On coding
Restorative Community Project Session 8:
“In order to engage in the critical labor of redress” Saidiya Harman “outline[s] the clandestine forms of resistance, popular illegalities, and ‘war of position’ conducted under the cover of fun and frolic” for 19th century American slaves. This “pained body” compelled to perform pleasure is the constant site of Hartman’s intervention and praxis within Scenes of Subjection and elsewhere. Professor Johnson once asked me what was one word I might use to name black feminism and I said redress.
Be it historical or epistemological, redress arose as a critical category of collective theorizing as Brandon and Mohammad coupled quotes from an interview with Chieftain Adam Dupaul of the Lenape Nation. I’m now wondering what their one word might be.
Language is a discrete combinatorial system enforced by an economy of elementary units: morphemes, phonemes, letters, and memories. One of the self portraits I once sent you was drawn on the backside of notes I took for my linguistics class and now it has now become a new conceptual category to thematize insights regarding the lenape language. I don't know how to say I miss you yet so how about this? “tɛl miː wɛn”
I cant think about Zami without flaring up a sense of what I perceived that one January, sitting outside an aime leon dore in soho, telling you about my new haircut, and desperately hoping you might be more than a “winter's night a traveler.” I’ve tried since then, many a time, to reread it and have simply failed. Part of me thinks it has to do with what Emerson said about the object of literary attraction (instant and dematerializing). But part of me also thinks it just has to do with how beautiful that ruinous alignment seemed. Like a solar eclipse that will never unhinge.
Beyond that, I continue to struggle with the third world women's politic advanced by Lorde as well. Maybe the excitement for such an orientation seemed generative then, but now I have no interest in solidarity. Not even with Greta. To reject a foundational principle of my intellectual mother seems like an expression of some matricidal economy Frued pathologized. But heres the thing; I don't think our disagreement is annihilation. For as Anne Chang writes, “The next generation of race scholars has to address the fundamental paradox at the heart of minority discourse: how to proceed once we acknowledge, as we must, that “identity” is the very ground upon which both progress and discrimination are made. What may be uneasy for some to entertain is the possibility that the future of ethnic studies may take a form very different from its original inception. New lines of inquiry may even appear antagonistic to (even as they are indebted to) the political activism that founded ethnic studies.” This author commits such infidelity. For as Destiny reminds us, “I don’t want to use these any regular quote cause I know I can find something that can hit better.”
In other words, we’re all asking questions off the rails of the protocols and deanimaizations of respectability and the swarm consciousness. What I loved most about you was that I sensed a consciousness wholly your own in the way only a functional misanthrope ought to possess. Looking out this window, watching a black man varnish his bass, pitying the reflection of a fat man I do not know, in a new city who took no time to ask me “are you korean? (enough)”, I think about what your hands must being doing now: will this final sentence be enough? I will let Sahfeeah decide: “If you could change the world, what would you do?”