Six Swords at Sea

Reading as Refuge

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“And those dwellers of the rooms who had no thoughts of visitors, could not know, but might imagine, that anything, any part, of them would survive the holding, the shipping, the water, and the weather, drink those visitors in like violet tea and lemon air.”¹ Christina Sharpe, In the Wake

Our Sea, Massimo Sestini, 2014

With tarot I am trying to make a small path through the wake. I paddle and I push and I brace. I want the reading to be a livable location, to make it a respite from the violence of the unlivable, lonely world we all endure. I want the beauty in the cards to be offered as a solace for the suffering soul.

In the queered temporalities of a tarot reading one observes a past that is not past. One sits with rupture, ongoing and historical. The phenomenological inquiry maintains a method that is unscientific. The reading is a gathering, a tracking. There’s that grief, there’s the sorrow, the terror, the breathless anxiety. Then that card collects a fragile faith, that one a weathered hope, this one a lionhearted longing.

Catastrophe is quotidian and so constantly are we capsized that only the most defiant amongst us dare to continue dreaming of refuge. But we all want a rescue boat. We are a people adrift. Communion is so far gone when fractured language fractures form more and more daily.

We wade through wave after wave after wave of remembering, forgetting, drowning, surviving. And water, as Gaston Bachelard says, is an element “which remembers the dead.”² So with a Six of Cups sensibility I wrote to you about the wake work of keeping watch with the dead. The cards can attend a mode of melancholia and mourning, attentive to the bereaved as they offer themselves as bridges, doorways and down-spiral stairways into crypts, and catacombs where the dead rest. A card on this altar assembles bones, blood and candle-light to consult the shadow of our own mortality. The card is a vigil.

But we cannot bring bodies back from a liquid grave. Christina Sharpe asks what is the wake work of grieving an interminable event? Well, the card that comes so clear to my mind is the Six of Swords.

Terra Volatile Tarot’s Six of Swords

Doesn’t it show being in diaspora? Isn’t it a mourning in motion? In some vessel, a handful of people attempt to cross a waterway that exceeds the limits of perception. They are clearly in the wake of wreckage.

Sharpe theorizes the wake as a conceptual frame for the ongoing unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery. She encourages us to widely consider the metaphor of the wake; it is the track left on the water’s surface by the path of a ship; the slave ship; it is a consequence; it is being in the line of flight and/ or sight; it is awakening; it is consciousnesses and it is a ritual process to sit with the dead and our relations to them.

“Living in / the wake of slavery is living ‘the afterlife of property’ and living the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb), in which the Black child inherits the non/ status, the non/ being of the mother. That inheritance of a non/ status is everywhere apparent now in the ongoing criminalization of Black women and children. Living in the wake on a global level means living the disastrous time and effects of continued marked migrations, Mediterranean and Caribbean disasters, trans-American and -African migration, structural adjustment imposed by the International Monetary Fund that continues imperialisms/ colonialisms, and more…Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence; living the historically and geographically dis/continuous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality in, and on, our bodies while even as that terror is visited on our bodies the realities of that terror are erased. Put another way, living in the wake means living in and with terror in that in much of what passes for public discourse about terror, we, Black people, become the carriers of terror, terror’s embodiment, and not the primary objects of terror’s multiple enactments; the ground of terror’s possibility globally.”³

Kara Walker, No World, 2010