J. Kameron Carter with a poetic commentary on the Charleston tragedy
The Hold, or, Charleston USA
(A Poem for the Emanuel 9)
there’s ludic limbo in the hold, the limbo’ed limbering of a form of life that though held up —
disembarked in dispossession: a slave market’s violent unrest
shot at the mother church: amniotic leakage of oceanic waters
spattered blood in bible study: charleston’s (no, the USA is) an auction block;
a flag’s half-staffed melancholic salute: the weary, weary postracial blues
denmark (vesey, i mean) is another country: ante-american feeling from a churchical underground
branded with a “religious tattoo,” somewhere it was said: the cross & the lynching tree
— is nevertheless and primordially un/held.
(black) life can’t be killed.
behold the hold, be (a) hold; behold the held, be(ing)held up in holding onto
no.thingliness, while held in gentrified state holds. un/held life: seizures against the
state, release of what’s uncapturable and only asymptotically approachable; un/held
life: the light of darkness, illuminations of black interiority; un/held life: a
paratheological project, maybe it’s the projects; un/held life: slain (in the spirit)
because the deregulated spirituality of extra-ceremonial life was refused. we refuse
the refusal. dylann tried to slay it but though wounded it can’t be slain.
be.hold, held up in the hold, which is to say, suspended or upheld in un/held life: “held,”
that is, “but not had, there but not to be had,” sang the “new night choir,”
phonographic diaspora of flesh, motoring on in deregulated wandering from
town to town from charleston to baltimore and back. time travelers of an other
time. off beat tempo out of step with state time un/held in a phonographic hold,
held up in the négritude church. dis/believers sangin’, folks be chantin’ in
“churchical girth.” the “almost-there” crew head tossed-back in slow motion
instasy ecstatically balancing im/balanced dancing in modal drift toward an
other world at the end of time where time done timed out and so begins what
Césaire was talking about, “the only thing worth beginning: the end of the world
of course.”
be.hold therefore of another sort. ante-hold, i call it. anterior embrace, interior unction,
posterior caress to propertied-holding. improper property’s unsignifiable,
untrespassable self-holding (“you took something from us” but it still has us, ethereal
blackness it is): non-proprietary hugging, the unbinding “bond of an abatement,” it
was said at the alter.nate. blue fasa’s semi-weeping, semi-singing, ready-dancing,
ludic-living the practice of an outside-in slipped inside-out, the outer inside of an
inner outside exceeding state holds and most especially the hold that that south
carolinian cyclops (“you rape our women and you’re taking over our country. you have to go
. . .”) tried to guard, the hold of racialized subjection. that’s what identity’s about in
the american tradition, which the governing because proper and normative citizen,
having property in itself to have property in things and over others, crystallizes. it’s
an american storm, but only because there’s first a congregational (in)surge(nce) of
un/wet tears from a mother’s womb.
be.hold of another sort, i tell ya’. liturgical ante-hold, held up in having but not owning
un/held life, (“we welcomed you with open arms into our bible study…”). ecumenical
blackness is ecumenical sharing, target of a drone attack, an other i-maginary, an
other i-conomy, an other icon-onomics, an other i-mage, an other i: the remythified
flesh of i-insofars as we-insofars in fractured touching, it was said at an alter.nate
sanctum:
“Insofar as there / was an I it wasn’t hers we heard / her insinuate, of late begun to be / else- / where, the late one she’d one day be . . .”
but hold up for a second, ain’t that just the question? “What will blackness be” when it has
“no thumbs to hold on with?” And yet, not uptight, hold itself together, it must; be
with others, it does; “multiple and ‘many-voiced’,” it is; be.hold up, négritude held up
in barricaded ludic life, citadel of futurity on extraterritorial hold ambulating down a
ferguson street, in black study in charleston’s mother (emanuel) in the hold up on
lock down, waked up to its own wake that it’s in but not of ‘cause the wake holds a
harbored faith in ludic faithfulness to revolutionary feeling.
be.hold of another sort. between.life suspended in an extraceremonial hold up where
black churchicality precipitated an ek-klesial black out(sider)(ness), a fall out
provoking a shoot out to take out lawless lovers. outlaws holding out for an alter.nate
liturgy: a sanctuaried sanctum of the sanctified otherwise. (w)holiness in ossuarine
fragments makes me think about the blessing and the wound and the relationship
thereof, what i call négritude’s pre(in)comprehension, aka, the (black) mass(es).
convocation of un/held up property interrupted, partakers of an ante-rupted liturgy,
the queered communion of the unprepossessively possessed, a movement of
improper property at a baltimore CVS and in a charleston mother’s (emanuel’s)
womb. their serrated paraliturgy of parapossessivity sarah.nate.s me: “swing low . . .”
unsang the ensemble of self-possessed i-insofars and we-insofars, re-singing an
unsang sorrow song. blackness is a wounded love song of unencroachable
parapossession against dispossession, a ludic song of lewd statelessness sang
together by some life together refugees.
be.hold, Emanuel AME, un/held life in memoriam[†]
Cynthia Hurd, 54,
Susie Jackson, 87
Ethel Lance, 70
Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49
The Honorable Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41
Tywanza Sanders, 26
Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74
Rev. Sharonda Singleton, 45
Myra Thompson, 59
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[†] There are many spiritual “coauthors” of this poem with whom I’ve tried and continue to try to think through this latest in a serially ritual string of American, all too American violent and deadly obscenities. The perpetrator of the horror or the “storm” of 17 June 2015 at Emanuel AME Church of Charleston, SC may have been caught but what he represents remains afoot because it founds this nation. No pulling down of the confederate flag in South Carolina (an action I support) will change that. Another ceremony, Sylvia Wynter rightly said some years ago now, must be found.
References and allusions in the poem are to Sarah Jane Cervenak’s “Holding On: Para-Possessivity Against State Holds” (forthcoming); Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return the Native Land (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); James H. Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011); Nathaniel Mackey’s Bass Catherdral (New Directions, 2008) and Blue Fasa (New Directions, 2015); Fred Moten’s “there’s a religious tattooing” in hughson’s tavern (Leon Works, 2008) and In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); M. NourbeSe Philip, “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy” in She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Gynergy Books/Ragweed Press, 1989) and “Notanda” in Zong! (Wesleyan University Press, 2011).