An Antidote to Antisociality: Root-Truths in the Spirit of Audre Lorde

The most devout disciples of African diaspora studies can testify not only to the profound intimacy between Black pleasure and Black peril, but also to the danger of an uprooting dichotomy between life and death implicit in this separation. It is no new revelation to many of us anguished and inspired by the pain and possibility of Black life and Black death that the two are never mutually exclusive for the majority of African descended people globally. Lives lived in relationship not only to death as ever possible, but also to the dead as ever present, cannot fathom the barren secular presumption that death is a finality any more than they might misrecognize birth as a beginning. Neither is a fixed point except in an antireligious half-light; both are transitions of the spirit into and out of the flesh that remind us that life and death, like pleasure and pain, are intricate layers in the palimpsest of Black existence.

This ancient paleographic phenomenon of layering provides an apt metaphor for the ghostly cross-temporal simultaneity of the past, present, and future that draws together (at the very least) the pre-colonial, slavery and its afterlife, and the Afrofuture. Here, time's cyclical complexity defies the inadequacies of flesh-and-blood knowing as Caribbean lesbian feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander reminds us in her meditation on how respecting time as palimpsestic plants seeds for resolving other kinds of false dichotomies, such as those between flesh and spirit, pleasure and peril, life and death:

The idea of the "new" structured through the "old" scrambled, palimpsestic character of time, both jettisons the truncated distance of linear time and dislodges the impulse for incommensurability, which the ideology of distance creates. It thus rescrambles the "here and now" and the "then and there" to a "here and there" and a "then and now" and makes visible . . . the ideological traffic between and among formations that are otherwise positioned as dissimilar.¹

With this meta-temporal, meta-spatial, and meta-existential infrastructure in place—as it is throughout most of the African diaspora as Alexander consistently reminds us—it becomes difficult to prop up the one-sided contention that violence and death alone structure Black life, the rooting condition of which must be mourning. Certainly, violence, death, mourning, and the elaborate cultural rituals attendant to each across the African diaspora are part of the soil bed of Blackness, but always in the turmoil of this existence these rituals have been simultaneous celebrations of love and life.

Hopefully, for Black diaspora studies, the powerfully effective though minimalist proclamation that #BlackLivesMatter is not new news, but rather plants a weighty exclamation point for a flag hoisted to the long history of resistance to the Euro-American insistence on dehumanizing Blackness, on Blackness as antimatter, if you will. And yet to finally agree that all Black life does indeed matter is only a starting point for an intervention that reverberates with poet and musician Saul Williams's fixing question: "What the matter is? What's the matter?" Williams sings a warning anthem for any who might reduce the complex alchemy of Blackness to antimatter—in essence, dancing irreverently on our ancestors' ashes—without recognizing the long and seemingly easy perversion of Black materiality as an invitation into the vast metaphysical landscape that grows sustenance for people of African descent.² To say that all Black lives matter should also be to recognize that matter alone cannot suffice without an equal measure of the mystical.

In fact, the increasingly codependent antisocial (clinically depressive?) turns in queer theory and Black studies largely fail—though artfully so—to acknowledge Black queer value, not only in terms of economic and civic denials (or "deaths"), but also (and most importantly) in terms of the spiritual sociality that joins this life to the one after. A refusal of death's afterlife is one of the poisoned gifts of a sporogenous secularism in queer theory and Black studies that spreads the hushed epidemic of depression (and related psychotropic drug addictions) among Black (queer) academics in...