The Fruits of Madness
Consenting to Bending Centuries into Place
“Hold tight, the way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly. It might send you staggering across asylum hallways, heckled by disembodied voices—or shimmying over spotlit stages, greeted by loving applause. It might find you freewheeling through fever dreams, then marching toward freedom dreams, then scrambling from sleep, with blood and stars in your eyes, the whole world a waking dream.”
— La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (2021), “Chapter 1: Mad Is A Place” pg. 1
Descending, descending, descending down the length of mountains. I know every trip might be my last but I go for the blackberries. I go because I don’t know how else to survive this without their juice. Dropping into the dangerous but familiar ritual of descending into the texture of my deepest longings. On this particular occasion the atmosphere was blanketed with gray curtains you could pull back only far enough to see your next step. The sky was the soil and the soil was the sea. Walking on water, placing one foot in front of the hour hand, the temperature grew colder and the world seemed to narrow into a path leading me to a ladder made of branches and carpeted with moss. As I climb up, past the clothesline suspending the curtains of fog, my belly becomes a basket and I pick the fruit only native to this timezone1 — the smell of Gay Guerrilla2, the texture of Corregidora3, the tartness of Mississippi Goddamn4, the citrus of Beloved5. I pick the fruit. I snack on the clouds and lick the sun. I remembered this Blackbottom, this other-world, is the only thing I possess and I let it possess me. I cut and sew the fog for the sake of opacity, consent to bending time and watch as I turn my fears into seeds.
In between calendar notifications about uncompleted tasks, new forms of war being invented at the same rate as poems, the pile of dishes staring back and an award show getting more airtime than multiple genocides, I slip into familiar daydreams and find pockets to practice the methodology6 of my madness. Sometimes my leg goes too far in the air and I go all the way down. Then my foot finds its way behind my ass and pushes me into the next year. I realize I could keep going on like this for a couple more centuries as long as they let me write it all down. Here, I let my attachments become dandelions that float away with the activation of my breath. Here, I feel a freedom I’ve never known beyond the sky of fruit and soil of blackwater. Here, my utters can finally retract as I feast on the labor of my dead.
“Some pessimists claim that the progeny of slaves are still not American, still vainly awaiting recognition as citizens and affirmation as human, still existentially captive, still suspended in that void. Wherever blackness dwells—slave ship, spaceship, graveyard, garden, elsewhere, everywhere—those captives accessed what Spillers calls a “richness of possibility”. They would realize black diasporic kinesis, kinship, sociality, creativity, love, and myriad modes of being that flourish in their marvelously tenacious heirs. In a “fruitless expanse,” the enslaved bore fruit. The pit held seeds, as pits sometimes do.”
— La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (2021), “Chapter 1: Mad Is A Place” pg. 3
We know the pit. We do, and yet we love and yet we dance. We store run to the bottom for its strange fruit. Sometimes I feel myself drift into madness when the ground of the outerworld becomes unbearable. This is the only home I know. We have only one more century of this, “only one more century to go”, they tell me. How do we endure this final leg of the race to the end of the century—the end of empire—without world hopping, without consenting to bending time, without freewheeling through fever dreams, then marching toward freedom dreams, then scrambling from sleep, with blood and stars in our eyes? In this fruitless expanse we turn our fear into dandelions, blowing seeds of myriad modes of being that will flourish in marvelously tenacious heirs. We worldbuild because we need somewhere to plant the seeds of our madness. So when the heirs reach the bottom and bite into another century they realize they were never alone, they realize we were there too planting seeds into the soil of the sky, they realize they’re not the first to dream up ways of turning their fears into feasts. They realize we left fruit for them to remember how to go mad without losing your mind.
“But there are lessons to learn from those who make homeland in wasteland, freedom routes to chart that start in a ship’s hull, debris of mad and black life to retrieve from the sea, mad black worlds to make that rise from a ship’s wake, and questions that refuse answers but rouse movements. Besides, if the anticolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon is right, if there is “a zone of nonbeing…an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born,” then “nowhere at all” may be an especially auspicious place to commence.” — La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (2021), “Chapter 1: Mad Is A Place” pg. 2
From Julius Eastman’s remarks to the audience before the premieres of Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla in January 1980 during his composer-residency at Northwestern University: “Now the reason I use Gay Guerrilla — G U E R R I L L A, that one — is because these names — let me put a little subsystem here — these names: either I glorify them or they glorify me. And in the case of guerrilla: that glorifies gay — that is to say, there aren’t many gay guerrillas. I don’t feel that ‘gaydom’ has — does have — that strength, so therefore, I use that word in the hopes that they will. You see, I feel that — at this point, I don’t feel that gay guerrillas can really match with ‘Afghani’ guerrillas or ‘PLO’ (Palestine Liberation Organization) guerrillas, but let us hope in the future that they might, you see. That’s why I use that word guerrilla: it means a guerrilla is someone who is, in any case, sacrificing his life for a point of view. And, you know, if there is a cause — and if it is a great cause — those who belong to that cause will sacrifice their blood, because, without blood, there is no cause. So, therefore, that is the reason that I use gay guerrilla, in hopes that I might be one, if called upon to be one.”
“Corregidora (1975) is a fiction novel written by Gayl Jones set in Kentucky in the late 1940s. The novel centers around Ursa Corregidora, who was recently hospitalized after an accident involving a flight of stairs. The first three sections of the novel follow Ursa through her recovery, her changing relationships, and her profession as a blues singer.” Source: Wikipedia
“But that's just the trouble (do it slow)
Washing the windows (too slow)
Picking the cotton (too slow)
You're just plain rotten (too slow)
You're too damn lazy (too slow)
The thinking is crazy (too slow)
Where am I going? What am I doing?
I don't know, I don't know”
— Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam” (1964)
Beloved is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison. Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. Source: Wikipedia
"If we are committed to anticolonial thought, our starting point must be one of disobedient relationality that always questions, and thus is not beholden to, normative academic logics. This means our method-making may not necessarily take us where we want to go, but it will take us, as Glissant writes, to “an unknown that does not terrify.” — Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (2020), “The Smallest Cell Rememebers a Sound”, pg. 45