You Bend the World and Water Comes Out
What technologies do we build if we started with belonging?
Earlier, when we said she went mad, we lied. She has always been sane. It’s just that she was contaminated with us, a godly parasite with many heads, roaring inside the marble room of her mind. Everyone knows the stories of hungry gods, ignored gods, bitter, scorned, and vengeful gods. First duty, feed your gods. If they live (like we do) inside your body, find a way, get creative, show them the red of your faith, of your flesh; quiet the voices with the lullaby of the altar. It’s not as if you can escape us — where would you run to?
— Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater (2018), pg. 41
I create all sorts of ceremonial practices to lubricate the portal. I weave documents, I model maps on the surface of my skull. I make vessels to hold and drink from the mouth of the Black river. A compost tea of song, prayer, spell gives way to gumbo.
Sometimes I hear it vibrate out of the data. I’ll catch a whiff of it on the radio. I’ll taste it in the air during the Mother’s day cookout celebrating 90 year old twins on top of the soil that remembers my great grandmother's flower garden. The garden that would make cars slow to the speed of Cykofa. Where winter marked the passing of a year, not the calendar, and dreams were as sacred as matter. Where the river kept time and the soil kept the score.
Naming Seeda is a sort of second birth. A sort of homecoming.
I named you to lubricate the portal.
Another world is possible and I know this because your name found my tongue.
Found my tongue when I couldn’t see a way forward on this side of the world. Found my hands when I forgot my fingertips were ways of knowing. Found my hair before I knew it reflected the math of the universe. Found my soul when my spirit craved belonging.
Now each day is a commitment to keeping it wet.
Keeping that opening slippery.
Sometimes I imagine we take turns.
Jumping in and out.
Switching places.
Switching masks.
Trading flesh.
Enduring both sides as one.
To say that we have something (only insofar as we relinquish it) is to say that we come from somewhere (only insofar as we leave that place behind). Genesis is dispersion; somewhere is everywhere and nowhere as the radical dislocation we enact, where we stay and keep on going, before the beginning, before every beginning, and all belonging, in undercommon variance, in arrivance and propulsion, in the flexed load of an evangelical bridge, passed on this surrepetitious vamp, here. If you need some, come on, get some. We come from nothing, which is something misunderstood. It’s not that blackness is not statelessness; it’s just that statelessness is an open set of social lives whose animaterialized exhaustion remains as irreducible chance. Statelessness is our terribly beautiful open secret, the unnatural habitat, and habitus of analytic engines with synthetic capacities. Preservation is conditional branching, undone computation (tuned, forked, tongued), improvisation and, what it forges, digital speculation beyond the analogical or representational or calculative reserve. Critique – for example, the deciphering of the fundamental discursive structures that (de)form Western civilization – is part of its repertoire but it must always be kept in mind that cryptanalytic assertion has a cryptographic condition of possibility.
— Fred Moten, The Subprime and the beautiful, African Identities (2013)
Vol. 11, No. 2, pg. 239
Too much obsession over newness, not enough obsession over remembrance. Every 20 years white supremacist capitalist patriarchy1 re-hydrates the clay of its imagination, to sculpt new forms of domination, to sell it to us as a new thing. My job is to keep our surrepetitious vamp wet, open, within reach — to deform Western ways of knowing as the default, through art, teaching, writing, worldbuilding, worldbending. When we remember ancient technologies of belonging can seed a continuum of technologies of belonging, the cryptographic condition of possibility becomes material made of memory — a map keeping us accountable to our needs.
Every 20 years white supremacist capitalist patriarchy re-hydrates the clay of its imagination, to sculpt new forms of domination, to sell it to us as a new thing. It’s amazing to watch this craft unfold in their studio, the speculative play space of the market. What’s so crafty about their studio practice is the reward systems exploit our very ancient need for belonging. It presents a false sense of belonging, something you can never hold — not even belonging’s shadow, just it’s paint. In this studio practice the group show is the conference. The title of this group show is called, Every Year We Bend The World And Capital Comes Out, whatever is on the marketing materials is a misprint. You’re the keynote speaker, you climb the stage and hope to find the relief you might feel if your mother was emotionally available but all you found were lights. You make the cover of Fast Capitalism2, but it doesn’t come with the accountability you need from your family engaged in an unspoken oath of silence over your cousin’s abuse. When domination is rewarded and vulnerability is abused, we retraumatize each other over and over again and call it progress. Oops, you just needed your dad to apologize but instead we got the metaverse.
What technologies do we build if we started with belonging?
Not the belonging that can be bought, with the receipt being a degree. Not the belonging that rewards your embodied dominance. Not the belonging that withholds love until your utility becomes obvious. No, no, I’m talking about the belonging that only shows up inside of vulnerability, accountability, and collective care. Where we bend the world and water comes out. Where relationship is the craft and healing is the studio practice. My favorite part of the song is when we remember we can do poetry. Where else would you run to? If you need some, come on, get some. The lullaby of the altar is calling, may the response be your imagination, your dance, your words, your gardening, your teaching, your coding, your cooking, your care, your embodied insistence on living as if…
With love,
Ayana
Letter to the Worldbenders
Non-fiction is a misnomer It’s all story The hymns The history The textbooks The mystery The grief The victory Imagination built on calcified imagination Some cultures look at the world and build castles of stone that last thousands of years. Another culture looks at the world and builds shrines every 20 years in collaboration with trees. Both once science fiction Matter turned to bone And in your hands bones break like twigs Be careful which bone you pick — Ayana Zaire Cotton
bell hooks, Cultural Criticism & Transformation, Media Education Foundation Transcript, pg. 7