CARE SYLLABUS interview

Victoria Papa (VP): The idea of Black elegies poses a challenge to the conventions of elegiac form. In the examples that you've assembled for this module, what is exceeding, refusing or transforming the elegiac form as it's been traditionally conceptualized? 

Kimberly Juanita Brown (KJB): This idea first occurred to me as a graduate student teaching 19th-century African-American literature and early African-American culture: that there was no real way of understanding slave narratives without paying some attention to sorrow songs or slave spirituals. I started to practice being in conversation across two genres of representation. When we discussed slave narratives, I would incorporate spirituals and sorrow songs so that students had greater context for what was trying to be represented there. When I tried to have that conversation with students, it didn't do as much work as I thought it would. I never took spirituals from a metaphorical, ascendant, ‘reaching-to-the-heavens-and-to-God’ perspective. I took them much more as balancing out the space between elegy and some kind of joy.

I didn’t bring spirituals back until I was teaching much later. I understood how to incorporate them better: you have a tone, you have a range, you have a medium of deployment that moves beyond the literary, but that also tells you something about Black sentiments, about Black narrative structure, and about the possibilities and the impossibilities of representing the condition of the enslaved. These were Black elegies. They wouldn't be registered in that way, but that's how I was hearing them. That's the framework of what I was hearing, and what I still hear. 

For Dubois, sorrow songs are so important because they tell you how slaves felt about their lives as enslaved people. I started and kind of never stopped thinking about sorrow songs as one of the ways that Black people get to say something about the condition of their lives, even if it has to be tethered to a double meaning or a kind of secret, which felt very poetic to me.

That's really been my only framework: if it sounds like an elegy, if it looks like an elegy, then it is one; because the avenues for representation and the avenues for visuality are so narrow for Black people, especially in this country, and they have to find other ways to express pain. For me, these sorrow songs are essentially going through the stages of grief in one to three or four minutes. 

VP: You are speaking to us about range and tone, and I'm thinking about how grief moves across the sentient, from the visual to the sonic. What distinguishes these two forms of elegiac release, and what brings them together? 

KJB: Most of my attention has been in the arena of stillness. Kevin Quashie would describe it as quiet, or the solitude of quiet. That’s not exactly it for me, because embedded within this is a series of musical forms. But there is something that says, ‘You are to regard this. Take time to regard this.’

If it's a photograph, that's what it’s saying. I've been interested in the spaces where Black cultural producers are creating images that are asking the viewer to pay more attention. It might be a close up. It might be an extended series. It might be a triptych. It might also be a moving image. That what the images that I've brought together have in common: they are sonic and they are not; they are moving and still; they are abstract productions that still say: ‘pause here, and attend to this.’ Moonlight is an example of a movie that is doing this kind of thing, without being called an elegy.

That's what I also see in Khalil Joseph's Black Mary. There’s a space between movement and stillness, regarding Alice Smith not just as a performer, but as a woman standing in front of a camera expressing something that is both within and beyond herself. Visually, the work has a lulling capacity. Sonically, this song is not being rendered in the way you see in most popular cultural productions. Joseph says that he hears 400 years -- that he hears a cry, a kind of wail --  in Alice Smith when she sings, and I agree. There’s something that can't be temporarily located, but has a kind of rhythmic frequency to it. Amanda Russhell Wallace's work, Mo(u)rning Tea, also gives you a sense of slow-motion and movement; it also feels photographic and still. I see the works as kind of evading capture, while also articulating some way to produce release.

With Dell Hamilton’ piece, Emulsions in Departure, I’m reading mourning into a piece that does not explicitly state mourning but has abstracted it in some way. There's something embedded in the color, and Hamilton's artwork that says to me, there's something Atlantic there. The ocean is present, as well as boundary markers, embedding an image with all of the kind of hopes and desires of people who, for a large part of Black diasporic memory, cannot be retrieved cleanly because the archive, the archival possibilities are fraught. 

I feel like evading capture is what a lot of Black artistic productions have to do: to locate them is to hold that person or these artistic needs in a time frame that they don't really belong, and in a racial container that doesn't really speak to what they're trying to produce. There were many more images that could have been included, but I tried to think about some that were in conversation with one another, and which may not be the kind of starting point for people to think about elegies, although I don't really know if people think about Black elegies.  

VP: Recently, I heard Fred Moten speak about “life as a refusal to fall into equilibrium” in the context of Black poetics. I’m thinking of this notion of refusal in relation to the “evasion of capture” that you speak of. It points to a mode of refusal that is far from passive, rather it’s refusal as the active creation of being...  

KJB: I once heard something to the effect of, ‘You have to exist outside of the confines of the space that you have been given, because that has never been a space.’

So when Toni Morrison writes in Sula, that these Black girls, Black women had no frame of reference because they weren't going to be received as women, they built it for themselves and created that for themselves. There's something about that here. If you think about the construction of sorrow songs, not meeting the measure of traditional or folk iterations of musical production, it’s also conveyed in that: not written down, moving from plantation to plantation and not being archived in a way that made Western sense until much later. Even that, in its improvisatory production, would not allow you to really locate where the song's origin point was, and where it moved. That's something of a mystery. It cannot be centered or held in place like that. That's spectacular.

The question about form is interesting: what Black cultural production is following, specifically following to a precise degree, the parameters of form? In some way, these productions are moving around above, behind, completely inverting it, because that's what's necessary. How do you balance an unbalanced field?

Levi Prombaum (LP): At the time of this interview, the New Museum has published a catalog and is about to open an exhibition titled “Grief and Grievance,” originally conceived by the late curator, Okwui Enwezor. It assembles “artists working in a variety of mediums who have addressed the concept of mourning, commemoration, and loss as a direct response to the national emergency of racist violence experienced by Black communities across America.” I wanted to ask your thoughts about the framing of this show.

KJB: I'm so sorry Okwui was not here to see the exhibition come to fruition. But I really appreciated the way that it was framed by him. Grief and grievance: two things, really, that Black people aren't allowed to to have or display. Black grievance is always seen and presented as rage. When white people have grievance, it is seen as grief, or a response to grief. Black people don't get to occupy that space in the same way. So Enwezor is bringing these two together, and thinking about artists that are in conversation with mourning practices by Black people who don't always get to say, ‘I'm in pain. I’m suffering right now. I am mourning the loss of this person, that thing, that person.’

It also seemed really important that Blackness was not in the title. It needed to be said that this could be contained within an exhibition, and in a book, and did not need to label itself and say that this is about Black grievance. Part of the tragedy is that you have to highlight the racial component every time to even get people to pay attention to what it means. 

This month, there are people who stormed the Capitol to air their grievances and take over, getting more space and time than your average Black person in a public space. It feels really awful to watch the Confederate flag brought into the Capitol. What you essentially have, in 2021, is three hundred and some odd years of Black people trying to articulate what is happening to them in real-time and across time, being muted or being stifled or being ignored, or people responding with indifference. You would have never gotten to what happened at the Capitol without a lot of violence and a lot of grief being ignored.

The understanding is that the Confederate flag in the capitol is awful and terrible because it's not an American flag. But that's not really the point. The center of white supremacist violence is wrapped around that flag. You know, we all know it. That's what the flag means.

This needs to be addressed. We can't really go forward without doing that, and I don't think that the country is prepared for that kind of conversation. It actually means that Black people will continue to have to mourn in plain sight, be asked to forgive their murderers and then be asked to save the nation at the same time. 

What I keep seeing embedded in these cultural productions is not that they get bigger and brighter. Maybe Jennie C Jones' piece, These (Mournful) Shores, is an example of a bigger, massive production that says, ‘We are still in mourning. We are still here in this space of mourning.’ I think Black people are always there in this space of mourning. 

LP: One piece of writing that anchors the “Grief and Grievance” exhibition is Claudia Rankine’s “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning,” a 2015 essay originally published in the New York Times. I wanted to ask you, in particular, about Rankine’s observations regarding the Black Lives Matter movement’s practices of mourning, and its political alignments with the dead.

KJB: That essay articulated for me some things that I've been wondering about. I do think that part of the violent and visceral reaction to Black Lives Matter being uttered or written anywhere is that you must attend to the dead. The way that the Black Lives Matters founders structured it, it's a two part process: you are being asked to refuse the extra juridical violence and the violence of the state at the same time, and to also say this person is a person who therefore matters. People are angered when they see the words Black Lives Matter. That kind of violent refusal says to me that this violence against Black people -- the ability to witness it, to watch it, to see it -- is something that you need. 

In James Baldwin’s short story, “Going to Meet the Man,” the deputy sheriff and his wife cannot get aroused unless they're thinking about a Black person being lynched. That’s what it takes. That’s where their psychological ability to be together, to lay together, comes from. They have to imagine violence. Public lynching, that’s what works for them. Baldwin is really saying that you have to think deeply about your investments, your cultural alignments, how you got here, why you are still here, and why this always looks the way that it does. For Baldwin, this history is a straight line. There is no interruption. The deputy sheriff has multiple interactions with Black people around his town, during his childhood, and it didn’t matter. His mind needs to enact violence against them. And that is why it's acceptable in the country. There is no other form of violence that you're seeing visualized that looks like this.

Initially, I really had such a hard time because I thought people would just say ‘Black Lives Matter,’ and not mean it. But the forceful refusal tells me so much about this country: that it will bear the Confederate flag in the capitol, but not a phrase as simple as that. 

The entire global diaspora has to shift around this very simple phrase, and has to unpack why that's such a problem for people, and why their initial response was to go to ‘All Lives Matter’ immediately, as if Black lives were more important than others. This mourning is always appropriated by white people. Even the insurrectionists are chanting things like ‘Whose house? Our house,’ or ‘Whose streets? Our streets’. Even in the change from ‘Black Lives Matter’ to ‘Blue Lives Matter’ to ‘All Lives Matter’: There's nothing they won't pull from Black pain and Black trauma, and then make a white production that completely has to obliterate the original people making the claim. This is why some of these artistic productions really have to be on lower frequencies, and not readily available to be co-opted, appropriated, and just stolen.

So the importance of Black Lives Matter, the alignment with the dead, the way that the founders meant, in every way possible to mean it, that they were not going to continue to stand by while these murders were taking place and nobody was being held accountable. From 2014 forward, somebody is recognizing what is taking place and presenting that to a larger public, whether or not they're prepared to do the work there. 

VP: I’m wondering about mourning’s relation to seemingly counter affective registries—the joyous, the celebratory—and how the coexistence of grief and joy so powerfully exists in much of Black music and art. Do you see the interplay of grief and joy present within the Black elegiac practices at work in the material that you’ve curated for CARE SYLLABUS?

KJB: I chose pieces that I wanted to return to again and again. Which meant for me that it wasn't so cleanly obvious that these were mourning and grief productions that were meant to not just lament loss or the dead, but that they were also meant to keep you embedded in a space where you would continually consider that. The other part of it is gestural to me. It doesn’t have an end point, a temporal horizon where it must stop or continue going. It's a hovering presence that is not necessarily a haunting. That to me, is a kind of Black vernacular tradition of talking to the dead so that you have a sense of who you are and where you're going. 

It’s also gestural in the sense that it doesn't necessarily remove joy from the equation. It's a balance of the release or the reprieve that mourning provides. And it's this other space, where I think Black music is kind of central to how people move within and beyond mourning and loss, so much so that it's sometimes hard to tell when grief is present. 

That's Snowden’s Jig for me. What I find mesmerizing about the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ song is that though I don't read it as an upbeat song, it does have an upbeat tone to it, and it can register that way. For me, that entire song is a wail -- a long, extended wail -- that needs to be ever present to hit on all the places that you’re not allowed. I literally couldn't place this work, didn't know what to do with it,  until I saw them live in Boston with Sandy Alexandre. We watched everybody just stand still, ourselves included, when they performed a song that I never heard before. 

It's almost as if a sacred text is being performed. And your response is not to dance, but really to try to absorb everything. And we were kind of spellbound and I've been kind of obsessed with the song ever since. 

You want to listen again. And if there is a theme to all of these, the texts that I have chosen, it’s that you want to sit and attend to the repetition of the piece. It’s contemplative, meditative. There’s something attending to grief, without the ‘all caps’ inculcation of mourning. You don’t have to be in the low place to get what you’re supposed to get from the piece.  

I’m also thinking of Toby Sisson’s series, Black Tears. If you’re not told the title of the series, what would you do if you were looking at 300 odd teardrops? What would the discourse around these images look like? I think it is in part trying to address grievance, perpetual grievance, with something that allows people to just take that time to contemplate everything that this means. 

VP: I like the idea of returning to these pieces again and again, just being with them. That feels like a form of care. It also makes me think of your book, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Resonance in the Contemporary and how you deploy repetition as a temporal mode of duration, a kind of continuity or afterlife, like a horizon you never arrive at. A lot of these artists that we’re speaking about are trying to regard the gravity of mourning and stick with it, not have it be resolved.

KJB: In this work, the resolution that would come with other forms of creative release is not the point, is not the destination. This work  is one part grievance and one part grief. And another part is about acknowledging that you can never try to contain that or try to produce something with it. That's where Toni Morrison’s Beloved would come in this world. That novel doesn't come close to addressing what took place during transatlantic slavery. It's not possible. There are 60 million different stories. There are 60 million sets of tears. It can go on and on. 

VP:  Yes, and I’m echoing you here, Morrison is able to stay with the impossibility of containing unspeakable loss, rather than attempt to resolve it. It’s clear that the Eurocentric tradition of elegy—with its insistence on resolution—simply does not hold up.   
KJB: The interesting thing is to have these artists not attempt to have that kind of resolution. So maybe they never get to the last grieving or the last stage of grief, or maybe they're always there. It's possible that all things are happening at once. 

VP: When we unhinge ontological categories, like death, from the frameworks of Western philosophy, different models of grief come into view. You’re currently at work on your second book, tentatively titled "Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual," which is exploring the relationship between photography and histories of antiblackness on the cusp of the twenty-first century by looking at images of the dead in the New York Times in 1994. Can you tell us more about that project? What do you think is to be gained by expanding understandings of death and how it is or is not documented? 

KJB: I was really curious about the overproduction of imagistic death that I saw in news media outlets during the 1990s. It seemed, according to these images and news reports, that only Black people were dying, their deaths caught on camera by some benevolent evidentiary apparatus devoid of a production of racial indifference. The reality, though, was much more familiar. Documentary photographs offered up Black death on a daily basis, as if engendering repetitions of Black trauma was the goal. I look back to the late nineteenth century to understand the long history of documentary photographic production and its relationship to antiblackness.

So many cultures have a very different relationship to death as something that is along a continuum but not removed so fully that the only place that you can visit your dead is a grave at a cemetery. That would instead be a conversation that would continue to take place. You don't have to commune with ghosts, but you could if you wanted to, if you felt it was necessary and if you had a loved one that you felt was speaking to you. That is something that would be far and away from a Western concept of the space between the living and the dead. 

But it also explains a kind of violent imperative that assumes that death is the end and you don’t have anything beyond that. It feels like a fear - an intense fear of death  - is being played out against Black people and white people who know that they're pretty much safe from being killed themselves. So you add to that the relationship between people who are already gone, and you can see how the conversation can't really take place: because you have an entire group of people who seem set so far against their own mortality that this is what it looks like. 

Then, the construction of the canonical elegy makes a great deal of sense. If you put “elegy” or “elegy poem” into Google, you're not going to find a single Black reference. And I don't know any Black writers who aren't writing about loss or grief. So how did they get so fully removed from an entire genre? There’s something there that will not allow a particular form of grief to be displayed in poetic form unless that resolution is already read as white. 

LP: CARE SYLLABUS is guided by a series of inquiries, including “Whose role is to care for whom?” and “What are the costs and rewards of care?” How do the conversations that you’re sharing in ‘Black Elegies in Sight & Sound’ address and resituate these inquiries? 

KJB: This module is highlighting a kind of enclosure where Black people are having conversations about things that we all know that Black people are experiencing and that there is not always a place to articulate. If somebody gets shot, then you allow a family member to say something publicly. But outside of that, how do they negotiate their pain? How do we have a conversation about the things that keep happening that don't get addressed? And I think that's where the real work can be done. 

This is not work that is supposed to be done in silence or under some kind of cover. These are not secrets. The problem is that it's too easy for people to appropriate Black pain and use it for their own ends, or disregard it. In order to protect that, different modes of representation have been in existence and continue to emerge so that you don't always know when you are seeing it or hearing it, which I think is probably best. 

It’s a symbol of how difficult it is to just say, if you’re Black, ‘This is a trauma for me.’ Or to say, ‘There is no way that the nation can refuse to address the centrality of white supremacy and for Black people to exist as free human beings.’ That is not possible, and Black people have plenty to say about that whether or not other people are listening. In this instance, most of these Black artists are really trying to speak to Black people and not for them, to be in conversation. This is what I want to highlight.

Black death is always handed repeatedly to Black people. But Black life, people have no idea what to do with that. Black artistic productions are scaled down to their bare minimum when people don't want to engage. And that means that Black three-dimensionality is something that we're still trying to decipher. Think about for how long, and in how many different ways, Black writers and artists and cultural producers have attempted to say the same thing and it just does not register. So it's between highlighting these Black elegies, and making it a more normalized practice of attending to Black life when it is being presented to a larger audience. It's there so that Black people can really have a conversation, have some kind of interaction with the public address of their lives and their histories.