Knowing from loss

Introduction

STORYTELLING ¹

(Putuma, 2017, p. 11)

5. You call us sell-outs and feminazis when we exhume the fungus from your politics.

·fanon and biko sound like venom in your mouth.

·I cannot tell if I am breaking bread or being poisoned.

·How come references to your revolution are only limited to biko, fanon and malcom?

·Do you read?

(Putuma, 2017, p. 80)

I do not find tragedy romantic at all.

I do not think playing dead is empowering.

Or good for my ego, even.

I love you.

But

I’d rather be alive.

(Putuma, 2017, p. 45)

It is 2019, and I find myself in front of another classroom of first-year students who arrive with unexpected and varying reasons for enrolling in the introductory course we offer at Witwatersrand, ‘Oral Literature and Performance in Africa’. I am several years into teaching part of the course, and it is the second time that I am teaching Koleka Putuma’s (2017) ground-breaking collection of poetry, Collective Amnesia. Putuma writes in the context of #rhodesmustfall, then a student at the University of Cape Town, but also writes herself into a genealogy of black women in general, and post-transitional black women poets more specifically, articulated most presciently in the poem ‘Lifeline’ (pp. 83–85). Post-transitional black women’s poetry marks a distance from ‘post-apartheid’ categorically, but only slightly. This notion I borrow from Barbara Boswell’s (2016) account, where the transition marked by the end of apartheid enables black women writers to work in new forms, and more specifically through poetry to explore new themes that directly confront, while being deeply aware of a historical consciousness of the past and present. In her recent edited collection, Makhosazana Xaba (2019a) offers a dense account of black women poets since 2000 in South Africa that reveals the extent and shape of what this form enables us to do. In her own essay in the collection, Xaba (2019b, pp. 32–35) offers several tables, to count the number of collections published by black women between 2000 and 2018, finding 84 collections.

I am consciously aware that the students in this classroom most probably know apartheid as the central historical event of their history, or the history of this country (for those who are positioned as non-citizens), so I press against this event as the central site of historical consciousness, in part by drawing connections between Putuma’s collection and those located in other African countries taught in the course; in part, by drawing their attention to the relationship between memory and history that Putuma’s work is deeply attentive to. Memory is unreliable, while history/historiography relies on an understanding of the past as though it has passed. Gabeba Baderoon’s (2011) tracing of black women’s poetic forms is a useful companion in this task, as she opens with a reading of Xaba’s (2008) poem ‘Tongues of Their Mothers’, which opens and closes with a wish to write an epic poem about black women – this wish, temporally a claim at a futurity.

This temporal claim resides in Baderoon’s (2011) second example, Yvette Christiansë’s (2006) novel Unconfessed, in which she tells the story of a slave in the Cape Colony named Sila, accused of murdering her son. Sila’s life is one of migrations from present-day Mozambique to prison on Robben Island, because of the charge against her. Sila’s imprisonment on Robben Island interrupts the more authoritative account of the territory/temporality of Robben Island, which is about Nelson Mandela and his figurative role in the anti-apartheid struggle. Christiansë draws Sila’s story from the archives, the story of a slave who refused to confess to destroying someone’s property, yet as Baderoon’s (2011) analysis reveals, through the incantation/enchantment of poetic forms, Christiansë is able to re-member/re-memory Sila’s story, but also to voice Sila, through a form Baderoon describes as ‘preferred silence’, and makes claims to justice in the future. Baderoon’s (2011) final example, the staging of the P-word at the University of the Western Cape (Hames et al., 2006; see also Hames, 2007), I also find useful.

Having set a group task for students on ‘how to read a secondary text’, I hear one student say to another ‘why does it matter to think about slavery?’ and another student in the group replies, ‘ok, we can skip over that part.’ The importance of relocating slavery as temporally present in the national consciousness of South Africa is a project well-articulated in Pumla Gqola’s (2010) and Baderoon’s (2014) work, even while it is difficult for many students in my class to immediately relate to it. To draw the conceptual comparison between memory and history, I draw their attention to the p-word, poes, which is somewhat ordinary, because of the ways it is regularly spoken, but not ordinary because many of them struggle to say it out loud, it is rude. I draw their attention to how this word and its connotations in relation to the representations of black women’s bodies endure (see Lewis, 2011) to help them to draw the connections between how memory ‘comes up’ and drags us through presents, pasts and futures even while history relies on a telos of progress.

In 2019, I do these opening lectures with the present/presence of the bodies of privatized security guards, again outside the doors of the lecture theatre, and for two weeks the South African Police Services (SAPS) armed and ready. On another morning I am sitting in my office emailing students to cancel lectures because of the heightened levels of ‘security’ on campus. ‘Security’ here understood as those whose force is meant to contain the possibility, or proximity of danger. The student, in this arrangement of security, enters a process of being made into a stranger, a figure of ‘stranger danger’ within an institution – the university – where you would imagine the student to be the heart of its institutional life. By ‘stranger making’, I refer to Sara Ahmed’s (2012) account, ‘we can think of the experience of becoming a stranger. A stranger experience can be the experience of becoming noticeable, of not passing through or passing by. Of being stopped or being held up’ (p. 3). That morning, one student arrives for the postgraduate seminar despite my email, knocks on the door and walks in crying. Once her tears dry, she shows me the video she took of a group no larger than 15 students seated on the ground, on the road surrounded: to their backs, university buses block their movement, to their front, they face the securitized ‘border’ and Enoch Sontonga Road into the university. Enoch Sontonga’s presence in the national imaginary is important because he composed the part of the national anthem that is ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica’, in 1925, which was not only central (and especially so in 1925) to imagining anticolonial/postcolonial struggle in South Africa, but was explicitly Pan-African in its visions of a futurity. The way that I learned the song as a child, in Shona, ‘God Bless Africa’, ‘nyika’, loosely translated to ‘nation’, but here implied in a Pan-African vision that the name of that nation exceeded the present boundaries forged in the aftermaths of anticolonial struggle.

In the video the student shows me, the border between Wits and the city is closed first by a line-up of at least 40 private security guards and behind them the SAPS, armed with guns, teargas and stun grenades that they let loose on the students. She cries as she shows me the video. I am angry, pained.

This article’s telos begins with an irritation. An aggravation as a colleague at work joked in 2017 about students and their reading practices in the wake of #feesmustfall. The first version of this article was my rage/boredom/discomfort/anger at a range of ‘progressive’ and ‘fauxegressive’ scholars who so easily dismissed the claims for epistemic justice in the wake of #feesmustfall. #feesmustfall and its aftermaths refer to student protests against the rise of university fees (see Heffernan & Nieftagodien, 2016, p. xi; see also Mupotsa, 2017; Ndlovu, 2017). Leading up to, and following the protests around fees, students drew connections with #rhodesmustfall (see Naidoo, 2016), which explicitly demanded the decolonization of the university and its curricula. #rhodesmustfall structured its antagonism against the university through three pillars; Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness and Black Feminism (see Dlakavu, 2017; Jacobs, 2017; Naidoo, 2016). As #feesmustfall gained life at Wits, these pillars where useful in framing demands to management, and in building a collective political vocabulary.

In this article, I note that several ideas emerge, explicitly articulated in the pillars named in #rhodesmustfall. Of these, decoloniality, intersectionality and afropessimism became terms used to name a sense of epistemic injustice, even where/when the student feeling/articulating this/these positions was not expertly tracing the various genealogies of these terms. In this sense, rather than standing as coherent fields of study, these terms are sites of intensity that articulate a coming to political consciousness. The endurance of white supremacy in the present, and the ways that sexual difference/class difference accumulate in this libidinal economy, happen under conditions where racial difference as a sociohistorical condition is sensed or articulated as ‘unreal’, and purely descriptive in an era of legislative racial freedom. Students are articulating Blackness as the condition around which their political consciousness and contestations with enduring questions about knowledge and its representation happen under these conditions. Blackness as a site for political awareness is not uncontested, as revealed in Putuma’s poetry; ‘I love you. But. I’d rather be alive’ (Putuma, 2017, p. 45) articulates the difficulties of Black solidarity, but also of what it means to drag the connection between the sociohistorical condition of being Black in the world, and Blackness.

My intention in this article is to explore that connection, which Fred Moten (2013) describes not as ontological, but as paraontological. That is, that for Moten (2013) where blackness is understood ontologically, it becomes a set of questions (and assumptions) about blackness where being and knowing through blackness only comes through the historical injury of anti-blackness. The paraontological here is, in part, a departure from ontology in and of itself, making more complex the assumed relation between blackness and being. I begin the article with a historical account of the emergence of Black Consciousness. I then offer a case, the ‘case’ here understood in Lauren Berlant’s terms as referring to ‘a problem-event that has animated some kind of judgement . . . [of] which what matters is the idiom of judgment’ (2007, p. 663); she continues, ‘as genre, the case hovers about the singular, the general, and the normative/ it organizes publics, however fleeting’ (2007, p. 664). I offer a case of one of the Memorandums presented to a department at Wits, to think about what temporal judgements we can make about epistemic questions in the present and what they tell us about our political time. Riding beside, but also pushing against the account of Kelly Gillespie and Leigh-Ann Naidoo of #feesmustfall as a case of a ‘Cold Future’, rather than to locate the temporal disappointments of the present in the exception of South Africa’s national time, I opt for an account of temporal disappointments rooted in Blackness as the temporal relation between being and knowing that shapes this rupture and its ongoing life.

Black Consciousness

In Students Must Rise: Youth Struggle in South Africa Before and Beyond Soweto ’76, editors Anne Heffernan and Noor Nieftagodien (2016) propose readings of current struggles around education in South Africa that are historically grounded. They begin with the Soweto Uprising of 1976, where thousands of students marched against the imposition of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 informs several of the reflections in this volume. The impact of the Act was to usher in ‘a tiered system of education, where both the schools [that] students attended and the content of the curriculum they were taught were based on race’ (Heffernan & Nieftagodien, 2016, p. 2). Es’kia Mphahlele describes this shift:

Before 1953, when Bantu Education became law, although facilities were separate and unequal, curricula were the same for black and white. The new curricula and syllabi compelled teachers to instruct their children to be and feel inferior. The rationale was to lower the quality of education for the Africans so that we did not aspire to pastures set aside for whites. The state insisted on mother-tongue instruction from elementary through high school, knowing full well that English textbooks were not going to be translated. It was hoped that the new system would counter political activism: the Mandelas and the Sobukwes, and their fellow activists had been educated in the earlier system. The frontiers of the imagination would thus be limited, because the ideas that came with education would thus be blocked. (1993, p. 184, emphasis original)

Mphahlele founded the Department of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1983, and retired in 1987. The canon/curriculum we inherit from him reflects his commitment as a pedagogue. As a scholar, he is most often referenced with regard to his body of work on African Humanism, which he traces through multiple Black intellectual traditions that include Négritude and Black Consciousness (BC) thought. He writes that ‘at the university level especially, we are pressing for an Africanism, or an expression of Africanism, in the curricula and also in the way educational institutions are run’ (in Samin & Mphahlele, 1997, p. 183). BC emerged in the 1960s, following the banning of the African National Congress (ANC), associated with ‘the Mandelas’, and the Pan African Congress (PAC), associated with ‘the Sobukwes’ following the Sharpeville Massacre (see Diseko, 1992; Mafeje, 1978). It is in the 1970s when BC is articulated by the likes of Steve Biko as a language (see Mngxitama et al., 2008), and it is then most actively engaged as a student movement in the 1970s and 1980s (see e.g. Moloi, 2011). It makes sense that the university would be the scene for BC to be articulated. This period coincides with the extension of primary, secondary and higher education to Black people in South Africa, within the framework articulated by the Bantu Education Act (see Heffernan, 2017).

Defined as an African existential philosophy by Mobogo P. More, ‘BC is a tradition that deals with issues of the emergence of black self-hood, black suffering, embodied agency, freedom, bad faith, racism, and liberation; in short, it deals with being-black-in-the-world’ (2008, p. 47). Recalling her experience of being a student in the 1980s, Xaba talks about attending a meeting of the South African Student Organisation (SASO), during which students were debating the terms of BC:

After that debate, I checked my dictionary for the word ‘self-determination’ because I knew the meanings of consciousness, pride, confidence and beauty, but not ‘determination’. Something shifted inside me and it is very difficult to describe that shift. Intellectually, it was only then that I understood racism as a system. I awakened to this powerful realisation in a deeply emotional way. (Xaba, 2016, p. 120)

The term ‘self-determination’ speaks to a range of intellectual and political debates that encircled the emergence and articulation of BC. In one instance, it refers to the context of broader anticolonial struggles, which in turn meant that what students debate was about South Africa but also about other genealogies and geographies of Black resistance and Black struggle. In another view, self-determination speaks to BC as phenomenological; phenomenology here understood to refer to the examination of the ‘formation of meaning as constituted by consciousness where the latter is relationally understood as always directed to a manifestation of something’ (Gordon, 2008, p. 83, emphasis original).

For example, the literary magazine Staffrider established in 1978 was a platform for emergent literary and cultural forms that was aligned to BC. This alignment meant that the magazine was openly didactic, but as Gqola (2001a) notes, the forms of writing that appear demonstrate the blurry lines between the audience and the writer, who were often in a dialogue. Staffrider also gives us a lens into the contestations within BC as a movement, as Gqola (2001a) points out, ‘since BC art is supposed to reflect society and influence action, the paucity of female agency betrays the position of women in BC-influenced literature, whereas activism is represented repeatedly as a male trait to emulate, it is almost exclusively the domain of the male staffrider’ (p. 38). Gqola (2001b) articulates the position ‘Blackwomen’ as an important political position in histories of BC.

Recent student movements can be described as yet another site or scene of intensity for the articulation of BC through student protest and politics. #feesmustfall produced a range of contestations related to what its ideological orientation would be. Shaped, or framed as about fees and access, the key lens would be that of class. But as Sello Mashibini (2017) notes, race and class are quite inextricably entwined in South Africa: ‘to name the protest as Black struggle was linked to class politics; the argument was that Black students were the most marginalised economically’ (p. 43). Mashibini emphasizes the conditions of exclusion, but the details of the contestations he describes speak also to the various locations of being Black at the university that inflect the shape and terms of this Black Struggle. In naming Biko and BC as an ideological framework, his gesture also speaks to the use of space, reading and tactics taken by students during their protest.

Against the Day: A memorandum attached, for your attention

In a fairly recent special section of the South Atlantic Quarterly edited by Kelly Gillespie and Leigh-Ann Naidoo titled ‘Against the Day’ (2019), Gillespie and Naidoo position their intervention as a looking back on the case/event of 2015 and 2016, while positioning the case of university struggles in South Africa as a temporal one. Describing a ‘Cold Future’, they offer a genealogy of the current political elite as inheriting a Cold War conceptualization of revolutionary time, with the result of a ‘two-stage theory’ (2019, p. 232) which involves a view of apartheid in South Africa as a special type of colonialism that required ‘an anticolonial victory against the white supremacist state before any struggle against capitalism could be successful’ (Gillespie & Naidoo, 2019, p. 233). As Gillespie and Naidoo offer, in the architecture of this staged notion of revolutionary time, ‘assimilation has become an end in itself. It is understood as not an unfolding of social contradiction explicitly mobilized toward a more just future but as a pervasive status quo, a stuckness. The future’s gone cold’ (2019, p. 233). I would like to offer an example of a case/events of a future gone cold at Wits, leading up to and following the protests in 2015.

This case tracks the Transformation Memorandum 2014 emailed to then Professor in the Department of Politics at Wits on 5 December that year by a group of postgraduate students. The document in its introductory notes highlights the importance of transformation, in principle echoing Gillespie and Naidoo’s (2019) claim of a future gone cold. The Memorandum critiques the pace of transformation and the depth of transformation in the department, speaking specifically to the lack of inclusion of Black thought and African scholarship in the curriculum. From the perspective of experience, the document offers suggestions on new courses and syllabi, an account of what the department stands to gain from a denser pursuit of transformation, and the concluding section of the Memorandum offers testimonials from individual students:

Everywhere I looked, thought was led by white students and white lecturers. How was this possible, twenty years after democracy, especially at an institution that claimed to be so dedicated to transformation it did not even need race quotas for admission anymore? . . . This led me to explore the liberal tradition that the university so proudly celebrates. While part of the ‘open’ universities during the 1950s, and while boasting a history of transformation, Wits does not acknowledge it was a beneficiary of the apartheid era and is very much a Western institution that fails to locate itself as a university in an African country with the appropriate syllabus. (Marisa Lourenço, Transformation Memorandum 2014, p. 20)

One time, at another university, we studied political philosophy, from Weber to Marx, to Mandela. We had a test on Mandela’s articulation of positive and negative freedom in his book Long Walk to Freedom; as well as his explanation for Mkhonto we Sizwe’s reasoning for armed struggle and the specific use of sabotage over other forms of armed struggle. As I was waiting outside the class for the test to begin, a classmate turned to me and said the test should be easy because, ‘well he’s not really a political philosopher, is he?’ referring to Mandela. (Thoko Chilenga, Transformation Memorandum 2014, p. 21)

My mother was a domestic worker. I lived with her in the white residential area that she worked. In my eyes white people were always superior and I could never relate to them in any other way but as superior. I did not realize it but unconsciously because of their position in that sense I have always just accepted what the lecturer was saying without questioning it and this restricts my ability to engage in class. (Nduvho Ramulongo, Transformation Memorandum 2014, p. 24)

By April 2015, this group of students had organized themselves under the name #TransformWits, with a Twitter, Instagram and Facebook page, and the curriculum was now fairly established as the site of what Moshibudi Motimele (2019) refers to as an ‘epistemic warfare’. A ‘Manifesto for the #TransformWits Movement’ as a working document was first published by the group of about 15 students with a more emboldened tone of demand. This Manifesto’s tone shifts from that of the Memorandum, which was more sentimental: for example the students write that ‘a fundamental part of our project is the rejection of the vision for the university set by management – namely that of “cosmopolitanism”. We want a university that speaks to and embraces us all in our various identities as Afrikans. We want a university that is unequivocally Afrocentric when articulating a vision for itself’ (#TransformWits, 2015). The Manifesto then specifically describes itself as ‘an intersectional movement that centres the struggles of Black South Africans. We subscribe to a definition of Black as articulated by Bantu Biko’, making the clear statement that this would be a non-partisan movement (in this way distancing themselves from the concessions of a two-stage anticolonial struggle and that structure of national time). Finally, before naming the six pillars of their movement, these students explicitly describe their actions concerning the curriculum as protest, and that this protest will involve forms of protest that refuse to be shaped by the manners of respectability.

The Manifesto becomes an important case of a rupture, articulated in what Motimele describes as the difference between the curricula and the academic program, whereas: ‘the academic program is represented by the university schedule of start and end dates for classes, examinations, and graduations, the curriculum is concerned with the environment, content, and nature of teaching and being taught’ (2019, p. 211). As one of the authors of the #TransformWits Manifesto, Motimele views this critique of the university as one that interrupted neoliberal time and asserted ontological warfare. As she describes it, ‘when black students and workers, as part of their activism articulate an imagined university premised on the dignity, visibility, and legibility of black subjectivity; a university that judges its prestige by the extent that it is responsive to local socio-political needs; a university that understands critical consciousness to be the calling into question its own foundations; a university that actively aims to be out of time with dominant antiblack hegemonic norms, a university not overdetermined by bureaucratic relationalities of KPISs (key performance indicators(, promotion, throughput, and collegiality’ (Motimele, 2019, p. 210).

The culture Motimele (2019) reads in the demands made during the protests follows the account Bhekizizwe Peterson offers regarding student protests in South Africa in the 1980s, in consideration of the present, through the lens of culture, writing that:

Culture [is] considered in relation to the needs and experiences of young people as well as their participation in social resistance and transformation. It is important, therefore, to spell out the two senses in which the term culture [is] used in this discussion. These are ‘culture’ as a way of life, and ‘culture’ as a range of creative and intellectual practices that are broadly called ‘the arts’. (2016, p. 16)

Peterson notes the difference between these two senses, but wants to think about the ways that they are related, contaminated by each other, and co-productive. In this sense, the struggle for culture becomes something quite close to what Frantz Fanon describes as national culture, ‘a national culture is not a folklore, not an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say actions which are less and less attached to the ever-present reality of the people. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence‘ (1968, p. 233).

Peterson (2016) offers that one of the best examples of the interconnectedness and mutual influence of the two senses of culture he proposes is the toyi-toyi. To toyi-toyi is to sing in protest. As Peterson continues, ‘it is performative in nature. It uses onomatopoetic chanting, call and response, and singing. The singing and chanting is accompanied by rhythmic clapping of hands or the high-rise stepping of feet. The body is also used as a canvas. It is adorned with clothing that is inscribed with slogans and it carries symbolic props such as replicas of weapons, coffins and other metaphoric objects’ (2016, p. 18; see Mokwena, 2016 and Radebe, 2017, on the aesthetics and performance of protest).

Vuyani Pambo (2015, p. 6) describes toyi-toyi in a similar way as umzabalazo: ‘it is tempting to totalize the idea of struggle, protest or umzabalazo as being synonymous with the black lived experience or at the least as its political culture’. Umzabalazo in his use refers to the sloganeering of political parties in the present, as well as to the practice of toyi-toyi as it has and continues to appear in political struggles. Pambo’s research essay emphasizes the mimetic citations of students in protest as resting at the heart of this tension in defining culture. In this sense, the repetition of a struggle song can appear at the moment of an incident of protest, where when it appears it both performs and articulates a demand, and becomes the moment or scene where one becomes conscious of their position/opposition. The same song can be repeated as a political slogan, sung with the intention of supporting a political party and national bourgeoisie, without the affect of resistance or oppositional consciousness.

This notion of culture comes into conflict with the ‘Cold Future’ in Gillespie and Naidoo’s (2019) account, in the main because it relies on a political vocabulary that still rests on a universalizing temporal frame of singular and linear time and the aspiration for order sutured to intellectual traditions in western thought. This illusion of order is described by Cedric J. Robinson (1980, p. 4), writing ‘yet the problem of the political was and is not merely a programmatic one. It is also analytical-conceptual, metaphysical and epistemological’, further adding that ‘the political has become a paradigm’ within these enduring traditions.

Conclusion

#TransformWits set about its protest with six pillars: Afrikanisation of University Symbolism and Institutional Memory; Radical Revision and Afrikanisation of all University Curricula; Fast-tracking Afrikanisation of Academic Staff Contingency; An End to Worker Discrimination; An End to Financial Exclusion of Students; and Revision of the Departmental Academic Structures that Impede the Throughput of Black Students. These pillars would shape the discussions during #feesmustfall, and also shape the approach that students took in confronting their own disciplines. For example, postgraduate students in the School of Social Sciences produced a discussion paper concerning how tutors are hired, highlighting the forms of discrimination students were experiencing. Students in the Department of Sociology would follow up on this document with a Letter to postgraduate students (from a group using the name Concerned Postgraduate Representatives) updating them on the various demands they continued to make in the department and the need to continue to caucus in September 2017, now at a time where the rupture of 2015 had since passed. The students indicate who their allies are in confronting racism and sexism in the department, but the tone of the letter reveals the ongoingness of a cold future, the students noting their ‘disappointment’ at the postponement/cancellation of further forums for them to engage with staff about institutional change. Among their continued demands, the first is to get more black women academics teaching. This postponement remains structured to the university’s commitment to its time and shapes the ways that Blackness structures ongoing struggles between being and knowing. These are discussions that remain stuck, as staff and students negotiate the relationship between the curricula (in and out of the classroom) and the enforced academic program, as Motimele (2019) describes it.

Since my appointment to the Department of African Literature at Wits in 2015, by coincidence I have taught the introduction and first text in a third-year course called ‘Literatures of the Black Diaspora’. The course has been on offer in the department for several decades and speaks more generally to the Black and African diasporic thinking and affinities that shape the set of questions that have come out of the department since it was created in 1983 (see Collis-Buthelezi, 2016, 2017). The course, like many of our other courses, is rooted in histories of struggles to include Black Studies into universities. But as I understand the question of curricula, the challenge remains for us to be immersed in the events of the postponements of the present. It is my experience of this and other courses we teach that gives me a different orientation to the Cold War/Cold Future orientation to national time articulated in Gillespie and Naidoo (2019), even if the present/future is cold.

In 2015, the first time that I was teaching and coordinating this class I was struck by the need for a conceptual opening that was rooted in the body and experience. I was preparing my notes and I was thinking of ways that I could communicate what it means to answer the question ‘is there a unique Black experience?’, which I had been asked by one of my teachers many years before. I called one of my graduate students and asked if he was already on campus. He was not, so I asked him to bring me a small bottle of liquor. He brought a half bottle of wine he had left over at home. When class started, I talked briefly about the concept of diaspora, then I noted that I also wanted them to think or know about it from other sources or ways of knowing. So, I took a sip from the wine, poured some to the ground and did something that I know as to ‘patla’,: to pour libations for the ancestors onto the ground. I passed the bottle around and people had the option to sip or not.

My intentions happened at the last minute. I wanted to include a ritual that offered an embodied form of knowing that disrupted the normal practice of the classroom and brought our bodies and our memories into the space. To pour libation is something that makes me take time to defamiliarize the inherent secularity of the university space, by bringing in the erotic and the Sacred. To pour libation for me is to remember, to love and to mourn, to connect to the loss of something that cannot always be named. Sometimes the only memory we have of a ritual like this is from a music video we watched as teenagers. For others, it is a practice that you only know to do with your grandmother. It could have been a different gesture. Perhaps I could play a tune, with a dance, like what Bibi Bakare-Yusuf (2000) describes when she talks about learning to dance the butterfly – for her it provokes a set of important questions about memory and the body. She writes:

. . . knowledge is not first of all a mental event of cognition but the effect of a pre-existing set of cultural parameters into which the body is inserted and with which it is in dialogue. Knowledge is first of all of the body, or rather the body in relational context. The body acquires knowledge of itself through mimetic engagement with its culture. Such mimetic acts unfold a perpetual reworking and renewal of pre-existing patternings. Out of the perpetual renewal, the body composes its own motile narrative which allows it to interact or dialogue with the world as an agent in and out of history. In the first instance then, we do not know the body, rather, the body is what allows us to know. (Bakare Yusuf, 2000, pp. 255–256)

Guided by a view that thinks about patternings and ritual as also what it means to know, the way that I guide students into our first text, Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is to think about forms of knowing that do not easily separate the object of knowledge from the subject of knowledge. There are important ways to introduce a narrative like this. It was written in a context of legal racial slavery in the United States, and with the purpose of fulfilling the work of the abolition of it. To this end, we talk about authority; noting that narratives open with several introductions that served to ‘prove’ the authority of the slave to speak at all, no less to give a proper account of their life that could convince another of their capacity as a human being. Next, we talk about the conventions and forms that guide the text, such as the sentimental novel (see Baldwin, 1949); or the way that slave narratives are written through the form of the King James Bible. I complicate these readings by thinking about the ways that there might be authoritative readings of the narrative and its form, within the liberal discourse of freedom, but that we need to also think about the ways that other political claims and commitments are embedded as tricks (see Gates, 1988) within that language, that produce what Lowe (2015) offers up as ‘failure’. In this sense, our reading practices follow what Bakare-Yusuf (2000) describes as patterning, which is a common practice within the black intellectual tradition; it is reminiscent of what Peterson (2016) refers to as culture; as what Zora Neale Hurston (1942/1992) describes as research; as the way that Barbara Christian (1987) writes about theory as something rooted in everyday practices.

In 2016, I asked students to write an essay that considers Jacobs’ (1861/2000) narrative, and the question of freedom. Then, an undergraduate student Ayabulela Mhlahlo’s essay offers that:

The concept of freedom has always been laden with, if not reducible to, the desire for transcendence, in both its critical and literary discussions. However, in the context of the black(ened) slave (or the slave as nothing but the black or the slave subsumed into blackness) whose life and cosmology is modelled by cyclic paradigms, transcendence becomes a desire either; repressed under that paradigm as itself a recursive desire or a desire which can only be realized through a recursive phenomenology, or simply transcendence is a concept without meaning, that is, an empty signifier. I want to argue the latter. I am looking to argue that freedom by way of transcendence or freedom qua transcendence is a concept which neither has any meaning – even though ‘freedom’ is constantly mentioned in historical, political and literary accounts of the black, as desirable in itself or as necessary for a desired subject construction – in the historical construction of the black and the black’s own cosmological systems which are riddled with and structured by cyclic paradigms. What is it to live life in a cyclic pattern? What kind of teleological concepts are laden within that pattern? What does a cosmology so filled with cyclic invocations mean for any concepts of dialectical relations between the master and the slave, the slave and his/ her slavehood, and the (post-)slave and his/her subjecthood (a metamorphic and historical dialectic)? (2016, p. 1)

Mhlahlo’s critical insights offer me a useful way to think about the initial discussion about how our students are reading. Incidents provokes questions that disrupt the single view of a connection between Blackness and no time; and also disrupts a single view of the connection between reading the story of Jacobs, and the reader, the black woman student in South Africa as one that can only be related from a perspective of distance. The relationship here is framed, not as an empirical mirror, but is instead connected through the relationship between freedom and knowing. In that question, there is culture, or what Moten refers to as ‘black social life’ (2008, p. 180), which is animated in Mhlahlo’s attention to cosmologies. In Moten, this is animated in Black intellectual traditions and other sites or scenes, such as the barbershop, and he continues: ‘What is the explanation between explanation and resistance? Who bears the responsibility of discovering an ontology of, or of discovering for ontology, the ensemble of political, aesthetic, and philosophical derangements that comprise the being that is neither for itself nor for the other? What form of social life makes such discovery possible as well as necessary?’ (Moten, 2008, pp. 178–179).

Moten (2013) describes the paraontological distinction between blackness and blacks as allowing:

. . . us [to] no longer to be enthralled by the notion that blackness is a property that belongs to blacks (thereby placing certain formulations regarding non/relationality and non/communicability on a different footing and under a certain pressure) but also because ultimately it allows us to detach blackness from the question of (the meaning of) being. The infinitesimal difference between pessimism and optimism lies not in the belief or disbelief in descriptions of power relations or emancipatory projects; the difference is given in the space between an assertion of the relative nothingness of blackness and black people in the face, literally, of substantive (antiblack) subjectivity and an inhabitation of appositionality, its internal social relations, which remain unstructured by the protocols of subjectivity. (p. 748)

Unlike the ‘Cold Future’ described in Gillespie and Naidoo (2019), in Mhlahlo’s essay I see productive citations and practices that respond to these questions; in offering up repetition and circularity as temporalities that touch what is linear and progress, as well as that which is backwards or a relation to no time. The argument Mhlahlo poses speaks to forms and narratives that rely on ‘the rhythmic-gestural patternings’ that Bakare-Yusuf describes as the ‘work of love and desire, or improvisation, or orality, or survival, or journeys, or collective anonymous self-preservation, and of a pleasure that knows its pain’ (2000, p. 155). The temporality of this dance of remembrance is a gesture that Bakare Yusuf reads through James A. Snead’s (1981) ‘cut’: a way to think about repetition and difference, where repetition, or what is circular is not simply understood as statis or non-progressive time. For Snead, repetition allows for a culture to respond to internal and external changes, repetition refers to ways of grasping memory, and citing practices across time. In Mhlahlo’s reading, where freedom is to be anticipated, as it is in the case of the slave narrative, it is a temporal gesture layered with contradiction and discontinuity. It is this kind of freedom that I see echoed in students and their attempts to imagine a new curriculum.