Stirring Atoms in the Necropolis

The “alienation” and “exploitation” that the human worker experiences through labor are contingent conditions resulting from human conflicts.

– Tiffany King

Labor’s Aphasia: Toward Antiblackness as constitutive to Settler Colonialism

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In a recent Indiewire article David Lynch says,

it is “absolutely possible” to create unity among Americans by tapping into the unified field through Transcendental Meditation, a practice championed by the David Lynch Foundation. The director issued a call to action: “All these problems, all these people so bitterly divided, enliven this field, and they affect collective consciousness with bliss, harmony, coherence, love, all these qualities from this field. And you’re going to have a different world.”

Full disclosure: I read up on the various programs his foundation has implemented over the years. They aim at teaching the benefits of TM to war veterans, children displaced by global conflict and incarcerated juveniles. They also work towards having TM taught in schools.

Lynch has also brilliantly created a filmscape filled with happenstance and casual violence. His vast imagination has blinded him to the fact that there is no room in the lives of the disenfranchised to sit still.

This is not unique to him. These days it’s fashionable to be a CEO guru. Using their platform to say, sit with me in this place so that we can all feel love.

We over here like, mufucka, love don’t pay the bills.

Dig it, we’re adept at reclaiming quiet space. On our own terms.

To understand how we claim space you have to understand why we demand that space be given outside of well meaning, white occupied spaces.

Our captivity has moved away from the marked brutality of chattel slavery. During its course, Settler politics has defaced our places of worship, smashed our alters. Population control through genocide and psychological terror effectively made us to cling to hope in service of the Settler gods, or co-opted spiritual teachings presented by the rebellious children of the upper class.

Through income inequality we’re beholden to insert our broken lives into this ratchet alien economy. You’ll have to excuse us while we reclaim the pieces.

What this incessant onslaught can never do was sever our connection to the universe. Social death, Otherness aside, our lives are intertwined with propulsion.

We are shaped by turmoil, movement, hustle. The storm you wish we forget is our refuge. We out in these streets, twerking for our ancestors, sweat mingled with countless lifetimes.

We’ve wandered this wilderness untethered for long enough. Our goddesses and gods have been found again.

They demand a dance of us, a nevertheless attitude, even within those quiet spaces.

Consistency, because bill collectors don’t make allowances for an attempt to will away a late fee.

We pour libations on street corners and beautiful alters. We sing, make beats, ancestor energy working it all out.

And it makes our black and brown skin glow. We speak in tongues in your sacred cubicles. As we toil, bass heavy hymns fill our earbuds, and move our spirit. We’re loud, passionate and don’t have time to sit quietly as our culture is capitalized upon, mocked and coveted.

We got shit to do.

So we find peace with movement, always accomplishing the impossible cause to sit still with you

Means we die.

Barefoot on Stone, Revised

The “black queer” cannot claim an ontology outside of blackness….

The “black queer,” then, is a catachresis. The problem I am laying out here is not merely the impossibility of folding the black queer into humanity (humanism) or the ‘community’ of objects (internal exclusion), but whether the injury directed at this being is registered as anti-blackness at all. The prevailing problem is that the injury sustaining this catachresis is so incomprehensible that it is doubly erased, and this is what I will call
‘onticide.’

– Calvin Warren

Onticide

Afro-pessimism, Queer Theory and Ethics

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I am a nonmonogamous, agender, queer black fugitive. Love and acceptance, as it has been taught from a colonized perspective, damn sure don’t love and accept me.

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Accepting my queerness has taken all my adult life. Being accepted is a work in progress. I don’t fit within the greater LGBTQ2IAA community with ease.

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I have passing privilege, am male presenting, older. I also have two biracial children with my white, nonbinary transmasculine nesting partner. As neither of us pass we are coded as a straight, albeit strange couple. We have to orbit the nebulous pre-fixation that has bound the gay community into particulars.

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Daily shedding the sickly skin of misogynoir, battling to use the perception of my masculinity and the privilege it affords to provide space for my newfound non-men, enby and transguy comrades, I have effectively alienated myself from most of my long time friends.

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This was expected. Still I worried over the idea of losing that acceptance once I decided to be more public about being queer. I worried about the silence from my family turning to ostracization. I worried that excising pieces of myself meant the whole of me sliding into Oblivion.

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I discovered that my various intersections all ran amok of what is acceptable.

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Unspoken hierarchies became clear. My relationship status along with my presentation was subject to scrutiny. I understand and agree, wholeheartedly, considering our perilous relationship with Eurocentric Settler Fascism and state violence.

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I continue to do the work, putting all my energies into writing missives that will stoke these radical fires already burning. Not tossing my relationship around as if it, in itself, is an act of resistance.

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Blessings to the myriad, majestic, multitude of bodies that push at the boundaries of queerness.

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Gender, like love as we know it, is a spectre of colonial settler politics.

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Dis-identifying with the stereotypes that have been used to ground white male fears about black super masculinity has made me even more vulnerable to the fractured machinations that are currently rooted in capitalism. My presentation has not changed all that much throughout my life Revelations.

(Side note, I gladly revel in the strength of my ancestors)

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While dodging the hunt at each turn, I have also learned to glide, strut, stay sexy, speak what I know, shut up and listen, love the multitude, be unapologetic about my stance.

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I seek to disentangle the self from colonized gender perspectives. A spiritual and psychological reformation that will allow me to reconnect with the ancestral norms that Eurocentric supremacy has effectively erased.

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Black queerness for me means a heightened state of awareness. I’m not a placeholder for fetishes, affirmation of the merits of how well I can integrate into society.

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This society was not built to accommodate or contain me. My very potential is a threat. I drag my black ass from bed each day, determined. One long look at my sleeping children, kiss my nesting partner. Then I pop my collar and jack my slacks. No regrets. No quarter given…

Look into my eyes, my defiant mind-frame, relying on a love ages old, the song of my ancestors drowned in cold oceans, slow heartbeats strong as the blackness coursing through my veins.

Constantly we are reminded that our genetic connection to the labor pool that shaped the settler economy is not access to privilege.

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Blackness as negation of whiteness. Queer outside the bounds of acceptable or easily categorized blackness.

That moment when you stop striving for humanity, and remember that it’s alright to just be a part of the universe, apart from the world. Part of the world. Departed.

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And I’m good with that.