In the Wake  On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe. 
You can read the first chapter where Christina Sharpe introduces the notion of the wake and its 'multiple registers'  by clicking on the image of the book.   Sharpe describes the aftermath, the afterlives of enslavement, the past that is not the past.  

Articulating it :  “I’ve been trying to articulate a method of encountering a past that is not past. A method 
along the lines of a sitting with, a gathering, and a tracking of phenomena that 
disproportionately and devastatingly affect Black peoples any and everywhere we are.” 
Mourning:  “How does one mourn the interminable event? Just as wake work troubles mourning, so 
too do the wake and wake work trouble the ways most museums and memorials take up 
trauma and memory.” 
Living it (consciously): “We might continue to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery…to survive (and 
more) the afterlife of property. In short I, mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and 
rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives. 
In the Wake
In Christina Sharpe’s work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, she locates herself – and all of us – within the wake of slavery. Sharpe explores, using multiple registers of the wake, Black lives as the unfolding afterlives of slavery. Having considered the ongoing abjection and exclusion of blackness, she proposes thought itself as an act of care. Being able to think ‘the wake’ as an act of care has supported a deepening of my work as therapist and teacher. Being able to ask questions about the different locations and positions that we occupy within the wake has created space within which we can – affectively and effectively – address the past-that-is-not-past. We might assume that therapy acknowledges the importance of the past, and how it manifests in the present, but blackness, and slavery’s afterlives, test this assumption. If not, it would not be possible to hear it said that ‘things would be better if people could get over slavery’ or that ‘racism will disappear if we stop talking about race.’ Therapists are not alone in being discomfited by black presence, but the refusal to explore this more fully becomes a hill on which therapeutic practice goes to die.  Our best efforts to position slavery in the past are doomed because we cannot get over that within which we still exist. We exist within black, brown (and white) bodies. Race is a construct without any biological basis but its impact is real. Being a black or brown body means carrying the past in our skin – literally signalling the past as present with our own presence. The extent to which we are able to express and be with these realities in therapeutic relationships is the extent to which those relationships can be therapeutic. What capacity do I/you/we have for establishing a therapeutic frame that acknowledges the Wake, and allows navigation of the-past-that-is-not-past’?

Sharpe suggests looking to;
“forms of expressive culture that do not seek to explain or resolve the question of this exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness…”

We cannot assimilate, include or ‘civil right’ ourselves out of the Wake. Sharpe asks about survival – how we do it and how art and literature mediate it. She tells of her mother bringing joy into the house ‘to make liveable all that was unliveable there’. Her words open spaces of imagination in me. I imagine black history month bringing joy by way of imagination; representing a space to explore the poetic and work across disciplines, and blend genres; I imagine spaces to write about writing as a therapeutic pathway…

A  piece from Dionne Brand - Verso 55

"When I finally arrived at the door of no return, there was an official there, a guide who was either a man in his ordinary life or an idiot or a dissembler. But even if he was a man in his ordinary life or an idiot or a dissembler, he was authoritative. Exhausted violet, the clerk interjects. Yes he was says the author, violet snares. For some strange reason he wanted to control the story. Violet files. Violet chemistry. Violet unction. It was December, we had brought a bottle of rum, some ancient ritual we remembered from nowhere and no one. We stepped one behind the other as usual. The castle was huge, opulent, a going concern in its time. We went like pilgrims. You were pilgrims. We were pilgrims. This is the holiest we ever were. Our gods were in the holding cells. We awakened our gods and we left them there, because we never needed gods again.
We did not have wicked gods so they understood. They lay in their corners, on their disintegrated floors, they lay on their wall of skin dust. They stood when we entered, happy to see us. Our guide said, this was the prison cell for the men, this was the prison cell for the women. I wanted to strangle the guide as if he were the original guide. It took all my will. Yet in the rooms the guide was irrelevant, the gods woke up and we felt pity for them, and affection and love; they felt happy for us, we were still alive. Yes, we are still alive we said. And we had returned to thank them. You are still alive, they said. Yes we are still alive. They looked at us like violet; like violet teas they drank us. We said here we are. They said, you are still alive. We said, yes, yes we are still alive. How lemon, they said, how blue like fortune. We took the bottle of rum from our veins, we washed their faces. We were pilgrims, they were gods. We sewed the rim of their skins with cotton. This is what we had. They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen". 

We all stood there for some infinite time. We did weep, but that is nothing in comparison.
Dionne Brand - from p.17 of In The Wake - On Blackness & Being by Christina Sharpe.



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