, I am not interested in rescuing Black being(s) for the cate-gory of the “Human,” misunderstood as “Man,” or for the languagesof development. Both of those languages and the material conditionsthat they re/produce continue to produce our fast and slow deaths. Iam interested in ways of seeing and imagining responses to the terrorvisited on Black life and the ways we inhabit it, are inhabited by it, andrefuse it. I am interested in the ways we live in and despite that terror

I’ve beenthinking about what it takes, in the midst of the singularity, the virulentantiblackness everywhere and always remotivated, to keep breath inthe Black body. What ruttier, internalized, is necessary now to do whatI am calling wake work as aspiration, that keeping breath in the Blackbody

In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as cli-mate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it isthe atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecolo-gies. Ecology: the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organ-isms to one another and to their physical surroundings; the political move-ment that seeks to protect the environment, especially from pollution.

And while the air of freedom might lingeraround the ship, it does not reach into the hold, or attend the bodies inthe hold. Recall Margaret Garner, on whom Morrison’s Sethe is based.Margaret Garner, who first breathes Ohio’s “air of freedom” when sheis seven years old3 and who, twelve years later, on the evening of Janu-ary 27, 1856, escapes from Kentucky and heads back to Ohio.

In my text, the weather isthe totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; andthat climate is antiblack.

She was caught between two allegiances,different, yet the same. Herself. Her race.Race ! The thing that bound and suffocated her.

She belonged In this land ofrising towers. She was an American. She grewfrom this soil, and she would not be uprooted.

One thought possessed her. She couldn't haveClare Kendry cast aside by Bellew. She couldn'thave her free.

Gone ! The soft white face, the brighthair, the disturbing scarlet mouth, the dream-ing eyes, the caressing smile, the whole tortur-ing loveliness that had been Clare Kendry. Thatbeauty that had torn at Irene's placid Hfe.Gone! The mocking daring, the gallantry ofher pose, the ringing bells of her laughter.Irene wasn't sorry. She was amazed, in-credulous almost.

But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard

And thought in living characters to paint, When first thy pencil did those beauties give, And breathing figures learnt from thee to live, How did those prospects give my soul delight, A new creation rushing on my sight?

Conduct thy footsteps to immortal fame!

Black life in and out of the “New World” is always queered andmore. We might say that slavery trans* all desire as it made some peopleinto things, some into buyers, sellers, owners, fuckers, and breeders ofthat Black flesh. That excess is here writ large on Black bodies—as it iswith the process of subjection

The hold is the slaveship hold; is the hold of the so-called migrant ship; is the prison; isthe womb that produces blackness.

Recently an acquaintance told me a story. A Martinique Negro landed at Le Havre and went into a bar. With the utmost selfconfidence he called, “Wait errr! Bing me a beeya.” Here is a genuine intoxication. Resolved not to fit the myth of the niggerwho-eats his-R’s, he had acquired a fine supply of them but allocated it badly.There is a psychological phenomenon that consists in the belief that the world will open to the extent to which frontiers are broken down. Imprisoned on his island, lost in an atmosphere that offers not the slightest outlet, the Negro breathes in this appeal of Europe like pure air.

Every colonized people—in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gapof male ignorance, and to educate men as to our existence and ourneeds. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep theoppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it isthe task of black and third world w o m e n to educate white women, inthe face of tremendous resistance, as to our existence, our differences,our relative roles in our joint survival.

Interdependency between women is the only way to the freedomwhich allows the T to "be", not in order to be used, but in order to be cre-ative. This is a difference between the passive "be" and the active "being."Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is thegrossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of differ-ence in our lives

Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.

Furthermore, every attempt he makes to overcome them will be painfully complicated by the fact that the ways of being, the ways of life of the despised and rejected, nevertheless, contain an incontestable vitality and authority.

Even if the attempts being put forth to free them should succeed, what has happened to them in these two years? People are destroyed very easily. Where is the civilization and where, indeed, is the morality which can afford to destroy so many?

However, masculinist sexist biases in leadership led tothe suppression of the love ethic. Hence progress was made even as some-thing valuable was lost. While King had focused on loving our enemies,Malcolm called us back to ourselves, acknowledging that taking care ofblackness was our central responsibility. Even though King talked aboutthe importance of black self-love, he talked more about loving our ene-mies. Ultimately, neither he nor Malcolm lived long enough to fully inte-grate the love ethic into a vision of political decolonization that wouldprovide a blueprint for the eradication of black self-hatred.

Everyone in our culture desires to some extent to be loving, yet manyare in fact not loving. I therefore conclude that the desire to love isnot itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namelyboth an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do nothave to love. We choose to love.His words echo Martin Luther King's declaration, "I have decided to love:'which also emphasizes choice. King believed that love is "ultimately theonly answer" to the problems facing this nation and the entire planet.

Being the supreme crossers of cultures, homosexuals have strong bonds with the queer white, Black, Asian,Native American, Latino, and with the queer in Italy, Australiaand the rest of the planet. We come from all colors, all classes,all races, all time periods. Our role is to link people with eachother—the Blacks with Jews with Indians with Asians with

She has a plural personality, sheoperates in a pluralistic mode—nothing is thrust out, the goodthe bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Notonly does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalenceinto something els

MI reaction is limited by, anddependent on, what it is reacting against. Because the counter-stance stems from a problem with authority—outer as well asinner—it’s a step towards liberation from cultural domination.But it is not a way of life. At some point, on our way to a newconsciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the splitbetween the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that weare on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and

The truth was, she was curious. Therewere things that she wanted to ask Clare Ken-dry. She wished to find out about this hazardousbusiness of "passing,"

Her lips, painted a brilliantgeranium-red, were sweet and sensitive and alittle obstinate. A tempting mouth. The faceacross the forehead and cheeks was a trifle toowide, but the ivory skin had a peculiar softlustre. And the eyes were magnificent! dark,sometimes absolutely black, always luminous,and set in long, black lashes. Arresting eyes,slow and mesmeric, and with, for all theirwarmth, something withdrawn and secret aboutthem.

It was as if the woman sitting on theother side of the table, a girl that she hadknown, who had done this rather dangerousand, to Irene Redfield, abhorrent thing success-fully and had announced herself well satisfied,had for her a fascination, strange and com-pelling.

hey always took herfor an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or agipsy. Never, when she was alone, had theyeven remotely seemed to suspect that she was aNegro. No, the woman sitting there staring ather couldn't possibly know.

taxi, put her hat on backwards? Guardedly shefelt at it. No. Perhaps there was a streak ofpowder somewhere on her face. She made aquick pass over it with her handkerchief. Some-thing wrong with her dress? She shot a glanceover it. Perfectly all right. What was it?

Instead, it was Irene who was put out.Feeling her colour heighten under the continuedInspection, she slid her eyes down. What, shewondered, could be the reason for such per-sistent attention? Had she. In her haste In the

Well, finally they got the boy brought back; an' then they tried to frighten him, an' to make him say that I wasn't his mammy, an' that he didn't know me; but they couldn't make it out. They gave him to me, an' I took him an' carried him home; an' when I came to take off his clothes, there was his poor little back all covered with scars an' hard lumps, where they'd flogged him

By this time I thought her manner so original that it might be worth while to call down my friends; and she seemed perfectly well pleased with the idea. An audience was what she wanted, -- it mattered not whether high or low, learned or ignorant. She had things to say, and was ready to say them at all times, and to any one.

As for intellect, all I can say is, if women have a pint and man a quart — why can’t she have her little pint full?You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, for we can’t take more than our pint’ll hold.

I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man.I have plowed and reapedto cut or gather a crop or harvest1 and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?[5]I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it.I am as strong as any man that is now.

The logics of the slave ship and the hold instantiated Obama’s re-iteration of that terrible calculus of the inability to “save every blacklife”: an awful arithmetic, a violence of abstraction

“Safety has no gender,” Inspector Roys-ter said. “When you are talking about the safety of an officer, the firstthing he or she is going to do is mitigate that threat.” (Ruderman 2012)

Think again of the multiple studies that tell us that though knownto be in pain, Black people are “forced to endure more pain” and thatBlack children are consistently seen as being older than they are and aretherefore, never really considered children.19 Turn, in the United States,to the recent 2015 news story that described a white eighteen-year-oldyoung man and a thirteen-year-old white girl child both fugitives fromthe law who stole cars, forged and stole checks, crossed state lines, andwere armed, as “Bonnie and Clyde” and as “teenage sweethearts.”

girl doesn’t mean “girl” but, for example, “prostitute” or “felon,”12boy doesn’t mean “boy,” but “Hulk Hogan” or “gunman,” “thug” or“urban youth.”13 We see that mother doesn’t mean “mother,” but “felon”and “defender” and/or “birther of terror” and not one of the principalgrounds of terrors multiple and quotidian enactments.14 We see thatchild is not “child,” and a Coast Guard cutter becomes, in Brathwaite’shands, a Coast Guard gutter—not a rescue or a medical ship but a car-rier of coffins, a coffle, and so on.

In this photographic arrangement I see herand I feel with and for her as she is disarranged by this process. I seethis intrusion into her life and world at the very moment it is, perhapsnot for the first time, falling apart. In her I recognize myself, by which Imean, I recognize the common conditions of Black being in the wake

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,Taught my benighted soul to understandThat there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

What, then, are the ongoing coordinates and effects of the wake, andwhat does it mean to inhabit that Fanonian “zone of non-Being” withinand after slavery’s denial of Black humanity?29 Inhabiting here is thestate of being inhabited/occupied and also being or dwelling in. In acti-vating the multiple registers of “wake,” I have turned to images, poetry,and literature that take up the wake as a way toward understanding howslavery’s continued unfolding is constitutive of the contemporary con-ditions of spatial, legal, psychic, and material dimensions of Black non/being as well as Black aesthetic and other modes of deformation andinterruption.

Those of us who teach, write, and think about slavery and its after-lives encounter myriad silences and ruptures in time, space, history,ethics, research, and method as we do our work. Again and again schol-ars of slavery face absences in the archives as we attempt to find “theagents buried beneath” (Spillers 2003b) the accumulated erasures,projections, fabulations, and misnamings.

It was with this sense of wakefulness

How did they come to conceive of what it means to be bothhuman and North American in the kinds of terms (i.e. to be White,of Euroamerican culture and descent, middle-class, college-educated and suburban) within whose logic, the jobless and usuallyschool drop-out/push-out category of young Black males can be

I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible. But in this American city with all its people, I am Native American — less than one, less than whole — I am less than myself. Only a fraction of a body, let's say, I am only a hand —

In Arithmetic and in America, divisibility has rules — divide without remainder.