Bodily Returns is a visual and sonic exploration, through collage, of the centrality of the body as a tool of self-articulation and transformation that move beyond the circumscribed racial and gender logics of the modern era. Collage, as a method, uses materials of various shapes, textures, and forms to create something new. The project considers the (re)constructions of the black body, and by extension black identity, as a performative act of assemblage that is always in struggle with the structures and epistemologies that aim to capture it. This argument is sustained through an engagement with Hortense Spiller's theory of "ungendering" in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" and its resonances in the speculative historical fiction and autobiographical fiction of Kindred by Octavia Butler and Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi. In these novels, the black body is understood as both the origin site of theft and violation, while also inhabiting the possibility to transcend constructs of race and gender altogether. Furthermore, C. Riley Snorton's argument of "fungible fugitivity," provides an opening for thinking through how black bodies marked by interchangeability and exploitation can use their raced and gender revisability to practice freedom.
This project’s use of an assemblage of sound, text, and images is shaped by Tina Campt's elaboration of "a black gaze" as considering the defiant visualizing practices of black people (in A Black Gaze), in order to display the multi-sensoriality of blackness and the imaginative practices it engenders. Using digital collage and the methodology of assemblage, this project underscores the body as a significant consideration in black aesthetic practices, and emphasizes the need for a bodily return to both imagine and exist otherwise. The main subject of the collage is multitalented dancer and artist, Jessica Pearl Bailey, who gave me permission to manipulate their bodily expression in this project. While viewing these three collages, I encourage you to listen to the playlist at the same time.
(Counter)gravity
(Counter)gravity borrows its title from Tina Campt's formulation of Black countergravity in A Black Gaze. In the text, Campt argues that the black body has the capacity to "def[y] the physics of anti-blackness" through what she calls Black countergravity (47). Black countergravity emerges in the text from a description of anti-blackness as a totalizing climate, which Christina Sharpe's work in In the Wake demonstrates. As a means of survival, Black people must resist and continuously struggle against this all-encompassing environment. Tina Campt utilizes fabulation to make note of how Black artists imagine black people as having a constantly resistant relationship to their geography. In this piece, I use text and images as an attempt to articulate this same idea. I imagine Jessica's figure as literally defying gravity, as she is able to move her body off of the ground, despite gravity's efforts to drag her down. Jessica's body exists in multiple, mirroring the repetition of the word “gravity” on the ground, in an effort of mine to represent movement and highlight the ways in which this process of defying gravity, or weathering against the weather is repetitive, always avoiding consumption. The effect of Black countergravity is a different relationship between blackness and space, evinced as the figure reaches with effort towards “A New Place,” constructed in the piece as an assemblage of words, representing the myriad of freedom practices Black people employ to reconfigure space. As Campt argues, this improvised struggle against antiblack space captured through the visual provides a roadmap to “navigating the weather” (46).
Additionally, (Counter)gravity contains motifs that are consistent across the three pieces, all connecting to the idea that Black people, through indigenous customs involving practices of adornment and our bodies, write a different script of being, belonging and relation that move against dominant epistemologies. For example, the python appears in all three texts as a visual representation of Ala, who is a spiritual figure in Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. Ala, represented by the python is of vital importance in Igbo cosmology. Ala is the mother of the land, and protector of liminal beings. I use her embodiment as a snake to demonstrate the ways that indigenous spiritual practices intimately hold black subjects and make them beholden to a different set of cultural norms. The snake, represented in Christianity as the epitome of evil, and the physical manifestation of the devil, is seen differently here. Ala takes her condemned kin, and cares for them, guiding them as they navigate and struggle against an antiblack world.
Flesh and Blood
In Flesh and Blood, I think through the implications of flesh and blood in Akwaeke Emezi’s novel Freshwater. In the text, Ada, who is inhabited by ancient spirits that seek to control her body, must present offerings in the name of blood. Throughout the text, Ada engages in self-mutilation practices as a way to honor those spirits inside her. The practice of marking the skin brings Ada’s liminality to the surface. Existing as both human and spirit, Ada mutilates her body to solidify her status as an ogbanje, a child of the python, of Ala (represented by the python which hangs around the figures neck, and the neck of the shadow figure, a spiritual copresence). I represent self-mutilation or self-reconstruction through the abstract yellow drawings rendered on the figures skin. This is an interpretation of the Igbo practice of Uli. Uli is an Igbo aesthetic practice that goes back to the 9th century. It was primarily used by Igbo women on their bodies and on walls as a form of beautification, celebration, and honoring . Uli, when displayed on the body, marks both a material and metaphorical transformation, demonstrating our ability to change the way we look at ourselves through a creative practice, to write a different script or text of empowerment. The Uli practice is primarily visual, but can also be understood as a kind of asemic text, where the meaning lies in the practice of drawing itself and not the content of this abstraction.
Flesh and Blood, through an assemblage of words, places Freshwater in conversation with Hortense Spiller’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” where she theorizes on the “ungendering” of the black body. In this text, Spillers explains that to African people, the body was a “convergence [of] biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological” meaning, that was disrupted through the establishment of modernity as external value and meanings were imposed onto it (67). This is precisely Ada’s dilemma in Freshwater, and through this piece, I demonstrate how black “ungendered” subjects make meaning out of their bodies reduced to flesh. Made into a “primary narrative”... the “zero degree of social conceptualization,” for the uses of the master, Black people take advantage. To know you aren’t limited to the definitions of the body/flesh imposed by the West allows us to reach for something deeper and older to survive.
Lastly, the purpose of contending with our fleshliness, is a violent process that can’t be undermined. The stakes of transformation, of accepting ones liminality is violent. In the piece, I take from Freshwater, the Igbo idiom, Obiara egbum, gbuo onwe ya, loosely translating to, “take this weapon and kill yourself” (61). It speaks to the ways that we as Black people must at times disavow the body altogether to transcend the externally imposed meanings placed onto it, in order to come back to ourselves. Octavia Butler, in Kindred, confirms this to be true. Dana, through her traversal back and forth to the time of her ancestors' enslavement, loses her arm. Though she is no longer physically “whole,” the experience of being with her ancestors marks her, bearing a connection to her kin that will last forever. At the same time, the body through this mutilation in Kindred and Freshwater becomes a fleshly archive of past lives lived, and thus a map to other possibilities of living and a different relationship with the idea of an origin point and time altogether.
Shapeshifter
Shapeshifter is the purposeful conclusion of this series as it asks the question: what is possible through a return to the body? What do we learn? I think this collage answers the question simply, but through a complex engagement with the texts I reference. A return to the body resignifies black people as shapeshifters, with the power, through movement and the elevation of our “old inherited languages” (moving beyond spoken language), to transform sites of enclosure into fugitive space. C. Riley Snorton’s idea of “fungible fugitivity” in Black on Both Sides articulates that blackness, as the passing into the converse of privilege and being into “thingness, and the interchangeable…points to a place where being undone is simultaneously a space for new forms of becoming” (70). Becoming undone constitutes a return to the original site of "theft and violation", the reduction of the body to flesh. This collage is a surrealist depiction of the possibilities engendered through fugitive fungibility, which tethers the creation of fugitive space to the body. Emezi’s masquerade scene in the beginning of Freshwater is the chief inspiration for this collage. In Igbo culture, the masquerade is a celebration of harvest, life, and any initiation from one stage to another. Throughout the African Diaspora, the masquerade expresses Black freedom practices through the performance of rebellious and erotic movement. In Freshwater, people become spirits through the concealment of their faces and appendages with decorative costumes that honor different indigenous deities through excess and call them forward into the physical plane. I imagined the kind of dream-like word that is conjured when the sound of the ogene calls the masquerade to begin. Once again, the python, Ala, is present, this time in the place of her domain, in the freshwater that was born from her mouth and is responsible for life’s beginning (226). In the text we understand masquerade as collapsing linear time, as it suggests a (non)origin point that predates birth and that reasserts itself in our black imagined futures. Like Emezi writes: “You will form the inevitable circle, the beginning that is the end. This immortal space is who and where you are, shapeshifter. Everything is shedding and everything is resurrection” (224).