to all my relations
w/ Karim Abdel-Wadood
رسالة لكل من يقاربني
My first time public speaking was at the border erected between my grandmother and I at her funeral. Her body in a silver casket, me standing at a pulpit in Inglewood. 13 years old, wringing my hands, I didn’t know much about loss but I knew the low rumble of my grandma in her easy chair, laughing; which guided my first impulse, saying she was up in heaven dancing with James Brown therefore we should not be sad on this day. Tension collapsed out the pews in scattered whistles singing relief.
Heavy is the heart interpreting the human condition but Black folks know it better, so heavy is the crown of our burdened existence. there’s something to be said about making the mud inviting, to provide a voice accompanying us in the lonesome thrashing of grief.
Everything can be a eulogy these days which means everything can be a joke, an alternative appeal to our wary imaginations. It’s easy to undermine humor as its own language, a linguistic practice between us. But considering growing up what my grandparents and mother had choice in - either collapse from the pressure or find something in the dark to clutch onto…I see why they chose the latter. Easing the blow of living under empire with a Bernie Mac or Eddie Murphy comedy special or repeating lines from their favorite songs by Tupac and Rick Ross. When I consider where artists speak from - it is an imposed isolation while also reaching outward. We go behind a microphone or piece of paper and speak from the place we are struggling to find ourselves in while also putting it on display for interpretation. What cuts through the noise is we are perpetually ransacked, and yet there’s something to be said that only another nigga can make me equally cling onto relief and morbidity of this shared purgatory. Our cackles providing an acute knowing that we agree : the shit we are enduring is genuinely ridiculous.
I guess the joke is a trickster opening the gates of the unexpected. Like Eshu, be careful what you wish for - let this rhythmic dance out the mouth be a guide of sorts. And yeah yeah, it can be a defense mechanism, but it is also where my volatile rage, the type of rage that could send me to jail - goes off to die. It makes that which is enormous and insurmountable reduced to the size of my palms. Like that time I was overflowing with cancer cells, in a hospital bed, at 23, and I thought of my grandmother, a decade earlier, still making me smile as a blood clot bulls-eyed its way to her brain. What grace, what vulnerability, to be a knowing architect of memory and insert the echo of a laugh track. Knowing, if my body erases itself, I must consider what is left.
I once believed i was invincible, until breath almost exiled itself from my body and I had to ask: what would I want people to hear from me? A joke or two would be nice. A sign I’m fine, I made it. Safe or not. I made it
Maybe it’s epigenetic, cultural, who knows, but when someone who looks like me, speaks from that loneliness letting me in and deliver a line that sends me into a guffaw, a giggle, a wait what the fuck, nigga what did you say - I imagine it’s a wedging open of a door - here is a way we can meet and understand each other. The pun is I cannot exist without you as my audience of night remembering me as a dissolved sun. We break bread by opposing the recoil into oblivion through the feedback, the seance, the abyss where we wheeze, whoop, screech, holla if you hear me n it all translates to: do you see how hard this shit is? Well gahd damn it, I do too, and it don’t gotta be more than that, but maybe. if you bare your teeth alongside me. then we both can forsake despair as the only option. Together.
The wind you hear is the birth of memory
when the moment hatches in time’s womb
there will be no art talk. The only poem
you will hear will be the spear point pivoted
in the punctured marrow of the villain; the
timeless native son dancing like crazy to
the retrieved rhythms of desire
fading
in-
to
memory
Keorapetse Kgositsile
gathering as relating
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