Achille's Talk on "Happiness in the Age of Animism" by William Brinkman-Clark

As the opening act of the 2015 JWTC, Achille Mbembe’s lecture on his work – in progress – about happiness began with a metaphor: contemporary thinking of happiness – in the words of Achille – resembles an “architecture of corridors that never intersect”. So before taking on the question of “how” to be happy, an inquiry that modernity reduces to what appears as an easy decision on what corridor to take (and, of course, follow through), this year’s workshop offers the opportunity to take a moment and think about happiness itself.

We use the word happiness it would seem, on a daily basis, and yet, the varied ways in which this signifier is displaced offers a kind of clue on it’s malleability; as an “inalienable right”, happiness as presented by the American Declaration of Independence suggests that it is something to be pursued, and therefore, something that can be “obtained”. This liberal idea of happiness grants “it” some sort of metaphysical essence that can be procured… if so, can it also be lost? Romantic love, we were reminded, can promise happiness through the finding of one’s “soulmate”; happiness then, would be a sort of fulfillment – through (an)other – of a constitutive void; Internet dating can systematize said fulfillment and guarantee that, whichever “part” you pick to “complete” this entity of happiness, will be the “correct” choice. If one can “find” happiness, what does it look like? If I can achieve happiness, am I done after I do? Can I buy happiness? What does it cost? Achille’s brief description of contemporary notions of happiness seem to hit the nail on the head, and with it, open up the discussion for the next 10 days: Happiness, it seems, has assumed the form – in one way or the other – of work; and work these days, is best done with the mediation of experts.

What I mean when I say that this idea really opens up the discussion is that, when Achille talks about “the form happiness assumes today”, it reminds us of how necessary it is turn away from all the metaphysical specters projected when “happiness” is thought of as something “pure”, to renounce nostalgia or longing for something lost (which maybe, was never had), and to properly historicize and contextualize happiness: it has a time, a place. There is a historical repetition of the concept happiness, yes, but always different. Hence, happiness can only be, for us, modern happiness (or postmodern, take your sides) in the times of a capitalistic regime of production. would mean that happiness is, nothing more, or nothing less, than a relational value; that is, that happiness must be thought of in the context of the possibility of its potential infinite equivalency, happiness as a part of capital’s quest for universal equivalency. Does this mean that there are no other contemporary forms of happiness? No; but I do think that they remain inaccessible to us in the same way Borges’ Chinese Encyclopedia is.

However, this still would not tackle the phenomenological aspect of happiness and life: its part in “living”, where it would seem to be closer to the condition of a category (not in the Kantian sense, as a transcendental structure of understanding, but more along the lines of Blumenberg’s description of category: an attempt to explain basic or fundamental life experiences in the world) as much as we can theorize about out ability to measure and compare happiness we don't feel about it that way…at least not entirely. Happiness then, as a category, mediates something immediate, a sort of affectation whose materiality can only exist in the flesh, but can only be attempted to reconstruct and explain through language. What I find interesting about this approach is that it would again bring us back to a certain historicity; this time of the categories that constitute any regime of historicity, to borrow François Hartog’s term.

How can we reconcile happiness as a subjective affection, only partially objectified through language, and happiness as a value that appears so objectified that it has attained a sort of universal equivalency? As challenging as it may seem, this contradiction appears as central if we are to tackle the subject of happiness: It is through the contradictions modernity creates that we can intervene it’s architecture and perhaps, make two corridors intersect.

William Brinkman-Clark

Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.

Brett Bailey Exhibit B - by Rodney Place

The cancellation of Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B in London and the critical squall that has blown up around it in the SA and the UK, reminded me of Sigmund Freud’s odd undertaking as the midwife of psychoanalysis.  Freud asked an artist friend to do a series of drawings demonstrating how Moses in Michelangelo’s epic sculpture, ended up in the pose he’d held for 400 years. The drawings are nice, like a horror movie where the corpse starts to move. Unlike Bailey, Freud allowed that Moses was a feeling, thinking human being before he was incarcerated in the marble tableaux.

As Freud’s animation tells, the Commandment Tablet had slipped from Moses’ arm as he stiffened in his big chair. Apparently, when Michelangelo found him, Moses had suppressed his visceral-Id in favor of his intelligent-Ego, or more his born-to-lead-Super-Ego. In short, Moses the Leader hadn’t lost his marbles by throwing them at the newly liberated children of Israel, even though they’d gone back to messing around with idols while he was up on the mountain getting concrete instructions from God.

Freud had set about in The Future of an Illusion to show that religious superstitions - now non-Globalized Others - had no future in the March of Civilization - now Global Capitalism and Contemporary Art Marketing. Oddly, according to Freud, the March would come at the cost of repression to the Civilized. They’d probably miss exotic-erotic passions and daily survival anxiety, and would have to dream them up at night, or go look at them in museums.

Civilized Thinking, particularly through psychoanalysis, has developed the incredible ability to turn oppressors into victims, as we’ve just witnessed in the Oscar Pistorius trial. What happened inside Oscar’s head has become far more important than what happened to Reeva’s body in the toilet. Remarkably, the trial judge accepted the defense argument that Reeva’s death was merely a logical consequence of Oscar’s justifiable paranoia about die swart gevaar (the black danger).

Despite Freud’s strident claims to be unpacking illusion once and for all, not once did he acknowledge that this wasn’t Moses at all, but a skillful human resemblance hewn out of a huge block of marble by Michelangelo and his co-workers.

Perhaps Freud, like contemporary art critics, was not as interested in unpacking illusion as he was in repackaging it as a more refined and exclusive version of Humanism and Civilization, to stay ahead in the illusion game? The marble was something only a bunch of twitters would pay attention to; they hadn’t a clue about History or Art.

Instead of understanding Bailey’s Super-Ego rerun of colonialism in Exhibit B, ignorant Moses-is-marble-recognizers might see instead a group of black actors being subjected to rather degrading conditions of exposure for 2014, apparently with no artistic say in the reconstruction of these tableaus to do with their own cultures and histories.  Visitors might even enquire about the actors’ conditions of employment since, unlike sculptures, these museum figures could answer back, director permitting of course.

Dumb marble-recognizers seem to rely more on their eyes than their brains when they’re having an art experience. The ignoramuses in London treated the actors in Exhibit B as real people, and referred to live chat networks rather than contemporary art discourse, can you believe?

Ivor Powell wrote in the late 90’s that in post-modernism meaning had become just another art material. Marble or actors who cares? Bailey and his critical supporters, like Freud, assume the Super-Ego still has important work to do, adding nuance to Critical Thinking, the contemporary benchmark of Global Morality.

It all goes back to the early 70’s when the US State Department declared that History had ended; all was now understood and could therefore be determined and manipulated.  The US State Department was probably just putting on a brave face. They’d just scurried out of Vietnam with their choppers between their legs and were trying to brush a lost war under the carpet. Who cared about the Vietnamese anyway; they’d missed their chance to be part of History.

Nevertheless the message was clear. History was no longer a contested and modern process of human aspiration, but instead a Theatre of Illusions where the main players were already cast in a new Western drama set to run longer than the Mousetrap.  The aspiring could count themselves lucky to occasionally get a walk-on part if someone got sick or bored, or something exotic was needed to add spice to Western staples.

Post-modernism offered a convenient marriage between the extensive ethnographic containments of 19^th Century European Knowledge, and the later assertions of 20^th Century Psychoanalysis that what went on inside Civilized Heads was far more important than what messy people did in their tacky reality shows.

In post-modernism, History became a sophisticated and well-articulated assertion of entitlements that played out in the arts and in neo-liberal economics. In this New World Order, the rich got richer and could write-off their donations to NGOs dealing with art and uncivilized problems. Superstitious governments clearly didn’t have the wherewithal to cope or even to have a vague idea.

Modernism in industrial South Africa had been truncated by apartheid in 1948, so post-modernism was a perfect fit. Ethnographic containments were legislated in black townships, and psychoanalytic entitlement became a way of life in the white suburbs. The Civilized Mind reached its zenith in the suburban house, a gorgeous obsessive-compulsive enclave protected by security companies. At no point were the Civilized required to engage with any other kind of reality, let alone treat it as aspiring. It was a perfect place to have Liberal anxiety attacks.

Living on the inside of your head is a difficult habit to break, with or without Facebook. It’s harder yet when a fully secured edifice is constructed to sustain the occupants’ delusions that they are valuable Civilized Minds wired to the Social Democratic State of Mind up north.

When ’94 presented an alarming opportunity for SA’s post-modern Civilized to at last open their gates and participate in SA’s 92% aspiring modern, the shit was bound to hit the fan.

After ’94 the Civilized reaction in SA has been to press the panic button labeled Freedom of Speech, relying on a helpful operator up North to understand breaches of our trying-to-be-Western (?) Constitution, and offer back-up.

However in the predominantly immigrant town of London, these delusions are harder to sustain when realities and aspirations are biting back. In this Great Library of the Civilized Mind, it turns out that these realities are no longer prepared to be taken off the shelf, flipped through, then put back again, no matter how convincing the librarian. They’re having their ’94 moment. 

A lot of white South African artists, borrowing from their Western counterparts, still treat art and images as fait accompli, a reference system like Filofax that by its very nature dwells on repetition and stereotype. Stereotype is the identikit UNWANTED, as seen on CCTV outside the gate.

Nailed on the wall outside the post-modern edifice, just above the CCTV, a sign proclaims These Premises are protected 24/7 by Freedom of Speech International.

However, venturing out of the gate and down the road a bit, for sake of argument to Soweto, there are other signs that begin to dislodge the premise that Freedom and Speech are welded together in Civilized Perpetuity.

For instance there’s one saying, Freedom wasn’t Free, and urging young township people to vote.  And all around the sign in Soweto there’s very little Speech but a lot of people speaking freely without worrying anymore whether their papers are in order like their parents once did.

Before SA had post-modern, we first needed to have modern. Let’s face it; we didn’t really have modern except an exclusive version that gave the small Afrikaans population an opportunity to enter the middle class by force in the latter half of the 20^th Century. So SA artists, like other ordinary citizens, now have a similar opportunity in the 21^st Century that the Constructivists had in 1916 Soviet Union, to descend into local streets in search of our modern.

In the modern, images are earned, not used. With Martha Graham, the dancer is the dance, not just an instrument sustaining old spectacle.  The modern has always been and will always be a negotiated territory to do with human aspirations and the future. That’s what makes modern so exciting and also so terrifying; it has little to do with Civilized Entitlements or Inherited Super-Egos kept alive on life support machines plugged into an aging Europe.

The shit is bound to hit the fan more often in SA as we make a modern country at last.

Rodney Place October 9^th 2014.

Rodney Place is a trans-media artist who lives and works in Johannesburg

Revolting Music – A Brief Survey of South African Liberation Songs by Laura Efron

Neo Muyanga at the Rainbow Restaurant in Durban
(c) Tana Nolethu Forrest

 La primera vez que escuché a Neo Muyanga cantar fue en el colectivo. Un largo viaje camino a King Williams Town que empezaba a acumular sentimientos, ideas, imágenes; una serie de explosiones emocionales e intelectuales dentro de un grupo que sólo se conocía hacía menos de una semana. La primera vez que escuché a Neo Muyanga cantar, la magia se apoderó de mí y de nosotros a través de canciones que nunca antes habíamos escuchado. La música puede hacer eso. La música nos encanta y nos encandila; nos libera de nosotros mismos.

The first time I heard Neo Muyanga sing was in the bus, alongside 60 other writers, activists, and scholars. It was a long road trip across the Eastern Cape from Durban to King Williams Town. There had been a series of moments of intense intellectual experiences among a group of people who had only known each other for less than a week. As I listened to Neo Muyanga sing, magic washed over me and over us through songs we had never heard before. Music can do that. Music bewitches and dazzles; frees us from ourselves.

Como un instrumento de liberación y de lucha, la música tiene su propia historia en Sudáfrica. Las raíces de los géneros locales pueden rastrearse en los cantos y plegarias de los Khoi-San, habitantes originarios del Cabo. Con la llegada de los colonizadores europeos y el posterior desarrollo de la Unión Sudafricana, los ritmos y melodías locales y extranjeras comenzaron a fusionarse, generando nuevos estilos musicales característicos de la región, como por ejemplo el Goema.

A few days later in Cape Town, Muyanga gave a lecture---titled "Revolting Music"--- that explored the history of music as an instrument of liberation and struggle in South Africa. He explains that the roots of local genres can be traced in the hymns and prayers of the Khoi-San – the original inhabitants of the Cape. With the arrival of European settlers and the subsequent development of the South African Union, local and foreign rhythms and melodies began to fuse, creating new musical styles that became characteristic of the region. 

A partir de la instauración del Apartheid y el desarrollo de la violencia de estado, antiguos cantos religiosos, como es el caso de Nkosi Sikelela, fueron adoptados por la población como canciones de unidad y de protesta. Al mismo tiempo, el jazz se transformó en un estilo musical experimental, en el que sonidos, tonos y ritmos diferentes se entremezclaban en busca de un nuevo discurso y una nueva identidad. En tal contexto, los músicos comenzaron a compartir espacios de producción no-racializados, espacios que procuraban construir otros vínculos diferentes a los impuestos por el Estado. Hacia mediados de la década de 1960, muchos de ellos lograron exiliarse en Europa y Estados Unidos, donde se perfeccionaron y expandieron la lucha contra el sistema segregacionista. Con el paso del tiempo, y el aumento de las medidas raciales, la música se transformó en un espacio de protesta, un espacio desde el que era posible desarrollar una comunión identitaria y un discurso legítimo y fácilmente escuchable. La música se convirtió en una forma de hablar sobre la vida cotidiana en los townships.

Since the beginning of Apartheid and the development of state violence, old religious songs such as Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (Lord Bless Africa in Xhosa) were adopted by the people as songs of unity and protest. At the same time, jazz became an experimental musical style, in which sounds, tones and rhythms mingled in search of a new discourse and a new identity. In this context, musicians began to share non-racial spaces of production, spaces that sought to construct social links different to those that were state-imposed. By the mid-1960s, many of them were exiled to Europe and the United States, where they refined and expanded the fight against the Apartheid regime. With the increase of racial segregation, the music became a space of protest, a space from which it was possible to develop an identity, a legitimate communion and a vector for communication. Music became a way to talk about everyday life in the townships.

Luego de la transición democrática, la música ha ocupado un lugar diferente en la sociedad. Los cantos de protesta y de lucha fueron desplazados por el hip hop, el rock y el rap. Nuevas letras con pocos contenidos y nada de sueños invadieron el ámbito de la música popular, concepto que desde entonces cambió de significado. La antigua música popular, aquella que le daba sentido a las luchas por los derechos de la mayoría de la población, se convirtió en un archivo de la resistencia contra el Apartheid. Lo que queda por descubrir, entonces, es qué lugar ocupa la nueva música popular en la actual sociedad sudafricana. ¿Podrá seguir siendo un camino hacia la redención? ¿Podremos seguir cantando en pos de una sociedad más equitativa?

Since the democratic transition, music has occupied a different place in South African society. The songs of protest and struggle were displaced by hip hop, rock and rap music. New lyrics with little content and no dreams invaded the field of popular music, a concept that has since then changed its meaning. The popular music of the past, one that made sense of the struggles for the rights of the majority of the population, became an archive of the resistance against Apartheid. What remains to be discovered, then, is what place the new popular music has in South African society today. Is it still be a path to redemption? Can we keep singing towards a more equitable society?

Mientras la globalización y el neoliberalismo arrasan con las tradiciones locales en pos de la expansión del capital, la música sigue viajando por los mares y también a través de los colectivos. Empecé el viaje escuchando a Neo Muyanga cantar. Y así también lo vamos a terminar en estos días. Esa música viajará con nosotros hacia nuestros hogares en los distintos rincones del mundo. Y así, mientras caminemos cantando por las calles, recordaremos que la música puede romper barreras y combatir ejércitos que la violencia física no puede vencer.

While globalization and neoliberalism destroy local traditions by means of capital expansion, music continues to travel the seas and through the bus. We began the journey listening to Neo Muyanga singing. We will finish it in the same way. That music will travel with us to our homes in different corners of the world. And so, as we walk through the streets singing, we will remember that music can break down barriers and combat armies that violence cannot defeat.

***

About the Author: 

Laura Efron is an assistant professor in African History at the History Department in the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She is writing an M.A dissertation on South African history.

"My Political Life Has Been Informed by the Struggle in South Africa" --- Angela Davis | JWTC 2014 Interview

American political thinker and activist, Angela Davis, traveled through South Africa with the JWTC mobile conference. During our stop at Ginsberg, I had a chance to chat with her at the Steve Biko Center. She reflects on how the South African anti-racist struggle informs her political work and comments on the place of women in political struggle. 

Angela Davis addressing JWTC participants on the Bus. (c) Tana Nolethu Forrest  

Ainehi Edoro:  60 intellectuals. One bus. 47 hours of road time. And the theme: "The Archives of the Non-Racial." What is your sense of what this intellectual project is about?

Angela Davis: The project is informed by place and space. This was the attraction for me---our movement from Johannesburg to Swaziland to the Eastern Cape to the Western Cape. I have visited South Africa on three other occasions, but this is the first that I’ve been able to acquire a real sense of space. Of course, it also has to do with the kinds of conversations that have been happening around the question of race and political struggle. I was primarily interested in this project because most of my political life, which is most of my life, has been informed by the struggle in South Africa.

Ainehi Edoro: Can you tell us a bit about your life---growing up in the south and entering into a life of political activism.

Angela Davis: I grew up in a racially segregated city--- Birmingham, Alabama--- a city that was known as the Johannesburg of the south. So my entire life, in many respects, has been informed by an anti-racist political project. I’m interested in how people, intellectuals---organic intellectuals---cultural workers, imagine the possibilities of moving beyond racism.

I often tell a story about my mother trying to me help understand why it was that we lived in a place where black people where treated as inferior and systematically excluded from education, amusement parks, libraries. As a child, I constantly asked my mother why.  And I’m very fortunate that, as an activist herself, she had her vision. She always insisted that we inhabited a world that was not supposed to be structured that way.  She helped me live in that reality without feeling as though I was fundamentally of that reality.

I eventually became involved in the campaign to free Nelson Mandela. I was very young. I could probably tell the story of my political life by pointing to various moments in the history of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.  For many years, South Africa was the center of the world in the sense that it was here that we invested all of our aspirations. But as with most investments that are as absolute and total as this one was, it didn’t turn out in the way we had all imagined.

Ainehi Edoro: How had you imagined it?

Angela Davis: As someone who was involved in communist politics and had close relations to the South African communist party, I could never separate economic liberation from racial liberation.  I imagine racial liberation as taking place within the context of a redistribution of wealth.  I imagined the end of privatization.  And that is not what was achieved.

But I’m interested in the achievements of the South African struggle because things are different. We cannot discount the struggles and those who gave their lives. It has to mean something, and it does mean something.

Angela Davis reflecting on Nelson Mandela's Legacy at Qunu---Mandela's hometown (c) Naadira Patel

Ainehi Edoro: You have taken part in many political movements. How has the South African anti-apartheid/anti-racist movement informed your own theories and practices around the questions of political struggle?

Angela Davis: My involvement in the campaign for international solidarity against apartheid dates back to the 1960s. I was arrested in 1970 by the US Government and charged with 3 capital crimes. I faced the death penalty 3 times. It was thanks to an international solidarity movement that I was released.

I’m saying this to point out that many South Africans joined that campaign. I received numerous expressions of solidarity from South Africans in exile, from the ANC, the South African communist party. In the year after my release---I was in jail for about two years—I visited London and participated in the anti-apartheid rally there. Not long after that, on August 9th,---the South African Women’s Day--- I went back to London and spoke at a huge rally.

I can’t imagine my own trajectory without that constant South African theme. In 1980 when I was arrested on the campus of UC Berkeley, I was participating in an anti-apartheid rally. I was also involved in the International Longshore and Workers Warehouse Union. They were the first to engage in actions that served as a catalyst for the student anti-apartheid efforts by refusing to unload South African Ships.

What I didn’t have a chance to say during the session at Qunu---where we shared our experiences about Nelson Mandela---was that I spoke to Winnie Mandela during the time of her banning. We rranged a conversation on the telephone. She went to a paid telephone. I was doing a radio show at that time, so I was able to organize the show around Winnie Mandela. I later met her and spent some time with her when she and Mandela were still living together.

Ainehi Edoro: Political movements tend to constellate around male figures. Think Mandela, Martin Luther King, Nkruma and so on. Names of women tend not to take on as much force. What do you think is the place or status of the feminine or the woman in these kinds political struggles?

Angela Davis: In the black struggle--- in black radical struggle---women have played an absolutely pivotal role. The struggle is inconceivable without the participation and the leadership of women.  It’s unfortunate that the figure of the heroic individual---the masculinist figure of the heroic individual---almost inevitably erases the people who are most responsible for the emergence and the development of these struggles. This applies to South Africa as well. We don’t hear about the women who played absolutely essential roles. There’s Albertina Sisulu. There’s Ruth First, a white woman whose name is not evoked nearly enough.

But what about those whose name we will never know? I’m primarily concerned about how we pay tribute to those whose names we can never know. How do we acknowledge that, in the US civil rights movement, it was Black women domestic workers who played the central role? Most people who are thankful for the civil rights movement never think about poor black women maids as being the ones who refused to ride the bus and therefore who were responsible for the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Women’s role in South Africa is very much the same. Hilda Bernstein’s book, For Their Triumph and their Tears, comes to mind. It’s a nice book that records the names of a number of these women.

We have to figure out how to read the silences of the archives. And certainly women are almost consistently absent---masses of women who participated in these struggles.

Angela Davis and Achille Mbembe during lunch in Johannesburg (c) Naadira Patel

Ainehi Edoro: This year’s workshop is built around the concept of the “non-racial.” What is your take on the term?  Do you see it has a helpful way of naming an ideal to which anti-racist struggle, philosophy, practice, or theory should aspire?

Angela Davis: I’m trying to be open. [laughs]. I’ve expressed some of my ambivalences, some of my suspicions, and my historical reluctance to embrace the non-racial except within a particular context of South Africa. What is important about this workshop is that we have stayed open to the exploration of all sides of the concept. The non-racial is not a unitary concept. And because it has played such an essential role in the history of South Africa and in the theorization of a free South Africa, we have to come to grips with it. We have to engage it. But then whether it travels in the way the idea of South African freedom has traveled across the planet, I do not know. But as I said, I’m trying to be as open as possible.

***

Ainehi Edoro is a doctoral student at Duke University where she studies African novels. She also writes an African literary blog called Brittle Paper. 

"Shit is Racial" --- The Archivist by Simon Abramowitsch

Simon Abramowitsch wrote this poem on the road and read it for the first time on the bus. We had just had lunch in a little town called Swellendam and were on our way to Cape Town. In the three hours that lay before us, some of the participants came up to the front of the bus to share their experience of the journey, seeing it was coming to an end. Most people reflected on our intellectual project of the non-racial. Other's gave thanks. Simon read this poem. --- Editor's Note

A JWTC participant standing on the Sliding Stone at Qunu, Nelson Mandela's hometown

The Archivist

down a bumpy road
in Swaziland, the end
of a beautiful evening,
the southern sky glistening above
the roof of her hospitality
Dolores Godeffroy told us:
“shit
is racial.”

From a bus in Southern Africa
and yet the archive is
in Oakland and Berkeley, CA
can never be removed but
can be turned inside
out from anywhere.

1. The Archive of Friendship

I was in the midst of kings:
junior high named for martin
and rodney on the tv: here
brown boys
yellow boys
black boys
white boys
together, clowning and frowning.
and we thought
it was hiphop
and we thought
it was as the sons of single mothers
and our mothers thought
it was the accident or genius of the school district.

listen: no politics here
no political families here,
or so we thought.
we learned politics from the police
they showed each one of us who we were.
we learned politics from houses bought, houses rented,
from evictions and foreclosures and property values
these showed each one of us who we were.
we learned politics from job interviews, bank accounts, and bills
these showed each one of us who we were:
brown boys, yellow boys, black boys, white boys.

in the wake of this knowledge, these politics
i tried to remember
that which I had never known.
listen now,
listen now,
i tried to remember
in Berkeley, CA
this possibility realized—so fragile
—and from where did it come?
and whose work was this?
whose politics suggested the promise of something else
whose politics worked like artists, magicians, sculptors
carving from within
carving a humanity already forever present
and listen now
listen now
I found the panther, so many
listened close.
I knew the first line
Black Power for Black People
knew that one, knew it well.
but listen again:
Black Power for Black People
Brown Power for Brown People
Red Power for Red People
Yellow Power for Yellow People
White Power for White People
All Power to the People!
in this archive
the ideal was the possible, no?

2. The Archive of Family

In the home of those friends
made amidst kings
that are now uncles and aunties
to my son: children play:
Iyari, Santana, Lucien
the laugh, the cry, the yell, even the whine.
To show you this scene
to make this scene language
or make this scene image
to utter the rainbow
would that destroy it?
—as if, somehow, this moment of freedom can exist.

but dolores told us
“shit is racial.”
here, in the home of friends
happiness, and nevertheless
we are under siege:
racism and the racial world
come through gaps under the door
cracks in the window
through the mail slot
through electric lines and tv cables
sneaks in with toys and children’s books
it knocks on the door and asks to come in
it kicks in the door in with the ferocity of the police.
and in this home of the uncles and aunties to our children,
how do we defend ourselves?
what armor shall we wear?
what arms shall we take up?
Now,
in the tradition of those who came before
what shall be our self-defense?

***

Image by Naadira Patel.

About the Author: 
Simon Abramowitsch works on multi-ethnic American literature and African American literature, literary ethnic nationalisms and the Black Power/Black Arts Movement--as well as the relationships between these various categories and movements.

Instagram: btownthinker

Twitter: @ambitionsaz

Blog: http://btownthinking.wordpress.com/