Making #BlackLivesMatter

Prologue

I, too, am the afterlife of slavery

—Saidiya Hartman (2007)

The density of his cry resounded far into the highlands of the Morne Rouge: “Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu! Canga, bafio té! Canga, mouné de lé! Canga, do ki la Canga, do ki la! Canga, li”—“We swear to destroy the whites and all they possess! Let us die rather than fail to keep this vow” (James, 1989, p. 18). Adamantine and immense as the surrounding mountainscape, Dutty Boukman towered over the clandestine gathering of Saint-Domingue’s slave elite to deliver the prophesy of revolution soon to come.

On this night in August of 1791, Boukman vowed to take vengeance against those “who thirsts for our tears;” a vow consecrated by the blood of a sacrificial black pig. One by one, each insurgent made the same blood-oath, becoming a herald of Boukman’s wanton call to arms, chanting in dissonant unison, “Couté la liberté li pale nan coeur nous tous.” With this axiom—“Listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us”—the insurgent force of nearly two thousand split into factions to begin the immediate and systematically destruction-by-fire of Le Cap, decimating of every plantation in a one-mile radius of the former capital of the French colony.

—Seeds of the Revolution in Haiti, August 22, 1791 (Fick, 1990; James, 1989)

Lesley McSpadden, the mother of slain teenager Michael Brown, stood atop of a wave of protestors gathered in Ferguson; she struggled to put the inconceivable into words—“I been here my whole life, I ain’t never had to go through nothing like this!” As she collapsed into a fit of tears, her thick, inconsolable grief washed over the crowd. Protestors began to shout, “We want justice!”/“Fuck the police!”/“That’s somebody’s son—that was somebody’s child. Y’all murdered her fucking son!” Her tears soaked her husband’s shirt, the back of which read, “I am Mike Brown.” Baptized by the death of his step-son, Louis Head turned toward the congregation of mourners and urged his compatriots to “burn this motherfucker down!” In a rhythmic tide of rage and loss, nearly ten times he announced his decree:

“Burn this bitch down!”

“Burn this bitch down!”

“Burn this bitch down!”

“Burn this bitch down!”

“Burn this bitch down!”

“Burn this bitch down!”

“Burn this bitch down!”

“Burn this bitch down!”

“Burn this bitch down!”

“Burn this bitch down . . .”

—Narrative of the Ferguson Protests, November 24, 2014

Two narratives born of one voice: though distanced by geography and time, separated by racial logics of decolonization and emancipation, the wails heard throughout the Morne Rouge mountainside echo in the streets of Ferguson. This conjoined story, centuries old, yet saturated with post-modern renewal, narrates the fable of blackness, a story of cyclical experiences of the deeply felt, yet nearly intangible absence at core of black life; experiences re/membered through the body. ¹ As we witness Michael Brown’s flesh laying in a pool of his own making for four and a half hours, or bear to hear Eric Garner’s last, suffocating cry eleven times repeated, we are reminded of memory’s cruelty; that the affective ecologies of death erected during the Transatlantic Slave Trade continue to have authority over ontological imaginings of blackness. Buried as deep in the body’s biological disposition as it is in the psychoanalytic self, the afterlife of slavery continues to return the body to an antiquated space of violence and negated humanity.

We are, as Hartman conceives, the Transatlantic Slave Trade’s afterlife. The story of blackness is one of subjectivities birthed in the liminal depths between life and death; a story buried in the flesh of bodies consumed by the aftermath of that conception; a ghost story narrated by muted voices. Brown and Garner are long gone, but, as evidenced by the multitude of protests in the wake of their untimely absence, the occult force of their existence pulls us toward the quasi-evacuated space of their death. From this liminality—the River Styx of our nation’s past, which stretches the miles and centuries between Dutty Boukman and Louis Head—specters of black life call out inviting, compelling, a response. Infused with their enunciative force—sometimes articulated through unreasoned indignation, a bile sourness that cuts through every utterance, or a fall into despondency so deep that it has no floor; but sometimes through the imaginative courage and performative hope inspired by the plunge—this is my riposte.

I work toward a hauntology of blackness by investing in the metaphysics of presence and absence to articulate how slavery’s ecologies of death, performatively manifesting through multiple bodies, are condensed within a single, seemingly autonomous signifier: blackness. Underpinning this investigation with critical studies in performance, and its theoretical appetite for articulating the cyclical performativities that fashion the relationship between a body and the world, I question the performative consequences of the death-driven relationship with blackness. Engaging the performative body as written text and as flesh, I take seriously the moniker #BlackLivesMatter, and the movement it encompasses, to address the specters of black life; the conjured spooks that haunt our present, yet simultaneously entrench our future with the embryonic possibilities inherent in their ghostly charisma.

Marching in Their Absence: Protest in/as Performance and Re/memory

“Have You No Shame?” catechized New York’s Daily News on Christmas Eve 2014, after activists refused to heed mayor Bill de Blasio’s plea to suspend demonstrations in honor of officers murdered four days prior. The night of December 23 witnessed a sea of nearly 700 protestors washing over New York City’s Madison Ave. making their way toward Times Square. The protesters joined a nationwide choir galvanized by St. Louis County officer Darren Wilson’s August 9 shooting of Michael Brown; a movement further crystallized by two grand jury decisions, one in Missouri, another in New York, to indict neither Wilson, nor Staten Island officer Daniel Pantaleo responsible for the July 17 chokehold death of Eric Garner. In juxtaposition to the protestors stood New York’s police force wearing black bands over their badges to memorialize their fallen brothers-in-arms, vengefully murdered by Ismaaiyl Brinsley to honor Garner’s homicide. “There’s a lot of pain right now we have to work our way through,” de Blasio observed in response to the uptick in protests, “We have to keep working to bring police and community together. We have to put the division of the past behind us . . .” (Durkin, Ng, & Hutchins, 2014).

As protests in New York adjourned, tensions in Missouri were again ignited—this time in Berkeley, two miles west of Ferguson—when Antonio Martin was gunned down by an unnamed police officer around 11:15 p.m. Central Standard Time. Approximately 300 impromptu protestors gathered outside the Mobil gas station where the shooting took place. Just as in the neighboring city, eyewitness testimony of the victim’s “hands-up surrender” contradicted the officer’s initial report claiming Martin was armed. “Fearing for his life,” spokesperson Sgt. Brain Schellman reported, “the Berkeley officer fired [three] shots, striking the subject, fatally wounding him” (Bever, 2014). The ratcheting weight of yet another death erupted into a night of impassioned unrest, as demonstrators fueled by loss and anger began launching epithets, bricks, and exploding fireworks at the officers called to the scene. No tear gas was used to disperse this crowd, however, as Ferguson’s police force deployed a month prior. Berkeley’s black mayor Theodore Hoskins emphasized this fact to distance the incident from the over-militarized escalations in Ferguson. Challenging the mayor, Jason Keith Coleman evoked the memory of Brown and Garner, as well as Kajieme Powell, killed in St. Louis on August 19th after approaching an officer with a knife, and Vonderrit Myers, killed on October 8th in St. Louis after firing at an off-duty officer. Coleman urged the mayor to “Call it what it is—a police officer has killed another black man . . .” (Suhr, 2014). Citing the same matrix of police-involved killings, Hoskins rebutted, “Everybody don’t die the same. Some people die because they initiated it. And at this point, our review indicates that the police did not initiate this . . .” (Suhr, 2014).

Hoskins’ point is apt, “everyone don’t die the same”: Kajieme Powell (1989-2014), Vonderrit Myers (1996-2014), Antonio Martin (1996-2014), and Michael Brown (1996-2014) were allegedly the instigators; Eric Garner (1970-2014) was asphyxiated; Yvette Smith (1967-2014) was shot by Texas police after answering their knocks at her door; Ismaaiyl Brinsley (1986-2014) committed suicide, echoing Dutty Boukman’s call in his Twitter feed: “I Rather Die a Gangster Then Go To Sleep A Coward” (Celona, 2014). Pearlie Golden (1921-2014) was shot in her front yard by Texas officers after an altercation with her nephew; Tamir Rice (2002-2014) was shot by Cleveland police while playing with a toy gun in a city park; Akai Gurley (1986-2014) was accidently shot by a Brooklyn officer fearful of walking down a darkened stairwell; Dontre Hamilton (1983-2014) was shot 14 times by a Milwaukee officer ultimately ruled to be acting in self-defense; Trayvon Martin (1995-2012) was shot by a self-appointed neighborhood watch coordinator; a month later, unarmed Rekia Boyd (1990-2012) was shot by police officers in a Chicago park; Milton Hall (1963-2012), a mentally disabled panhandler, was shot by six officers a total of 46 times in Michigan; Chavis Carter (1991-2012) suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the head while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser in Arkansas; Aiyana Stanley-Jones (2002-2010) was shot during a police raid in Detroit while sleeping on her grandmother’s couch; Oscar Grant III (1986-2009) was shot in the back by Oakland police early New Year’s morning; and Ohio police shot and killed Tarika Wilson (1982-2008), and wounded her 14-month-old child during a police raid to arrest Wilson’s boyfriend.

The fact that everyone don’t die the same, don’t change the structures of violence erected from the past to organize the racial logics of the present. It don’t change the overwhelming forces of absence that layers affects of nonexistence upon the body. It don’t change the internecine algorithms that govern the racial memory of blackness:

a memory of the violence inflicted on the racially marked body, that is also a bodily memory, a memory that takes on a bodily form precisely because it exceeds both the individual’s and the community’s capacity for verbalization and mourning (Durrant, 2004, p.80).

The unexhausted catalogue of police-involved killings exemplifies a continuation of mourned inexpression, which results in the incessant repetition of the atrocities of the Transatlantic Slave Trade through political and social (which always implies visual and performative) processes of projecting the density of that memory onto black bodies. The death of Brown and Garner irrupt from the performative act of re/membering blackness; also witnessed through the spike in racial profiling that prompted the Obama administration to forward a revised set of guidelines, in the prison industrial complex’s overwhelming racial imbalance, in the grotesque acts of quarantine and policing, gentrification and the political redistricting of black communities put on performative display in cities such as Detroit and Atlanta. Coleman’s impulse to “call it what it is” is not simply a response to individuated circumstances, rather he is acknowledging the Transatlantic afterlife of blackness; the invisible, yet palpable forces that use the body as a phenomenal vessel to conjure Transatlantic ecologies of absence and death.

The felt materialization of these affective ecologies catalyzed the wave of activism that followed the Brown and Garner cases. Observed in Time magazine, Alex Altman appropriately remarks, “Protest is a performance that can make the unseen visible” (Altman, 2014). Alluding to the process of surrogation outlined by Joseph Roach, Miller testifies to the technique of performative protests to make visible affects of nonexistence. Protests place the invisible upon the body, continually encoding and decoding the vacated space of Brown and Garner’s death through a range of performative practices. The protestors who overtook interstate-95 in Miami, Florida on December 7, 2014, the coffin-bearing activists marching across the Brooklyn Bridge on December 4 and 5, the collaborative protest organized by one hundred churches in Chicagoland, and the thousands in California, South and North Carolina, Louisiana, London, Tokyo . . . who staged protests, blocked roadways and blacked-out traffic, place their bodies in performative opposition to the rule of law to make visible the absences constructed by dense affects of nonexistence that devalue black life to the point of death.

These protests align with Roach’s explanation of how the

. . . histories of private life, histories of death, or histories of memory itself—attend especially to those performative practices that maintain (and invent) human continuities, leav[e] their traces in diversified media, including the living bodies of the successive generations that sustain different social and cultural identities (Roach, 1996, p.11).

Working at the intersection of performance, subjectivity, and memory, the bodies of the protestors attempt to fill the absence of Brown and Garner with newly invented human continuities that stand in opposition to forces of nonexistence. Their bodies become the surface upon which black life is made to matter.

These new continuities exceed the limits of “traditional” protest. During pre-game introductions at the November 30 contest between the St. Louis Rams and the Oakland Raiders, five Rams players: Tavon Austin, Stedman Bailey, Chris Givens, Kenny Britt, and Jared Cook, took the field hands above their heads. Evoking the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” pose performed throughout the nation by activists, students, and elected officials on the floor of Congress, the players used the visual ideogram of the injustice witnessed in Ferguson to magnify the continued presence of Brown and Garner’s absence. Further reflecting the influence of absence over his body, wide-receiver Kenny Britt etched Mike Brown’s name onto the tape of his right wrist, with his opposite wrist reading: “My Kids Matter” (Salter & Suhr, 2014). Despite demands to discipline the involved players, athletes across major sporting leagues followed the memorial with their own public performance of grieved remonstration. On December 6, 2104, Chicago Bulls’ Derrick Rose donned a pre-game warm-up T-shirt that simply read, “I Can’t Breathe.” The straightforwardness of the performative act, similar to Louis Head’s “I Am Mike Brown” tee, carries an illocutionary force that rips and restitches the social fabric of the contemporary moment by placing the living body in the space of Brown and Garner’s absence. Through a phenomenological transmutation, the spectral force of Brown and Garner’s (non)existence is (almost) imperceptibly cemented into those continuing to live within the conscious or unconscious (re)memory of the (nearly) vacuous constitution of black life.

The Transatlantic ecologies of nonexistence move through the performative currents of surrogation, taking possession of the protestors’ bodies, as well as those unaware of its magnetic pull. Gary Fishell garishly illustrated the unconscious surrogative consumption of absence at a charity dinner for Los Angeles Police Department officer Joe Myers. A recording released on December 23, 2014, caught Fishell’s performance of the following self-authored song sung to the tune of Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” for a gathering of 50 to 60 active and former law enforcement officials in Glendale, California:

“Michael Brown learned a lesson about a messin’

With a badass policeman

Fishell is caught in the gravitational pull of absence. His lyrics respond to the call of the specters of black life—dead, dead Michael Brown, who’s whole life is not gone, but screams from the chasm between life and death, demanding response regardless of an ability to do so. Fishell’s riff exposes the dangers of performative surrogation, revealing how conscious and unconscious surrogative transmission, uniquely executed within the Transatlantic afterlife, carries not only affects of absence but also equally powerful forces that block abilities to mourn and verbalize the act.

As discussed earlier, the black body is marked by a violence that passes itself as a bodily memory “precisely,” in the words of Durrant, “because it exceeds both the individual’s and the community’s capacity for verbalization and mourning.” As a result, sedimented in living bodies are those same inabilities to mourn and/or verbalize the violence suffered. Fishell’s perverted insistence of Michal Brown’s death demonstrates an acute inability to articulate the conditions of that loss, reproducing the very structures that resulted in Brown’s death. The protests throughout the nation are framed not by an inability to verbalize the conditions of loss, but the inability to mourn the loss itself. Explicit in these acts of protest are attempts to place the living body within the matrix of Brown and/or Garner’s tangible nonexistence, an expression that prematurely mourns a loss that is felt on the register of the body, though not exercised upon it. Richard Wright describes this consequence of surrogation in his first short story:

I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings . . . The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness (Wright, 1944, p. 74).

This felt sensation of prolonged mourning, the need to acknowledge an experience of loss without an ability to assuage the re/memory of violence, falls in line with Freud’s articulation of melancholia as the mourning of a loss that cannot be located. ² The performative re/memory of blackness activates affects of mourned and inexpressive absence, precisely because the localized site upon which violence was enacted cannot be found, or worse, is already gone. In this way, absence is unoccupiable and unfillable; the more it is lived on the body, the larger absence becomes. Brown and Garner deepen the linage of specters moving through multiple bodies and times, constructing blackness through a “palpable structure of feeling, a shared sense that violence and captivity are the grammar and ghosts of our every gesture” (Wilderson, 2009). The self-referential confluence of melancholia and impeded articulation often reifies the structures of violence from which they emerged, as was witnessed in November and December of 2014.

Mo(u)rning/Riots: Making Black Life Matter, a Hauntology

In the mo(u)rning of November 25, following Darren Wilson’s “No Indictment” ruling, CNN cameras panned over the streets of Ferguson. Framed by images of smoldering buildings and charred police cruisers, a caption read, “Violence without a conscious.” In the following days, these sentiments were elaborated: While former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani acknowledged the riots by “reminding” the nation that 93% of blacks are murdered by other blacks, exceedingly conservative rock icon and political commentator Ted Nugent offered “Lessons of Ferguson” via Facebook. He urged the nation’s Black population not to “. . . let your kids grow-up to be thugs who think they can steal, assault & attack cops as a way of life & badge of black (dis)honor . . .” (Agee, 2014). Continuing to question the integrity of the rioters, former NBA great Charles Barkley remarked, “Those [expletives] who are looting, those aren’t real black people. Those are scumbags . . .” (Shorr-Parks, 2014). The violence seen in Ferguson is birthed from a deep conscious of negation, performed to interrupt algorithms of nonexistence. These denunciations highlight an inability to verbalize the palpable memory of absence, using the rioters as scapegoats upon which that speechlessness is projected. It is this psychoanalytic projection that prompted Johnetta Elzie, a lead organizer in Ferguson, to ask, “You’re Mad Over a Building? We’re Mad Over a Body” (Altman, 2014). Her astute question and answer is a reminder that the stakes of rioting, in equal measure to peaceful protest, is not property, but efforts to re-invent human continuity in the wake of absence. In the weeks following the initial demonstrations, however, sight of the political stakes voiced by Elzie would be obscured by the macabre nature of mourning.

On December 20 at 2:47 p.m. outside the Tompkins Housing Projects in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Ismaaiyl Brinsley opened fire on two unsuspecting New York police officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, fatally wounding both, before taking his own life in a nearby subway. The day before the shooting, Brinsley posted to Instagram a photo of the would-be murder weapon and a decree: “I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today. They Take 1 of Ours . . . Let’s Take 2 of Theirs” (Celona, 2014). Protest organizers quickly dissociated Brinsley’s actions from those of the nationwide movement, citing a history of mental instability as the source of his raged motive. I am hesitant to deem his actions misguided, and equally hesitant not to; Brinsley acknowledges the value of black life on the highest register, but does so in a way that fails to assuage the re/memory of violence. His murder-suicide as an act of protest, if anything, reveals the latent psychoanalytic consequences of the phenomenal transmission of absence, an expression of mourning-turned-vengeance traced through generation after generation.

The expansive range of peaceful and riotous protests outline the conscious and unconscious performative interplay between the facticity of black flesh and the unseen presence of specters carrying the cargo of the dead. Through that relationship, an ontology of blackness is imagined through structures of nonexistence, and performed on the body. Given this, how do we escape these Transatlantic affects when they are so easily embedded in the facticity of the body? How do we make black lives matter when the matter of black life—the flesh-and-blood of the body—is entrenched within static forces of nonexistence that, through the impossibility of recovery, re/member the melancholic inhibitions of slavery into a corporeal knowledge that is passed through generations? Engaging these questions necessitate a turn toward hauntology as a heuristic escort through the dense haunting of blackness.

“Ghosts are the signals of atrocities,” Roger Luckhurst (1996) writes,

marking sites of an untold violence, a traumatic past whose traces remain to attest to the fact of a lack of testimony. A haunting does not initiate a story; it is the sign of a blockage of story, a hurt that has been not honored by a memorializing narrative (p.38).

The deaths of Brown and Garner hold open the quasi-evacuated space of negated humanity, signaling with intentionality, the unknowable atrocities of pained inexistence within the speaking body. They stand as recent testimonies to the surrogative acts that trace inhumanity throughout the facticity of black flesh. The specters that once haunted Michael Brown’s body script Darren Wilson’s portrayal of their altercation—“ . . . he looked at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon . . .” (Calamur, 2014, emphasis added). The only vocabulary Wilson possessed to articulate the presence of Michael Brown was through a language of death, soon to be written upon Brown’s body. Now through the surrogative acts of protests, Brown and Garner have transitioned from flesh to force; they are newly minted specters of blackness, brooding figures that lie buried beneath the surface, irrupting within the word/flesh to layer it with a meaning that exceeds its own facticity. Enlivened through the performativity of the body, these specters of blackness haunt the film and fiber of post-modernity.

Frantz Fanon describes the haunting of blackness using the analogy of collapse: a giving away of the body schema to a historicized racial epidermal schema. ³ But I use the word “specter,” as derived from its Derridian roots, to articulate the forces of the Transatlantic afterlife as “the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone as someone other” (Derrida, 1994, p. 5). The specters of blackness continue to exist as they are resurrected in the racialized body of someone other, leaving a material yet unspeakable trace of death— a trace that occupies not only within the space and time between bodies, but the body itself. Speaking back to the ghosts and specters to which the foundations of blackness are sworn, I turn toward hauntology and its logics of haunting as forwarded by Jacques Derrida.

In questioning the fundamental assumptions of what it means “to Be,” Derrida rearticulates ontology through a theorization of “hantise,” translated within the text as “haunting.” Rummaging the etymological roots of the term reveals its emergence from the early 12th-century Old French term “hanter” meaning “to frequent.” Not far off is its 13th-century Middle English cousin, “haunten” meaning, “to reside or inhabit.” Derrida takes up the connation of inhabitation to offer a logic of haunting that marks a body “inhabited in its inside, that is, haunted by a foreign guest” (Derrida, 1994, p. 3). He offers haunting as a “sense of obsession, a constant fear, a fixed idea, or a nagging memory” that lies unseen within a body. As such, Derrida explains “to be” is to

live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship . . . of ghost . . . And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations (Derrida, 1994, p. xviii).

Derrida mobilizes these politics to follow the specter, tracing its absence made present through the body. In turn, he theorizes hauntology to address the affective work of the specter in the production of knowledge within an episteme, arguing that hauntology “would not be merely larger and more powerful than ontology . . . [it would] harbor within itself . . . eschatology and teleology themselves” (Derrida, 1994, p. 10). My investigation builds upon Derrida’s theorization to engage the questions inherent to black hauntology, the same questions that animate a hashtag with agential force: How is black life made to matter? How can the matter of the black body be conceived as an entity that is inhabited by death, while exceeding death’s visual, aural, and performative materializations? Said otherwise, how do you honor the hurt of a story without becoming its principle character?

Articulating blackness through hauntology begins by rejecting the incomplete rendering of blackness as an entity made ontologically stable. Not indelibly inked onto bodies or objects, blackness flows through the currents of surrogation, filling the space between body, performance, memory, and other. Surging with mournful and inexpressible affects of nonexistence, as blackness inhabits a body, it anchors that body at the interstice between haunting—an obsession/constant fear/fixed idea/nagging memory of slavery’s affects—and the performed materialization of those affects through the body. At this junction between haunting and performance, blackness couches the body within a politics of history (memory), justice (inheritance), and temporality (generations). The body’s performance of blackness, read through the lens of hauntology, is always in conversation with the politics of history and temporality to expose the material foundations of black life within a matrix of deadly ecologies that are passed from generation to generation.

These politics outline blackness’ eschatology: the study of the end of things, which positions death as the generative force of blackness, but not as its end. Where ontology simply positions blackness at the point of material death, I turn toward hauntology to ascertain the temporal techniques by which the affects of death galvanize the body in/as performance to reimagine the material conditions of blackness as it moves toward an unscripted end. Consequently, this turn toward a hauntology of blackness also implies a turn toward an ethics of imagination, which possess the ability to rewrite the visual and aural scripts of blackness as more than an entity over-determined by its historical roots. Rather, the body mobilizes the surrogative movement inherent to blackness to refashion the choreographies of its own existence. Fred Moten (2008) reflects this ethics of imagination when he suggests,

Perhaps, the dead are alive and escaping. Perhaps ontology is best understood as the imagination of this escape as a kind of social gathering . . . Seen in this light, black(ness) is, in the dispossesive richness of its colors, beautiful (p. 211-212).

The surrogative escape of the dead, however, is only the first step in accessing the imaginative and political force of justice; escape means nothing if we cannot locate the where of the escaped.

Hauntology helps to access the imaginative and political potentialities of escape by first localizing the dead within our own bodies. Through a hauntological politics of justice—the performative projection of the here-and-now of our bodies in the imagined somewhere we want our bodies to “Be”/be—we can begin to make performative counter-investments in the body that make black life matter. The political force of this ethics of imagination was witnessed in the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins of 1960, as activists literally placed their bodies in the somewhere that could only be imagined through a politics of justice. When held in juxtaposition to modern-day simulations of death enacted through “die-ins,” one is forced to ask, where is the somewhere you imagine to “Be”/be? The stout political tactic lacks the imaginative a resonance of justice. The performance falls short of an ethics that restructures the “should be/could be” of blackness. Though to a lesser degree than Brinsley’s murder-suicide or Fishell’s depraved tune, the die-ins, as well as the proliferation of “I Am Mike Brown” and “I Can’t Breathe” memorabilia elongates the affective ecologies of nonexistence and its melancholic inhibitions. The question of how to make black life matter must be a consideration of how to occupy the space of the Transatlantic afterlife, not to reiterate its affects, but to expose sites of justice yet to come; how do we imagine our bodies in the somewhere of those spaces?

A turn toward a hauntology of blackness allows for a refocusing of attention that accounts for, not only an eschatology but also a teleology of blackness as well. A teleology of blackness works to show that blackness is made to matter, that is to say, valued, not in spite of its deathly origins, but because of it; because the purpose of blackness is to reveal the false binaries that circulate around understandings of what it means to “Be.” Haunting is not the initiation of the story of blackness, but thrusts us toward an end that has yet to be written. To write that ending, we have to forward a politics that moves from attempts to make Black Life Matter, insisting upon placing value on pre-existing notions of blackness, toward attempts to make Black Life Matter, the dynamic and performative materialization of memory, inheritance, and generation into the “dispossesive richness” of the multiple possibilities of blackness. With each imagined end, a new beginning is written. To make Black Life Matter, we must listen to the choir of specters and its post-modern sonata encouraging us to reckon with the memorialized, inherited, and generational mourning of blackness: a politics that takes up the company of specters to develop a

. . . willingness to follow ghost, neither to memorialize nor to slay, but to follow where they lead . . . to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. That is its utopian grace . . . (Gordon, 1997, p.57-58).

Perhaps the truest sense of “haunting” is in its Germanic origins, “haimatja,” a verb meaning, “to lead home.” Perhaps we are haunted because we are in search of a home lost during a Transatlantic detour through slavery. And, perhaps by traversing each moment from Boukman to now, living with those spirits, we realize that the “home” we seek never existed, really; thus illuminating the realm of possibility that was always there, waiting just beneath the surface, unseen.

EPILOGUE: Byway of Conclusion, or Beginning Again

to those who use their tongues

as if they are more than flesh

as if inscribed beneath the muscle lurks

an unrefined truth, to

those who name to know.

imagine more than just

fiber and liquids.

rest the tongue and

remember hands that have traced your toes in

“foreign” soil. soles

of feet, deep in the heart of the softest whisper;

of you.

imagine

the warmth of the

the touch,

distant though it may

Be.