This Is Not an Roll Out.
I want to speak about it and I think a lot of you would like to speak about it as well but don’t have the accommodations, the lungs, the stomach or the gall.
I've been studying the way lizards regurgitate their severed tails all year; I know we all have phantom limbs where embodiment, untampered breathing and consent use to live. These past few years, I have had my fingers, my eyelashes, my femur, my ears and my gut, compromised. Either carelessly mishandled by others, by unjust lovers, by the state or by my own thorny internalizations.
I was dead when a lot of you were able to ride along for free in my life. I took breath back when I started speaking up on the crimes, yours and my own, because nothing thrives but shame in silence.
Let me be clear — I do not believe in revenge as much as I believe in redemptive fury.
I do believe in warranted rage.
The essay, Move san, Let Gate bad blood, Spoiled Milk: Bodily Fluids as Moral Barometers in Rural Haiti (1988), sparked my thesis towards the end of 2019.
Right before the global incubation phase that was 2020.
I let myself stew with the words from the essay. I let myself sit; churning a wooden spoon within the slop of the inconceivable from time to time. I went into my showers, reflecting on it. I massaged my skin mindlessly with shea nut trying to imagine it all. I rubbed myself raw trying to quantify it. The ails of pregnant women out in rural Haiti followed me around like a scent.
I have dedicated the past three years to this research; tracking the footsteps of the enslaved from stretched land to the bottom of the sea. I followed ship voyages across the Atlantic same as ancient sharks followed blood trails from the vessels. I sifted through seas, crowded with infant black toddlers, their mothers never far behind, who died along with them, if not always in the physical, most certainly always in spirit. I have applied to over 30 grants, residencies, fellowships with hopes to fund this itch to lay my people to rest. This research has casted a spell of perspective onto my life. This research has made me feel strong in my weakest moments and saved in my most harmful ones.
It’s safe to say that I’ve come to figure, 3 years and 4 deaths later (2 natural causes, 1 terminal illness and 1 suicide) and with a new understanding of the trembling magnitude that was the transatlantic slave trade, I firmly believe no one has the right to drown out our fury, our pain or our grief, the personal nor the collective.
Just because a pain is massive doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and be meticulous in remembering. If there are 12.5 million bodies boarding a european galleon (originally built for war then later transitioned for the trade of Guineamen) to the “new” world1 — there are 12.5 million intricate lives to dream about. Then there are their children and their children’s, children and their children’s, children’s children and all the children to come ‘til we see ourselves, our peers; our contemporaries. The pain may be unquantifiable but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and dream up each singular experience. Honor is found in the witness, in the choice to remember, to kneel down and spend a moment in silence. We honor the stories forgotten in the spaces between speech.
The gift and catastrophe of imagination is knowing anything you can dream of very well may have already happened. If not on this plane then on the millions of others that are sure to exist within (and outside) of the observable universe. Because of the sheer size of vulnerable people, with no proper laws or regulations put forth for their protection, I figure any form of torture I can think of has already been committed. I don’t think that I have a single original thought or dream— not to say that I don’t exist in a realm of specialness; my experience, although my own and intricate, is wildly ordinary against the timeline of humanity. It’s a lightbulb that feels similar to why James Baldwin appreciated a good read or what offered momentary balm to Emil Sinclair’s angst-ridden youth (see Demian, The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth by Hermann Hesse). Our lives become universal when we are specific, detailed and careful with language. I first thought of this after hearing Frank Ocean’s Endless project. I listened to him murmur about his life, dropping names and specific details and I wondered how and most importantly, why it felt like he was also recounting my own experience. I made a mental note then at the tender age of 21 to follow in his footsteps. Since then, my writing has gradually shifted throughout the years. Impressionable and wide-eyed, I soaked up the subtle ways of the artists I admired. I stopped writing in parables and riddles. I laid out my truths, my abusers, my lovers, my friends and my foes with their government names and bared witness to a healing that has only come when I speak up, and speak accurately, to my experience. I swore to write out the names of all my trespassers and lovers in my journal, something that was taboo for me throughout my teenage-hood.
When I share my writing, it is because I was raised that way. I was raised by artists I admired for their low murmuring, belted wails and fierce relatability. That’s who I was watching as a young artist, like an awkward doe, fully realized; my legs are well-practiced in this realm. The sharing of private truths comes as natural as breathing to me. I am hard-wired to think of the particular, the individual, to think of the books that have gutted me and do the same in return. I cast out my own net of experience through song, photo essays, moving visuals, instagram stories, and strings of tweets with the lived understanding that my experience is as extraordinary as it is ordinary.
Someone out there is bound to understand. Someone out there wants to understand.
I write to the reader that resembles myself.
The most private place for me has consistently been the close space between my nose and the pages of a book. I still dream about the smell of some of my favorite novels (see, olfactory hallucinations) and fantasize about taking a deep breath, letting the scent tickle my nose hairs. I have been taught sensuality, hope, empathy, rage, blinding pain and redemptive refuge through the pages of books as a vulnerable child well before I encountered the complexities of these emotions as an adult. I was around 7 years old when I first came across a big, thick black book that spoke about the US empires foundational legacy with chattel slavery. It was laminated and the words were hard to read because of its size and low opacity against the dark pages.
I remember having to sneak into our playroom to read it. I’d make sure all the adults were busy so I wouldn’t be interrupted and flip through the pictures, mostly ignoring the unappealing font and size of the words. I saw a picture of a little black boy, charred and on top of a pile of burning wood, with white faces staring back at me from the flash of a camera.
That memory has stuck with me for over 20 years.
I have searched high and low for the thick, laminated book that slipped through my mothers inspection of the weekly 20 books I was allowed to borrow off of my library card. That was the deal, 20 books a week, no more or I’d be predisposed to misplacing one or two and racking up cents of debt on my card. (I first learned about debt from my local librarian and my very, frustrated mother).
I was lucky to find so many confidantes in books.
They taught me how to ride the waves of life and also taught me when to let myself be thrashed around by the current. They instilled in me, an in-formidable trust that after the fainting spell of a stormy sea, I would be carried away, safely and wake up on a shore of a deserted isle. Dazed and confused, but better for it. More capable to get to the core of it. Better equipped to write about whatever it is, just like the characters I looked up to in my books.
My dreams followed suit. I never died in my dreams. I would wake up or be taken to another dream world before harm could touch me. It was that way from childhood until the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Post-Trayvon Martin, I had nightmares for months about getting shot, sometimes up to nine times, in my back. I watched myself get shot, over and over, night after night. I was shocked by the new reality settling into my subconscious about the delusional tagged worth of my life in the country I called home.
The day of the the acquittal, you could hear a pin drop. My usual roar of a timeline grew silent for a hair of a moment. I remember it felt like time had slowed down and then just as quickly as the silence had come, it folded in on itself and outrage flamed. That night bred a rage that I had never seen before amongst my peers. I remember clearly the moment a lot of my generation became radicalized.
If I can dream up the most inhumane and torturous act on a Tuesday afternoon while sitting in Jenelle’s Los Angeles courtyard, then so can a poor white man with only enough assets for one enslaved person— worth around 500 USD back in the 1700’s.2 He is extremely dissatisfied with the position he holds in a world that he has been told is owed to him. The enslaved person in turn feels the backlash of white mediocrity and unhappiness on his flesh. He is cooked with iron bars, whipped when the master stubs his toe on his own iron rod and treated as a pet for the masters sexual appetite. He lives 40 years in a room that can only be entered and left through the master bedroom. There are a million more stories like this and a million more in the deeper neck of the woods, more insular, more terrifying and sure to be, more grotesque.
We could honor the ones before us for lifetimes
All the funerals have shown me that light always follow but first you have to walk toward the casket of your loved ones and through the sheets of black, you have to face the darkness before you are touched by the exquisite compromise of living after loss. We have to withstand our own unimaginable chasms and assign our own meaning to the period of excruciating deliverance and hope that is sure to follow.
Simply put, there is no resolve, only the unraveling.
I do understand that it’s all a circle and your mother shouldn’t have ever left you vulnerable like that, as her mother should have never left her vulnerable like that. I know a lot of the hurt you lashed out at me begins with her lacking. I hope, by now, she has taken the time to see the inside of your apartment as you both have a late lunch.
Nonetheless, we all have things that make us feel like a drop of God’s Wrath. But, we are getting Older Now & we’ve got to kneel on our bare knees with offerings of frankincense and myrrh by the feet of our victims when we wake up from the nauseating microcosm of chattel legacy this reality affords us. Of all the gifts we can give the ones we harm, I most want to see the gift of deep remorse, of fervent empathy in place of defensiveness - even when it might not change a thing.
Sometimes, our remorse , our apologies, our blood-clot tear falls in 1 Los Angeles hotels - might not change a thing to the lives we rupture but this dissertation hones in on the imagined transformations it just might if the way we abuse one other is at least brought up at our dinner tables, on our porches, in our one-room-white churches and by the graves of our great grandmothers and late brothers and sisters.
It might not change a thing but our children will be better for it. I’m taking these photos, recording these songs, timekeeping and archiving these moments for my unborn kids.
and for yours, too.
This is not an roll out - it’s a thesis. It’s a look at what it could be, what it is and most of all, acknowledgment of what some will claim, never was.
Distance tends to bring clarity to love crimes.
bell said abuse cannot coexist with love.
Many of our connections don’t constitute love for me anymore but it was all the while still so important for this archive of work to be birthed.
Here is the breath.
Here is my interpretation
Here are the makings that helped me make sense of the years 2020-2023.
I couldn’t have done it without you.
With love -
always,
TWEAKS
TWEAKS is a multidisciplinary artist with a concentration in sound design, writing and directorial work. Their practice is grounded in a constant exploration sprouting from their love of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. They are currently studying to get their MS in Regenerative Science with special emphasis on combating racist environmental policy-making in the global south. TWEAKS is based in South Florida with their 15-year-old childhood dog, Ziggy and their Kitten, Raven Chadwick Black bear Onyx.
The Unfungible Flow of Liquid Blackness by R.A Judy
The Unfungible Flow of Liquid Blackness by R.A Judy