Darling readers, just sending a reminder that Paper Crowns, starts June 26 and is now enrolling. This 5 week deep dive into the tarot court cards see in their reflection evidence of existence, of being, of presence. We will be readers as visual activists and confront how the image is construct to exalt some, while restricting, regulating and repressing others. Acquaint yourself with the history of portraiture and inscribe yourself into the archive.
“In every slave society, slave owners attempted to eradicate the slave’s memory, that is, to erase all the evidence of an existence before slavery. This was as true in Africa as in the Americas. A slave without a past had no life to avenge. No time was wasted yearning for home, no recollections of a distant country slowed her down as she tilled the soil, no image of her mother came to mind when she looked into the face of her child. The pain of all she lost did not rattle in her chest and make it feel tight. The absentminded posed no menace. Yet more than guns, shackles, and whips were required to obliterate the past. Lordship and bondage required sorcery too…It was one thing to be a stranger in a strange land, and an entirely worse state to be a stranger to yourself.”1
If the slave is the one who has lost their mother, what tales must be twice-told to rescue their castaway memory, adrift for generations in the wake of the ones taken across the waters? Surely there is an herb, a ritual bath, a prayerful incantation that can bring our mother to port. For all the mythic waters of forced forgetting where are the healing memory waters of Mnemosyne? Where could we find a face for this watery goddess in a hue that conjures home?
Certainly, she would be some Queen of Cups to unobstruct the entrances to the past and take the shriveled, dehydrated time of only today and return it to the rivers of runaways. These ones who can retrace a path back to their origins are the ones who never cease to loot the futurity of their freedom.
Yes, this Queen of Cups could gather your kin and reconsecrate the blessings of your innate spiritual protection. No longer ignorant of your lineage, you’d have a bustling court to appeal for intercession. With a rich recall you’d reconstruct shrines and altars to petition water deities, ancestral spirits and divine guardians and no more would you be defenseless. You’d be your mother’s child, because you’d bless the reverberating memory of her name.
Take to her your questions of belonging. If, as Dereck Walcott directs, we ask the sea about our origins, then we will find blood in the water.
We will work against occult practices that trick or bewitch us into forgetting that the ocean is a metonymic history of the Atlantic slave trade. Primordial memory is hazy, dilating feverishly on the red horizon. Our identity fluctuates. We have a home and then we don’t. We were once sovereign, but now no matter what shore we reach we wade through rejection. Only in the sea do we see a reflection of ourselves.
The ocean is a constant of political and conceptual creativity, especially true in Caribbean philosophy, so thinking with and from a Black diasporic space of memory between the Caribbean and the Atlantic we find the Queen of Cups at the shore where these waters converge.
She expands our oceanic thinking, recovers our water-logged memory with a tidalectic2 that mirrors the rhythmic fluctuations of waves. Tidalectics is unbound by a terrestrial “obsession for fixity, assuredness, and appropriation,”3 so that in the crisis of our world that is like a tidal wave, we can imagine with and beyond the tide, and look for escape that is like turning the possibility of an opening to the sea.
Being so intimate with liquidity, she knows the wet ways bodies merge with other bodies. At the sea’s edge she contends with continental thinking. She is a diviner attending the blurry boundary between human and non-human worlds. She is a being dedicated to being in flux, offering a certain provocative social poiesis with her range of readings and dynamic interpretations.
Obviously, the west’s history of ideas is a masculinized one and as buoyant as the sea may make a body it doesn’t exactly unmoor the history of bodies being gendered or racialized. So 70% water ain’t worth shit in the biology of human bodies when we’ve been dragged across, drowned, submerged and sunken in the swamps of the putrid sorrow of being made slave.
The sea has historically been feminized with its vast fluidity. Dominant forms of masculine identity have been presumed to possess a solidity and objectivity which require a female gendering of ship and sea so that the homosocial community of a contained group of male travelers, associated with the perpetual mobility of travel, spermatic sea-men, are able to maintain a heterosexual spatial logic. Men get naturalized to be mobile, voyaging across feminized sea-space but women are physically and culturally left behind, stranded, sidelined. Ironically masculinized nomads broker their motility with the invocation of feminized flows, regenerative fluid circulations. But the feminine, as an organizing concept, and as subjects, are then rendered so profoundly localized that they register symbolic and physical stasis.4 Here read the Four of Cups, the Moon’s distilled decan in Cancer, to connect stasis with death. If men have movement, then they have life.
Thus, so as to not be left or reinscribed within a heteropatriarchal imaginary it is vital that the Queen of Cups guides us toward Black Feminist Caribbean thought. Caribbean, Black, Asian, lesbian, woman, New York City resident, as well as a Jamaican national, spoken-word poet Staceyann Chin rhapsodizes:
Women everywhere are rising like an angry tide, our collective rivers are full from the tears of all the women, all of us who are sick and tired of weeping, we are now roaring like an ocean, come back to take back what was carried away by the brutality of men without my permission.
Touch me one more motherfucking time and see what happens. This time your apologies will no longer shield you from retribution.
Every act of breaking and entering, every unwanted fluid that was ever emptied into our already full cup will be made public, will be made public, will be made public5…
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