Pulsing

Our conversation bubbled up immediately. We had prepared questions and outlined our responses but it was almost as if, with that work of seeding done, we could nurture our own offshoots and departures. I remember feeling buoyant from the comradeship built up over the years of collaboration which supported these leaps. My list of notes afterwards read:

Archive

Ancestors

Connection

Accessibility

Tell everyone you know

Everything at its peak

Expansive

Joyful

Processing and develop

-ing a language

– Build things or destroy them – → past → speculation – ancestors – proximity + grief

*imagination

Worlds for ourselves

• • Dream space

The rights of stars

Beaming sounds to stars

*artists have been doing this

• • Geological time

• • Audiobook

• • Nonlinear

• • Structure

→ Invoicing details and copy

Different streams of time tension experience

I cannot go back

The practices of each of us – Seke, Xana and myself – are interdisciplinary; morphing in some way as modes of survival. The morphing between genres is almost the after-effect, or inevitable outcome, of believing in and creatively expressing embodied multiplicities. These are called on to replenish the extraction of Black lived experiences by the faux neutrality, the singular (universal) ‘whole’ white Western narratives of history. Black Holes is nothing so neat … nothing so privileged as a history (and present) which omits forced dislocation, scattering and erasure … and although there are threads of dystopia, the work offers nothing so bleak as to continue the subjugation and assimilation, the disavowal of authorship, the calculating dismissal (murder) of Black life.

How could we have co-created anything other than multiple landscapes evoked within a script that continually redefines the often weaponized, burdensome or blanket term ‘we’, and reorients relationships to origin stories?

We – the galaxies – had to make sense of our own arrival. We existed but the tides of the birthing universe had broken all connection to the wheres and hows of how these clouds of stars came to be …

Shapeshifting

Black Holes has almost too much text.

We – the nothing – are undiluted sulking. Hobbling through a woeful landscape. A space full of unseen potential.

We – time–space – become the hadal zone, a wet, vast underworld of all that has been lost. We are and it is, lost.

We – the universe – come up for air from the dank cavern of non-existence. Awakened by an impossible shockwave, after lying in dormant darkness. We – the universe – are gasping.

We – the pocket of air – are an accident.

Through pink dust clouds we – time – fly and are made.

We – the mess – begin.

We – the Gods – stepped into our space boats and began our intergalactic voyages

We – the creators – sketch out our universe.

We become the newborn galaxies.

We are floating now. Infinity roaming in the black oceans.

We fell out of time into the era of swing.

We – the moon children – wish we knew enough about our histories in order to be truly original. Secure in our realities. Secure in our points of departure rather than floating around in fragments, in imagination or in genetically inherited trauma-tides.

We – the universe – are an accident. A random gesture. We – the universe – take shape. We – the universe – drop shape. What we thought were our outsides become our insides as more and more matter starts to matter, and sticks to us.

We will sleep well tonight for we have no more capacity for fear.

It's beyond black. We're playing dark history. We're dealing with the dark things of the cosmos.

Fragments

Anyone else feeling scattered these days?

Anyone else Black feeling undermined because white supremacy sees us as at a deficit, at a loss?

Black Holes’ excess has an element of spilling/filling up the deficit and challenging the negations within identity traits, which the conditions of systemic capitalist, ableist heteronormative oppressions name for us, e.g. not male, not white, not straight, not well; permanently placing us in relation to its own entrenched centre. This filling up on words can be seen as softening the double, triple or quadruple negations so many of us live with.

André M. Carrington notes the work of Michelle M. Wright in tracing the responses of the Black diaspora, deploying strategies to negate ‘the negations through which White supremacy defines Blackness’.Footnote ² She and others present instead Black subjecthood as intrinsically valuable.

In the creative process of writing the Black Holes text, Seke and I literally cut up the script, frequently changed the order and swapped words that one had written to put them in the other's mouth instead; the urgent need to reassemble our own tales was intrinsic to the process.

Black people – in this case artists – move beyond what white supremacy imagines us as: presenting our own motivations, desires and narratives; the expansive creativity of afrofuturism, speculative fictions, biomythographies and capturing the formative processes of dancing. We insist on being over time … through multiple timestreams, universes and bloodstreams.

Seke: This really is a wasteland, I heard you think. We are on the cliff edge. Ready to drop. Ready to fall. We thought. But there is no time here. We dream-shouted. We read each other's vacant minds before we fell asleep.

They say it is coming. It distributes good things, appears in the east and belongs to the element water.

It is also sky and light, earth and root. It is unique and singular.

It has no ancestors, no past or future. It pervades the whole of creation.

Alarm woke us up – for the first time. We had overslept.

We unpacked our empty suitcase, got dressed in nothing, ate nothing and stared silently at the future.

Alexandrina: We unpacked our empty suitcase, got dressed in nothing, ate nothing and stared silently at the future.

Seke: The future stared back at us. (For the first time.)

Orbiting

Seke and I wrote Black Holes script between 2016 and 2018, and personally, in 2021, it has been so grounding to appreciate the ways our instincts related to concepts of non-linear or cyclical time within the traditions of Yoruba peoples and wider African metaphysics.Footnote ³ Knowing there are knowledges in perceiving and experiencing the past–present–future as an orbit alive and in flux, has supported me in braiding together the nurturing and reparative reasons why afrofuturism and speculative fiction have been such fruitful sites of imagination politics.

When thinking how to write this reflection, I called in Malidoma Patrice Somé's telling of the connections between ancestral guidance and the spiritual link between a grandfather and their grandchild:

‘Elders become involved with a new life practically from the moment of conception because that unborn child has just come from the place they are going to. The living must know who is being reborn, where the soul is from, why it chose to come here …’Footnote ⁴

Information is gleaned through a ‘hearing’ ceremony where the whole body of the unborn child speaks through the mother with the grandfather as witness and listener.Footnote ⁵ The porosity of this exchange holds multiple embodied knowledges within several different realms and generations; each relating in vital proximity. In felt exchange. In connective potential.

We go on healing the static.

Whistling our merry tune – in spite of it all. How does it go again?

We fly and we are made. Assimilating the pre-matter into our present bodies. Bodies of dark matter. We – the resistance – begin.

Rajni:

So,

I've been feeling kind of nervous

about sending the first message

because I realized that this format is so

intimate

and

I tend to use it in a very spontaneous and

intimate

way and well we

don't know each other that well,

and … but I didn't want to prepare something to say to you so I've done a deal with myself which is that this, this first message, and maybe indeed however many messages as we need to,

they can be like the first pancake

and they can just be there to be the first one

and then we can throw them away if we need to

[LAUGHING]

So, that's what's making it possible for me to leave this message.

I'm looking at our …

the text that we wrote about this

and the idea of building the impossible bridge

and I guess I'll just begin by saying a little bit more

about where that idea came from for me

which is you know

I feel in some ways

this great solidarity with you and with the work that you're doing

and I'm really glad for you,

I'm really glad for you

and I know that for myself I couldn't …

I don't think I could survive, or be doing the work

that I need to do if I was inside an institution

but I know it's important and you know, I know it's really important to be doing that work from the inside, and at the same time, for me, in order to be able to even …

I want to say in order to be able to …

survive, and offer out from where I am

I have to not only be outside of the institution, but I have to …

live as if … it didn't exist.

and so, I think this idea of the impossible bridge was one where from my end

I have to imagine that your world doesn't exist in order to do the work that I'm doing.

I'm curious about how that impossibility of – the thing that's an impossibility for me – how that sits with you and also how you feel in relation to the work that I'm doing, because I think there might be a similar …

it's not a negation, of that work, but almost like

I wonder if

you almost have to …

deny the possibility of the world that I exist in, in order to just be able to function and do the work that you need to do from where you are?

It sounds kind of cruel what I'm saying, and I don't actually think that I'm articulating it very well, but I am really curious and I do think there is –

I just think there's something really interesting in there

about what we can imagine and from where we can imagine it.

Fig. 2

Image by Rajni Shah.

Royona

It's been four days since you sent me the first voice note for our series

and

I think

you know

the neo-liberal institutions’ demand for fast and prolific response rates

was where I first turned to.

And then,

I forced myself to slow down

and I listened to your message

many, many times.

To really think through the tensions that you actually so clearly articulate.

I know you said that you thought you weren't being clear,

but

you

so vividly

described

the tensions between our respective relationships to institutions.

As Maggie Berg and Barbara K Seeber remind us in

The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy Footnote ¹

the task

of reforming institutions from within,

a task

that I think I identify with closely

requires

withstanding

institutional pressure

to always deliver at great and relentless speed.

And so I slowed right down.

I ignored that panicking voice within which was saying

‘but if I take too long, what if we don't get enough voice notes by the deadline that we have set ourselves?’

and then the slowness that I was trying to embrace, made me think

‘fuck the deadline’.

The only way

to respond to the questions that you raised in your voice note

was to really sit down with the challenges that you posed

and that took me

to a pretty difficult

and

uncomfortable

place.

which is great.

it's great to sit in those places of

discomfort

and think through,

and reinforce

why we believe what we believe,

why we do what we do,

why we have chosen the pathways that we have for ourselves.

So you know,

I fully understand that in order to do the work that you are doing

you

have to imagine

that my world

the world of the institution and the academy

does not exist.

In fact

my world cannot exist

in order for you to carry out the work that you're doing.

I can understand

how

that is exactly what you need to be doing

in order not only to survive but to thrive in your work.

Survival.

survival within

white

patriarchal

heteronormative

ableist

cis-gendered

institutions such as the academy

is just so immensely hard

for so many.

the onslaught is daily and relentless.

I can understand you wanting to negate the existence of this world

my world

in order to thrive in yours.

You ask though

if the converse is also true

that

whether

in order for me to do what I do,

I need to somehow negate the existence of your world.

and I'm not so sure that that is the case for me.

Perhaps

it's the healing offered in the knowledge

that other modes of existences are possible

beyond my world,

beyond the academy.

Perhaps

when my burnout is beyond repair

I know that there is somewhere to escape to.

to heal.

But for now

I dwell on the fact

that the academy also operates on the basis that many of us will escape

that many of us will be pushed out

that many of us will realize

it was not actually meant for us in the first place.

And to live with this crushing reality

is just unbearable.

But knowing that the world-making you are a part of

outside the institution,

the academy

gives me so much hope.

It gives me hope that

this bridge

that we've been talking about

this bridge

that seems impossible to build

between our respective worlds and world-making

is indeed worthwhile pursuing,

even as we recognize

the impossibility of bringing those existences together.

So, it's become my life's commitment

to take on the role as

Sara Ahmed

has described

of the plumber within institutional structures.Footnote ²

The plumber who can create blockages,

or the plumber who can create floods,

in order to

stall

and

disrupt

the practices and operations

that institutions take for granted.

That uphold injustices.

It feels as though

it's in these disruptive possibilities

that there lies hope

towards

building this impossible bridge.

* * *

Rajni was recording their voice notes from the unceded lands of the Gadigal people in so-called Australia. Rajni moved there from London about five years ago, though they have journeyed over and lived on other lands during this time. Their family of birth is from Nainital in India, though Rajni has never lived in India.

Royona sent her voice notes from the UK, which is now her home, having moved here over two decades ago. Her family live in Kolkata in India and they share ancestries with both sides of Bengal (West Bengal and Bangladesh). Together with her Scottish-American partner, she has a daughter who is grounded in her Bengali-Scottish-American heritages.