"Black Night Is Falling": The "Airy Poetics" of Some Performance

In his poem, "Properties," Ed Roberson offers a history of the world told through the journey of water into sky: "the verdant tropical mists' drip / tears gathering into the cold / bloody rivers of the atlantic / grinding ashore / captured into the plantations' white glacial field." And in the last stanza: "Black with the roads' dusts / the atmosphere, solid, on the ground / turns into a pool, the / ground's mirror / and picks up the sky again" (1995:82–83).¹

Rain. Tear. River. Ice. Stream. Sky.

The movement of mist, water's becoming air bespeaks a particular and general ambulation. The "bloody" Atlantic along with the "glacial" devastation wrought by the plantation traces the devastating course of antiblackness, from the breaking of life to the breaking of current. Stolen flesh and soil. An ecohistory of the middle passage, with whiteness glacializing every field into flesh, flesh into field.

Even still, the particular is undercut by the deregulated movement of the general; the thieved or privately shed tear moves the stream that bursts from the frozen wall into the air. The stars bear witness to the ethereal portrait engendered from that movement, all the while glistening as the celestial miracles that illuminate passage.

In some ways, Roberson's attention to the complex, atmospheric harboring of such "scenes of subjection" (Hartman 1997) offers another modality of thought that, following Timothy Choy's important work, contends with the "materiality of air and the density of our many human entanglements in airy matters" (2011:145). With Roberson and Choy, I wonder how such attention to the airy entanglements, water's after/life elucidates something about this question around the intersections of blackness, reproduction, and performance and does so by poeticizing an answer that only the sky can decipher.

To live within air is to be in common. A postaquatic commons. A pneumatic commons. Respiration is a choral practice; the interplay between oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide complexly threads the reproductive fates of oceans, trees, flesh, and cells together. We might say breathing is reproduction's ur-text.

To concede this elaborates most acutely Fred Moten's assertion that "antiblackness is antilife" (Kelley and Moten 2015). The long history of antiblackness as antilife moves from the terroristic middle passage to antireproductive eugenics projects to the ongoing (extra) legalized killing of black people by the state; all of which deeply bespeaks a mythic investment in breath's particular privatization. Eric Garner's last words, "I can't breathe," terribly, tragically reveals (once again) the lengths whiteness and propertied personhood will go in expunging blackness from a commons they mythically imagine they control.

Even still, the thing about breath is that it manages somehow to stay around. And what is more, as Choy (2011) writes, air "drifts" beyond the telos of the "human," wandering past the notion of life itself as beginning and ending with what Sylvia Wynter calls "biocentric" man (2003:267).

Ashon Crawley's deeply brilliant and beautiful recent work Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility speaks precisely to the perambulatory, para-ambulatory, earthly movements of "black pneuma," enfleshed breath (2016:38). His engagement with black Pentecostal preachers Dorinda Clark-Cole and Juandolyn Stokes's airy animation of an improvised syllable at the end of particular words—for example, Stokes's insertion of "vocables [what Crawley also calls 'impure appendages'] such as 'hah' and 'tuh'" at the end of each line of a sermon—indexes both the always-more-than-one quality of air and the way air's very performativity cuts against the various interdictions, the failed performatives, that terribly sustain whiteness's suffocating, earth-killing animation.² Following Choy and Crawley, air's reproductivity is larger than the individualized performances of inhalation and exhalation. We might say it unmoors reproduction from teleology. In other words, we do not know the shape one's exhalation takes, what and who are its expressions and conditions, the path it follows from ocean to tear to blossom, from one dying woman's last breath to the first wail of another. J. Kameron Carter and I (2016) have considered whether there's a...