Ashon Crawley
Tue, 26 Dec 2023 17:36:16 +0000
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Pets in Palestine
/pets-in-palestine/
Tue, 26 Dec 2023 17:36:16 +0000
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We went to look at puppies because I was heartbroken. Summer 2020, my sense of time was off because my days were blending together. It felt like time was moving too quickly but also not moving at all. Without teaching and leaving the house for the gym or the supermarket to mark my days, everything felt the same. There was COVID, yes, and the separation anxiety of social distancing. But it, my sadness and brokenheartedness, was much more intimate for me: I was experiencing something like a breakup.
Sleepless nights, prayerful nights, sweaty nights, overwhelming nights. No rest or too much sleep, I was fatigued in body, in mind, in spirit. My emotions felt distant and dissociated but also nearer and more in and on and through me than I’d known before. And lots of tears too.
Queer people, if you ever listen to and are in relation with us, can tell you a lot about how grief feels. How you have too many words and not enough, how harrowing and emptying it all feels. And not just the grief from death. Having to mourn the silence of another, the unkindness of another, is a real separation too, a kind of death of possibility. This isn’t just the grief for the departed and dead. It is a grief for the living—a family member, a severed friendship, a flirtatious relation gone cold, a lover now gone. A grief because they still live and there is hope even when you do not want there to be hope, when you want the door closed and finalized and ended. The quality of this grief is different than that experienced through the death of a loved one. The ones that remain in this realm that we must grieve compel us to need to forget and pretend they are gone when there remains a stifled and ever so quiet hope for change.
But this isn’t a story about a breakup. It’s a story about a dog.
July 26, 2020
I remember it clearly. My pandemic pod—my friends, wife and husband—came to my house for dinner on the 25th. It was July and hot and we likely watched Greenleaf. We laughed and ate and it felt like a moment to breathe. They returned home and I sent my friend a text telling her that I was glad they came over, that I’d been crying the entire week, grieving the loss of possibility. She suggested we go to the Charlottesville ASPCA to look at puppies the next day, told me to fill out the paperwork to foster a dog. I did it without much thought, there was no way I was going to take a dog home.
July 26th we went. I thought we’d be looking at newborns and I could hold them for a couple of minutes, get an endorphin rush, smile, and give the puppies back to the workers. Instead, they brought dogs that were a bit older, and larger, than I was imagining. We walked a couple of dogs around.
I’ll only take one with me if it sits next to me and doesn’t say anything for 45 minutes. An impossible task, I thought. There was no way I was taking a dog home anyway.
The folks brought a white pit bull terrier mix, with brown spots, named Speckle. We walked for a bit and I sat down, tired, ready to go. My friend was walking another dog. 45 minutes passed without my noticing, Speckle next to me sitting quietly. Someone brought me the papers to sign, take her with you, they said. Protest though I did, she was in my car a bit later.
Me and Speckle—who I renamed Speckles because I’m black and we add s’s to everything—have been together, quite literally, ever since.
Dogs have been on my mind a lot since October 8th. And cats too. The atrocities being rained down on Palestinians makes me feel so much grief. I began following an Instagram account—Sulala Animal Rescue (@sulalaanimalrescue), described as “the only organization in the Gaza strip that rescues stray animals,” and it follows Saeed Al-Err, an Afro-Palestinian man that provides food and medical care to animals—particularly but not only dogs and cats. Their work has increased exponentially after the violence that began on the Gaza strip on October 8.
I go to the page and see so many animals with shrapnel, broken limbs, gouged out eyes. And even in their different and varied injuries, all of these animals, these pets, hungry, all of them with frames thinning and frail, animals looking for food because they have not been cared for. Perhaps deceased, their human companions, or at least separated, confused, unable to find them. Before my encountering Speckles I would have thought about these stray animals on the street seeking solace as sad, certainly, but not something to concern one’s thinking and emotions with. Not when there are bigger things to worry about like the people.
I was the person that would proudly say I don’t understand why people cook for their pets and Why do they give them sweaters. And I would question any real display of affection between animals and people. We are the top of the food chain and all that, so I thought. But being in relation with a pet does something to you.
She is annoying, she snores a lot, she eats expensive food because she has a weak stomach. After she came home with me and my heartbreak did not subside and I cried multiple times at the edge of the bed, she just stared at me. Her incurious nature at my tears actually made me laugh then. Still does now. Because I had been taught that dogs are empathetic, and they care and they cuddle with you when you are feeling terrible. Speckles just looked at me from a bit of a distance, stayed a little bit removed from me because I think she was confused.
I imagine what she would do in a moment of protracted crisis like the animals Saeed Al-Err cares for. Like them, I know she would be confused. And like them, I know there is no explanation that for their confusion, though cataclysm is surely being registered and felt in their central nervous systems. Mine is a very nervous and easy to startle dog. It is not an overstatement to say that she becomes afraid at the sight of her own shadow. I often laugh at her because as we are on our morning walk in the park, she will see her tail get startled and try to run in the opposite direction.
**
But she is not innocent. Innocence is a concept some use to assert pets, animals, olive trees, dirt, shouldn’t have to experience or endure the violence of settler colonialism. And on the surface, it makes sense—innocence because it implies a lack of blame, a lack of acting or behaving criminally. Speckles staring at me is funny because she lacks a kind of knowledge to act maliciously. This is true. It would be true for the pets in Palestine experiencing cataclysm and crisis and settler colonial violence too—the lack of knowledge to act maliciously, the lack of blame, the inability to be criminal. They are confused, and after confusion, hungry.
Sulala Animal Rescue, Speckles too, make so very real to me the urgent need to think through different epistemologies regarding how we treat one another, our animal friends, and the earth.
I’ve been thinking more about the limits of the concept of innocence when applied to pets, animals, olive trees, dirt…and people too. Because the very conceptual domain of innocence and guilt is deeply flawed. Innocence is primarily about moral claims that presume punishment and property.
Some would claim that no Gazan, no Palestinian, is innocent, that they are all on their way to becoming terrorist. This is reasoning at least some do not lament the deaths of children, framed as “collateral damage,” precisely because they—according to this logic—lack the very capacity to be innocent. These folks wield innocence as a weapon precisely to withhold it. They are the measure and metric by which the concept can be given and withheld. With their concept of innocence, their affective orientation to the world is privileged and centered, and they then are allowed to justify targeting those they decide are enemies and carry shame and are guilt embodied by virtue of their breath, their existence. And this is the problem.
As an abolitionist, I think about harm a lot. Innocence is not a measure for how harm happens, and it is not a reason to provoke or condone It either. Abolitionists believe no one should have to endure harm. We believe we can build worlds in which everyone’s life and breath can thrive and flourish. An abolitionist commitment compels us to interrogate the epistemology of the normative world, the world that allows settler colonialist violence to occur.
In this peculiar epistemology of innocence and guilt, grief and mourning for the victims of genocide are turned against us, our grief and attempts to mourn transformed into antisemitism. And this, we are told, because Gazans, Palestinians, Muslims, and their earth and dirt and ground and water and trees and fruit and pets are not innocent. We are supposed to pretend the loss of life in Gaza, the targeting of hospitals and schools and zoos and children and women and men and grandmothers and granddaughters and cousins and dogs and cats and horses and poets and journalists and the laughter the emerges from the delight of having an animal companion or imaginary friend is inconsequential.
**
As a young person growing up in the Blackpentecostal religious world, there was so much loss. But there was not the expression of grief, not the sharing of mourning. If we expressed or shared it, we were rendered guilty of sin and shame too.
HIV was being contracted and the AIDS virus was manifesting itself in so many folks that were an integral part of the church communities of my young life. Musicians, singer, choir directors, ushers, drummers, preachers, pastors, laypeople were contracting the virus and dying of complications related to it. There was so much unkindness, especially for the queer folks, or the people presumed to be queer. The vitriol was levied at and reserved mostly for the ones writing the music, directing the choirs, singing and playing instruments. It was heartbreaking to experience so much loss. But I was nine and ten and eleven years old when I began to notice the disappearances and began to really pay attention to the rumors and gossip floating all around and about me, the whispered conversations about these ghosts. I dared not ask questions about them because in such asking my affinity and similarity to them would be revealed.
There was an existential crisis happening, but we lacked the fortitude to confront it. And I began to wonder, and it is the basis for everything I teach and write and my artistic practice too—how does an entire people get rendered disposable? What is necessary to think and feel and sometimes explicitly state in sermons and songs too, that it does not matter that uncles, sons, cousins, brothers, nephews die—oftentimes alone, oftentimes without homegoing ceremonies that honor their lives? What does it mean to lose so many lives and not be able to bury your dead in the traditional ceremonies?
Musicians in black churches—the ways their lives were rendered expendable, the ways they became lives so many of us refused to grieve—prompt my questions. But I make connections with other communities and spiritual practices and stateless peoples too. What do we make of the dead still under rubble in Gaza, unable to be washed and wrapped and given the appropriate traditional ceremony according to the sacred life worlds and traditions? We should be heartbroken.
I watched a TikTok video of an Israeli citizen saying she looks forward to the destruction of Gaza so that the state can build a Sephora, a Disneyland, a Starbucks on the occupied land. There is something so menacing and unkind about such a declaration of desire for things to consume after being made available through vengeance, through violation of international law, through unfettered violence. I do not presume that every Israeli citizen wants a Sephora or Disneyland or a Starbucks. But I do know that after October 7, economists have declared that there has been an intense downturn in traveling leisure spending especially with regards to gathering in public: “Spending on leisure and entertainment crashed by 70%. Tourism, a mainstay of the Israeli economy, has come to an abrupt halt.”
Even so, some have made it to theaters to watch, and celebrate with Israeli flags, the releases of Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” and Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” films. These films being shown there are being used in the service of encouraging and strengthening the ideology of displacement of Palestinians. With direct distribution deals with AMC, they both profit from the genocide. Their silence, then, is more than complicity.
Architecture and construction firms are envisioning what Gaza could look like after the violence—beach front property, leisure. And as someone that loves section drawings and digital renderings as an artistic practice, for me this is the transformation of art into a menacing practice of ongoing settler violence.
That hoped for destruction of land and displacement of people for a coffee chain and a visit to the movies simply means that consumerism has taken the place of spiritual fulfillment. They sing in theaters because it gives a moment to refuse to think about the violence being inflicted 40 miles away.
So much destruction of land, of earth of soil, of people, of pets, of laughter, of love, of language. Family lines decimated and all delivered to us on smartphones. Heartache. Harrowing and emptying mourning and grief. Words fail.
And but also, I keep thinking about the dogs, the cats.
The folks like Sulala Animal Rescue, like the kids, demonstrate another form, a different epistemology, for living. And they give me hope. Hope—not a disregard for the loss of life, or an attempt to redeem it because it cannot be redeemed but a social practice of endurance and encouragement. And in enduring, the invitation others to the cause of justice, to remember there is so much worth fighting for—like our breath, like our rest.
**
Speckles snores when she sleeps. A lot. I sometimes wonder if there is a cpap machine for dogs because she snores so loudly she wakes me up. Her snoring reminds me, too, of how comfortable she is with me. She had lots of nightmares when we first met and her sleeping was very anxiety-ridden. Now she just makes loud inhalation and exhalation noises and I say her name loudly to get her to stop. It works most of the time. Her loud snoring reminds me of the beauty and necessity and fragility of breath, and rest. I am undone daily at the lack of care and concern, the refusal to tend to and be incited to rage regarding the breath and rest of Palestinians, their trees and water, their air and soil, their pets and animals, their imaginations and songs, their poets and plays, their hospitals and homes.
I think about the kids, the adults, the human companions, that miss their pets—their snores, their chasing of their tails, the tales they can tell about the delight and joy and love brought to them by feeding them, caring for and tending to them. I think about the heartache of losing someone that cannot articulate their own confusion but still register it. There is sadness. There are tears.
Sulala Animal Rescue
As bombs burst in the air, a Palestinian boy holds a cat gently. As a mosque is raided and a hospital destroyed, a group of Palestinian girls feeds a stray dog. Finding innocence in dogs and olive trees isn’t the solution to the problem of thought. They tell us to remember them, to continue to fight for them. To hope with them. And this hope, my friend Mariame Kaba teaches me over and over again, is a discipline. And I have hope that a world otherwise is being constructed each and every now moment and that we can join in the struggle.
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“otherwise is not a place but a practice” artist talk.
/otherwise-is-not-a-place-but-a-practice-artist-talk/
Sat, 22 Jul 2023 19:38:30 +0000
During Ashon’s Fellowship with New City Arts in January 2021, he created various pieces that explore the concepts of sameness, difference, that attempt to think about versions of the nothingness of blackness, of blackqueerness. Working with scripture, with hymns, with concordance, with shouting, the various pieces were created by attempting to figure out a way to relate to a religious and spiritual world of plentitude and possibility, the space and complexity and contradiction of Blackpentecostalism. He is extending the foundations of his two books, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility and The Lonely Letters, into several large-scale paintings using an audiovisual practice that includes dancing, painting, and singing in rhythm with Blackpentecostal hymns.
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It’s Ok to Be Afraid
/its-ok-to-be-afraid/
Sat, 22 Jul 2023 19:37:17 +0000
excerpt of email i sent to my students:
It’s ok to be afraid.
I’ve posted this statement about being afraid across different social media platforms the last couple of weeks, and really days. It’s ok to be afraid. These past days have felt very fuzzy and gray to me, very difficult to find the correct energies to think about syllabi and course rubrics. I am concerned about my family. I am thinking about my friends, hoping everyone is well. I am going to parks in order to walk (no one is there, so it’s ok). I am concerned about my well-being and those I hold dear. And I care about you all too … how you’re doing, how you’re making out with so many changes in so little time, the demands this makes on our bodies, the stress, the fear.
It’s ok to be afraid. I post it for folks that follow me, yes, but I also post it over and over again because I need the reminder too, because I feel afraid and it’s not something to shun but an emotion to honor, like any other emotion. So we can honor our fear, sit with it, let it be with us. Because it is only through treating it as sacred—sacred because the emotion betrays to us something about our desires and our hopes, it reminds us that we are indeed alive and not numb to it all, that we retain the capacity to feel—to be afraid is another way to say: I am alive. And to be alive is to be sacred.
In the past few weeks of class, I have been conversing with you all about imagination, saying that I watch cartoons and paint and try to make sound art and dance because imagination is a reflex we have to exercise daily, we can’t call upon it only in times of duress and despair and expect it to do its magic. We have to cultivate a practice of imagination, kinda like the Muppet Babies. But as I have also been saying: Imagination ain’t easy. Imagination isn’t something that is frivolous or luxuriant and reserved for the elite or the monied or the normal. Imagination is work, it takes fortitude and commitment and courage, it takes courage, to live imagination as practice, as a way of life.
Black folks have had to practice imagination as an urgent mode of resistance to and against dominance, to and against violence. Black life is an imagined life insofar as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, insofar as racial capitalism as a form of exploitation, would have us all dead and spiraling towards death without attempts to live, without attempts to breathe, without attempts to say no to these conditions, without attempts to create alternatives in the here, in the now. To talk about the souls of black folks and grief, to talk about the art practices of black folks and creativity, to contend for rights domestically and against war and global dominance, is the practice of black imagination. And today I want to remind you that imagination towards the possible isn’t easy but we can, and must, strive for it. Breathe.
Otherwise possibility is the phrase I’ve been using to say that what we have is not all that is possible, that alternatives to the normative can exist, already exist in this world. Maroons—enslaved people that escaped plantations and created lives in woods and swamp interiors—engaged the dangerous practice of imagining other kinds of relations to one another, to the earth, to the world. And after imagining, they put into practice the desires they imagined. Imagination, the practice of otherwise possibility, is not the lack of fear, it does not mean one isn’t afraid. Imagination, the practice of otherwise possibility, is the recognition of—and honoring as sacred—fear and being afraid and moving in the direction of the alternative anyway, anyhow, in spite of.
Black life isn’t lived in absence of fear but is a kind of courageous wisdom fashioned in the face of fear to continue to breathe and become otherwise. This is our time, in other words. It has always been our time to practice alternatives. It’s ok to be afraid of what is to come, because there is so much unknown, so much that is uncertain. But we are here. I am not concerned about grades and quizzes but about your well-being, about your capacity for care, about your ability to imagine alternatives.
[…]
I often write the phrase: ‘make art. find your joy.’ to friends and across social media platforms. I want to encourage you in these coming weeks to engage the practice of imagination as a kind of art-making. Find something beautiful everyday. Whether a passage in a book or poem; a piece of art; a color; a flower; a sensation. If you’d like, you can share it during the open lectures. But it’s primarily an exercise for yourself.
With hopes that you are breathing,
Professor C
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From: Black Religion in the Age of Trump; or, On Friendship
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Sat, 22 Jul 2023 19:36:33 +0000
Black religion in the age of Trump, in whatever age really, needs friendship as practice. And black religion in the age of Trump needs blackqueerness. Blackqueerness is fundamental to but also excluded from the institutional practice of black religion because it unsettles identity fully, because it is open and capacious and enduring. This, its being open and capacious and enduring is its gift, not as identity but as relation.
When black religion functions in the service of, rather than against, empire, dominance and violence, it loses its life and breath, it ceases to be the practice of radicalism, it relinquishes friendship.
In Michel Foucault’s interview “Friendship as a way of life” he says: in friendship you must invent from a to z how to be with another, which at its initial moments is formless. In other words, we must be inventional to respond to the urgency of any now moment. Black religion in the age of Trump must rediscover friendship.
The interpersonal is how I come to understand the problem of religiosity, as a person attempting to practice blackqueer life and relation, having been excluded from the religious communities that have formed me because of doctrinal and theological breaks between those communities and my practice. There are questions that would be necessary for reestablishing relation, for rediscovering friendship: how are you; can you help me understand; is there a way for us to practice relation in our difference? But these questions cannot be asked under the regime of identity because it is a thing that assumes a stable core coherence, an unchanging essence. But what black religion is, is a freedom impulse, a liberatory drive and verve, it is not identity but practice. We must learn how to practice relation, we must learn to refuse to relinquish one another for something like doctrinal integrity of traditions of churches, mosques, masculinities.
I have been writing about white supremacy as the renunciation of the flesh, how white supremacy is the practice of renunciation of relation, of the social, of blackness. And I have been teaching Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and have been thinking a lot about the character Harpo. He loved to cook, to clean, to take care of the children. But because he wanted to be a “real man,” because he wanted to participate in patriarchal dominance, he was willing to relinquish his joy, his absolute delight and happiness, he let go friendship, in order to compel his wife Sofia to mind him, and he was willing to do this with brutal violence.
Harpo gave up his joy to attempt the normative. And I think about the black church’s relinquishing of blackqueer folks, their release of joy and delight found in blackqueer praise and practice, in order to attempt normative doctrine and theology of sex, sexuality and sin. It is heartbreaking. The desire for normative function and form—whether the guise of patriarchy as a system of domination, religious chauvinism, normative gender and sexuality as a mode of queer antagonism, settler colonialism, antiblack racism—dispenses with difference, renounces possibility for and of and about relation.
The Color Purple shows that men have the ability to do emotional, intimate and aesthetic labor, it brings Harpo lots of joy to do it, it brings Harpo lots of misery to live a normative life. Walker elaborates the ways the systems of domination called patriarchy, heterosexism and queer antagonism produce occasions for men to practice renunciation of the social field in which this kind of labor is produced.
So when Harpo relinquishes the care work he enjoyed in order to be a “real man,” to enact patriarchal power, he also practiced the refused relation to his own capacity for intimacy and friendship with Sofia that the work made possible, it is the renunciation of labor and of the sociality that is had and gained and practiced through that labor. He gives up, and relinquishes, the capacity for being in relation in a way that is deeply emotional, intimate and physical. He gives up friendship as a way of life, forestalling it. He gives up intimacy as a way of lovingness and livingness, refusing its capacity for radically altering who they could be.
Harpo might be the practice of black religiosity in the age of Trump when it acquiesces to empire, to patriarchy.
We must rethink tradition; how do our particular practices of Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or agnosticism open us up to relation. This question of the possibility for being moved is informed by my reading of Imani Perry’s Vexy Thing: that we must contend for relation with one another, that we must be open to being moved by one another. This openness to being moved is what black religiosity as practice teaches. This capacity for being moved, undone, vulnerable, is relinquished in the concept of identity grounded in a past of resistance that then presumes any current political position is itself radical. But radicalism, like blackqueerness, is practice. Relation with people that practice blackqueerness is blackqueer because it is a mode of relation against patriarchy. Relation with people that practice radicalism is radical because it is a mode of relation against normative function and form, a practice of insurgency against violence and violation.
Finally, there is a film, “Purple Rain” that stars Prince that we all know. There is a film based on “Purple Rain” located in Nigeria spoken in the Tuareg language titled ”Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai,” which is a Tuareg phrase that translates “Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red In It” … (the language has no word for the color purple).
I think the difference between ”Purple Rain” and ”Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red In It,” is beautiful. Beautiful because it illustrates the way we have to search language for feeling, for familiarity, for that which can be lost if we think ”there is no word for purple in that language.”
Just because there is no word for it doesn’t mean it’s not real, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, doesn’t mean it’s not effective. We can find delight and joy in the gap between, the space where difference is practiced and felt and known. This delight in difference is what black religion in the age of Trump, which is another way to say black religion in the age of Thomas Jefferson, which is another way to say black religion in the age of racial capitalism, antiblack racism and settler colonialism, needs to rediscover. In such a rediscovery will be the reckoning with the urgency of our times, times that span at least from 1492 to today.
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on the courage to make, the miracle of making, worlds
/on-the-courage-to-make-the-miracle-of-making-worlds/
Sat, 22 Jul 2023 19:35:42 +0000
**originally posted as an fb status, i decided to put it here too**
though i haven’t said much of anything publicly, i’ve been thinking about the methodist church and its likely impending schism because of the “question” of human sexuality. and most recently i’ve been thinking about the sermon in tennessee at the blackpentecostal church that used homophobia and transphobia and sexism to welcome pence, to illustrate, see, you belong here, your white supremacist xenophobia has a place here, we agree with you.
i’ve been thinking a lot about — and really wanting a feeling for — a sense towards a different kind of world. in this world otherwise, there isn’t even the possibility for one’s sense for connection to others through intimacy being a “question.” in this other world that we struggle to make together, all we do would be an occasion to ask how we can practice justice with one another so that all might flourish in their practice of gender identity, in their practice of affectional intimacy in non-coercive ways. that’s it.
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detail from: “dancing in one spot number 6” x ashon crawley
i’ve been thinking about this because the kinds of messages that say queerness is sinful and shameful and embarrassing and should be relinquished and destroyed are so pernicious and insidious and harmful.
even if you somehow manage — with the help and work and energy and struggle of community — to begin to think otherwise about affection and pleasure and intimacy and, yes too, sex, there is absolutely no guarantee that even if you somehow manage to find relationship (friendship, romantic; these words are imprecisions and cannot capture fully the multiple ways we relate to one another but shorthand here, you feel me) with others that it will somehow be grounded in the same or even similar thoughts, convictions, shared compassions, shared imaginations. you can’t assume that there will be shared intuitions, ideas, intentions about the religious, the spiritual, the political, about “causes” for affectional orientation (is it “biological,” is it “socially constructed”; the very question of its “construction” is itself a problem), for example.
that anyone of us finds semblance of peace and relationship after working against all these terrible messages about our simply trying to live and breathe and be is really a miracle at all.
one of the things i try to gesture towards in The Lonely Letters, because it took me so long to figure out, is that one form of heartbreak that is difficult to discuss emerges from having loved someone deeply but because there is no reconciliation about what that love means, even though it is beautiful and brings joy and absolute delight, it is continually questioned and forestalled and broken by the ones engaging it. they are struggling to share a similar sense of and for what their love means because they disagree deeply about the religious, the spiritual, the political, the “cause” for their affections. and this even after having accepted the interrogation of doctrine and theology that reductively considers their practice of queerness sinful.
sometimes even when attempting to fight it with all one’s might, one loses the struggle, the force of the oceanic surround of messaging that engulfs becomes too much to stand against. it is heartbreaking.
so much potential for relating to one another in deep and loving and non-coercive and reciprocal and joyful ways obstructed because of the refusal to think of the fullness of our lives as beautiful. i keep thinking about how that preacher, and certainly he is not the only one or the first time i’ve heard such a sentiment, said another man better not touch him. what is so very explicit to me are the ways patriarchy as a form of control and violence and also desired protection is about refusing the kind of touch that undoes and unmakes us, touch that would underscore the fact of our vulnerability, the fact of needing tenderness and caress. it is sad. it is heartbreaking.
the courage to seek alternatives in this world is such a gift. and i am thankful for the gifts, the examples that practice relationship with me daily, that remind me we can do differently, we can be otherwise. there is no guarantee that one will find it. there is no guarantee that, if after finding it, it will be sustained. it is such a struggle but this world otherwise is beautiful. and it is worth the pursuit.
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Kim Burrell and Feeling Ugly
/kim-burrell-and-feeling-ugly/
Sat, 22 Jul 2023 19:34:48 +0000
Tears formed in the corners of my eyes. I tell my friends that the older I get, the more emotionally raw and vulnerable and available I seem to be. It’s as if feeling were no longer worn on the sleeve but is now the very skin of flesh. Not like cloth that can be removed, emotion – the range of affective possibilities experienced through a weird simultaneity – is sensed much more expansively. It is what allows a certain entry into and perception of worlds. But also, and curiously, it seems to go unnoticed. Emotion is always there, for good or ill, but not the stuff I think about until a prick or pull or push. I am no longer protected, it seems, from a range of emotion, often sensed together in conflation but also, at times, in contradiction. Anyway.When I begin to tear up, my face becomes hot, I have to squint a bit to fight back the waters. And so my face got hot and I began to feel a bit congested, the way the mother-in-law called her, in the story, ugly. On an episode of the television show The Real, a mother-in-law wanted to talk about how she loves her daughter-in-law.
Can I be real? They went to church together. I liked her in church because I was her Sunday School teacher and he was like nah, ‘mom she’s ugly.’ She got older and started filling out, and he says ‘mom, I want to marry Jasmine’ and I said ‘Jasmine? The one you called ugly?’ And he said, ‘she’s not an ugly duckling no more.’ But I’m happy because she is the best thing that ever happened to my son. I love her.
Kim Burrell
Posted to a friend’s page on Facebook, it caught me off guard, that word, ugly. Hearing it, the way with which the mother-in-law shared such a story with such casualness as if she were talking about the weather or the time of day, bothered me. Ugly. She said it with such a coolness and calm. The way she told such a story, intimated for me at least, that it’s not the first time she told it, that she thinks it’s funny, that she thinks it’s loving. But in the story, her son is the one with the power to evaluate, she does not interrogate his relation to concepts of the pleasing, the beautiful, the pretty. It is he who is allowed to make such a determination and the mother doesn’t once consider that perhaps his capacity for evaluation is, itself, violent. He gets to determine what does and does not belong in the domain of the ugly. This is, in other words, violence of patriarchy given through the way she talks about ugliness. It’s the construction of power through allowing him the space to evaluate.
Hers was a soft narrative, not full of vehemence and screams. Sometimes ugly shows up in the smiles and gentle kindness of muted disgust. Laminated contempt. This disgust, this contempt, is always there but the vibration is made a bit more difficult to detect, its surface area dispersed a bit. There are other times when the trumpet mute is put down, when the lamination technology is removed. In such instances, disgust and contempt are not new but are felt, experienced, enunciated with a particular clarity and force.I’ve been thinking about ugliness ever since I saw the clip of The Real’s episode. But the hurt that ugliness is supposed to conjure sharpened when I listened to Kim Burrell and then Shirley Caesar proselytize about queer folks, death and the supposed sin of our existence. I am of course talking about Kim Burrell and her sermonic rant about queer folks and Caesar’s subsequent defense of the same.
What to make of such disgust and contempt preached? With such preaching, blackqueer folks are supposed to be made to endure and carry an ugliness we did not make. I want to think about the ugliness we did not make but are told to carry – that we often refuse to carry – without pathologizing those that find such ugliness impossible to bear but with no place to take it. I saw Burrell’s rant the same day I saw the episode of The Real. On the one hand, a mother-in-law pronounced that her daughter-in-law was no longer an ugly duckling. Rather than challenging her son to think more expansively, she intimates that it was the daughter’s “filling out” as the reason she is acceptable for her son. In her narrative, he maintained the capacity to choose. The video struck me as a sort of quiet heinousness, an unkindness delivered with sweetness and familiarity. But on the other hand was Kim Burrell, pronouncing to the folks gathered in the congregation of her church that homosexuality (to say nothing of transgender, gender-non-conforming, asexual or a range of other peoples) is only ever behavior and that such behavior is only ever perversion.
I came to tell you about sin. That sin nature. That perverted homosexual spirit, and the spirit of delusion and confusion, it has deceived many men and women. You as a man, you open your mouth and take a man’s penis in your face, you are perverted. You are a woman and will shake your face in another woman’s breast, you are perverted.
She also “prophesied” that for those of us that do not “come out” of our queerness, that do not abate our queer behavior, that death would visit us in 2017. To call our way of life perversion, to declare death on us. In another register, in another key, this is to call us ugly. These callings out of ugliness and perversion, to wish us death upon queer possibility, is to make explicit a spiritual and ethical failure rooted in patriarchy, misogynoir, forces aligned against blackqueer flourishing.
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My first impulse was to have a sorta cavalier response to Kim Burrell. Though what she said, and the subsequent “apology,” are thoroughly theologically wrong, mean spirited, morally reprehensible, displaying for her a lack of integrity and consistency, I did not want to think much about what she’d said. I’m not there anymore, I thought to myself, so my first response was more about agreeing to disagree.But a cavalier response today is made possible today because of a lot of struggling with doubt and fear and shame and sadness. I wanted to live a life that we called holiness and tried and tried and tried and prayed a lot and shed many tears and meditated and supplicated with hopes of being delivered. I felt, in so many and deeply important and existential ways, that I was – that my very existence could only be – ugly. There were moments in my life when the very fact of my existence felt like too much weight to bear, that such a weight was eclipsing my capacity to breathe. And so a cavalier response, an insouciance, is the freedom dream and imaginative impossibility of my life’s past. Some days, I still don’t know how I got here.
As part of a research project I produced in 2007, I conducted several interviews with black church folks that are queer identified. Some were living out the closet, others deeply entwined within. Some reconciled faith and sexuality, others not. One interview I remember particularly. I asked her about how she experiences her sexuality, from the time she first discovered her erotic desires through the time of the interview. She responded,
I figured if I’m not able to shake this thing, I’m going to hell, which would suck because I love the Lord and I want to see his face and I don’t want to go to hell. So…what the difference is now: I am pretty certain that I’m going to hell but I’m really hoping for a pass. I’m hoping that the Lord will look back over my life and see how much I love him and let me in for my love for him alone and so that he will not judge me for the fact that I’ve been sleeping with women. But he will more see that I love him.
I still remember the way this respondent said, “I am pretty certain that I’m going to hell.” It was, for her, an inescapable fact, something she must endure. It meant her existence was one created for the purpose of being destroyed. It was as if she were saying she were tired from a long day’s work or wanted some water to drink. Listening to Burrell’s rant and the well-worn theological and doctrinal defenses that folks have used to assert her rightness, forced me to think about ugliness. Because ugliness is about a forestalled relation, one based on the capacity to evaluate, the capacity to analyze, the capacity to deem valued or valueless. Listening to Burrell caused me again to think about this respondent, how existence was a kind of brutality. Sunshine and rain, both then, are cruel. Happiness with a partner or loved one, then, is always the capacity for terror. Because such happiness will still compel her to think eternal torment is what awaits her.
I want to think about her interview in light of Burrell’s sermon because the doctrine and theology preached is one that fundamentally does harm. Blackqueer folks ask, in varied registers because of these theologies and doctrines: Am I broken? Am I beyond repair? Who will love me? Who will touch me? What is experiential for queer people – through normative theology-philosoph