Johnny Appleseed and Linda Evangelista Jeremy Fragrance Sean Smell Intelligence against life Errors are hard to kill Additional life vests for intellectual children Wig in the wind an evening-length work Michael Kors for Grocery Outlet A very Forgues Christmas Jaques Da Booty Worry and also somehow be happy Mea Gulpa Linda Ifoundapizza Kate Cross 😡 Sharemyworld Sophisticated Boom Boom The reverie of the clown blowjob You or someone like you “For everything you feel there is a do so” is it for a cowboy or a librarian? Unisex Street We will play music inspired by angels, video games and sports energy i release us now from thinking Americana Most Wanted: from a whimsical windmill to a silver ice bowl resplendent with polar bear Ethereal shopping Judo starcraft Muy thai video ball Mystery chess boxing the trance of unworthiness The Switzerland of Italy hiding my Yohji - Christian Alborz Oldham Zero Dark Squirty Ideas are so corny Nancy Spongebob the human embodiment of an exclamation point My Sexiest Year Brilliant, but only for those who are not intellectually challenged Orban Outfitters Jejune Dancing to Eurobeat with girls in tight dresses at secret clubs mental celebrity Viva Sobriety Sister Mary Boom Boom Sister Mae B. Hostel Trauma Flintstone Please look at my ass The elevator in the room You can take a whore to culture but you can’t make her think Prince Tuesday fancy information 95% Balenciaga 5% Myself bedroom semioticians #notikebana The documentary called The Animaniacs Joseph Pilates Basmati様 Gaffy Potatoes Infamy Pollard The Apocalypse Tapestry Super Notorious Outrageous Whiteboy Pigpen is basically dirty Linus Linda is over represented in offline tweets NB FM She refers to her daughters as Richard and Concrete Trust no one, always be nice Chantelle Bloodsucker Operation Always Be A Brave Little Cunt Phone of Arc Little Peanut La Bouche Holly go heavily #smackyourlips T.O.P. This is our place A mad object The nothingness module Taffy baseball Peanut seminar Seminar Astro Congee fatwa Baby is car 30 years of seeing McDull Birthday economics Blue gender It’s for the she who is Reggaeton Gilbert Gottfried the fall fell My life as a medieval peasant Wunderkammer der brote Driving while stupid I’m an authority on things that don’t make sense a kind of Audrey Hepburn remix If you read the daily papers, you are not in the mood for pink and green blithely overwhelmed by human evil daily the thing about music is that it's all about how it sounds Some are, some aren’t Men who can’t love My Bloody Basket Evil love is on its way 2pac crisis actor Money laundering SpongeBob SquarePants A skincare influencer gone rogue The incredible shrinking trans person Slinky Palermo Tuesday is a construct Human First Time Guided by Invoices Portrait of a Wide-Eyed Poodle Nonsense incense Angel of Style Theresa Mona Lisa and Lola Balenciaga Sexy and unwell Padam Hussein The future Ms. Ravioli Make me a fabric that looks like poison. Al go riddim Christopher Pencil Optimistic for no reason Christmas is undeniably a whore Risse Have fun or I’m leaving now Talentfree My Child will be named after me, Invasive, or was it Prayer? I need to check my notes. I brake for basic arrangements Clothing is for the weak Ginger Dingus Madonna without child Miss Lady Salad Wait, you’re telling me a cis teen built this chapel? Squeaky Shuffle Inside the Harlequin it’s time for you to own your truth and clear the air and occupy your space and step into the light and return to you and become who you’ve always been but also evolve into the new you with absolute clarity and confidence in who you are at the end of the day because life is short and you know who you are and what you represent through all the bullshit and drama. Online Ceramics is the new Halston Specificity Jones today was full of possibility miming for muffins separatist grandma food Pippi Kahlo Ice cream apophenia Satan in disguise Coagula sexy clock tick murder on the stupid bitch express i was supposed to be born rich, but i was born way too beautiful Fondazione I Have to Think About it Klaus Bibimbap Every day is a holiday Sci-if When I am Laid in Earf Mr. David Genius Love bumps heads Fucking the room Make a Bitch Foundation Legs Misérable Darts is Electric Arugula Intuition Rebecca Teaandcrackers i’m not a finsub i’m a paypal I’m on a drug, it’s called Charlie Sheen President Uma Thurman degeneratesnoopy The Biggest Sexter’s Laboratory New World Sober gaykyle2 archieguchikeychain Monsieur Carbuncle Oriental Grande Christian D’orbit I wish SpongeBob came to the opening Welcome aboard darlingus Trine Pingle The Twenty-Third Century Man of Feeling If you see something cute, say something A Game for the People of our Age Aphlix Twain (Elmer Fudd saying, ”A Flix Train” / Aphex Twin pun?) Peace isn't lucrative. Therefore, it's never going to be a priority. tiramisu tour The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns. Futuro Fish Music is a four letter word Literally until next time Got wig? The Moncler Genius Award That Bitch and That Bitch Jr. boomerissima The memoire industrial complex the girlfriend awards KeDeWeBay a sort of reverse glamour Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you Beauty is love kissing horror Does the paywall have a gloryhole? She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s sick Turbulent Infinity Eternally kittens Zaha Hadid talking about unconditional love Ballerina dinner Land art for oligarchs Michael Kors Ultra Agnes B. and ecstasy bumpy trot waiting for nothing My hamster went viral on Tuesday Secret and Clue Princess Bronson Cinnamon syndrome the lathe of heaven Romeo Giggle Go be a lady North Korean spas Tomorrow is a girl Chamber pot maiden Terminal B for beautiful Socialite Justice warrior The future lasts forever Cappuccino Benevolence My grandmother just called Taylor Swift “sailor twig” My grandmother just called Oppenheimer “alzheimer’s”                                         in [N15,3] of The Arcades Project, a fragment that opens “On the dietetics of historical literature.” That which might at first read as a mistake, whether from the transcription or the translation, is explained by that which precedes it: “At any given time, the living see themselves in the midday of history. They are obliged to prepare a banquet for the past. The historian is the herald who invites the dead to the table.” In this image, the dead, the slain, emerge out of the continuum of empty catastrophic time to break bread and redeem history. In “The Cruelty Is the Point,” Adam Serwer, journalist and staff writer at the Atlantic, turns to the self-documentation of white communities who participated in lynchings. He notices the faces of the white crowds who are smiling or somber or interested or jubilant, but not disgusted, and who gathered in small and large groups, witness and participant to the murder and maiming of Black people. “Their names,” he writes, “have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s bother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.” But they were not just white men in those lynching photos: there were white women also, white girls, and white boys, and they were smiling, sometimes somber, and sometimes rapturously attentive. The white children are holding each other’s hands, holding their parents’ hands, staring into the camera, one hand holding their other hand, or hands on hips, standing beside the white men and women, and standing beside, in front of, and underneath the bodies of Black men, women, and young people who had been brutalized before, during, and after death. Some of those white children may still be alive and the peple who call them brother, wife, father, husband, sister, aunt, uncle, cousin, mother, grandmother, and grandfather have, with very few exceptions, chosen to remain silent in the face of the political and ethical demands of these photographs. Not lost to time. Hidden. Their names are not lost to time, they are hidden in time, hidden in the work of the US< hidden in towns, in cities, in consciousness, and in lies. They are hidden ad enjoyed, loved, adorned, and breathed in like air. Before Carr and Ball there was Lillian Smith, who wrote Killers of the Dream—and with it explored hate’s geographies, how, to quote Patricia J. Williams, “hatred is learned in the context of love.” What if the project that white people took up was to locate each of the white people who appear in the crowds of those lynchings, those who posed for photographs and those others who appear in the background? What if their project was to identify them and their families and to link their present circumstances to the before of those photographs and the after? That is, what if the work was to draw a line or to map new or continued wealth, accumulation of property and status, access to education and health to those mass murders—a Legacy of Lynching Participants database—that would join the past and the present in the same ways that the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project laid bare the “slave owners”—their strategies of accumulation of wealth and power, evasion and disavowal, that have continued into the present. The demand is uneven. We are called to different things. What if white visitors to a memorial to the victims of lynching were met with the enlarged photographs of faces of those white people who were participant in and witness to that terror then and now? What if they had to face themselves? Might that not be a different endeavor? Might that not hit a different note? Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much. SAIDIYA HARTMAN vessel: a container (such as a cask, bottle, kettle, cup, or bowl) for holding something a person into whom some quality (such as grace) is infused a watercraft bigger than a rowboat; especially: ship a tube or canal (such as an artery) in which a body fluid is contained and conveyed or circulated a conducting tube in the xylem of a vascular plant formed by the fusion and loss of end walls of a series of cells Knowing that every day that I left the house, many of the people whom I encountered did not think my precious and showed me so, my mother gave me space to be precious—as in vulnerable, as in cherished. It is through her that I first learned that beauty is a practice, that beauty is a method, and that a vessel is also “a person into whom some quality (such as grace) is infused.” I continue to think about beauty and its knowledges. I learned to see in my mother’s house. I learned how not to see in my mother’s house. How to limit my sight to the things that could be controlled. I learned to see in discrete angles, planes, plots. If the ceiling was falling down and you couldn’t do anything about it, what you could do was grow and arrange peonies and tulips and zinnias; cut forsythia and mock orange to bring inside. My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words. She gave me every Black book that she could find and, in her practice, birthdays always included gifts for the body, gifts for the mind, and gifts for the soul. The mind and the soul came together in books: novels, poetry, short stories, history, art. One of those books are Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters in which Bambara, in the dedication, thanks her mother, “who in 1948, having come upon me daydreaming in the middle of the kitchen floor, mopped around me.” In that dedication, I saw something that my mother would do; I saw something that she had done. My mother gave me space to dream. For whole days at a time, she left me with and to words, curled up in a living room windowsill, uninterrupted in my reading and imagining other worlds. “Slavery is the ghost in the machine of kinship” is a concise articulation of the ways that chattel slavery’s logics, laws, and relations continue to animate the present. Transatlantic chattel slavery’s domestic relations solidified and severed relations by making kin in one direction, and in the other, property that could be passed between and among those kin. In the days after the 2016 US elections, I sat with a number of colleagues. They were good people, all well-meaning, and we were gathered in the spirit that there was much to do and that we were committed to the doing. Some of my Black colleagues were organizing around ways to protect their children from the racist attacks that they were facing in schools. Some of my white colleagues were doing similar work while others were struggling, in this moment, to figure out if this was the time to speak to their white kin about white supremacy and if so, how. They spoke this fear into the same ether as their Black co-workers, friends, and colleagues. They wondered, should they be silent, or should they broach the election and its aftermath with people in their lives who occupied different points of view, who voted differently, who apprehended the world in ways that my white colleagues self-reported as deeply antithetical or inimical to their own. they acknowledged that the lives of people (not them) were at stake. And yet they equivocated. They half spoke, the unspoke, they decided not to speak. They made peace. And with those equivocations, they reconstituted and re-enfleshed that ghost of a past that is not yet past. This note repeats into our present. Daily and with deliberation, newspapers constitute whiteness as innocence, in ways that hide and forgive their own interests in the preservation and distribution of white supremacy. Whiteness as a political project that sorts oneself and others into categories of those who must be protected and those who are, or soon will be, expendable. Many in the media float white supremacy as if it is in a fixing solution—deploying it, exonerating it from its lethal work with “the exonerative tense.” That grammar of “mistakes were made” is one in which terrible acts are committed and yet no one is assigned responsibility for them. Julie Platner, a white woman photojournalist, twenty-eight years old at the time, spent several months with Hall, his family, and the neo-Nazi group. Following the murder, she was interviewed in the New York Times. Even after her time with the Halls, even after the son murdered his father, Platner continued to categorize Jeff Hall as a “good father.” She said, “I do believe in most ways they were good parents, despite the indoctrination of their children.” What can that possibly mean? How can a “good father” or “good parent” be a neo-Nazi, and vice-versa? How can a parent be “good” who raises children in that noxious atmosphere, in that ecology, in that weather of hate? the title is “A Family Tragedy in a Neo-Nazi Home.” But the tragedy, or tragedies, is not, or not only, the murder in the home by the child who kills, the tragedy is the fact of the neo-Nazi home. Platner said, “I’m trying to give human voice to people that most of society sees as monsters. I’m interested in truth at the end of the day.” In an all-too-familiar pattern, the piece continues, “While covering the 2008 presidential campaign, Ms. Platner found herself growing interested in the large number of disaffected white people whom she encountered. ‘I think that since Obama was elected president, it’s a little more acceptable to be outwardly racist,’ she said. ‘To explore that, I felt compelled to explore the extreme version of the story in a human way. I was interested in who they were and what they did. I think that they are pushed to the edge; almost like a white gang type of thing. They build a community. A lot of them are marginalized by society. Many are working-class people who have been hurt by the economic downturn.’” The working class is once again imagined as only and always white. One lie is in that framing. Another is in the statement that “most of society” views these white people as monsters. In reality, these white people are always extended grace—and the grammar of the profoundly human. They are the human. That is cement. That is a sidewalk. That is not an unarmed teenager with nothing but Skittles trying to get home. That was someone who used the availability of dangerous items, from his fist to the concrete, to cause great bodily injury. I was watching the news and I heard one of the commentators say, there were the Biden supporters having their celebration and the Trump supporters having their protest . . . and they are conflicting, and they have the right to be here. Not one time when we were marching for George Floyd did those people on the mainstream news say we had the right to be there. In the world between Man and not Man appears the powerful specter of blackness in which not Man can both weaponize sidewalks and disinherit them. and when I tell you you mine, I also mean I’m yours. TONI MORRISON I have collected lines (and they have collected me). “What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch and dandelions. . . . “ (Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha) “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” (Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God) “Know this: being frozen in the lake is another kind of life.” (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies) “‘Mr. Blakey?’ the small white man asked.” (Walter Mosley, The Man in My Basement) “Growing up was like falling into a hole.” (Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina) “‘I mean Sir, I don’t meant to kind of harass you or anything,’ pressed the student, ‘but did the Egyptians who built the pyramids, you know, the Pharaohs and all, were they African? / ‘My dear young man,’ said the visiting professor, ‘to give you the decent answer your anxiety demands, I would have to tell you a detailed history of the African continent. And to do that, I shall have to speak every day, twenty-four hours a day, for at least three thousand years. And I don’t meant to be rude to you or anything, but who has that kind of time?’” (Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy) “go on / go on, the brilliant future doesn’t wait.” (Dionne Brand, Ossuaries) “I had my recurring dream last night.” (Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower) “Within the context shaped by a musket barrel, is there any ethical responsibility besides silence, resistance and cunning?” (John Keene, Counternarratives) Fagen draws our attention to an episode in Burns’ life. In 1786 Robbie Burns books a passage to Jamaica to escape economic and other pressures and accepts the position of slave overseer. At the last moment news arrives that his recently published fist work has been well-received and so he changes his mind and the journey is seemingly forgotten, or perhaps not quite. He writes “The Slave’s Lament,” 1792, the poet’s only work that empathizes with the appalling hurt of the displaced, the trafficked and the enslaved. A beautiful lyric written over 200 years ago with a narrative that remains entirely contemporary as we think of current tragedies unfolding on borders and hinterland locations. You may think of Burns as a man who was, at some point, involved with abolitionism, but Burns’ intention meets John Newton’s. Newton makes his living on slave ships and is well integrated into the economy of slavery. Burns is about to become and overseer on a plantation until he gets good news about the reception of his book and abandons the contract. Fagen says, “‘The Slave’s Lament’ isn’t a song with a begining, middle and end—the version is endless so [I’ve] been understanding it as a kind of formal sonic landscape.” Slavery was the note, it was the weather, that conditioned everything. Thinking of the sonic landscape of Savion Glover’s dance and the sonic landscape of Barack Obama’s singing at Rev. Pinckney’s funeral, it occurs to me that people must actively and continually allow that song to escape its genesis in order to offer it in such circumstances: the murder of six Black women and three Black men in Mother Emanuel AME. To sing “Amazing Grace” is to mispronounce the song. It is to insist on a romance of salvation in which the grace is for Newton. The grace is not for us. It is to misunderstand the genesis and the subject of the song and its violence. The song has long elided its origins and attached itself to the fascia of Black spirituality. When we sing this, who is the wretch? Who was lost? Who was found? Who is in need of redemption? “Amazing Grace” is about Newton’s journey; it has nothing to do with the horrors and terrors of slavery for the enslaved.               My mother’s hands were elegant even as a child—the same elegance that I remark on in our future time and that she laughingly shrugs off, even though she knows this to be true and even as she loves her hands—what they make, the shapes they trace in the air when she speaks, and then again when she is still and listening. “Her hand leafs through the grained air.” In Camera Lucida, written shortly after the death of Roland Barthes’s mother and in the midst of his mourning, he reads a set of familial and historical photographs, and he constructs what he imagines to be a universal taxonomy of the photograph. For Barthes: the operator is the photographer the spectator, the viewer of the photograph the studium is a photograph within its cultural world; that which seems to lend and convey meaning the punctum is subjective and personal—it is that not-predetermined aspect of a photograph that has an effect on the viewer Barthes reads photography through a photograph he finds of his mother that was taken when she is five years old. That photograph Bathes calls the “Winter Garden Photograph”—and about it he writes: Something like an essence of the Photograph floated in this particular picture. I therefore decided to “derive” all Photography (its “nature”) from the only photograph which assuredly existed for me, and to take it somehow as a guide for my last investigation. and (I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of a thousand manifestations of the “ordinary” it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound.) But there is no universal taxonomy and “[w]ith respect to practices of looking, there is a deep-seated dialectic, if you will, between racism and photography.” Many of Barthes’s photographic examples are of Black people, and some of them arrive from colonial archives, but the one that he returns to is that 1926 family photograph of the Osterhouts taken by James VanDerZee. Barthes writes, “In order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes.” Barthes’s survey of blackness (and Black people) is a gaze and not a look; and within that gaze are all of the ordering structures of white supremacy, such that he performs a misnaming and mis-seeing in which that necklace around VanDerZee’s aunt’s neck becomes a gold chain. This substitutive logic in which a pearl necklace becomes a gold chain turns VanDerZee’s aunt into “mammy” and marks the work of unseeing VanDerZee’s aunt and blackness and how that not-seeing is the condition by which Barthes comes to (not) see himself—to insert his look as universal. After my mother died on January 19, 1998, I wondered what words I would use and how I would find my way to them. When people called to offer their condolences, they’d say, “we heard that your mother passed” and “we are so sorry.” I thought, that’s how people speak about death who are far from it. People who have never watched someone they love die a painful death. Those people said that someone passed. But if passed was a euphemism meant to soften death that softening couldn’t have been for me. I knew passed was too inactive, too easy, too subdued. Passed skirted the hard work of dying. My mother didn’t pass. She struggled and her death was not easy on anyone. Least of all on her. So, what would be the right word? what word would capture the mix of resistance, suffering, will, dignity, reserve, love, regard, and more that was my mother’s dying? and what word would capture the difficulty and the privilege of sitting with my mother as she died? The way my mother is holding her hands: cupped, fingers not quite touching. Where did she learn that? I share the Halloween photograph with KM, who writes: “And you can see in your grandmother’s photo with your mother, in the fold of her legs, the crossing of the ankle, that elegance of ‘sit for’ emerges. To sit for his camera. Which is to say, to sit in his loving lok. The elegance there emerges through the grammars of a body in front of a camera. My grandmother’s crossed ankles. Those strapped pumps. In response to a question about his approach to beauty in his work, the artist Glenn Ligon replies: I agree that the question of beauty is a charged one for people of color. Beauty is a force that is seemingly outside of culture—which in the end it very well may be—but the discussion around beauty is often used as a way to preempt any debates about exclusion or marginality or privilege or any of the topics that had some currency in the art world of the late eighties and early nineties. Now it’s like “just show up fr the banquet, bring a gift for the host, and shut up.” I think it’s fine for artists to bring flowers, and I love flowers as much as the next person, but sometimes you have to hold your flowers like a weapon. With beauty, something is always at stake. I am reading Natasha Trethewey’s Memorial Drive when I come across this: I kept only a few of her books, a heavy belt made of bullets, and a single plant she had loved—a dieffenbachia. Throughout my childhood it had been my responsibility to tend it, every week, dusting and misting the upper leaves and snipping the browned lower ones. Be careful when you handle it, but thee is a toxin in the sap of the dieffenbachia; it oozes from the leaves and the stems where they are cut. Dumb cane, the plant is called, because it can cause a temporary inability to speak. It feels so familiar it takes me a few beats to recognize why. There was always dieffenbachia in our house. My mother worked, for many years, in the garden department at Sears, Roebuck and Company. When the managers would throw away plants, she would take them out of the trash and put them aside to bring home, or she would take a cutting that she woudld later bring home and put in a Dixie cup or in a sawed-off bottom half of a 32-ounce or 64-ounce plastic Canada Dry ginger ale bottle. She would fill that with water, set it on the kitchen windowsill, and wait for it to take root. My mother was always wonderful with outdoor plants, but from one season to the next, some of the indoor plans that she rescued would not survive. My mother was a maker and keeper of lists and inventories. Names of plants Latinate and common. Philodendron. Forsythia, family Oleaceae. Azalea, family Ericaceae. More lists. Names of things. Titles and prices of books. Plans. Designs. Some of the lists my mother made were written on the back of advertising cardstock from the Doncaster clothing line. I have no idea how my mother came to be a distributor of these clothes and to show the designs in our home to well-off white women, but I can see the suits, dresses, and coats hanging on the clothes rack. I can recall their rich textures and patterns, their substantial weight, and their fine silk linings. The fronts of the Doncaster cards were illustrated with drawings of white women wearing that season’s fashions, and their blank backs became hand-drawn mini crossword puzzles to stretch my vocabulary and imagination. There was a time when I would answer people’s questions largely with quotations from plays, novels, poems, and nonfiction works. What I wanted to say had already been said and said better than I could have hoped to say it myself. I was only at your home in Wayne once. Your mother invited me for a weekend. I only have vague impressions of the house as being warm and inviting and what I would have expected of Ida’s home. But I have vivid memories of the garden! my mother’s best friend married a berry farmer, so we spent a week or more in Hammonton, New Jersey every summer. I loved being in the country and picking wildflowers for the table. Growing up in a rowhouse in Kensington, I only knew small cement backyards. Your mother’s garden was a revelation—so much green so close to the city! she lovingly showed and named each plant and shrub. You describe a mother who had a life in the world, friends who came to visit—these are things that I did not experience with her while my father was alive. I gives me great joy to hear of this life from someone who knew her. The garden! The vegetable one in the back, flowers and mind at the side and flowers in front. Those are the gardens of my childhood. My mother made joy. She worked hard at it. There is a project that I’ve had in the back of my mind for several years. Not a solo project, but one that D and I envisioned as collective and that we thought t call it “The Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness.” Our imagined Dictionary was inspired by a real one: the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin. Here is a description of that published book: This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages–English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. As we read and skimmed the entries, we observed that many of the definitions could not, did not, or might not stand if the word or concept was thought from Black. That is, not only did blackness not appear among the “important philosophical . . . and political terms” to be defined or discussed, neither did Black philosophers (so no Negritude, Creolité, Fanon, Glissant, Aimé, or Suzanne Césaire, no Du Bois, no double consciousness). But many of the entries that did appear would need to be rethought or unthought if one considered blackness and Black people. If one began from Black, what would an entry on civilization, or claim, or archive or memory or life look like? How would it sound? “To speak of untranslatables in no way implies that the terms in question, or the expressions, the syntactical or grammatical turns, are not and cannot be translated: the untranslatable is rather what one keeps on (not) translating . . . “ “Every writer is a writer in politics. The only question is what or whose politics?” the girl who wrote on the chalkboard the boy who was carrying Skittles and iced tea the girl who was by herself and surrounded by hate the young woman who was asleep in her bed the young woman who drive the wrong way and the babygirl who survived this the man who cried for his mother the girl who took the video of the man who cried for his mother the other girl, the cousin of the first girl, who also witnessed this the boy who was skipping away the woman convulsed with mourning and the woman who warned them not to take her picture the girl who told her mother that she would take care of her the boy who had only just arrived at the gazebo to play the girl who was sound asleep in her grandmother’s living room the girl to whose forehead someone taped the word ship the woman who questioned why she was being stopped the woman pulled over with her three young children in the car the woman who knocked on a door and asked for help the boy who was walking down the street the woman whose two little sons were swept away in a floor, the door to their safety barred the man who was running down the street the boy who was playing music in his car with his friends the boy whose mother was anxious when he did not return home the woman who fell the girl who called for help the man who said, “I can’t breathe” the young man accused of shoplifting and his mother whose heart was broken the man who said, “I’m scared” the girls, sisters, whose bones became lessons the girl who said, “I am a child.”     We are in New York from Toronto and S has invited us to her house for dinner and talk. There are six of us—give of us are professors and of that five, two are poets, one of us is a jazz singer, two of us are writers and professors of literature and one of us is a painter. We are talking about the books and the projects that we are working on or that we have just finished. We are talking about the painter’s show at the Drawing Center, where she and I had a public conversation earlier in the week. We are talking about Black life. We are talking about abstraction. The painter is describing her hypershapes and her work at the Wynter-Wells School. She is trying to describe the architecture of the hold. She asks us this question: “How many corners are there in this room?” We are stumped and respond with numbers so low they make no sense. We say four, six, twelve, even as we know the question is more complicated, and the number of corners much higher. When we stop guessing, the painter begins to point out all of the corners—she points to windows, to where walls meet floors, to carpets, and to doors. The painter was trying to get us to engage with the deep study of the enslaved in relation to the line of a board or the curve of a chain, the plane and arc and edge of a hoe. She was trying to get us to recognize captive time and study and to begin from there. She wanted us to image what an enslaved person might see in the hold or the garret, in the field or the kitchen. She said, think of a circle. The painter was Torkwase Dyson, and what she said as we talked before our conversation that February Saturday hovers over much of what I think’ she said, “the shape makes the Black.” This was a theoretical distillation that was wide and deep and stunning in its long reverberations. “[T]race becomes vocabulary.” There are two structures by Dyson, both titled The Latitude and the Longitude of this Place. The dimensions of one piece are taken from the wooden crate in which Henry “Box” Brown mailed himself to “freedom.” That crate was three feet long by two feet, eight inches deep by two feet wide. Briefly, the tension in Dyson’s piece—the tensions of Dyson’s piece—get at something about tight, enclosing spaces, something constraint and pull. The pull between harm and safety; between prosperity and dispossession. The other structure is of Harriet Jacob’s Loophole of Retreat. Both tether past and present, its circulation, its wake, and expose how that shows up in form and in the production of space. What are the angles and dimensions of Black freedom? What is a Black/African sustaining architecture? Where are those coordinates on a map? How do we break them? Make them? Dyson works in a vocabulary of shape that attempts to attend to what the or a Black person sees and experiences; a language that acknowledges and takes its cues from the natural world. When Dyson observes that “the shape makes the Black” I understand her to be saying that if “blackness” is made on the coffle and in the ship, then it is the line of the coffle in that walk from one location in the interior to another and then on to the littoral, that circle around the neck, the curve of the hull, the plane of the rough board, and the porthole that contribute to that making of (captive) blackness. And if shape makes, it can also unmake; it can liberate as well as confine. Black Compositional Thought is black abstraction in pursuit of Black life. “We arrived spectacular” Professor and scholar of photography John Edwin Mason tweeted: “what would photojournalism & documentary photography look like—now and in the past—if the photographer’s right to take someone’s image were balanced by that person’s right to say No?” He continued, “The photographer’s right to take has been & is rooted in a connection to power—cultural, economic, political. The poor, the marginalized, & the oppressed have never had a parallel right to refuse to have their image taken because they lack & have lacked that connection to power.” In Boston, the photographer takes pictures of a woman in deep mourning. He writes, “Reporters were not welcome . . . The woman did not give us her name because she is too angry about the coverage of the story, and she says the family is angry, too . . . I photographed a woman screaming in agony as she ran from the church steps. Her friend, holding an umbrella over her head, shouted at me: ‘Don’t take her picture! Don’t do it!’” The photographer took a series of photos anyway. The newspaper published them. The young man, who is really a boy, is seventeen and he stays in a makeshift camp in Calais, France. Without papers, he has been stuck in this in-between space for five months, harassed by police, evicted, unable to make a living, and unable to complete his journey to England where he hopes to study computer science. He tells his story to the reporter for Al Jazeera, and he tells the photographer, ”I prefer not to have photos of my clothes today because they are very dirty, and I don’t have shoes.” It is the end of December and very cold. The photographer takes photos anyway, and the newspaper publishes two of them. Spectacle is the right to capture, to capture what is deemed abjection, and the right to publish. Spectacle is a relation to power. It has a long life and a big sound. The photographer doesn’t just see the thing but also amplifies it, doubles and trebles it. And with each appearance of blackness their spectacles are summoned. BREATHING, COLLECTIVE NOUN: a multitude of Black persons gathered; a breathing. Property: Something that should be collectively owned. An orientation to life; an ethic of collective care. The enclosure of the commons; monarchical domination; European global expansion; theft of Indigenous lands, genocide and near genocide; theft of African bodies, enslavement; primitive capitalism; the invention of the Americas; modern global capitalism. Police, prisons, carceral logics and practices, criminal punishment; unequal distribution of resources; premature deaths; insurance and banking; private property, real estate; wealth; billionaires; later modern capitalism, its logics, its practices—technological fetishism. “my gran told me when you do things with your hands, it heals you in places lower than where you cry from. Them deep spaces.” DIMPLES, IN KEISHA RAE WITHERSPOON’S SHORT FILM T. This elegance is coral. Imagine: we collaborate with beauty. Imagine; we protract the drama of how we appear in the world. Imagine; enjoyment in as many ways as would satisfy the whole of us present. Contrasted with the harmful world, we are coral: in the experience of our survival is a lean, a walk, a lilt, a calamitous phrase turned inside-out, a hat tipped diagonal on the head, a perpetual riff in any major key, a procession with flowers and dried fronds down any minor road, the life of land and water transmuted to the get-up-and-go of a roadside (dis)agreement . . . All of our renewed power to refuse the concentric senses of the ruinous. The sweetly ordinary remarks of our bodies tarrying for careful and carefree living. Reminders of our desires. Of what can come hard with grace. Elegance is a curation of instances where no interest remines subjugation. Imagine: concentrated sensibility for pleasure despite terror. CANISIA LUBRIN You enter a place. Stick out the tip of your tongue. Taste what lingers. The sense that something happens here, as Rinaldo Walcott insists about Black Canada. Tense strains the smash of terra: terror: terroir. What lingers is here: now and now: here, a tug that times and untimes. You are thrown into a past that is a future tense. Tongue strains. What flavors place, what place flavors. Relation is made here. Rock to soil, soil to sweat, sweat to water, water to microbes, microbes to memory, memory to work. Ghost to ghost. Ghost as what lingers. A haunting flavor. It used to taste like. … “You would have starved,” my aunts say, when I tell them I don’t eat particular meals. “You would have starved under colonialism, in those work camps.” Njahi is the traditional Kikuyu bean. It produces the most beautiful purple flowers—bumblebees love the flowers. The bean is pretty, black with a white edge where it clings to the pod. It is a hardy bean, a perennial bean. Plant it once and you’ll never need to plant it again. The roots travel deep, anchor firmly in the soil, It is harvested as a dry bean. Like most other beans, njahi responds best when it’s soaked before cooking. Unlike most other beans, njahi does not become silky soft: the outer coat never melts and the inside flesh never breaks into a soft paste. Unlike many other beans, njahi does not take flavor well. It will not meld with cumin or garlic or chili or ginger or cardamom. It remains stubbornly itself. Earthy. Gritty. It tastes stubbornly of earth and mineral. If survival has a range of flavors, njahi must be one of them. This stubborn, perennial, flavorsome food was survival food for my mother’s generation, those who lives under the terror of colonial rule. Njahi preceded the terror. Njahi persisted during the terror. Njahi lives in the afters of that terror. In the afters of that terror, some swore they would never again eat survival food. Others, like my mother, held on to memories that preceded the terror. Perhaps njahi’s deep, perennial roots anchored a different kind of memory. Njahi is food offered to mothers with newborns. It is a food that celebrates new life. This ritual precedes the terror. It survives the terror. Take this food, eat it, let it nurture and welcome. Still, knowing all of this, I cannot stand the taste of njahi. … Permeate It is said that the scientists who work for food corporations develop methods to make plants resistant to disease, resistant to weather conditions, resistant to travel conditions, resistant to stray pollinations. The fruits are larger. The colors more vibrant. Their ability to travel enhanced. These are plants bred to resist terroir. They are not to absorb the place and history and work we call flavor. We eat these foods and say they taste of nothing. Njahi tastes like too much. It refuses to yield. It insists on itself. Unlike other beans, it has not traveled well to other parts of the world. It has not been absorbed into and transformed by other cuisines. It persists as another way of being and knowing. Now, I let it grow and flower and drop its seed, and wait for the joy of bumblebees. I cannot taste survival as my mother could, the joy of knowing that to eat is to live another day, and to live another day is to pursue freedom. I work her memories into the earth, and listen for what the earth tells me. K’EGURO MACHARIA Life is the place where love comes through. ALEXIS PAULING GUMBS Black life often entails finding beauty in the (im)possible and the possible in the (un)real. JOHN KEENE Life is the possibility that remains—a heart that will not stop loving, a glimpse of something beautiful even in the midst of grief and dying—propelling us forward. The ability to see, to hurt, to feel, but also to dream, to move, to sit still, to exist in relation and not possession, to be. ANDREA DAVIS The Black life form is the mark of differentiation within the species that Europe’s partial understanding of species life has termed human. The Black life form both highlights Europe’s partial view and simultaneously is the antagonist of Europe’s definition of the human, framed by the violence of the imposition and exceeding the imposition by continually (re)inventing what life might be and can be. RINALDO WALCOTT Life is a loving practice, the practice of loving. Life is the bridge between past wisdoms and imagined futures. Life, like love, is a rhizome—or perhaps an entanglement—of try. Life is relation between revelation. Life lays itself on / creates / treads the line between here and there. PHOEBE BOSWELL It is July 2020, many long months into the pandemic, and in the US already over 100,000 people have died. My friend S and her family are in Western Massachusetts. S tells me that she is working in her garden when a young whiteman approaches her. He is clearly lost. He wants directions. But white supremacy is gyrocompass. White supremacy is GPS. Whiteness is property. So first, he asks her if the house belongs to her. I keep returning to “Dream #5” in “Act III: Ain’t I Épistémè? . . . elsewhere called the transaction of dream and return.” It opens: If I could just leave the old things to their trembling If I could leave you t your monuments, too. No innocence I’ve known the sharp world and it is imagined and gerund big enough for all of us . . . I return to Lubrin’s “If”s—those conditional conjunctions—and to what they might hold and release, and to the hard knowing beside them: “No innocence” for those who make, as well as for those who meet, the “sharp world.” In Lubrin’s hands, this knowing is twofold: the sharp world is material and imagined, and there are multiple ways to see it and to be in it. The perspective of the poem’s subject is multiple; it is the I that knows itself to be “more than one way to see / the word-world.” “Dream #5” opens me to the force of our collective imagining (“gerund”) as the material and metaphorical monuments to white supremacy are falling. Still, there’s a difference between a word and a world: A word might hold you close when the world does not, gerund; it might measure the distance between what is and what might be. Open to this old/new word/world that was always there and that was “big enough for all of us.” When I was a graduate student, I developed a gesture that was, for all intents and purposes, self-strangulation. As I talked, my hands would move to my throat, my thumbs meeting at my larynx, my eight fingers touching behind my neck. Besides the fact of doing this, what astounds me now is that before that afternoon when M asked me, “Why are you strangling yourself?” I was not conscious that I was doing it. Her incredulous question stopped me in the moment, but it took months of vigilant attention to the placement of my hands to undo the gesture completely. To develop a gesture like that. I was strangling words before they even left my throat. Speech and speechlessness; each one has a cost. Some things I remember but they no longer live on the surface of my days. The Giverny Document is a beautiful film and, as Dionne Brand tell us, “Beauty is not uncomplicated . . . beauty is the ability to see everything; the confront everything.” In Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories it was the wisdom of the just-turned-eleven child narrator in the story “Eleven” who says, What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. . . . Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is. In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand writes that “[b]ooks leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. they leave much more than the words.” Books—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, theory, memoire, biography, mysteries, plays—have always helped me locate myself, tethered me, helped me to make sense of the world and to act in it. I know that books have saved me. By which I mean that books always give me a place to land in difficult times. They show me Black worlds of making and possibility. Some notes threaten to take over the entire book. I have the sense that many of the writers who are not Black, and whose work I have taught and found useful and interesting and moving, have not read the work of Black writers. I have the sense that apart from one Baldwin or one Morrison (Beloved), or maybe Jamaica Kincaid (Annie John) or Alexandre Dumas père or fils, most of these writers have not read at all, let alone read widely, the work of Black writers across the Diaspora—no Aidoo or Head or Philip or Books or Brand or Ellison or N’Diaye or Wright or Baraka or Lubrin or Wicomb or Walcott (Derek or Rinaldo) or Hartman or Césaire. I have the sense that many of these writers who are not Black and whose writing I have taught and found moving imagine there is nothing that they can possibly learn from these Black writers and their work. A culture of surprise is: a way of marking the ways that through the processes and politics of remembering and forgetting (history, narrative, lived experience, etc.) one (a person, group, nation, faction) is continually positioned as, or to be, “surprised” by events (traumatic or otherwise), instead of, for example, prepared, knowing, or aware; a culture of refusal and disavowal, and the national as well as personal ability to maintain innocence in the face of knowledge and/or evidence to the contrary to be found in all aspects of juridical, social, economic, political, and everyday life; one in which, through the processes and politics of remembering and forgetting (history, narrative, lived experience, etc.), one (a person, group, nation, faction) is continually positioned to be surprised by events, traumatic or otherwise, instead of, for example, prepared, knowing, aware of, or producing them. … “The cultures of surprise” speak to the ways that a specific “we” forget and/or remember selectively. To speak of a culture of surprise from the position of the oppressed might be to recognize that one might have to forget, or at least perform forgetting, in order to survive. This forgetting is not naiveté. The machinery of whiteness constantly deploys violence—and in a mirror-register, constantly manufactures wonder, surprise, and innocence in relation to that violence. That innocence-making machine rubs out violence at the very moment of its manufacture. Michel-Rolph Trouillot tells us, “Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. Fr those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake.” When I was a child there was a water tower up the street from me—midway to the top of Upper Gulph Road. The tower terrified me. Maybe someone had told me that these towers could fall over and sweep away all of the houses in their path. Maybe I had read a story or seen a film with this disaster as part of the plot; maybe toppling water towers were like quicksand was in the 1980s, an unlikely yet frequent plot point of terror. For whatever reason, that water tower haunted my days back then, days that were already filled with disasters. My dreams were full of the impending disaster of a tower that would break open or fall over, and we would all die. Seeing that tower in the email made me realize again that we do forget things that we think will never let go of us. There is, sometimes, relief. This was the second time i as many months that I had faced something, and in facing it recalled that I had once thought not remember it an impossibility. I had believed that I would never not live in its presence. Each occurrence of a thing is not the same, either in velocity or force. There are people who can see something and know the source of it. They can point to it without reproducing the hurt of it. There are others who settle all seeing there, in the wound. In her foreword to Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” Alice Walker writes, “Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief. At the moment they show us our wound, they reveal they also have the medicine.” When the Black students arrive at the museum in Chicago, they are given instruction in decorum. What these lessons really are is threat, haranguing, and harassment. When the Black students enter the museum, they are not free to look and laugh and explore. These Black students have to keep their hands in their pockets or on the top of their heads. These children’s exploration of exhibits that are meant to spark curiosity is interdicted by the constant, policing reminders of where their hands should be. So much energy expended disciplining Black children into the knowledge that museums are not for them, that this world is not for them. This is another manifestation of what the educator and curator La Tanya Autry tells us: Museums are not Neutral. This is the coffle, the hold, and the chain gang. I am walking home from the gym when my brother texts me: I just had an awful grief come over me this morning while driving to work. I text back. I know that feeling. Do you know why? Then I stop and call him. Later, I think: Why did I ask why? There are personal reasons and then there are political ones. One of his oldest friends is dying and my brother is a soft man. “Every day you wake up and there’s something trying to break your heart.” There is, in other words, every possible reason to be overcome with an awful grief. But what on earth is whiteness, that one should so desire it? Then always, somehow, some way silently, but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen! Now what is the effect on a man or a nation when it comes passionately to believe such a dictum as this? Wave on wave, each of increasing virulence, is dashing the new religion of whiteness on our shores. W. E. B. DU BOIS The presence of white people summons the always-present threat of state violence against Black people. The white person, the white crowd, is deputized. White people “are not simply ‘protected’ by the police, they are—in their very corporeality—the police.” Whiteness being a name for property and its violent protection. There is no set of years in which to be born Black and woman would not be met with violence. The answer to these obscene questions? Return the bones. Return the photographs. Repatriate the statues. Empty the museums.