ok, so boom … (your Black media hub) Writing With: Wail Song in Relation

I am an MFA candidate, in the first year of my program, learning in so many implicit and explicit articulations that what it means to be a writer is to be alone, to be singular, to be novel and glistening and brilliant, but definitely in a field where to say is to speak to and not among. I am a writer and have no interest in being conscripted into that project.

This year, on the day this writing will appear, is the publication date for Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world. In some ways, Wail Song represents five years of extended thinking on death and blackness, on water and whales and breath, on the category of the human and that of the non-human animal, it is a prolonged consideration of what if anything might be recovered from the archive of slavery. It is a text where I was attempting to think alongside many others.

Among those is Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, which has been foundational. I have read and re-read its pages into being worn, would read the chapter, “The Ship,” once a day for a period of two months, have written extensively into its margins, have read it so often that I now wonder if I am entangled with it on a cellular level. Sharpe’s thinking on death on blackness on situating the stakes of where we are in the ongoing residence time of slavery, are woven in every word I tried to write. There is something about Sharpe’s practice of care, the way she brings it into “the wake” into the “afterlives of slavery” that are deeply affecting to me. Her method of black redaction and annotation inform the ways I am decided in my textual opacity, and the importance of my citational practice not as an indication of a kind of academic rigor but to say, always acknowledgment.

There is Sharon Patricia Holland’s, Raising The Dead, I keep it by me always, its work on death and the body and blackness have fundamentally shaped my thinking on the corporeal. But also Moses Sumney’s “Live From Blackalachia,” the yearning in his voice, how a note is held, how I am held there with it. In the song, Doomed, a speaker asks for someone to “cradle me” & ”am I doomed?” There is an affective opening in the request to be cradled, and a movement into the unknown of that unanswered question of, “am I doomed?” that was & is compelling to me, that echoes in Wail Song.

And it seems important to say that Wail Song was written during a global pandemic, one that impacts the respiratory system, and it was written in a city where the scene of officer Derek Chauvin making the breath of George Floyd an impossibility was seen around the world. These are not referenced as events in what I’ve written, or named in any official capacity, but they underwrite so much of the thinking on black breath, on black breathing, on a world, shaped by the structure of anti blackness that makes that breathing an impossibility.

So much of Wail Song is not only in, but underwater. Is wanting to write into the species impossibility of breathing there. See Drexciya. But also, my youngest child, who we named Ocean, was a water birth, where she exited the birth canal fully submerged in water, that she took an extended moment to breathe. All of this is its own swirling text, that is connected to every syllable of the writing.

And there are so many other texts and songs and images and thinkers that could be named here, from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relations, from M Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing to Jack Whitten’s “Dead Reckoning”. I hear and feel the layers of vibration in an old rendition of “Wade in the Water,” attempted to bring it to the pages, am floating within it still. Wail Song is an attempt to speak among, however fraught and failed, to name a tradition and talk back with it, to try and join its chorus. The errors are mine, it is my hope that something in the song is resonant to those for whom this world is not enough.