Author: shafaqsohail

A Story of Love

The black radical tradition is a story and a journey of love. 

The story begins with individuals reduced to bare lives and nothingness. It sows seeds of love with an urge to recognize their existence and redeem their oppressed pasts; it acknowledges their damage, it measures their scars. 

How deep is the scar, it asks? 

Deep. Deep and so infectious that it requires the tyrant to be cured along with the victim if it is to be truly healed. The love is truly radical, for it recognizes the humanity of the oppressed AND the oppressor, and in doing so, it seeks to heal the tyrant and tends to the wretched. 

Finally, in stretching its hold in order to accommodate previously denied ways of being, it promises an inclusive (F)uture that renders possible the existence of multiple future(s).

This love is that of Fanon, so radical that it demands a bigger, more flexible measure to hold the entire humanity in its embrace. 

Like that of Du Bois, it travels back in time to pay its respects to those who lived lonely lives and died forgotten deaths. 

Haartman’s love, that aches to belong to a place that can be called home. 

Hooks’ love, critical but never disdainful- a love that reminds us all of our collective potential to be better, to constantly do better.

Malcolm’s love, a love truly urgent but also uncompromising.

It is a love also like Ali’s. One that reminds us to claim our identity and our names.

To make them say our names.  

Say my name. 

Say my name.

Say it till they get it right.

A love like Anzaldua’s. It demands to be acknowledged, does not beg for it. 

Perhaps also like Morrison’s, for it urges us to bear witness for those who can’t bear witness for themselves.   

Audre Lorde’s love, one that teaches us that incomplete love is no love at all, for much like oppression, there can be no hierarchy of love.

MLK’s love. A love truly vulnerable. A love truly brave. A love that strives to find a home in the ‘not yet’, in perhaps the ‘never will be’ and yet still continues to strive. To live. And to fight. 

It is a love that is revolutionary, for it refuses to settle for scraps. It demands more and better from the present to ensure a better tomorrow.

But it is also kind, gentle and selfless, since it does not want to leave anyone behind. 

It is vulnerable. It recognizes the limited resources we have to redeem our fractured pasts. But it also admits that it is this limitation that necessitates our collective effort, for our humanity is all we have and as long as our humanity is not exclusionary and vengeful, it is enough.

It is exemplary love, for it urges us to lead lives that are reflective of our values, not our conditions. Of our dreams, not our pasts. 

Black radical tradition, then, is a story of a love born out of our mutual vulnerability, unifying us all in our shared humanity. And a story that lives on through the hope of our reunion, at the rendezvous of victory. 

Of Obeah Histories and Resistances

In discussing activists and thinkers like Fanon, Césaire and Memmi, the focus of our course has primarily been upon colonized intellectuals. Our understanding of their particular cultural contexts has consequently been informed through their relations and positions vis-à-vis these resources. I intend to move away from colonized intellectuals as a primary reference to the lives and experiences of the colonized masses and their reliance upon culture and religion as a means to resist their physical and psychic domination. 

The aim of this project will thereby be to study how the very sites of colonial domination, for instance cultural/social institutions, also become the means of resistance. In employing religion and tradition as tools of defiance, the enslaved deny the accusations of calcification and stagnancy and instead reveal these institutions to be dynamic and adaptive in nature.

The aforementioned analysis will be traced through the study of Obeah practices. Obeah, as a religious practice had its roots in West African religions and was a synthesis of one’s natural, supernatural and social realms. Practitioners derived legitimacy through their access to and contact with spirits and an intricate knowledge of herbs and medicines that could cure or poison its recipients. Its reliance upon spirituality and nature as means of authority to heal, protect, and often condemn people redeemed a sense of authority in the enslaved populations and thus challenged the domination of the colonizers over them. Moreover, men and women of authority also had a pivotal role in organizing rebellions and garnering support through the proclamation of invincibility as a result of taking the oath.

In discussing direct physical combat, such as the Tacky Rebellion of 1760 fought under the command of an Obeah woman, Queen Nanny, as well as everyday resistances enabled through Obeah beliefs, like reproductive control and social capital for Obeah-women otherwise denied under patriarchal arrangements, I will highlight the adaptive nature of enslaved communities to negotiate power relations with their salve-masters. This stance will further be supported through the ability of enslaved communities to manipulate legislations that criminalize their religious practices. 

Finally, my project is intended to take the shape of photomontages accompanied by a write-up. Photomontage was first employed as a tool of expressing political dissent under Dadaism (1915) and later Surrealism. Since I aim to highlight the resistances posed by enslaved groups to their domination, I believe montages to be a relevant art form that may complement the nature of my project.