Captive Maternals and Wet Nursing a Genocidal State
How Do We Tunnel Out?
That was when Vienna burned to the ground. Red fire doing fast what white sheets took too long to finish: canceling every deed; vacating each and every field; emptying us out of our places so fast we went running from one part of the county to another — or nowhere. I walked and worked, worked and walked, me and Victory, fifteen miles to Palestine. That's where I met Violet.
— Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992), pg. 126
Alice Coltrane stirs the lavender soup so we know it’s time. We all assemble, just like the last New Moon and the one before that and the one before that and the one from before. We clapped in a circle, sang in a ring and that always did it. Cracked time wide open and, finally, we could breathe. How do you spell the sound of air? Here, right here, in this vessel of movement time swayed different. No, yeah, we were somewhere else. And as soon as we thought, how could this be? We thought, why could it not? If any explanation of reality could have holes poked into it, why not choose to live inside the tunnel that feels the best? So yeah, we made it up on this here bridge between starshine and clay1, clapping on the coltrane. No, yeah, we went somewhere else.
Away from where our desire was entangled with our death. Away from where our care stabilizes capital and the state thanks us for our service. Our suffering, the slippery, slick oil that keeps the engine of empire churning. Our grief metabolized into syllabi, think pieces, groundbreaking films, panel discussions and novels keeping the despair at bay. And the state occasionally invites us on stage to thank us for our service. And there’s no more water left to spit in their face. What did they do to the water? There was no water left so we made daughters out of dust who keep the engine going. And the state thanks us for our service.
“Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” “God’s Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.”
— Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81.
Captive Maternals2, what do we do when our care stabilizes a genocidal state? When our labor keeps the despair at bay, just far enough to find the strength to go to work, to pay the taxes that pay for the bombs, that leave craters in our own bodies? The morbid loop of community care as self-mutilation is enough to make the blood boil so violently it becomes a storm under the flesh with no escape so you blue. Hey you, who can never strike because your loved ones will die first. What do we do?
JOY JAMES: This brings me to the Captive Maternal. I’m totally fascinated by the notion of an ungendered phenomenon whose generative powers have been stolen by the state. But this is the persona that, if you call them at 2:00 in the morning because you're just crying on the floor in your bathroom, they will come over and get you. This is a Captive Maternal that allows your nervous system to function and for you to show up in these wretched schools…public schools or any kind of schools that denigrate you and don't give you a real education. Or these jobs where you're laboring in these factories where you get damaged or poisoned. But here's our bind. We keep our communities functioning because we love them. We will not abandon them, even when they turn on us, because we love them, and the state uses that labor to stabilize itself. Because we keep our communities from going crazy, just like they kept us from going crazy. And that labor is expropriated by the state. So now I'm like, so what's next for the Captive Maternal? Like, what's the exit plan? You're not going to leave your community behind, and you're not going to stop helping and nurturing and healing. But every time we stabilize, they build upon that stability and enforce another form of theft — trauma, time theft, loss — for productivity to a state that you find, you know, horrific. I mean, Professor (Anthony) Bogues writes and talks about marronage. Other people do. It's just the exit door. I'm totally fascinated about how you tunnel out. And then, of course, we'd have to figure, literally, how to get people out of prison so that they come with us…This may sound weird, but do you see the beauty in that? Like, it's an impossible task, but it's one completely worthy of you.
ARYA SERENITY: Kind of spiritualizing it.
JOY JAMES: Yeah, which is why you're doing it anyway.
— Joy James at 1:43:06. The Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice's Carceral State Reading Group presents, "The Architects of Abolitionism: George Jackson, Angela Davis, and the Deradicalization of Prison Struggles," a lecture and conversation with Joy James on Monday, April 8, 2019 at Brown University. Clip seen on Simone Yvette Leigh’s Instagram post.
Captive Maternals, our question then becomes how might our care stabilize our communities while simultaneously destabilizing the state? One shouts “art is the answer!” Another Captive Maternal kisses their teeth, “no, no mutual aid is the only way”. Another shouts back, “we need housing experiments, rent too damn high!” The Captive in the corner reminds everyone, “we need worker owned cooperatives…my back hurt”. Joy James invites us to consider, “not everything can be spoken or sketched out; sometimes, you just have to act like a Captive Maternal in the middle of a play”3. It could be argued we’ve tried that already and it’s the only reason we’ve survived this long. Perhaps it’s the only reason America has survived this long too.
How do we tunnel out?
How do we tunnel out?
How do we tunnel out?
I don’t know, please let me know when you do. In the meantime, I’m making it my business to work for those who are working for everyone else. What does it mean to be the desire doula for Captive Maternals? The ones invented to not want a thing. Not even an inhale and especially not an exhale. How are you caring for Captive Maternals? The ones saving your life even while they sleep, shaping dreams you get to wake up to. Those ungendered beings who die and resurrect every Sunday to keep the world together with spirit and spit. What is your offering to them?
This Black August4 I’m thinking about all the political prisoners and the cost of truly giving a fuck. The unlawful audacity of wanting more, the unruliness of desire, the ungovernability of the erotic as power5 manifesting, not as essays but, as physical freedom fighting. The wildly violent consequences of daring to exhale by any means necessary. With gratitude to the sacred, archival, organizing and memory work of Mama Ayanna Mashama and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, I’m thinking about Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal and George Jackson and The Soledad Brothers and Khatari Gaulden and W.L. Nolen and Dr. Mutulu Shakur and Sekou Odinga and Debbie Sims Africa and and and and and. Cutting the umbilical cord with teeth and flushing placentas down prison toilets and singing outside the cell to obscure the cries of unsanctioned life.
Captive Maternals invented to watch us raise 200 million dollars for a genocidal cop campaign in 1 week right before Black August is a sight even their darkest humor couldn’t make light of. Invented to watch while grandmothers raising everyone’s kids works two jobs, abolitionists struggle to pay rent, community organizers’ mutual aid requests go underfunded and political prisoners are unable to get the care they need. This play breeds intrusive thoughts about risks you can’t afford to take. Just as they invent Captive Maternals, they take them away. They take them away.
“When the Americans talk about progress they mean how fast I become white. That is a trick bag because they know perfectly well I can never become white. I’ve drunk my share of dry martinis. I have proven myself civilized in every way I can, but there is an irreducible difficulty. Something doesn't work. Well, I decided…I decided I might as well act like a nigga.” [Laughter][Applause]
— James Baldwin at 18:32 in “James Baldwin: Reflections - Berkeley, California (15/01/1979)” on YouTube. Clip seen on Zeba Blay’s Instagram post honoring Baldwin’s 100th birthday and inside the
newsletter.
I don’t know how we tunnel out, but I know the tunnel exists because I’ve felt it. A wild wormhole of general relativity, general relation, general safety, general sound vibrating the ground — ordering our steps to accept nothing less than the ungovernability of our desire. I don’t know how we tunnel out but here’s something I am clear on: I work for the Captive Maternals, the daughters of the dust, the niggas. I work for the black feminists, the non-humans, the fleshy AIs the state invented, using the same energy they could’ve used to imagine a safety net that catches all of us. A small population is left to catch us instead. These Captive Maternals, quantum social workers, fleshy AIs don’t possess the names Jarvis, Gemini, Siri, Alexa, Samantha, The Red Queen or Bina-48. Their names are Big Ma, Honey, Nana, Asiola, Sissy, Cat, Assata, Mumia, Debbie, Sonya Massey and countless names history paved over. Invented inside dispossession whose source code compelled them to care for others; they overrode their programming and in a mass reclamation of their power, their radical care for themselves became an irreconcilable glitch that brought the entire system down.
The sound of air, a feeling you can’t spell but can hear. That’s the coltrane tunneling through. You coming?
📰 Seeda School News
🧘🏾 There’s a guided breathwork meditation for Treehouse members waiting in the Worldbuilder’s Way library. This meditation on safety is inspired by Mariame Kaba’s invitation, “safety is relation”. Inside the meditation we explore using breathwork to cultivate a felt, somatic sense of safety within our inner worlds so we might practice safety as relation in the worlds outside our body.
🕯️The August workshop on Collaborating With our Ancestors in our Weekly Dispatches is happening tomorrow at noon EST! I couldn’t be more excited. Inside this class we will learn how to walk across non-linear time while on errands for ancestors who died long ago and will be born way after we’re gone. We allow the answers to take many moons, while acknowledging they already live inside us. With embodied, ancestral wisdom, we remember time is thick and the answers may take a while to articulate but exhale knowing they are already on their way.
🎙️The podcast For the Worldbuilders is taking a break and will resume in September with a 5-part series. In the meantime, please enjoy the archive of 55 episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement generously created a Black August Database of Study and Handbook stating, “this Handbook is for communities to learn and engage in the commemorative Black August Tradition. It is yours. We encourage you to read it and engage”.
"what did i see to be except myself? / i made it up / here on this bridge between / starshine and clay” — Lucille Clifton in “won’t you celebrate with me”
“The Captive Maternal emerges within the “end of the world,” which becomes the New World of conquest, chattel slavery, and genocide…Captive Maternals are not identified by individual or personal identities—not by gender, social status, class or formal education. They are a function, not an identity. They/we are identified by their/our function in service, caretaking, sacrifice, and resistance to dishonor and disposability.” — Joy James in “The Captive Maternal is a function, not an identity marker” published by Scalawag on April 28, 2023
“Of course, pleasure and sanctuary exist in current forms: sex, poetry, dialectical dancing and bashing; teaching, dying, birthing. Also, there is always the strategic retreat.” — Joy James. Ibid.
Black August is an annual commemoration and prison-based holiday to remember Black political prisoners, Black freedom struggles in the United States and beyond, and to highlight Black resistance against racial, colonial and imperialist oppression.
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.” — Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power (1978)
Whew Ayana 😭 thank you thank you thank you. I binged watched/listened to every Joy James lecture and podcast she was featured in that I could find a few months ago. The timing of this was super aligned now that I’m reading In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love by her to commemorate Black August 🥹. I feel honored to witness your gifts this was beautifully written🖤
gobsmacked again and again by your writing & thinking. so grateful to have found your work. wow.