Quietly Making Black Futures
February 18, 2022
“What we don’t see, we assume can’t be. What a destructive assumption.”
A Quiet Collage
Image Description: A collage of smiling Black ancestors. Top row of photos from left to right are: James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Audre Lorde. Bottom photos are Marsha P Johnson, Lois Marie Hutchinson, Toni Morrison, and Olivia VS Helms. The photos are layered over transparent images of a galaxy and oceans waves. Botanical leaves, wheat, blackberries, and pressed flowers decorate the collage.
Dominant narratives of Black history often follow a familiar structure: individual Black person sees injustice, they stand up in face of that injustice, “good” or well meaning white person may help, history is made! We know that the Hollywood versions of the stories of Black heroes like Ruby Bridges, the Tuskegee Airmen, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, Muhammad Ali, or Jackie Robinson are incomplete at best. Yet, how often do we acknowledge the incompleteness of using a lens like resistance, rebel, or revolutionary to define the fullness of who these people were and the lives they led?
This Black History Month, I intend to share a world I have been exploring for the past 5 years as I journey through healing, making myself, and freedom dreaming to connect to my own ancestral wisdom. My ancestors resisted, rebelled, revolutionized; and they did and were so much more.
“I don’t have to be available to be eligible for breath. I don’t have to be measurable in a market of memes. I don’t have to be visible to be viable on my path. I don’t have to be shy to be sacred about my time. There are only two things I have to do, my mom taught me, and I can do them in the company of my choosing. The company of myself, my living, my dead, my folks, my dreams. 1. Stay Black. 2. Breathe.”
I don’t aim to admonish the ways we have collectively celebrated, honored, acknowledged, and learned Black History, but rather to expand possibilities of remembering and connecting this month. We can reshape time, removing the spatial and temporal distance between us by deeply connecting to our Black ancestry and Black historical figures, known and unknown, through quiet.
Quiet, not silence, as described by Kevin Quashie, “is a metaphor for the full range of one’s inner life-- one’s desires, ambitions, hungers, vulnerabilities, fears. The interior [or one’s inner life] could be understood as the source of human action--that anything we do is shaped by the capacities of our inner life.” Quashie argues that our frameworks for understanding Black people are limited. Limited in part because of how we have made Black culture, Black people, Black history, and Blackness synonymous with resistance.
YES, Black folks have resisted, struggled, sabotaged, fought, led, and undone countless systems of harm, only to be faced with another iteration of oppression, dispossession, dehumanization, and racism generation after generation. All across the diaspora we have inherited the trauma and resilience of that resistance. At NEP our notion of rebel leadership - taking risks, getting in “good trouble” - is rooted in Black resistance and voicing demands that our systems must work for us too.
AND, we are a rich, vibrant, complex, expressive, opulent, and varied people who have lives and existence beyond resistance. These qualities, we too, have inherited.
So, rather than only celebrating a narrative of Black History that honors an overdetermined definition of being Black as resistance, I’d like to offer an invitation to explore something else. What might it mean to celebrate a history of making and belonging to ourselves? We have inherited such abundant inner lives. Our ancestral legacies are so capacious and expansive, the only way non-Black people have been able to describe us is as resistors. Who could we be if we chose to claim that abundance by birthright?
“I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.
Whatever’s burning in me, is mine.”
Whatever’s burning in Black folks, is ours. Not a possessive ours that a capitalist and white supremacist culture would file under the words ownership; but rather an ours that honors boundaries, interdependence, and being one another’s keepers.
The inner lives of our heroes, leaders, and ancestors are bountiful and lush! What burned in them was so profuse it could not energetically cease to exist as they moved to the ancestral realm, instead it is within us at a cellular and molecular level. So that burning could be within us, always. Their inner lives are defined by a type of joy, rage, uncertainty, silliness, complexity, magic, wisdom, and fullness that we can only access by exploring our own quiet. If you are quiet, and search your inner life, can you find their desires, fears, vulnerabilities, and ambitions within you?
“In order to keep me available to myself, and able to concentrate my energies upon the challenges of those worlds through which I move, I must consider what my body means to me. I must also separate those external demands about how I look and feel to others, from what I really want for my own body, and how I feel to my selves.”
I often wonder how we go about doing the work of protecting our inner lives to, as Audre Lorde described, “keep [us] available to [our] selves”? We must protect our quiet. We have to mean so much to ourselves (both a singular self and a collective self) that we are able to separate from external demands. What did our Black ancestors and historical figures do to keep them available to themselves?
To keep me available to myself has required me to practice setting boundaries that our extractive economy and culture does not often honor or respect. As a queer, Black, non-binary femme I am expected to share my story. To use my narrative of resistance in order to teach others how to see and hopefully honor my humanity. Sometimes I share and sometimes I refuse. The depths of my quiet, where I share desires with my Aunt Lois, Aunt Olivia, and Martha P. Johnson, fears with James Baldwin, vulnerabilities with Octavia Butler, and ambitions with Gwendolyn Brooks, are for me. When I am unsure or doubtful of the power of love, I can connect to the quiet innermost parts of myself and find bell hooks there. She has moved into the realm of ancestors, but she is not lost to me.
Image Description: A collage of smiling Black ancestors. Top row of photos from left to right are: James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, and Audre Lorde. Bottom photos are Marsha P Johnson, Lois Marie Hutchinson, Toni Morrison, and Olivia VS Helms. The photos are layered over transparent images of a galaxy and oceans waves. Botanical leaves, wheat, blackberries, and pressed flowers decorate the collage.
I recently saw a series of videos (video 1, video 2) of a young Black child from from @aina_company, a farming family I follow on social media. They held the camera in that familiar angle that children do when you FaceTime them and their too close faces take up the whole screen, or you only see their foreheads and sky. Confidently and matter-of-factly speaking into the recording camera they said, “Remember, yourself is your own self. I have my own thoughts. My own thoughts is a good thought. You can’t take these thoughts away from me. Cause I’m the only one that can have these thoughts around me. And I have thoughts that make me happy!”
“Remember, yourself is your own self. I have my own thoughts. My own thoughts is a good thought. You can’t take these thoughts away from me. Cause I’m the only one that can have these thoughts around me. And I have thoughts that make me happy!” -@aina_company
ID: Video screenshot of a young Black child with braids in a pink hat looking directly at the camera, her words in the top of the frame read "I have this own thoughts I have my own thoughts." Video caption on bottom reads, “you can’t take her happiness!” Click for video.
Staring back at the face of a Black child claiming for themselves the beauty of their own thoughts and desires while simultaneously setting boundaries around who could have and access those very thoughts was too much for me to witness. I giggled and wept at their earnestness. I wept for the abundant joy and pride I felt witnessing a child I do not know understand the power of their quiet. I wept for all of the violations, external pressures, and publicness that is demanded of Black people. And I wept for the gifts that have come to me in quiet from literary geniuses, colleagues, ancestors, theorists, writers, poets, and children telling me, us, that we can make Black history everyday by honoring and protecting the sacredness of our inner lives. In that way we are making Black futures as well.
In her 2021 Emmy acceptance speech For 'I May Destroy You', brilliant actress, screenwriter, director, producer and singer Michaela Coel dedicated her work to “every single survivor of sexual assault,” and shared a provocation to other creators that I think is worth considering as we reflect on what we make available of ourselves and the ways that we expect visibility and availability from our Black leaders, healers, revolutionaries, artists, cultural and spiritual guides:
“In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to, in turn, feel the need to be constantly visible, for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success. Do not be afraid to disappear,
from it,
from us,
for a while,
and see what comes to you in the [quiet]*.”
*Original speech used the word silence. Quiet is used to replace silence to both clarify my interpretation of the quote and avoid using quiet and silence interchangeably as they are distinct conceptual frames in this piece.
Resources
The Sovereignty of Quiet, Beyond Resistance in Black Culture by Kevin Quashie
Sula by Toni Morrison
Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lorde
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Deeply Rooted in Black History by LaShawn Routé Chatmon