quilting
by Lucille Clifton
somewhere in the unknown world a yellow eyed woman sits with her daughter quilting. some other where alchemists mumble over pots. their chemistry stirs into science. their science freezes into stone. in the unknown world the woman threading together her need and her needle nods toward the smiling girl remember this will keep us warm. how does this poem end? do the daughters’ daughters quilt? do the alchemists practice their tables? do the worlds continue spinning away from each other forever?
Somewhere in the unknown world with rivers the color purple, folks dance under the moonlight of uncertainty with relief. Under cypress trees, they share a meal at sunrise to keep relation ripe. Intuition spins into material and spirit is carved into craft. The activity of improvisation is both a way of knowing and unknowing. Threading their need, the only device they carry is care — a mirror that helps them remember what they come from and what they belong to. Their technology is storytelling.
Some other where, synthetic biologists are creating the future without consent. Another century churns, colonial logics are coded as solutions, and imaginaries rooted in domination are called science. Language grows into taxonomy and taxonomy blooms into discipline. Surveillance software attempts to map the movements of the unknowable and are always two steps behind. Fear is calcified and coded into recursion through systems of reward and punishment. At annual conferences, anxious atoms collide to storyboard a version of reality they don’t fear. Their technology is storytelling.
Inside The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons Jack Halberstam reminds us “revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine”1. Every second spent attempting to control the outcome is marked by the sound of a colonial whip crack, reverberating through time and space. In order to escape the torturous echo of the tick tocking tyranny, in Dear Science, Katherine McKittrick invites us to “observe how our present system of knowledge, a biometric system of knowledge upheld by capitalist financing, is a self-referential system that profits from recursive normalization; and, second, to read and notice the conditions through which self-replicating knowledge systems are breached and liberation is made possible”2. It is through consenting to journey toward the wild beyond that we begin to destabilize the recursive normalization of scientific racism “to concoct a different story altogether”3. A story rooted in anti-author worldbuilding and rehearsal. Bringing every history, our seed data, a text message thread spun with desire to the river’s edge, tossing it into the gumbo, watching ownership melt in the stew to remember it was never about you.
Somewhere in the unknown world, cloth is a document and ceramic vessels are ceremonial objects embodying memory. Sonic landscapes provide the erotic energy to stay in it, trust it, keep up with it, surrender to it, release fear and dance inside it. Care makes all the vulnerability bearable. Uncovering the sound of multispecies relation they play, play, play to its notes across time. Free your mind and your ass will follow4. Turning to their kin, dancing to the noise of the unknowable, rehearsing a form of revolution not yet imagined — they hold each other and rejoice, remember, this will keep us warm.
Some other where biodesign is foreclosing a grandmother’s mushroom garden with the promise of STEM jobs for the grandchildren. Centuries old indigenous practices are getting new millennial branding and black folks are getting same old death. Biotechnology forging new advances in necropower entangle DNA with the stock market in a vow to tend to the violence of colonization — mumbling over pots brewing biosurveillance — they speculate across a boardroom table, remember, this will keep us warm.
How does this story end?
Do the worlds keep spinning away from each other forever?
Published inside The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney on pg. 11
This quote can be found published inside Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick on pg. 43 within the essay titled “The Smallest Cell Remembers a Sound”.
Found inside Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick on pg. 186 within the letter titled “Dear Science” the full quote reads, “To be black is to recognize and enervate the fictive perimeters of you, Science, and notice that the enclosures of biological determinism and the potentials of opacity, together, provide the conditions to concoct a different story altogether.”
Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow is the second studio album by American funk rock band Funkadelic, released in July 1970 by Westbound Records.