After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson
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But then the dawn breaks, the performance ends, the party comes undone, and they slip away from each other, falling back into the void. The party is the communism of incommensurability where, as Siouxsie described it, an “aura of sadness abounds [in] you” but gives way to being-with and being together-in-difference, where the past isn’t lost, the future isn’t foreclosed, and the present is the presence of infinite, boundless, and renewable life. For Nancy, this is “the condition of the ever-renewed present.”34 And for you, it was, and was akin to, performance: “This potentiality is always in the horizon and, like performance, never completely disappears, but instead, lingers and serves as a conduit for knowing and feeling other people.”35 What allows the party, or a performance, to serve the will toward freedom and More Life is that another night beckons and that it can happen again. And again. And again.
At first, after you died, I couldn’t find you. I wandered the halls looking for you. I screamed out your name but you did not come. And then you started to return: in the songs that you used to listen to, the things you wrote, the books you read, art you adored, sometimes in dreams, and most of all in the company of the people you loved. Throwing parties was a way of performing your resurrection, even if, like a performance, your return was always ephemeral or impermanent. You took a part of us with you when you died. Like the parties we threw, I wrote this to bring you back.
This book is about minoritarian subjects who keep each other alive, mobilizing performance to open up the possibility for new worlds and new ways of being in the world together. I wrote it for the other ones who are lost, left behind, and living in the breakdown, but it is addressed to you, in particular, because in spite of the mundanity and ubiquity of queer and trans of color death, each of those deaths remains singular, particular, and personal for those of us who live in the wake of them. We can never forget that. To write a book about minoritarian death, survival, and freedom (which was also to write a book about queer of color grief, life, and insurgency) is always to write about the particular, singular people (like you) whom we have loved and lost. I wrote this book for you. And I wrote it to keep some part of you alive and with me (with us) in order to take you with us to the various battles that we will wage in your name—and in our own.
Introduction
I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free
Montreux, Switzerland. July 3, 1976.
On the stage of the Montreux Jazz Festival, the pianist takes a seat behind the piano. She is forty-three years old, and it has been a few years since she played to such a large crowd. At various points during the concert she expresses disdain for the audience. She wanted to write a song for them, but then, she says, “I decided you weren’t worthy. Because I figured that most of you were here for the festival.”1 They weren’t really there to see Nina Simone. Sometimes performance is just a job, and she needed this job. Money wasn’t coming in the way it once did. A few years before Montreux she walked away from a tumultuous, violent marriage. Her ex-husband was also her manager, so when she left him, the money dried up or disappeared. White audiences, alienated by her commitment to the struggle for black freedom, were becoming restless. The other work that sustained her, in spirit at least, was also evaporating, as the once promising movement for black emancipation was falling apart. By the mid-1970s, her friends Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry were dead, Dr. King was dead, Malcolm was dead, and Stokely Carmichael and Miriam Makeba had been chased out of the United States by the reactionary forces of state-sanctioned antiblackness. Reeling from all this loss, she spent the mid-1970s in self-imposed exile in Barbados and Liberia, before returning to work on that stage in Switzerland.
The lights glide across her arms, accentuating the deep hues of her shimmering dark skin. Black dress. White necklace. White audience. She puts her hands in place above the keyboard, and they start to dance, pressing hard at surprising intervals, grabbing hold of the ear, before getting soft, loose, and quick again as baroque flourishes erupt from the fingertips. She sits still, her back straight and arms extended loosely in front of her, eyes concentrating on her hands. And then, after a while, she leans her head back just slightly and starts to sing into the silver microphone: “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.”
A wish for freedom can be hard to sustain so as she pushes it into the air in front of her, her voice falters, and the word crackles apart. Her expression is opaque, and the vocal cord tightens, holding onto the sound as it slips out from between her lips. Then the wish rematerializes for the second lyric: “I wish I could break all the chains still binding me.” Still. Still binding. Still.
Still.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana. July 16, 2016.
The woman stands still with her feet flat against the asphalt, blocking a highway that runs beneath her and parallel to the horizon. A line of witnesses, mostly journalists, have assembled to watch. She is facing a flank of police in riot gear. The expression on her face, like that of the pianist, is opaque. The air around her lifts up the flaps in the lower portion of the dress, like wings, exposing the skin on her legs. Her right arm is pulled across her torso, hand relaxed against her abdomen. The left arm draws straight down from the shoulder, muscles tensed, as the arm curls at the elbow to reach forward and toward the right side of her body. Her hand, weighed down slightly by a gold bracelet or watch, curls back toward her. She looks like a dancer, body suspended as she prepares for her next move.
Figure I.1. “Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge,” 2016. Photographer: Jonathan Bachman. (Courtesy of Reuters.)
Two white police officers dressed in black battle armor move in her direction. They wear helmets. The gray light of the sky reflects against the clear shields that wrap the space in front of their faces and block significant portions of their expressions. Guarded, she looks toward but not necessarily at them. Their guns are strapped to the holsters on their right hips and white plastic handcuffs dangle from the left sides of their utility belts. Behind them, a flank of police wearing the same defensive shielding, like a dystopian futuristic army except the future is in the present. Glints of pale skin peek out from their armor. They, too, are still.
Though the singular details change, the woman on the highway is playing a role in a by-now familiar masque, scenario, or performance event with dramaturgy routine and reportorial. The inciting incident: fifteen days ago Alton Sterling, a thirty-seven-year-old black man, was wrestled to the ground and shot at point blank range by the Baton Rouge police for selling CDs. This keeps happening: Eric Garner choked to death by the New York City PD for selling untaxed cigarettes; twelve-year-old Tamir Rice shot to death by the Cleveland PD for playing with a toy gun in a park; Philando Castile shot by the Minneapolis PD for riding in a car as his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her two-year-old daughter watch him bleed to death; twenty two-year-old Rekia Boyd shot in the back of the head by an off-duty Chicago police officer because her boyfriend raised his phone into the air as they walked in an alley with friends; Sandra Bland, who died in Waller Country police custody after being pulled over for a traffic violation.
The rising action: a family in shock with grief assembles a press conference and, in person or through lawyers, issues calls for justice and peace. Reporters descend on the scene, protestors (like the woman in Baton Rouge) take to the streets, mobilizing the black body in performance to draw attention to the persistent devaluation of black life and degradation of black flesh. The climax. In the rare instances where an uprising rises up, the police face down the protestors, beat down the protestors, reload, repeat. Falling action. Investigations and committee reports, staff changes and press conferences, new policies and training protocols are announced. The screaming of the mourning is drowned out by an ocean of white noise. Conclusion. Fuck you, Aristotle. For people of color in the United States of America there’s no such thing as resolution, let alone a solution, because we are always already conceived of as the problem.2 So the cycle simply stops when the next thing happens and the country moves on. Until the pageant starts again with the sound of another gunshot. With the sound of another gunshot. With the sound of another gunshot. Or the sound of a makeshift noose snapping taught in a Waller County, Texas, jail cell.
In the wake of Alton’s murder, the woman stands still with her feet flat