What Does After The Wake Really Mean and Where in Your Life is Your “After the Wake” moment?
If you know me, you would know I love to tell stories, but I realized that for a while, I was rarely the main character in the stories I told. The main characters in the stories I used to write, talk about, and design were always women I wanted to be. I would tell a story about a best friend, a manager, or somebody I learned from, but I was always the side character. I was the observer, and it didn’t bother me until it almost killed me. Being killed, or dying, isn’t always simply dying; sometimes, it’s not finding joy in being awake.
First,
take a deep breath in,
feel air rush from your throat to your belly, don’t breathe out,
Hold.
Around the time I found myself so close to dying, I also found myself close to whiteness, a state of mind when you constantly compare your success to white supremacist ideals. When did my thinking become so overtaken by whiteness? I used to think my parents set me up for this; we were living very close to whiteness. Despite having a roof over our head, we envied those who lived in Forks Township, where our car was pulled over every time we returned my childhood friend to her big house there with her wide green yard. But we also lived in a white house, with a small backyard and a garden, across the street from the projects. No matter what we had, it wasn’t enough. My dad was always looking for an upgrade, not depending on what he could afford.
By closeness to whiteness, I don’t mean money or wealth, it’s what I consider wealthy. When you compare yourself to white supremacist ideals, your brown skin will never be beautiful, and you will never be wealthy because you won’t have worth. For a long time, I really thought I was different from my parents in their desire for white approval and prestige, but I also desired an upgrade.
I desired a white picket fence. I imagined that the only way out of the slavery-like poverty I knew growing up was to go to college and join the club of the elite. However, colleges stopped offering passes to elite, or even human status, over 400 years ago. Only when reading white literature surrounded by white bodies did I discover that success was complicated for girls like me. Success isn’t figuring out how to work with whiteness, but to work around it. At college, searching for success for some was “two roads diverged in a wood,” but for Black girls like me, it was one road on a tightrope. While some of the students at my college wrestled over life choices, I was busy performing acrobatics. And for what? In some ways, getting a seat at the table is resigning from your identity, to truly see the world as colorblind, and to not see the color in your own skin.
While I performed at school for mostly white woman professors, I would also work at a minimum wage job. Then minimum wage started to feel like the new slavery, sans the whippings, rape, and lack of access to Vaseline. Yet, I felt robbed as I took every dollar in my tip jar and transferred it to my landlord’s bank account. The lack of funds wasn’t the only thing draining me, though. I would go days and weeks without a second to myself, without sleep, and I got used to my body functioning like it was in crisis. I got used to not being able to breathe. I was 20 and embarrassed and ashamed the day my manager found me on the floor having my first real panic attack.
That was before the wake, or maybe, “in” the wake. According to Christina Sharpe’s book In The Wake On Blackness and Being, the “wake” I’m writing to you about is “a region of disturbed flow.” Imagine a hamster on a wheel running as hard as it can to no particular goal, then a hand quickly stops the wheel. Your pet was putting all her energy into a wheel of self-gratification but no payoff. You may find your hamster on her ass. That’s the “wake,” and it hurts. Do you know what that feels like?
I know you do because to be Black in America is to be living, breathing, but furthermore carrying the wake of your ancestors. It is to experience a ceremony where there are joy and community, and love in the middle of mourning. It is to write a sentence about you, for somebody other than yourself. It is to take steps along with an unavenged soul. It’s to breathe for somebody who is not breathing, and it is heavy. To stop drowning, I threw things out. I spent a year throwing out heavy things like friends who were fans, a semester of painful white supremacy informed education, my job, and my hair. I threw everything out until I became weightless. This, however, is still not the state of being “after the wake” unfortunately.
Now,
take a deep breath in,
feel air rush from your throat to your belly,
Release.
After The Wake is the name of the podcast, I’ve produced during the two pandemics that affected me personally as a Black woman in America in 2020. One pandemic being the global Covid-19 spread that left me home alone and made my space of comfort feel like a holding cell. The other pandemic has been the outrageous war against former property and the police system built to keep that property in line. After the Wake was supposed to create a space for Black liberation and healing during these two pandemics, yet it has turned into something needed even more. After The Wake became a space that allows Black women to answer the questions we never get asked about what the future holds for us as a country and as a community. However, you may still be unsure of what “after the wake” really means and where in your life you can find your “after the wake” moment. Let me explain.
2020 has definitely been a waking moment for most of us — a moment of interrupted patterns. Our focus on After the Wake is the moment after. The moment when your pattern was dramatically disturbed and what good came out of your resilience at that moment. I believe we all have an “after the wake” moment, even if it didn’t specifically happen in 2020 caused by coronavirus or rampant police brutality. Sometimes after a “crisis,” is the only moment when we as humans have the ability to dream while we’re awake and imagine the future. Especially for Black people who are born carrying the wake of the deferred dreams of our ancestors. Christina Sharpe calls this work of finding new ways to live life while exploring our ancestor’s “wake work.” Wake work is a product and a process.
“Wake work,” for me, is writing my own story. Before, when I told stories, I was the side character and the victim. However, now I see the things I fell victim to as the most exciting parts of my hero’s journey. Those are the parts that make my victory even more satisfying. I am not a victim to anything other than my own thoughts, and I am in the process of doing that wake work too.
Being “after the wake” is that constant state of motion where you embrace a new direction. I’m grateful I’m not a hamster on a wheel working myself to death with no direction. My “in the wake” moment allows for my “after the wake” moment — moments where I exhale the carbon dioxide around me after I’ve allowed the oxygen in. Being Black in America is being in a constant state of emergency. It is to breathe in without breathing out. Capitalism specifically fixes Black bodies so we cannot breathe, and we cannot imagine the future while we’re fighting for single breaths. Waking up can change more than any president can for your life and can affect more Black lives than a protest. Because a Black future can’t exist if we can’t imagine it first. Black lives don’t really matter until we know what happens after just existing. And the wake is only a catalyst for radical change when you love the wake and the hold as much as you do the moment after.
