On The Pulse of Mo(u)rning

I'm Writing Something

This is unfamiliar. No, not the name. Anyone who has listened to one of my talks, or read my first book, knows that my spiritual pinship to Maya Angelou runs deeps and the poem is one of my favorite pieces of read or performed poetic prose, ever. But this isn’t an attempt to pay homage. It is merely an expression of this moment, this Sunday morning, this moment of collective mourning, is feeling like for me.

It is unfamiliar though. No, not for all the silly or serious reasons one might mark. It is unfamiliar because I don’t write like this. I don’t wake up early on Sundays to write. I certainly do not write from my bed. I rarely write in the intimate presence of others (my fiance is snoring away on my left, the result of a night out in the Black Midwest). I rarely write in the active presence of anyone at all; preferring to me either a lone, or a remade into the fantastical background of life, with all its movements, sounds and beautiful chaos. More often, my words are born in a boosey bar where conversation is lost by the ways that words and bourbon spill into each other and my competing interests in zoning in and out; in to smirk and revel at the secrets of human life—but also to make sure I’m remaining from its predictable, if we listen, sporadic if we do not, violent moments of passion & spite—and out, well, to focus on my interior world, to make sure that what I’m writing is both true in deed; but also true to the beauty of human life and complexity and unspeakability, particularly as the writing, the words and the human being are experienced.

In this moment I’m tempted to go walk my dogs. My youngest standard poodle, Chiké (8 months or so), is licking himself with the vigor of lion with OCD; making sounds that echo off the walls of the room that create a surround of drowning and studious gulps and gasping for..not air..but cleanliness. I cannot blame him. He’s merely repeating, with almost perfect imitation, the morning ritual of Assanté, my much larger, 99lb tazmanian devil, menance-turned-sweetheart of a boy. In truth, I never wanted either of these dogs. I bought Assanté because Bakarí—the first dog I bought for myself, my child and life journeyman—was getting older and seemed quite disinterest in other animals. It was if they were beneath him. I’m serious. We would go to dog parks and he would prance despite the other dogs, his head held high, as they would attempt to engage him. He had no use for barking, the sniffing, the like. If anything, he’d find interest in outwitting them, taking their toys and holding them high in the air, knowing evcen if the other dog were stronger and faster, they could never match his wits or agility; or he’d hide their balls and watch—laying on my feet— with what appeared to be bemusement, as they searched about, until he felt like giving it back. Perhaps, I bought Assanté because I saw too much of myself in that queer child of mine but also because I knew life is short, he had already endured law school with me, I was intending to be single for the foreseeable future, my dissertation was underway (as was covid) and he’d need someone else at home to pique his interest. Assanté was a five year disaster with little relief until recently. He was unruly, even when obedient. He relished being dirty. He refused to learn to swim. He was both aggressive and petrified of his own shadow; security and insecure. He was unpredictable; but had a respectable distrust of straight men and unkempt children. Then in August, Bakarí died, in a manner so sudden, unnatural and infuriating, I still cannot bare to step foot inside the franchise of dog boarders who enabled this. I cannot walk down the street where he collapsed on the sidewalk. I cannot even look at it from across the way. His ashes and remains exist in an urn bearing his and our family name. They are also part of a system of living urns, so that he might live on, in those braided money trees. Not long after, I bought Chiké, with Assante being about the same age Bakari was, when entered our lives. This was a long explanation; but it is part of my Sunday mo(u)rning.

I am not going to write about the world falling apart today; it is has never been together, at least not consensually, nor in any way that sustained Black life and abundance. I am not going to write about the law today; it is continuing it’s crucial work of ordering and disordering the way Black and BlaQueer live and die, and democratizing that mandated bloodlust to Blackened and unwhite others. I am not going to write about the election or the president; once again, we remain our own undoing, mired in self sabotage, viewing the world through a refracted polyannic lens that simultaneously tells us there is nothing we can do so fuck it, and if only we put all our trust in a candidate who utters our slogans, we might yet get free; seeing and knowing full well again, we have fought ourselves marronage back to the hull of the ship, and some still revel in the pleasure of their self styled..I don’t know what the fuck. I am not going to write about the deportations and disappearances; because this was the obvious outcome and if I write about it, I fear my anger my overwhelm my words and while true, may add evermore harm to this alchemy of strategic failure, hubris and managed murder. How, in our righteous protests against the unspeakable, did we find it in ourselves to enable a world where the protesters would be doxxed, deported and disappeared and the right to protest itself disposed of? How the fuck did we enable the disarming of resistance, the ability to push back without being sent to a foreign gulag, because we felt better about our performance of moral superiority? And now we have no leverage. We have more death. We have enabled those who would dance our graves, nevermind that of Palestinians, to claim an electoral mandate for fascism, domestic and Palestinian ethnic cleansing, gutting of the equal protection clause and the treatment of any evidence of non-white resistance or existence in American life and history as evidence of racism, terrorism and treason. I am not going to talk about that anymore today.

I will merely say that this morning, I am in mourning. I have also come to the serious epiphany that I have never truly wanted to be a law professor or professor of Black Studies. I have always wanted to be writer who speaks, or speaker who writes; or some iteration of a person who speaks and thinks and writes broadly to, from and with the public—through a gaze as Black and Queer, BlaQueer, as me—and to toil in the alchemy of uncovering truth, democratizing power and sustaining life, in a way that is honestly worth living for us all.

I have an overdue book proposal that was ready, albeit late, on October 6th, 2023. I’ve had no passion or joy for writing since them. I was caught up in doing and defending; for myself, my students, my colleagues, my friends and those that I saw as the most vulnerable to this treacherous narrative of criticism as antisemitism, of free speech as assaultive speech and the conflict of political ideas, identities and ideologies as evidence of domestic terrorism, of those in the minority. The last part was particularly galling—and I still cannot articulate how a realist like me was so paralyzed by this reality—because if we considered the targeted and explicit disregard and disavowal of Black culture, experiences, history and presents, fears, desires, lives and untimely deaths, and the attendant Black discomfort…in the ways we were considering critiques of Israel as attacks on the very existence of American Jews…would we have a nation? Could we have a nation? And what did it mean that at the end of the day, no matter the deathcounts, no matter the issues, in contest of the experiences between feelings and flesh, antiBlackness had won again?

I still don’t know. That is partially, mostly, why this is a substack post. I have to write it out. There has been so much death and I’m just, in awe, that we are still centering feelings and not flesh. I don’t know how to argue in such a contest. Perhaps this has always been the context of Black life here, or the ultimate arithmetic of slavery, that one’s feelings will always be superior to the material reality of how one is maimed, molested and murdered, and regardless of who keeps the score, it will always be the feelings of another, that are privileged, under the rules of human evidence—or evidence of humanity—that are legible, eligible and proof, rather than the marked bodies before us; so much for habeas corpus.