Alternative Facts
When death is the weather, you collaborate with the water
"What brings us back to remembrance is both individual and collective; both intentional and an act of surrender; both remembering desire and remembering how it works. Daring to recognize each other again and again in a context that seems bent on making strangers of us all."
— M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (2005), pg. 278
When death is the weather, you collaborate with the sun. “Capitalism is a fact of life”, overheard on 60 Minutes occupying a small space in the background. Surrounded by the miracle of Sunday dinner wrapped in sweat and unnamed spice blends, an apple pie is in the oven as an ode to Big Ma. Family can be seen from every direction and love is on tap. But — “capitalism is a fact of life”, said the spokesperson for empire, not present enough to consider how his own tongue is choking everything he doesn’t know he loves — pulls me back to this time zone. Am I the only one aware of the toxic slime coating our neck? The room didn’t even shake one bit. Am I the only one who is negotiating with the fire in her belly at all times? Am I the only one with this unearthly thirst for new facts?
“They fill their mind and hands with soap and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage. Molten. Thick and slow-moving. Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury. Or else, into a beat of time, and sideways under their breasts, slips a sorrow they don’t know where from”.
— Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992), pg. 16
Suspended between the facts we’re sold and the facts of the black water, she swims in the data in search of air. Trees, leaves and bodies heavy with encrypted DNA stain the river Black. A compost tea brewing language forced down it’s river mouth metabolizing story into movements you can’t see but can smell. Futures you can’t name but can know. New facts you can’t remember but are urgently making their way toward you. Swimming in this underworld one learns how to breathe underwater — inhaling memories, exhaling promises. Emerging from the Black Water soaked and winded, dripping with alternative facts, we dare to recognize each other.
“Blackness unfolds in and as the oceanic; the distance of the Atlantic marks the original displacement; it is a crypt for the unceremoniously buried and the womb of our becoming. Water is the matter of our being. Liquidity is another way of registering this and announcing the primacy of water and its passageways; it is a principle conduit of metamorphosis. Vessels and hulls and bodies and earth all hold water, and water holds memory; it is the archive of the shipped and the milieu de memoire of those displaced in diaspora. Liquidity expresses an essential dimension of blackness—it is labile; it is always on the move, on the run, in flight, in transition, in the process of becoming. Liquidity, like metamorphosis, is a synonym for state change, which is produced under conditions of terror and brutality, and miraculous invention.”
— Saidiya Hartman, “Crawlspace Manifold” (February 12, 2023), published in “Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging” (October 3, 2023), pg.10
Last week was Week 1 of the Seed A World Retreat, rotating around a single invitation: “Remember Your Desire”. With every cycle I overflow with gratitude that we’ve designed a practice which invites us to return to the fact of our desire every third month. As the leaves change and the branches fall, staining the river once more — we remember our desire to invent stories beyond language. Choreographies undetectable by the radar of empire. An alternate universe of facts being practiced on the stage of real time. A script without neologisms, only memory. Only water. Only black. Only blue. Only me. Only you. Stargazing at the truth of this place. Swimming in its cosmic slop. Playing with the sun using our panty hose. Yo-yoing worlds between wet fingers. Transforming the weather with our becoming. The new age activists from the Metaverse are inviting me to rest but if I drop this soap and repair, the same old facts might seep in.
“These scalar experiments and mobile laboratories are speculative projects that envision new modalities of relation and offer blueprints for unanticipated existence.”
— Saidiya Hartman, “Crawlspace Manifold” (February 12, 2023), published in “Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging” (October 3, 2023), pg.14
Rest isn’t resistance, but learning how to breathe underwater in search of blueprints for unanticipated existence smells like a close cousin.
With desire,
Ayana