If the text of the human was written over and against him, she fell out of order of representation all together. Neither subject nor object, but a mute, silenced thing, like an impossible metaphor or a beached whale or form not yet named. Her coming of age has been endlessly deferred.
— Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019), pg. 259
Just as Saidiya Hartman poetically writes about the swarm of mutuality and refusal of the queer radicals of Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century, what would we see or remember if we took that same tender lens to the early 2000s where music videos were the stage — the portal where the chorus rioted and shined through the black mirror and refracted off of the pages of glossy rap magazines found on the grounds of Black hair salons as if they were growing from the floors…waiting for little Black girls to pick up the flowers of otherwise?
What would the unnamed, “silenced things” in the background of BET uncut music videos say about the methodology of remaining slippery — what might her take be on the theory of opacity1? Skin metallic, the metaphysics of her hips a coding language no one has captured. A form not yet named. An undefined
variable to the Department of Data.
come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to name me
and has failed2
What does the video girl do to epigenetics and necropower3? How does Eve shift biopolitics? How does Missy write a new script that makes the terminal log a language not yet complicit? The algorithm of the vixen, video gurl, rapper, bad bitch, etc. might be the most unpredictable yet — a black box, a black hole once you enter you can never go back. Running on datasets too slippery to catch. When does the Black girl become fast? Is it that moment when she danced to Ciara a little too good, or was it the way she walked through the house like she paid bills, or was it when she understood she was a sexual being before she could spell h i s t o r y? The vixen, video gurl, rapper, bad bitch, etc. a composite of stories of refusal and surrender. Re-appearing like a superfamily cicada cycle4 in the 2000s she wrote a list of all the ways they tried to kill her, w(rapped) it in poesis, and sent it sailing across the for
loop of the beat machine. Throwing ass in a circle5, the shape of a loophole of retreat6, where queerness was always the only hush harbor, strip club dressing rooms are study spaces for anarchy, and the hair salon doubles as cheap childcare.
When does the Black girl become
When does the Black girl become fast fast fast A deviant error on the loose loose loose unable to catch fast fast fast unable to name loose loose loose
Glissant Édouard (1997). For Opacity. In B. Wing (Trans.), Poetics of Relation (p. 189) essay, University of Michigan Press
Lucille Clifton, “won't you celebrate with me” from Book of Light. Copyright © 1993 by Lucille Clifton. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press. (In the original poem Clifton writes, “come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed”)
Jackson, Z. I. (2020). Coda: Toward a Somatic Theory of Necropower. In Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. essay, New York University Press.
“Cicadas spend most of their lives underground, feeding on fluids produced by plant roots. Despite their loud rattle, beady eyes and large bodies, cicadas are practically defenseless. They don't bite or sting and they're not poisonous. Their primary defense against predators then, seems to be their sheer numbers during their synchronized emergence. By having a long life cycle, cicadas can prevent predators from matching their reproductive timing. By having a life cycle that is a prime number (as are 13 and 17), they can also prevent predators from developing a life cycle that is a factor of that number. But these same factors also make periodical cicadas difficult for scientists to study. As a result, data on periodical cicadas is lacking compared to other species.” (Alger, S. J. (2013, June 3). Cicadian Rhythms: Why Does the 17-Year Cicada Emerge Like Clockwork? Nature news. Retrieved September 6, 2022, from https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/accumulating-glitches/cicadian_rhythms_why_does_the/)
Leigh, S., Hartman, S., & Campt, T. April 27, 2019. The Loophole of Retreat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. New York.