maniq: notes on blk mania
“Blk is not a country, but I live there”
-Jericho Brown, The Tradition
“For all we know
This may only be a dream”
-Donny Hathaway
I. The story goes Donny Hathaway went off his medication.
He was a paranoid schizophrenic. The voices told him he could fly. The notes hanging in the air asked why he was still tethered to the ground. Believin he could make it to where the music was, Hathaway dropped off the balcony a 15th floor hotel room suite. His body died. His spirit, steady trying, finally clawed itself out of the soul singer’s corporeal form N soared elsewhere.
II. When Nina Simone sings Stars at The Montreux Festival in 1976, she gazes into a distance, seemingly absent minded or potentially glitching between the realms of meditated and medicated. She sees a girl standing in the distance to whom she commands to “sit down.” The audience lets out surprised laughter followed by clapping, but Nina ain’t playin, for if she is to travel a distance alongisde her spirit and a piano, she requires perfect conditions. For she’s seen the end of days and lithium keeps her from losin her mind n her life. But music circumvents the laws of medication and she flies the same place Donny flies to. One all Black Crazy Folk go. The realm of the maniq.
III. I met a poet recently who re-reminded me How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind by La Marr Jurelle Bruce. In Chapter One, Mad is a Place, Bruce describes the suspension of time and space Black people experienced being live human cargo in the Middle Passage. Describing it as a type of induced madness, Bruce writes,
“What vertigo does a body undergo, caught between treacherous waters below and treacherous captors above, with “nowhere” outside?…How does one keep time, or discern direction, or remember the way home from “nowhere at all,” with no familiar beacon to behold ahead or behind? It seems to me that neither imagination nor historiography is apt to apprehend the seasick- ness of spirit, the existential dread, and the feverish homesickness that might menace a mad prisoner or black captive trapped at sea”
(Bruce, p14).
Veritgo originally means to bend, so what bending does the body undergo when caught in a liminal space of a neverendin captivity? Bruce describes there is no way that a being can discern time, space, direction, or how to get home from such a place. Given all familiarity has been destroyed, Bruce refers to this sensation as an induced illness, a “seasick-ness” of the spirit…yeah, that would drive anyone insane. But that is the is the experience of the “black captive trapped at sea” therefore: our ancestors. It breathes within us, as recent history that is also ancient. Bruce refers to this as a “mad diaspora.”
IV. When I was four, my grandmother convinced my mother to take me to a doctor, citing that she didn’t understand anything I was saying. Lips flapping zippers, making a cacophony of sound me n my accelerated speech were its own dialect. My mother, reluctantly, took me to a Kaiser in Mid City to where a doctor asked if she could understand me out of everyone, she did, so she nodded. Doc shrugged, “Her lips move faster than her mouth.”
We never got the answer.
V. “Are you manic right now?” my friend asks me while slightly laughing on the phone, pointing to my accelerated speech, alas, the sting of recognition, and there was no judgement from anyone but me.
VI. I get lifted and I get low, it’s true. Lifted be like whatever the alkaline folk talk about the pineal gland being decalcified or whatever. But I get it now. Ego melting into an infinity pool, my brain becomes porous with the electrical shock of intuition constantly pulsing. It’s really that simple, one morning I wake up believing I can do anything and I’ve got a backlog of miracles to prove it. I’ve got a list of delusions, I’m steady convincing myself in to and out of…such as:
VII. My friends were sent to kill me / They are coming for me Some of them are spies / Some of them are members of Government agencies Someone is coming to save me / It is the British monarchy I am the next Duchess of Sussex / The Daily Mail is following me/ I am going to be shot at a college campus / I am related to Asssata / I am the next princess of genovia / I am the next princess diana / I am Whitney Houston from the Body guard / My partner is working with the / secret service but in nigeria / Someone is trying to get into my home / My lover is the only person I can trust / I am calling for another man I think is my brother - I don’t believe he is safe / I still believe that to be true / The gede are looking for me / My parents still love me / I am meant to subvert the Navy / I’m under a conservatorship without my knowledge / I’m meant to save the world / My family needs to go into exile / The eyes are everywhere watching me / I am part of a covert drug dealing operation / Insanity is the unresourced healer / Hearing voices is the unresourced shaman / Someone is coming to save me / The aliens are real. I am an ancient monster forced to inhabit a human body. / The music is always speaking directly to me./ I can talk to whales / There’s always a hidden message. / An old friend asks If I’m still crazy. / I can’t help the world speaks / to me in riddles I cannot decipher.
VIII. Maniq is the realm in which the mad diaspora convenes
Meets once a month and if you tapped in, you tapped in
We all somehow get the same delusions of grandeur
share the same dreams n somehow know something is coming,
and it requires Suspending suspicion, We all know faith exists
in this Realm unlike any other. And if we all visit where our ancestors
did too, then we kin of some kind, tethered to a nu but similar bio
technology. A traveling home in the sky. Maniq is a place we be at
sometimes. Get intel from another reality. I’ve never see its four walls,
we talk shit, we hit the lotto, we see angel numbers everything is a sign.
Because it is. The delirium dismisses time, the delirium rejects the laws
of the universe, it makes one believe in the Impossible. Sometimes I am
A danger to myself. I believe I can fly. Insanity, the zenith of self belief
“The Blk mind Is a continous mind. I am not a narrative Form,
but damnit if I don’t tell a story”
-Jericho Brown, The Tradition
Glossary:
maniq = a term coined by walela nehanda expressing that blk* surreal mania is as a different experience for Black people, that doesn’t adhere to the typical presentations of “mania” in Western pathology. To be maniq is to be so full of sound, in another plane, it enters the mystical which is a contradictory backdrop to the current conditions we are required to endure.
*Blk = reference to Khalil Joseph’s BLK NWS and Jericho Brown’s The Tradition