To my as of yet nameless kin
Originally presented on November 4th, 2016, upon invitation to the 1st annual Black Religion, Spirituality, and Culture Conference at Harvard University, as part of the “Black Religion and Religious Thought” Panel.
I preface my thoughts offered to you today by noting that they are unconventional both in content and in form. By unconventional, I mean to say that my thoughts here do not meet the expectations of a conference paper, which would ideally cut a snippet of research into a clean-limbed performance of citation and rhetoric. It seems to me that the inaugural conference on Black religions, spirituality, and culture at Harvard — that this distinguished occasion demands from me something else. My theoretical framework, therefore, is not disclosed but implied in the style of my narrative exposition and description. As it is written, “Whosoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” Nonetheless, I have weaved several names into what follows as a way to mark some of the academic debates pertinent to my area of specialization, which is the study of African diaspora religions and of embodied Black thought through Caribbean literature. But, as those who are born and who die and are born again remind us, names do more than incite discussion. It is to this “more,” to this excess that my following words pay their respects.
**
I wrote a five-page letter to my nephew the night after the Orlando Pulse shooting, which will have taken place five months ago a week from tomorrow. My nephew does not exist, at least not yet. In fact, he might not ever exist; and still I needed my nephew, an as of yet nameless being with whom I am already kin, to know. I needed my nephew to know that I was sad. I was sad not because I was shocked by the unexpected, but because I was overwhelmed by the intensity with which my everyday had manifested itself that early summer morning. I needed him to know that all too often it takes the death of Puerto Rican, Black, undocumented, closeted, queer bodies for the world to think and rethink itself. We are literally food for thought. I needed him to know that long after muscles had stiffened and blood had settled, the cell phones of the dead were still ringing on a silent dance floor. After having written my nephew, I called on my grandfather’s name, placing a cup of fresh water, coffee grinds, warm milk, and a piece of pound cake next to the frame that holds his image open, so that he might help guide at least some of the dead back home across 1200 miles of ocean from Orlando to San Juan, and to do so before the phones stopped ringing, before the living started thinking the dead were not alive.
Writing a nameless nephew who has yet to live — if at all — about what life is like in death dealing institutions and under death dealing law, a living son takes great care in feeding his dead grandfather, so that each dead sister might cross into another form of afterlife. Embodied Black thought suspended between life and death, between moribund living and fecund dying, what Frantz Fanon once called “straddling nothingness and infinity.” There remains, then, a tension between life and death, a tension that twists, compresses, and expands when, on the one hand, we curate AfroLatin collections at the Schomburg in New York City or more recently an African-American museum in D.C. and, on the other hand, create ngangas; when, on the one hand, we record state-sponsored murder on a video phone and, on the other hand, consult itá and the diloggún; when we remember the hangman’s knot and feel the spiritual electric cord — these racializing technologies and techniques whose energies are bent on answering the same question so many Black feminists have posed. Saidiya Hartman’s reservation still stands: “How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?”
This tension stresses the politics of excavating African diaspora religions as a site of anticolonial resistance, of social transformation, and of racialized authenticity, especially since historical material relations hold alternative ways of knowing and of being, tethered to an assumed even if revalued primitivism regarding the practices of Black thought embodied. Take, for example, the transnational debates in Ifá about the initiation of women and gay men as priests of Orula in their own right and the triangulation of gendered and sexual politics through claims of Africanity. What is at stake when a Cuban babalawo claims to be more African in his religious practice than his Nigerian counterpart because he does not initiate those who feverishly sweat to be mounted? Or, consider a more recent case in which a young man by the name of Andrew Caldwell testifies at a COGIC convocation that he has been delivered from homosexuality, and how quickly his claim to an alternative way of knowing, of being sexually, one predicated not on biology but on spirit, is dismissed as an insult to commonsense on the basis of our own reading of his dialect, his flared gesture, and his gait. How often have we mistaken hieroglyphics for babble, putting our reading glasses on when sonar vision is required?

It is this precious and tenuous differentiation between Afrodiasporic signal and static about which I am trying to tell my nephew in that letter. I am trying to let him know what Zora Neale Hurston spent a lifetime trying to sync up with, this fine attunement that does not mistake static for signal but can nonetheless sense the signal in the static, about the life of embodied Black thought in the wake of death, under the weight of death, despite the spate of death, beyond the grate of death. Of course, it is much easier to wax poetic before the ever growing ledger of freedom’s collateral, than it is to begin what Aimé Césaire thought was the only thing worth beginning — that is, the end of the world. This too is the truth I am trying to tell my nephew: that in this world it is as if our lives matter more dead than alive, the insurance on property thrown overboard more valuable than the prospect of return of investment.
**
Just like Junot Díaz’s Oscar, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, James Baldwin’s Rufus, and Mario de Andrade’s Macunaíma, Black death, which is Black afterlife, finances affective networks, political economies, and aesthetic forms. From primetime tirades to congressional bills, from task force to initiative, from special issues in prestigious journals to “woke” think pieces — a dime a dozen — oh, how we are compelled to consume bullet-torn flesh! The so-called father of AfroBrazilian studies had been trained as a coroner, his detailed study of corpses assumed to be a relevant skill for the trade. This is the reason why I had not shared the letter I wrote my nephew until now. Our labor yields strange fruit. And yet, on this distinguished occasion, beholden to such an audience as this, I offer this letter, written to my as of yet nameless kin, as one who traffics in truths that only fiction can tell — strange labor yielding strange fruit.
