Finding Form Inside Unreasonable Faith
We’ve Been Here Before, Cykofa Narration As A Black Method
“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
We know this place as the North Carolina Black River, they know it as Cykofa1. A parallel universe suspended amongst the past and future where cornrows are cryptography keys, data farms are data forests, the weaving loom is a computer, cloth is a document, the body is an interface and chain link fencing from demolished prisons is woven with plant life and used as architectural membrane. But this ain’t no utopia2.
Their innovations in embodiment might have ushered in a world where data farms became data forests, but it was only after the water almost ran out and the atmosphere started to boil did they decide to become wiser about data stewardship. They couldn’t keep colonizing prairies and playgrounds and neighborhoods and ecosystems and people. So the first step was abandoning the strategy of clear cutting the data towers in old growth forests to make things they didn’t need. Many argued they didn’t need data and many more argued they did. Ultimately, leveraging data is how the black feminists won. Cykofians started mining the data and noticed blueprints stowed away in Harriet’s garret3, care manuals4 inside text messages threading grocery lists, prayer requests abstracted in Gee’s Bend5, offers to watch the baby on a Sunday and “pretty pleases” paired with wine for help with taking down braids. They found frameworks for survival encoded in the photographs they listened to6. Every pixel hid a great grandmother's grimoire and every gap in the archive they pined for could be found inside the moan of a blue note. Dear science7 wayward lives8 harlem is nowhere9 code noir10 the sound of undrowned11 jazz12…Cykofians began to wonder, how do we wring out the world and create another with the mop water?
Eventually they found the protection spells in the YouTube videos and access keys in the Mehretus13. Zora Neale Hurston’s Glossary of Harlem Slang contained 123 escape routes, at least. Sojourner Truth taught them how to sell the shadow to support the substance14 and the mixtapes of oral history15 became breathing tubes.
It was undeniable, they needed the data and they realized they didn’t need to kill the planet to collaborate with this inheritance. Cykofians began to encode data into the DNA of plant life using a recipe passed down by Emma Dupree16. Through the methods of relation and seed data of black feminism a poem became a fiber plant, a lyric was written into a flower, a film was uploaded onto a grain of rice17 and multimedia wrapped around the rings of time in dendrochronological fashion.
“Black studies and anticolonial thought offer methodological practices wherein we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on existing liberatory practices and pursue ways of living the world that are uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, imprecise and unrealized. The method is rigorous, too. Wonder is study. Curiosity is attentive. Black method is therefore not continuously and absolutely undisciplined (invariably without precision, invariably undone). Black method is precise, detailed, coded, long, and forever. The practice of bringing together multiple texts, stories, songs, and places involves the difficult work of thinking and learning across many sites, and thus coming to know, generously, varying and shifting worlds and ideas.”
— Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (2020), pg. 5
“We’ve been here before” are the four words every black feminist I talk to about the chaos of this moment eventually utters. Can’t you smell it? The promise of possibility and petrichor. Pulling us back into the present, back into the wisdom of our breath, the blueprints already embedded in our ancestral memory. Inside the practice of embodying our citations, “we’ve been here before” turns into “we know what to do” and paths begin to reveal themselves through abstract action amidst chaos.
Cykofa Narration is an embodied method of non-linear storytelling that is summoned and activated by ancestral wisdom and citational seed data spanning digital, print and all other media that engage the sensorium through and beyond: touch, smell, taste, sight and sound. By weaving the memories of spiritual belonging located deep in our inner worlds, with the data of black feminism and marronage from our outer worlds, we create walkways with words toward alternate realities and parallel universes suspended in the present moment.
We are playing telephone, building on top of the words and worlds left by those before us. This moment doesn’t require original thinkers, single innovators, self-proclaimed geniuses, solo artists and the myth of authorship. This moment requires grief workers, care givers, facilitators, stewards and frameworks. It requires practitioners prepared to create and rehearse18 inside polyphonic frameworks for living and alternative methods of relating to the scent and sound of Black Compositional Thought19, Critical Fabulation20, Black Miscellanea21, Mad Methodology22, Beauty As A Method23, Black Visual Intonation24, Wake Work25, Afropresentism26, Revolutionary Love27, Black Quantum Futurism28 and Undercommoning29 while Earthseeding30 Mundane Afrofuturism31, or something like that.
We’ve been here before. Can’t you smell it? The fumes of faith and fire. The familiar smell of smoke and triumph and eroticism and fear, so much fear, yet even more love. We get to speculate for a living because of someone else’s unreasonable faith. There are deep registers of healing and possibility inside of learning how to trust our wildness not to kill us, but instead, to reveal unanticipated blueprints for living. Sometimes it’s hidden in plain sight in the form of a footnote32, a glossary, a photograph, undrowned jazz, an Aunt's laugh lines or a tree asking to be watered by our tears33. Faith takes the form of multiple texts, stories, songs, places and life affirming citations breadcrumbing toward moments of marronage we chain together into something called a life. I am clear I am alive because of someone else’s unreasonable faith. Every week I am committed to honoring theirs by finding mine. On a good day I remember it’s looking for me too.
📰 Seeda School News
🌳 Last week inside the Treehouse we explored the erotics of the Creative Sales Cycle and learned spells for making the work for us first in order attract the folks it is most sustainable to serve through our practice and offers.
If you are a Treehouse member, check out the workshop replay and workbook in your Treehouse library — where we playfully explored all things consent, flirtation, honeymoon phases, attraction and commitment inside creative marketing aligned with our values.
I'm overflowing with gratitude that I’ve been invited by my dear friend and collaborator
and The Black School (operated by Joseph Cuillier and Shani Peters) to offer a reading at the upcoming collective altar-building workshop, “ITS ALL OUT OF MY ARMS” at the ICA on Friday, February 21st at 5pm. I’ll be reading an excerpt from the first chapter of the novel I’m currently incubating which follows the story of Seeda, a non-binary biotechnologist living in an abolitionist community, named Cykofa, seeded by black feminist ancestors. Offering this reading, for the first time, alongside Alexis De Veaux on the occasion of the Dear Mazie, exhibition which celebrates black queer architecture and worldbuilding is a dream too wide for words. Truly humbled by this invitation. See you there?Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story (2022) co-authored by Ayana Zaire Cotton and the Cykofa Narration Database
“Let me let me step back for a second and just say that, you know, utopia - the definition of utopia is nowhere, OK? That's the formal definition.” — Robin D.G. Kelley in “There Are No Utopias” published via Throughline
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written by herself. “Harriet went into hiding, first at the homes of friends, and later in the home of her grandmother. There, above a storeroom, she hid in a small garrett, measuring about nine feet long and seven feet wide.” (Source: Harriet Jacobs) The highest point was just three feet. Also known as “the loophole of retreat”.
Listening to Images by Tina Campt
Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick
Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
“I work in abstraction because I think within abstraction there’s a lot that I can communicate that’s visceral and felt, but that we don’t have language for.” — Julie Mehretu. Source: Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory
Sojourner Truth, "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance" (1864)
“This mixtape embodies my resurgence, my reclaiming of power. It’s a testament to my unyielding spirit and limitless creativity. In my research about alligator attacks, i found that a common thread in each survivor was that the main reason they survived is BECAUSE they fought back. This mixtape is my fight back. I am nobody’s prey.” — Doechii
“Emma Dupree was an influential herbalist in Eastern North Carolina. Born Emma Williams, as the daughter of freed slaves on a farm 9 miles east in Falkland, where she was born the Fourth of July, 1897. Early on, her parents Pennia and Noah Williams knew she was nature's child. From the time she could walk, Emma felt drawn to the land. She would roam the woods, plucking, sniffing, and tasting weeds. She grew up that way, collecting the leaves, stems, roots and bark. "The woods gal, that's what they called me. They'd say, ‘here comes that little medicine thing,’" says Ms. Dupree of her time as a child.” (Source: Sow True Seed)
“Present Tense” by Harryette Mullen, from Sleeping with the Dictionary
“Another way that I have tried to give some very open-ended definition to abolition is to call it “life in rehearsal.” So life in rehearsal, I hope, invokes in a listener or reader some sense or sensibility of how interpersonal abolition must be. That there is so much doing involved in making ourselves free, and most importantly, radical dependency: that it’s not something an individual can do for themself or can embody as one person.” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore via On Being with Krista Tippett
“These boys, like Eugene Williams, practice what I call black compositional thought. My working term considers how paths, freeways, waterways, architecture, and geographies are composed by black bodies and how properties of energy, space, and objects interact as networks of liberation…It’s trying to negotiate what it means to have those multiple, radical conditions in space, particularly in this country, for brown and black bodies.” — Torkwase Dyson, “Torkwase Dyson tells the history of black liberation through cartographic art”
“The title of this gallery is borrowed from Saidiya Hartman, a cultural historian who has written about the afterlife of slavery. Responding to the limits of official archives, she offers us “critical fabulation”—the use of storytelling and speculative narration as a means of redressing history’s omissions, particularly those in the lives of enslaved people.” (Source: MoMA)
“Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea” by Katherine McKittrick
How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity by La Marr Jurelle Bruce
“Beauty Is a Method” by Christina Sharpe
“Arthur Jafa: Visualizing a Continuum of Black Visual-Cultural Image Production” published by Afrovisualism
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe
“Afropresentism, this indigenous technology of connection and love, informs everything about how I move around the world, the things I take notice of, and what I do with them.” — Neema Githere
Black Quantum Futurism (BQF) is a literary and artistic collective composed of Moor Mother (Camae Ayewa) and Rasheedah Phillips.
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
“Earthseed is a fictitious religion based on the idea that "God is Change". It is the creation of Octavia E. Butler, as revealed by her character Lauren Oya Olamina in the books Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (the third book of the trilogy, Parable of the Trickster, was not completed before Butler's death).” (Source: Wikipedia)
The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto by Martine Syms
Legacy Russell: On Footnotes. “Russell’s lecture will explore and occupy the footnote as a conceptual and theoretical frame, a radical site of Black, queer, and feminist collaboration and decolonized creative praxis that extends through and beyond the architectures of the book or the essay themselves.” (Source: Vera List Center for Art and Politics)
“Episode 8: From Pentecostal to Pathless Path: Sonya's Toolkit for Living an Aligned Life” published via Mundane Mircales
Whew! Reading this was a whole portal I did not know I was going to enter nor knew I needed to enter. What a journey in experiencing/embodying. Thank you.