This That Life Beyond Your Own Life

I am not supposed to exist. I carry death around in my body like a condemnation. But I do live. The bee flies. There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it.

—Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

And there are stars, but none of you, to spare.

—June Jordan, "Sunflower Sonnet Number Two"

As a boy, my favorite part of Sunday morning service was watching congregants take flight. Watching them laugh. Watching them dance, and fall, and sprint, as if weightless, or jet-propelled, down each aisle. My father was a deacon back then, my mother the head of Vacation Bible School, my older sister, a resident celebrity in the alto section. And though my musical talents were dubious at best, I too had a Messiah Baptist Church claim to fame: the recitation of memory verses. For those that might be unfamiliar with this practice, it usually involves the children's ministry, and can take place at any point between the invocation and benediction. The rest is essentially what it sounds like: one by one, young people would come forth and perform a passage from the biblical canon, oft times a text they had practiced with friends and family long beforehand. One after another, we proclaimed our verses with varying levels of clarity and conviction, our Sunday School teachers standing close by, their nylon hats resplendent and shimmering, red leather-bound bibles in hand in case of emergency.

It was thusly that I came to know the 4th and 5th verses of the King James Version of the 30th Psalm by heart, their central claims a kind of guiding ethos within walls of that sanctuary, my childhood home, and countless other would-be refuges beyond their borders. It reads:

Sing unto the Lord, O ye saints of his, and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness. For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

(Psalm 30:4–5)

Then, as now, I am captivated by the broader set of questions this passage calls to the fore. Not in the least because, even in the midst of our current, secular modernity, we nonetheless hear varying versions of just this sort of moral imperative or affirmation on a regular basis. We are told that joy and sorrow are mostly matters of temporality, that suffering of all sorts can be assuaged, or altogether eradicated, by some combination of healthy diet, exercise, and positive thinking, but most of all, by patience. By forgetting. If one is committed to living well, to embracing The Good Life and all it has to offer, then there are, of course, limits to mourning. We must look forward, after all. We must move on.

Nonetheless, I am led to wonder what happens when we linger too long with the second verse's first clause here, when we dare to remain surrounded by the expansive blackness of night, and keep daylight at arm's length. What does such tarrying produce, or make possible? What radical ways of organizing human life might take hold in the darkness? Put differently, what happens when we imagine a joy that does not exist in contradistinction to mourning, or death, or despair, but rather has those ostensibly negative effects built right into it? Might the shape and tenor of a darker joy, a black joy, resemble just such a vision?

Along these lines, this Special Issue of Callaloo takes up elegy as its central theme, and takes flight from the premise that we need a new, more robust language for the process of rendering in language black death and dying, black life, black living, and whatever modes of being and becoming might persist in-between. The choice of the term elegy here is meant to reflect both a special emphasis of the role of poetry in this larger literary, social, and political endeavor, but also to highlight, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge once did, that elegy is an instrument best employed when "sorrow and love" are one...