A Metonymy for Repair. Side B

11.

We see the solidarities forged between diasporic and continental Africans in resisting colonial rule and Apartheid, and providing asylum for revolutionaries targeted by the Western imperial core. But this kinship must not be taken as intact and continuous. This kinship was wounded in the capturing of people from Africa, in the slave ship and on the plantation.11.See W.E.B. Du Bois, The Negro American Family, Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1908. We understand the contingency of this kinship, as something made up and something dissolved, bound in an architecture of brutality, invaded by the notion of property relations.22.See Hortense J. Spillers, ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, Summer 1987, pp. 64–81. Hence an important inflection of the idea of race, of Blackness as a moment of racial solidarity, according to Saidiya Hartman, ‘was expressed in the language of kinship because it both evidenced the wound and attempted to heal it’.33.Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p. [6]. It was developed by those chained in the hold, the orphans, the exiles, and the progeny. Desire to heal, however, is not sufficient for reparation. But the attempts mark the centuries between the inception of modernity and now, the perpetual after of histories, both recorded and felt, of feverish movements of Black people across the Atlantic ‘not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship’.44.Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso, 1993, p. [197].

12.

The global project of antiblackness still operates, and interferes with our attempts at repair, its fingerprints everywhere in the wake, with us even as we participate in wake work. Christina Sharpe braids the connotations of the wake, among other things, as the recoil of a gun, the track of the ship, the consciousness of Blackness in the afterlives of slavery, the hold, and extends it to the weather of the sky and the sea.

13.

The weather is singularity, a distorting event from which a total environment of abjection issues. The weather produces the Black being, the agent buried under the archives, as the non-citizen. We exceed the violence that overrepresents itself in our horizons, therefore, the weather here is both ‘disaster and possibility’,55.Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016, p. [94]. that is, if we are lucky. Or not. We are unlucky, have been unlucky, we (that is both part and crowd) are in bad weather, in the wake of the disaster, but the predictably unpredictable transformations of the disaster is our possibility. We are unlucky, escaping and constrained by the sentence of history on both sides of the Atlantic and beneath. In a weather constituted and constructed to keep breath out of Black bodies, Sharpe asks how to name the returning and retaining of breath in the Black body? She finds the word: aspiration, ‘a violent and life-saving mode’, a praxis of the wake: a hot, moist breath in the lungs.66.Ibid., p. [81].

14.

Like the wake, repair follows: its position, or pre-position, is posterior. After something is damaged, it can be repaired. We have learned this in the body. Repair is response. There is something incomplete in its separation from context. When tissue breaks, the body summons inflammation, the pools of blood, the rising warmth. The cardinal sign of calor77.Bryan Oronsky, Scott Caroen and Tony Reid, ‘What Exactly Is Inflammation (and What Is It Not?)’, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, vol. 23, no. 23, 2022, article 14905, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. signals repair or an attempt at it. In narrow injury the site can be bounded with fluid. The inflammation is confined. But what happens when the wound is everywhere? When the wound is a singularity,88.Sharpe, In the Wake. disturbing the coordinates by which after and before are kept separate and distinct and one can now finally move past the past? When the before collapses under the after and the trauma condenses into a singularity? All who survive it, do so in an after, in the wake, sacrificing parts of themselves to the centripetal force of its violence.

15.

The lynched Black body has endured its own metonymies.

16.

Metaphor is the ‘trope of resemblance par excellence’,99.Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello), University of Toronto Press, 1977 [1975], p. (205). therefore it is a process that works by full assurance of kinship. Two likes can replace each other without an issue. Metaphor is an overconfident simile, assimilating resemblance to identity. It operates in the provinces of the same, the self, of reflections. Metonymy instead operates like a motley crew on a pirate ship: contingency, association, contiguity.1010.See Roman Jakobson, ‘Results of a Joint Conference of Anthropologists and Linguists’, Selected Writings, Vol. II, Word and Language, The Hague: Mouton, 1971, p. 554ff. First published in Results of the Conference of Anthropologists and Linguists, Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1953. The metaphor presupposes the integrity of the present and the beyond the present, in the absence which is still present because of the persistence of the feeling of kinship, of likeness. It carries meaning and sense over the borders of semantics like a favoured citizen carrying contraband across a militarized national border. Just like that. Other mobile bodies and histories, alterized, reduced, humiliated at the border, the motley crew, must be strategic. They must memorize their changed names1111.See Online Etymology Dictionary, ‘Metonymy’ (meaning ‘change of name’), etymonline.com. because one could not trust resemblance. They are confronted with their dissimilarity at each turn except their togethernesses, the utter factuality of their co-presences. So they hold on to what is near, at hand, at foot. Whatever kinship, whatever likenesses, they forge it in this contact. And its fictive nature will always show, like a scar.

The Black historian, the Black woman in the archives, must reckon with the shards, the rare instances of full names and identities. She will countenance a massive world of disfigurement as will frustrate any attempt at translation. Figuring, figures of language, they are useless with this scale of dislocations. She returns from her hard-work in pieces, her sack filled with traces, avatars without originals, hints, vast nothingnesses. Metaphor is unsuited to wake work. There is nothing like that.

17.

The Middle Passage did not carry all its human cargo to term or port. The journey was a lossy transmission. As a metaphor,1212.Online Etymology Dictionary, ‘Metaphor – Etymology, Origin & Meaning’, etymonline.com. the ship is an incontinent, fraudulently abortifacient vessel. What kind of repair might the Black body attempt? Can we imagine a repair that holds dear to our chest a restoration to wholeness? That attempts repatriation to natal geographies? And yet we stumble on the impossibility of these aspirations.

18.

We who are one and crowd are beside ourselves and each other in the hold and wake. The origin is everywhere and nowhere and the horizon only recedes farther. We look near, and repair, turning part towards part, reknitting net knot to net knot, we repair, pairing and pairing, we repair. At the level of the nearest surviving bit between us, the parts that remain of the irrecoverably lost in the intermittent heat and cool of the Atlantic, the fragments that arrived, in bodies alive as hydrogen, like oxygen,1313.Dionne Brand, ‘Verso 55’, The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2018. we sit in the ardour of the wake, we alloy, we stitch, we sit together, a motley, marked crew, narrowing the gulfs that frustrate our metonymies.

19.

Toni Morrison, posed a question from the audience during an interview session with Juan Williams, a question about how to survive whole in a world of perpetual victimhood, replied:

… that is a nice, big, fat, eastern, western philosophical question about how you get through. Sometimes you don’t survive whole. You just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt.1414.‘A Conversation Between Toni Morrison & Frank McCourt’, Connecticut Forum, The Bushnell, Hartford, CT, 4 May 2001, video, 1:36:50, youtube.com.

20.

If one reads the oceanic heat transfer, the constriction and slackening of the thermohaline belt alongside the diasporic crisscrossing currents of the Black Atlantic – those human flows, return-movements and intellectual circulations between Africa and the African diaspora, that tension and sag – then the gyres, in their slow revolutions, in their accumulation of fragments and particles and stresses and currents, can be read as an attempt at writing new conditions for Black weather, however fragile: an attempt at a partial repair.