrongness. An antiblack imaginary presumes to have nul-
lified the question “how to be,” since we e­ ither are what­ever the world says we
are or are enmeshed in refusing that imposition. Of course, acquiescence is in-
tolerable, and though defiance is essential, it is not sufficient enough to honor
ethical inhabiting. In ­either instance, the black one is turned away from rather
than into herself, alienated from the site that might generate ethical rendering.
Baldwin’s declaration comes in an open letter to Angela Davis as she awaited
trial in 1970, though the conditions of black being that he articulates reverber-
ate beyond this context. For sure, the terms of self-­despisal constitute a hitch
in the common understanding of social justice, where, at best, black being—­
disregarded, harmed, or killed being—is the object lesson that inspires justice
and spurs racial reckoning for the nation-­state, as well as for the person who is
not black. This is the meta­phorical use of black life as a scene of social thinking,
a scene that excludes and exempts blackness from the conditions of life itself:
the proverbial canary in the coal mine; the killed or harmed one whose cry or
pain becomes the impetus for an antiblack world to try to confront itself. Such
dynamics cannot withstand the black one as a subject of being and therefore as
a subject of the ethical question; such dynamics are not the condition of black
livelihood.4
Sigh: One can only undertake the ethical in a context where orientation
remains open, such as the relationality constituted in a text’s invocation of a
black world. That is, as a question, “How am I being/becoming?” cannot be
figured through the terms of worth and value on which antiblackness is predi-
cated. Simply, ­every black one is already worthy since they are on earth and
worth is a ­human legacy. And embedded in this claim is the companion notion
that e­ very h
­ uman being is called on to manifest their worth—to believe it, to
act of its accord, to negotiate its par­ameters and fall short of its obligation, over

108 Chapter 5
and again: this is what might be called grace, the work of trying ­every day to be
engaged in an investigation of one’s being. I know that the historical denigra-
tion of blackness trou­bles any suggestion that one has to reckon with, earn, one’s
worth. And still, the invitation to reckon must be countenanced without being
anchored to an ideology of black nonvalue.5 Reckon we must, since the reckon-
ing with being ­human is ours to bear: “Our humanity is our burden,” Baldwin
reminds us, “we need not ­battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely
more difficult—­that is, accept it.”6 One does not have to display one’s reckoning
to another so as to have it be verified or confirmed; one does not have to be of
a certain manner or tethered to a normative idea of what constitutes ethical
encounter. One must reckon, over and again.
“It was the right ­thing to do, though she had no right to do it.”
Morrison’s willingness to behold the ethical recalls the idiom of care articu-
lated by literary theorist Christina Sharpe as wake work: “What happens when
we proceed as if we know this, antiblackness, to be the ground on which we
stand, the ground from which we to [sic] attempt to speak, for instance, an ‘I’
or a ‘we’ who know, an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who are” (7; emphasis in original). Sharpe’s
declaration refuses the fallacy of thinking black ethics in any normative frame,
since the normative is antiblack, and her emphasis on proceeding “as if we
know” is akin to instantiating a black world orientation. Morrison’s chiasmus
and Sharpe’s theorizing represent a black feminist poethics in the way phi­los­o­
pher Denise Ferreira da Silva means the term, a creative praxis that abandons
the creeds of the antiblack world ­toward “the ethical mandate of opening up
other ways of knowing and ­doing” (“­Toward” 81). Again, Morrison ­doesn’t elide
the ethical; instead, she authors it in the black world of a novel where ethical
weight can fall humanly, rightly, on a black and female one. As such the ques-
tion i­ sn’t only about the legality of murder or the wrath of slavery’s terror, but
also a high order of self-­assessment embedded in confronting Sethe and her
­doing. I take Morrison’s insight as inspiration for exploring the black ethical
through the language of ordinary examples.7
“How to be” is as essential a question as it is unanswerable, especially
­because its interrogative is more wide open than “what” (what to do, what to
be).8 “How” indicates manner, condition, and means—it is a discernment that
includes thinking about one’s instance and capacity of being, as in: what am I
feeling, what resources do I have, what do I need, what can I do, what might be
its impact. The scale of the question “how to be” is a profoundly personal one,
which is how it appears in a disagreement about goodness in the last conversa-
tion that Sula has with Nel. The exchange—an argument, ­really—­comes while
Sula is in pain on her deathbed; Nel visits to pay re­spect but also to seek an

Aliveness and Ethics 109

explanation for Sula’s infidelity with Nel’s husband, Jude. Their conversation
runs for six pages, and it crackles as a scene of philosophical dialogue between
the two, each repeating the other’s short phrases in ways that expose the com-
peting understanding in each ­woman’s positionality. Sula’s illness does nothing
to dull the audacity that allows her to imagine and pursue rightness of being,
and at the end,

embarrassed, irritable and a l­ ittle bit ashamed, Nel r­ ose to go. “Good-
bye, Sula. I d
­ on’t reckon I’ll be back.”
She opened the door and heard Sula’s low whisper. “Hey, girl.” Nel
paused and turned her head but not enough to see her.
“How you know?” Sula asked.
“Know what?” Nel still ­wouldn’t look at her.
“About who was good. How you know it was you?”
“What you mean?”
“I mean maybe it ­wasn’t you. Maybe it was me.” (Morrison, Sula 146)

­ here are no more words between them ­after this moment—­Nel takes “two
T
steps out the door and close[s] it ­behind her.” I want to appreciate Sula’s “How
you know?” as a genuine query in her consideration of goodness. E ­ arlier, Sula
is more resolute in declaring that “being good to somebody is just like being
mean to somebody. Risky. You ­don’t get nothing for it” (144–145). Indeed, she
makes the comment as a retort to Nel’s suggestion that one’s goodness ­matters
in the abstract and can be adjudicated outside one’s self. “It ­matters,” Sula says
of good-­doing, “but only to you. Not to anybody e­ lse” (144). H ­ ere, Sula dis-
misses a notion of goodness as an inflection of domestic respectability since
an ethical framework ­can’t be given to you; instead, she advances a starker
concept of ethical pursuit. For her, goodness is a lifelong query, an unsettled
and unsettlingly personal one. So when she says, “Maybe it was me,” we can
consider the statement not only as sarcasm, as if Sula intends to say, “Of course
it was me,” but also in regard to the chapter’s depiction of a character who
is caught in the surprise of what ­dying means, as a person reckoning again
with the quality of how she has lived. As such, “How you know?” expresses
Sula’s speculative ethos, her investment in her right to be alive and to be of
the questions afforded by aliveness. Sula can bear the open-­endedness of t­ hese
questions b­ ecause of the faith she has in her rightness of being and its invita-
tion to surrender to the ambivalence of knowing. That this ­doing is personal
­doesn’t abdicate the consideration of care or relationality. Indeed, an ethics of
goodness can account for harm, but only as much as the harming one can be-

110 Chapter 5
hold the harm they have done, only as much as the harmed one can speak—to
themself at least—­the name of said harm. Ethics is the site of self-­beholding,
and therefore Sula is not invoking the apparatus of the state to adjudicate the
possibilities of goodness, since the state could not recognize her or Nel, nor
their righ­teous actions t­ oward being of a life. She is grappling with—­unsettled
in—­her thinking about being and how to be, about the life she inhabits and its
force in the world, including its force with, between, ­toward Nel.9
I call again on Sula ­because of my commitment to oneness as the name for a
subject of philosophical significance, a self-­centered idiom of the h ­ uman being
engaged in her living. And though Sula’s self-­centeredness might seem unethi-
cal, such interpretations overlook the relational praxis of her audacity. Who
­else but Sula thinks through the wealth of being and occupies each day ori-
ented by “how to be”? Sula, she who realizes that t­ here is no ethical compass
offered by an antiblack and antifemale world, even as the need for an ethic
pulses within: “­Because each had discovered years before that they ­were nei-
ther white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them,
they had set about creating something e­ lse to be” (52; emphasis added). This is the
novel’s—­and its title character’s—­figuring of the ethical imperative through
the relationality of black female oneness.10
The black text is a black world where a black one can navigate the ethics of
being, the question of how to be.11
The authority of Sula’s thinking recalls Audre Lorde’s ideas, which I have
co-­opted for defining aliveness. Remember that in “Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde
directs us clearly ­toward the ethical as being held in feeling:

The erotic is a mea­sure between the beginnings of our sense of self and
the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction
to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For hav-
ing experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its
power, in honor and self-­respect we can require no less of ourselves. (­Sister Out-
sider 54; emphases added)

For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how
acutely and fully we can feel in the ­doing (54; emphasis added)

In Lorde’s formulation, self-­interrogation is key to a meaningful living prac-

tice. She extends this notion in two ­later passages:

Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, “It feels right to me,” ac-
knowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that

Aliveness and Ethics 111

 means is the first and most power­ful guiding light t­ oward any understand-
ing. Any understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or
clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nurse-
maid of all our deepest knowledge. (56)

When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of
the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illumi-
nate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible
to ourselves in the deepest sense. (58; emphases added)

What is conceptualized h ­ ere is not solipsism but a relational practice of study

where the initial sentiment (“It feels right to me”) ushers in another “under-
standing”; that is, the rightness of one’s feeling—of inhabiting and interrogat-
ing feeling—­gives way to a deeper appreciation of one’s being in the world. The
force of contemplative engagedness, rather than closing off the contemplative
one in rabid isolation and individualism, inspires more capacity. I could cite
again the opening of “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” to reinforce that the interroga-
tive “how” coheres in Lorde’s work: “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our
lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes
which we hope to bring about through ­those lives” (­Sister Outsider 36; empha-
sis added). Indeed, this sequence of passages exemplifies that the imperative
of Lorde’s thinking is ­toward principled being, ­toward the ethical, a tumbling
movement into more and more consciousness that we might call studying.12

Throughout this proj­ect, I have used the words “study” and “studying” to de-
scribe the attentiveness of an alive one. We might think of studying as the spe-
cial province of the acad­emy, but ­here I mean studying as a ­human endeavor,
the way that Lorde or Baldwin or Sula invites us to pursue intelligence by
giving attention to what trou­bles and what intrigues. Studying, in this ver-
nacular, constitutes being a holy phi­los­op ­ her of one’s inhabiting of the world,
what Socrates named as the vitality of examining one’s life.13 It might involve
books and a nudge from a mentor, as in the anecdote from Nikky Finney’s
National Book Award ac­cep­tance speech, where in giving thanks for the gift of
encouragement, Finney recounts an efficient anecdote from her college years:
“Dr. Gloria Wade Gayles, ­great and best teacher, you asked me on a Friday,
4 ­o’clock, 1977, I was 19 and sitting on a Talladega College wall dreaming about
the only life I ever wanted, that of a poet. ‘Miss Finney,’ you said, ‘do you r­ eally
have time to sit ­there, have you finished reading ­every book in the library?’ ”14
I want to be clear that the urgency ­here is not par­tic­u­lar to the institutional,
but instead comes from what it means to have fidelity to the ­doing. Studying

112 Chapter 5
is ordinary, and Finney, whose poetry regularly invokes scenes of instruction,15
characterizes this everydayness through a love of pencils:

I was raised in a land of pencils and pencil users. I was reared around ­people
who worked with their hands: seamstresses, tailors, carpenters, teachers,
butchers, coaches, paint­ers, farmers, electricians, plumbers. T ­ hese small
town folk w ­ ere close inside my life and within my eyeshot. I noticed them
and how they did their work in the world. As they kept an eye on me,
I noticed their pencil habits. Pencils w ­ ere a part of their tool b­ elts and
jewelry. It was not unusual how they kept pencils so near their lives, just
inside a purse, in an overalls pocket, on a cash register, on a string dan-
gling from a nail in the wall, over an earlobe. As a girl, not only did I like
to write with pencils but I also liked to read them and imagine the places
they represented: Jimmy’s Hog Heaven, Dent’s Undertaking Establish-
ment, The Silver Moon Café, Johnson’s Nursery, Miss Mable’s Frozen Pies
and Custards. Pencils got me ­going about words and the work worlds of
­human beings. Pencils in my girlhood w ­ ere tiny handheld billboards; they
­were jumbo pencils with knife-­carved points; cigar-­size pencils with teeth
marks speckled all down their backs, evidence of a ner­vous mouth; early
morning computation; or an eve­ning with lunations found in the almanac.
As a girl, I tied pencils to sweat and hard work. I associated them with
calculations and contemplation. P ­ eople who worked with their hands
and their heads used pencils. ­People who made ­mistakes and understood the
power of second effort reached for pencils. (215–216; emphasis added)

This passage, from an essay titled “Inquisitor and Insurgent: Black W ­ oman
with Pencil, Sharpened,” describes “pencil habits” as a manner of being and
working in the world, a habitat of worldly existence where one is attentive
and has regard for possibility. The ­labor and the trial described ­here constitute
studying as an ethic for and of the black one.
Part of thinking about study is a rethinking of our understanding of work,
to make the term “work” or “­labor” usable again. That is, in the logic and cri-
tique of racial capitalism, the notion of work seems corrupt and irredeemable.
And still, h
­ ere in t­ hese poems and essays—­and in the invitation for the black
one to be of/in relation with the phenomenon of her reading—is a wealth of
work, the craft or poiesis where what is being made is the self ’s proj­ect of in-
habiting life rather than a product that confirms systems of capital. The work
I mean h­ ere animates rather than degrades or violates the black one. “I want to
make myself ” (92), Sula says, not as an overdetermined sense of completion but
as an articulation of a w ­ ill ­toward becoming, the certainty that can withstand

Aliveness and Ethics 113

uncertainty. Work, effort, w ­ ill, ­labor: all t­ hese words seem inept, though what I
­really mean by them is the poetic happenings of one, the possibilities for study
illuminated by one being engaged in the cir­cuits of one’s being. Work as an
iteration of oneness, as a ­thing that happens on one’s behalf rather than against
the one—­a relational dynamic of the one, similar to the Old En­glish connota-
tion of the word “craft” as “a form of knowledge, not just a knowledge of making
but a knowledge of being” (Langlands 7).16
It is terrifying, this work that is a descent into knowing, a terror rendered
beautifully in James Baldwin’s singular essay “Nothing Personal”:

It has always been much easier (­because it has always seemed much safer)
to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. And yet,
the terror within is far truer and far more power­ful than any of our labels:
the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something
to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents—­the self one
takes oneself as being, which is, however, and by definition, a provisional
self—­and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow
the provisional self to bits. It is perfectly pos­si­ble—­indeed, it is far from
uncommon—to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply
walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between
inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort
is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material ­will one
build a self again? (384)

Ah, Baldwin: Baldwin goes right to the heart of aliveness, its responsibility and
its tenuous tender edges. He imagines the “terror within” as a source of energy
for being in one’s life. And his syntax, that exceedingly long and wandering final
sentence of tumbling lyrical sublimity, mimics the terrifying quality of feeling.
Both the syntax and claim reflect Baldwin’s ideological voluptuousness, the way
that he hardly ever concludes an argument—­there is rarely ever a pithy summary
or a sense that the speaker has won the day—­but instead sustains in the righ­teous
pursuit of knowing.17 Here I am implying a crucial distinction between righ­teous
and self-­righteous: self-­righteousness elevates the self-­righteous one above o­ thers
and is nonrelational (­because I believe this, I am better than you), whereas righ­
teousness exists in regard to one’s studying, is a call to act from and in regard to
that which one believes. The orientation of the righ­teous is ­toward becoming,
­toward inhabiting being rather than ­toward the denigration of an other.
The righ­teousness of trying to learn (from) the ­things one already knows, of
trying to know what one already knows, a deepening of insight, a humility and
ferocity of pursuit: this I believe and by this I ­shall try to live rightly.

114 Chapter 5
 Studying is ordained righ­teously, and it is also lonely—­the feeling and the
work of pursuance is lonely. Think back to the invitation in Lucille Clifton’s
“­won’t you celebrate with me” and the reiterated imperative in closing, “come
celebrate / with me.” That invitation constitutes a lonely practice, lonely not
only ­because of the question and the enjambed clause that seem to separate the
speaker from her audience, but even more so ­because the poem aestheticizes
an invocation of the one by the one. Again:

­ on’t you celebrate with me

w
what i have s­ haped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and ­woman
what did i see to be except myself ?
i made it up
­here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed. (427)

The vocative energy ­here designates a speaker in reflection, and the tender
clarity of the killing threat—­that invitation to come celebrate—­marks the
speaker as one on the cusp of newly arrived knowing (the clay enrobed by not
sunlight but “starshine”). Clifton’s verse often dramatizes the call to do one’s
solitary work, as is the case in many of her Lucifer poems, Lucifer being the
figure of the poet herself since both are named for light. H
­ ere I am thinking
of the eight-­poem sequence “­brothers,” which includes the following note at
the start:

(being a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though
only Lucifer is heard. The time is long ­after.) (466; italics in original)

The first poem is titled “invitation” and commences stunningly:

come coil with me

­here in creation’s bed
among the twigs and ribbons
of the past. (466)

Aliveness and Ethics 115

We might notice the echo between this invocation and the one in “­won’t you
celebrate with me,” as well as the excellent verb “coil” that characterizes per-
fectly Lucifer’s habitat and longing. And since we know that God d ­ oesn’t speak
in ­these poems, since “the silence of God is God” (469; italics in original) as Clifton
tells us in a l­ater epigraph, Lucifer’s invitation is t­oward himself. T ­ here is no
response to the entreaty to “coil,” and throughout the eight lyr­ics, Clifton show-
cases Lucifer’s voice moving through anger, regret, and then resolution, alter-
nating between his speaking directly to God, speaking of God, and sometimes
speaking as if to himself. In the final poem, Clifton repeats the epigraph about
God’s silence—it is a line from a Carolyn Forché poem—­with a signal difference:

8.
“. . . . . . . . . . . . ​is God.”

so.
having no need to speak
You sent Your tongue
splintered into angels.
even i,
with my ­little piece of it
have said too much.
to ask You to explain
is to deny You.
before the word
You ­were.
You kiss my b­ rother mouth.
the rest is silence. (470)

The title’s indication of absence, that long line of conjoined ellipses, reinforces
God’s immanence, which has already been established and need not be re-
peated. But I love, too, that this syntax opens up the possibility that anything
might be akin to God, that one might complete the blank space with any word
or phrase. This punctuation is a sign of and a doorway to work—as in, fill in
the blank. Indeed, we get evidence of Lucifer’s work in the poem’s opening
line, “so.,” a word that suggests the conclusion of one era of his discerning and
the commencement of another: “so.,” appended with a period and therefore
akin to an apostrophe, an exclamation; “so.,” a vernacular dismissal of God’s
dismissing silence; “so.,” a word that locates accountability as a contingency of
the relation—­not achieved, not a demand, just this moment of Lucifer conclud-
ing for now what he can conclude. This single word “so.” is a term of orientation,

116 Chapter 5
and it initiates the final poem with the sense that all that ­matters is the orien-
tation, the effort to try to be of regard relationally. As such, no reconciling is
necessary as Lucifer speaks for God (who is addressed ­here as throughout in the
relational You, properly capitalized) and puts to rest his own yearning in a crisp
closing sequence: “You w ­ ere,” “You kiss,” “the rest is silence.” In this finale,
Lucifer constructs himself as the one to whom the ecstatic happens—­that kiss,
which, in its emphatic pre­sent tense, contrasts with God’s other actions in the
poem, which are noted in the past tense. (Again, ­because God never speaks in
the eight poems—he is a presence but is not legibly pre­sent—­Lucifer describes
happenings from before the fall.) Lucifer recalls the kiss (Judas-­like?) from their
days of being boys together but chooses to narrate it in the pre­sent: “You kiss”
rather than “You kissed,” which means that the relation is forever, which se-
cures Lucifer to a relationality of studying that begins in and stays with Luci-
fer, he who radiates ­toward a sharper understanding of being.18
It is a lonely telling, this reckoning that Lucifer must do alone, announced
and reconciled in the opening “so.,” reminiscent of another Clifton poem that
is too beautiful not to pass on, “lucifer speaks in his own voice”:

sure as i am
of the seraphim
folding wing
so am i certain of a
graceful bed
and a soft caress
along my long belly
at endtime it was
to be
i who was called son
if only of the morning
saw that some must
walk or all w
­ ill crawl
so slithered into earth
and seized the serpent in
the animals i became
the lord of snake for
adam and for eve
i the only lucifer
light-­bringer
created out of fire

Aliveness and Ethics 117

 illuminate i could
and so
illuminate i did (402)

We could read the poem along its balance of subjunctive assertion, such that
“sure as i am” is revised as “so am i certain.” In this repetition, the surety of
the first statement conditions the second as the syntactical order is inverted:
“sure as i am” becomes “so am i certain.” This inversion, nearly chiasmic, puts verb
before noun in the second clause and, in so ­doing, intensifies the weight of the
adverb “so.” (Again.) The clarity, then, of Lucifer’s knowing resides in the rela-
tion between the first sureness and what may come from that, as if certainty
could propel the capacity to withstand more certainty and even uncertainty. In
Clifton’s slim poem, Lucifer’s subjunctive moves are quiet and sly, including the
“if ” clause, which adds hesitation to his status (“i who was called son / if only in
the morning”), and the perfect modal magic at the end: “illuminate i could / and
so / illuminate i did.” What strikes me h ­ ere is the inverted syntax again, where
Lucifer’s speech delays the first-­person referent, which has the effect of empha-
sizing the action as well as emphasizing the authority of the speaker—­almost like
a case of thrown voice: not “i can and w ­ ill illuminate” but “illuminate i could /
and so / illuminate i did.” Clifton dramatizes subjunctive agency in depicting
Lucifer as a figure of trembling, Lucifer as hosting a willfulness that radiates with
hesitation . . . ​not a rash or arrogant speaker, but a considered lonely studier of
his condition, determined, yes, but also wide open. In Clifton’s poetics, the call
to illuminate is work, and this work of inhabiting the pursuit of one’s fire is on-
tological (as it is with Sula). Notice, for final example, the incredible clause, “it
was / to be,” where the line break stages the pre­sen­ta­tion of two statements of
being: it was (as in something happened or is instantiated), to be (as in something
is and is becoming). This is Cliftonian excellence, and I love the breaks of line
and the fractured space left open—­those edges and suspensions that gape before
Lucifer as he inhabits the “sure” subjunctive work that he alone, “the only
lucifer”—­with that “i” separated by a chasm!—­could undertake: that brilliant
illuminating arriving he does as a vocation that no one might understand.19
This is holy poetics: “sure as i am” begets “so am i certain” begets “it was / to
be” begets “illuminate i could / and so / illuminate i did.” I love how Clifton’s
Lucifer inhabits encounter even without an interlocutor, how he remains in
studying’s lonely enterprise. This Lucifer recognizes the impossibility of rela-
tion, the ­simple fact that we are never met fully by—­never fully meet—­the
other. In this way, we are always impossible t­ oward each other, and the mean-
ing of “impossible” depends less on the prefix (“im-”) and more on the fact

118 Chapter 5
that the meeting might exist, if not now, in some other instance, some other at-
tempt. This explication might seem convoluted, but I am drawing from a par­
tic­ul­ ar way in which Clifton uses “impossible” in an untitled poem, “a w ­ oman
who loves,” that comes pages before “lucifer speaks in his own voice.” The un-
titled poem considers “a ­woman who loves / impossible men” (354) and though
the idiomatic w ­ oman ­doesn’t triumph over her misplaced loving, it is the char-
acterization of the men as “impossible”—­a vernacular idiom that repeats six
times—­that gives me pause. Clifton’s syntax elides the ste­reo­typical language
that frames black female-­male relationships, such that the men h ­ ere are not
failed or slack or worthless but are impossible, such that the w ­ oman’s short-
coming is about repeated attempts to behold relation. The term “impossible”
conspires with subjunctivity and, rather than render definitive judgment of a
person, seems more to assess the relating: it ­doesn’t exist now, ­doesn’t seem as if
it might ever exist, though it might . . . ​­there is always possibility in the impos-
sible of relation. This is surely a difficult way to live, this sustained openness to
what might seem closed, but such is the aspiration of relational inhabitance.
I say all this to contextualize Lucifer’s loneliness, his outreach to God (ah, as
an impossible man), his declaration of his being “the only lucifer” who must il-
luminate this way, this wildly, ­because he could. Lucifer’s impossibility echoes
Sula’s audacity during her illness and isolation before her eventual death. Re-
call, for example, the passage quoted in an ­earlier chapter ­after Ajax leaves
and Sula wakes from a deep sleep with an unfamiliar melody in her head. She
quickly remembers the song’s provenance a­ fter misbelieving she had created
it, and this tiny occasion yields a meditation:

She sat on the edge of the bed thinking, “­There ­aren’t any more new
songs and I have sung all the ones ­there are. I have sung them all. I have
sung all the songs t­ here are.” She lay down again on the bed and sang a
­little wandering tune made up of the words I have sung all the songs all the
songs I have sung all the songs t­ here are ­until, touched by her own lullaby,
she grew drowsy, and in the hollow of near-­sleep she tasted the acridness
of gold, left the chill of alabaster and smelled the dark, sweet stench of
loam. (Sula 137; emphasis in original)

“Audacity” might be the only word to describe this willful d ­ oing, Sula’s inven-
tiveness with a small moment such that it expands into a meditation on life—­
that ­there is nothing new; that ­every exceptional t­ hing is common; that even in
this regard, one can illuminate, can be alive. I love how much Sula’s song-­making
undermines the absence it names (impossibly), how the existential intelligence
­here is not that Sula has answered—or presumes to have answered—­one of her

Aliveness and Ethics 119

life’s central questions, but more that she has approached the question and ex-
ists in its terrifying solitude. Illumination to be sure.
And ­isn’t loneliness the indictment that Nel makes of Sula’s life—­“Lonely,
­ain’t it?” she asks in the argument where Nel wants Sula’s contrition? In this mo-
ment, Nel thinks she has uttered a damning assessment, but Sula’s reply shifts
the stakes of loneliness and also, potentially, offers a way for Nel—­for any of us—
to envision aliveness: “Yes. But my lonely is mine” (143; emphasis in original).
To claim loneliness, to inhabit it as a consequence and quality of being in
one’s experience of being: studying, then, is lonely ­because the hunger and strug­
gle of pursuing a question—of even knowing that the question is one’s question—­
cannot be shared, not fully or properly, with another. Its relationality cannot
yield, is not transactional, cannot be made to express. Indeed, the inhabiting of
the question and its imperative on one’s breathing never materializes in a way
that one can possess or commodify or pre­sent. We neither own nor command
our inquiry, though we are called to be of regard to its humming vibration. We
may know, but even in the knowing we exist with ineffability. Lucifer and Sula
are of reckoning’s ecstasy; they both recognize the eternal loneliness of study-
ing’s praxis, that the sweet revelation not only is incomplete but is beyond one’s
dominion. “­There is a loneliness that can be rocked,” Morrison tells us in the
coda of Beloved, and “then ­there is a loneliness that roams”: “No rocking can hold
it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading ­thing that makes the sound
of one’s own feet ­going seem to come from a far-­off place” (274). This wandering
loneliness—it is relational, so it travels and encounters—­this fantastic suspen-
sion, this terrifying boldening . . . ​this is studying, a synonym for Baldwin’s love
or reckoning, our holy call, the ethical invocation embedded in the question how
to be. “To study,” the director Anne Bogart tells us, “you enter into a situation
with your ­whole being, you listen and then begin to move around inside it with
your imagination. You can study e­ very situation you are in” (2). In this regard,
studying is a force of, a force within, a force ­toward—­though it is not a force
against; its relationality moves the one and moves the one in the world.
Studying is possibility, an “adventure of [one’s] own existence.”20 In advanc-
ing this claim, I am echoing the previous chapter’s case for thinking as a phenom-
enological act of the ­human, such that life is of one who thinks, and one who
thinks has and is of life. I’ll end, then, with Baldwin, who sutures being and
doing as a self ’s moral obligation to itself: “I think all theories are suspect, that
the finest princi­ples may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by
the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and
move through the world hoping that this center ­will guide one aright. I consider that I
have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and

120 Chapter 5
get my work done” (Notes of a Native Son 9; emphasis in original).21 Baldwin’s dis-
tillation of the call to write (which is the call to reckon with being) echoes the
singularity of studying as an ethical undertaking, studying that is a loneliness
that radiates within but also outward, offering to the world the widened self of
the one in study.22
Oneness returns ethics to the philosophical capacity within each of us. ­Isn’t
this what Lorde was advocating so brilliantly in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and
in “Uses of the Erotic”? Yes, this is our aliveness, a condition of relation that a
black world makes pos­si­ble, where the absence of any argument about ­human
worth sustains the imperative to engage in being of one’s worth. We could name
this the subjectivity of “regardless” in accord with Alice Walker’s language in
the third entry of her definition of womanism: “3. Loves ­music. Loves dance.
Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves
strug­gle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless” (“Womanist” xii; emphases in
the original). “Regardless,” italicized and singular, is such a fine word to describe
an orientation of the one in the world: one is in the world as it is, at the same
time that one’s astuteness to being exceeds the world. So much of my thinking
about aliveness has been inspired by the notion “being of regard” that it might
seem antithetical now to celebrate regardlessness. But I take Walker’s use to be
vernacular such that it means superlative regard for one’s instance in the world:
it is at once a dismissal of the world’s terms, as it is an acknowl­edgment of the
world’s conditions (including its terrible) that reinforce the essentiality of care.
I feel a bit self-­conscious in articulating what seems like unbridled and
naïve optimism, when what I ­really want to say is that though every­thing may
not be pos­si­ble, no h­ uman manner of being is impossible. It is an idea that is
both terrifying and exhilarating, this capaciousness that makes necessary the
work of “how to be.” I think, again, of this beautiful and complicated fact: that
one adult enslaved black person made a doll for a child who was also black
and enslaved. In truth, archaeologists and scholars have confirmed that this
must have been done many times by many enslaved ­peoples. Regardless could
describe the orientation of the doll-­making one, who instantiated a world
through their ­doing, whose ­doing was an ordinary, small force that resided in
and far, far beyond the antiblack world of slavery.
Beautiful, and complicated, hence I am reluctant to exemplify this example,
which could be used facetiously to try to underplay the horrors of slavery or
to support an argument about personal responsibility in the face of structural
vio­lence—as if anything personal can ever resolve the enduring structures of
terrible. What I can say is that I find this example compelling, that it allows
me to or­ga­nize a black world reading for a scene and happening that did not

Aliveness and Ethics 121

occur in a black world but that occurred in the profoundly antiblack world
of transatlantic slavery. Considering this example allows me to get closer to
beholding the dignity of black being as ever always ­there, just ­there. That this
happening, and its unaccountable bigness, makes me speculate anew about
ways of being—­about how the scope of conversations about being are too nar-
row for understanding this discernment, this doll-­making and doll-­giving. And
I want to be clear that ­there can be no torqueing of this fact of doll-­making to
do antiblack work. (I know that I am using this example for the case I want to
make, and therefore this injunction is prob­ably false.) Simply, bigly, an adult
person made a doll for a child, an act that reflected a world of being and that
also inspired—­made—­the world anew; an adult person made a doll for a child,
and the philosophical meaningfulness of this ­doing lives with me.23
I read Walker’s “Regardless” as a name for h ­ uman dignity that is not in-
dexed to how one behaves or comports oneself or is assessed, a dignity that is
inherent and that can inspire one’s exploration of the question, how to be. No
one can judge for you the manner of your reckoning with that dignity. It is as
it is, as one is of regard to it. Again, I turn to Lorde: “[The erotic] is an internal
sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire” (­Sister
Outsider 54; emphasis added). Notice that the erotic is constitutive and trans-
formative, evident and aspirational, an interior well-­spring that compels ac-
tion or pursuit. And Lorde names this feeling and d ­ oing as excellent, such that
“to encourage excellence is to go beyond,” an inclination that comes as a result
of “having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling” that is the erotic
(54). This sterling capacity is the ambition and inspiration of being in one’s life.
The best example I know of this ideology is when Baby Suggs, holy, calls the
­people into the Clearing in Morrison’s Beloved:

She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She
did not tell them they w ­ ere the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek
or its glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they
could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.
“­Here,” she said, “in this h
­ ere place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs;
flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they
do not love your flesh. They despise it. They ­don’t love your eyes; ­they’d
just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back.
Yonder they flay it. And O my p ­ eople they do not love your hands. T ­ hose
they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love
them. Raise they up and kiss them. Touch o­ thers with them, pat them

122 Chapter 5
 together, stroke them on your face ’cause they ­don’t love that ­either.
You got to love it, you! . . . ​This is flesh I’m talking about h
­ ere. Flesh that
needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need
support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O
my p ­ eople, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed
and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and
hold it up. . . . ​The beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes
or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw f­ ree air. More than your
life-­holding womb and your life-­giving private parts, hear me now, love
your heart. For this is the prize.” (88–89; emphases in the original)

Morrison imagines Baby Suggs engaging the subjunctivity of imagine (“the

only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine”) in an excep-
tional way: the invocation of imagine is how Baby Suggs comes to regard her-
self and her beloveds as ones in the world; and it is this regard that she recites
as a prayer. Said another way, Baby Suggs is regard, imagines regard, and then articu-
lates regard through an imperative to have regard. And in this instance, regard—or
self-­regard—­doesn’t mean “self-­concept, as in self-­esteem,” Patricia J. Williams
reminds us. Instead, such regard connotes the work of beholding, “the view of
the self which is attained when the self steps outside to regard and evaluate the
self ” (66). Self-­regard as the work aestheticized via the syllogism “If they could
not see it, they would not have it.”
Come celebrate, Baby Suggs says, come be of the becoming of the virtuous
ordinary you are.24
In making this argument about ethics, value, and the everyday, I am draw-
ing on the intellectual tradition of black womanist ethics, particularly as ar-
ticulated by the late Katie Geneva Cannon, where ­every h ­ uman being has to
earn her humanity as much as her humanity has to be taken for granted. This
notice that humanity has to be earned is a necessary caution against forswear-
ing the work we are called to do, the slow work of getting close to what one
feels and of trying to act from the integrity of such knowing on behalf of one’s
goodness. In saying this, I do not mean to infer any prescription of how one
should act, look, be. The question “how to be” is too dynamic to be relegated
to norms, too humbling to sustain judgment of another person’s inhabitance.
It is work of the one. Notice that Baby Suggs d ­ oesn’t begin with a claim to spe-
cialness or deprivation; that she makes only brief reference to an “out yonder”
that might correlate to the nation-­state, the plantation, the modern Western
proj­ect. Baby Suggs anchors her thinking in the realm of the spiritual and its
vernacular language of ­human existence.

Aliveness and Ethics 123

 Again, I am cautious of the ways that a turn to the everyday might evoke dis-
courses of personal responsibility as well as exempt an account of the structural;
I mean neither the exemption nor the alliance. (As I understand it, t­ here are at
least two levels of reckoning—­institutional and personal—­though ­these are not
always discrete from each other. And since the force of institutionality works
against the h ­ uman, institutional actors always have a responsibility beyond the
terms of relation, a responsibility to be accountable to their power and its destruc-
tive normativity—­think, for example, of a parent in a f­amily or a director of a
com­pany, never mind agents of the state.) I am making a case for ethics through
the capacity of oneness, through the philosophical possibility legible in the aes-
thetic worlds of black texts and somewhat in the tradition of what V. Denise
James calls “black feminist pragmatism.” In oneness, the question of the ethical
is phenomenological: its temporality is now (“now,” which holds subjunctivity),
the time of the body sensorially; its recourse is not to the pronoun “we” as a
­matter of po­liti­cal ideology and critique but to the “one” of relational being.25
The ethical of black aliveness remains open, ushers an invocation toward
(more) awareness, an invitation for the one to inhabit self-­regard. I know that our
social worlds prob­ably ­can’t withstand such openness, but I also don’t want to be
limited by the world we live in. I am studying with and through a tradition of phi­
los­o­phers who are creative writers, thinkers who are largely black and female and
who are working through the question of being. I turn and return to their think-
ing, this cohort of ­human beings: Clifton, Morrison, Lorde, Brooks, Finney, Bald-
win, Jordan, Shockley, Kincaid, Shepherd, Awkward-­Rich, Derricotte, Walker,
Toni Cade Bambara, she who said that the revolution must be irresistible, which I
take to mean that one could pursue the beautiful, that one should be moved since
moving is feeling is being in the work of one’s d ­ oing.26 In a black world imagi-
nary, one can embrace relation as an invitation to stay open through the won­der,
smallness, hostility that happens. Relation, which summons the one to be ever of
becoming, an ongoing habitat, “being h ­ uman as praxis.”27

“Every­thing can be done with a ­little grace,” Gwendolyn Brooks writes in Maud
Martha (66). To me, this use of “grace” connotes engagedness, such that in
every­thing, in ­every state or practice of being, one can be of attentiveness: if
one is angry, mean, being petty; if one is feeling deeply some ugliness, all of
this can be inhabited with an attentiveness to the ­thing. That attentiveness,
however par­tic­u­lar, is one’s grace, a “mea­sure” of awareness in regard to a mo-
ment of one’s being-­on-­earth.28 In this way, the question how to be is an inflec-
tion of “how am I” as an occasion to consider one’s self, to feel and be of one’s
viscerality. In this way, the world of being is open-­ended, and in that wideness,

124 Chapter 5
the question is not “how to be perceived” but “how to be.” It is an abundance,
this question, akin to the quality of the speaker in Ross Gay’s poem “Cata­log
of Unabashed Gratitude”:

Friends, ­will you bear with me ­today,

for I have awakened
from a dream in which a robin
made with its shabby wings a kind of veil
­behind which it shimmied and stomped something from the south
of Spain, its breast aflare,
looking me dead in the eye
...
it was telling me
in no uncertain terms
to bellow forth the tubas and sousaphones,
the ­whole rusty brass band of gratitude
not quite dormant in my belly—
it said so in a ­human voice,
“Bellow forth”—
and who among us could ignore such odd
and precise counsel? (82–83)

This two-­page opening is one long, continuous sentence, a flare of feeling that
swells from a dream scene where a cargo-­carrying bird traveling from Spain to
Indiana prompts the speaker awake into awareness. Notice immediately that
the enjambment in the second line emphasizes the completed state (in the
present perfect tense) of the speaker’s commencement: “for I have awakened,”
not only from a specific dream or on a specific morning but in timeless perfec-
tion. “I have awakened,” he says. In this utterance, we might conclude that the
speaker speaks to a congregant of one, capaciously, calling himself into forma-
tion, aestheticizing the call and the astuteness via the swooping rise and fall of
that long, breathless sentence, erotic and luscious as it is. (The scope and sweep
of the address—­from one to one—­recall Morrison’s Baby Suggs in the Clearing
and the salutation of Celie’s final letter in Walker’s The Color Purple.)29 In Gay’s
poetic landscape, the invocation incites a tumbling into repeated apostrophes
of grace: “thank you,” the speaker exclaims over and again, as in

and thank you for taking my ­father

a few years a­ fter his own ­father went down thank you
mercy, mercy, thank you (84)

Aliveness and Ethics 125

What I want to highlight is how ­these expressions of gratitude constitute an
aesthetic liveliness in the poem, not only the way that the words unfurl textu-
ally (the poem is eleven pages long, and its line and stanza breaks bear no dis-
cernible pattern), but also in regard to the poem’s pre­sent tense. This intensity
of pre­sent tense refers both to the verb case and to the speaker’s instantiation
of the poem as happening now. Moreover, being of gratitude, a feeling in the
broadest sense of that term, is an act of attentiveness that is consonant with
the act of writing this par­tic­u­lar poem. It is as if the speaker is experiencing the
words as they form on the page:

And thank you the tiny bee’s shadow

perusing t­ hese words as I write them.
And the way my love talks quietly
when in the hive,
so quietly, in fact, you cannot hear her
but only notice barely her lips moving
in conversation. Thank you what does not scare her
in me, but makes her reach my way. Thank you the love
she is which hurts sometimes. And the time
she misremembered elephants
in one of my poems which, oh, ­here
they come, garlanded with morning glory and wisteria
blooms, trombones all the way down the river.
Thank you the quiet
in which the river bends around the elephant’s
solemn trunk, polishing stones, floating
on its gentle back
the flock of geese flying overhead. (86–87)

This is aliveness, the way that the speaker’s immanent experience of writing
cavorts with the arrival of another experience, one that breaks open the poem
being written. Notice, for example, the signal exclamation, “oh, ­here / they
come,” which recognizes the coming of decorated poetic elephants in a place
where they w­ ere not before, elephants that are heralded by the sonic pairing of
“blooms” and “trombones.” Notice, too, how the repeated exclamation is not
appended by a preposition (“thank you for”) but is a “thank you” that is wedged
right up against its referent: “Thank you the tiny bee’s shadow,” “Thank you
what does not scare her,” “Thank you the quiet.” I love this syntax, which creates
a merged expressiveness where the speaker is not divorced from or in control

126 Chapter 5
of the ­thing being spoken of; I love to think that this syntax characterizes the
pulse of the speaker being in regard to the feeling of this sequence of compiling
gratitude, this cata­log of awareness. ­There is something of the magic of alive
being in the poem, how openness is both an arrival and a departure, how the
speaker’s verse-­traveling ensues b­ ecause of and beyond the trajectory of his
being. “Abundance” might be the only word for it.
Gay’s aesthetic of gratitude includes the terrible, since abundance consti-
tutes ­every pos­si­ble—­and impossible—­thing:

And thank you the baggie of dreadlocks I found in a drawer

while washing and folding the clothes of our murdered friend;
...
. . . ​thank you
the way before he died he held
his hands open to us; for coming back
in a waft of incense or in the shape of a boy
in another city looking
from between his ­mother’s legs (89)

In this sequence, where the image of a killed beloved morphs into the visage
of a shy boy, the speaker describes and performs conjuring; that is, the scene
materializes through its doubling, which is another instance of its abundance.
What a poem of aliveness, even more so ­because the speaker’s exclamations,
“thank you” and “mercy,” are elliptical speech where the expression omits part of
the clause (as in “I thank you,” “____ have mercy”). I love the way that this omis-
sion enhances the force of the speaker’s presence, since the one who says t­ hese
holy terms is made, via the syntax, into a one . . . ​rendered as an immanent figure
whose speaking does not require a self-­referent. Moreover, that Gay uses ­these
two phrases interchangeably reinforces our appreciation of “thank you” as a syn-
onym of gratitude, as an expression not necessarily directed to the other but as
an articulation and inhabitance of oneness. (To be able to say “thank you,” truly,
is to be of a feeling at least as much as it is a kindness to the other.)30
It is hard to discuss this poem other than through the language and insights
of affection: I love that the poem’s address orients ­toward the one speaking,
he who is subjectless, deeply intimate and local, cosmological. In “Cata­log of
Unabashed Gratitude,” the speaker is alive, tumbling through his becoming as
such is realized both in the moment of experience and in the feeling of being
filled by attentiveness to experience. “Thank you,” he says to his lover, to the
reading/listening one encompassed by the poem’s first word, “friends” (“and

Aliveness and Ethics 127

you, again you, for hanging tight, dear friend”), to a w­ hole host of p
­ eople and
­things; and in the instance of speaking so fully, he speaks of himself:

. . . ​Soon it w
­ ill be over,

which is precisely what the child in my dream said,

holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
hurtling our way like so many buffalo,
who said it’s much worse than we think,
and sooner; to whom I said
no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
this singing and shuddering is,
what this screaming and reaching and dancing
and crying is, other than loving
what ­every second goes away?
Goodbye, I mean to say.
And thank you. ­Every day. (93; emphases in original)

This gratitude, which closes the poem, aestheticizes the speaker dressed in at-
tentiveness, winding through the cata­log of all that he is and is becoming, even
and especially through the terror of extinction. Gay’s “Cata­log of Unabashed
Gratitude” articulates through a speaker who is of poetic relation, who says
thank you as an expression of the unfolding self of his encounter. Thank you
for what I am and what is pos­si­ble through my being, this largess that is of a black being
in the world.
What an achievement, this poem that animates through its speaker’s alive-
ness, a voice that exists as one trying to attend to its formation. “In my atten-
tiveness, I am becoming pos­si­ble to myself,” the speaker seems to say in Gay’s
poetic rush of grace, a studying that is lonely, and abundant.
Another example, this time Tracy K. Smith’s ironically titled “Po­liti­cal Poem”:

If ­those mowers ­were each to stop

    at the whim, say, of a greedy thought,
   and then the one off to the left

­ ere to let his arm float up, stirring

w
    the air with that wide, slow, underwater
   gesture meaning Hello! and You ­there!

aimed at the one more than a mile away

    to the right. And if he in his work ­were to pause,
   catching that call by sheer wish, and send

128 Chapter 5
 back his own slow one-­armed dance,
   meaning Yes! and ­Here! as if threaded
   to a single long nerve, before remembering

his tool and shearing another message

    into the earth, letting who can say how long
   graze past ­until another thought, or just the need to know,

might make him stop and look up again at the other,

    raising his arm as if to say something like Still?
  and Oh! and then to catch the flicker of joy

rise up along t­ hose other legs and flare

   into another bright Yes! that sways a moment
   in the darkening air, their work would carry them

into the better part of eve­ning, each mowing

    ahead and doubling back, then looking up to catch
   sight of his echo, sought and held

in that instant of common understanding,

   the God and Speed of it coming out only ­after
   both have turned back to face to the sea of Yet

and Slow. If they could, and if what glimmered

    like a fish ­were to dart back and forth across
   that wide wordless distance, the day, though gone,

would never know the ache of being done.

   If they thought to, or would, or even half-­wanted,
their work—­the humming ­human engines

pushed across the grass, and the grass, blade

   ­after blade, assenting—­would take forever.
But I love how long it would last. (54–55; emphases in original)

Every­thing vital to this poem is encapsulated in that final line, which stuns
with its first-­person self-­reference and which makes us aware of the speaker,
who, all the while, has been imagining and absorbing the tense, quiet action of the
scene. “But I love how long it would last” upends the poem’s construct of two­ness,
the dialectic between one man and another, and instead trains attention on the
relational inhabitance of the one who beholds the scene. The poem, then, is nei-
ther about the po­liti­cal signaled in its title nor about the possibility of ­these two

Aliveness and Ethics 129

men; indeed, the work that is being celebrated ­here is the speaker’s witnessing
subjunctivity.
Let’s begin with the fact that “Po­liti­cal Poem” is a verse of work, not only
­because that word is used twice; not only ­because it describes two men in do-
mestic ­labor; but especially b­ ecause it speaks to the diligence and engagedness
of being open. We could notice, for example, how rife the poem is with deliber-
ate slowness, its cascade of prepositional clauses and commas and enjambments
that encase or make up its swaying, almost overlapping rhythm. In the very be-
ginning, the fantasized thought is broken by a line break and by characterization:
“If ­those mowers w­ ere each to stop / at the whim, say, of a greedy thought, / and
then the one off to the left . . . ,” where the speaker’s interjection of “say”
enhances the spoken quality of the line and also adds to the embellishment of
“stop” and “whim”—­the interruptive “say” enacts a whimsical stop itself. Such
syntactical dynamics resonate throughout the poem, including near the end, in
the last two stanzas when the speaker comes back to the wish noted ­earlier: “If
they thought to, or would, or even half-­wanted, / their work”—­and then rather
than complete the thought, the poem wanders off for fifteen words, bracketing
again the speaker’s stylishness, the speaker who is the “humming ­human en-
gine” described in the clause. The poetics ­here are superb, as Smith’s language
reinforces deliberation and hesitancy, this half-­wanting that is preceded by two
other verbs (“thought to,” “would”). Again, this syntax enacts the poem’s con-
ceptualization of work as it also points us to a speaker whose language, notice,
and effort are so keen that they match the scene the speaker is imagining.
What fine inhabiting, this speaker, who is unafraid to acknowledge the en-
during quality of being in study. If they wanted to, the speaker says, this work
could and “would take forever.” “Work” ­here is physical for sure, but it is also
affective and psychic, of relationality; we might be inclined to think of—­and
critique—­work as a synonym of modernity and its state formations, but that
would be a superficially po­liti­cal understanding of a term that r­ eally, in this
context, constitutes an ethic of relation.31
Notice, too, that the poem’s exploration of work turns on the subjunctive—­
the poem begins with an “if ” clause, and narrates something that has not hap-
pened but that exists as a possibility in the imagination of the speaking one. This
wishfulness amplifies the speaker’s d ­ oing, for if we think about how much work
the speaker performs to conjure up exclamations and greetings, to create and
compel the subtlety of each man’s yardwork, to travel through the capacities
and hunger of each—if we behold that effort, we can no longer fixate on the two
mowing men. The marvelous ­here is the effort of the speaker’s attentiveness, which
spins into a world of abundance. And the more one appreciates the speaker’s

130 Chapter 5
endeavor, the more one realizes that the slow-­drag quality of the ­imagined
yardwork becomes a synecdoche for the speaker’s own poetic ­doing. As such,
Smith’s speaker exists not outside the scene of ­these two but as the third—­and
centering—­force of the poem, the figure of oneness in this text of reckoning that
unfolds over twelve form-­full tercets. Look again at the third and fourth stan-
zas: “catching that call by sheer wish, and send // back his own slow one-­armed
dance, / . . . ​as if threaded / to a single long nerve.” The line breaks ­here are fantastic,
creating swerve and mimicking the threading work as the lines pull back and
forth in sequence with the stanza’s wavery indentations. And the notion of a
“single long nerve,” that tendril of capacious being that seems to encase both
men and the speaker, that tendril speaks of oneness. Smith sustains the meta­
phor of relation in the eighth stanza: “each mowing / ahead and doubling back,
then looking up to catch / sight of his echo.” ­These lines seem to describe the
poem’s undulating structure, each of its stanza’s three lines indented at a dif­fer­
ent point; it also names the tussle of relation, of being flung between habitats of
one’s being. Indeed, the referent for this meta­phor is the speaker, who, engaged
in the lush inhabiting of a world, is “mowing / ahead and doubling back” in alive-
ness, becoming expansive through the tingly threshold of the poetic scene.
In this regard, the poem’s hesitant subjunctivity, all of its half-­wanting
trembling, is not a discourse of difference, but instead constitutes the breath of
black aliveness—­the push and pull and undoneness of being. I know that ­there
is nothing racially specific in Smith’s poem, but I am making this claim to resist
the way that “Po­liti­cal Poem” has invited a commonplace reading: that the
poem speaks to our current po­liti­cal climate of divisiveness. At vari­ous pub-
lic events, Smith’s interlocutors have seized on the specter of the poem’s two
(male) protagonists positioned across a proverbial fence, and have advanced
an interracial interpretation that also suits the larger arc of Smith’s collection,
Wade in the W ­ ater.32 But what if we could read the poem not as a tension be-
tween the two protagonists but on behalf of its speaker, who unveils themself
so strikingly at the end? We might take a clue h ­ ere from Smith’s admission
that the poem was originally titled “Mowers,” in ode to the Robert Frost poem
“Mowing.” As such, we might recall that Frost’s speaker grapples with what
can be learned from his “scythe” dancing over the ground, that the animating
­matter in Frost’s “Mowing” is the revelation to be had by the one in a steady act
of back-­and-­forth ­doing. Frost’s and Smith’s verses amplify the quotidian, and
Smith’s, especially, warns against felicitousness (the irony of her title). I can
understand how the symbolism of two men and a fence would garner critical
purchase, but the aesthetic moves of “Po­liti­cal Poem” seem to require attend-
ing to its speaker.33

Aliveness and Ethics 131

 Indeed, such attending is nearly mandated by the poem’s final line, that
glorious sentence, “But I love how long it would last,” a sublime statement of
­human capacity, especially for a speaker who has already done the work to con-
jure possibility. In this clause, the speaker expresses fidelity to being undone by
the small and forever of work (the conjunction “but” and the auxiliary verb
“would” both indicate forever), to staying in relation to being, no m ­ atter how
fleeting. But most of all, ­there is the verb “love” in audacious pre­sent tense, en-
during as if love is happening in the moment for which love is awaiting. This is
the line in which the speaker reveals themself as the figure who animates “Po­
liti­cal Poem.” Moreover, it is an exceptionally subjunctive revelation, since the
syntax enacts love for a moment that ­hasn’t happened, since it uses the work
of imagining to revel in feeling now for something that has yet to come. “But I
love how long it would last,” whenever—if ever—it comes, this what­ever (“it”)
that is small and s­ imple and terrifying, a call of preparedness.
Again, what fineness: in Smith’s “Po­liti­cal Poem,” the tension and reaping
of relationality belong to the one, the beautiful speaker ­doing that beautiful
beholding and imagining, the one who could say and bear the capaciousness
of “But I love how long it would last,” enduring as if love is happening in the
moment for which love is awaiting—­the speaker who arrives in the moment
for which they are awaiting.

Aesthetics makes the ethical pos­si­ble via the invocation of a textual world where
a black one can live in a relation of rightness. In this way, the idiom of a black
world inspires rather than forecloses the ethical question since the imagining
of such a world does not presume to have solved the ­human prob­lem of being.
­Here, I am making a case for an ethics of aesthetics, for an appreciation
of the capacity that resides in paying attention to form, shape, style—­all the
vibrancies of the made-­text. Aesthetics is not a surface ­matter; indeed, as phi­
los­o­pher Martha Nussbaum explains, “style itself makes its claims, expresses
its own sense of what ­matters. Literary form is not separable from philosophi-
cal content, but is, itself, a part of content—an integral part, then of the search
for and the statement of truth” (3). This commitment to art’s philosophical
vitality characterizes the advocacy of the Black Arts/Aesthetic movement,
most explic­itly in Larry Neal’s declaration that “your ethics and your aesthet-
ics are one” (“Black Arts Movement” 31). Neal’s conspiration between ethics
and aesthetics describes the condition of being an artist, where the exploration
of life’s questions happens via the imagination. In this regard, Neal seems to
reprise James Baldwin’s 1963 essay “The Artist’s Strug­gle for Integrity,” which
suggests that “the artist’s strug­gle for his integrity must be considered as a kind

132 Chapter 5
of meta­phor for the strug­gle, which is universal and daily, of all h ­ uman beings
on the face of this globe to get to become ­human beings” (50–51; emphasis added).
Compellingly, Baldwin exemplarizes this becoming as the work of poets, “(by
which I mean all artists) [who] are fi­nally the only p ­ eople who know the truth
about us” (51), poets whose ­doing he conceives as ethical engagedness.34
In my embrace of the poetic, I mean to address the black poem as a world
left wide open for encounter, our lit­er­a­ture as an apparatus of suspension. That
is, in thinking about ethics through oneness and studying, I am interested in
the black reader who is instantiated via “imagine a black world,” in what is pos­
si­ble for that reader by the invocation of such a world. I am compelled by the
work that the reader must do to behold and to be beheld by their engagement
with the page. Such commencement of work materializes in Lorde’s instruc-
tion about poetry, right ­there in the first sentence—­“the quality of light by
which we scrutinize our lives” (­Sister Outsider 36; emphasis added). ­Here, aes-
thetics is a site of relation, and we can inhabit the ethical summons of oneness
through the materiality of the text, through its very “texture of being.”35 This
conceptualization appreciates black aesthetics for its vitality as well as its colla-
tion with freedom, akin to the broad case phi­los­o­pher Paul C. Taylor makes in
Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Throughout this proj­ect, I have
embraced black lit­er­at­ ure as an apparatus of black aliveness, which is precisely
what literary theorist Barbara Christian describes in “The Race for Theory.”
Christian, in this essay published in 1987 at the height of arguments about can-
ons, exclusion, and theory, asserts unflinchingly, “My folk . . . ​have always been
a race for theory” (52). For Christian, theory does not exist distinct from the
artistic production of black (­women) writers; instead, theory constitutes and
is constituted in the creative deployment of abstraction and eroticism in black
arts. In Christian’s conceptualization, black literary criticism—­like black lit­er­a­
ture itself—is phenomenological and epistemological, an invitation to encoun-
ter being and becoming: “For me lit­er­a­ture is a way of knowing that I am not
hallucinating, that what­ever I feel/know is. It is an affirmation that sensuality is
intelligence, that sensual language is language that makes sense” (61; emphasis
in original). ­Here, the literary is a world of and for the black one, a textuality
for feeling and orienting; in this way, Christian is in conversation with Audre
Lorde’s argument in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (indeed she cites Lorde) as well as
with Hortense J. Spillers, who, in a reevaluation of black intellectualism, notes,
“It seems to me that the only question that the intellectual can actually use is: To
what extent do the ‘conditions of theoretical practice’ pass through him or her,
as the living site of a significant intervention?” (456; emphases in the original). Spill-
ers coheres intellectual d ­ oing to the body, akin to the embodied consciousness

Aliveness and Ethics 133

that Lorde argues and that I have deployed throughout this book. Moreover, in
Christian’s, Lorde’s, and Spillers’s formulation, the work of studying is a praxis
of the living one, an ethical inhabiting of how one does what one does.36
It is common wisdom in black literary studies—in black culture writ large—­
that words can effect profound change. I am interested in considering this ca-
pacity for change, not through the public, but through the one: What is the call
that the literary work makes to the black one reading it? And how is this call
ever an ethical invitation?37
As before, Lucille Clifton offers two good examples, which I want to engage
briefly; first, “the times”:

the times

it is hard to remain ­human on a day

when birds perch weeping
in the trees and the squirrel eyes
do not look away but the dog ones do
in pity.
another child has killed a child
and i catch myself relieved that they are
white and i might understand except
that i am tired of understanding.
if this
alphabet could speak its own tongue
it would be all symbol surely;
the cat would hunch across the long ­table
and that would mean time is catching up,
and the spindle fish would run to ground
and that would mean the end is coming
and the grains of dust would gather themselves
along the streets and spell out:

­these too are your ­children this too is your child (545)

Let’s consider this poem through the subjunctive invocation ignited by the
speaker’s admission, “i might understand except / that i am tired of under-
standing,” a claim that sends the poem careening on an if clause (“if this / al-
phabet could speak its own tongue”). The imaginary ­here converts the instance
of terrible happening, of exhaustion and fear, into an imperative for the ­human
one. I love how the speaker’s reluctance is textualized by their delayed arrival
as a subject in the poem’s second sentence . . . ​that it is seven lines before the

134 Chapter 5
speaker says, “i catch myself.” Yes, the speaker gets beheld by themself in this
moment where we might assume they should be oriented t­ oward the other, the
killed and killing ones in the world. This “i catch myself ” allows the speaker to
become subject and object of the happening, and thereby to recognize them-
self as an astute h­ uman who sees birds and trees and squirrels and dogs and
who, therefore, can also be of and can recognize ­human pain. Said another
way, “i catch myself,” in its repetition and circularity, performs embrace and
nudging; the reckoning with the ethical happens through the speaker’s being,
not as a displacement of that being. And the poem ends with a declaration em-
phasized via exaggerated spacing—­“this too is your child”—­that ­doesn’t resolve
the speaker’s dilemma of understanding. As if to say, the world is open for you
to be in it—you, too, are a subject of this becoming that is marked by harm and
its seeping risks, that is marked by the possibility of and need for care.
Throughout her body of work, Clifton offers invitations to black oneness.
In her poetic worlds, we are obligated to read as if the one who is speaking and
the one who is being figured, is black, often black and female. Clifton’s ­doing,
to me, is a black world aesthetic, ­these textual habitats of oneness that tingle
with possibility for studying. Again, in aliveness, one exists as the subjective
case and the objective case; ethical being arrives in the steady reconciliation
between being the subject of one’s object, being object of one’s subject. In alive-
ness, ethicality resides in your capacity to engage your relation. Such inclina-
tion ­toward oneness operates even in a poem like “blessing the boats,” where
the speaker seems to be offering a prayer to another:

blessing the boats

   (at St. Mary’s)

may the tide

that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it ­will
love your back may you
open your eyes to ­water
­water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that (405)

Aliveness and Ethics 135

I like reading “blessing the boats” in sequence with “the times” ­because of the
way each poem helps to expose the other’s philosophical trajectory: In “bless-
ing,” the speaker seems to address the reader in the catholicity of the second
person (“may the tide / . . . ​/ carry you out”) and seems to share the occasion
with the addressee (“the lip of our understanding”). And yet, it could be that
the speaker addresses themself through the second person—­that they are the
“you” speaking to themself, in whisper—­and that the pronoun “our” indicates
a generic larger community. However one explicates the site of address ­here,
“blessing” is a relational offering: I love the way its wishes for leave-­taking are
articulated in broad, straightforward language (“and may you in your inno-
cence / sail through this to that”), as if the wish could be inhabited by anyone
who has to move from a “this” to a “that.” I love, too, the subtle m­ usic of its rep-
etition, as in “face of fear” or “you in your” or the v’s and w’s of “­water / ­water
waving forever,” a cascading quality that reinforces the precision of this impre-
cise t­ hing. That mix of breadth and exactitude matches the poem’s relational-
ity, where the speaker is offering not answers but a world for the intimacy of
encounter, a text of thresholding that means possibility and doubt. Again the
subjunctive, the ethos of bearing what may come, a surrender that includes
terror, as is notable in this poem’s diction and images that gesture to the abyss:
tide, the being carried out, fear, all that ­water. But into the abyss we are called
with the tender blessing of “may” and “may” and “may” and fi­nally “may.”38
Clifton’s thinking conceptualizes blackness through a cosmological orienta-
tion located in the habitat of one’s being, a grandeur of the small.39 The pervasive
terms of racial capitalism cohere individualism, accumulation, and withholding
into a violent logic through which we often think of selfhood. But the call ­here,
in Clifton’s poetry, is about relation, relation that moves in (one’s) oneness and
moves ­toward (more) oneness. I study oneness through Clifton’s imagination,
through the way I understand her to construct relation as a dialectic of the one.
This ethical thresholding that Clifton undertakes so singularly recalls the effi-
cient explication of work that Sara Ahmed offers in Queer Phenomenology: “Even
when ­things are within reach, we still have to reach for ­those ­things for them
to be reached” (7). Such fidelity to d ­ oing, to trying, resonates with the blessed
intelligence of Clifton’s thinking, her investment in the terms of relation, which
can be described no better than in her own comments at the end of an interview:

I have this friend, and she changed her name—­when every­body was
changing their names to African names—­hers was Jeribu. And I thought
that was the most beautiful name ­because it means “one who tries.” If
ever I ­were ­going to change my name I would like to be known as Jeribu,

136 Chapter 5
 one who tried. I would like to be seen as a ­woman whose roots go back to
Africa, who tried to honor being h
­ uman. And who tried to do the best she
could, most of the time. My inclination is to try to help. (“I’d Like” 328)

That is Lucille Clifton, the phi­los­o­pher, a one who lived and knew aliveness. It is in
this regard that we could read anew the aesthetics of distance in her poem “reply”
as an ethical invitation: again, this marvelous poem that begins with terribleness:

[from a letter written to Dr. W. E. B. Dubois by Alvin Borgquest

of Clark University in Mas­sa­chu­setts and dated April 3, 1905:

“We are pursuing an investigation ­here on the subject

of crying as an expression of the emotions, and should
like very much to learn about its peculiarities among
the colored p ­ eople. We have been referred to you as a
person competent to give us information on the subject.
We desire especially to know about the following salient
aspects: 1. W
­ hether the Negro sheds tears. . . .”]

reply

he do
she do
they live
they love
they try
they tire
they flee
they fight
they bleed
they break
they moan
they mourn
they weep
they die
they do
they do
they do (337)

Aliveness and Ethics 137

Reading this poem again, over the arc of thinking about aliveness, I understand
its roll call of possibility as a subjunctive imagining. Such subjunctivity resides
both in the world made by the poem and in the ethical instruction via that
black worldness, as if to say: black one, this is how you are, this big and this small,
this is how you can be. The phrase “imagine” is unspoken ­here, but it is implied in
the breath and breadth of life showcased through the poem and in the linger-
ing echo of “they do / they do / they do.”
I could read this poem forever and find each time something e­ lse of its be-
wildering aliveness. This poem reminds me that to read via the inevitability of
black oneness is an ethical orientation: in such reading, I am thrown into the
possibility that I, too, could be a one and could figure being through aliveness.
This poem, all the poems in this book, are in our hands, are a world of invita-
tion in one’s hands.40 This is what a poem does: it orients you into openness,
into being capable of the openness that is rightly yours.
How to be: be like an artist, the one making art of one’s self, as in Maud
Martha in Gwendolyn Brooks’s novel. Study one’s self, study away from what
is quantifiable or what can be indexed by achievement, since the cosmic of
oneness moves against such mea­sure­ments. Again the instruction comes from
Patricia J. Williams: self-­regard as “that view of the self which is attained when
the self steps outside to regard and evaluate the self ” (66; emphasis added). Be
as an artist of one’s self, this pursuit that can be an ethical inhabiting.41
Be of one’s aliveness as such is manifested in and by the materiality of texts,
where the question, how to be, is pos­si­ble, is open and wondrous and terrifying
too—­where ­there is grace in bearing the rigor of the question ­every miserable
day. Black aliveness, which calls the black one to be of their abundance and
smallness; black aliveness, which says: do not think only of your deprivation,
though deprivation surely is yours; be of humility and of grandeur too . . . ​all
of this is your aliveness, all of this is an invitation to study, to study regardless
of the ­things of the world, to study ­because you are black and alive and ­human.
Be like a poem—­like the poetic inhabitance of Audre Lorde’s argument, like
the ambling of the speaker in the first-­person essay, who is random and brief
and unyielding in commitment to the pursuit of a clarity that is never singular,
never promised, always, always worth the plea­sure and strug­gle of the d ­ oing.
Lorde, in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” instructs us well: “I feel, therefore I can
be f­ree. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary
demand, the implementation of that freedom” (­Sister Outsider 38). Yes, yes, that
“revolutionary demand” for freedom is chartered in poetic inhabitance. Yes: be
like a poem, like Beulah in Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, she who is described

138 Chapter 5
this way: “Like all art / useless and beautiful, like / sailing in air” (48). Has
ever our normative language permitted black female subjectivity to be “useless
and beautiful”? Well, regardless, be like that, useless, beautiful, like a poem.
“Black p­ eople . . . ​Are poems,” said one writer; “Black ­people you are Art. You are
the poem,” followed another.42
In a black world, the black one can be like a poem.

Aliveness and Ethics 139

This page intentionally left blank
CONCLUSION

AGAIN, ALIVENESS

If this book is anything, it is a pro­cess, not an answer: not a r­ ecipe for how to
be, certainly not a chastisement to any of us, but a study, a determination to try
to think about the being of one’s being. And I have been deliberate not to call this
work black life, since I did not want to invoke personhood per se, but instead I
wanted to set the idea of aliveness in relief. We, black p ­ eople, have been studied
plenty; ­we’ll be studied more, some of it for the good, but I d ­ idn’t want to repli-
cate that ­here.1
Black Aliveness is of relation, and as such it revels in the heterogeneity of us,
the vagary of black being that cannot be cata­loged. That capaciousness reso-
nates with Édouard Glissant’s phrase “consent not to be a single being,” where
“consent,” as Fred Moten argues, “is not so much an act but a nonperformative
condition or ecological disposition” (Black and Blur xv). Moten’s phrasing tries
to acknowledge Glissant’s consent as a force or domain, an orientation in or to
the world. In this way, I read Glissantian consent as aliveness, as a manner of
being of aliveness that also means becoming that aliveness.
Our aliveness is heterogeneous.
In making an argument for aliveness through the aesthetics of texts, I want
to be clear that aliveness cannot be captured in writing—­that, at best, it can be
approximated. I would not want to betray the ineffable excellence of being. More-
over, aliveness ­doesn’t exist ­because it is public or legible; indeed, I mean aliveness
to describe a state of being that moves beyond the trou­ble of a public-­private bi-
nary as well as beyond the logics of an antiblack world. It might be better to think
of aliveness as a philosophical habitat that sustains being, propelling the one into
any pos­si­ble manner of existence; again, black aliveness resides in relation’s open
tussle of being and becoming. Ecological, Moten says, or cosmological, like Audre
Lorde’s depth of feeling that constitutes a privacy that also radiates out into the
world of one’s com­pany. A black world is not a black public—it does not exist in
response to a prob­lem; it is not a black nation intended to cohere right blackness.
It is an orientation to reading that inspires an orientation to being.
A black world is of relation, and relation unsettles rather than affirms identity—­
relation invites one into the world of becoming. Racism and antiblackness make
essential that we have to figure our being through the language of community,
but the oneness of relation is also our right. We need both; we need the world-
making of oneness too. Sigh: I am trying to be clear that neither oneness nor rela-
tion nor black worldness equates easily to the idea of community, while I am also
trying to honor that relation is intersubjective—­that it calls the one t­ oward more
and more connection. In this attempt at balance, I hope to bypass the interracial-
ity that overwhelms po­liti­cal conversations about intersubjectivity, especially in
a US context. I think again about James Baldwin, whose writing often analyzes
reckoning as a complicated interracial relationality—­Baldwin, who in “The Hal-
lelujah Chorus” proclaims, “But Amen is the price.” I love this idiom of Baldwin’s,
which comes from a narrative interlude of the 1973 concert per­for­mance with
Ray Charles, a per­for­mance chronicled beautifully and extensively by poet and
scholar Ed Pavlić in Who Can Afford to Improvise? Pavlić reads “Amen” as a term of
intersubjectivity, such that “one must say amen to life, forgo delusions of personal
safety, and accept the twists and turns of experience in attempts to remain in
touch with ­others d ­ oing the same” (167). ­Later, Pavlić assesses that for Baldwin,
who had recently returned to the United States and who was creating his part of
“Chorus” “during an era of widespread po­liti­cal vio­lence”—in that context, for
Baldwin, “to say ‘Amen’ [is] to implore p ­ eople to be pre­sent in their lives and works
in ways that go beyond the taboos and divisions” (169). (By “taboos and divisions,”

142 Conclusion
Pavlić means the bound­aries of racial difference.) ­There is no quibble with Pavlić’s
glossing ­here, not only b­ ecause of his substantial study of Baldwin’s canon and his
effort to bring renewed attention to “Chorus,” but especially b­ ecause his assess-
ment reflects Baldwin’s inclination to think about reckoning through a discourse
of national racial belonging, “to achieve our country,” as Baldwin himself phrases
it in The Fire Next Time (105).
What happens, though, if we co-­opt the notion of “Amen” from its entangle-
ment with community, black or interracial, such that being able to say “Amen” at
the end of each day is the only price the black one ever has to pay? Baldwin cer-
tainly meant the phrase as a statement of interracial salvation, but Baldwin also
often suspended his language of national reckoning to speak directly to a black
us about our being ­human. (Again, as in the previous chapter: “Our humanity is
our burden, we need not b­ attle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more
difficult—­that is, accept it” [Notes of a Native Son 23].)2 As such, I want “Amen” to
belong also to the black one, as if it ­were a line in Sula’s deathbed song, Sula alone
and of intimacy in her broad “ecological disposition” (Moten, Black and Blur xv),
Sula, whose relational ethic produces a life, a ­dying, and a death that embeds
her into a deepened connection with o­ thers around her, without sacrificing the
vitality of her self-­regard. What would it mean if each of us, each black one of us,
could live with “Amen” as our horizon, such that the ­doings of each day, how-
ever modest, would be anchored by the reflective invitation in being able to say,
“Amen” . . . ​such that this saying reflects the habitat of the ­human, the disposi-
tion of right and of humility, the beautiful case of becoming.
I can be even clearer still: in addition to the assumption of interraciality noted
­earlier, I am also sensitive to the tug of community as a guarding and authenti-
cating function, community that coheres as a po­liti­cal response to the state’s
profound antiblackness. In making a case for the world of black aliveness, I am
eclipsing community in ­favor of the idea of a commune or a commons, akin to the
way Stefano Harney and Fred Moten describe shared being in The Undercommons,
their articulation of a collective that “perseveres as if a kind of elsewhere, h ­ ere,
around, on the ground, surrounding hallucinogenic facts. Meanwhile, politics
soldiers on, claiming to defend what it has not enclosed, enclosing what it can-
not defend but only endanger” (18). This characterization envisions collectivity
through relation’s wide berth rather than through the narrow language of poli-
tics, and it helps me to affirm, again, that the call to oneness is not an abdication
of a black collectivity that enrobes us in joy and pain, as in that fantastic roll call
in Lucille Clifton’s “reply”; the call to oneness is a call of a black world, a call that
exists and vibrates beyond the scope of the rule of the world as we know it—an
imaginary that inflects how we can behold ourselves and each other.

Again, Aliveness 143

 Relation is and makes a world, and when we move in relation, we move with
trust, with regard for (our) one that manifests regard for (each) one. We can
trust the freedom of a black world, and its free-­mindedness can enliven more
and more. And more.
A good example here might be Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture, where relation—­
and its rigorously earned trust—is at stake in the narrated fable: an old w ­ oman
who lives on the edge of town is approached by some c­ hildren who seem to want
to tease her. She is blind, and they ask her to tell them ­whether the bird in their
hands is dead or alive. She refuses their question, first with no response, then with
this reply: “I ­don’t know ­whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but
what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands” (199). Morrison
tells us that this story circulates in many cultures, but “in the version I know the
­woman is the d ­ aughter of slaves, black, American” (198); she uses this provoca-
tion to or­ga­nize a lecture in two parts—­first, the speaker (Morrison herself) muses
on what the old w ­ oman’s refusing gesture and her modest comment can mean;
then the speaker asks us to imagine that, rather than attempting to trick the old
­woman, the c­ hildren wanted to be engaged, to be heard. What is striking in this
latter case is that Morrison’s speaker ­doesn’t speak for the ­children but rather
the c­ hildren speak for themselves—we get to read their indictment of the old
­woman’s silence in their furious words. This structural apparatus is vital ­because
while Morrison’s speaker uses the old w ­ oman’s few words—­and the gap produced
by their smallness—to ignite a meditation on language, vio­lence, racist and colo-
nial plunder, misogyny, and po­liti­cal hope, the speaker gives the c­ hildren the stage
for and to themselves. And they inhabit it fully, railing against what they perceive
as the old ­woman’s arrogance in declining to engage them, especially since she has
bequeathed them a ruined world. “You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is
not in our hands. Is t­ here no context for our lives?” they ask and then implore her,
“Tell us what it is to be a ­woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. . . . ​
What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your com­pany” (205, 206).
The ­whole lecture is glorious, but I am interested in the way ­things end:

It’s quiet again when the ­children finish speaking, ­until the ­woman
breaks into the silence.
Fi­nally, she says, “I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not
in your hands ­because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is,
this ­thing we have done together.” (207)

“I trust you now,” she says as she directs attention to their collective hands, to
work—­“this t­ hing we have done together.” The “­thing” is relation, the being en-

144 Conclusion
gaged with each other through the dissonance of unknowing or fear, through
the presumption of thinking that they, old ­woman and ­children, could know
the you beforehand. The gift of relation is trust, but the gift is also work—­the
effort to inhabit the capacity to meet and be met.
This exchange of trust happens in a black world; in a black world, oneness
enables trust b­ ecause relation is a praxis of precisely that: to be able to say “you”
without fear. Such an understanding of fear, trust, and collectivity informs my
consideration of ethics in the previous chapter, especially my determination
that the ethical question ­can’t be answered collectively (it ­can’t be answered
at all). But this truth should not obscure that each one in a black world can be
ethically engaged, and that collectivity, as such is pos­si­ble, comes and becomes
through the relationality of each one.
Racism and antiblackness make essential that we have to figure our being
through the terms of community but oneness is also our right, oneness that is
not antithetical to collectivity, oneness that is a term of relation. Amen, indeed.3

“Imagine a black world” is the invocation that makes it pos­si­ble to be invested

in ideas that might seem naïve or uncritical but that remain vital, ideas like
being h
­ uman. I take my cue ­here from Sylvia Wynter, whose own work charac-
terizes what David Scott names as “a demand for, a hope for, a search for, a new
universalism” (Wynter, “The Re-­enchantment of Humanism” 196). Wynter, in
conversation with Scott, affirms this framing:

Yes. One [a new universalism] whose truth-­for ­will coincide with the em-
pirical real­ity in which we find ourselves, the single integrated history we
now live. You see, the prob­lems that we confront—­that of the scandalous
inequalities between the rich and the poor countries, of global warm-
ing and the disastrous effects of climate change, of large-­scale epidemics
such as aids—­can only be solved if we can, for the first time, experience
ourselves, not only as we do now, as this or that genre of ­human, but also
as ­human. A new mode of experiencing ourselves in which e­ very mode of
being ­human, ­every form of life that has ever been ever enacted, is a part
of us. We, a part of them. (196–197; emphases in original)

Wynter compels us to imagine a possibility where one exists not as “this or that
genre of ­human, but . . . ​as ­human,” an appeal that recognizes the structural
ravages of the o­ rders of modernity. I read Wynter’s overture as a relational call
to an openness that is not precisely optimism since an optimistic orientation
presumes that better is forthcoming or is inevitable. (The reverse might be said
of pessimism too.) Relation does not assume to predict what might be and does

Again, Aliveness 145

not foreclose possibility; simply, relation invites the one to be open to being as
well as to be open to the undoing of being. Such relational thinking thrives in
Toni Morrison’s oeuvre—in the “make me, remake me” of Jazz, in Sula’s em-
brace of her oneness (Sula), in Baby Suggs’s sermon in the Clearing (Beloved),
in the Nobel lecture cited ­earlier. It is ­there, too, in Audre Lorde’s theorization
of embodied being, and in Lucille Clifton’s worldmaking verses. ­These three
writers are phi­los­o­phers of being, and each of them, in their differing registers,
embrace this bit as gospel: ­every ­human being has to earn their humanity as
much as their humanity has to be taken for granted. This d ­ oing is the very
meaning of ethics, of goodness as “the acquisition of self-­knowledge.” 4
“Imagine a black world” is a gambit to return the subjunctive to black-
ness, akin to the verb phrase in the title of Whitfield Lovell’s beautiful 2011
charcoal drawing Kin XXXIII: May I Assume What­ever Form I Want, in What­ever
Place My Spirit Wishes. ­Here, the verb “assume” and its mood (“may”) indicates
a timeless aspiration, a magic spell in the way it announces a question and also
commences an invocation of the one becoming the assumption. Like Lovell’s
prayer, I use “imagine a black world” as a thought experiment intended to
make space for one to engage black being-­in-­the-­world beyond the imperatives
of antiblackness and the restrictions of ideas about blackness. Again, poetic
being is experimental being, poetic being is being experimental.
“May I assume what­ever form I want . . .”
­Earlier in Black Aliveness, I flirted with the claim that e­ very black person
lives u­ nder the terror of antiblackness. This statement is true—­I believe it to
be true—­but I want to be cautious of its sayability, since to claim subjection as
the definitive fact of black life is to establish a threshold of authenticity, maybe
even to imply that ­there is a certain quality of subjection—­a quality of respond-
ing to subjection—­that confirms black being. To do this would be to undermine
the case I am exploring for black aliveness. To say this is to make a declaration
about us to someone beyond us—­the forever prob­lem of audience. It is undeni-
able that ­every historical ­thing, including the days of summer 2020, reminds
us that blackness, terror, and death are synonyms in the world. That sentence
needs to stand alone, and so does this next one: in the world of a black person’s
being, death is both a fact of antiblack threat and a fact of being alive (this
latter fact is the death that countenances the ­human’s ordination of living).5
In a black world imaginary, we can think of death more capably than in the
stark terms offered by an antiblack world. Glissant, in Poetics of Relation, reminds
us that “the active vio­lence in real­ity distracts us from knowing” the poetic
force of being (159), that the vio­lence of subjugation interferes with one know-
ing how and what one knows. We ­can’t ­will the violent real­ity away, nor can

146 Conclusion
we not incorporate its impact. We have to live in the world and also live in the
world of imagine.
In a black world, black ­people are ­human without qualification. In a black
world orientation, t­ here is no need to verify blackness along any mea­sure, es-
pecially since such a world is not instantiated in response to a prob­lem. A black
world is, is of “Blackness stern and blunt and beautiful, / organ-­rich Blackness
telling a terrible story” (Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks 431).
Black aliveness is. It is. And the study in this book is an attempt to realize
something about a sequence of writing that stirs (up) such aliveness of being.
Sigh: This is a book by one black person about reading (and) blackness. It is
also a love letter to myself, made as if in a black world where the capacities of
being can be taken for granted. Indeed “imagine a black world” is a love gesture
that says to the one: Be as you are. You ­will become and you ­will undo. As you are, you are
and are worthy—­inhabit that and unfurl in and into the world. In this way, the invita-
tion to imagine a black world requires enduring work. It is a call to relation that
means it is a call to suspend in the heft of its work, an invocation of ethicality
that resides in the capaciousness of one’s figuring through one’s oneness, discern-
ing ­every day how to be in the world. “I am what the world and I have never seen
before,” Audre Lorde writes of herself in The Cancer Journals (48), that ecstatic
statement of newness and determination and surprise . . . ​and rightness—­a state-
ment of the right to be becoming. Such a statement might be misread as indi-
viduality but it is not that; it is relational, black aliveness as the w ­ hole world of
being. (Again, individualism is a bankrupt idea and it is incompatible with black
life in an antiblack world; moreover, black aliveness is relational, not individual.)
We deserve the inspiration of oneness that the textual makes pos­si­ble—we
deserve that inspiration, and ­here I am pressing on the denotation of breath in
the word “inspiration.” We deserve the force of alive being and how it can enable
each of us, each day, to imagine how we want to be in the world and then to move
­toward that being. I know we have to engage the antiblack world and to host con-
versations of our being in the realities of that world; I also believe that we need
the imaginary of a black world and its gentle nudging welcome—­come, baby, sit
­here and do this piece of your work—­that we never get from the world as it is.
­Were I to start this book over now, I’d say that my claim is this: when black
literary characters say “I” or “you,” they can also mean “one”; that when black
speakers speak, they are in pursuit of the oneness that is of a h ­ uman being philo-
sophically oriented to a prob­lem that is theirs to pursue. Even when they seem
to be speaking ­toward the audience of antiblackness, their furious ­doings could
be read for what they mean to the one of black being. As such, I am making a
case for an equanimity of syntax—­I, you, one—that conscripts the black reader

Again, Aliveness 147

into a manner of reading. I am interested in the black reader who is instantiated
via “imagine a black world,” in what is pos­si­ble for that reader by the invocation
of such a world, the work the reader must do to behold and to be beheld by the
world of the work. In short, “imagine a black world” is an invitation to study that
a black text makes to a black reader. This being conceptualized by reading as if in
a black world—this is what I mean by black aliveness as a poetics of being. It is a
notion of study that resonates with bell hooks’s ­Sisters of the Yam: Black ­Women and
Self-­Recovery, a book that taught me how to read lit­er­a­ture for (my) black becom-
ing, a book that begins with a superb invocation of black world instantiation:
“­Sisters—­and you who are our friends, loved ones, and comrades—­I greet you in
love and peace” (1). Such astonishing poetics ­here.
Aliveness is a world, a pursuit, and—­most of all—an ethical habitat that ­doesn’t
traffic in debt, as in what we owe to the other. What we owe is to ourselves—­love
and generosity, the ­will and willingness to be better in our being.
Such is the exploration in this book.
I’ve chosen a very specific archive for this proj­ect—­poems and essays, mostly
written since 1970.6 And except for the foregoing reference to Lovell, I have not
engaged the visual arts. Two readers of this manuscript questioned this exclu-
sion, so I feel compelled to explain briefly: in Black Aliveness, I want to undermine
as much as pos­si­ble the repre­sen­ta­tional imperatives for black being, since the
logics of repre­sen­ta­tion so often constitute limits to how blackness is ­imagined.
Even in the case of first-­person essays and poems of relation, my investments re-
main with the quality of feeling, the materiality and dynamism of the speaker as
a textual endowment of oneness. I am interested in the abstracting capacities of
literary blackness as a harbor of aliveness. Of course, it is pos­si­ble to think with
abstraction in the visual, or even to “think like a work of art” in Stephen Michael
Best’s idiom, which means attending to sensation and experience rather than
securing argument. As critic Darby En­glish writes, “Some art—­particularly the
possibilities certain art rehearses by presenting concepts, images, actions, and
ways of being not yet expressed in instituted culture—­points to a way forward”
(xi). Here, English means that art can help us describe and contend with living
in an intensified climate of racial terror. But En­glish cautions us against any
easy understanding of the visual, since “art like this exercises its critical func-
tion at a distance from the e­ veryday and the real. At the end of the encounter, it’s
we who must return and face the day” (xi; emphasis added). I appreciate En­glish’s re-
minder of the profound gap between art’s representative capabilities and the life
invoked (as subject or as viewer) by its presence. To me, En­glish’s argument, his
investigation of what it is “to describe a life” (his book’s title) hinges on abstrac-
tion. And indeed, one of the reasons I adore Lovell’s work is that his drawings of

148 Conclusion
black ­faces privilege the capacity for abstraction without undermining the rich
singular life that might be constellated via a charcoal image on paper. I could say
the same ­thing about work by Lorna Simpson, Arthur Jafa, Carrie Mae Weems,
Kara Walker, Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, Simone Leigh, and so on.7
In thinking with the literary, I wanted to keep my terms of aliveness from arcing
­toward the fallacy of representing life itself. In Black Aliveness, I wanted to indulge
in abstraction’s generous wake, in the breadth to be had in imagining blackness as
everything and nothing, in eluding the discursive limits of representation. Such
is the abstraction mobilized in the textual examples throughout the book, and
the prodding to think visually gives me the occasion to consider the cover image,
Shinique Smith’s sweeping Prayer for Grace, where dimension is produced through
fabric pieces and ink lines. In Smith’s distinctive use of calligraphic practice, black-
ness is idiomized as something sculptural, like a new animal form with swooping
antennae and radial shell made by snatches of material. And yet I read in this image
less a form and more a map, a map of and for one’s traveling—dimension; in this
way, Prayer for Grace composes a worldliness via its small collaged pieces.
As is the occasion with Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, the invocation of
and traveling through grace belongs to blackness.8
Smith’s Prayer for Grace is an apt complement to an image that holds my heart,
Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series panel 46 (see fig. C.1). No work moves me more
than this one, this staircase or ladder or tracks for a train that signals both ascent
and descent, the possibility that movement might happen—­this approximation
of deepening, of force left open, a trail that d­ oesn’t offer direction. And that win­
dow with a moon vis­i­ble—or is it a green door with a golden knob? Astonishing.
I love how blackness h ­ ere is figured not as a legible subject but as an energy or
capacity, a poetic. Thrilling and terrifying. I love Lawrence’s gorgeous slim color
palette and modest gestures, this abstracting aliveness that invites one to engage
the threshold of paying attention, the way the image’s perspective constitutes
one as a subject in the visual scene rather than presenting the subject themself.
The black one gets to ­ride or fall or rise in the scene, not be captured by it.
Lawrence’s colorful modified cubist style revels in abstraction and therefore
complicates how we read repre­sen­ta­tionally. That is, before we get to the figure-
less panel 46, his aesthetic in the Migration sequence showcases figures that lack
extensive repre­sen­ta­tional detail. In that regard, shape and color and ­angles do
the work of approximating and importing breadth and specificity to his char-
acters. This abstracting praxis intensifies in panel 46, one of the few paintings
in the sixty-­piece series that does not include a h ­ uman figure. Moreover, though
the panel’s caption—­“Industries attempted to board their labor in quarters that
were oftentimes very unhealthy. L ­ abor camps ­were numerous”—­offers i­ mpor­tant

Again, Aliveness 149

figure C.1. ​Lawrence, Jacob (1917–2000) © ars, NY. Industries attempted to board
their l­ abor in quarters that ­were oftentimes very unhealthy. ­Labor camps w
­ ere numerous.
1940–1941. Panel 46 from The Migration Series. Tempera on gesso on composition board,
18 × 12″. Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy. © 2020 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence
Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York. Digital Image © The
Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by scala / Art Resource, NY.
­ istorical context, this context does not totalize the capacious scene of ladder
h
(or track?), door (or win­dow?), moon (or knob?). The caption is essential histori-
cally and is resonant of the narrative arc of the series, though it is not determi-
native of what we see and feel and know through apprehending panel 46.9
Panel 46 is all sky—­when I recall it, I often remember it as all sky, as being
oriented to and suspended in sky.
This piece, in its poetics, strikes me as about as Brooksian an art piece as
­there is. What I mean is that Lawrence’s abstracting aesthetic relates well to the
way in which Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about and characterized black p­ eople,
especially in the long poem In the Mecca, with its compounded subject clauses
full of unusual adjectives situated next to surprising nouns. ­Here, for example,
is how the poem pre­sents Mrs. Sallie Smith, black m ­ other and domestic worker,
as she returns home and climbs the stairs to her fourth-­floor apartment:

S. Smith is Mrs. Sallie. Mrs. Sallie

hies home to Mecca, hies to marvelous rest;
ascends the sick and influential stair.
The eye unrinsed, the mouth absurd
with the last sourings of the master’s Feast.
She plans
to set severity apart,
to unclench the heavy folly of the fist.
Infirm booms
and suns that have not spoken die ­behind this
low-­brown butterball. Our prudent partridge.
A fragmentary attar and armed coma.
A fugitive attar and a district hymn. (Blacks 407)

This language is superb: the use of “hie” to describe hasty movement, “sick and
influential” to denote a staircase, the exceptional balance of “eye unrinsed”
with “mouth absurd,” where the poetic iteration deforms the normal adjective-­
noun pattern and thereby elevates the scene of this ordinary ­woman, tired and
resilient and moving. Brooks’s diction dramatizes the s­imple fact of heavy
breath and crusty eyes, makes it unfamiliarly known. We feel the heft and love-
liness of this “prudent partridge” of a ­woman who casts a long shadow. In-
deed, the poetic characterization is enhanced by the way each of the last three
lines cleaves along a caesura, the break in a line where one phrase ends and the
following phrase begins, as if to imply balance and separation, as if each line
holds a twinned description of Mrs. Sallie: “low-­brown butterball” paired with
“our prudent partridge”; “a fragmentary attar” with “armed coma”; “a fugitive

Again, Aliveness 151

attar” with “a district hymn”—­all three prefaced by the e­ arlier tethering of “eye
unrinsed” with “mouth absurd.”10 The diction of In the Mecca is compellingly
unusual, nearly absurd in its use of specificity to abstract the specific. Take, for
example, the rapturous conclusion of “The Sermon on the Warpland”:

“My ­people, black and black, revise the River.

...

Build now your Church, my ­brothers, ­sisters. Build

never with brick or Corten nor with granite.
Build with lithe love. With love like lion-­eyes.
With love like morningrise.
With love like black, our black—
luminously indiscreet;
complete; continuous.” (Blacks 451–452)

Notice that this declaration of ­doing swirls on a series of l’s and i’s (“lithe love,”
“love like lion-­eyes”), and the impressive chiasmic repetition in the last two lines
as “luminously” adheres with “continuous” and “indiscreet” with “complete.” It is
further evidence of the way blackness is narrated in Brooks’s aesthetic, how her
mouthy syntax wriggles away from simplistic rendering even as she is very much
interested in the ­simple, how her syntax marries words to densify the expressed
­thing. Brooks’s rich, quirky language—­what scholar Gloria T. Hull describes as
“idiosyncracies [sic] of manner” (281)—­enacts abstraction and disrupts our belief
that we know, can know precisely, black p ­ eople. ­People are unknowable; we are
lucky if we get close enough to be moved by their breath and breadth, but they
are unknowable. So Brooks’s poetry, as much as it chronicles and describes black
characters, also seems to refuse a kind of knowing.11
Gwendolyn Brooks writes love songs for black life, a gift to us. I read her
syntax and its abstraction as kin to the wide-­open magic in Lawrence’s Migra-
tion panel 46, an invitation for us to imagine.
I’ll say it again: No work moves me more than this staircase or ladder or
tracks for a train that signals both ascent and descent, this approximation of
deepening, of force left open as well as the force of being left open. (Indeed,
the dynamism in panel 46 is a bookend to the calligraphic grace of Shinique
Smith’s image on the cover.) This, to me, is aliveness, the way it constitutes one
as a subject in the visual scene rather than presenting the subject themself.
­Here, in this instance in Lawrence’s world, the black one gets to ­ride or fall or
rise in the scene, not be captured by it. I am moved both by trying to imagine
Lawrence imagining and making this, as I am moved in beholding myself as the

152 Conclusion
one in the scene of the work—as the one who is reading and can be read in the
scale of this ladder, this win­dow, this moon.
Aliveness: in thinking through poetry and the poetic, I am leaning on words
to go ­there—­for words to withstand the unsayable expressivity of being. Like Fred
Moten, I want to advance poetics as a capable case for aliveness, poetics that is
elusively blurring and still pre­sent and of presence. “I feel, therefore I can be ­free,”
Audre Lorde tells us in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” this repeatable bit of wisdom: “I
feel, therefore I can be ­free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this
revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom” (­Sister Outsider 38).12

If this is prayer, then I hope Reginald Shepherd and Audre Lorde and Lucille
Clifton and James Baldwin know how much we rejoice in the example of
their study, the relation-­of-­being evident in their thinking. If this is prayer,
I hope they know this. I hope that all the ones whose work moves h ­ ere know
this. If this is prayer, I hope it lands on Toni Morrison too. I am a grateful
student of ­these thinkers, especially Clifton and Morrison and their sustained
investment in the force of one’s self-­regard. Morrison, and Clifton, she who,
in the poem “grandma, we are poets,” revises the definition of autism from its
pathologies—­“a state of mind / characterized by dreaming,” a “failure to use language
normally,” “ritualistic and repetitive / patterns of be­hav­ior / such as excessive rocking
and spinning” (374–375; emphases in original)—so as to theorize a notion of ethical
inhabitance in being of one’s self:

say rather
i ­imagined myself
in the place before
language imprisoned itself
in words
...
say rather circling and
circling my mind i am sure i ­imagined
­children without small rooms
­imagined young men black and
filled with holes ­imagined
girls ­imagined old men penned
imagine ­actual ­humans
howling their animal fear
...
say rather i withdrew

Again, Aliveness 153

 to seek within myself
some small reassurance
that tragedy while vast
is bearable (375)

I could pre­sent and gloss the ­whole beautiful poem (including how the past
tense yields to the pre­sent in the line “imagine ­actual ­humans”—oh my), but
“say rather” that Clifton’s call to a language-­of-­being and to the withdrawal
that is an ethical enactment of the w ­ ill to be alive—­“say rather” that this call is
a subjunctive declaration of aliveness.13
(If this is prayer, then pray also that it finds my grand­mother, my ­mother’s
­mother.)
For as long as I can remember, I have seen the world in and through black
­women’s understandings of blackness. In my study, to be in relation to black
femaleness is to be in relation to blackness, which is also what it means to be
in relation to black aliveness. This black femaleness is ecumenical, which in its
root means “the w ­ hole inhabited world.”14
If I could, I would have called this book “Aliveness.” If I could, I would have
dropped the qualifier; I could speak of us—of any one of black us—as being of
aliveness and it would be discursively self-­evident. I could study this same col-
lage of poets and essayists and thinkers, and the title “Aliveness” would make
perfect sense. If I could, this book would not need to exist.
­These works tell us that aliveness is personal, not individual, personal in the
way that James Baldwin means that word in his tour-­de-­force essay “Nothing
Personal”: as a term of reckoning with the condition of being on earth, alive and
therefore responsible. We have in us aliveness. We are of aliveness and indeed our
aliveness can help us navigate being and being (alive) in the world, including that
ethical question, how to be, which so often is troubled by antiblackness. Aliveness
is the repertoire of having an ethical orientation in a world that is not ethically oriented.
We are not the idea of us, not even the idea that we hold of us. We are us, mul-
tiple and varied, becoming. The heterogeneity of us. Blackness in a black world is
every­thing, which means that it gets to be freed from being any one t­ hing. We are
ordinary beauty, black p ­ eople, and beauty must be allowed to do its beautiful work.
We do not live in a black world, this is true. But the as-if of such imagining
can inspire how we might navigate the world that we indeed live in, the one
that is antiblack and that resists and resents and despises our being. We do not
live in a black world, but in a poem ­there is an orientation of such being wait-
ing for us, ­these poems in our hands as a world of invitation.15
This being is poetic and we are of its aliveness.

154 Conclusion
ACKNOWL­E DGMENTS

First t­ here are poets, by which I mean the ones mentioned ­here as well as ­those
who are uncited, that cohort of artists whose work has helped me to think
about poetics as a frame for being (this includes my eldest s­ ister, Cindy). Then
­there are black writers in general (essayists, novelists, scholars), musicians and
visual artists, dancers and actors—­could I just say thank you to the w­ hole wide
world, since it is worth mentioning too t­ hose ­people (some of them new to me)
who asked questions or nudged me along during talks, or students (gradu­ate
and undergraduate, especially ­those in Race and Love) and faculty colleagues
who held space open for thinking, strangers in everyday moments who helped
me appreciate another inflection of ­these ideas? It is hard to imagine a page
wide enough to bear acknowl­edgments. Indeed, many of the ­people who might
be acknowledged h ­ ere are noted in the endnotes, which I take seriously as a
chance to be able to name names. And still, it is not pos­si­ble to name every­one
whose interest or attention has propelled me along. I am grateful; as Ross Gay
might instruct, I ­will just say, broadly, thank you.
Thanks to colleagues at Smith College (Africana Studies, the Program for
the Study of W ­ omen and Gender) and Brown University (En­glish Depart-
ment, Africana Studies), as well as colleagues and audiences at Connecticut
College, Dartmouth University, Hamilton College, Hampshire College, Har-
vard University (especially that dazzling American Studies gradu­ate cohort),
Pomona College, Tulane University, ucla (especially Sarah Haley’s black
feminist working group), the University of Cincinnati, the University of Mas­
sa­chu­setts at Amherst, the University of Miami, the University of Michigan,
the University of Pennsylvania, and Vassar College.
Par­tic­u­lar gratitude goes to Dr. Maryemma Graham for organ­izing a Na-
tional Endowment for the Humanities summer study in black poetry (at the
University of Kansas) and to all the colleagues ­there from whom I learned
much (especially Monifa Love, Sequoia Maner, Claire Schwartz, and Derik
Smith); this book came to its aliveness ­there.
­These ­people have been my com­pany in this studying, both in their manner of
being and in the fineness of their ideas: Aliyyah Abdur-­Rahman, Jafari Sinclaire
Allen, Donn Boulanger Jr., J. Kameron Car­ter, Lyrae Van Clief-­Stefanon,
Devon Clifton (especially), Soyica Diggs Colbert, Margo N. Crawford, Madhu
Dubey, Ann duCille, Nikky Finney, Temar France, Warren Harding, Bonnie
Honig, Catherine Imbriglio, Ricardo Jaramillo, Joyce Ann Joyce, Jacques
­Khalip, Daniel Kim, Airea Dee Matthews, Dennis Miehls, Diego Millan,
Rolland Murray, Claudia Barbosa Nogueira, N’Kosi Oates, David Osepowicz,
Emily Owens, Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo, J. T. Roane, Kiran Saili, Dorin Smith, Eric
Sorenson, Hortense J. Spillers, L. H. Stallings, Mecca J. S­ ullivan, Britt Threatt,
and Andre C. Willis. As students and now as colleagues, Quinn Anex-­Ries and
Nasir Marumo have been especially dear to me; as inhabitants of “the black
alcove,” so have Kristen Maye, Cole Morgan, and John Casey. (Has t­ here ever
been a finer reader than John Casey?) At vari­ous moments, Fabrizio Ciccone,
Erin Prior, Adanne Ogbaa, and Nora Daniels worked tenderly with me on parts
of the proj­ect. Thanks, also, to Courtney Berger, whose enthusiasm was so
genuine and generous that it caught me off guard, and to the staff at the press
(especially Courtney Baker and Sandra Korn). Thanks to Melody Negron and
the folks at Westchester Publishing Services. Thanks to Benita J. Barnes and
Jennifer Randall for full-­life living; to Mike King, whose thinking and studying
and being-­with is rapture; to Matt Ashby for conversations about Audre Lorde
the phi­los­o­pher. Thank you to the com­pany of black ­women, none of whom
are academics, who came to lectures and who engaged me afterward (the
engagement was always away from the formal scene of the talk): t­ hese specific
­women, each of whom I met only once, all of whom I have been writing for and
thinking with the past ten years: thank you. Similar gratitude goes to Daphne
Lamothe for believing in the radical right for black study and for all the days of
writing side by side, so severely, so singularly.
I could say thank you forever: Thank you to Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn
Brooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Monique J. Savage; thank
you to Sula Mae Peace. Thank you to Jacob Lawrence. Thank you to my three
­sisters and my parents. I never take it for granted that anything par­tic­u­lar ­will
manifest from studying; I am just studying. For support in this orientation,
among other t­hings, thank you, dear Peter Riedel, my guy; and thank you,
forever, to Miss Esther P., my m­ other’s ­mother, my first and best teacher, poet
­human she was.

156 Acknowledgments
NOTES

Introduction
1 My use of “rightness” ­here echoes Sylvia Wynter’s argument about “wrongness
of being”; see the essay “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and
Re-­imprisoned Ourselves in an Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black
Studies t­ oward the H ­ uman Proj­ect,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-­American
Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (London:
Routledge, 2006), 107–169.
2 All my references to Clifton’s poems are from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton,
1965–2010, ed. Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser (Rochester, NY: boa Editions, 2012).
3 I could mention, too, that the long e sound resonates with the short i of “live”
­because of the sonic play of the consonants in that word, which is another way of
saying that sonic entanglement is rife throughout this poem. Gratitude to Mike
King, who used the word “waltz” in a discussion with my Smith College students
in 2015 and who engaged me in conversations about black sonic and verse practices.
Thanks also to Herman Beavers, who alerted me to Michael S. Harper’s poem
“Deathwatch,” which makes reference to the DuBois query.
4 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London:
Pluto, 2008), 82. Thanks to Heather Williams for an astute question about the
vernacular inflection of “he do / she do.”
5 See Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Per­for­mances of Race and Freedom,
1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), especially the introduc-
tion, as well as her engagement of Brechtian distanciation in “Nina Simone’s
­Triple Play,” Callaloo 34, no. 1 (2011): 176–197; in both instances, Brooks reminds us
to attend to the black performer more than to the presumptive white audience,
to listen to and for blackness. My discussion of looking ­here could be described by
the term Elin Diamond, a per­for­mance studies scholar, uses: “looking-­at-­being-­
looked-­at-­ness.” Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre
(London: Routledge, 1997), 52. For more on distance, looking, and black subjectiv-
ity, see Hortense J. Spillers’s consideration of the black specular in “Mama’s Baby,
 Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (“being for the captor” as a “distance
from a subject position” [Black 206; emphases in original]) and “ ‘All the ­Things You
Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your M ­ other’: Psychoanalysis and
Race,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–229, 376–427; bell hooks, Black Looks: Race
and Repre­sen­ta­tion (New York: Routledge, 2015); Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision:
Per­for­mance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011);
Elizabeth Alexander, “ ‘Can You Be Black and Look at This?’ Reading the Rodney
King Video(s),” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 77–94; Jasmine Nicole Cobb, Picture
Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth C­ entury (New York: New York
University Press, 2015); Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography
and the African American Freedom Strug­gle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2013); Kimberly Juanita Brown, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in
the Con­temporary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Courtney R. Baker,
Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2015); Krista Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light
in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015);
Simone Browne, Dark ­Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015); and Kalpana Seshadri-­Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian
Analy­sis of Race (New York: Routledge, 2002), which describes race as a “regime of
looking” (2). That this list reflects only part of my encounter with a subset of works
in this area suggests the potency of ­matters of blackness and looking.
6 The dynamics of address are multiplied when “reply” is read in regard to the poems
that precede and succeed it in Quilting: “memo,” which is dedicated to Fannie Lou
Hamer, where the speaker addresses Hamer directly and includes herself in the “us”;
and the aptly named “whose side are you on,” where the speaker, in the first person,
declares allegiance with a ­woman trying to get on a bus before its door closes.
7 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 2–3, emphasis added. In the longer passage, Deleuze uses
the terms “general” and “ordinary” in ways that might seem in conflict with my
thinking about the quotidian excellence in Clifton’s verse. I take my cue on Deleuz-
ean time from John Rajchman’s introduction to Deleuze’s Pure Immanence: Essays
on a Life (New York: Zone Books, 2001); Rajchman notes that for Deleuze, “We are
always quelconque—we are and remain ‘anybodies’ before we become ‘somebod-
ies’ ” (14). For more on Deleuze’s thinking, see Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); and John Protevi, Po­liti­cal Physics:
Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). I am also drawing
on Michelle M. Wright’s argument about time, phenomenon, and epiphenomenon
in Physics of Blackness: Beyond the ­Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2015). Fi­nally, in regard to my comment about the orthography
of the repetitive “they do,” see Jennifer DeVere Brody’s consideration of ellipsis as
a black sign in Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2008), chap. 2.
8 This Finney citation is from her National Book Award ac­cep­tance speech, included
at the end of Head Off and Split (Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern

158 Notes to Introduction

 University Press, 2011), n.p. My comment about utopia references Clifton’s Quilting:
Poems, 1987–1990 (Rochester, NY: boa Editions, 2000), the collection that contains
“reply” and that is inundated with iterations of subjunctivity where time and his-
tory are on the make. For more on conceptualizations of utopia, see José Esteban
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and ­There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York
University Press, 2009); and Jill Dolan, Utopia in Per­for­mance: Finding Hope at the
Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
9 I am riffing h ­ ere on Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Billy “Fundi” Abernathy’s
photographic verse collection, In Our Terribleness (Some Ele­ments and Meaning in Black
Style) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-­Merrill, 1970). I am also acknowledging that many of
Clifton’s poems are invitation poems in the tradition that Erik Gray explores in his
essay “Come Be My Love: The Song of Songs, Paradise Lost, and the Tradition of
the Invitation Poem,” pmla 128, no. 2 (2013): 370–385. This point ­will be explored
further in chapter 1.
10 I am using the phrasing h ­ ere from Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror,
Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
11 I am referring to Wynter’s essay “On How We Mistook” and to Margo Natalie
Crawford’s Black Post-­blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-­First-­Century Aes-
thetics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). The worldmaking that Wynter
advances as a feature of the intellectual proj­ect of nascent black studies complements
the case that Crawford makes for experimentation and abstraction as central to the
Black Arts movement’s intellectual commitments. As a complement to Crawford’s
work on expanding how we understand Black Arts, also see Evie Shockley, Renegade
Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: Iowa
University Press, 2011); James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary National-
ism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005);
Howard Rambsy, The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Cheryl Clarke’s conceptualization
of circles in ­After Mecca: ­Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2004); and GerShun Avilez, Radical Aesthetics and Modern
Black Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). Indeed, the era’s world-
making instinct is legible in the example of the renaming of Negro Digest as Black
World in 1971, the return to Négritude as an ideology of the black subject’s “being-­in-­
the-­world” (Jean-­Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus [Paris: Présence Africaine, 1963], 41), or the
think-­tank Institute for the Black World, founded in 1969.
The reference to Wynter is intended to signal her superlative contribution to
the power of narrative in inventing worlds; see, for example, “The Ceremony Must
Be Found: ­After Humanism,” Boundary 2 12, no. 3 (1984): 19–70. Scholarship on black
worldmaking is vast, including Paul C. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black
Aesthetics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2016), which offers a thorough consider-
ation of blackness, aesthetics, and black life-­worlds; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming
­Human: ­Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University
Press, 2020), which explores black writers’ “imaginative practices of worlding” that
refuse liberal humanism’s terms of the ­human (1); and Anthony Reed’s reading of

Notes to Introduction 159

 “textural and textual” “worldliness and wordliness”—­via Martin Heidegger and Black
Arts theorists—in Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 31. Also see studies on Afrofu-
turism and cosmopolitanism—­for example, André M. Carrington, “The Cultural
Politics of Worldmaking Practice,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal
8, no. 2 (2015): 1–13; Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The ­Future of Race in Science Fiction
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and Alex Zamalin, Black Utopia:
The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2019). For studies on aesthetics and cultural history, see works such
as Imani Perry’s reading of “I’ll make me a world” in May We Forever Stand: A History of
the Black National Anthem (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); and
Mark C. Jerng, Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popu­lar Fiction (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2018). For per­for­mance studies, see works such as Malik Gaines,
Black Per­for­mance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible (New York: New
York University Press, 2017); and Tavia Nyong’o, Afro-­fabulations: The Queer Drama
of Black Life (New York: New York University Press, 2018). For black gender stud-
ies, see, for example, Kimberly Nichele Brown, Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva:
­Women’s Subjectivity and the Decolonizing Text (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2010); and L. H. Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). For works on the black radical tradition,
see Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon,
2002); Ashon T. Crawley’s notion of dreaming and other­wise in Blackpentecostal
Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); and
Barrymore Bogues’s “radical imagination” in “And What about the ­Human? Free-
dom, ­Human Emancipation and the Radical Imagination,” Boundary 2 39, no. 3 (2012):
28–46. For work in black po­liti­cal cultures, see Richard Iton, In Search of the Black
Fantastic: Politics and Popu­lar Culture in the Post–­Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2008). This partial list explores what Greg Thomas summarizes well in
The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-­African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007): “The world put in place by colonial-
ists is not the only world that has ever been. It is not even necessarily the only world
that is. It is most as­suredly not the only world that can be” (154).
Suffice it to say, also, that the discourse of worldmaking is expansive in human-
ist theory, including Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1978); Goodman, Of Mind and Other M ­ atters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987); Jean-­Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1984); Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, The World of Perception (New
York: Routledge, 2004); Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of language and worldmak-
ing in Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus (San Bernadino: De­cades, 2019) (“The limits of my
language mean the limits of my world” [5.6, p. 123, emphasis in original]); Toril Moi’s
engagement of ordinary language theory and worldmaking in Revolution of the Ordi-
nary: Literary Studies ­after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2017), esp. chaps. 1, 2; Nicholas F. Gier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology
(London: Routledge, 2018); Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and
Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (London: Routledge, 1993); Jacques Rancière’s construc-

160 Notes to Introduction

 tion of heterotopia in “The Senses and Uses of Utopia,” in Po­liti­cal Uses of Utopia:
New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Demo­cratic Perspectives, ed. S. D. Chrostowska and
James D. Ingram (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 219–232, and “The
Aesthetic Heterotopia,” Philosophy ­Today 54 (2010): 15–25; and Charles W. Mill’s
interrogation of the worldmaking of racial ideology in The Racial Contract (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). Fi­nally, worldmaking has also been impor­
tant conceptually to thinking about aesthetics and narratology; see, for example,
Jerome Bruner, “Self-­Making and World-­Making,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 25,
no. 1 (1991): 67–78; Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); and Pheng Cheah, What Is a World?
On Postcolonial Lit­er­a­ture as World Lit­er­a­ture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2016), which includes the beautiful phrase “lit­er­at­ ure that worlds a world” (10).
12 Baraka’s verse use of emotion (anger, rage) is consistent with Sara Ahmed’s argu-
ment about emotions as worldmaking; see The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). I read this closing call, in its turn to the
cosmic, as a utopian per­for­mance, “a manifesto [as] a call to a ­doing in and for the
­future” (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia 26). For further discussion of the unusual quality
of “let” as an imperative, see Rodney Huddleston, “Clause Type and Illocutionary
Force,” in The Cambridge Grammar of the En­glish Language, by Rodney Huddleston
and Geoffrey K. Pullum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 851–945,
especially the discussion of directive and open imperatives on 934–937. I am grateful
to Neal Whitman’s blog Literal-­Minded for the reference. The imperative in Baraka’s
“Black Art” situates the invocation in all-­time, even outside time, such that ­there
is not ever a moment when one cannot imagine a black subject feeling or living
through or speaking this call. It is impor­tant that Baraka’s speaker does not orient
blackness via a past or a ­future (the line is not “Let black p ­ eople understand that
they ­were or w­ ill be”), since ­these are the common time registers for conceptualizing
black subjectivity. Instead, Baraka’s speaker speaks through the time of sensibility
and feeling, surpassing the logics of what Michelle M. Wright has called “­Middle
Passage time” so as to focus on “the phenomenology of Blackness—­that is, when and
where it is being ­imagined, defined, and performed and in what locations, both figu-
rative and literal” (Physics of Blackness 3). In this regard, Baraka’s is a time of the being
in embodiment. For more on time and phenomenology, see Sara Ahmed, Queer
Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, ­Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006); Mark Hansen, “The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life,” Critical In-
quiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 584–626; Brian Massumi, The Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK:
Polity, 2015); and Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian
Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Fi­nally, it is notable that
the poet Terrance Hayes borrows the energetic compounding language—­including
the reference to poets and warriors—of the end of “Black Art” for the first sonnet
sequence and then a l­ ater sonnet in American Sonnets for My Past and ­Future Assassin
(New York: Penguin Books, 2018); see pp. 5, 22.
13 We might consider the poem’s closing imperative through Wynter’s arguments for
upending genres of black nonbeing, her “re-­enchantment of humanism,” which, in
David Scott’s language, imagines “the emancipated ecumenical conception of the

Notes to Introduction 161

 ­ uman.” Sylvia Wynter, “The Re-­enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with
h
Sylvia Wynter,” by David Scott, Small Axe 8 (2000): 197. That is, one can read “the
ecumenical” in Baraka’s relatively open and abstract language at the end of “Black
Art,” language that contrasts with the excessively concrete diction e­ arlier and that
idiomizes a black world as a black poem. Baraka’s closing also evokes Édouard Glis-
sant’s tout-­monde, the all-­world of relation as a universe of change and exchange:
“Thus, I dream, since I am a writer, I dream of a new approach to lit­er­a­ture in this
excess that is the Tout-­Monde.” Quoted in Bernadette Cailler, “Totality and Infinity,
Alterity, and Relation: From Levinas to Glissant,” Journal of French and Francophone
Philosophy 19, no. 1 (2011): 143–144; Cailler is translating and quoting from Glissant’s
Introduction à une poetique du divers (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal,
1995), 91–92. Glissant’s thinking w ­ ill become central to the arguments in chapters 1
and 2. Also see Eric Prieto, “Edouard Glissant, Littérature-­monde, and Tout-­monde,”
Small Axe 14, no. 3 (2010): 111–120; Kara Keeling on Glissant and imagination in
Queer Times, Black F­ utures (New York: New York University Press, 2019); and Robin
Kelley’s Freedom Dreams. Fi­nally, my thinking h ­ ere acknowledges that worldmaking
is all over Baraka’s poetics, including in poems like “Black Dada Nihilismus” and
“Return of the Native,” both in The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J.
Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), 71–73, 217. I am also thinking
with Essex Hemphill’s “Heavy Breathing,” an epic poem of blackness that invokes
Négritude and that also rages through an expansive black collectivity, though this
one is queer and feminist; Hemphill’s poem is from his collection Ceremonies: Poetry
and Prose (New York: Plume, 1992).
14 Harper describes this especially well in his argument about double-­voicedness in
Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Prob­lem of African-­American Identity (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996):

­ ecause of the way the poetry uses direct address and thus invites us to conflate
B
addressee and audience, it appears that the material is meant to be heard by blacks,
and overheard by whites, who would respond fearfully to the threat of mayhem it
embodies. I think that this is appearance only, however, and it ­will be a secondary
effect of my argument to demonstrate that, while Black Arts poetry very likely
does depend for its power on the division of its audience along racial lines, it
achieves its maximum impact in a context in which it is understood as being heard
directly by whites, and overheard by blacks. (45–46; emphases in original)

Harper also uses Baraka’s epigraphic poem, “sos,” and Sonia Sanchez’s “blk/rheto-
ric” to explore the nature and limits of the call t­ oward a black collective as such is
conceptualized in the era.
15 Wynter, “Re-­enchantment of Humanism” 197. I know that Wynter ­didn’t mean this
statement exclusively, but if its idealism is to work, it has to be of a black world too.
Wynter’s use of “form of life” resonates with Giorgio Agamben’s grappling with the
same phrase, sometimes hyphenated, in Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneap-
olis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). ­There is a striking parallel between Wyn-
ter’s phrasing ­here and Baraka’s “The World ­You’re Talking About,” his introduction
to David Henderson’s collection of poems Felix of the ­Silent Forest (New York: Poets,

162 Notes to Introduction

 1967), published ­under the name LeRoi Jones: “The Black Poetry is a sensitivity to
the world total, to the American total. It is about, or is feeling(s). Even governmental
structures are made the way ­people feel they should be made. The animating intel-
ligence is a total of all existence. . . . ​Ways of making sense, of sensing. . . . ​Worlds.
Spectrums. Galaxies. What the god knows” (n.p. [first page]; emphasis in original).
­Later, Jones (Baraka) concludes that “our content is literally about a world of h ­ umans
and their paths and forms” (n.p. [first page]), which resonates, too, with his verse in
and the ambition of In Our Terribleness. I am grateful to J. Peter Moore for pointing me
to Henderson’s collection and Jones’s (Baraka’s) introduction.
16 Another way to think of the poem’s invocation is through Crawford’s notion of
“public interiority,” especially the idea of the Black Arts movement as “the call for a
black interior and the call for the black collection of blackness” (Black Post-­blackness
167; emphasis in original). Crawford’s work, like Harper’s, frames the ­matter of
audience in Black Arts lit­er­at­ ure; also see Rolland Murray, Our Living Manhood: Lit­
er­a­ture, Black Power, and Masculine Ideology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007); Robert F. Reid-­Pharr, Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black
American (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and Stephen Michael
Best, None like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2018).
17 My reference in this paragraph is to Hartman’s body of work, especially Scenes
of Subjection; Lose Your ­Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York:
Macmillan, 2008); “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14; and her
conversation with Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui
Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 183–201.
18 Though t­ here are ideological distinctions between black/Afro-­pessimism and black
optimism, I choose “black pessimism” as an encompassing term since I am not
arguing the difference. And though Fred Moten does not identify with black pessi-
mism, I am citing his ideas in this gloss precisely ­because Moten’s exploration of black
radical aesthetics and of fugitivity are often incorporated into the field. For more in
this regard, see Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-­pessimism
and Black Optimism,” Intensions 5 (2011), http://­www​.­yorku​.­ca​/­intent​/­issue5​/­articles​
/­jaredsexton​.­php; Sexton, “Afro-­pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes 29 (2016),
https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­20415​/­rhiz​/­029​.­e02; David Marriott, “Judging Fanon,” Rhizomes 29
(2016), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­20415​/­rhiz​/­029​.­e03; and Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,”
Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218. Worldmaking is pre­sent conceptually in many
works in the field, including in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons:
Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013); in Hartman’s
refiguring of the archive via fabulation (“Venus in Two Acts”); in Sharpe’s exposition
of the wake (In the Wake: On Blackness and Being [Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2016]); in Frank B. Wilderson III’s conceptualization of the hold and his claim that
­there is no assumption of h ­ uman equilibrium for the black (Red, White and Black:
Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms [Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010]); in Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s exposition of the DuBoisian color line as a
thought horizon (X—­The Prob­lem of the Negro as a Prob­lem for Thought [New York:
Fordham University Press, 2014]); and in Katherine McKittrick’s assertion that “our

Notes to Introduction 163

 historically pre­sent black geographies . . . ​are from nowhere . . . ​inventions, just as
we are” (Demonic Grounds: Black W ­ omen and the Cartographies of Strug­gle [Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006], 97). Black pessimism’s philosophical thinking
allies with the black radical tradition that conceptualizes a black world totality,
what Cedric Robinson calls “ontological totality” in Black Marxism: The Making of the
Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 171.
­There is, too, a manner of worldmaking in the way black pessimism conceptualizes
black study: all thinking is blackness, black thinking is black being (see especially
Harney and Moten, Undercommons, as well as Jared Sexton, “Ante-­Anti-­Blackness:
Afterthoughts,” Lateral 1, no. 1 [2012]: n.p.).
19 I am gleaning this summation from studying Sylvia Wynter and Frank Wilderson,
especially Afropessimism (New York: Liveright, 2020), though I imagine that Wilder-
son might disagree with my exact formulation in this summary.
20 See especially Jared Sexton, who offers a clear rejection of death in “Ante-­Anti-­
Blackness.” If we read for it, vitality is evident in Fred Moten’s “scream” and his
sustained interest in fugitivity (In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradi-
tion [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003]) as well his attention to the
“aesthetic sociology or a social poetics of nothingness” (“Blackness and Nothingness
[Mysticism in the Flesh],” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013): 742); Glissant’s
opacity (Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1997]); the theoretical astuteness of the word “social” in Orlando Patterson’s
conceptualization of social death (Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study [Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018]); Avery Gordon’s so­cio­log­i­cal haunting
(Ghostly ­Matters: Haunting and the So­cio­log­ic­ al Imagination [Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008]); Lewis R. Gordon’s revision of Sartre’s bad faith (“Yet the
slave is also si­mul­ta­neously aware of not fully being a slave; he is, a­ fter all, conscious of
the beyond” [Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1995), 16;
emphasis in original]); Fanon’s zone of nonbeing (Black Skin, White Masks); Vincent
Brown’s understanding of the dead as a social force in The Reaper’s Garden: Death
and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2008). I could note, too, Frank Wilderson’s use of the idioms “Slave” and “Savage,”
which surpass the terms of death (in Red, White and Black). My thinking is inspired
by Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
Feminist Theories of the ­Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), par-
ticularly his warning about suffering as an overriding conceit in some biopo­liti­cal
formations of blackness, as it is by Achille Mbembe (“Necropolitics,” Public Culture
15, no. 1 [2003]: 11–40; and Critique of Black Reason [Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2017]), Darieck Scott (Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the
African American Literary Imagination [New York: New York University Press, 2010]),
Joshua Chambers-­Letson (his revision of death and/as communism in ­After the Party:
A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life [New York: New York University Press, 2018]), and
Neil Roberts (Freedom as Marronage [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015]).
Surely death is endemic to the construction of the rational subject and the racialized
subject, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues in ­Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007), but the ­matter of black theory always theorizes

164 Notes to Introduction

 life. And again, I am cohering an array of thinkers ­under the rubric of black pes-
simism, though not all of them claim—or have had the chance to claim—­the label.
21 I am borrowing the notion of opacity from Glissant’s Poetics of Relation; the refer-
ence to “ontological terror” is from Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness,
Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Also, I read
Wilderson’s iteration of the Savage/Slave dyad—­explored in Red, White and Black
and in Afropessimism—in conjunction with Iyko Day’s elision of such a binary in
“Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,”
Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 102–121.
22 At stake h ­ ere is thinking about the role that a history of the black past plays in how
we conceptualize terms in black studies. Again, this is not a dispute of the total-
ity of antiblackness, which is past and now, which Sharpe conceptualizes via “the
weather [as] the totality of our environments . . . ​the total climate; and that climate is
antiblack” (In the Wake 104), a totality that leads Warren to assert that “Black freedom,
then, would constitute a form of world destruction, and this is precisely why human-
ism has failed to accomplish its romantic goals of equality, justice, and recognition”
(Ontological Terror 6; emphasis in original). Yes, and still I hear Jared Sexton’s impor­
tant query, “Must one always think blackness to think antiblackness?” (“Social Life of
Social Death”), which leads me to ask, Must one always and only think antiblackness
to think—or imagine—­blackness? This question is asked directly in Best’s None like Us,
which notes that “black studies [is] burdened by . . . ​the omnipresence of history in our
politics . . . ​[and] confronts the more difficult task of disarticulating itself . . . ​from the
historical accretions of slavery, race, and racism, or from a par­tic­u­lar commitment to
the idea that the slave past provides a ready prism for understanding and apprehend-
ing the black po­liti­cal pre­sent” (2). The disarticulation is impossible and so too is the
balance between Sexton’s question and mine. This complication of blackness and time
thrives in work by Sharon P. Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black)
Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Wright, Physics of Black-
ness (66); Nyong’o, Afro-­fabulations; Robert F. Reid-­Pharr, Archives of the Flesh: African
Amer­i­ca, Spain, and Post-­humanist Critique (New York: New York University Press, 2016);
as it does in post-­soul studies (see, for example, Nelson George, Post-­soul Nation: The
Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans
(Previously Known as Blacks and before That Negroes) (New York: Penguin, 2004); Mark
Anthony Neal, Soul Babies: Black Popu­lar Culture and the Post-­soul Aesthetic (New York:
Routledge, 2001); and Paul C. Taylor, “Post-­Black, Old Black,” African American Review
41, no. 4 [2007]: 625–640). Also, my reference to “anti/ante” riffs on Sexton’s “Ante-­
Anti-­Blackness.” Fi­nally, thanks to Daphne Lamothe for a conversation h ­ ere.
23 Thanks to Nichole Calero, a former student, for the conversation that sparked the
insight about the expectation of blackness.
24 The word “being” consorts easily with naïve constructions of freedom, individua-
tion, and even agency. In Ontological Terror, Warren asks, “What is black existence
without Being?” (14), a question that notices the ways that being/Being is already
sequestered by Enlightenment imagining. (Throughout the text, Warren uses the
term “being” with a strikethrough.) It is impor­tant, then, to be clear that I always
mean “becoming” when I say “being,” since being is not static; being unfurls and

Notes to Introduction 165

 dissolves and accretes, each happening yielding another instantiation. In this
work, my thinking on being inclines t­ oward the phenomenology of Audre Lorde
(a Lordean phenomenology—­see chapters 1 and 2) rather than t­ oward what Moten
describes as the exhausted language of ontology (in the preface to Black and Blur).
See also the case Carl Phillips makes in his essay “A Politics of Mere Being,” Poetry,
December 2016, https://­www​.­poetryfoundation​.­org​/­poetrymagazine​/­articles​/­91294​
/­a​-­politics​-­of​-­mere​-­being.
25 I am inspired ­here by the clarity of Christopher Freeburg’s assertion, in his study of
black interiority, “that the powers of ­human identification never cause ontological
ambiguity between p ­ eople—­that is, one never r­ eally confuses another person for some-
thing ­else ­under normative conditions” (Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life [Charlot-
tesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2017], 42). Wilderson’s claim echoes what Nahum
Dimitri Chandler describes as the prob­lem of exorbitance, that t­ here is no outside—no
“­free zone or quiet place”—­for black writing and thinking (X 14). My invocation of a
black world is an attempt to argue that such a zone can be read in the world of the
text, not unlike the language Harney and Moten use for the aesthetics of the under-
commons: “the sociopoetic force we wrap tightly round us” (Undercommons 19).
26 Thanks to Alexis Pauline Gumbs for the reminder about this essential line in the
Combahee statement, which helps me to signal my debt to the par­tic­u­lar ways
black ­women thinkers have engaged blackness and worldmaking. Central in
this regard is bell hooks, ­Sisters of the Yam: Black ­Women and Self-­Recovery (Boston:
South End Press, 1993), a book that holds singular meaning in my studying and
that opens, in invocation, “­Sisters—­and you who are our friends, loved ones, and
comrades” (1). T ­ hose words are like a spell, the kind of shapeshifting and embod-
ied praxis that Aimee Meredith Cox writes about in Shapeshifters: Black Girls and
the Choreography of Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) or the
worldmaking that black girls enact through the poetic in Ruth Nicole Brown’s
work (see especially “Plea­sure Verses: A Five Ele­ment Set,” American Quarterly 71,
no. 1 [2019]: 179–189; and Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood [Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 2014]). In terms of thinking about blackness and
heterogeneity, see Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: ­Toward a Queer of Color
Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); C. Riley Snorton, Black
on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2017); and Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Re­imagined: ­After Intersectionality
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). And as with all my feminist black
­doings, I learned much from and with Monique J. Savage.
27 Also see the argument that Robin D. G. Kelley makes in the opening of Yo Mama’s
Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban Amer­i­ca (Boston: Beacon, 2008), par-
ticularly his reading of John L. Gwaltney’s Drylongso: A Self-­Portrait of Black Amer­i­ca.
The phrase “calling all black p ­ eople” repeats a line from Amiri Baraka’s poem “sos”
and invokes the argument Phillip Brian Harper makes about the poem in Are We
Not Men? ­Because my commitment is to be thoughtful about gender and gender-
ing, I often use the singular third-­person pronoun “their” to refer to speakers when
a gender designation is not clear; I also use the reflexive pronoun “themself ” for

166 Notes to Introduction

 the same reason. T ­ hese choices are repeated and become clearer in thinking about
aliveness and oneness in chapter 2.
28 Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Second Sermon on the Warpland,” in Blacks (Chicago:
Third World Press, 1987), 453. I am grateful for conversation with Matt Ashby that
sharpened my thinking h ­ ere.
29 Wilderson explores the ethical limits of/within an antiblack world in Red, White and
Black (see especially “Introduction: Unspeakable Ethics”). The m ­ atter of ethics is
taken up in chapter 5.
30 Unsaid ­here is a larger conversation about citational practice as a m ­ atter of schol-
arly or disciplinary legibility. I am inspired first by Barbara Christian’s iconic essay
“The Race for Theory,” then by Phillip Brian Harper’s example in the introduction
of Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture
(New York: New York University Press, 2015), esp. 15.
31 Their names are, respectively, Christian Cooper and Skhylur Davis.
32 In thinking about catastrophe and the terms of the modern world, I am reading
with Sylvia Wynter (especially “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/
Freedom: T ­ owards the H ­ uman, ­After Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,”
CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 [2003]: 257–337; and “The Ceremony Must
Be Found”), Hortense Spillers (especially “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”), Maria
Lugones (especially “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,”
Hypatia 22, no. 1 [2007]: 186–209; and “­Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia
25, no. 4 [2010]: 742–759), Kara Keeling (Queer Times, Black ­Futures [New York: New
York University Press, 2019]), Sean Gaston (The Concept of World from Kant to Der-
rida [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013]), Jacques Khalip (Last ­Things:
Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar [New York: Fordham University Press, 2018], esp.
chap. 4), Massimo Livi Bacci (Conquest: The Destruction of the American Indios [Cam-
bridge, UK: Polity, 2008]), Jason W. Moore (Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature,
History, and the Crisis of Capitalism [Oakland: PM, 2016]), Jodi Byrd (The Transit of
Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2011]), Mark Rifkin (Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous
Self-­Determination [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017], which argues
against the logic of time and world imposed by colonial and imperial imagination),
Kathryn Yusoff (A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None [Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2019]), and Achille Mbembe (especially Critique of Black Reason).
Gratitude to Khalip for a conversation that extended my thinking h ­ ere.
33 For a good engagement with ­matters of address, see Monique Roelofs, Arts of Address:
Being Alive to Language and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

Chapter 1. Aliveness and Relation

1 I am quoting h ­ ere from Alexis De Veaux’s indispensable Warrior Poet: A Biography of
Audre Lorde (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 199.
2 I’ll come to affect theory ­later, though I want to acknowledge Teresa Brennan’s
argument about the transmission of feeling in The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca,

Notes to Chapter 1 167

 NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). Thanks to John Casey, who encouraged me to
highlight rather than embed Christian’s statement.
3 The first quotation is from p. xvi, the second is the title of chapter 1 from Jane
Bennett’s Vibrant ­Matter: A Po­liti­cal Ecol­ogy of ­Things (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010). My thinking about life and aliveness, especially the notion of force, is
inspired by phenomenology, especially Maurice Merleau-­Ponty and Michel Henry,
as ­will be specified in subsequent notes.
4 First, in addition to Bennett’s Vibrant ­Matter, my thinking on materiality is in-
debted to Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218;
Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic
Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013): 737–780; Bill Brown, A Sense of ­Things: The Object ­Matter of
American Lit­er­a­ture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Mel Y. Chen, Ani-
macies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2012); Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, “Has the Queer Ever Been H ­ uman?,”
glq 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 183–207 (indeed, the entire discussion in that “Queer Inhu-
manisms” special issue of glq); Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics,
and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Grosz,
Volatile Bodies: ­Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1994); Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Lon-
don: Routledge, 2011); Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and
Subjectivity in the Twenty-­First ­Century (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press,
2006); Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone Books,
2001); Rachel C. Lee, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian Amer­i­ca: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and
Posthuman Ecologies (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Donna V. Jones,
The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010); Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming ­Human: ­Matter
and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020); Katie
Genel, “The Question of Biopower: Foucault and Agamben,” Rethinking Marxism 18,
no. 1 (2006): 43–62; Donna J. Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in
the World of Modern Science (London: Psy­chol­ogy Press, 1989); Haraway, “A Cyborg
Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism in the Late Twentieth
­Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and W ­ omen: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 149–181; and Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008), which extends the case he made in The Essence
of Manifestation (New York: Springer, 1973). (I am grateful to Jeffrey Hanson and
Michael R. Kelly, eds., Michel Henry: The Affects of Thought [London: Continuum,
2002], for help in thinking with Henry.)
On the question of life and the state, in addition to works listed ­earlier, see also
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978); Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Simone Brown, Dark ­Matters: On the Surveillance
of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); and Alexander Weheliye,
Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the
­Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), which makes a case for think-
ing of life that exists “alongside the vio­lence, subjection, exploitation, and racializa-

168 Notes to Chapter 1

tion that define the modern h ­ uman being” (1). Though Agamben ­doesn’t specifically
take up blackness, Weheliye warns us of the limits of the notion of homo sacer as a
framework for thinking about black vitality; in this regard see also Achille Mbembe,
“Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40; and Marcelo Svirsky and Simone
Bignall, eds., Agamben and Colonialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Indeed, we could look to Agamben’s articulation of “form-­of-­life,” a hyphenated
phrase distinct from the notion of “form of life,” as an example of his appreciation of
the limits of homo sacer to characterize ­human life at all; see “Form-­of-­Life,” in Means
without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 3–12.
In this way, Weheliye’s caution (and Agamben’s) relates to my comment about black-
ness as a prob­lem to conceits of life. In this comment, I am citing W. E. B. ­DuBois’s
question in the opening of The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Terri
Hume Oliver (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), “How does it feel to be a prob­
lem?” (9), as well as invoking Orlando Patterson’s conceptualization of social death
(Slavery and Social Death [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018]); Sharon
Patricia Holland’s engagement of Patterson in Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and
(Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Achille Mbembe,
On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Ronald A. T. Judy,
“Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon
et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 53–73; and Nahum Dimitri Chandler, X—­The Prob­lem
of the Negro as a Prob­lem for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), as
well as Hartman, Moten, Sexton, and Sharpe, who are cited in the introduction.
On the question of hierarchy, value, and quantification, see Denise Ferreira
da Silva, ­Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2007); Silva, “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On ­Matter beyond the
Equation of Value,” E-­Flux 79 (2017), https://­www​.­e​-­flux​.­com​/­journal​/­79​/­94686​/­1​
-­life​-­0​-­blackness​-­or​-­on​-­matter​-­beyond​-­the​-­equation​-­of​-­value​/­; Katherine McKit-
trick, “Mathe­matics: Black Life,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 16–28; Zakiyyah
Iman Jackson, Becoming ­Human (especially the introduction); Ian Baucom, Specters
of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC:
Duke U ­ niversity Press, 2005); Lindon W. Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has
Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books,
2016); Kyla Schuller’s exploration of impression, impressibility, and racialized unim-
pressibility in The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth C ­ entury
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and Victoria Pitts-­Taylor, The Brain’s
Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Relatedly, my thinking about aliveness and worthiness is informed by disability
studies, in par­tic­u­lar, Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Dis-
ability (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer,
Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna
Kirkland, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality (New York: New York
University Press, 2010); Eli Claire, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); and Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s
field-­shaping Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and

Notes to Chapter 1 169

 Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), as well as Mel Chen’s con-
sideration of linguistic hierarchy in Animacies. Fi­nally, by “inherence” I mean simply
being inherent more than I mean to call on the Platonic philosophical notion.
5 I want to be clear that my term “aliveness” is not consistent with the fallacy of
transparency or legibility or self-­consciousness, as explored by Denise Ferreira da
Silva in ­Toward a Global Idea of Race; nor is it commensurate with “personhood, sov-
ereignty, and property” in Imani Perry’s formulation of the terms of modern ­legal
subjecthood in Vexy ­Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2018), 9–10. Also, while iterations of excess can be useful in eliding biopo­
liti­cal constructs, I am cautious of the ever-­present idea of black excessiveness;
I have learned much from the ways that scholars think with and against excess,
including in Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Per­for­mances of Race and
Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) (especially her use
of “sybaritic” to indicate that which is pleas­ur­able beyond use [205]); Darieck Scott,
Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary
Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Omise’eke Natasha
Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the M ­ iddle Passage,”
glq 14, no. 2–3 (2008): 191–216 (“corporeal effluvia” [198]); J. Kameron Car­ter and
Sarah Jane Cervenak, “Black Ether,” CR: The New Centennial Review 16, no. 2 (2016):
203–224 (as “exorbitant life force” [209]); Joshua Chambers-­Letson, ­After the Party
(New York: New York University Press, 2018) (especially his thinking about death
and “More Life”); Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibil-
ity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); and especially Saidiya Hartman’s
thinking about the archive (in “Venus in Two Acts” [Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14])
and her method in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (New York: W. W. Norton,
2019). Also see Hartman’s response essay “Intimate History, Radical Narrative,”
Black Perspectives, May 22, 2020, https://­www​.­aaihs​.­org​/­intimate​-­history​-­radical​
-­narrative​/­. For further consideration on the limits of excessiveness, see Sianne
Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Toni Mor-
rison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage
Books, 1993); Robin Bern­stein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from
Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Eric Lott, Love
and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2013); Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2017); and my discussion of the trou­ble of publicness in Kevin
Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Re­sis­tance in Black Culture (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
6 Following the case Lyndon K. Gill makes in “In the Realm of Our Lorde: Eros
and the Poet Phi­los­o­pher,” Feminist Studies 40, no. 1 (2014): 169–189, I read Lorde
as a theorist and phi­los­o­pher, particularly in the ways that she resolves Kantian
ambivalence about imagination. I think this especially about the way her argu-
ment mixes experience, the sublime, and the ideal (via imagination). For more
on that ambivalence and its ideological implications, see Jane Kneller, Kant and
the Power of Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Sarah
Jane Cervenak, Wandering: Philosophical Per­for­mances of Racial and Sexual Freedom

170 Notes to Chapter 1

 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) (especially her notion of philosophical
kinesis); Charles W. Mills, Blackness Vis­i­ble: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1998); Ronald Judy, “Kant and the Negro,” Surfaces 1 (1991),
https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­7202​/­1065256ar; and Silva, ­Toward a Global Idea of Race (her explora-
tion of knowledge and the discursive meanings of experience and difference). Also
see Paul C. Taylor’s reading of Lorde via aesthetic philosophy in Black Is Beautiful: A
Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2016). I am grateful to
Matt Ashby for conversations about the nature of knowing in Lorde’s work.
7 My thinking about m ­ atter and the body is informed by phenomenology, material-
ism, affect theory, and especially Judith Butler’s explication of the iterative term
“­matter” in Bodies That ­Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge,
1993). In that regard, I read Lorde’s theorization h ­ ere to be about ­matter in at least
three ways: about being of form (­matter), about coming into form (­matter), about
being of consequence (­matter). In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name—­a Biomythography
(Berkeley: Crossing, 1982) and in The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute
Books, 1980), Lorde engages the body more literally than in “Poetry” and “Uses,”
though throughout all four works, the body serves as a meta­phor of phenomeno-
logical assemblage, similar to the case that Elizabeth Grosz makes for embodi-
ment of consciousness in Volatile Bodies: “[Maurice] Merleau-­Ponty begins with
the negative claim that the body is not an object. It is the condition and context
through which I am able to have a relation to objects. It is both immanent and
transcendent. Insofar as I live the body, it is a phenomenon experienced by me
and thus provides the very horizon and perspectival point that places me in the
world and makes relation between me, other objects and other subjects pos­si­ble.
It is the body as I live it, as I experience it” (86). This is in keeping with the aims
of new materialism (see, for example, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s claims in
the introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole
and Samantha Frost [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010], that “materiality
is always something more than ‘mere’ m ­ atter” [9]). For more on this, see Grosz’s
argument about the material and the ideal in Incorporeal; Judith Butler, “Performa-
tive Acts and Gender Constitution,” Theatre Journal 20, no. 4 (1988): 519–531; Gayle
Salamon’s superb glossing of psychoanalysis and phenomenology in Assuming a
Body: Transgender and Rhe­torics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press,
2010); Amber Jamilla Musser’s thinking about Lorde and materiality in Sensational
Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York: New York University Press, 2014);
Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of erotohistoriography in Time Binds: Queer Temporali-
ties, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Ann Cvetkovich’s
thinking about the relational embodiment of affect in An Archive of Feelings: Trauma,
Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003);
Charles Johnson, “A Phenomenology of the Black Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review
32, no. 4 (1993): 599–614, which cites embodied consciousness in reading Fanon;
Brittney C. Cooper’s explication of “embodied discourse” (3) in Beyond Respectability:
The Intellectual Thought of Race ­Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017);
Robin D. G. Kelley’s consideration of poetic knowledges in Freedom Dreams: The
Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002); and Elizabeth Alexander’s reading

Notes to Chapter 1 171

 of Lorde’s engagement with the body in “ ‘Coming Out Blackened and Whole’:
Fragmentation and Reintegration in Audre Lorde’s Zami and The Cancer Journals,”
American Literary History 6, no. 4 (1994): 695–715. Lorde’s is a black feminism of feel-
ing; see Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
8 See Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”
in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–229; and Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must
Be Found: ­After Humanism,” Boundary 2 12, no. 3 (1984): 19–70; as well as Katherine
McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being ­Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2015). Thanks to Quinn Anex-­Ries for reminding me that this claim
about the body is akin to Fanon’s phenomenological encounter in Black Skins, White
Mask, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 2008).
9 In the essay “In the Realm,” Gill makes a compelling case that “we must read Lorde
for the audience gathered and not presume that she would reject the proposition
that eros as a princi­ple be allowed to retain the widest pos­si­ble applicability—­
without losing its necessary attention to the ground of lived experience (of ­women,
men, trans ­people, heterosexuals, queers, and p ­ eople of color, ­etc.)” (185). And in
attending to the specificity of Lorde’s language in this moment, I have opted to put
the word “black” in parentheses so as to acknowledge the explicit general reference
she makes to femaleness. Appreciating Lorde’s interest in the theoretical capacious-
ness of embodiment is impor­tant to reading her use of “black ­mothers” in “Poetry”:
“The white f­ athers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black m ­ others in each
of us—­the poet—­whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be ­free” (38). On one
hand, Lorde’s use of “black ­mothers” invokes the specific identity of the essay’s
speaker; on the other hand, the iteration is idiomatic and conceptual à la the deploy-
ment of black motherhood in Spillers (“Mama’s Baby”), Saidiya Hartman (Lose Your
­Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route [New York: Macmillan, 2008]), and Jen-
nifer L. Morgan (Laboring ­Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery [Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004]). The challenge in thinking with
Lorde is to navigate between the specificity of embodiment and the universality of
her philosophical interest in questions of the h ­ uman. For more on this declaration
in “Poetry,” see Lorde’s conversation with Adrienne Rich, also in ­Sister Outsider
(101–102) and Margaret Kissam Morris, “Textual Authority and the Embodied Self,”
Frontiers 23, no. 1 (2002): esp. 177–183. And in addition to Gill’s essay, my studying
of Lorde’s conceptualization of the erotic, feeling, and being has learned from
Sharon Patricia Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2012); Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Textual Healing: Claiming Black ­Women’s
Bodies, the Erotic and Re­sis­tance in Con­temporary Novels of Slavery,” Callaloo 19,
no. 2 (1996): 519–536; Sharon Marcus, “The State’s Oversight: From Sexual Bodies
to Erotic Selves,” Social Research 78, no. 2 (2011): 509–532; Jafari S. Allen, ¡Venceremos?
The Erotics of Black Self-­Making in Cuba (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011);
Kristie Dotson, “How Is This Paper Philosophy?,” Comparative Philosophy 3, no. 1
(2012): 3–29; Amber Musser, Sensational Flesh; Keguro Macharia, Frottage: Frictions
of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2019),

172 Notes to Chapter 1

 esp. 55–57; and Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-­African Embodi-
ment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).
10 Notions of immanence and transcendence are relevant to Lorde’s conceptualiza-
tion of the erotic in “Uses of the Erotic”: “The erotic is a mea­sure between the
beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an
internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we
can aspire,” and then, “To encourage excellence is to go beyond . . .” (­Sister Outsider
54). Moreover, Lorde’s merger of the ideal and the material is noted in “Poetry Is
Not a Luxury”: “At this point in time, I believe that ­women carry within ourselves
the possibility for fusion of t­ hese two approaches so necessary for survival, and we
come closest to this combination in our poetry” (­Sister Outsider 37). (The two ap-
proaches she means are the ideas of the “eu­ro­pean f­ athers [sic]” and the feelings of
“ancient non-­european consciousness.”)
Though I say more about immanence and transcendence in the next chapter,
I want to acknowledge ­here that the conceptualization of aliveness and relation
(and, ­later, of oneness) harmonizes with some of the thinking in transcendentalism
and Romanticism. That is, even as t­ hese two aesthetic traditions ­don’t center black
female subjects (nor, importantly, indigenous subjects), one can use their ideas to
frame the ecstatic conceptualization of being, of what it means to be alive and to
be of experience—­a reclamation of h ­ uman value against cap­i­tal­ist encroachment:
“The ethics of Romanticism is impelled by a w ­ ill to value in the face of a prevail-
ing reduction of value,” Laurence S. Lockridge tells us in The Ethics of Romanticism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 43. Some citations ­here include
Paul Outka, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Re­nais­sance (Lon-
don: Palgrave, 2008); Peter Wirzbicki, “Black Transcendentalism: William Cooper
Nell, the Adelphic Union, and the Black Abolitionist Intellectual Tradition,” Jour-
nal of the Civil War Era 8, no. 2 (2018): 269–290; Charles Capper, “ ‘A L ­ ittle Beyond’:
The Prob­lem of the Transcendentalist Movement in American History,” Journal of
American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 502–539; Christoph Bode, “Discursive Construc-
tions of the Self in British Romanticism,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net
51 (2008), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­7202​/­019264ar; George Boas, “The Romantic Self: An
Historical Sketch,” Studies in Romanticism 4, no. 1 (1964): 1–16; and Jacques Khalip,
Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009), as well as recent efforts to reconsider Romanticism through think-
ing about racial blackness, including Joel Pace, “Afterthoughts: Romanticism, the
Black Atlantic, and Self-­Mapping,” Studies in Romanticism 56, no. 1 (2017): 113–123;
Paul Youngquist, “Black Romanticism: A Manifesto,” Studies in Romanticism 56, no. 1
(2017): 3–14; and Youngquist and Frances Botkin, “Introduction: Black Romanti-
cism: Romantic Circulations,” in Circulations: Romanticism and the Black Atlantic, ed.
Paul Youngquist and Frances Botkin, Romantic Circles PRAXIS (October 2011),
https://­romantic​-­circles​.­org​/­praxis​/­circulations​/­HTML​/­praxis​.­2011​.­youngquist​
.­html. Fi­nally, as I w
­ ill note ­later, I think of Lorde’s philosophy in concert with
American pragmatism, especially as described in V. Denise James, “Theorizing
Black Feminist Pragmatism: Forethoughts on the Practice and Purpose of Phi-
losophy as Envisioned by Black Feminists and John Dewey,” Journal of Speculative

Notes to Chapter 1 173

 Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2009): 92–99. Also see Kristie Dotson, “ ‘Thinking Familiar
with the Interstitial’: An Introduction,” Hypatia 29, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 1–17; and
Devonya N. Havis, “ ‘Now, How You Sound’: Considering a Dif­fer­ent Philosophical
Praxis,” Hypatia 29, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 237–252.
11 In using ars vitalia, I am riffing on Michel Foucault’s distinction between ars erotica
and scientia sexualis in The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
12 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 19.
13 My thinking through aliveness has been inspired by a cohort of black female char-
acters: Walker’s Celie as well as Sula (Toni Morrison, Sula), Maud Martha (Gwendo-
lyn Brooks, Maud Martha), Clare (Nella Larsen, Passing), Beulah (Rita Dove, Thomas
and Beulah), Janie (Hurston, Their Eyes), and the unnamed narrator of Morrison’s
Jazz. This theorizing is in keeping with Barbara Christian’s enduring and endur-
ingly clear authorization in “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique, no. 6 (1987):
51–63, her declaration that the “variety, multiplicity, eroticism” of black w
­ omen’s
writing characterizes a philosophy of dynamic black being (59). And in thinking
about Celie’s phrasing, I am reminded of Milkman’s offering of himself to Guitar
at the end of Morrison’s Song of Solomon (New York: Vintage Books, 2004)—­“­Here I
am,” he says—­and of Claudia Rankine’s glossing of the word “­here” in ­Don’t Let Me
Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2004), 130–131. Thanks to Mike
King for reminding me of Rankine’s ­doing. Fi­nally, the notion of possessiveness is
taken up further in chapter 3.
14 Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet 21.
15 Throughout this chapter, my thinking has been inflected by phenomenology and
affect theory; this inflection is sustained in the forthcoming chapters, though I want
to acknowledge Michel Henry’s explication of the interior of a phenomenological
life in Material Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008) and this
passage from Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2002), which resonates in kind with Lorde’s thinking through embodiment:

Even when involved in situations with other p ­ eople, the subject, in so far as he has
a body, retains e­ very moment the power to withdraw from it. At the very moment
when I live in the world, when I am given over to my plans, my occupations, my
friends, my memories, I can close my eyes, lie down, listen to the blood pulsating in
my ears, lose myself in some plea­sure or pain, and shut myself up in this anony-
mous life which subtends my personal one. But precisely ­because my body can shut
itself off from the world, it is also what opens me out upon the world and places
me in a situation ­there. The momentum of existence t­ owards ­others, t­ owards the
­future, ­towards the world can be restored as a river unfreezes. . . . ​Even if I become
absorbed in the experience of my body and in the solitude of sensations, I do not
succeed in abolishing all reference of my life to a world. (191)

I have been influenced by Lewis R. Gordon (Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism [Am-
herst, NY: Humanity Books, 1995] and Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana
Existential Thought [New York: Routledge, 2000]) and Paget Henry (“Africana
Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications,” CLR James Journal 11, no. 1 [2005]:
79–112) in studying phenomenology, though my interest is not in black subjection

174 Notes to Chapter 1

 as a phenomenological condition but in phenomenology as a condition of the black
world. In addition to Brian Massumi (The Politics of Affect [Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2015]), Sara Ahmed (Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, ­Others [Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006]), and other work cited ­earlier, also see M. Jacqui
Alexander’s thinking about feelings, embodiment, and the sacred in Pedagogies of
Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2006), esp. chap. 7; and more recently, Aliyyah Abdur-­
Rahman, “The Black Ecstatic,” glq 24, no. 2–3 (2018): 343–365.
16 Walter Arnold Kaufmann translates the binary as I-­You so as to reflect the inflec-
tion of mutuality in En­glish pronouns. Except in one case noted shortly, I use
Kaufman’s translation ­here; see Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Arnold
Kaufmann (New York: Touchstone, 1996). Thanks to Sarah Bellows-­Meister for
conversations about Buber—­and for the gift of a Kaufman edition.
17 In the second quotation h ­ ere, I am citing from Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans.
Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).
18 I read Buber’s I and Thou with Buber, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between
Religion and Philosophy (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), as well as
with Maurice S. Freidman, Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (New York: Routledge,
2002). My study also gains from Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the other, espe-
cially Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1969); Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love (New York: New Press, 2012); Jacques
Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Derrida,
The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008);
Jean-­Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2000); and Luce Irigaray, To Be Two (London: Psy­chol­ogy Press, 2001). On relation
and intersubjectivity, see also M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing; Deborah
Achtenberg, Essential Vulnerabilities: Plato and Levinas on Relations to the Other (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014); Robert R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics
of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Stephen Hudson,
“Intersubjectivity of Mutual Recognition and the I-­Thou: A Comparative Analy­sis
of Hegel and Buber,” Minerva—­An Internet Journal of Philosophy 14 (2010), http://­www​
.­minerva​.­mic​.­ul​.­ie​/­Vol14​/­Intersubjectivity​.­pdf; TreaAndrea Russworm, Blackness Is
Burning: Civil Rights, Popu­lar Culture, and the Prob­lem of Recognition (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2016); Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness”; Judith Butler,
Notes t­ oward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2018); and Peter Sas, “A Relation to End All Relations: On Badiou’s
Scandalous Closeness to Levinas and Buber,” Critique of Pure Interest (blog), May 7,
2012, http://­critique​-­of​-­pure​-­interest​.­blogspot​.­com​/­2012​/­05​/­relation​-­to​-­end​-­all​
-­relations​-­on​_­6111​.­html. I should say, too, that I use Buber’s relationality—­rather
than Levinas’s—­because Buber imagines relation as pos­si­ble in regard to the liter-
ary (a book, for example); this capacity ­will become impor­tant to thinking about
the ethical via aesthetics l­ ater on. For extended consideration of this difference
between Levinas and Buber, see Jill Robbins, “Aesthetic Totality and Ethical Infin-
ity: Levinas on Art,” L’Esprit Créateur 35, no. 3 (1995): 66–79; and Akos Krassoy, “The
Transcendence of Words,” Levinas Studies 10, no. 1 (2016): 1–42, as well as Achtenberg,

Notes to Chapter 1 175

 Essential Vulnerabilities; Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition; and Hudson, “Inter-
subjectivity of Mutual Recognition.”
19 Goldman is quoting Michel Foucault and is keen to focus on improvisation as a
way of navigating “tight” or restricted social spaces: “To ignore the constraints that
improvisers inevitably encounter is not only to deny the real conditions that shape
daily life; it is also to deny improvisation’s most significant power as a full-­bodied
critical engagement with the world, characterized by both flexibility and perpetual
readiness. . . . ​Improvised dance involves literally giving shape to oneself by deciding
how to move in relation to an unsteady landscape” (5). I am grateful to J. Kameron
Car­ter, who recommended Goldman’s book, and inspired also by reading Daphne
Lamothe’s work in pro­gress on black thresholds.
20 I want to note Glissant’s inattention to gender difference in Poetics of Relation (and
in Ca­rib­bean Discourse: Selected Essays [Charlottesville: University of V­ irginia Press,
1991] and Poetic Intention, trans. Nathanaël with Anna Malena [Callicoon, NY:
Nightboat Books, 2010]), even as his thinking about relation, abyss, and poetics
relies on idioms (the womb, pregnancy, fluidity) that seem informed by conceptual
femaleness. In this par­tic­u­lar elision, Glissant’s ­doing runs against the case I am
making for aliveness that centers black feminist/women’s thinking in pursuing a
notion of black being. For more on Glissant and gender difference, see Max Hantel,
“­Toward a Sexual Difference Theory of Creolization,” Journal of French and Franco-
phone Philosophy 22, no. 1 (2014): 1–18; and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar:
Eroticism between ­Women in Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010). Also, I am grateful to S. A. Smythe who suggested that the resonance
between Glissant’s and Lorde’s mobilization of the poetic might be informed by
their shared Ca­rib­bean subjectivities.
21 I read Glissant’s Poetics of Relation in conjunction with Glissant, Poetic Intention,
and his conversation with Manthia Diawara, “One World in Relation,” Nka: Journal
of Con­temporary African Art 28 (2011): 4–19, as well as J. Michael Dash’s critical
biography Edouard Glissant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John E.
Drabinski and Marisa Parham, Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2015); Ronaldo Walcott, Queer Returns: Essays on Multicul-
turalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies (London, ON: Insomniac, 2016); Kara Keeling
on Glissant and imagination in Queer Times, Black ­Futures (New York: New York
University Press, 2019); and Bernadette Cailler’s indispensable “Totality and Infinity,
Alterity, and Relation,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19, no. 1 (2011):
135–151. Traveling h ­ ere, too, is the thinking about black life in two essays by J. Kam-
eron Car­ter: “The Inglorious: With and Beyond Giorgio Agamben,” Po­liti­cal Theol-
ogy 14, no. 1 (2013): 77–87; and “Paratheological Blackness,” South Atlantic Quarterly
112, no. 4 (2013): 589–612. I should note the distinction between Levinas’s notion
of totality and Glissant’s; indeed, Levinas’s infinity is more akin to what Glissant
means by totality. For more on this, see Silvia Benso, “Joy beyond Boredom: Totality
and Infinity as a Work of Won­der,” and John E. Drabinksi, “­Future Interval: On
Levinas and Glissant,” in Totality and Infinity at 50 ed. Scott Davidson and Diane Per-
pich (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2011), 11–28, 227–252; Williams, Hegel’s
Ethics of Recognition; and Fred Moten’s critique of totality (In the Break: The Aesthetics

176 Notes to Chapter 1

 of the Black Radical Tradition [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003] and
“The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 [2008]: 177–218), though Moten means
“totality” as a synonym for Enlightenment transparency. As long as I am making
distinctions, it is worth saying that Glissant’s totality complements Cedric Robin-
son’s notion of “ontological totality” in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical
Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 171. And b­ ecause
assemblage is so relevant to Glissant’s thinking, see also Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo­phre­nia (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1987); Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in
Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Weheliye, Habeas Viscus;
Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity
(London: Bloomsbury, 2006); and Erin Manning, Always More Than One: Individua-
tion’s Dance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
22 The invitation poem is a form that I find throughout Clifton’s oeuvre, including
the iconic “­brothers,” which w ­ ill be discussed l­ater. See Erik Gray’s exploration of the
form in En­glish literary tradition in “Come Be My Love: The Song of Songs, Paradise
Lost, and the Tradition of the Invitation Poem,” PMLA 128, no. 2 (2013): 370–385.
Also, in regard to the m ­ atter of address ­here, see Monique Roelofs’s claim that “ad-
dress orchestrates relational life” (8) in Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and the
World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
23 We might note the prevalence of hands, as an idiom of relation, in Clifton’s poem
“wild blessings” (369).
24 In calling this poem “a poem of relation,” I am highlighting something par­tic­u­lar
about the way the text engages voice through its speaking persona. “Voice” is a
historically and theoretically complicated idiom in black literary studies; see, for
example, Meta DuEwa Jones, The ­Music Is M ­ usic: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Re­nais­
sance to Spoken Word (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), esp. the introduc-
tion and chaps. 1 and 2; Stephen Michael Best’s caution about “the cult of voice”
in None like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2018), 132; Evie Shockley’s provocation “voice held me hostage,” which titles
pt. 1 of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Po-
etry (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2011); and Howard Ramsey II’s exploration of
voice and persona in “Catching Holy Ghosts: The Diverse Manifestations of Black
Persona Poetry,” African American Review 42, no. 3 (2008): 549–564. In specific regard
to Clifton, see Hilary Holladay, Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 3 and 5, which consider
Clifton’s use of voice to construct a multitudinous speaking self. I come back to the
­matter of voice—­via the lyric—in chapter 2. Thanks to Mike King for a conversa-
tion about that “starshine and clay” line.
25 The idea of the poetic as force, resonant in Glissant and Lorde, recalls Aimé Césaire’s
argument in “Poetry and Knowledge,” in Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Ca­rib­
be­an, ed. Michael Richardson, trans. Michael Richardson and Krysztof Fijalkowski
(London: Verso, 1996), 134–146; and Imanu Amiri Baraka’s in “Poetry and Karma,” in
Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays since 1965 (New York: Random House, 1969), 17–26. This
notion of force is vital to black poetic studies, including Evie Shockley, Renegade

Notes to Chapter 1 177

 Poetics; Rowan Ricardo Phillips, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (Champaign:
Dalkey Archive Press, 2010); Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-­
American Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Meta
DuEwa Jones, The Muse Is ­Music; Lorenzo Thomas, Extraordinary Mea­sures: Afrocentric
Modernism and Twentieth-­Century American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2000); Fahamisha Patricia Brown, Performing the Word: African American Poetry
as Vernacular Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999); Tony
Bolden, Afro-­blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 2003); Keith D. Leonard, Fettered Genius: The African American
Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press,
2005); Adam Bradley, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop (New York: Civitas Books,
2017); Alexs Pate, In the Heart of the Beat: The Poetry of Rap (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow,
2009); and Eugene B. Redmond’s enduringly impor­tant Drum Voices: The Mission of
Afro-­American Poetry: A Critical History (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976). I am
indebted, forever, to Joanne V. Gabbin’s work with Furious Flower and Maryemma
Graham’s 2015 National Endowment for the Humanities seminar Black Poetry a­ fter
Black Arts, since both have or­ga­nized my studying of poetics. In addition to the
works noted, I could also cite Michael Thurston’s exploration of poetic ­doing in
Making Something Happen: American Po­liti­cal Poetry between the World Wars (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Kevin McLaughlin’s consideration of the
aesthetics of Kantian sublime in Poetic Force: Poetry a­ fter Kant (Stanford, CA: Stan-
ford University Press, 2014); Jacques Derrida’s idiom of witnessing and surrender in
“ ‘A Self-­Unsealing Poetic Text’: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing,” in Revenge of the
Aesthetic: The Place of Lit­er­a­ture in Theory ­Today, ed. Michael P. Clark (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2000), 180–207; and Julia Kristeva’s conceptualization of
the Symbolic and the Semiotic in Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985).
26 I cite the poem from Jordan’s collected works. My use of the idiom “made and
unmade” riffs on the florid end of Morrison’s Jazz. Indeed, Morrison’s novel opens
with an epigraph from the Nag Hammadi gnostic gospels, which speak in a voice
that claims itself to be both self and other; this d ­ oing is akin to June Jordan’s
speaker in “Fragments from a Parable,” who speaks spiritual transformation in a
language that mirrors that of the gnostic gospel; see Jordan, Directed by Desire: The
Collected Poems of June Jordan, ed. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Port Townsend,
WA: Copper Canyon, 2005), 155–164. Moreover, my reference to the subject as both
I and you echoes two references: one is Glissant’s notion of relationality, where
“it is pos­si­ble to be one and multiple at the same time; that you can be yourself
and the other; that you can be the same and dif­fer­ent” (“One World in Relation”
6); the other is the case of being in Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2012). For the latter, see Adrianna M. Paliyenko, “The Dialogic Je
in Rimbaud’s Illuminations,” French Forum 19, no. 3 (1994): 261–277, which argues
that Rimbaud’s syntax “construct[s] the poetic self in relation to its otherness”
(262). I am grateful to John Casey for reminding me of this instance. For further
discussion of Jordan’s poetics, see Kevin Quashie and Amy Fish, “A Subjunctive
Imagining: June Jordan’s Who Look at Me and the Conditions of Black Agency,” in

178 Notes to Chapter 1

 Literary Cultures and Twentieth-­Century Childhoods, ed. Rachel Conrad and Brown
Kennedy (London: Palgrave, forthcoming). Fi­nally, in thinking about the poetic as
a “form-­of-­life,” I am borrowing the phrase from Agamben’s essay of the same name
from Means without End, 3–12. ­Here, Agamben distinguishes between the unhyphen-
ated phrase, “form of life,” which is synonymous with an idea or a definition of life,
and the hyphenated term, which he intends to refer to life that is indescribable,
that resides in possibility, that is in pro­cess and “can never be separated from its
form” (3). I am invoking also the case that phi­los­op ­ her Monique Roelofs makes that
“racial formations are aesthetic phenomena and aesthetic practices are racialized
structures” (83); see “Racialization as an Aesthetic Production,” in White on White/
Black on Black, ed. George Yancy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 83–124.
This point about aesthetics w ­ ill be given further attention in chapter 3.
27 The stranger shows up in the relational thinking of Buber, Glissant, and Levinas.
28 The second person is a vital case in black letters; in addition to Phillip Brian
Harper’s engagement of the second person in Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety
and the Prob­lem of African-­American Identity (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996), which I cited in the introduction, see my discussion of the pronoun case in
chapter 2 of Sovereignty of Quiet. My reading h ­ ere of Clifton’s and Jordan’s use of the
second person could inform how we read instances of the second person in other
con­temporary poetry collections, including Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets to My
­ uture Assassin (London: Penguin Books, 2018); Claudia Rankine, Citizen:
Past and F
An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2014); and Evie Shockley, The New Black
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011).
29 Glissant makes this point in his distinction between relation and cosmopolitanism:
“Cosmopolitanism is a sort of upheaval that lacks direction” (Poetics of Relation 10).
30 This elegant definition of poiesis comes from Donald E. Polkinghorne, Practice and
­ uman Science: The Case for a Judgment-­Based Practice of Care (New York: State
the H
University of New York Press, 2004), 115. Thanks to an anonymous reader who sug-
gested that I emphasize poiesis.

Chapter 2. Aliveness and Oneness

This chapter is an expansion of my essay “To Be (a) One: Notes on Coupling and
Black Female Audacity,” differences 29, no. 2 (2018): 68–95, and it also extends my brief
exploration of oneness in The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Re­sis­tance in Black Culture
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012) (see 119–120).
1 The term “oneness” is used varyingly in religion and philosophy. Though it is
often noted as a concept in Eastern religions (see Philip J. Ivanhoe, Oneness: East
Asian Conceptions of Virtue, Happiness, and How We Are All Connected [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017]), I am interested h­ ere in philosophical, relational inflections
of the term, including the notion of “soul” in the history of body-­mind dualism.
2 This comment on individuality is foundational to my understanding of black pessi-
mism. For more ­here, see especially Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (New York:
Liveright, 2020), as well as endnotes on black pessimism in the introduction; also
see Denise Ferreira da Silva, ­Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of

Notes to Chapter 2 179

 Minnesota Press, 2007), as well as endnotes on the terms of life at the beginning of
chapter 1.
3 In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and
in Color: Essays on American Lit­er­at­ ure and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 203–229, Spillers writes that “as a category of ‘otherness,’ the captive
body . . . ​embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general
‘powerlessness,’ resonating through vari­ous centers of h ­ uman and social mean-
ing” (206). And throughout her work, including “Interstices: A Small Drama of
Words,” Spillers sustains an argument about black femaleness—­about blackness and
femaleness—as an exception to the figuring of the h ­ uman. See also Zakiyyah Iman
Jackson, Becoming ­Human: M ­ atter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New
York University Press, 2020).
4 The anthology’s title phrase seems to have originated in the book, though Farah
Jasmine Griffin notes that Toni Cade Bambara’s introduction to The Black ­Woman
anthology anticipates the title; see “Conflict and Chorus: Reconsidering Toni
Cade’s The Black ­Woman: An Anthology,” in Is It Nation Time? Con­temporary Essays
on Black Power and Black Nationalism, ed. Eddie S. Glaude (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002), 113–129. Thanks to Nora Daniels for research assistance h ­ ere.
5 I think of this exemption as similar to Emmanuel Levinas’s asymmetry described in
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1969), or in regard to Spillers’s articulation of “being for the captor” in “Mama’s
Baby” (206). For more on difference, especially in regard to Audre Lorde’s relation-
ality, see Quashie, “To Be (a) One.”
6 The importance of cancer in Lorde’s life is reflected in the structure of Alexis De
Veaux’s biography Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 2004), which is divided into two sections, with cancer marking Lorde’s second
life. Notable, too, is that nearly all of the ­Sister Outsider essays and all of Zami: A New
Spelling of My Name (Berkeley: Crossing, 1982) ­were written in this period ­after her
diagnosis. Furthermore, De Veaux links Lorde’s ideological investment in being
an outsider to cancer (230); of The Cancer Journals, she writes, “If the publication of
The Black Unicorn expressed a poetic embracing of African mythologies, for spiritual
sustenance, then The Cancer Journals signaled Lorde’s self-­styled transfiguration
as Seboulisa incarnate. She became a living version of the one-­breasted warrior
goddess, central to her spiritual links to be a re­imagined, mythic Africa. . . . ​It was
not simply that Lorde had breast cancer or a mastectomy; it was what she did with
­those facts” (271). And what Lorde did with t­ hose facts, one could argue, was to
construct an ontological idiom.
7 The conceptual uses of the black autobiographical are considered in Barbara
Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique, no. 6 (1987): 51–63; Kimberly
Nichele Brown, Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva: ­Women’s Subjectivity and the
Decolonizing Text (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); William Andrews,
African-­American Autobiography (London: Pearson, 1992); Patricia Hill Collins,
“Learning from the Outsider Within: The So­cio­log­ic­ al Significance of Black Femi-
nist Thought,” Social Prob­lems 33, no. 6 (1986): S14–­S32; and Farah Jasmine Griffin,
“An Interview with Farah Jasmine Griffin,” by Charles H. Rowell, Callaloo 22, no. 4

180 Notes to Chapter 2

 (1999): 872–892. Also see Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s reading of the autobiographi-
cal in DuBois’s philosophical imagining in X—­The Prob­lem of the Negro as a Prob­lem
for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), chap. 2; and Sarah J.
Cervenak’s explication of the first-­person wandering evident in classical philosophy
in Wandering: Philosophical Per­for­mances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2014).
8 The full passage reads, “­There is no desire more natu­ral than the desire for knowl-
edge. We try all the ways that can lead us to it. When reason fails us, we use experi-
ence . . . ​which is a weaker and less dignified means. But truth is so g­ reat a ­thing
that we must not disdain any medium that ­will lead us to it” (407), from Michel de
Montaigne, Essays and Selected Writings, trans. and ed. Donald M. Frame (New York:
St. Martin’s, 1963). Montaigne also exclaims experience in “Of Practice.” See also
Andrea Frisch, “Cannibalizing Experience in the Essais,” in Montaigne a­ fter Theory,
Theory a­ fter Montaigne, ed. Zahi Zalloua (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2009), 180–201, which considers Montaigne’s ambivalences in “Of Experience.”
9 I am riffing h ­ ere on Saidiya Hartman’s interview by Frank B. Wilderson, titled “The
Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 183–201, as well as Chandler, X.
The first quotation is from the title of Jean-­Luc Nancy’s book; the second is from
Glissant’s conversation with Manthia Diawara (“One World in Relation,” Nka:
Journal of Con­temporary African Art 28 [2011]: 5). T­ hese appeals to multiplicity recall
for me Rinaldo Walcott’s call for a “community of singularities” (93) in “Outside
in Black Studies,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson
and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 90–105. It is
also useful to think about Lorde’s investment in mythos—­for example, her adop-
tion of the name Afrekete, her stylization as Zami, her embrace of a Ca­rib­bean
subjectivity—as a manifestation of a transcendent multiplicity of being every­thing
and nothing; see De Veaux, Warrior Poet 261, 271. For further consideration of black
femaleness as an idiom of exception/exemption, see Kai M. Green and Marquis
Bey, “Where Black Feminist Thought and Trans* Feminism Meet,” Souls: A Critical
Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 19, no. 4 (2017): 438–454; C. Riley Snorton,
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2017); L. H. Stallings, Mutha’ Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore,
Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2007); Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between
­Women in Ca­rib­bean Lit­er­a­ture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Sarah
Haley’s explication of carceral gendering in No Mercy ­Here: Gender, Punishment, and
the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2016); and Farah Jasmine Griffin, “That the ­Mothers May Soar and the ­Daughters
Know Their Names: A Retrospective of Black Feminist Literary Criticism,” Signs 32,
no. 2 (2007): 483–507.
10 The quotation is from Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being,
and Apricot Cocktails (New York: Other Press, 2016), 20. This commitment to the
quotidian is informed by ordinary language philosophy, including Stanley Cavell,
Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Toril
Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies ­after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell

Notes to Chapter 2 181

 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Iris Murdoch’s notion of inhab-
ited philosophy in The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30. Also see
Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the ­Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 1; and the case Kristie Dotson makes in
“How Is This Paper Philosophy?,” Comparative Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2012): 3–29.
11 See Lucille Clifton, “­won’t you celebrate with me” (427); June Jordan, “Poem for
South African ­Women” (Directed by Desire 278–279); Ntozake Shange, For Colored
Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem (New York:
Scribner, 1997), 63; Alice Walker, “Womanist” (In Search of Our ­Mothers’ Gardens
xi–­xii); Maya Angelou, “Phenomenal ­Woman” (Phenomenal ­Woman: Four Poems Cel-
ebrating ­Women [New York: Random House, 1995], 3–6); and Nikki Giovanni, “Ego
Tripping (­there may be a reason why),” 125–126. Also see my argument for girlfriend
selfhood in Kevin Quashie, Black W ­ omen, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming
the Subject (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 1–3.
Fi­nally, as I note at the beginning and conclusion of this book, my debt to black
women/feminist scholars is enduring.
12 The phrase “monumental first person” is from Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An
American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2014), 73, which explores the fractures
and alliances between the second-­and first-­person vocative. For a consideration
of Rankine’s pronouns, see Andrew Gorin, “Lyric Noise: Lisa Robertson, Claudia
Rankine, and the Phatic Subject of Poetry in the Mass Public Sphere,” Criticism 61,
no. 1 (2019): 97–131; also see Rankine’s essay “The First Person in the Twenty-­First
­Century,” in ­After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2001),
132–136. On the specificity of indigeneity as a critical idiom, see Iyko Day’s incisive
essay “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial
Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 2 (2015): 102–121, as well as Mark Rifkin, Daniel
Heath Justice, Daniel Heath, and Bethany Schneider, eds., “Sexuality, Nationality,
and Indigeneity,” special issue, glq 16, no. 1–2 (2010). Relevant h ­ ere is the extended
argument Rifkin makes in Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), which invites us to strug­gle with the
distinctions between the terms of Indigenous strug­gles and black ones. In agree-
ment with Rifkin, I want to be clear that my use of “first person” generates from
the grammar of En­glish syntax and a Western cultural discourse. Also see Brittney
Cooper’s explication of black w ­ omen’s theorizing of “American peculiarity” and
exceptionalism (49) in Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race W ­ omen
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
13 I am drawing ­here on Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015), as well as Reed’s argument in Freedom Time: The Poetics and
Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2014) for a black postlyric in which the self is “extinguished of person,” where voice
is inflected with saturation, maximality, even avant-­garde or experimental com-
plexity (100). In addition to Reed, also see Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aes-
thetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2011), esp. pt. 1; and the case Gillian White makes about the debate between
lyric and antilyric in Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Con­temporary American Poetry

182 Notes to Chapter 2

 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). I am deploying the terms of lyric
in a manner consistent with ­Virginia Jackson’s query, “Can a text not intended as
a lyric become one?” (24), in Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Prince­
ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005). ­Here, Jackson leans on the case that
Yopie Prins makes for “lyrical reading, or reading lyrical” (27). Fi­nally, in thinking
about the elisions and illusions of voice and authenticity, see the superb arguments
ethnomusicologist Nina Sun Eidsheim makes in Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening
as Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015) and especially The
Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African American M ­ usic (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2019), particularly the idea of voice as a “thick event” (5).
14 See Tavia Nyong’o, Afro-­fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York: New
York University Press, 2018). In terms of the black experimental, see Reed, Freedom
Time; J. Kameron Car­ter and Sarah Jane Cervenak, “Black Ether,” New Centennial
Review 16, no. 2 (2016): 203–224; Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black
Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Saidiya
Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), as some examples.
15 See Glissant, who asserts that the “poem is the poetic tool of the One” in Poetic
Intention, trans. Nathanaël with Anna Malena (Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books,
2010), 200. In Poetic Intention, Glissant makes regular, elusive references to oneness.
16 We can see Sula’s subjectivity-­in-­formation in crucial moments from her childhood,
especially her exchange with Shadrack ­after the death of Chicken ­Little. Other mo-
ments of this discernment include when Ajax and his friends yell “pig meat” at her
and Nel; when Sula cuts off the tip of her fin­ger to protect Nel against the young
white bullies; and when she overhears Hannah, her ­mother, in a moment of confes-
sion with a c­ ouple of other ­women about ­children, saying, “You love her, like I love
Sula. I just d­ on’t like her,” which sets Sula off in “bewilderment” (57).
17 This moment recalls Shadrack’s reading “a command to fuck himself ” on the wall
of the jail cell, moments before he has his moment of reckoning and self-­awareness
by looking in a toilet bowl (13).
18 I have previously interpreted this moment as a regression for Sula (see Black
­Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory 58–59), and therefore I offer this reading as a
clarification in my sustained study of the novel. Indeed, we can appreciate Sula’s
surrender to domesticity as “the embracing dream . . . ​[that] provides an image
of an expanded self ” (Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love [New York: Punctum, 2012], 6),
such that Sula’s hallucination creates a romantic scene in which she, Sula, can revel
through wanting to feel de­pen­dency. (Berlant’s insight about the essential fantasy
in the love narrative mirrors the case that Ann duCille makes about the marriage
plot in The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black W ­ omen’s Fiction [Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1993]). As such, Sula’s sex reveries are material and
immaterial, following the case Naana Banyiwa-­Horne makes for immateriality in
the novel (“The Scary Face of the Self: An Analy­sis of the Character of Sula in Toni
Morrison’s Sula,” Sage 2, n. 1 [1985]: 28–31).
19 Spillers’s essay “A Hateful Passion, a Lost Love: Three ­Women’s Fiction” (originally
published in Feminist Studies 9, no. 2 [1983]: 293–323) was ­really the first to centralize

Notes to Chapter 2 183

 thinking about the ideology of black femaleness in the book. Also see Deborah
McDowell’s similarly formative argument in “The Self and the Other: Reading
Toni Morrison’s Sula and the Black Female Text,” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison,
ed. Nellie Y. McKay (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1998), 77–89; and Diane Gillespie and
Missy Dehn Kubitschek, “Who Cares? Women-­Centered Psy­chol­ogy in Sula,” Black
American Lit­er­a­ture Forum 24, no. 1 (1990): 21–48, which takes up relational being.
20 The ­matter of respectability is part of thinking about Sula and ethics; in that
regard, see Candace Jenkins’s essential Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black
Intimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Roderick A. Fergu-
son, Aberrations in Black: T ­ oward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003); and Terrion L. Williamson’s use of “scandalize” as a way
to notice “the black w ­ oman who both is and ­causes a scandal within the field of
repre­sen­ta­tion[,] . . . ​to contemplate a black female subjectivity that attains mean-
ing by way of an amoral social order that exists beyond the dichotomous regulatory
regimes that structure so much of repre­sen­ta­tional discourse” (Scandalize My Name
[New York: Fordham University Press, 2016], 19; emphasis in original). We could
think more about the ethical possibility in oneness via the case Alan H. Goldman
makes in Reasons from Within: Desires and Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009). Also see the discussion of ethics in chapter 5.
21 The question is from Ta-­Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spie-
gel and Grau, 2015), 12.
22 In Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997), Édouard Glissant writes, “ ‘Being is relation’: but Relations is safe from the
idea of Being. . . . ​The idea of relation does not preexist (Relation)” (185). His stance
against abstraction mirrors that of Levinas and Martin Buber, though in Glissant’s
specificity about universality, I read a caution about the collectivity of blackness. On
immanence and transcendence, see especially chap. 4 of Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith
and Antiblack Racism (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1995). I know that we might be
reluctant to embrace immanence and transcendence ­because of racist logics that
conceptualize blackness ­either as exceptionally material (immanence) or as needing
to overcome its excessive materiality (transcendence). Such conceptualizations
are of an antiblack world, where blackness exists as the mark of otherness rather
than as a ­human herself. For more on immanence and transcendence as terms in
philosophy, see Patrice Haynes, Immanent Transcendence (New York: Bloomsbury,
2012); Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two
Directions in Recent French Thought,” Con­temporary Philosophy 11 (2007): 123–130;
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life (New York: Zone Books, 2001); and
Marc Rölli, Gilles Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press, 2016), as well as Alain Badiou’s reading of the One in Deleuze: The Clamor
of Being (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Daniel Barber, Deleuze
and the Naming of God (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); and Christoph
Bode, “Discursive Constructions of the Self in British Romanticism,” Romanticism
and Victorianism on the Net 51 (2008), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­7202​/­019264ar. I also read
Stephen Best’s None like Us as an exploration of immanence and transcendence,
especially in his claim for obliteration as a stay against the communitarian impulse.

184 Notes to Chapter 2

 Indeed, the case for black phenomenological being in Frantz Fanon, Black Skins,
White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 2008), toggles
between immanence (being) and transcendence (becoming); see David Marriott’s
excellent “Judging Fanon,” Rhizomes 29 (2016), https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­20415​/­rhiz​/­029​.­e03.
23 I am signifying ­here on the end of Lucille Clifton’s “poem in praise of menstruation.”
24 Buber, indeed, would say we should approach the poem as a Thou.
25 See chap. 3 of Sovereignty of Quiet for further consideration of this scene and Maud
Martha as a w ­ hole. My thinking about the pronoun “one” is inspired by reading James
Baldwin’s navigation of pronouns, especially in the essay “Nothing Personal,” in The
Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), 381–395.
26 See Reed, Freedom Time 31, 99. In thinking of voice, the lyric “I,” and oneness, I am
leaning on Reed’s expansion of lyric universality and singularity (see esp. chaps. 2
and 3) as I am on Evie Shockley’s consideration of the lyric “I” as a renegade black
poetic (see esp. chap. 3 of Renegade Poetics). I also find useful Helen Vendler’s claim
that the lyric “requires not a character but a voice, one engaged in solitary medita-
tion [. . . ​, which] may of course include direct address” (The Given and the Made:
Strategies of Poetic Redefinition [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995], x).
Also see the title essay of Carl Phillips, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of
Poetry (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2004), esp. 239, for more on the lyric and ecstasy.
27 The DuBois reference is from the opening chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, ed.
Henry Louis Gates and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 9;
the Moten reference is to the opening of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black
Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); the Fanon
reference is from Black Skin, White Masks, 82; the Crawford reference is from Black
Post-­blackness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 42. I could add ­here Frank
Wilderson’s Afropessimism, which characterizes abstraction as part of the proj­ect of
antiblackness (esp. 12–17). I know that Glissant, in a passage cited ­earlier, collates
abstraction with universality, though I want to think about abstraction as a possi-
bility of the self-­in-­relation and even akin to the larger argument that Philip Brian
Harper makes in Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African
American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2015). Also see abstraction
as considered in Christopher Freeburg, Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life (Char-
lottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2017); and Michael Boyce Gillespie, Film
Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2016). My thinking ­here is informed by Moten’s work, which has done much
to explore blackness via subject, object, t­ hing (especially The Universal Machine
[Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018]); studies of phenomenology that, as
a philosophy, refuse a subject-­object dualism (for example, Sara Ahmed, Queer
Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, ­Others [Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2006]); and studies in black feminism that grapple with states of being object.
This latter group includes Ann DuCille, “The Occult of True Black Womanhood,”
in Skin Trade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 81–119; Patricia J.
Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992), especially her exploration of being the object of
property; and Evelyn Higginbotham, “African American W ­ omen’s History and the

Notes to Chapter 2 185

 Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–274, on the “meta­phoric and met-
onymic” language of racialization (254). Related ­here is the exploration of a poetics
of nothing in J. Kameron Car­ter and Sarah Jane Cervenak, “Black Ether,” CR: The
New Centennial Review 16, no. 2 (2016): 203–224; Denise Ferreira da Silva, “­Toward
a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness ­toward the End of the
World,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 81–97; Dawn Lundy Martin, “A Black Poetics:
Against Mastery,” boundary 2 44, no. 3 (2017): 159–163; and Fred Moten, “Blackness
and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013):
737–780. I am indebted to Quinn Anex-­Ries for a series of conversations about
phenomenology, objectness, and black feminist studies.
28 For more on colons, especially their capacity to cleave, see Jennifer DeVere Brody,
Punctuation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 148.
29 In thinking about the ambivalence of force and willfulness, see Sara Ahmed, Willful
Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2014). Also, Shockley’s use of syllepsis and
objectification recalls for me Camille Rankine’s poem “We,” in Incorrect Merciful
Impulses (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2015), 77–78.
30 I am evoking Moten on possession as an unsettled inhabitance, a disturbed, thrill-
ing ­thing “troubled by a dispossessive force objects exert such that the subject
seems to be possessed—­infused, deformed—by the object it possesses” (In the Break 1).
One could also read Shockley’s poem in tandem with Rita Dove, “The Oriental Bal-
lerina,” in Thomas and Beulah (Pittsburgh: Car­ne­gie Mellon University Press, 1986),
75–77; see my essay “The Black ­Woman as Artist: The Queer Erotics of Rita Dove’s
Beulah,” Tulsa Studies in ­Women’s Lit­er­a­ture 37, no. 2 (2018): esp. 410–412. Fi­nally, we
might consider syllogism, a conclusion made based on the assumption of two prem-
ises, as another doubleness ­running through Shockley’s poem.
31 Awkward-­Rich’s question is a riff on Fanon’s comment on the object. And in read-
ing Awkward-­Rich’s consideration of femaleness and gendering through a transgen-
der male speaker, I am reminded of the argument C. Riley Snorton makes about
black femaleness as a defining trope of the terms of both blackness and transness;
see Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2017). I have chosen to use the singular pronoun “themself ” as a
way to circumvent the inherent binary in singular pronouns in En­glish. I do this
­here and elsewhere in instances where the speaker’s gender is not explic­itly identifi-
able via the terms of the poem, so as to avoid narrowing the terms of black world
imagining that I am exploring in the book.
32 This poetic moment is characteristic of how Awkward-­Rich uses pronouns (es-
pecially the first and second person) to do nuanced gender work. For example, in
“Essay on the Awkward/Black/Object,” the speaker says, “Now, when the t­ hing is
made to do / dangerous work, he flings its body from the / low rungs of a ladder”
(19). In this clause, the subject moves from being “­thing” to being “he” to being
“its,” in a terrific articulation of suspension.
33 I am grateful to have studied this collection in four classes: Readings in Black and
Queer (spring 2019), Blackness and Being (spring 2019), Black Poetics (fall 2019),
and Fanon and Spillers (spring 2020); ­these occasions sharpened my appreciation
of the work. This attention to “splits” and refraction gestures also to the ­matter

186 Notes to Chapter 2

 of gendered vio­lence: “splits” coheres with “slit” and “hole,” as well as with the
slashes that punctuate the poems; all of ­these reflect the threat of violation to the
young person who is gendered female, who is navigating gendered being. See other
poems in the collection, including “The ­Little Girl Is Busy Asking Questions
about Desire” (Awkward-­Rich 26), “To­night” (29–31), “Essay on Crying in Public”
(36–38), “Theory of Motion (3): Another Middle-­Class Black Kid Tries to Name
It” (46–47), “The Child Formerly Known as ______” (50–51), “Ars Poetica” (56),
and “Theory of Motion (4), Nocturne” (57–58).” Fi­nally, I want to acknowledge my
student Lyle Cherneff ’s observation that the treble repetition of “splits” acts as an
ellipsis.
34 My reference to authority h ­ ere invokes Ann duCille’s binary of authority and
authenticity in “The Occult of True Black Womanhood,” in Skin Trade, 81–119.
35 The Awkward-­Rich quotation is from the poem “Essay Amending the Nature of My
­Mother’s Tears”; the uncited quotation is from Quashie, Black ­Women, Identity, and
Cultural Theory 17.
36 Again, in making this claim about black w ­ omen’s intellectual contributions, I work
in com­pany with scholars like Kimberly Nichele Brown, Brittney Cooper, Kristie
Dotson, Lyndon Gill, Farah Jasmine Griffin, V. Denise James, Saidiya Hartman, and
L. H. Stallings, as well as a w
­ hole generation of scholars from the 1980s and 1990s,
including Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Ann duCille, Trudier Harris, bell
hooks, Hortense Spillers . . . ​and many, many o­ thers.

Chapter 3. Aliveness and Aesthetics

1 My reference to per­for­mance studies ­here is indebted to the field’s arguments about
ideation, aesthetics, and performativity in the being of blackness. In this regard,
I am drawing especially on E. Patrick Johnson’s idiom of appropriation (see Ap-
propriating Blackness: Per­for­mance and the Politics of Authenticity [Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003]), as well as on Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez,
Black Per­for­mance Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Robert Reid-­
Pharr’s thinking about blackness in the opening of Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire,
and the Black American Intellectual (New York: New York University Press, 2007);
and Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black
Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), especially his exploration of
how ideation creates the black social body in chap. 1. ­Here I am not interested in
nonblack per­for­mances of blackness, though t­ hese exist as part of the cir­cuit of ide-
ation. In terms of thinking about aesthetics and blackness, see Paul C. Taylor, Black
Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2016),
particularly the race-­aesthetic nexus that he develops in conjunction with Roelofs’s
argument. Taylor writes that “black aesthetics is an unavoidably po­liti­cal subject.
It exists as a cultural phenomenon and as a subject of philosophical study b­ ecause
of po­liti­cal conditions” (79). Taylor does well to surpass the “racial regimes” of
aesthetic theory that David Lloyd notes in ­Under Repre­sen­ta­tion: The Racial Regime
of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). Also see the subfield of
existential aesthetics, including Galen Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking

Notes to Chapter 3 187

 through Merleau-­Ponty’s Aesthetics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2009); Eugene Kaelin, An Existentialist Aesthetic: the Theories of Sartre and Merleau-­
Ponty (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962); Richard Kearney, Poetics of
Imagining: From Modern to Postmodern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1998); Jerrold Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1996); Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Amie Thomasson, “The Ontology of Art,”
in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 78–92.
And to cite more broadly, my study of aesthetics draws from the following works:
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006); Sara
Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2004); Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1990); José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and ­There
of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Phillip Brian
Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American
Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Jared Sexton, “All Black
Every­thing,” e-­flux 79 (2017), https://­www​.­e​-­flux​.­com​/­journal​/­79​/­94158​/­all​-­black​
-­everything; Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-­Making
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge:
Essays on Philosophy and Lit­er­a­ture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Marc
Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2003); Russ Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics
and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Roland
Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975); Barthes, Plea­sure of the Text (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1975); Jacques Derrida, “ ‘A Self-­Unsealing Poetic Text’:
Poetics and Politics of Witnessing,” in Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Lit­er­at­ ure
in Theory ­Today, trans. Rachel Bowlby, ed. Michael P. Clark (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000), 180–207; and Samantha Pinto, Difficult Diasporas: The
Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (New York: New York University
Press, 2013), especially her consideration of aesthetics and black experimentalism.
2 In thinking with Morrison’s declaration about language—­and writing as a specific
creative genre—­I am engaging Mel Y. Chen’s work in Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial
Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), especially
her consideration of materiality and vitality (51–53). Other works relevant to my
engagement of aesthetics and repre­sen­ta­tion include Lauren Berlant, Cruel Opti-
mism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): “Aesthetics is not only the place
where we rehabituate our sensorium by taking in new material and becoming more
refined in relation to it. But it provides metrics for understanding how we pace and
space our encounters with t­ hings, how we manage the too closeness of the world
and also the desire to have an impact on it that has some relation to its impact on
us” (12); Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018): “The aesthetic enacts, produces, and
performs,” which is why she writes of “aesthetic practices, not just aesthetic forms,
­because they do t­ hings in the world” (16; emphases in original); and Kandice

188 Notes to Chapter 3

 Chuh’s argument for aesthetics, relation, and a notion of “illiberal humanism” in
The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “­After Man” (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2019). And again, I am using the phrase “form-­of-­life” from
Giorgio Agamben, “Form-­of-­Life,” in Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 3–12, though it also occurs in Ludwig
Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations [London: Pearson, 1973]).
3 See Amit S. Rai, “Race Racing: Four T ­ heses on Race and Intensity,” wsq: ­Women’s
Studies Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2012): 64–75, which I came to via Tavia Nyong’­o’s compel-
ling “Unburdening Repre­sen­ta­tion,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 70–80.
4 Jones’s essay serves as the introduction to David Henderson’s poetry collection
Felix of the S­ ilent Forest. Thanks to J. Pete Moore for pointing me to Henderson’s col-
lection. As I’ve noted in the introduction, aesthetics and worldmaking are central
features of the work in the Black Arts/Aesthetics movement. For more h ­ ere, see
Margo Natalie Crawford, Black Post-­blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-­
First-­Century Aesthetics (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2017), as well as the range
of works mentioned in the endnotes in the introduction. Also see the case Farah
Jasmine Griffin makes for textuality and materiality in “Textual Healing: Claim-
ing Black ­Women’s Bodies, the Erotic and Re­sis­tance in Con­temporary Novels of
Slavery,” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 519–536.
5 Geoffrey Pullum, in “Being a Subjunctive,” says that subjunctive clauses are “finite
and tenseless” (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 29, 2016), which follows the case
that Rodney Huddleston makes in “Content Clauses and Reported Speech,” in The
Cambridge Grammar of the En­glish Language, ed. Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K.
Pullum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 947–1031 (but see esp.
993–1000). For a brief consideration of the tense of imperatives and subjunctives,
see Frank Parker, Charles Mayer, and Kathryn Riley, “­Here Us Go Again,” American
Speech 69, no. 4 (1994): 435–439. Also see Charles D. Cannon, “A Survey of the
Subjunctive Mood in En­glish,” American Speech 34, no. 1 (1959): 11–19; F. R. Palmer,
Mood and Modality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Paul
Portner, Mood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). The subjunctive m ­ atters
to blackness; indeed, Saidiya V. Hartman has made the case for the subjunctive as
an aesthetic of black being in regard to reading historical archives (see “Venus in
Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 [2008]: 1–14). Also see Tavia Nyong’o, Afro-­fabulations:
The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Tina
Campt’s engagement of tense in Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2017); and Muñoz’s attention to the “­here and now” of any utopia or call for
futurity (in Cruising Utopia). Especially in reading Muñoz, I came to think of the
subjunctive as a structure of feeling à la Raymond Williams. Fi­nally, the poet Lyrae
Van Clief-­Stefanon, in a pre­sen­ta­tion at the Callaloo conference “The Legacy of
1619” at the University of Pennsylvania, October 19, 2019, advances the idea of “ady-
naton,” the impractical and impossible as rendered in a hyperbolic figure of speech,
in a manner that echoes my consideration of the subjunctive.
6 In regard to black maleness as a poetic (and bardic) ontology, Hayes makes early
reference to the caged-­bird meta­phor, in an allusion to Paul Laurence Dunbar

Notes to Chapter 3 189

 (“Sympathy”) and Countee Cullen (“Yet Do I Marvel”); as well as to Orpheus,
Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Prince, Ginuwine, and Gucci Mane, among o­ thers.
7 See Farah Jasmine Griffin, “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black W ­ omen’s
Vocality,” in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent
Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press,
2004), 102–125.
8 An excellent example of subjunctivity’s if-­then logic is Lucille Clifton, “poem in
praise of menstruation” (in The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965–2010, ed. Kevin
Young and Michael S. Glaser [Rochester, NY: boa Editions, 2012], 357), where
poetic force resides in the compounding of the subjunctive phrasing, “if ­there is a
river,” a phrase that is intensified by repetition and varied enjambment, such that
with each iteration the clause becomes more dramatic. Clifton’s staggered declara-
tion generates suspension as we wait for the phrase that ­will append each iteration
of “if.” Another well-­known example of subjunctive-­into-­imperative is Claude
McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” (The Complete Poems of Claude McKay [Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2004], 177).
9 ­These syntactical dynamics include the compounded adjectives “tree-­loving / gun-­
hating” and the lovely “about-­to-do deed.” Notice, also, how the work of “imagine”
surpasses the subjunctive possibility of “could” and “maybe,” which are articulated
in the epigraphic paragraph that opens the poem.
10 Part of the sublime is that “imagine” mixes syntax that is both interior (which is
the normative habitat of the subjunctive, as a mood) and exterior (the habitat of the
imperative command). H ­ ere I am borrowing from Elizabeth Povinelli, who, in The
Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), cites the subjunctive as interior (72).
11 This quotation, which is explored considerably in chapter 1, is from a letter Barbara
Christian wrote to Audre Lorde; see Alexis DeVeaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of
Audre Lorde (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 199.
12 I mean “timelessness” ­here to emphasize the fact that the subjunctive and the
imperative, as moods, ­don’t ­really indicate time on their own and are therefore not
overtly tensed. We tend to read the subjunctive as future-­oriented ­because of its
signifying possibility, and perhaps we read the imperative through the pre­sent, but
­these time sentiments are not inherent in e­ ither syntax.
13 See Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), especially
the first paragraph, where he notes that “our resistant, relentlessly impossible object
is subjectless predication, subjectless escape, escape from subjection, in and through
the para­legal flaw that animates and exhausts the language of ontology” (vii), which
describes his undertaking in In the Break and “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50,
no. 2 (2008): 177–218. Also see Stephen Best (The Fugitive’s Properties: Laws and the Poet-
ics of Possession [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004]), Saidiya Hartman (Scenes
of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca [New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997]), Hortense Spillers (especially “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], 203–229), and
Alexander Weheliye (Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist

190 Notes to Chapter 3

 Theories of the ­Human [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014]). I also want to
recall the discussion of Toni Morrison’s characters Sula and Ajax (in chapter 2) and
to cite two other works that engage the terms of possession in ways I find compelling:
Natasha Trethewey’s poetry collection Thrall (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
2012), including the title poem’s use of “as if ” and the way that a sensibility of imagine
radiates through the book’s poetics; and Stephanie L. Batiste, “Dunham Possessed:
Ethnographic Bodies, Movement, and Transnational Constructions of Blackness,”
Journal of Haitian Studies 13, no. 2 (2007): 8–22.
14 I thank John Casey for helping me achieve the clarity of this reading. In consider-
ing ­these dialectics of being, one could look t­ oward Lauren Berlant’s description of
intersubjectivity in Cruel Optimism, where, thinking about Barbara Johnson’s con-
ceptualizing of apostrophe, Berlant explicates “the reaching out to a you” that is
“actually a turning back, an animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make
something happen now that realizes something in the speaker, makes the speaker
more or differently pos­si­ble, ­because she has admitted, in a sense, the importance
of speaking for, as, and to, two—­but only u ­ nder the condition, and illusion, that
the two are r­ eally (in) one” (25–26; emphasis in the original).
15 My quick reference to smallness h ­ ere evidences my debt to affect studies as it inter-
sects with thinking about materiality, aesthetics, the ordinary, and phenomenology.
This confluence of ideas informs and is cited in the discussion of aliveness in chapter 1.
16 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), 115.
17 The quotation is from Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, Academic ed., s.v. “essay,” ac-
cessed June 14, 2020, britannica​.­com​/­search​?­query​=e­ ssay.
18 See Carl H. Klaus, “­Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay,” in Essayists on the
Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-­French (Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press, 2012), xv–­xxvii, esp. xxiii–­xxiv. Cheryl B. Butler makes a
similar claim in The Art of the Black Essay: from Meditation to Transcendence (New York:
Routledge, 2003): “In the African American essay, the uncanny moment happens
upon the reader as it happens upon the essayist and upon the character the essayist
constructs” (11).
19 The m­ atter of audience and the biographical is taken up in chapter 4. In regard to
thinking about the author function, see Michael Boyce Gillespie, Film Blackness:
American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2016); and Patrick Colm Hogan, Narrative Discourse: Authors and Narrators in Lit­er­
a­ture, Film, and Art (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013). In regard to the
genre more broadly, see Ned Stuckey-­French, The American Essay in the American
­Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); and Terence Cave, How to
Read Montaigne (London: Granta Books, 2013).
20 We might do well to think of the personal essay in the genre of memoir, as a text
of memory, unreliability, and indeterminacy, where the dialectic is between writer
and speaker, not speaker and reader. Or we might consider the way Robert McRuer
puts pressure on the word “composition”—­a text of failing and willful disorder; see
“Composing Bodies; or, De-­composition: Queer Theory, Disability Studies, and Al-
ternative Corporealities,” jac 24, no. 1 (2004): 47–78. That is, I want to be clear that

Notes to Chapter 3 191

 the conventional m ­ atter of voice and authority is not read flatly in regard to the
essay’s dynamism. As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten ask, “What if authoritative
speech is detached from the notion of a univocal speaker” and from a “possessive
individualism”? (Undercommons 135, 140). As an extension of comments made e­ arlier
about voice (see chapter 2), I would add that not only is voice in the essay not en-
gaged with audience, but the voice represents a commitment to becoming, perhaps
even “dissensus” in the way Jacques Rancière means that term to characterize that
“gap in the sensible itself ” (“Ten ­Theses on Politics,” in Dissensus: On Politics and
Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran [London: Continuum, 2010], 38). We might recall
also heteroglossia as explored in Mae G. Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialog-
ics, Dialectics, and the Black W ­ oman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” in Changing Our
Own Words, ed. Cheryl Wall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989),
16–37. Related h ­ ere is Gerard Genette’s arguments in Narrative Discourse: An Essay
in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), particularly the claim that
­there is no “third-­person” narrator; also see Mieke Bal and Jane E. Lewin, “The
Narrating and the Focalizing: A Theory of the Agents in Narrative,” Style 17, no. 2
(1983): 234–269.
21 The m ­ atter of abstraction is addressed in chapter 2.
22 From John D’Agata, “2003,” in Klaus and Stuckey-­French, Essayists on the Essay, 172–173.
23 William Hazlitt calls this “familiar style” (“On Familiar Style,” in Table-­Talk: Essays
on Men and Manners [Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2007], 113–114); also see Gerald
Early’s discussion of the essay’s conversational tone in the introduction to Tuxedo
Junction: Essays on American Culture (New York: Ecco, 1989).
24 I mean poetic ­here in accord with the discussion of lyric voice in the previous chapter.
25 Vinson Cunningham, in “What Makes the Essay American,” New Yorker, May 13,
2016, argues with D’Agata’s attempt to reenvision the essay as “neutral attempt” in
the vein of Montaigne and argues that “most of us Americans are Emersons: artful
sermonizers, pathological point-­makers.” I’ll address Cunningham’s argument for
the essay as a site of “conflict [that] is elemental to Amer­i­ca” in the next chapter.
And in regard to experience and Hall’s argument, I am recalling Joan W. Scott’s
iconic essay, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–794,
particularly her notion of “the discursive character of experience” (787). Scott’s
argument ignited a debate in feminist studies, especially in women-­of-­color femi-
nism; see Linda Alcoff ’s response to Scott, “Phenomenology, Post-­structuralism,
and Feminist Theory on the Concept of Experience,” in Feminist Phenomenology, ed.
Linda Fisher and Lester Embree (Berlin: Spinger, 2000), 39–56; and Johanna Ok-
sala’s more recent “In Defense of Experience,” Hypatia 29, no. 2 (2014): 388–403. My
interest in Scott’s exploration of experience generates from a black world orienta-
tion, where the calculus of experience, evidence, and value is not at stake; indeed,
this is how I have read Audre Lorde’s claim for experience in chapters 1 and 2. Unre-
lated to the discourse about Scott’s essay, see Harvey Young’s thinking about black
embodiment and misrecognition in Embodying Black Experience.
26 Bigé’s comment is from a personal conversation; see also Patrizia Pallaro, ed., Au­then­
tic Movement: Essays by Mary Starks White­house, Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow, 2 vols.
(London: Jessica Kingsley, 1999); D. Soyini Madison, foreword to Black Per­for­mance

192 Notes to Chapter 3

 Theory, ed. Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2014), vii­–­ix; and Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez, “Introduction:
From ‘Negro Experiment’ to ‘Black Per­for­mance,’” in DeFrantz and Gonzalez, Black
Per­for­mance Theory, 1–15.The phrase “autonomous passage” is from conversation with
Matt Ashby. I think of this consideration of inauthenticity as akin to Derek Wal-
cott’s idiom of feasting in the poem “Love a­ fter Love,” in The Poetry of Derek Walcott,
1948–2013, ed. Glyn Maxwell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 227.
27 See José Esteban Muñoz on disidentification (Disidentifications [Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999]), Daphne Brooks on distanciation (“Nina
Simone’s ­Triple Play,” Callaloo 34, no. 1 [2011]: 176–197), and Phillip Brian Harper on
abstraction (Abstractionist Aesthetics).
28 The essay embodies thingness. As such, we could think of it as a kind of fetish that
Monique Allewaert theorizes in Ariel’s Ecol­ogy: Plantations, Personhood, and Colo-
nialism in the American Tropics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013):
“Diasporic Africans’ production of fetishes recognized that objects, far from being
wordless or mute, could be conceived as dense interiorities or constellations of
force that could store, pro­cess, and actualize information and that w ­ ere also crucial
to the production of the collectivities, or assemblages, through which personhood
was articulated” (118–119). I am compelled by Allewaert’s notice of “dense interiori-
ties or constellations of force” since it evokes my claim of the essay’s worldness
through its small, fierce partiality. Furthermore, her attention to the aesthetics of
the object collates with the Black Aesthetic movement’s engagement and “­critique
of the text as object and monument” (Crawford, Black Post-­blackness, 17), its invest-
ment in a textual force of aliveness that resides in the inanimate. Writers like Amiri
Baraka and Larry Neal knew that even in the face of treacherous discourses of
black objectification, the art object in a black world imaginary could instantiate
being. Or, as Allewaert describes it, “­Here, subjects and objects are recalibrated as
assemblages that are animate and entangling. It then follows that personhood is
neither an a priori category nor a mode of being oppositional to objects, but a com-
position produced through the relation of (para)­humans, artifacts, and ecological
forces” (119). My consideration of the broad and complicated discourse of thingness
includes Moten, “The Case of Blackness”; Bill Brown, A Sense of ­Things (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003); Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orienta-
­ thers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Jane Bennett,
tions, Objects, O
Vibrant M­ atter: A Po­liti­cal Ecol­ogy of ­Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010); Robin Bern­stein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery
to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Zakiyyah Jackson,
“Outer Worlds: The Per­sis­tence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond the ­Human,’ ” glq
21, no. 2–3 (2015): 215–218; Jackson, “Losing Manhood: Animality and Plasticity in the
(Neo)Slave Narrative,” Qui Parle 25, no. 1–2 (2016): 95–136; Jayna Brown, “Being Cel-
lular: Race, the Inhuman, and the Plasticity of Life,” glq 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 321–341;
and Aime Cesaire’s notion of “Thingification,” from Discourse on Colonialism, trans.
Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 42.
29 The idiom “aesthetics of existence” comes from Michel Foucault’s essay “An Aes-
thetics of Existence,” in Philosophy, Politics, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, ed.

Notes to Chapter 3 193

 Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 47–53. And in thinking of the
essay’s volatility, I am leaning on Elizabeth Grosz’s conceit of Volatile Bodies: T ­ oward
a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), as I am also recall-
ing Adorno’s claim that “the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy. Through viola-
tions of the orthodoxy of thought, something in the object becomes vis­i­ble which it
is orthodoxy’s secret and objective aim to keep invisible” (“The Essay as Form,” trans.
Bob Hullot-­Kentor and Frederic ­Will, New German Critique 32 (1984): 151–171, 171).
30 My conceptualization of aliveness is phenomenological, which my engagement of
the essay-­as-­genre bears out. And I should note ­here Moten’s critique of “phenom-
enology’s assumption of thingly individuation [that] renders no-­thingness unavoid-
able and unavowable” (The Universal Machine [Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2018], ix), where no-­thingness is blackness. I am aware that phenomenology proper
often excludes blackness, but I think that its ideas can be used for blackness in a
black world, which indeed seems to be the point of Moten’s discussion of Fanon in
Universal Machine, chap. 3.
31 See Seneca Review’s fall 1997 issue on the lyric essay, though I retain the term “first-­
person essay” ­because I am speaking of works h ­ ere that are less intentionally hybrid
in form than the canonical examples of lyric essays (for example, Maggie Nelson,
The Argonauts [Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2015]).
32 In Film Blackness, Michael Gillespie describes this collapsing as characteristic of the
prob­lem of black repre­sen­ta­tions and cultural criticism. Moira Ferguson, in Jamaica
Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press,
1994), argues that “in A Small Place the speaker is concerned for her native land, not
herself ” (78), which is one way to read Kincaid’s work though dif­fer­ent from my
attention to the singularity of the speaker. Also see J. Brooks Bouson’s reading in
Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the M ­ other (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2005).
33 See Julieta Singh’s argument about Kincaid’s engagement of ambivalence in
Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2018). For scholarly considerations of the second person in A Small
Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), see Claudia Marquis, “‘Making a
Spectacle of Yourself’: The Art of Anger in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place,” Journal of
Postcolonial Writing 54, no. 2 (2018): 147–160; and Suzanne Gauch, “A Small Place: Some
Perspectives on the Ordinary,” Callaloo 25, no. 3 (2002): 910–919. Fi­nally, Kincaid uses
direct address superbly in her well-­known short story (or is it an essay?) “Girl,” New
Yorker, June 26, 1978, https://­www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­magazine​/­1978​/­06​/­26​/­girl.
34 In the first section, t­ here are only two references where “I” is the subject of the sen-
tence, though I am not including ­here this sentence where the singular first person
operates as an exclamation: “I mean, in a way; I mean, your dismay and puzzlement
are natu­ral to you” (15).
35 See Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics, esp. chap. 3, as well as his discussion of the sec-
ond person in Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Prob­lem of African-­American
Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), chap. 2.
36 See David ­Wills, “Passionate Secrets and Demo­cratic Dissidence,” Diacritics 38,
no. 1–2 (2008): 17–29. On virtuals, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans.

194 Notes to Chapter 3

 Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and Pure Immanence:
Essays on a Life (New York: Zone Books, 2005). I am also inspired ­here by Brian Mas-
sumi’s conceptualization of affect (the use of “pure” and “raw” echoes him from The
Politics of Affect [Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015], 207) and Ashon Crawley’s notion of
other­wise in Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2016). This tension between explicitness and furtiveness fuels the
performative aspect of the anecdote, its quality of discursive unfolding, which ­Wills
goes on to track via the secrecy embedded in the etymology of the word:

The anecdote, anekdota, is etymologically the unedited (inédit). One should hear
that in two senses: in the first place as that which h­ asn’t yet been published, or
prepared for publication, that which remains out of the light, in secret, but simply
waiting for the inquisitive or all-­seeing gaze of an editor; and in the second place
as that which appears without the benefit of an editor’s red pen, what is spoken of
in excess of what needs to be written, that which appears unexpurgated, unsecreted.
Thus the anecdote as inédit has, between its two senses, the paradoxical structure
of the “patent secret”: it can both give and withhold. (22–23)

See also Jane Gallop, Anecdotal Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2002), espe-
cially for its suggestion that the anecdote merges the literary and the real; and Joel
Fineman’s essay “The History of the Anecdote,” in The Subjectivity Effect in Western
Literary Tradition: Essays ­toward the Release of Shakespeare’s ­Will (Cambridge, MA: mit
Press, 1991), esp. 61–62. ­Wills’s thinking about the anecdote parallels Foucault’s
theorizing in “Lives of Infamous Men,” which considers the power to be had in the
characterization of ordinary happenings, what he calls “nameless misfortunes and
adventures gathered into a handful of words” and l­ ater, “­those flash existences,
­those poem-­lives” (in Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D.
Faubion [New York: New Press, 2001], 3:157, 159). I find this compelling even though
Foucault is describing accounts made of rather than by subjects. Thanks to Tamar
Katz for pointing me to W ­ ills’s article and John Casey for the Gallop reference.
37 Indeed, it is an anxiety of audience that inspires much of the harsh criticism of
Kincaid’s writing; see, for example, Derik Smith and Cliff Beumel, “My Other: Im-
perialism and Subjectivity in Jamaica Kincaid’s My ­Brother,” in Jamaica Kincaid and
Ca­rib­bean Double Crossings, ed. Linda Lang-­Peralta (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 2006), 96–112. In addition to Greg Thomas’s arguments in The Sexual Demon
of Colonial Power: Pan-­African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2007), see also Jane King, “A Small Place Writes Back,”
Callaloo 25, no. 3 (2002): 885–909.
38 See Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology. Bouson notes that shame is central to Kincaid’s
conceptualization of diasporic subjectivity. On the aesthetics of bad/ugly/difficult
feelings, see José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo
Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other stds),” Theatre Journal 52, no. 1 (2000):
67–71; Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity
of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs 31, no. 3 (2006): 675–688; Sianne Ngai,
Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Darieck Scott,
Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary

Notes to Chapter 3 195

 Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010). This speaking of one’s
self through the object case coheres with the inclination of affect theory in t­ hese
works. Also see Shaundra Myers, “Black Anaesthetics: The New Yorker and Andrea
Lee’s Rus­sian Journal,” American Literary History 31, no. 1 (2019): 47–73, on black aes-
thetics and the pronoun case.
39 That is, this closing abstraction reprises the subjunctive ambivalence of Kincaid’s
speaker, her aesthetic of “Ca­rib­bean impossibility,” a phrase that is the title of
Thomas W. Sheehan’s useful study “Ca­rib­bean Impossibility: The Lack of Jamaica
Kincaid,” in Lang-­Peralta, Jamaica Kincaid and Ca­rib­bean Double Crossings, 79–95. In
using “ordinary language” h ­ ere, I am making reference to the school of ordinary
language philosophy; see Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially the title essay; and Themes Out of School:
Effects and ­Causes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), especially the opening
essay, as well as Toril Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies ­after Wittgenstein,
Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Fi­nally, it is notable
that Kincaid’s final passage uses an equation that is strikingly similar to both Édouard
Glissant’s near the end of Poetics of Relation (trans. Betsy Wing [Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1997]) (“­There would be something ­great and noble about initiat-
ing such a movement, referring not to Humanity but to the exultant divergence of
humanities. Thought of self and thought of other ­here become obsolete in their dual-
ity. E
­ very Other is a citizen and no longer a barbarian” [190]) and Frantz Fanon’s near
the end of Black Skin, White Masks (trans. Charles Lam Markmann [London: Pluto,
2008]): “­There is no Negro mission; t­ here is no white burden” (178).
40 This ­doing reminds me of Saidiya Hartman’s undertaking in Lose Your ­Mother: A
Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Macmillan, 2008). That is, the im-
perative in Hartman’s title, “lose your ­mother,” is an ambivalence that infers an act
of colonial imposition, a loss made inevitable and irrecuperable via the horrors of
modernity, as well as a call to relinquish the meager practices of recovery. (Think,
for example, about the speaker’s journey through the trou­ble and fictions of kin-
ship.) For a scholarly exploration of such losing, see Stephen Michael Best, None like
Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018),
especially his consideration of elimination and his engagement of Toni Morrison’s
Beloved and A Mercy.
41 The case for this making resonates with Jana Evans Braziel’s argument about auto-
fiction in “ ‘Another Line Was Born . . .’: Genesis, Genealogy, and Genre in Jamaica
Kincaid’s Mr. Potter,’ ” in Lang-­Peralta, Jamaica Kincaid and Ca­rib­bean Double Crossings,
127–150.
42 See Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotions 12.
43 The quotation comes from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994): “Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are in­de­pen­dent of a state of
­those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go be-
yond the strength of t­ hose who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are
beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to
exist in the absence of man ­because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or

196 Notes to Chapter 3

 by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art is a being
of sensation and nothing e­ lse: it exists in itself ” (164; emphasis in original).
44 The quotation is the title of William Irwin’s book, which was inspired by a moment
in Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation (New York: Other Press, 2015).

Chapter 4. Aliveness in Two Essays

1 Its mantra could be “We cannot represent ourselves. We ­can’t be represented”
(Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black
Study [New York: Minor Compositions, 2013], 20). And though Harney and Moten
use the plural first person to make the case for the undercommons, I am inspired by
their commitment to a collectivity that is not indexed to institutionality and that
is relational. I consider the ­matter of the commons, collectivity, and oneness in the
conclusion.
2 Shepherd explores some of this terrain in his poetry, especially the first section
of Some Are Drowning (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); and his
par­tic­u­lar use of the lyric direct address in “Slaves” seems resonant with his use
of the second person in the essay. Also see Reginald Shepherd, “An Interview with
Reginald Shepherd,” by Charles H. Rowell, Callaloo 21, no. 2 (1998): 290–307. In
regard to thinking about literary expressions of black queer interracial desire, see
Darieck Scott, “Jungle Fever? Black Gay Identity Politics, White Dick, and the
Utopian Bedroom,” glq 1, no. 3 (1994): 299–321; Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Black-
ness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: New
York University Press, 2010); Robert Reid-­Pharr, Black. Gay. Man: Essays (New York:
New York University Press, 2001); Kendall Thomas, “ ‘­Ain’t Nothing like the Real
­Thing’: Black Masculinity, Gay Sexuality, and the Jargon of Authenticity,” in The
House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New
York: Vintage, 1998), 116–135; Stefanie Dunning, Queer in Black and White: Interracial-
ity, Same Sex Desire, and Con­temporary African American Culture (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2009); and David A. Gerstner, Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black
Male Homo­sexuality, and the Cinematic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012).
And in citing Scott, I want to recall his notion of a politics without defense noted
at the end of the previous chapter. Fi­nally, the territory Shepherd explores h­ ere, es-
pecially the specificity of thinking about the black queer male subject as a negative
inflection of (white) masculinity, reminds me of James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
(New York: Vintage Books, 2013), as well as the mix of abjection and the negative in
Hilton Als, The ­Women (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996).
3 See Dagmawi Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the
Early Era of aids (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), especially the
introduction, and Brad McCoy, “Chiasmus: An Impor­tant Structural Device Com-
monly Found in Biblical Lit­er­a­ture,” cts Journal 9 (2003): 18–34. Perhaps the most
iconic chiasmus in the black literary canon is what Frederick Douglass writes a­ fter
his fight with Edward Covey: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you s­ hall
see how a slave was made a man” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip
Smith [New York: Dover, 1995], 39).

Notes to Chapter 4 197

 4 The reference to Eliot is oblique, through the phrase “objective correlative” in the
essay’s opening paragraph.
5 See Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), xii;
emphasis in the original. I am implying a relationship between aesthetics, plea­sure,
and innovation, an implication that is informed by my study of Harryette Mullen,
“Incessant Elusives: The Oppositional Poetics of Erica Hunt and ­Will Alexander,”
in The Cracks between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 173–182; and Daphne Brooks’s idiom
of troubling style in “Afro-­sonic Feminist Praxis,” in Black Per­for­mance Theory, ed.
Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2014), 204–222. My reference to the “fantastic” borrows from Tzvetan Todorov, The
Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1975). Indeed, my use of “fantastic” rather than “futuristic” reflects my sense
that the suspending aesthetic quality originates in the specificity of smallness, in the
phenomenological tendering in the body, such that time and space are remade not
out ­there but in ­here (see esp. 24–40 of Todorov, Fantastic). As Lee Edelman argues
in Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge,
1994), “Language, syntax, the appurtenances of ‘style,’ perform more truly than they
register an erotic cathexis, a condensation or dilation of plea­sure” (25; emphases in the
original).
I am also thinking with Aliyyah I. Abdur-­Rahman, “The Black Ecstatic,” glq
24, no. 2–3 (2018): 343–365, which explores plea­sure via José Esteban Muñoz’s work,
not as a futurity but as “a beyond that is not temporal . . . ​but that reaches in and
reckons with the ruinous now as the site of regenerative capacity and of renewed
po­liti­cal agency” (344). Relevant to studying through this question are works by
Audre Lorde (“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in ­Sister Outsider: Essays and
Speeches [New York: Crossing, 1984], 53–59), Jennifer C. Nash (The Black Body in Ec-
stasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014]),
Ashon T. Crawley (Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility [New York:
Fordham University Press, 2016]), Roland Barthes (Plea­sure of the Text [New York:
Hill and Wang, 1975]), and especially Toril Moi, whose consideration of attention,
reading, and plea­sure in Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies ­after Wittgenstein,
Austin, and Cavell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), chap. 10, is a useful
way to imagine the speaker’s inhabitance in the essay.
6 The reprisal and its language recall Cameron Awkward-­Rich’s poems discussed in
chapter 2.
7 For more, see Barry Stampfl, “Hans Vaihinger’s Ghostly Presence in Con­temporary
Literary Studies,” Criticism 40, no. 3 (1998): 437–454; and Kwame Anthony Appiah,
As If: Idealizations and Ideals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), the
latter of which uses Vaihinger to extend a philosophical appeal for multiplicity.
8 My use of “floating signifier” h ­ ere is a direct allusion to Patricia J. Williams’s
explication of polar bears throughout The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law
Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. 6, 7.
9 This suspension is phenomenological, in the way Sara Ahmed describes the idea
of reaching: “Even when ­things are within reach, we still have to reach for ­those

198 Notes to Chapter 4

 t­ hings for them to be reached. The work of inhabiting space involves a dynamic
negotiation between what is familiar and unfamiliar, such that it is pos­si­ble for the
world to create new impressions” (Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, ­Others
[Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006], 7–8).
10 I am making direct reference to Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007), which is one frame for beholding Shepherd’s
ideas. That is, I think about Shepherd’s essaying abjection as a magic that operates
through the negative. And my cohering of chiasmus, exchange, and terrible feel-
ings is inspired, in part, by Chela Sandoval’s reading of Frantz Fanon’s title phrase
“black skin, white masks” as a “chiasmic meta­phor,” a “location, which is neither
inside nor outside, neither good nor evil, . . . ​an interstitial site out of which new,
undecidable forms of being and original theories and practices for emancipation,
are produced” (Methodology of the Oppressed [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000], 84–85). In regard to abjection, I could cite again Scott, Extravagant
Abjection; Stephen Michael Best’s idiom of “beautiful elimination” in None like
Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018),
chap. 1; Ahmed’s consideration of shame in The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010) (“a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as
being ashamed of you” [116]); José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and
Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other stds),” Theatre Journal
52, no. 1 (2000): 67–71; Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect,
the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position,” Signs 31, no. 3 (2006):
675–688; Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2003); Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2012); Aida Levy-­Hussen, How to Read African-­American Lit­er­a­ture (New York:
New York University Press, 2016), particularly chap. 3, “The Missing Archive [on
Depression]”; Nash’s discussion of injury and wounding in The Black Body in Ecstasy;
John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),
particularly his thinking about shame in chap. 1; Alexander Weheliye’s overall argu-
ment about suffering and the proj­ect of black studies in Habeas Viscus: Racializing
­ uman (Durham, NC: Duke
Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the H
University Press, 2014); and Kathryn Bond Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful
Shame (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Shepherd explores negation
and otherness in other essays too; see Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics,
and the Freedom of Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), where
he makes “a resolute defense of poetry’s autonomy” (1) and which includes the
argumentative essay “The Other’s Other: Against Identity Poetry, for Possibility.”
11 See the discussion of individualism and oneness in chapter 2.
12 The distinction between grief and grievance is Robert Frost’s, and it is taken up in
affect studies, especially in Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis,
Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), where Cheng
argues that grief “speaks in a dif­fer­ent language—­a language that may seem inchoate
­because it is not fully reconcilable to the vocabulary of social formulation or ideol-
ogy” (x). Moreover, Cheng argues that “how a racially impugned person pro­cesses
the experience of denigration exposes a continuous interaction between sociality

Notes to Chapter 4 199

 and privacy, history and presence, politics and ontology” (x). On melancholia,
also see Sharon P. Holland, Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Woubshet, Calendar of Loss; and Fred
Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2003).
13 See Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-­slavery Subjects (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010). I think of this ambivalence as an “existential sur-
prise,” in the phrase poet and scholar Ed Pavlić uses to describe a poetics of “self-
hood that claims a fluid, durable, and authoritative kind of presence in the world”
(“How to ‘Heal a Mouth Shut This Way,’ ” Black Scholar 43 [2013]: 103). Such surprise
looms, for example, in the speaker’s hesitancies and diversions as he moves through
oblique anecdotes of rejection, talking wanderingly—­that is, without conclusion—­
about being. And I must cite h ­ ere Nasir (Nandi) Marumo for conversations about
monstrosity and Shepherd’s aesthetics.
14 Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine, introduction to The Racial Imaginary: Writers on
Race in the Life of the Mind, ed. Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap
(New York: Fence Books, 2015), 20.
15 My use of “exploit” is inspired partly by Anna Holmes’s meditation on the distinc-
tion between empathy and exploitation in the “Bookends” section of the New York
Times Book Review, though my use incorporates one into the other: “­Here’s how
I see it: Empathy is the ability to re­spect and maybe even understand another’s
point of view, revealing larger truths about ourselves and o­ thers. Exploitation is
the use of another’s experience for personal gain. Empathy requires self-­awareness.
Exploitation is marked by self-­interest. Empathy is about deepening connections.
Exploitation, about filling one’s pockets, literal or figurative” (May 29, 2016, 29).
16 In using “optimism” ­here, I am in conversation with Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), though Berlant argues that “agency and
urgency . . . ​extend from imperiled bodies” (101). I ­don’t think of the essay as a body of
urgency that generates from (and in response to) the po­liti­cal peril of being alive.
17 I am invoking Judith Butler’s argument in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performa-
tive (New York: Routledge, 1997), particularly the idea that speech is always already
beyond the control of the speaker.
18 Wall hedges in considering how Ralph Ellison “turns to the essay to answer
personal questions” about collective black agency (3). I want to note, again, my ap-
preciation for the breadth of Wall’s scholarship in On Freedom and the ­Will to Adorn:
The Art of the African American Essay (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2018), which makes clear the m ­ atter of the essay and public intellectualism.
My difference from Wall (and Early) is that I think of the personal essay as a poetic
and, as such, I am interested in its capacity to work beyond the po­liti­cal impera-
tive of an antiblack world logic. For more on the par­tic­u­lar history of the African
American essay, see Cheryl B. Butler, The Art of the Black Essay: From Meditation to
Transcendence (New York: Routledge, 2003), which, in thinking about the essay as a
meditative form, falls much closer to my own interest in the genre. Indeed, Butler
acknowledges the dissonance between the essay’s wandering and conceptualiza-
tions of black public intellectualism (see the introduction, esp. 7–16).

200 Notes to Chapter 4

19 I am borrowing the notion of surrogacy in keeping with Morrison’s argument in
Playing in the Dark. ­These ­matters of audience inform my reading of Jamaica Kin-
caid’s diasporic wandering in A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1988); see the previous chapter. See also Chinua Achebe, “En­glish and the African
Writer,” Transition 18 (1965): 27–30; Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The
Politics of Language in African Lit­er­a­ture (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986); Mar-
lene Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Charlottetown,
Prince Edward Island: Ragweed, 1989); and, more recently, Binyavanga Wainaina,
“How to Write about Africa,” Granta 92, Winter 2005.
20 See, for example, James Baldwin, Notes on a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 2012); Marita
Bonner, “On Being Young, a W ­ oman, and Colored,” in Frye Street and Other Environs:
The Collected Works of Marita Bonner, ed. Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Sticklin
(Boston: Beacon, 1987), 3–8; Ta-­Nehisi Coates, “The Black Journalist and the Racial
Mountain,” Atlantic, June 2, 2016 (which revises Langston Hughes’s iconic “The
Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Nation, June 23, 1926); Ralph Ellison, “­Little
Man at Chehaw Station,” American Scholar 47, no. 1 (1978): 25–48, and “The World
and the Jug,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1995), 107–143; Roxane Gay, Bad
Feminist (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014); Zadie Smith, “Their Eyes W ­ ere Watching
God: What Does Soulful Mean?,” in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (New York:
Penguin, 2009), 3–13; and Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights. I could say, too, that
the notion of the essay’s prerogative might be a way to navigate pronouns and audi-
ence in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2014).
21 The Eady quotation is from Toi Derricotte, The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 121–122. This consideration of audience echoes
my explication of the watcherlessness of quiet in The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond
Re­sis­tance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 22,
and also acknowledges the par­tic­u­lar work that scholars have done to explore the
question in regard to the Black Arts/Aesthetic movement and to black nationalism
in general; see especially Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety
and the Prob­lem of African-­American Identity (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996); Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African
American Poetry (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2011); Margo Crawford, Black
Post-­blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-­First-­Century Aesthetics (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2017), especially the idiom of “public interiority” on
167; and GerShun Avilez, Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2016). Further consideration of (and caution about)
racialized publicness can be found in Hortense J. Spillers, “The Crisis of the Negro
Intellectual: A Post-­date,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Lit­er­a­ture and
Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 428–470; Mae G. Henderson,
“Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black W ­ oman Writer’s Liter-
ary Tradition,” in Changing Our Own Words, ed. Cheryl Wall (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1989), particularly her argument about expressive ways
that are “outside the realm of public discourse and foreign to the known tongues of
humankind” (122); Patricia J. Williams’s thinking about privacy and dispossession
in The Alchemy of Race and Rights; and Simone Browne’s explication of publicness

Notes to Chapter 4 201

 and surveilling terror in Dark M ­ atters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2015). Fi­nally, in regard to the essay genre, Gerald Early’s
“Gnostic or Gnomic?” (in Speech and Power: The African American Essay and Its Cultural
Content from Polemics to Pulpit, ed. Gerald Early, 2 vols. [New York: Ecco, 1992],
1:vii–xv) considers how class inflects the m ­ atter of audience—as in for whom and to
whom is the black essayist, as a public intellectual, writing. For more on thinking
about the idiom of the public intellectual, also see Hazel Carby, Race Men (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Eric Lott, The Disappearing Liberal
Intellectual (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability:
The Intellectual Thought of Race ­Women (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,
2017); and Robert Reid-­Pharr, “Cosmopolitan Afrocentric Mulatto Intellectual,” in
Black. Gay. Man, 44–61.
22 In this way, the idiom of reading does not import the mess of racialized audi-
ence, but instead luxuriates in the relationality of the black one. Not reading for
comprehension or translation, but reading as the thrall of being in relationality,
where the speaker makes himself the subject and gives back to himself the right to be
ontologically of—­rather than before—­the act of reading. My thinking about reading
­here is informed first by Moi’s Revolution of the Ordinary, where she theorizes “reading
as a practice of acknowledgement” (196), as well as by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger
Chartier, A History of Reading in the West (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press,
2003), especially its introduction; Heather Williams, Self-­Taught (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 2007); Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Alan Jacob, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of
Distraction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Tara Bynum, “Phillis Wheatley’s
Pleasures,” Boston University World of Ideas, October 22, 2017 (and her thinking about
plea­sure in “Phillis Wheatley on Friendship,” Legacy 31, no. 1 [2014]: 42–51); and even
works with which I disagree, like Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological
Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996). I am also inspired by a cohort of black writers’
thinking about the dynamics of writing: Jamaica Kincaid’s characterization of the
“perfect reader” in My ­Brother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998); Patricia J.
Williams’s extended thinking about writing as “sacrifice, not denial” (92) in The Al-
chemy of Race and Rights; Marlene Nourbese Philip’s still-compelling thesis on writing
as spy-­like in She Tries Her Tongue; James Baldwin’s specific exploration of writing and
being in “Every­body’s Protest Novel” (in Notes of a Native Son, 13–23); and Harryette
Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including
the Excluded,” boundary 2 26, no. 1 (1999): 198–203. On witnessing, see James Baldwin’s
work, especially his articulation of the term in the preface to Evidence of T ­ hings Not
Seen (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), xiii–­xvi; Joshua Miller, “The Discovery of What It
Means to Be a Witness,” in James Baldwin Now, ed. Dwight McBride (New York: New
York University Press, 1999), 331–359, and Ed Pavlić, “Open the Unusual Door: Visions
from the Dark Win­dow in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Early Poems,” Callaloo 28, no. 3 (2005):
780–796 (even as both essays explore witnessing by focusing on what Baldwin does
for his readers); Naisargi Dave’s caution about the limits of witnessing in “Wit-
ness: H
­ umans, Animals, and the Politics of Becoming,” Cultural Anthropology 29,
no. 3 (2014): 433–456; and Giorgio Agamben’s formulation in Remnants of Auschwitz:

202 Notes to Chapter 4

 The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002), esp. 25–40. Fi­nally, the
consideration of reading h ­ ere includes aspects of the arguments about criticism
and critique, including t­ hose made by Eve K. Sedgwick, Stephen Best, Heather
Love, Sharon Marcus, and Rita Felski; see Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary, chap. 8,
for a crisp summary.
23 Trethewey’s comment is from her brief introduction to the Poem column in the
New York Times Sunday Magazine, July 5, 2015.
24 The essay is a text of relation, and relation is a poetic habitat according to Glissant
(“poetics of relation”) and Martin Buber (relation’s surprises are “queer lyric dra-
matic episodes” [I and Thou, trans. Walter Arnold Kaufmann [New York: Touch-
stone, 1996], 84). In making this point, I want to acknowledge that I am focusing on
essays from the late twentieth ­century, especially in light of the historical argument
Cheryl Wall makes about the difference that social/po­liti­cal time makes in essaying
(see On Freedom and the ­Will to Adorn). And still, my larger claim about the essay
and aliveness—­about the philosophical value of the personal—is not specific to
era. Publishing and appraisal are m ­ atters of temporality and of history, but I ­don’t
believe they overdetermine what lives in the h ­ uman or how the ­human comes to
understand and engage their being alive.
25 Though I am not reading closely any essay by James Baldwin, this sense of openness
and terror is explicated superbly in “Nothing Personal,” which is cited briefly in the
next chapter.
26 Benjamin Demott, “Passing,” review of The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey, by
Toi Derricotte, New York Times, November 2, 1997.
27 The Kafka quotation is from Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Posthumous
Prose Writings (London: Secker and Warburg, 1954), 324. French feminist theorist Hé-
lène Cixous famously cites this passage in describing writing as descent; see Cixous,
Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5–6.
28 In thinking about the creative potency of the speaker, I am drawing especially on the
ways Philip imagines the black w ­ oman as an artist in “The Absence of Writing or How
I Almost Became a Spy,” in She Tries Her Tongue, 10–25. Indeed, in “The Black ­Woman
as Artist: The Queer Erotics of Rita Dove’s Beulah,” Tulsa Studies in ­Women’s Lit­er­a­ture
37, no. 2 (2018): 397–418, I argue that black w ­ omen’s criticism in the 1980s “make[s]
the philosophical case that negotiations of black femaleness are akin to the making of
art—­that black femaleness is ontology and that ontology is creativity” (403). (­There
are striking parallels between the threats that domestic f­ amily dynamics make to
black female girlhood in Dove’s collection and in Derricotte’s essay.) Also, Derricotte
describes distance and pain as a function in her lived relationship with her f­ ather:
“My ­father encouraged me to have an emotional distance between myself and t­ hings
that other p­ eople would call gruesome. . . . ​My f­ ather could also make ­people suffer so
much. He would put my mom down for crying, and when he beat me, he ­wouldn’t let
me cry. This was a very power­ful form of control, and it cut me off from my emotions”
(Toi Derricotte, “Toi Derricotte and the Psy­chol­ogy of the Sublime: An Interview,” by
Jessica M. Brophy, African American Review 50, no. 3 [2017]: 252).
29 In Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2012), Mel Y. Chen posits that “first-­and second-­person animacies,

Notes to Chapter 4 203

 all ­else being equal, tend to value higher in animacy than third-­person ones” (26),
though I think the case for third-personness is dif­fer­ent in a black world context.
Derricotte describes childhood abuse—­though not necessarily sexual abuse—in
vari­ous entries in The Black Notebooks.
30 My use of “opulence” is inspired by the mc in Jennie Livingston, Paris Is Burning
(Burbank, CA: Miramax, 1990), and echoes Cheryl Wall’s adoption of Zora Neale
Hurston’s phrase “the w ­ ill to adorn” as part of the title for her book on the art of
the essay, the aesthetic overture of the genre; see On Freedom and the ­Will to Adorn.
(Also note Wall’s attention to “the [essay] form [as a] win­dow . . . ​into the writer’s
mind” [7].) The comment about thought and quotation marks borrows from Edward
St. Aubyn’s review of Javier Marías, The Infatuations, which claims that Marías blurs
“the distinction between what is said and what is only thought” by using quotation
marks for both (New York Times, August 11, 2013, 8).
31 This discussion of the archive, time, fabulation, and incompleteness recalls the discus-
sion of time and subjunctivity in chapter 3 (see the endnote t­ here) and also invokes
Saidiya Hartman’s explication of the intersection between fabulation and archives in
“Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14; and Aimee Bahng’s formulation
of fabulation and fabrication in “Specters of the Pacific: Salt Fish Drag and Atomic
Hauntologies in the Era of Ge­ne­tic Modification,” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 4
(2015): 663–683. Also see Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings; Achille Mbembe, “The Power
of the Archive and Its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al.
(Berlin: Springer, 2002), 19–26; and David Scott, “Introduction: On the Archaeologies
of Black Memory,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): v–­xvi. We might think of Derricotte’s—­
and Shepherd’s—­aesthetic praxis as one of “inquiry and assembly” in the way that
Paul C. Taylor uses that term (drawing from Stuart Hall); see Paul C. Taylor, Black Is
Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2016), 3. Or
as the phenomenology of incoherent being from Lauren Berlant’s formulation in
talking about sex, such that the speaker is “not . . . ​shocked to discover their incoher-
ence or the incoherence of the world; they find it comic, feel a ­little ashamed of it, or
are interested in it, excited by it, and exhausted by it too” (Berlant and Edelman, Sex,
or the Unbearable 6). Fi­nally, in Derricotte’s passage, one c­ an’t help but hear echoes of
Immanuel Kant, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, and Audre Lorde.
32 ­Here I am thinking especially in the context Muñoz’s articulates in Cruising Utopia:
“The pre­sent must be known in relation to the alternative temporal and spatial maps
provided by a perception of past and ­future affective worlds” (27). I read Muñoz’s
caution against the pre­sent not as a rejection of feeling and aesthetics—he makes a
case for the quotidian, ­after all, a case that resonates with the everyday ­matter of the
personal essay—­but as a commitment to a queer politics of plea­sure. I am also think-
ing in regard to Sara Ahmed’s thinking about the pre­sent in Queer Phenomenology.
33 Carl H. Klaus, in “­Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay” (in Essayists on the Essay:
Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-­French [Iowa City: Uni-
versity of Iowa Press, 2012]), asserts that the speaker seems to “speak methodically
unmethodically” (xx), which is a way to proj­ect the “quality of the author’s mind”
(xxiii). The reference to “­after” engages the case that Theodor Adorno makes for
the time of the essay; see the discussion in chapter 3.

204 Notes to Chapter 4

34 See Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000).
35 Thanks to John Casey for helping me clarify this claim. See Koritha Mitchell’s
explication of the vagaries of evidence in her introduction to Living with Lynch-
ing: African American Lynching Plays, Per­for­mance, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2012).
36 I had intended to write about Als’s The ­Women, though the arc of this chapter made
more sense with Shepherd’s and Derricotte’s shorter essays. But Als’s prose practice
is superb, since even his argumentative essays ­tremble with the wiliness of a free-­
minded speaker. For an excellent recent example, see his stunning personal history
essay “My M ­ other’s Dreams for Her Son, and All Black ­Children,” New Yorker,
June 29, 2020. Thanks, also, to Devon Clifton for thinking about free black being.

Chapter 5. Aliveness and Ethics

1 Toni Morrison, “A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” by Bill Moyers, in Conversa-
tions with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille K. Taylor-­Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1994), 272. Thanks to Mike King for com­pany in revising this chapter.
2 See James Phelan, “Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading,” Style 32, no. 2
(1998): 318–333; Mariangela Palladino, Ethics and Aesthetics in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2018); and Yvette Christiansë, Toni Morrison: An Ethical
Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), though all three works focus
on the ethics of Morrison’s narrative choices. Also see Shatema Threadcraft’s read-
ing of Margaret Garner’s case in Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body
Politic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). One of the hallmarks of Beloved is
that Morrison leaves the question of rightness open: “She [Baby Suggs] could not
approve or condemn Sethe’s rough choice” (180). Frank B. Wilderson III, in Afropes-
simism (New York: Liveright, 2020), reads Morrison’s comment in regard to death as
sanctuary (92)—­that is, he focuses on one half of Morrison’s statement as I choose
to focus on the other. Fi­nally, I am inspired by Farah Jasmine Griffin’s study of the
literary ethical in her new work, as reflected in her talk “In Pursuit of Justice and
Grace: Reflections on the African-­American Literary Tradition,” delivered April 17,
2018, at the University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Amherst.
3 James Baldwin, “An Open Letter to My S­ ister Angela Y. Davis,” in The Cross of
Redemption: Uncollected Writings (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 257.
4 Questions about the racial limits of ethics run through much of black critical stud-
ies, including the field of black pessimism. See a number of authors cited ­earlier
(especially in the introduction), including Lewis R. Gordon, Nahum Dmitri Chan-
dler, Denise Ferriera da Silva, Frank B. Wilderson III, David Ross Fryer, Achille
Mbembe (Critique of Black Reason [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017], esp.
chap. 1), Lindon W. Barrett, Ashon T. Crawley, Terrion L. Williamson, Calvin War-
ren, Shatema Threadcraft, Paul C. Taylor, and Fred Moten (especially “The Case of
Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218). Also see the case that Debra Walker
King makes about the utility of black pain in African Americans and the Culture of Pain
(Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2008). Central in my thinking about

Notes to Chapter 5 205

 ethics is the notion of care articulated in Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness
and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
5 In ­Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007),
Silva argues that ­there is no axiology for blackness in a racist world; she extends
this argument in “­Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Black-
ness t­ oward the End of the World,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 81–97. Also see
Lindon W. Barrett’s extensive consideration of black (non)value as a function
of modern coloniality (Blackness and Value: Seeing Double [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998]). My own interest is in an idiom of value that could be
­imagined as inherent in ­human life, even if the terms of inherency get distorted by
the ideologies of modernity. As such, I mostly use pronouns that avoid imposing
a gender binary—­“themself ” and “their” in the singular case, or “they” to speak of
the singular one. This ­doing, though sometimes ungrammatical, is in keeping with
the open quality of a black world imaginary I am exploring in the book.
6 James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 2012), 23.
7 I am thinking h ­ ere in the tradition of ordinary language philosophy; see Toril Moi,
Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies a­ fter Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2017), especially her thinking with Simone Weil, Iris
Murdoch, and Cora Diamond in chap. 10; Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Cavell, Themes Out of School:
Effects and ­Causes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Also see Kristie
Dotson’s argument about black ­women and livable philosophy in “How Is This Paper
Philosophy?,” Comparative Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2012): 3–29; Dotson, “‘Thinking Familiar
with the Interstitial’: An Introduction,” Hypatia 29, no. 1 (2014): 1–17; V. Denise James,
“Musing: A Black Feminist Phi­los­o­pher: Is That Pos­si­ble?,” Hypatia 29, no. 1 (2014):
189–195; Devonya N. Havis, “ ‘Now, How You Sound’: Considering a Dif­fer­ent
Philosophical Praxis,” Hypatia 29, no. 1 (2014): 237–252; and the case for “ordinary
ethics” in Michael Lambek, ed., Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2010) and in Veena Das’s essay “Ordinary
Ethics” in A Companion to Moral Anthropology, ed. Didier Fassin (Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012), 133–149.
8 ­There is a parallel question ­shaped by “why”—as in “Why do I live?”—­but the
impulse of such a question leans t­ oward causation, a dangerous inclination as
Morrison’s narrator Claudia tells us in The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage, 2007). My
study of ­these ideas has been s­ haped by Sarah Bakewell’s terrific At the Existentialist
Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-­Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert
Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-­Ponty and ­Others (New York: Other Press,
2016), existentialism being impor­tant to questions about ­human life. Also see Todd
May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
which explores the role that “How might one live?” plays in Continental philosophy
and in Deleuzean thinking; Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence
and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought,” Con­temporary Phi-
losophy 11 (2007): 123–130, which distinguishes between the ethical as a transcendent
imperative (“What must I do?”) as well as a po­liti­cal specificity (“What can I do?”);
Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Pro­g­

206 Notes to Chapter 5

 ress,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984),
340–372; Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s Ethics in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San
Francisco: City Lights, 2001), chap. 2; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s engage-
ment of Derrida in “Responsibility,” boundary 2 21, no. 3 (1994): 19–64.
9 Sula’s awareness of her life as a force is related to her accounting of the moment of
Chicken ­Little’s death.
10 See the engagement of Sula’s moral agency in chapter 2. And in regard to the
ethic of full living in Morrison’s works, see David Z. Wehner, “ ‘To Live This Life
Intensely and Well’: The Rebirth of Milkman Dead in Toni Morrison’s Song of
Solomon,” in Toni Morrison and the Bible: Contested Intertextualities, ed. Shirley A. Stave
(Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2006), 71–93.
11 I am grateful to Lubabah Chowdhury, whose question and email (April 2017)
helped me clarify this point, as I am to Diego Millan for a sustained conversation
about care and regard.
12 See Jane Bennett’s arguments about the ethical and the affective in Vibrant ­Matter:
A Po­liti­cal Ecol­ogy of ­Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) and The En-
chantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton
University Press, 2001), as well as the cases that Sara Ahmed (The Cultural Politics of
Emotions [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004]) and Anne Cvetkovich (An
Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures [Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003]) make for studying emotions.
13 As sometimes translated, Socrates is recorded in Plato’s Apology of Socrates (line 38a)
as saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” an idea that broadly character-
izes the work of philosophy. In addition to the works cited ­earlier in the body and
in succeeding endnotes, my thinking on study is informed by Stefano Harney and
Fred Moten in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor
Compositions, 2013), especially their distinction between critique and study. I am also
drawing on poet Mary Oliver’s invitations to pay attention, especially in the poems
“The Summer Day” and “Wild Geese,” in New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon,
2004), 94, 110; and on my thinking about the nature of prayer in Kevin Quashie, The
Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Re­sis­tance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 2012). I also come to this notion of studying through reading bell hooks,
especially ­Sisters of the Yam: Black ­Women and Self-­Recovery (Boston: South End, 1993) and
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
14 Nikky Finney, Head Off and Split (Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern
University Press, 2011), unpaginated final page.
15 See Head Off and Split, especially the poems “Resurrection of the Errand Girl: An
Introduction” and “Instruction, Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver
Leica,” 3–4, 97.
16 While I keep in mind the incisive critiques of work—­see, for example, Jackie Wang,
Carceral Capitalism (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2018)—my own interest in recover-
ing the term draws on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of inoperativity as explored in Sergie
Prozorov’s reading in Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction (London: Edinburgh
University Press, 2014). Also see Joshua Chambers-­Letson’s terrific explication of
Nina Simone’s minoritarian work per­for­mance in ­After the Party: A Manifesto for

Notes to Chapter 5 207

 Queer of Color Life (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 37–80; and Kathi
Weeks, The Prob­lem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imagi-
naries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), especially her thinking about the
terms “work” and “­labor” in the introduction (1–36). Echoed h ­ ere, too, is my think-
ing with Saidiya Hartman’s brief prose-­poem “Manual for General House­work” (in
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval [New York:
W. W. Norton, 2019], 77–79), which conceptualizes black female ­labor via terms of
subjection, even as the histories characterized in the book suggest other—­richer—­
possibilities for thinking about what black ­women do with their hands.
17 Vinson Cunningham calls Baldwin’s clauses “Jamesian,” though he means this in a
dif­fer­ent sense from my attention to Baldwin’s syntax. Writing in the essay “Why
Ta-­Nehisi Coates I­ sn’t Our James Baldwin,” Cunningham claims that “Baldwin’s
Jamesian sentences are long, but long b­ ecause they are almost ­legal in intent: Each
dependent clause hedges, qualifies, clarifies, and eliminates room for specious
readings. (Coates recently tweeted his admiration of ­these rhetorical feats.) When
Baldwin fi­nally hits the period, his meaning is bare, and the only option left to the
reader is to decide w­ hether to agree” (New York, August 5, 2015). For more on the
relationship between Baldwin’s aesthetic and that of Henry James, see Robert J.
Corber, Homo­sexuality in Cold War Amer­i­ca: Re­sis­tance and the Crisis of Masculinity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), chap. 6; as well as James Baldwin, “An
Interview with James Baldwin on Henry James,” by David Adam Leeming, Henry
James Review 8, no. 1 (1986): 47–56.
18 Thanks to a student in my undergraduate Black Poetics class, Semi Oloko, for sug-
gesting the Judas inference.
19 For more on Clifton’s use of Lucifer, see Mandolin Brassaw, “The Light That Came
to Lucille Clifton: Beyond Lucille and Lucifer,” melus 37, no. 3 (2012): 43–70. Satan,
in book 5 of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, declaims God’s authority by disavowing that
he, Satan, originated from God. “No one before us,” Satan advances. Scholars see
this as Satan’s hubris, arrogance, and failing, but Clifton, in imagining Lucifer,
embraces this notion of automony, a self-­authoring that d ­ oesn’t preclude relation
to the world. Also see Hilary Holladay, Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), esp. chaps. 5, 6; and Rachel
Elizabeth Harding, “Authority, History, and Everyday Mysticism in the Poetry
of Lucille Clifton: A Womanist View,” Meridians 12, no. 1 (2014): 36–57. Thanks to
Marney Rathbun for a shared love of Clifton’s Lucifer poems in her undergraduate
thesis work (and in classes)—­and for casting Lucifer’s illumination in a gift I ­will
remember forever.
20 The quotation is from Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary, 91; Moi also refers to such
inhabitance as being lost (89). For more on loneliness as a feature of creative and
philosophical ­doing, see Denise Riley, “The Right to Be Lonely,” in Impersonal Passion:
Language as Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 49–58, the last para-
graph of which mirrors the two iterations of loneliness in the coda of Morrison’s Be-
loved; Wynton Marsalis, “Premature Autopsies (Sermon),” which includes the phrase
“the loneliness that mastery demands” (track 4 on The Majesty of the Blues [Columbia
Rec­ords, 1989]); and Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker (London:

208 Notes to Chapter 5

 Penguin Classics, 1980). Also see Darius Bost’s exploration of “loneliness as black gay
longing” (23) in Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Re­nais­sance and the Politics of
Vio­lence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). I am grateful to Andre C. Willis
and Jacques Khalip for conversations that amplified my thinking ­here.
21 Thanks to Quinn Anex-­Ries for reminding me of this passage.
22 My engagement of loneliness gestures, in part, to the question of community and
collectivity in black study/studies. Though the distinction between community
and collectivity is addressed in the conclusion, I want to acknowledge ­here some
scholarly thinking about collectivity and black studies. For example, Hortense J.
Spillers, in “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-­date” (Black, White, and in Color:
Essays on American Lit­er­a­ture and Culture [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003], 428–470), reminds us that Harold Cruse’s call for black studies was t­ oward
many blacknesses, not blackness as singular legible value—­black study as a praxis
of black being, rather than black study intended to produce a recuperative idea of
blackness. A similar claim ­toward multiplicity runs through Harney and Moten,
Undercommons, and is amplified in Moten’s critique of Hannah Arendt’s Of Vio­lence:
“Black study, in its turning over of the very ground of the distinction between intelligence and its
Other; which is to say black presence, in its continual displacement and deferral of
­here, now, and the subject which they determine and by which they are determined;
which is to say blackness, which in its communicability is not reducible to the black
­people” (The Universal Machine [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018], 67; em-
phasis added). Also see Christina Sharpe, “Black Studies: In the Wake,” Black Scholar
44, no. 2 (2014): 59–69; Jared Sexton’s description of black studies in “The Social Life
of Social Death: On Afro-­pessimism and Black Optimism,” Intensions 5 (2011), http://­
www​.­yorku​.­ca​/­intent​/­issue5​/­articles​/­jaredsexton​.­php; and Stephen Michael Best’s
caution about the cult of voice and cult of death (None like Us: Blackness, Belonging,
Aesthetic Life [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018]).
23 See James Deetz, In Small ­Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New
York: Anchor Books, 1996); David K. Wiggins, “The Play of Slave C ­ hildren in the
Plantation Communities of the Old South, 1820–1860,” Journal of Sport History 7,
no. 2 (1980): 21–39; Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-­Century
Amer­i­ca (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); and Kym S. Rice, World of
a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States (Santa Barbara:
abc-­c lio, 2011), esp. 187–188. In my estimation, “regardless” is not akin to the
term “unapologetic” that circulates in con­temporary popu­lar culture. As Wesley
Morris concludes in his First Words essay “Guilt ­Free” (from the New York Times
Sunday Magazine, July 30, 2017), “­There’s something celebratory in the phrase
[“unapologetic”], but it’s also defensive and defiant. Nearly all of this work has white
patronage. So a g­ reat deal of the astonishment over the proud detail of its blackness
comes with an awareness of a white gaze. Blackness was never forced to owe black
­people an apology for anything” (13; emphasis added). My argument for “regardless”
imagines a black world. In a way, one could say that “regardless” is distinct from the
term “despite” and could draw a parallel with Reginald Shepherd’s reference, in
the previous chapter, to the philosophical condition of “as if ” being distinct from the
phrase “if only.”

Notes to Chapter 5 209

24 Baby Suggs could be read ­here and elsewhere as a practitioner of Aristotelean virtue
ethics, particularly when she claims, “Every­thing depends on knowing how much,”
and “Good is knowing when to stop” (87). For a recent exploration of Baby Suggs
as a source of ethical consideration, see Pamela M. Hall, “The ‘Desolated Center’:
Baby Suggs, Holy, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” in Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh,
Holy Flesh, ed. Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd [New York: Routledge, 2014],
164–181). On virtue ethics in general, see Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, eds., Virtue
Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Lawrence Blum, “Racial Virtues,” in
Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Con­temporary Moral Prob­lems, ed. Rebecca L. Walker
and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 225–250; and Andre C. Willis,
­Toward a Humean True Religion: Genuine Theism, Moderate Hope, and Practical Moral-
ity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), esp. chap. 4. One
prob­lem in the discourse of ethics is that blackness (or race, racialization, racism)
is rarely considered, and when such happens, blackness amplifies the question of
virtue for an unmarked white subject rather than in regard to a black subject (as is
the case with Blum’s other­wise compelling essay).
25 See Katie Cannon’s iconic Black Womanist Ethics (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock,
2006), as well as Katie Cannon, Emilie M. Townes, and Angela D. Simms, eds.,
Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2011).
My argument h ­ ere is cautious about the terms of respectability, not unlike the cau-
tion in Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righ­teous Discontent: The ­Women’s Movement
in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1994). In the final chapter of that work, Higginbotham is attentive to the conser-
vative impulses of the “politics of respectability,” though sometimes readers miss
this complexity. For other considerations of respectability, see Brittney Cooper,
Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race W ­ omen (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2017); Brando Simeo Starkey, “Respectability Politics: How a Flawed
Conversation Sabotages Black Lives,” Undefeated, December 12, 2016, https://­
theundefeated​.­com​/­features​/­respectability​-­politics​-­how​-­a​-­flawed​-­conversation​
-­sabotages​-­black​-­lives​/­; Cathy J. Cohen, “Deviance as Re­sis­tance: A New Research
Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 27–45; and
especially Aimee Meredith Cox, Shapeshifters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2015). This m­ atter of dignity is one that Imani Perry explores well via the notion of
black formalism in May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (Cha-
pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and that my colleague Aliyyah
Abdur-­Rahman explores in her current work on black feminism and regard. And
though I have made overtures to ordinary language philosophy in this work, I am
also compelled by American pragmatism; see especially V. Denise James, “Theoriz-
ing Black Feminist Pragmatism,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2009):
92–99; Havis, “ ‘Now, How You Sound’ ”; and Eddie S. Glaude Jr., In a Shade of Blue:
Pragmatism and the Politics of Black Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2008). In thinking about temporality and phenomenology, see Michelle M. Wright,
Physics of Blackness: Beyond the ­Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2015), especially her notion of Epiphenomenal time and her
explication of blackness through per­for­mance theory; José Esteban Muñoz, Cruis-

210 Notes to Chapter 5

 ing Utopia: The Then and ­There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University
Press, 2009); John Manoussakis, The Ethics of Time (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017);
Heather Dyke, ed., Time and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Berlin: Springer, 2003);
Michael R. Kelly, Phenomenology and the Prob­lem of Time (London: Palgrave, 2016);
Matthew Clemente, “Introduction: On the Ethics of Time,” Journal of Theoretical and
Philosophical Psy­chol­ogy 38, no. 2 (2018): 92–95; and Robin Le Poidevin, “The Experi-
ence and Perception of Time,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015),
ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://­plato​.­stanford​.­edu​/­archives​/­sum2015​/­entries​/­time​
-­experience. In asserting the pronoun “one,” I am thinking about Stephen Best’s
critique of “we” in None like Us, as I am also thinking about the way Stefano Harney
and Fred Moten deploy “we” in a relational commons in Undercommons. (This is
discussed further in the conclusion.) Fi­nally, I am grateful to John Casey, Kristen
Maye, and Hilary Rasch for conversations that helped my thinking ­here, and to
Mike King for his engagement with the idea of regard, which, though dif­fer­ent
from my own, is companionate.
26 Toni Cade Bambara, “An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara,” by Kay Bonetti, in
Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara, ed. Thabiti Lewis (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2012), 35.
27 Sylvia Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness
a Dif­fer­ent F
­ uture: Conversations,” by Katherine McKittrick, in Sylvia Wynter: On
Being ­Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2015), 23. I know that Wynter talks about the structures of the modern world,
but I also find her work compelling for its commitment to the enchanting idea of
the ­human.
28 My citation of “mea­sure” invokes uses of the term by Audre Lorde (“Uses of the
Erotic,” in ­Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches [New York: Crossing, 1984], 57) and
Toni Morrison (“The Nobel Lecture in Lit­er­at­ ure,” in What Moves at the Margin:
Selected Nonfiction, ed. Carolyn C. Denard [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2008], 203).
29 The letter is addressed, “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear ­peoples.
Dear Every­thing. Dear God” (242).
30 On elliptical sentences, see Richard Gunter, “Elliptical Sentences in American En­
glish,” Lingua 12, no. 2 (1963): 137–150; and Richard J. Stainton, Words and Thoughts:
Subsentences, Ellipsis, and the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), esp. chaps. 5, 6.
31 For another beautiful understanding of work, see Philip Levine’s iconic poem
“What Work Is,” in What Work Is (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 18–19.
32 See, for example, Ruth Franklin, “Tracy K. Smith, Amer­i­ca’s Poet Laureate, Is a
­Woman with a Mission,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, April 10, 2018.
33 See Robert Frost, “Mowing,” in The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, ed.
Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 1969), 17.
34 Neal’s statement is a riff off of Wittgenstein’s equation from Tractatus Logico-­
Philosophicus. Also see Leonard Harris’s discussion of Alain Locke’s articulation of
art, work, and transformation in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Re­nais­sance and
Beyond (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1989).

Notes to Chapter 5 211

35 I am borrowing the unattributed phrase from Cora Diamond, “Having a Rough
Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,” New Literary History 15, no. 1 (1983): 162,
an idiom Diamond gleans from Iris Murdoch’s work, particularly R. W. Hepburn
and Iris Murdoch, “Symposium: Vision and Choice in Morality,” Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 30 (1956): 14–58. Also see Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics
and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2014), which argues that “for Black Arts theorists the poem relies on the transcen-
dental facticity of words to achieve its reconstructive work: the encounter with
the poem reactivates and participates in the inner lives of words and ­those who use
them” (30–31). ­Later, Reed echoes Diamond’s phrase in describing black lyric poet-
ics as “textural and textual . . . ​worldliness and wordliness” (31). On narrative and
ethics, see the special issue “Lit­er­a­ture and/as Moral Philosophy,” New Literary His-
tory 15, no. 1 (1983); Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1997), as well as Daniel R. Schwarz’s extended review essay
“Performative Saying and the Ethics of Reading,” Narrative 5, no. 2 (1997): 188–206,
which considers Newton’s work; and Candace Vogler, “The Moral of the Story,”
Critical Inquiry 34, no. 1 (2007): 5–35. More classically and in regard to aesthetics,
see Yuriko Saiko, Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-­Making (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017); Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Wayne C. Booth, The Com­
pany We Keep (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Booth, The Rhe­toric of
Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
An Aesthetic Education in an Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2013); J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, De Man, Eliot, Trollope, James,
and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and Suzanne Keen, Em-
pathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). My thinking on ethics
is also informed by Stephen Darwall, The Second-­Person Standpoint (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009); Alan H. Goldman, Reasons from Within: Desires and
Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Thomas E. Hill Jr., Autonomy and
Self-­Respect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Tommie Shelby, “The
Ethics of U­ ncle Tom’s ­Children,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2012): 513–532; Iris Young,
Justice and the Politics of Difference (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011);
Jeffrey Alexander, “Theorizing the Good Society: Hermeneutic, Normative and
Empirical Discourses,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 25, no. 3 (2000): 271–310; Jeanne
Randolph, Ethics of Luxury: Materialism and Imagination (Toronto: yyz Books, 2007),
especially the discussion of “ethical imagining” on 65–83; and Rosi Braidotti, Trans-
positions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006). Thanks to Lorne Falk
for the Randolph and Braidotti suggestions and John Casey for research assistance.
36 I am inspired h ­ ere by Paul C. Taylor’s work in Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black
Aesthetics (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2016), especially his discussion of W. E. B.
DuBois’s argument for art as propaganda. In part, Taylor makes the case for black
aesthetics as an ethical encounter with freedom, “self-­legislation in the face of, and
in recognition of, the wider resources for seeking the truth and pursuing the good”
(97). The Spillers citation is from her essay “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-­
date” (in Black, White, and in Color), where she wards against being misread as naïvely
individualistic by arguing that intellectual ­doing is part of “an ensemble of efforts”

212 Notes to Chapter 5

 (456; emphasis in the original). Overall, in this chapter, I am collating aesthetics,
ethics, and relation through the figure of the black reader as a one; see the endnote
about reading in the previous chapter. In addition to Taylor’s book, I am inspired
by Édouard Glissant, who, in Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1997), notes that “[relation] is an aesthetics of turbulence
whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance” (155); and by the sustained
implicit argument Phillip Brian Harper makes about the reader/viewer and critical
capacity in Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American
Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2015), esp. chap. 1. I am grateful to
Kiran Saili and Marah Nagelhout for conversations about Taylor’s book.
37 I would be remiss if I d ­ idn’t mention again bell hooks’s ­Sisters of the Yam, which
helped me understand the role lit­er­a­ture could play in imagining black oneness. I
cite hooks’s work more fully in the conclusion.
38 I am reading the openness of this prayer in conjunction with the ambivalent “bless-
ing” Clifton describes in the poem “wild blessings.” One way to think of Clifton’s
engagement with ethics is through an ideology of hope, as Tiffany Eberle Kriner
does in “Conjuring Hope in a Body: Lucille Clifton’s Eschatology,” Chris­tian­ity and
Lit­er­a­ture 54, no. 2 (2005): 185–208. The use of w
­ ater ­here is akin to the abyss in
Glissant’s opening of Poetics of Relation, as well as ­water as a scene of blackness in
Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of
the ­Middle Passage,” glq 14, no. 2–3 (2008): 191–215.
39 This characterization is epitomized by her per­sis­tent use of the first person
uncapitalized.
40 In making this statement, I am leaning on Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture (“It is
in your hands” is what the old w ­ oman says to the ­children [199]) and the closing
lines of her novel Jazz: “Look, look. Look where your hands are. Now” (New York:
Plume, 1993), 229.
41 In addition to Maud Martha, which I discuss in The Sovereignty of Quiet, I am think-
ing ­here of the iconic opening of Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (New York:
Vintage, 1992), which dramatizes the question of being and its weight, where Minnie
asks Velma, “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well,” and then “A lot of
weight when ­you’re well” (3, 5); I discuss the latter in Kevin Quashie, Black ­Women,
Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2004). Fi­nally, my reference to “weight” calls me to distinguish
that term from what Katherine McKittrick has called “mathe­matics of black life”
(“Mathe­matics Black Life,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 [2014]: 16–28), ­those terms of black
quantification that are well considered in Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery:
A ­Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2008); and Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and
the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
42 The first quotation is from Amiri Baraka, “Black Art” (in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri
Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris [New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2000], 220); the
second is from the conclusion of Larry Neal’s essay “Any Day Now: Black Art and
Black Liberation,” in Black Poets and Prophets: The Theory, Practice, and Esthetics of the
Pan-­Africanist Revolution, ed. Woodie King and Earl Anthony (New York: Mentor

Notes to Chapter 5 213

 Books, 1972), 148–165, and riffs on Baraka’s poem (163; emphasis in the original).
Oddly, my thinking about existentialism and the poetic found some harmony with
Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); indeed, it was compelling to see how
Walsh used the poetic as a manner for thinking through Kierkegaard’s seeming
hierarchy of the ethical and religious superseding the aesthetic.

Conclusion
1 It is worth saying that I have deliberately avoided extended consideration of inci-
dents involving ­people.
2 The first essay in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage Interna-
tional, 1993) speaks specifically to a black us through the idiom of the letter to his
nephew.
3 It is clear that I have a debt to the language of common/commons in Stefano
Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study
(New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). I know that terms like “community” and
“collectivity” a­ ren’t inherently oppositional, and in some everyday use they are
synonyms. My intention ­here is to sustain the idea, from the introduction, that a
black world is heterogeneous and nonnormative, akin to conversations about the
uses and limits of black nationalism. See, for example, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., ed., Is
It Nation Time? Con­temporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2002), especially the essays by Farah Jasmine Griffin
and Cornel West. Other references that inform my thinking about community
and collectivity include Hortense Spillers, “ ‘All the ­Things You Could Be by Now,
If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your ­Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” in Black,
White, and in Color: Essays on American Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 376–427; José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and
­There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), especially
the idea of a gathering or “field of utopian possibility . . . ​[where] multiple forms of
belonging in difference adhere to a belonging in collective” (20); Robin D. G. Kel-
ley, Race Rebels (New York: ­Free Press, 1996); Kelley, Yo Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting
the Culture Wars in Urban Amer­i­ca (Boston: Beacon, 1997); Joshua Chambers-­Letson,
­After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York: New York University
Press, 2018); and Jane Bennett, Vibrant M ­ atter: A Po­liti­cal Ecol­ogy of ­Things (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010), especially the exploration of demos and public
in chap. 7. See also my consideration of publicness, quiet, and collectivity in Kevin
Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Re­sis­tance in Black Culture (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). Fi­nally, thanks to Britt Threat for a useful con-
versation about Spillers and community, and to Mike King and Daphne Lamothe,
whose exquisite com­pany helped me ­ride through this saying.
4 The quotation is from Toni Morrison’s essay “Goodness: Altruism and the Liter-
ary Imagination,” in Toni Morrison: Goodness and the Literary Imagination, ed. Davíd
Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Maria Willard (Charlottesville: University of

214 Notes to Chapter 5

 ­ irginia Press, 2019), 19; also see Josslyn Luckett, “Quiet, as It’s Kept and Lovingly
V
Disrupted by Baby Suggs, Holy: On the Volume of Goodness in Beloved,” in the
same volume (216–225). I am inspired h ­ ere by “Freedom: Soon,” the final chapter
of Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black
Feminist Theories of the ­Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
5 This is how Sharon P. Holland explores death in her formative Raising the Dead:
Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2000), how Sula and Shadrack behold death in Toni Morrison’s Sula. See my
engagement of death and black pessimism in the introduction. I have long been
struck by a specific claim Douglas Crimp makes in his iconic essay “Mourning and
Militancy,” October 51 (1989): “I am saying that by ignoring the death drive, that
is, by making all vio­lence external, we fail to confront ourselves, to acknowledge
our ambivalence, to comprehend that our misery is also self-­inflicted” (17). ­Here
Crimp tries to advance a deepening of what we prioritize of gay experience in the
midst of responding to the po­liti­cal and material horror of the aids epidemic in
the 1980s. This claim facilitates the beautiful ending of his essay—­and gives rise to
its title: “The fact that our militancy may be a means of dangerous denial in no way
suggests that activism is unwarranted. ­There is no question but that we must fight
the unspeakable vio­lence we incur from the society in which we find ourselves. But
if we understand that vio­lence is able to reap its horrible rewards through the very
psychic mechanisms that make us part of this society, then we may also be able to
recognize—­along with our rage—­our terror, our guilt, and our profound sadness.
Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy” (18).
6 This era could be described as postsoul or con­temporary, though periodization was
not central in my conceptualizing black aliveness. And still, t­ here are ways that the
specificity of modern lyric aesthetics informs con­temporary black poetry (and vice
versa); see, for example, Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black
Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Evie Shock-
ley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry
(Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2011); and Kate Sontag and David Graham, ­After
Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2001).
7 I am thinking of part 1 of Stephen Michael Best, None like Us: Blackness, Belonging,
Aesthetic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), as I am also invoking Phil-
lip Brian Harper’s argument in Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique
in African American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2015). The visual
is an enduring prob­lem in the racial language of repre­sen­ta­tion, what Tavia Nyong’o
would call a burden (see “Unburdening Repre­sen­ta­tion,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 [2014]:
70–80). It is also the case that so many terrific scholars work with and through the
visual, not only the three just named (Best, Harper, and Nyong’o—in Afro-­fabulations:
The Queer Drama of Black Life [New York: New York University Press, 2018]), but also
Tina Campt, Image ­Matters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Campt, Lis-
tening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Imani Perry, Vexy ­Thing:
On Gender and Liberation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Kara Keeling,
Queer Times, Black ­Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019); and Jasmine

Notes to Conclusion 215

 Cobb, Picture Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2015). Also see my
extensive note on the m ­ atter of looking in the introduction.
8 This matter of grace is a signature in Smith’s work, including in her sculptural
fabric installations. See her essay “Grace Stands Beside Us All,” BlackBook, June 12,
2020, https://bbook.com/news/essay-artist​-shinique-smith​-on​-standing​-with​-grace​
-and​-dignity/.
9 Nearly all of the other captions are more explic­itly tied to the images, part of the
coherence of The Migration Series, which Lawrence i­ magined and painted together
between 1940 and 1941. For more on Lawrence, see Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem
Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019);
Michelle DuBois and Peter T. Nesbett’s two-­volume The Complete Jacob Lawrence
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000); and Elizabeth Alexander, ed., Jacob
Lawrence: The Migration Series (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2017), which
includes a series of commissioned poems.
10 That the lines break this way could also be read in regard to the terrible ­thing that
interrupts the poem midway—­the disappearance of and then search for her mur-
dered ­daughter.
11 See Hull’s excellent early article “A Note on the Poetic Technique of Gwendolyn
Brooks,” cla Journal 19, no. 2 (1975): 280–285, as well as Brooke Kenton Horvath,
“The Satisfactions of What’s Difficult in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Poetry,” American
Lit­er­a­ture 62, no. 4 (1990): 606–615; D. H. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and
the Heroic Voice (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988); Carl Phillips’s
exploration of Brooks’s “twist and tact” of syntax in Coin of the Realm (Minneapolis:
Graywolf, 2004); Evie Shockley’s study of Brooks’s epic language in Renegade Poetics;
and Elizabeth Alexander’s thinking through her poetics and politics in The Black
Interior (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004) and in Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews,
and Interviews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
12 I am riffing h ­ ere on Moten’s iconic argument about the florescence of sound, an
argument that builds from a Charles Lloyd comment, “Words ­don’t go ­there”; see
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 41–63. Also see the case Bill T. Jones makes
for words (the poetic), dance, and performative time in Last Night on Earth (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1995).
13 Clifton’s orientation ­here resonates with Patricia J. Williams’s in The Alchemy of Race
and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991),
which challenges the ways that l­ egal discourses normalize what intelligence looks
like. Williams argues for “­those who cannot express themselves in the language of
power and assertion and staked claims—­all ­those who are nevertheless deserving of
the dignity of social valuation, yet ­those who are so often denied survival itself ” (21).
14 I was reminded of this etymology by Ashon T. Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath: The
Aesthetics of Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). And in invok-
ing this term, I think of Alice Walker, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the
Self,” where the speaker describes her young d ­ aughter Rebecca saying, “Mommy,
­there is a world in your eye” (in In Search of Our ­Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose

216 Notes to Conclusion

 [Boston: Harcourt, 1983], 370; emphasis in original). This moment where Rebecca
realizes that her ­mother’s eye is glass and reflective fuels the idiom in this brief
paragraph. Throughout this work, I have tried to make clear my indebtedness to
black women/feminist scholars, and to that com­pany of names, I would like to add
Michael Awkward, Marlon B. Ross, and Mark Anthony Neal (especially his work
to or­ga­nize a world of black ideas via his Left of Black series), whose thinking with
black feminism has long been a lesson to me.
15 This attention to the capacities of nothingness is central to Fred Moten’s work;
also, my thinking about a world ­here is inspired by Achille Mbembe, “Epilogue:
­There Is Only One World,” in Critique of Black Reason (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2017), 179–183. Fi­nally, I could have made this argument about subjunc-
tivity and the ethical through a reading of the final beautiful monologue of Jackie
Sibblies Drury, Fairview (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2019).

Notes to Conclusion 217

This page intentionally left blank
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abdur-­Rahman, Aliyyah I. “The Black Ecstatic.” GLQ 24, no. 2–3 (2018): 343–365.
Adorno, T. W. “The Essay as Form.” Translated by Bob Hullot-­Kentor and Frederic ­Will.
New German Critique 32 (1984): 151–171.
Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2000.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, ­Others. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2006.
Alexander, Elizabeth. The Black Interior. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2004.
Als, Hilton. “Ghosts in the House.” New Yorker, October 27, 2003.
Angelou, Maya. The Complete Poetry. New York: Random House, 2015.
Awkward-­Rich, Cameron. Sympathetic L ­ ittle Monster. Los Angeles: Ricochet Editions, 2016.
Bakewell, Sarah. At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-­Paul
Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-­Ponty and
­Others. New York: Other Press, 2016.
Baldwin, James. “The Artist’s Strug­gle for Integrity.” In The Cross of Redemption: Uncol-
lected Writings, 50–58. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage International, 1993.
Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 2012.
Baldwin, James. “Nothing Personal.” In The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction,
1948–1985, 381–395. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985.
Baldwin, James. “An Open Letter to My ­Sister Angela Y. Davis.” In The Cross of Redemp-
tion: Uncollected Writings, 254–260. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
Bambara, Toni Cade. “An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara.” By Kay Bonetti. In Con-
versations with Toni Cade Bambara, edited by Thabiti Lewis, 35–47. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2012.
Baraka, Amiri. “Black Art.” In The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J.
Harris, 219–220. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2000.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant ­Matter: A Po­liti­cal Ecol­ogy of ­Things. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010.
Best, Stephen Michael. None like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2018.
Bogart, Anne. A Director Prepares: Seven Essays on Art and Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Bouson, J. Brooks. Jamaica Kincaid: Writing Memory, Writing Back to the M ­ other. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2005.
Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Books,
2001.
Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Per­for­mances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. Blacks. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987.
Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha. Chicago: Third World Press, 1993.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1958.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann. New York: Touch-
stone, 1996.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.
Car­ter, J. Kameron. “The Inglorious: With and Beyond Giorgio Agamben.” Po­liti­cal
Theology 14, no. 1 (2013): 77–87.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988.
Chandler, Nahum Dimitri. X—­The Prob­lem of the Negro as a Prob­lem for Thought. New
York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique, no. 6 (1987): 51–63.
Clifton, Lucille. The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965–2010. Edited by Kevin Young
and Michael S. Glaser. Rochester, NY: boa Editions, 2012.
Clifton, Lucille. “I’d Like Not to Be a Stranger in the World: A Conversation/Interview
with Lucille Clifton.” By Michael S. Glaser. Antioch Review 58, no. 3 (2000): 310–328.
Coates, Ta-­Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015.
Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In All the ­Women Are White,
All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black W ­ omen’s Studies, edited by Gloria T.
Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, 13–22. New York: Feminist Press, 1982.
Cooper, Anna Julia. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including a Voice from the South and Other
Impor­tant Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles C. Lemert and Esme Bhan.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.
Crawford, Margo Natalie. Black Post-­blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-­First-­
Century Aesthetics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017.
Cunningham, Vinson. “What Makes an Essay American.” New Yorker, May 13, 2016.
https://­www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­books​/­page​-­turner​/­what​-­makes​-­an​-­essay​-­american.
D’Agata, John. “2003.” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H.
Klaus and Ned Stuckey-­French, 169–170. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

220 Bibliography
Demott, Benjamin. “Passing.” Review of The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey, by Toi
Derricotte. New York Times, November 2, 1997.
Derricotte, Toi. “Beds.” Creative Nonfiction 39 (2010): 49–59.
Derricotte, Toi. The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
De Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. New York: W. W. Norton,
2004.
Diamond, Cora. “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is.” New Literary
History 15, no. 1 (1983): 155–169.
Dove, Rita. Thomas and Beulah. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-­Mellon University Press, 1986.
DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited by Henry Louis Gates and Terri Hume
Oliver. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
Early, Gerald. “Gnostic or Gnomic?” In Speech and Power: The African American Essay and
Its Cultural Content from Polemics to Pulpit, edited by Gerald Early, 1:vii–xv. 2 vols. New
York: Ecco, 1992.
Early, Gerald. Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture. New York: Ecco, 1989.
Ellison, Ralph. The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison. Edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C.
Conner. New York: Random House, 2019.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature and Selected Essays. Edited by Larzer Ziff. New York:
Penguin, 2003.
En­glish, Darby. To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. London:
Pluto, 2008.
Finney, Nikky. Head Off and Split. Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern
University Press, 2011.
Finney, Nikky. “Inquisitor and Insurgent: Black ­Woman with Pencil, Sharpened.” Merid-
ians: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism 7 (2006): 214–221.
Finney, Nikky. The World Is Round. Atlanta: InnerLight, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. “An Aesthetics of Existence.” In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews
and Other Writings, 1977–1984, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman, 47–53. New York:
Routledge, 1984.
Frost, Robert. “Mowing.” In The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, edited by
Edward Connery Lathem, 17. New York: Henry Holt, 1969.
Fryer, David Ross. “On the Possibilities of Posthumanism, or How to Think Queerly in
an Antiblack World.” In Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-­American Studies in Theory
and Practice, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, 227–242. London:
Routledge, 2006.
Gay, Ross. Cata­log of Unabashed Gratitude. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2015.
Gill, Lyndon K. “In the Realm of Our Lorde: Eros and the Poet Phi­los­o­pher.” Feminist
Studies 40, no. 1 (2014): 169–189.
Gillespie, Michael Boyce. Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film. Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
Giovanni, Nikki. The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, 1968–1983. New York: William
Morrow, 2003.

Bibliography 221
Glissant, Édouard. “One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with
Manthia Diawara.” Nka: Journal of Con­temporary African Art 28 (2011): 4–19.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1997.
Goldman, Danielle. I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
Gordon, Lewis R. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1995.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “When Malindy Sings: A Meditation on Black W ­ omen’s Vocality.” In
Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Ed-
wards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, 102–125. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Hall, Stuart. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popu­lar Culture?” In Black Popu­lar Culture,
edited by Gina Dent, 21–33. Seattle: Bay, 1998.
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.
New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.
Harper, Phillip Brian. Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African
American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
Harper, Phillip Brian. Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Prob­lem of African-­
American Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Harris, Trudier. From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Lit­er­a­ture. Philadel-
phia: ­Temple University Press, 1982.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your ­Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York:
Macmillan, 2008.
Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century
Amer­i­ca. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2019.
Hayes, Terrance. American Sonnets for My Past and F ­ uture Assassin. New York: Penguin
Books, 2018.
hooks, bell. ­Sisters of the Yam: Black ­Women and Self-­Recovery. Boston: South End, 1993.
Hull, Gloria T. “A Note on the Poetic Technique of Gwendolyn Brooks.” cla Journal 19,
no. 2 (1975): 280–285.
Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the ­Women Are White, All
the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black W ­ omen’s Studies. New York: Feminist
Press, 1982.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes ­Were Watching God. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.
Irwin, William. God Is a Question, Not an Answer: Finding Common Ground in Our Uncer-
tainty. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018.
Jones, LeRoi. Home: Social Essays. Brooklyn: Akashic Books, 2009.
Jones, LeRoi. “The World ­You’re Talking About.” Introduction to Felix of the ­Silent Forest,
by David Henderson, n.p. New York: Poets, 1967.
Jordan, June. Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Edited by Jan Heller
Levi and Sara Miles. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2005.
Jordan, June. Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry. New York: Random House,
1977.

222 Bibliography
Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.
Klaus, Carl H. “­Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay.” In Essayists on the Essay: Mon-
taigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-­French, xv–­xxvii. Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2012.
Kocher, Ruth Ellen. domina Un/blued. North Adams, MA: Tupelo, 2013.
Langlands, Alexander. Craeft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional
Crafts. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018.
Loffreda, Beth, and Claudia Rankine. Introduction to The Racial Imaginary: Writers on
Race in the Life of the Mind, edited by Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King
Cap, 13–22. New York: Fence Books, 2015.
Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980.
Lorde, Audre. ­Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing, 1984.
Massumi, Brian. The Politics of Affect. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015.
Moi, Toril. Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies ­after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Montaigne, Michel de. Montaigne’s Essays and Selected Writings. Translated and edited by
Donald M. Frame. New York: St. Martin’s, 1963.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1988.
Morrison, Toni. “A Conversation with Toni Morrison.” By Bill Moyers. In Conversations
with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille K. Taylor-­Guthrie, 262–274. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Morrison, Toni. “Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination.” In Goodness and the
Literary Imagination, edited by Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard,
13–19. Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2019.
Morrison, Toni. “Home.” In The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, edited
by Wahneema Lubiano, 3–12. New York: Pantheon, 1997.
Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Plume, 1993.
Morrison, Toni. “The Nobel Lecture in Lit­er­at­ ure.” In What Moves at the Margin: Selected
Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn C. Denard, 198–207. Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 2008.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York:
Vintage Books, 1993.
Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” In What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction,
edited by Carolyn C. Denard, 65–80. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
Morrison, Toni. “Strangers.” New Yorker, October 12, 1998, 68–71.
Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Plume, 1982.
Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.
Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218.
Moten, Fred. “An Interview with Fred Moten, Part 1.” By Adam Fitzgerald. Literary Hub,
August 5, 2015. https://­lithub​.­com​/­an​-­interview​-­with​-­fred​-­moten​-­pt​-­i​/­.
Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2003.
Nancy, Jean-­Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E.
O’Byrne. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Bibliography 223
Neal, Larry. “Any Day Now: Black Art and Black Liberation.” In Black Poets and Prophets:
The Theory, Practice, and Esthetics of the Pan-­Africanist Revolution, edited by Woodie King
and Earl Anthony, 148–165. New York: Mentor Books, 1972.
Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” Drama Review 12 (1968): 29–39.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Nissen, Alex. “Form M ­ atters: Toni Morrison’s Sula and the Ethics of Fiction.” Con­
temporary Lit­er­a­ture 40, no. 2 (1999): 263–285.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Lit­er­a­ture. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992.
Pavlić, Ed. Who Can Afford to Improvise? James Baldwin and Black ­Music, the Lyric and the
Listeners. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.
Phillips, Carl. “A Politics of Mere Being.” Poetry, December 2016. https://­www​
.­poetryfoundation​.­org​/­poetrymagazine​/­articles​/­91294​/­a​-­politics​-­of​-­mere​-­being.
Quashie, Kevin. Black W ­ omen, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Quashie, Kevin. The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Re­sis­tance in Black Culture. New Bruns-
wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012.
Rai, Amit S. “Race Racing: Four T ­ heses on Race and Intensity.” wsq: ­Women’s Studies
Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2012): 64–75.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2014.
Reed, Anthony. Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
Roelofs, Monique. “Racialization as an Aesthetic Production.” In White on White/Black on
Black, edited by George Yancy, 83–124. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
Royster, Francesca T. Sounding like a No-­No? Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-­soul
Era. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhe­torics of Materiality. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010.
Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American
Literary Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
Sexton, Jared. “Afro-­pessimism: The Unclear Word.” Rhizomes 29 (2016). https://­doi​.­org​
/­10​.­20415​/­rhiz​/­029​.­e02.
Sexton, Jared. “Ante-­Anti-­Blackness: Afterthoughts.” Lateral 1, no. 1 (2012): n.p.
Shange, Ntozake. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow Is Enuf:
A Choreopoem. New York: Scribner, 1997.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2016.
Shepherd, Reginald. “On Not Being White.” In In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology, edited
by Joseph Beam, 46–57. New York: Alyson Books, 1986.
Shockley, Evie. The New Black. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.
Silva, Denise Ferreira da. “­Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Black-
ness t­ oward the End of the World.” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 81–97.
Smith, Tracy K. Wade in the ­Water: Poems. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2018.
Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Lit­er­a­ture and Culture.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

224 Bibliography
Stallings, L. H. Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures. Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 2015.
Taylor, Paul C. Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2016.
Thomas, Greg. The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-­African Embodiment and Erotic
Schemes of Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Thompson, Krista. Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Trethewey, Natasha. “Poem (Column).” New York Times, July 5, 2015.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Boston: Harcourt, 1982.
Walker, Alice. “Womanist.” In In Search of Our ­Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, xi–­xii.
Boston: Harcourt, 1983.
Wall, Cheryl A. On Freedom and the ­Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
Warren, Calvin L. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2018.
Weheliye, Alexander. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist
Theories of the ­Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Wilderson, Frank B., III. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright, 2020.
Wilderson, Frank B., III. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Williams, Patricia J. The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Williamson, Terrion L. Scandalize My Name. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.
­Wills, David. “Passionate Secrets and Demo­cratic Dissidence.” Diacritics 38, no. 1/2
(2008): 17–29.
Woubshet, Dagmawi. The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of
aids. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
Wynter, Sylvia. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-­imprisoned
Ourselves in an Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies t­ oward
the ­Human Proj­ect.” In Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-­American Studies in Theory
and Practice, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, 107–169. London:
Routledge, 2006.
Wynter, Sylvia. “The Re-­enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.”
By David Scott. Small Axe 8 (2000): 173–211.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a
Dif­fer­ent ­Future: Conversations.” By Katherine McKittrick, in Sylvia Wynter: On Being
­Human as Praxis, edited by Katherine McKittrick, 9–89. Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2015.

Bibliography 225
This page intentionally left blank
PERMISSIONS

Migration Series panel 46, copyright © 2020 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence
Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York. Digital Image © The
Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by scala / Art Resource, NY.
Tracy K. Smith, “Po­liti­cal Poem,” from Wade in the ­Water. Copyright © 2018 by Tracy K.
Smith. Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Com­pany, llc, on behalf
of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress​.­org.
Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca and “The Sermon on the Warpland,” reprinted by
consent of Brooks Permissions.
June Jordan, “­These Poems,” copyright © 2020 June Jordan Literary Estate. Reprinted
with the permission of the June M. Jordan Literary Estate, and Alice James Books.
www​.­junejordan​.­com.
Nikki Giovanni, excerpt from “Ego Tripping (­there may be a reason why),” from The
Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Copyright © 2003 by Nikki Giovanni. Used by per-
mission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Nikky Finney, “The Making of Paper” and lines from “Nikky Finney’s Ac­cep­tance Speech
for the National Book Award for Poetry,” copyright © 2011 by Nikky Finney. Published
by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
Evie Shockley, “my life as china,” from The New Black, copyright © 2011 by Evie Shockley.
Published by Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission.
Ruth Ellen Kocher, “Domina,” from domina Un/blued. Copyright © 2013 by Ruth Ellen
Kocher. Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Com­pany, llc, on behalf
of Tupelo Press, www​.­tupelopress​.­org.
Cameron Awkward-­Rich, “Essay on the Awkward / Black / Object,” “Essay on the
Theory of Motion,” and “The ­Little Girl Dreams of ­Dying,” from Sympathetic ­Little
Monster. Copyright © 2016 by Cameron Awkward-­Rich. Reprinted with the permis-
sion of the author, Ricochet Editions, and Small Press Distribution.
Amiri Baraka, excerpt from “Black Art,” from S O S: Poems, 1961–2013, copyright © 2014 by
the Estate of Amiri Baraka. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third-­party
use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
Ross Gay, “Cata­log of Unabashed Gratitude,” from Cata­log of Unabashed Gratitude by
Ross Gay, © 2015. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Lucille Clifton, “reply,” “testament,” “lucifer speaks in his own voice,” “the times,”
“blessing the boats,” “a w­ oman who loves,” and excerpt from “grandma, we are poets,”
from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. Copyright © 1991, 2000 by Lucille Clifton.
Reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Com­pany, llc, on behalf of boa
Editions, Ltd., boaeditions​.­org.
Lucille Clifton, “­won’t you celebrate with me” and excerpt from “­brothers” from The
Book of Light. Copyright © 1993 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted with the permission of
the Permissions Com­pany, llc, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyon-
press​.­org.
“Magic” from Thomas and Beulah: Poems, Car­ne­gie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh,
PA. Copyright © 1986 by Rita Dove. Used by permission of the author.

228 Permissions
INDEX

Abdur-­Rahman, Aliyyah I., 83, 198n5 animacies, 203–204n29

Abernathy, Billy “Fundi,” 159n9 antiblackness, 11, 46, 59, 96, 108, 109, 142,
abjection, 3, 8, 68, 197n2, 199n10 146, 148, 154, 185n27; blackness and, 5,
abstraction, abstractionism, 47, 133, 148–149, 165n22; black texts and, 10, 79, 82, 94, 97;
152, 184n22, 185n27; as feature of relational community and collectivism vs., 38, 145;
oneness, 43–44; in Lawrence’s Migration Series harm of, 1–2; totality of, 10, 165n22; in US,
panel, 46, 149 95, 142
address, 13, 85, 91, 197n2 antiblack world, 13, 107, 121, 122, 167n29,
Adorno, Theodor, 69, 70, 194n29, 204n33 184n22; black ­people and, 12, 32, 108, 147;
aestheticization, 61, 70, 92, 105, 115, 125, 128 logic of, 8, 20, 53, 142, 200n18; subjection
aesthetics, 49, 94, 101, 104, 127, 152, 166n25, and, 9–10, 32
188n2, 198n5, 215n6; aliveness and, 2–5, 9–10, apostrophe, 68, 125, 191n14
12, 57–82; of black art and texts, 2, 13, 14, 124, Arbery, Ahmaud, murder of, 12
142, 163n18, 187n1; ethics and, 132, 213n36; of Arendt, Hannah, 209n22
existence, 193–194n29; imaginary of, 9, 11, Aristotelean virtue, 210n24
20; in Lawrence’s Migration Series, 149, 151; ars erotica, 40, 174n11
Shepherd’s, 85–87, 200n13 ars poetica, 5, 26–27
affect, 81–82, 97, 191n15, 195n36, 196–197n43; ars vitalia, 19, 174n11
theory of, 167n2, 171n7, 174n15, 196n38 Ashby, Matt, 167n28, 171n6, 193n26
Agamben, Giorgio, 104–105, 162n15, 169n4, assemblage, 12, 171n7, 177n21, 193n28
202–203n22, 207n16; form-­of-­life and, 179n26, audacity, 33, 41, 91; in Morrison’s Sula, 110, 111,
189n2 119
Ahmed, Sara, 80, 81, 136, 198–199n9, 204n32 audience, 7, 96, 146, 148, 163n16, 172n9, 201n19,
Alexander, Elizabeth, 47, 73 202n22; anxiety of, 32, 93, 195n37; black
Allewaert, Monique, 193n28 expressiveness and, 95–96
Als, Hilton, 12, 105, 205n36 authenticity, 72, 89, 143
“American Sonnet for My Past and ­Future Awkward-­Rich, Cameron, 49, 51, 124, 186n31,
­Assassin” sonnet 55 (Hayes), 59–61 186n32
anecdotes, 78, 90–91, 195n36
Anex-­Ries, Quinn, 172n8, 186n27, 209n21 Baartman, Saartjie, 47
Angel, Interrupted (Shepherd), 84 Baby Suggs, in Morrison’s Beloved, 122–123, 125,
Angelou, Maya, 37 210n24
Baldwin, James, 50, 95, 108, 109, 112, 124, 153, 184n19; vocalists and, 42, 60; voice and, 25,
202n22, 208n17; The Fire Next Time, 143, 214n2; 98, 104. See also black feminism and feminists;
Giovanni’s Room, 197n2; Notes of a Native Son, black ­women
120–121; “Nothing Personal,” 114, 154, 203n25; black feminism and feminists, 11, 19, 109, 124,
“The Artist’s Strug­gle for Integrity,” 132–133; 171n7, 182n11, 185n27, 192n25, 216n13
“The Hallelujah Chorus,” 142–143 black interiority, 20, 163n16, 166n25. See also
Bambara, Toni Cade, 62–65, 124, 213n41 interiority
Baraka, Amiri, 58, 159n9, 161n12, 193n28; “Black “Black Lives M ­ atter,” 2, 13
Art,” 5–8, 162n13; In Our Terribleness, 163n15; black maleness, 59, 189–190n6
“SOS,” 162n14, 166n27. See also Jones, LeRoi black nation and nationalism, 142, 201n21, 214n3
Beam, Joseph, 84 blackness, 5–6, 9–13, 16, 22, 26, 38, 70–71, 82,
Beavers, Herman, 157n3 89–95, 104, 142, 147–149, 157–158n5, 165n22,
becoming, 25, 37, 41, 48–49, 54, 76, 83, 89, 98, 169n4, 187n1, 194n30, 206n5, 209n22, 209n23,
133, 142, 148, 154, 192n20; being and, 11, 19, 210n24; aesthetics and, 68, 152; black w ­ omen
165–166n24, 185n22; Sula and, 39, 42; world of and, 154, 166n26, 186n31; Clifton and, 4, 136;
one’s, 32, 38, 52 collectivity of, 32, 163n16, 184n22; form and
“Beds” (Derricotte), 97–104 formlessness of, 7, 57, 164n20; ideation of, 59,
being, beingness: becoming and, 11, 19, 165– 146; subjunctive and, 146, 189n5; as totality in
166n24, 185n22; embodiment and, 17, 161n12; ­imagined black world, 1, 10
expressivity of, 61, 152; oneness and, 39, 143; black pessimism, 163n18, 164n18, 165n20,
one’s self and, 44, 122, 153; poetic, 146–148, 154; 179–180n2; as field, 8–9, 205n4
relational, 44, 55, 184n22; worldly, 54, 69, 146. black poetry and poetics, 6, 28, 46, 58, 133,
See also black being 177n25, 215n6; Black Arts poetry, 7, 73, 162n14
Bellows-­Meister, Sarah, 175n16 black reader, 133, 148, 213n36
Beloved (Morrison): Baby Suggs in, 122–123, 125, black studies, 5, 12, 16, 37, 159n11, 165n22, 209n22
146; Beloved in, 11; loneliness in, 120, 208n20; black ­women, 10, 11, 47, 123, 151, 154, 172n9, 182n11,
relational thinking in, 146; Sethe in, 11, 107 203n28; as writers and thinkers, 36–37, 124,
Bennett, Jane, 16 166n26, 187n36, 216n13
Berlant, Lauren, 183n18, 188n2, 191n14, 200n16, black ­women’s studies, 54
204n31 Black World, 159n11
Best, Stephen Michael, 10, 148, 177n24, 199n10; black world and black worldness, 7, 9–11, 95,
None Like Us, 37–38, 165n22, 184–185n22, 211n25 135, 138, 144, 154, 159n11, 164n18, 166n25, 175n15,
Beulah, in Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, 138, 174n13 214n3; collective and community of, 12,
bewilderment, 60–61, 69, 183n16 142, 145; imaginary of, 9, 38, 53, 124, 147–148,
Bigé, Romain, 72 186n31, 206n5; orientation of, 44, 57, 66, 84,
Black Aesthetic movement, 5, 132, 189n4, 104, 109, 192n25; relationality of, 23–26, 121,
193n28, 201n21. See also black aesthetics; Black 142; texts and, 4, 6, 13, 82–83, 108, 111, 139
Arts movement “blessing the boats” (Clifton), 135–136
black aesthetics, 13, 37–38, 57, 71, 91, 133, 187n1. body, 11, 18–19, 52, 101, 124, 171n7, 172n8, 174n15,
See also Black Aesthetic movement 198n5; black female, 43; habits of, 17;
“Black Art” (Baraka), 5–8, 161n12, 162n13 ­women’s, 35, 40. See also embodiment
Black Arts movement, 5, 46, 132, 159–160n11, Bogart, Anne, 120
163n16, 189n4, 201n21, 212n35. See also Black Bonner, Marita, 95
Aesthetic movement Borgquest, Alvin, 2, 137
black femaleness, 11, 18–19, 33, 41, 154, 174n13, Brand, Dionne, 46; A Map to the Door of No
180n3, 186n31, 203n28, 208n16; oneness and, Return, 71–72
32, 111; righ­teousness and, 54–55; subjectivity Braziel, Jana Evans, 196n41
and, 139, 173n10, 184n20; thought and, 12, 55, Brennan, Teresa, 167–168n2

230 Index
Brooks, Daphne A., 4, 157n5, 170n5 poets,” 153–154; “homage to my hips,” 46;
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 147; Maud Martha, 44–46, “invitation,” 115–116; “. . .  . . . ​ . . . ​ . . . ​is God.,”
124, 138, 213n41; In the Mecca, 151–152; “The 116–117; “lucifer speaks in his own voice,”
Sermon on the Warpland,” 152, 167n28 117–119; “memo,” 158n6; modellessness of,
“­brothers” (Clifton), 177n22 37, 44; “poem in praise of menstruation,”
Brown, Jericho, 46 185n23, 190n8; Quilting, 2, 158n6; “reply,” 2–5,
Brown, Ruth Nicole, 166n26 16, 58–59, 73, 137–138, 144, 158n6; “testament,”
Brown, Vincent, 164n20 54; “the times,” 134–135; untitled verse “­won’t
Buber, Martin, 21, 22, 175n16, 175n18, 184n22, you celebrate with me,” 23–26, 32–33, 115, 116;
185n24, 203n24 “whose side are you on,” 158n6; “wild bless-
Butler, Cheryl B., The Art of the Black Essay, ings,” 213n38
191n18 Coates, Ta-­Nehisi, 95
Butler, Judith, 200n17 collective, collectivity, collectivism, 3, 38,
143–145, 162n13, 162n14, 184n22, 193n28, 197n1,
Calero, Nichole, 165n23 209n22, 214n3. See also commons; community
Cancer Journals, The (Lorde), 33–36, 47, 147 colonialism and coloniality, 8, 9, 11, 73–74, 76,
Cannon, Katie Geneva, 123 144, 196n40, 206n5; destructions made by, 13,
capaciousness, 11, 31, 37, 40, 84, 121, 147, 149, 68, 75, 79, 80
172n9; of black being, 4, 10, 141; in texts, 7, Color Purple, The (Walker), Celie in, 20, 125
91, 125, 131 Combahee River Collective, 11, 55, 166n26
Car­ter, J. Kameron, 44, 176n19 commons, 143, 197n1, 211n25. See also collective,
Casey, John, 168n2, 178n26, 191n14, 195n36, collectivity, collectivism
205n35, 211n25, 212n35 community, 142, 143, 145, 184n22, 209n22, 214n3.
“Cata­log of Unabashed Gratitude” (Gay), See also collective, collectivity, collectivism
125–128 consciousness, 19, 21, 32, 39; embodiment of, 31,
Cave Canem, 97 51, 171n7
Celie, in Walker’s The Color Purple, 20, 125, Cooper, Anna Julia, 11, 36
174n13 Cooper, Christian, 167n31
Chandler, Nahum Dimitri, 9, 166n25 Cox, Aimee Meredith, 166n26
Charles, Ray, 142 Crawford, Margo Natalie, 5, 46, 159n11, 163n16
Chen, Mel Y., 203–204n29 Crimp, Douglas, “Mourning and Militancy,”
Cheng, Anne Anlin, 199–200n12 215n5
Cherneff, Lyle, 187n33 Cunningham, Vinson, 95, 192n25, 208n17
chiasmus, 87–88, 93, 199n10; in Brooks’s “The
Sermon on the Warpland,” 152; in Clifton’s D’Agata, John, 70–71, 95
“lucifer speaks in his own voice,” 118; Dou- Daniels, Nora, 180n4
glass and, 197n3; in Morrison’s Beloved, 107, Dave, Naisargi, 202n22
109; in Shepherd’s “On Not Being White,” 86, Davis, Angela, 108
87, 88, 90, 91, 93 Davis, Skhylur, 167n31
Chowdhury, Lubabah, 207n11 Day, Iyko, 165n21
Christian, Barbara, 26, 167n30, 174n13, 187n36; death, deathness, 1, 8, 12, 146–147, 164n20,
“The Race for Theory” (1987), 37, 133–134; 205n2, 215n5
writes to Lorde, 15, 16, 21, 168n2 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 158n7; and, Félix Guattari,
Clare, in Larsen’s Passing, 174n13 196–197n43, 207n8
Clifton, Devon, 205n36 Derricotte, Toi, 124, 203n28, 204n31; “Beds,”
Clifton, Lucille, 10, 14, 124, 146, 177n24, 179n28, 97–103; The Black Notebooks, 97, 204n29
208n19, 213n39; “blessing the boats,” 135–136; desire, 84, 86, 181n8
“­brothers,” 115, 177n22; “grandma, we are De Veaux, Alexis, 167n1, 180n6

Index 231
Diamond, Elin, 157n5, 212n35 familiar style, 192n23
difference, 12, 33, 42–43, 143 Fanon, Frantz, 3–4, 46, 50, 164n20, 172n8,
dignity, 210n25, 216n12 185n22, 186n31, 194n30; Black Skin, White
dissensus, 192n20 Masks, 196n39, 199n10
“Domina” (Kocher), 67–69 Faulkner, William, 87, 89
Douglass, Frederick, 197n3 Fells, Dominique, murder of, 13
Dove, Rita, 46; Thomas and Beulah, 138–139 feminism: of black w ­ omen, 11, 19, 109, 124, 172n7,
DuBois, W. E. B., 2, 46, 137, 157n3, 169n4, 212n36 185n27, 192n25, 216n13
duCille, Ann, 183n18, 185n27, 187n34, 187n36 feminist studies, 12, 182n11, 192n25
Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 189–190n6 Finney, Nikky, 4–5, 46, 112, 124, 158–159n8;
“Greatest Show on Earth,” 47; Head Off and
Eady, Cornelius, 96, 97 Split, 207n15; “Inquisitor and Insurgent: Black
Early, Gerald, Speech and Power, 94–95 ­Woman with Pencil, Sharpened,” 113; “The
elegies, 64, 65 Making of Paper,” 61–65, 69; The World Is
Eliot, T. S., 87, 198n4 Round, 61
ellipses, 4, 38, 116, 127, 158n7, 187n33 First Nations ­peoples, 37
Ellison, Ralph, 95, 200n18 first person and first-­personness, 28, 32, 34, 36,
embodiment, 18, 21, 82, 166n26, 172n9, 174n15, 38, 47, 69, 77, 129, 158n6, 182n12; aliveness of,
180n3, 193n28; being and, 146, 161n12; of 85–86; black, 37, 94
consciousness, 31, 51, 171n7; intelligence and, Floyd, George, killed by police, 12–13
22, 40; knowledge and, 34, 96. See also body; Forché, Carolyn, 116
materiality form-­of-­life, 58, 179n26; Agamben and, 169n4,
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 19, 192n25 189n2
En­glish, Darby, 148–149 Foucault, Michel, 174n11, 176n19, 193n29,
Enlightenment, 8, 37, 165n24, 177n21 195n36
epistemology, 19, 35, 133 Freeburg, Christopher, 166n25
erotic, eroticism, 40, 44, 67, 80, 133, 198n5; Frost, Robert, 199n12; “Mowing,” 131
Lorde on, 18–19, 111–112, 122, 173n10 fugitivity, 26, 151, 163n18, 164n20
essay, essays, 50, 81, 82, 93, 95, 96, 192n25, 193n28,
194n29, 201n21, 203n24; etymology of, 71, Gabbin, Joanne V., 178n25
85; first-­person, 12, 80, 102, 138, 148, 194n31; Gay, Ross, “Cata­log of Unabashed Gratitude,”
personal, 69, 82, 191n20, 200n18; poetics of, 125–128
71, 97; subject and object in, 73, 76 Gay, Roxane, 95
“Essay as Form, The” (Adorno), 69 Gayles, Gloria Wade, 112
essayists, 84, 154, 191n18; black, 94–95, 155, 202n21 gender and gendering, 12, 19, 32, 49–52, 86,
“Essay on the Theory of Motion” (Awkward-­ 176n20, 186n31, 187n33; pronouns and,
Rich), 51 166–167n27, 206n5
ethics, 12, 13, 43, 107, 109, 145, 153, 205n2, 205n4, Genesis, 6
213n38; of aesthetics, 132, 213n36; aliveness genre, 50, 191n20; essay as, 69, 70, 76, 93, 94,
and, 107–139; relational and, 143, 213n36 102, 105
exception, exceptionalism, 33–35, 40, 41 Gill, Lyndon K., 19, 172n9, 187n36
exemption, 34, 40 Gillespie, Michael, 70, 194n32
existentialism, 19, 206n8, 214n42 Giovanni, Nikki, 37, 38
experience, 17–18, 66, 69, 70–72, 82, 85, 90, 105, Glissant, Édouard, 102, 141–142, 162n13, 164n20,
126, 192n25, 215n5; black, 76, 92 176n20, 177n21, 179n29, 183n15, 203n24; Poetics
of Relation, 22–23, 26, 146, 165n21, 184n22,
fabulation, subjunctive, 102 196n39, 213n36, 213n38; on relationality, 28,
Falk, Lorne, 212n35 178n26; on universal, 43–44, 185n27

232 Index
God, 6, 35, 44, 94, 100, 163n15, 208n19; Clifton imaginary, imagination, imagining, 2, 7, 8, 10,
and, 115–117, 119 32, 42, 59, 74, 147–148, 170n6, 191n13
Goldman, Danielle, 22, 72, 176n19 “imagine a black world,” 1, 13–14, 133, 145, 147,
Gopinath, Gayatri, 188n2 209n23; subjunctive and, 61, 146
Gordon, Avery, 164n20 immanence, 36, 44, 48, 52, 53, 86, 105, 116, 127,
Gordon, Lewis R., 44, 164n20 173n10, 184n22
Graham, Maryemma, 178n25 immateriality, 19, 32, 183n18
Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 60–61, 187n36, imperative verbs, 12, 51, 61, 74, 105, 115, 190n10,
205n2 190n12; in Baraka’s “Black Art,” 6–7, 161n12;
Grosz, Elizabeth, 171n7, 194n29 Fanon’s use of, 3–4; in Kocher’s “Domina,”
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, 166n26 67, 68
Gwaltney, John L., 166n27 impossible, impossibility, 35, 118, 119, 121
improvisation, 22, 176n19
habitat, 31, 36, 40, 59, 84, 142, 190n10; aliveness indigeneity, 37, 182n12
and, 26, 102, 148; essay and, 69, 72 individualism and individuality, 20, 32, 53, 143,
Hall, Stuart, 71 147, 192n20; black pessimism and, 179–180n2;
Hamer, Fannie Lou, 158n6 oneness vs., 31, 32, 53
Harper, Michael S., 72, 157n3 inhabitance, 17, 36, 44, 51, 91, 108, 120, 127, 138,
Harper, Phillip Brian, 7, 162n14; Abstractionist 153, 186n30, 198n5, 199n9, 208n20; aliveness
Aesthetics, 47, 76, 213n36; Are We Not Men?, and, 66, 83; poetic, 27, 96; relational, 22, 37,
166n27 129
Harris, Betsey, 47 interiority, 20, 26, 97, 99, 102, 163n16, 190n10,
Harris, Trudier, 36, 187n36 193n28
Hartman, Saidiya, 8, 9, 10, 159n10, 170n5, 187n36, interraciality, 84, 143
189n5, 204n31, 208n16; Lose Your M ­ other, 11, intersubjectivity, 21–22, 142, 191n14
196n40 intimacy, 73, 81, 97, 100
Hayes, Terrance, 161n12, 189–190n6; “American invitation, 27, 104, 113, 135, 147; in Clifton’s
Sonnet for My Past and F ­ uture Assassin” untitled verse “­won’t you celebrate with me,”
sonnet 55, 59–61 24, 115; relationality and, 43, 124, 146
Hazlitt, William, 192n23 “invitation” (Clifton), 115–116
Heidegger, Martin, 160n11 invitation poems, 159n9, 177n22
Hemphill, Essex, 162n13 invocation, 134, 163n16, 166n26; of black world,
Henry, Michel, 168n3, 174n15 145, 148, 166n25
heterogeneity, 7, 11, 83, 96, 141–142, 154, 214n3
Heth, Joice, 47 Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman, 21
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 210n25 Jafa, Arthur, 149
Holland, Sharon P., 10 James, V. Denise, 124, 187n36
hooks, hooks, 187n36, 207n15; ­Sisters of the Yam: Janie, in Hurston’s Their Eyes ­Were Watching God,
Black ­Women and Self-­Recovery, 148, 166n26, 25–26, 174n13
213n37 Jeribu, 136
Hull, Gloria T., All the W­ omen Are White, All the Johnson, Barbara, 191n14
Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, 33, Jones, LeRoi, 7; “The World ­You’re Talking
54, 152 About,” 58, 162–163n15. See also Baraka,
Hurston, Zora Neale, 25–26, 204n30 Amiri
Jordan, June, 37, 124, 178n26, 179n28; “Frag-
“i,” in Clifton’s poems, 54, 116–118, 134 ments from a Parable,” 178n26; “­These
“I,” 39, 45–46, 51, 53, 109, 148; in Kincaid’s A Small Poems,” 26
Place, 74–75, 80, 194n34 Judd, Bettina, 47

Index 233
Kafka, Franz, 97, 100, 104, 203n27 “lucifer speaks in his own voice” (Clifton),
Kant, Immanuel, 170–171n6, 204n31 117–119
Katz, Tamar, 195n36 lyric, 38, 46, 183n13, 185n26, 194n31, 197n2, 212n35,
Kaufmann, Walter Arnold, 175n16 215n6
Kelley, Robin D. G., 166n27
Khalip, Jacques, 209n20 “Making of Paper, The” (Finney), 61–65, 69
Kierkegaard, Søren, 214n42 Map to the Door of No Return, A (Brand), 71–72
Kincaid, Jamaica, 79, 124, 195n37; A Small Place, Marumo, Nasir (Nandi), 200n13
73–81, 194n32 mastectomy, Lorde’s, 34
King, Mike, 157n3, 174n13, 177n24, 205n1, 211n25, Massumi, Brian, 195n36
214n3 materialism, 148, 171n7
Klaus, Carl H., 69–70 materiality, 18–19, 27–28, 32, 47, 72, 78, 85, 102,
knowing, knowledge, 17, 22, 26–28, 34–38, 44, 52, 171n7; essay and, 69, 83, 105; in Finney’s “The
82, 105, 110, 112, 114, 170n6, 181n8; embodied, 31, Making of Paper,” 64, 65; of ­human body,
96; Lorde on, 20, 26 40–41; in Kocher’s works, 66, 68; of texts, 10,
Kocher, Ruth Ellen, 66–69 69, 133, 138
Maud Martha (Brooks), 53, 124, 138, 174n13; rela-
Lacan, Jacques, 204n31 tional world in, 44–46
Lacks, Henrietta, 47 Maye, Kristen, 211n25
Lamothe, Daphne, 165n22, 176n19, 214n3 McDade, Tony, killed by police, 13
language, 66, 87, 103, 119, 127, 130, 143–144, 153, McKay, Claude, 190n8
172n9, 188n2, 198n5, 215n7; ordinary, 196n39, McKittrick, Katherine, 163–164n18, 213n41
206n7, 210n25 McRuer, Robert, 191n20
Larsen, Nella, 174n13 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 168n3, 171n7, 174n15
Lawrence, Jacob, The Migration Series panel 46, Migration Series panel 46 (Lawrence), 149–152
149–152, 216n8 Millan, Diego, 207n11
Leigh, Simone, 149 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 208n19
Levinas, Emmanuel, 175n18, 176n21, 180n5, Milton, Riah, murder of, 13
184n22, 204n31 modellessness, 34, 37; in Clifton’s untitled verse
Lewis, Robin Coste, Voyage of the Sable Venus, 46 “­won’t you celebrate with me,” 24, 33, 115
“­Little Girl Dreams of ­Dying, The” (Awkward-­ Moi, Toril, 198n5, 202n22, 208n20
Rich), 50–52 Montaigne, Michel de, 53, 192n25; “Of Experi-
loneliness, 120, 209n22 ence,” 34, 181n8; “Of Practice,” 73
Lorde, Audre, 15, 18, 26, 31, 41, 43, 71, 76, 86, 124, mood, 59
142, 166n24, 170–171n6, 172n9, 176n20, 181n9, Moore, J. Peter, 163n15
192n25, 204n31; The Black Unicorn, 180n6; The Morris, Wesley, 209n23
Cancer Journals, 11, 33–36, 47, 147, 180n6; on Morrison, Toni, 2, 12, 14, 18, 109, 120, 124,
embodiment, 22, 96, 146, 174n15; on erotic, 146, 153, 205n2; Beloved, 11, 107, 120, 122–123,
122, 173n10; “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” 11, 17, 208n20; The Bluest Eye, 206n8; Jazz, 72, 146,
19, 21, 28–29, 34, 53, 65–66, 112, 121, 133–134, 174n13, 178n26, 213n40; on language, 58,
138, 153, 171n7, 172n9; ­Sister Outsider, 58, 188n2; Nobel Prize lecture of, 58, 144, 146,
180n6; “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic 213n40; Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and
as Power,” 18–21, 34, 111–112, 121, 171n7, 173n10; the Literary Imagination, 94, 201n19; Song of
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, 180n6 Solomon, 174n13; “Strangers,” 28; Sula, 39–43,
Lovell, Whitfield, 148; Kin XXXIII: May I Assume 109–111, 183nn16–18; “The Site of Memory,”
What­ever For I Want, in What­ever Place My 93–94
Spirit Wishes, 146, 149 Moten, Fred, 26, 46, 66, 152–153, 163n18, 164n20,
Lucifer, Clifton and, 115, 116–119, 208n19 166n24, 177n21, 185n27, 186n30, 194n30, 216n11,

234 Index
 217n14; Black and Blur, 190n13; on consent, openness, 43, 97, 103, 124, 133; of black world-
141–142; and Stefano Harney, 143, 166n25, making, 7, 206n5; orientation and, 101, 108,
192n20, 207n13, 209n22; The Undercommons, 138; relation and, 142, 146
197n1, 211n25, 214n3 Otherhood (Shepherd), 84
Mrs. Sallie Smith, in Brooks’s In the Mecca,
151–152 Patterson, Orlando, 164n20, 169n4
Mullen, Harryette, 46 Pavlić, Ed, 142–143, 200n13
Muñoz, José Esteban, 161n12, 189n5, 198n5, per­for­mance studies and per­for­mance theory,
204n32, 214n3 38, 57, 157n5, 187n1, 210n25
“my life as china” (Shockley), 47–49 performativity, 72, 104, 187n1, 195n36; in Shep-
herd’s “On Not Being White,” 86, 87–88
Nagelhout, Marah, 213n36 Perry, Imani, 170n5, 210n25
Nag Hammadi gnostic gospels, 178n26 pessimism. See black pessimism
Nash, Jennifer C., Black Feminism Re­imagined: phenomenology, 20, 72, 105, 124, 133, 161n12,
­After Intersectionality, 166n26, 171–172n7 166n24, 168n3, 171n7, 172n8, 174–175n15,
Neal, Larry, 132, 193n28 185n27, 194n30, 198n9
negation, negative, 8, 87–88, 90, 91, 93, 171, Pheoby, in Hurston’s Their Eyes ­Were Watching
197n2, 199n10 God, 25–26
Négritude, 159n11, 162n13 Philip, Marlene Nourbese, 46, 203n28
Negro Digest, 159n11 Phillips, Carl, “A Politics of Mere Being,” 92
Nel, in Morrison’s Sula, 39, 40, 42, 109–111, 120, philosophy, phi­los­o­phers, 44, 57, 88, 137, 179n26,
183n16 206n8; ordinary language, 196n39, 206n7,
New World, 13, 22, 32 207n13, 210n25
Nissen, Alex, 43 pluralization, 89
Nobel Prize, Morrison’s lecture for, 58, 144, 146, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (Lorde), 28–29,
231n40 34, 112, 121, 133, 138, 153, 173n10; light in, 53,
nonbeing, 8, 9, 11 65–66
Nussbaum, Martha, 132 poiesis, 44, 113, 179n30
Nyong’o, Tavia, 10, 38, 215n7 “Po­liti­cal Poem” (Smith), 128–132
prayer, 153, 154
object, objects, 21, 49, 102, 193n28, 194n29; pronouns, 3–4, 12, 54, 58, 76, 80, 175n16, 185n25,
subject and, 135, 185n27 186n32; first-­person, 197n1, 213n39; in Maud
objectification, 3, 46, 51, 52, 89, 90, 193n28 Martha (Brooks), 45–46, 53; “one” as, 31, 44,
objective correlative, 84, 198n4 211n25; proper impersonal, 39, 45–46; reflex-
Oliver, Mary, 207n13 ive, 40, 86, 166–167n27; second-­person, 27, 28,
Oloko, Semi, 208n18 85, 117, 179n28, 197n2; singular, 166–167n27,
“one,” 44; “I” and, 45, 53, 148; as pronoun case, 186n31, 194n34; “themself,” 186n31, 206n5;
31, 185n25, 211n25 third person, 50–51
oneness, 47, 80, 95, 96, 104, 114, 127, 131, public intellectuals, 95, 201n21
142–148, 179n1, 183n15; aliveness and, 31–55; Pullum, Geoffrey, 189n5
being and, 39, 143; black, 36, 49, 111, 135, 148; punctuation, 15, 39, 116; ampersand, 50, 54; com-
ethics and, 121, 124, 133; relationality and, 38, mas, 75, 130; double colons, 47–48, 49; ellipsis,
108, 111, 142 4, 38, 116, 158n7, 187n33; parentheses, 51, 76, 81,
“On Not Being White” (Shepherd), 84–93 99, 172n9; periods, 24, 116, 208n17; quotation
ontology, 9, 11, 29, 59, 118, 164n18, 166n24, marks, 102, 204n30; slashes, 50, 187n33
166n25, 190n13; black, 8, 189–190n6, 203n28;
Lorde and, 19, 35 Quashie, Kevin, The Sovereignty of Quiet, 20
opacity, 22, 164n20, 165n21 Quilting (Clifton), 2, 159n8

Index 235
race, 3, 57, 86, 202n22 Sandoval, Chela, 199n10
racial blackness, 97, 149, 173n10 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 164n20
racial capitalism, 32, 53, 113, 136, 144, 184n22 Savage, Monique J., 166n26
racialization, 18, 67, 94 scientia sexualis, 174n11
racism, 5, 12–13, 68, 92, 142, 145 Scott, Darieck, 68, 81
Rai, Amit S., 58 Scott, David, 145, 161–162n13
Rajchman, John, 158n7 Scott, Joan W., 192n25
Rancière, Jacques, 192n20 Scott, Patricia Bell, 33, 54
Rankine, Claudia, 174n13 Seboulisa, 180n6
Rasch, Hilary, 211n25 second-­person vocative, 182n12
Rathbun, Marney, 208n19 self and selfhood, 21, 31, 48, 86, 96, 101–102, 108,
reader, 3, 14, 24, 40, 69, 73–78, 85, 94–97, 133; 113, 178n26, 200n15; beholding of, 32, 111; being
black, 14, 133, 148, 213; white, 74–75, 79, 94 and, 51–52, 153; black, 73, 182n13; study and, 97,
reading, 147, 202n22 111–112, 124, 138
reckoning, 109, 110, 117, 122, 124, 131, 154; Baldwin self-­regard, 33, 138, 143, 153; black femaleness
and, 142, 143 and, 37, 38
Reed, Anthony, 38, 46, 159–160n11, 212n35 self-­righteousness, 114
regardless, 121, 209n23. See also self-­regard Sethe, in Morrison’s Beloved, 11, 107, 109, 205n2
Reid-­Pharr, Robert, 10 Sexton, Jared, 8–9, 10, 164n20, 165n22
relation, 39, 118, 124, 142–147, 154, 173n10, 177n23, shame, 80, 97
179n29; aliveness and, 15–29, 65, 121, 142; being Shange, Ntozake, 37
and, 55, 184n22; essay and, 148, 203n24; ethics Sharpe, Christina, 8, 109, 165n22, 206n4
and, 143, 213n36; oneness and, 32, 100, 108, 145; Shepherd, Reginald, 96, 124, 153, 199n10; aes-
poems of, 136, 177n24. See also relationality thetics and, 200n13, 204n31; “On Not Being
relationality, 7, 40, 43, 60–61, 74, 80, 86, 110, White,” 84–93; “Slaves,” 197n2; Some Are
130–132, 142–147, 175n18, 178n26; aliveness Drowning, 197n2
and, 15–29, 65, 121, 142; in “American Sonnet Sherald, Amy, 149
for My Past and F ­ uture Assassin” sonnet 55 Shockley, Evie, 124; “my life as china,” 47–49
(Hayes), 60, 61; black, 4, 38, 49, 104, 202n22; signifiers, floating, 73, 198n8
black female, 37, 111; essay and, 69, 72; in Silva, Denise Ferreira da, 109, 170n5, 206n5
Finney’s “The Making of Paper,” 64, 65; one- Simpson, Lorna, 149
ness and, 31, 32, 36, 38, 53, 96; of speaker, 24, ­sister outsider, Lorde on, 34
48; of studying, 117, 120. See also relation slavery, enslaved ­people, 22, 32, 66, 80–81,
repetition, 6–7, 15, 60, 68; in Clifton’s poems, 94, 107, 109,121, 122, 164n20, 197n3; afterlife
4–5, 118, 119; in Shepherd’s “On Not Being of, 8, 9
White,” 86, 87, 90 Small Place, A (Kincaid), 73–81, 196n39, 201n19
“reply” (Clifton), 2, 5, 12, 137–138, 144, 158n6; Smith, Barbara, 33, 54
speaker in, 3, 4; verbs in, 16, 59 Smith, Danez, 46
repre­sen­ta­tion, 57, 72, 148, 149, 215n7 Smith, Shinique, 152
re­sis­tance, 4, 9, 190n13 Smith, Tracy K., 46; “Po­liti­cal Poem,” 128–132;
Robinson, Cedric, 164n18 Wade in the ­Water, 131
Roelofs, Monique, 57, 179n26 Smith, Zadie, 95
Romanticism, 173n10 Smythe, S. A., 176n20
Royster, Francesca T., 96 Snorton, C. Riley, 186n31
Socrates, 207n13
Saili, Kiran, 213n36 Sojourner Truth, 36
Salamon, Gayle, 52 Some Are Drowning (Shepherd), 84
Sanchez, Sonia, 162n14 sonnets, 59–60, 161n12

236 Index
Sontag, Susan, 86–87 suspension, 64, 66, 68, 70, 89, 133, 186n32, 198n5,
speaker, 38, 46, 186n31, 192n20, 194n32, 198n5, 198n9; in Clifton’s poems, 118, 190n8
200n17, 203n28; in Awkward-­Rich’s “The syllepsis, 48, 49, 52, 186n29
­Little Girl Dreams of ­Dying,” 51, 52; in syllogism, 123, 186n30
Baraka’s “Black Art,” 6–7, 161n12; black, Sympathetic ­Little Monster (Awkward-­Rich),
32, 78, 88, 92, 97, 148; in Brand’s Map to the 49–50, 51
Door of No Return, 71; in Clifton’s poems, synecdoche, 131
3, 4, 44, 115, 134–136, 158n6; in Derricott’s
“Beds,” 98–103, 105; encountering self, 49–50; Taylor, Breonna, killed by police, 13
essay and, 69, 70, 72, 97; in Finney’s “The Taylor, Paul C., 133, 212n36
Making of Paper,” 64–65; in Gay’s “Cata­log temporality, 10, 59, 61. See also time
of Unabashed Gratitude,” 124, 126–127; in “testament” (Clifton), 54
Hayes’s sonnets, 59–61; in Jordan’s “Frag- “­These Poems” (Jordan), 26–29
ments from a Parable,” 178n26; in Jordan’s Thomas, Greg, 79, 160n11
“­These Poems,” 27–29; in Kincaid’s A Small Threatt, Britt, 214n3
Place, 74–81, 196n39; in Kocher’s “Domina,” time, 10, 59, 60–61, 165n22, 210n25
68; in Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, 35–36; in timelessness, 190n12
Shepherd’s “On Not Being White,” 84, 86, “times, the” (Clifton), 134–135
87, 90, 91, 93, 105; in Shockley’s “my life as totality, 9, 14, 22–23, 35, 39, 41–43, 58, 105, 143,
china,” 48–50; in Smith’s “Po­liti­cal Poem,” 165n22, 176–177n21; of blackness, 4–5, 8, 10; of
129–132. See also voice black world, 11, 12, 164n18
Spillers, Hortense J., 18, 32, 42, 133–134, 187n36, transcendence, 36, 48, 53, 86, 105, 173n10, 184n22;
209n22, 212n36, 214n3; “A Hateful Passion, relation and, 43–44
a Lost Love,” 183–184n19; “Interstices: A transcendentalism, 19, 173n10
Small Drama of Words,” 46, 180n3; “Mama’s transness and transgender ­people, 49, 186n31;
Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 11, 36, 157–158n5, 180n3, blacks and, 13, 52, 186n31
180n5 Trethewey, Natasha, 96, 191n13
Stallings, L. H., 17, 187n36
state, community vs., 143 undercommons, 166n25, 197n1
stranger, idiom of, 28 Undercommons, The (Harney and Moten), 143,
“Strangers” (Morrison), 28 163–164n18, 166n25, 192n20, 197n1, 207n13,
studying, study, 112–113, 117, 120–121, 147, 153, 209n22, 211n25, 214n3
207n15 universal, universalism, universality, 23, 43, 46,
subjunctive and subjunctivity, 28–29, 42, 44, 46, 81, 103, 133, 145–146, 172n9; 185n26; Glissant
59, 65–68, 71, 74, 82, 105, 118, 134, 146, 189n5, and, 184n22, 185n27
190n9, 190n12, 196n39; aliveness and, 73, 131, untitled verse “­won’t you celebrate with me”
154; in Clifton’s poems, 119, 159n8, 190n8; in (Clifton), 32–33, 116; black relationality in,
Hayes’s sonnet 55, 60–61; in Shepherd’s “On 23–26
Not Being White,” 88, 89; in Smith’s “Po­liti­ “Uses of the Erotic, The” (Lorde), 34, 111–112,
cal Poem,” 130, 132; time and, 61, 124; verbs, 12, 121, 173n10
14, 27–28, 85
Sula (Morrison): oneness in, 39–43; relational Vaihinger, Hans, 88–89
being and knowing in, 44, 146 Van Clief-­Stefanon, Lyrae, 46, 189n5
Sula, in Morrison’s Sula, 39, 41, 53, 66, 112–114, Venus Hottentot, 47
118, 119, 143, 174n13, 183n16, 207n9; Nel and, verbs, 12, 16, 39, 59, 68, 130, 146; auxiliary,
109–111, 120; oneness and, 42, 44, 53; totality 48; in Clifton’s “reply,” 3, 4–5, 59; subjunc-
of, 41–42 tive, 27, 68. See also imperative verbs; verb
surrender, 37–38, 66, 70, 104, 110 tenses

Index 237
verb tenses, 4, 154; ­future conditional, 35; past, Wilderson, Frank B., III, 164n19, 164n20, 165n21,
103, 117; past perfect, 25; pre­sent, 4, 68, 117 166n25, 167n29, 185n27; Afropessimism, 9,
vernacular, 11, 87, 89, 121 205n2; Red, White and Black, 11
vocative, 38, 42, 68, 115, 182n12 Wiley, Kehinde, 149
voice, 45, 53, 68, 98, 100, 162n14, 177n24, 178n26, Williams, Heather, 157n4
182n13, 192n20; Best on, 37–38; in Clifton’s Williams, Patricia J., 66, 71, 93, 95, 123, 138;
poems, 54, 116; in essays, 65, 70, 81, 83, 84–85; The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law
in poems, 48, 59, 96. See also speaker Professor (1991), 36–37, 73, 216n12
Williamson, Terrion L., 9, 184n20
wake, as idiom, 8 Willis, Andre C., 209n20
Walcott, Derek, 193n26 ­Wills, David, 77–78
Walker, Alice, 124; “Beauty: When the Other womanism, 11
Dancer Is the Self,” 216n13; The Color Purple, work, 114, 145; in Smith’s “Po­liti­cal Poem,” 130,
20, 125; on regardlessness, 121, 122; womanism 132; usability of term of, 113–114
of, 11, 37, 121 worldmaking, 3, 10, 59, 69, 74, 81, 105, 142,
Walker, Kara, 149 159–161n11, 162n13; aesthetics and, 2, 58; black
Wall, Cheryl A., 200n18, 203n24; On Freedom pessimism and, 8, 164n18; black w ­ omen and,
and the W ­ ill to Adorn, 94, 95, 204n30 11, 166n26; in Clifton’s poems, 4, 146
Walsh, Sylvia, 214n42 Woubshet, Dagmawi, 86
Warren, Calvin L., 165n22, 165n24; on ontologi- Wright, Michelle M., 10, 158n7, 161n12
cal terror, 9, 165n21 Wynter, Sylvia, 5, 18, 145–146, 157n1, 159n11,
Weems, Carrie Mae, 149 161–162n13, 162n15, 164n19, 211n27
Weheliye, Alexander, 16, 168–169n4
Wescott, Anarcha, 47 “you,” 24, 28, 51, 79, 84, 136, 145
Western imaginary, 32
Whitman, Neal, 161n12 Zimmerman, Lucy, 47

238 Index
This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank
This page intentionally left blank