"I wanted to stay in the wake to sound an ordinary note of care".
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake
Inspired by: "The Nap Ministry was founded in 2016 by Tricia Hersey and is an organization that examines the liberating power of naps. We engage with the power of performance art, site-specific installations, and community organizing to install sacred and safe spaces for the community to rest together. We facilitate immersive workshops and curate performance art that examines rest as a radical tool for community healing. We believe rest is a form of resistance and name sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue".
If we think of care and of making care as practice, as everyday practice, as what makes moments of experience of self and of self with other and within the therapeutic relationship. It seems that care as Keguro Macharia points to is constructed as lesser, devalued yet is fundamental to black feminist theorising and practice.
"Care pays attention to how we are known to ourselves and to each other. Care lingers at the ordinary: notices it, names it, creates it, inhabits it, pursues it, practices it.
There might be something theoretically uninteresting about care. It is feminized work, so devalued. It is also, frequently, tedious, repetitive, unglamorous work: feeding the vulnerable, cleaning up shit and puke, washing bedpans, changing nappies, cooking, cleaning, medicating. Repeat. And repeat".
- black (beyond negation) by Keguro Macharia
So care is revolutionary given it's repudiation within a neo-liberal, white supremacist, patriarchal hegemony.
"In our current moment, care and death are entangled in the black feminist theoretical imagination. Christina Sharpe, for example, treats care as fundamental to the concept of 'wake work' that she develops. For Sharpe, wake work is an analytic about survival and death, and their inextricable link. It captures a mode of cultural production, creative praxis, and daily practice that attends to how “we are Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected,” and to how we live, survive, imagine, dream, and do in the midst of the afterlives of slavery and the persistence of racial Violence. She writes, “I want to think ‘Care’ as a problem for thought. I want to think care in the wake as a problem for thinking and of and for Black non/being in the world. Put another way, . . . [this] is a work that insists and performs that thinking needs care (‘all thought is Black thought’) and that thinking and care need to stay in the wake.” For Sharpe, care performs myriad forms of work: it is away of “defending the dead,” a strategy of thinking through black death and our endless proximity to it (or perhaps the fact that we reside in it), and a tool for theorizing “Black non/being in the world. Care is a practice for tending to what has already been lost and what might be lost, a political tool for the maintenance of self and collective, that is always oppositional to the the state (something I will return to in the book’s fourth chapter). It is thus a practice of being deeply attuned to historical and ongoing violence, and to living in the midst of it, a strategy of examining black life and the structures that seek to constrain that life".
Jennifer Nash - Black Feminism Reimagined: p.79