I don’t know if it begins with references. I think building this narrative has everything to do with my desire for an antidote to the erasure that is the foundational violence of the colonial project. What would a new origin story look like – one grounded in some of the research I was doing into precolonial Igbo culture? Learning about modes of kinship and sociality that troubled notions of gender and suggested protodemocratic practices was really exciting to me, usefully disorienting. How could I interrupt a received history, or introduce my own hidden scrolls to disrupt what I believe about the past, and help shift how I might imagine the future. And I wanted this text to operate in a griot-like kind of way – or like an epic song that is only being remembered now. I guess I want an Athena bursting from the head of Zeus, an Aphrodite emerging from sea foam. But in my design I’m thinking about antennae bursting from the head of one character, opening up a network of communication across time. In my design what is born of the ocean foam is violence, death, and inevitable transformation, transmutation.
What the world is offering right now is so grim, I need a space that isn’t necessarily an escape from the grimness, but that has something else to offer. Or maybe I just need to imagine how we got here? Blood is still spilled in this mythology. My imagined spaces aren’t free of conflict and pain, but there are new territories to explore, new ceremonies to write, new transgressions, new mistakes. Even though this new/old world seems to be lost because the rupture of the slave trade is so total, what if there are fragments that can be recovered? What is the event or series of events that might lead to this recovery? And, after being recovered, what new song can bind these fragments into a kind of sense and meaning that can be shared?
What are some of the ways we are marked by history, and how do we understand the marking? And I don’t only mean physical traits and genetic markers. Is there something else that we are carrying? Marks that we can’t interpret, which have no code to unlock them. But it’s also a custom or tradition. So, a shibboleth, right? Something that anchors you in a particular position in relationship to others.
“People are trapped in history
And history is trapped in them” – James Baldwin[1]
When the end becomes the beginning
When the end comes it’s beginning
There is no end
There is a tear in my heart
And you rush through that fissure
You gush through that immeasurable break
I want to hold you together
As you come through my break
And you can tell me your terrors
Wake me whenever you need soothing
That was her way
That’s what she would say
She had one little daughter who was like fresh spring water, she was cooling[2]
A gift beyond measure, there was gratitude and terror in her loving,
Her fear that was secret,
that her love was too greedy,
her ache dropped so deeply
that one day she would be stolen away
there were children disappearing every day
people said they were stolen away
necks chained together
leaving trails of tears in their wake
and though she had power and plenty
this was an uncertainty she would live with every day[3]
And then the nightmare came
No one comes when she calls her name
Just the echo of her name
breaking the blood barrier of her brain
How can she go on?
How can she go on?
How can she go on?
How can she go on?
She cries:
Why……
Oh why????
Can I go on?
With her cries
Inside my mind
Can I go on?
With her eyes
Trained on mine?
Is this my story
Am I trapped in time?
What can I say?
Is there a way?
To carry on
Is there a way to carry on?
And then you say:
Love has a weight
Love has a way of finding a way
To give way
To make a day fly by
You
To make a way flow through you
Love has a way
Of making you sway
Under its weight
Love has a way
Love has a weight
And it makes you say
“I’m gonna try”
To carry
To carry
On
I’m gonna carry on
I’m gonna carry on
I’m gonna carry on
I’m gonna carry on
I’m gonna carry one
I’m gonna carry all
I’m gonna carry one
I’m gonna carry all
I’m gonna carry on
I’m gonna carry on
And
I will wait
I will wait
Til love finds a way
I will wait
And then I carry on
I’m gonna carry on
I’m gonna carry on
I’m gonna carry on
So you come when I’m
Dreaming,
A light stretching my seeing
I will wait
I will wait
Til you come when I’m dreaming,
A light steady and beaming
And I can carry on….
Til space and time
are just streets
to cross over
And then by the time
you look over your shoulder
I skip right across boulders
expanding beyond any room
Your mystery in full bloom
My mouth opens, you swallow the moon[4]
And we’re gonna carry on
We’re gonna carry on
We done carried one
We done carried all
Who will
Carry me?[5]
You carried me.
You carried me.
This song is an origin story. It maps the consequences of the theft of one human being, tracking their movement from human to subhuman to human again. Chattel slavery was epic in its scope and is foundational to who we are and the land that we stand on. It is a topographical map that has shaped the world and the microworlds couched within it that have become undone. In this scoring of the epic, I have written in a wail – one that takes a considerable amount of time and that reverberates in the space of the rupture.
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
First of all, what I like about this is its loopness. The quality of this sentence suggests an eternal loop that cannot be escaped. If there’s a history trapped in us, then these forms of relation that appear to be new, particularly queer relations, have been in us. We’ve inherited them. And this memory rises in contention with the mandate and logic that the colonial, patriarchal, capitalist system wants to impose. This logic wants to suggest an inevitability about the world and about life, and I had to get out of that and beyond it. I’m digging for another kind of inheritance.
So I feel like it’s beautiful to have James Baldwin anchor us in this idea. And even though it arises from his critique of white supremacy and an entrenched racial hierarchy that kills the capacity for love, it also might make the case that the project of erasure was doomed to fail. So his statement is both an indictment of our inheritance of racialised violence, and perhaps a suggestion pointing towards the history, buried in us, of a time before this system. A time when our capacity to express love was not systematically stunted to perpetuate chattel slavery.
I’m interested in these writers who seem to really think about love as the highest human work. I have made a very clear practice of creating spaces that privilege a particular position, i.e. that of the Black femme, a community that has survived systemic erasure. I am trying to undo this erasure in my small way. There is a way in which I’m demanding that we recognise that the whole world can happen in these bodies.
The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses by Oyeronke Oyewumi
I was looking at her scholarship around constructions of gender. The Yoruba language didn’t have gendered pronouns, and that was the case with the Igbo language as well. Categories like ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ did not necessarily have biological determinants, but suggested a particular relational condition instead.
Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society by Ifi Amadiume
In my reading of Amadiume, a gendered status seems to be more about resource allocation. She critiques the Western feminist perspective that seeks to freeze these fluid gender paradigms within the space of sexual desire. And she’s like, “You shouldn’t do that.” She’s thinking about these fluid gender relations in terms of a particular social order. She doesn’t suggest that the female husband is queer, only that they have a particular responsibility to secure the family lineage.
And then I’m like, I haven’t been able to find a narrative that talks about actual love relationships, or I didn’t find it in this, maybe I missed it? Or am I locked in some kind of Western psychosocial framework that can only define this kind of relationship as queer? Still, I don’t want to foreclose the possibility of queerness within these relations. Even the social order within a compound, which was composed of one man and multiple wives – creating conditions where women may have some economic autonomy – suggests a potential space of liberation to me. The wives were able to take their goods to the market and keep the proceeds. They were able to share childcare responsibilities. The more women there were, the more they might be free to do other things. If you look at the particular way polygamy was ordered, there may have been some space for women to have a collegial or sororal relationship around their shared responsibilities. I’m not trying to suggest it was a polyamorous utopia, I’m sure there were also women vying against each other for the favour of the husband, an abusive husband playing the women against each other. But sometimes I need to check my assumptions about how these relationships work or don’t work.
The Greek Myths by Robert Graves
I can’t necessarily point to one story that marked me, but I was always struck by the people who try to outwit their fates and trip right into it. The first plays I read were English translations of some of the more well-known Greek tragedies – Antigone, Medea, The Libation Bearers.
Then, sometime in my twenties, a friend introduced me to The Greek Myths by Robert Graves. Graves claimed, after extensive research, that the ambrosia the gods famously consumed was actually psychedelic mushrooms. Graves is pointing towards a portal-opener, another point of access for engaging the potential of myths. They raise questions about fundamental existential relationships: of (wo) man to God, of the mortal to the divine.
Interstices: A Small Drama of Words by Hortense Spillers
Spillers’ precision in naming the gendered and racial violence of enslavement on Black women, and the psychic weight of that legacy, rings with truth. She speaks to Black women having been positioned at the boundary of the human, and of Black women being “a principal point of passage between the human and the non-human world”. The Black woman’s body served as a site for the production of capital, not children. How might this calculus continue to impact Black women? Spillers names an indelible marking and inheritance that stays with me, having been born in the United States. This is an underlying concern. One of the reasons I am structuring this story in three parts – past, future present and future – is to get the chance to see how this plays out.
Having an African-American, Nigerian expat, immigrant relationship to Nigeria, I feel like there are nuances and understandings about the country that I don’t have. But growing up with Nigerian parents, aunts and uncles shaped a specific cultural paradigm for me, as well. So, can a network of people constitute another kind of country? These multiple markings and inheritances are the terrain I hope to etch this mythology out of.
