- The Lonely Letters by Ashon T. Crawley
Ashon Crawley’s ground-breaking work, The Lonely Letters, is an exercise in “thinking with” Black life, or, to be more specific, the “lifeworlds of Blackpentecostals” (10). According to Crawley, Black life offers an “alternative to” (142) Western epistemology and its particular genre of the human being, the individual and rational subject (27–28). The Lonely Letters, in thinking through and with Black life, challenges the reader to (re)imagine religion, mysticism, epistemology, performance, and the possibility of life together otherwise.
The text is composed of semiautobiographical letters divided into five sections—Breath3, Shouting3, Noise3, Tongues3, and Nothing3. The letters themselves are written between the characters A and Moth. Moth is a composite character of lovers and friends throughout A’s life; A is based on Crawley’s own adult life. Indicative of the title, Crawley calls the letters an “autobiography of loneliness,” reflective of his experience of being a thirty-nine-year-old who had yet to fulfill his desire for a long-term romantic partnership (6). However, this text is not simply one individual’s lament of his lack of romantic connections, but Crawley’s loneliness speaks to the trauma of being rejected by one’s community, particularly one’s religious community, by embracing a blackqueer life (7). Therefore, these questions drive Crawley’s project: “What happens when blackqueerness is what one experiences as connecting to others, but living such a life is what creates or occasions the distancing metaphorically and materially felt from family, friends, religious communities? What is that but loneliness of and from and in the desire for social worlds, for sociality? And can anything be made in the distance, at the border, in the margins? This distance marks limit, but limit marks occasion or, as Nahum Chandler would say, possibility” (7). In asking “can anything be made” at the border/limit produced by this experience of abandonment, Crawley is gesturing toward a possibility. That possibility, which serves as the connective thread of the text, is none other than a mysticism otherwise, a Black mysticism, reflective of an “abiding connection with one another and the creaturely world” (91).
However, before engaging Crawley’s mysticism, it is important to note that the whole of The Lonely Letters is permeated with a particular Blackpentecostal ethos that reflects Crawley’s Blackpentecostal past (which is in fact, despite [End Page 132] his having left the church, his Blackpentecostal present). Crawley states: “I am still trying to discover something about the lifeworlds of Blackpentecostals and The Lonely Letters gives another occasion for such a thinking with” (6). One must be careful not to misunderstand Crawley’s use of the term “Blackpentecostal,” assuming that he is only referring to the movement that begins with William Seymour in 1906. For Crawley, Blackpentecostalism is an epistemology, an epistemology otherwise, one that rejects Western epistemology’s attempt to radically separate the zone of “thought” from that of “feeling.” Blackpentecostal epistemology is a matter of feeling, “not against thought, but feeling as thought” (37).
This alternative epistemology grounds A’s/Crawley’s examination of mysticism. Rather than engaging the major figures of Western mysticism, A thinks through mysticism in asking questions about how these early traditions bespeak the problem of Western epistemology. Crawley gives special attention to the practice of “renunciation” in Western mysticism, that common practice of rejecting the body and sociality with the goal of cultivating a deeper relationship with the divine (91–92). A/Crawley argues that in early mystics’ attempts at renouncing sociality and the body, they were attempting to create the “the individual . . . the self . . . the subject,” not unlike the individual subject that would mark Western epistemology (22–23). This singular self, in “vertical relationship with god” (23), views the social/relationality as an impediment to the individual’s creation of themself as an “enclosed subject” (23, 25).
Scholars of Africana religion should take heed of the way A/Crawley seeks to imagine mysticism otherwise, a mysticism of radical connection one to another (91). A/Crawley...