I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance
Worldbuilding Inside the Fugitivity of Madness
“I doubt the ability of the visual, the shadow of any Daguerrian art, to actually transfer the substance of what was so powerful about witnessing her, which I am arguing was profoundly physical and participatory.”
— Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021), “Along the Psychic Highway: Black Women Mystics and Utopias of the Ecstatic”, pg. 28
The Fugitivity of Madness
Reclaiming the Rupture
“How to Go Mad attends to people and practices who, like those Flying Africans, will not be captured by normative Reason.”
— La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, “Mad Is a Place”, pg. 16
On the days when I’m truly lost inside the forest of my writing I feel a sort of reverence for the childhood abuse. Nonono, not a romance but a respect…that still seems too perverse. Thing is, it is that perversion that invented my rupture. My break1. Invented the otherworldly cracks to parallel universes, timezones, landscapes. I learned flight at an early age. Fleeing, flying, floating were choreographies of escape that nine-year old Ayana had to learn. Disembodiment wasn’t all bad until adulthood, but for that time of being, it was how I traversed alternate realities from inside the occasional torture of the present. Disembodiment provided another layer of disassembly to leverage: taking flight in the sky of my skin, overlooking the landscape of my inner world. Performing a simultaneity of disembodiment while floating inside the flesh.
“Sethe has a breakdown that feels like beating wings and probing beaks:
She was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher's hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there.2
Sethe originally sought sanctuary in an “over there” north of the Ohio River, but its freedom proved ephemeral and illusory. Now she seeks freedom in a more distant “over there,” in an otherworldly elsewhere…”
— La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, “Mad Is a Place”, pg. 19
Learning, creating, practicing inside this dissemblance is how I carved out a path. The perversion deepens. I didn’t survive whole, but I did survive in parts3. Now I’m making a life, inside the cracks, inside the breaks, exposing parallel universes and speculative sites suspended between the past and the future, also known as The Upstairs Bathroom on Endicott Place, also known as Cykofa, also known as over there. As a child I had a recurring dream. I would be at kite day, a cookout, or recess, playing, laughing, screaming, howling, ecstatic movements children are allowed to perform in public without punishment. I’d be so utterly in my body then suddenly I’d start to drift. My feet would leave the ground and I would find myself suspended in mid-air, floating above the scenes of my life. Surrendering to the air, at a distance, inventing stories and making meaning out of everything I witnessed.
“If Reason is benefactor of white supremacy, proponent of antiblack slavocracy, and underwriter of patriarchal domination, an enslaved black woman might fare better by going insane instead. Rather than remain captive behind the barbed fences of slavocratic sanity, she might find refuge — however tenuous, vexed, and incomplete — in the fugitivity of madness.”
— La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, “Mad Is a Place”, pg. 18-19
Toward Selling the Shadow to Support the Substance
Liberatory Possibilities Between the Binaries
“I sell the shadow to support the substance”
— Sojourner Truth, "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance" (1864)
I remember being confronted by the mirror of Truth in childhood. Seeing photos of her, always with portals for eyes, always with a bonnet to protect her head from the hummingbirds, or perhaps, maybe to keep them in. I remember listening to the images4 of Sojourner Truth not yet knowing she’d become my air traffic controller. “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” I carried this quote in my left cheek for most of my 20’s as a survival spell or incantation. Perhaps I keep returning to it because it confronts capitalism while acknowledging the flesh and the ghost, the memory and the map, the witch and the warrior, the spell and the strategy, the poet and the engineer, the 0 and the 1, the divination and the direct action. Fuck it, perhaps I keep returning to this quote because my sun is in Gemini. What’s the substance? What’s the shadow? My Capricorn rising compels me to ask, which needs protection? My Libra moon compels me to ask, how can both serve collective liberation? Are these the wrong questions entirely? The only thing I’m clear on: these binaries create the poles I fly between — staying within range — as if to ensure I don’t float away forever, disappearing into over there. Truth gives us permission to fly while simultaneously inviting us to make sure we have a place to land. But where are we going?
Abolitionist As in Witch
The Agency and Mythic Militancy in Holding Ungovernability and Disorganization
“Just a note from the world of embodiment: Chaos or disorganization is not always the worst option. In fact, it can be very helpful. Sometimes we’ve got vital power we need stuck in old habits. A bit of chaos can help you recover some power actually (the right knows this too well). What’s especially important at least from an embodiment perspective is that when we are disorganized we make meaning of it, use it to expand, to inspire. Disorganization is part of transformation. And a system that refuses all disorganization will never grow.”
— Prentis Hemphill, Instagram post (June 29th, 2024)
In How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind La Marr Jurelle Bruce reminds us “mad is a place”, to go mad is to go some where. Might that some where, over there, be toward transformation, toward change, toward ungovernability? Big Ma could hold entire conversations with empty chairs, she knew the flesh and the ghost were the same thing. How do we become students of chaos in between the binaries of the legible and illegible, the matrial and immaterial? Artists who are no longer agents of the state but agents of an alt-militancy operating in plain sight? It feels important to name this: I don’t consider myself an abolitionist that organizes community. No, I’m not directly mobilizing communities to advocate for the defunding of the police, the demolition of prisons and the sacred sabotage of Cop Cities. That’s vital work and it feels important to honor that work by acknowledging that I realize what I’m doing is not direct action. So no, I’m not an abolitionist as in community organizer but perhaps I am an abolitionist as in witch. In my wildest dreams, inviting you to imagine then actualize a world wrapped around the molten core of your desire, allows us to pour into the possibility of a world without prisons and police by co-creating the care and resource distribution infrastructures that will necessarily take its place. What breaks open when we honor the work being done on the streets and at the altar?
“One of my investments in this chapter is to show that a historical and theoretical focus on early female radical visionaries makes us redefine what the very term radical means. Such focus requires us to rethink prominent histories of black political radicalism and their (re)enlistment in contemporary theories of blackness. Select histories of black militancy and nationalism have come to shape commonsense notions of black radical resistance.
[...]
The utopian urge within militant forms of resistance is ultimately of a type shaped by the same liberal politics these seek to challenge, as the aim of such movements is forms of freedom and equality defined by patriarchal nationalist belonging and political recognition. In contrast, the radical utopian practices of the preaching women included challenges to state and capitalist control, alternatives to heterosexual marriage and motherhood, feminisms, experimental health and religious practices, and the wild worlds of dreams and visions. These alternative practices did not preclude reform or revolution at the level of nation-state politics, but these were not the central aim. Their radical utopian animus was the elsewhere, the (im)possible, the altruistic, and the otherworldly.”
— Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021), “Along the Psychic Highway: Black Women Mystics and Utopias of the Ecstatic”, pg. 26-28
In what ways does Sojourner Truth necessarily problematize our conceptions of militancy? In what ways does the neutrality of the word “worldbuilder” or “artist” allow us to practice anarchy in plain sight? In what ways is the radical resistance on full display in the Hoodoo house, but not visible from the street, a practice of marronage? In what ways do the dreams become doors become portals for materializing (im)possibility in waking life? How can we use the patriarchal dismissal of this work as “non-militant” or “non-radical” to our advantage? Suspended between the worlds we can’t see but can smell and the universes we can’t know but can hear, I find myself growing impatient. But Palestine, but Congo, but Sudan, but Kenya, but Haiti, but Cop City, but Chocolate City. Tending to the rupture from both sides I now know the childhood abuse radicalized me, turned me into an abolitionist as in witch. Introducing me to both sites of madness and possibility. I flew across the terrain of the page to write this, dropping more questions than answers, along the way Nikki Giovanni whispered “I don't think life is inherently coherent”5. She invited me to embrace that, to use it. Use it all, flesh and ghost, memory and map, witch and warrior, spell and strategy, poet and engineer, 0 and 1, divination and direct action. And Palestine, and Congo, and Sudan, and Kenya, and Haiti, and Cop City, and Chocolate City, and Cykofa.
Dear flying Africans, shapers of shadow and substance, how might we take flight through the landscapes of over there as we tend to the landscapes of right here?
Summer Syllabus
On Holding Tight and Letting Go
Recall that I began this chapter by warning you to hold tight. Mad methodology also, sometimes, entails letting go: relinquishing the imperative to know, to take, to capture, to master, to lay bare all the world with its countless terrors and wonders. Sometimes we must hold tight to steady ourselves amid the violent tumult of this world—and sometimes we must let go to unmoor ourselves from the stifling order imposed on this world. I am describing a deft dance between release and hold, hold and release.
— La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, “Mad Is a Place”, pg. 11
The Seeda School Treehouse Summer Syllabus is here! Perhaps this is the power Hemphill was hinting at? Visioning new worlds from inside the chaos as we begin to pull them closer towards us with words, with sound, with movement, with, with, with, and, and, and. Let’s pull our worlds together, because we need exactly what we have and if we just got closer we might start to believe it. Week after week, with every inhale and exhale, with every hold and release.
Register for the free upcoming Worldbuilding Workshop to learn more about the Treehouse a place where, put plainly, we explore creative marketing and intuitive storytelling in order to build our email list inside our interdisciplinary practice. The strategy unfolds in plain sight, but the spell, see, that’s for us.
“To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.”
— bell hooks
Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition (2003). In The Break, investigates the connections between jazz, sexual identity, and radical black politics.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987), pg. 192
“Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part, but the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can and behaving as beautifully as one can under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly. It may be horrible but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable, it needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails, it needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention. But the opposite which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually — and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born. We are going to die so you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.” — Toni Morrison, “Toni Morrison on Trauma, Survival, and Finding Meaning” published on YouTube. The Connecticut Forum (May 4, 2001)
Listening to Images (2017) by Tina M. Campt
Nikki Giovanni, Conversations with Nikki Giovanni (1992), “Claudia Tate/1938”, pg. 145
Nonono…The rupture was always materially present in the body. Otherworldly includes the worldly. Where did the other come from? Sylvia Wynter says, “words made flesh.” We are the Bios and Logos, this flesh, these words. In some of us the rupture is, has always and will always be materially present. I wish you will never ever thank the event. I wish.