Protest, Prayer

Abstract

Protest, Prayer Ashon T. Crawley (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution "dancing in one spot" by Ashon Crawley I can't breathe. Announced again. Return. Repetition. Grief. And what is protest but a solicitation, a plea, a desire? And what is protest but an insistence that otherwise is not only able to be enacted but can materially emerge in, and thus against, the normative world? And does, continually. And has emerged. And is emerging. Otherwise is the practice of breath and breathing. To breathe in an inhospitable place, in the context of settler colonialism and antiblack violence. To breathe inhospitable air and atmospheres. To breathe for black life, blackqueer possibility, is protest, is prayer. And to pray is to announce relationship. Relationship to and with, at the very least, one's breath. It is to make one's flesh implement, conduit, instrument, with hopes of a different kind of way to live and relate to one another. This American Life is antithetical to protest, to prayer. Though they might mythologize about la Niña, Pinta and Santa María, though they might wax [End Page 51] nostalgic about throwing boxed tea overboard ships as an act of dissidence, the American way of life has never been able to accommodate protest when it shows up and emerges from within black and indigenous and the various nonwhite strategies for living. I can't breathe. Announced again. Return. Repetition. Grief. And we are in a moment of intense protest, of intense prayer for otherwise than the normative world. There is no beginning to this resistance to white supremacy and its racial capitalism, its patriarchy, its cisheteronormativity. As soon as there was theft of land, of flesh, there was likewise resistance - protest and prayer - against such theft. But some might point to the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade as the most recent catalysts for struggling against the violence of policing, the violence of white supremacist organizing principles against our capacities to breathe, our being held captive by this regime of power and knowledge. I can't breathe. Announced again. Return. Repetition. Grief. And this particular moment against police violence is occurring against the backdrop of a world changing event, the pandemic, COVID-19. The stakes are clear because the danger is ever present. To gather in community breathing and sharing air when such breathing is the way the virus spreads, a virus that targets most emphatically though not only the lungs, is to enunciate the ways white supremacy targets the breath and breathing of black folks. We just wanna breathe. Breathe easy. Be easy. Live. What happens in protest, in prayer, is the practice of relation. Celebrate. I am thinking about the poetic form of black life and love, a form of breathing the word, the phrase, the stanza. Lucille Clifton is a guide. Won't you celebrate with me1, she questions. Celebration because white supremacy has done a lot to make whiteness a protected class but absolutely nothing about it seems joyful or celebratory. Look at the way they who are committed to white supremacy refuse masks, look at the way those committed to whiteness carry guns against people screaming Black Lives Matter as if this plea, this protest and prayer, is an attack. Fear. There is so much fear in white supremacy. And whiteness seems to be so much about squandering relation and sociality. Clifton's poem to me demonstrates sociality and relation—"won't YOU celebrate with me"—it is a call to together acknowledge the fact that white supremacy has not destroyed the joy she has with living. Shaped into a "kind [End Page 52] of life" but not one predicated on white supremacist logics, she celebrated a life that was also an outpouring, an unfolding into absolute possibility, absolute potential. We should learn from this outpouring. The poem is protest, is prayer. I can't breathe. Announced again. Return. Repetition. Grief. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy is capable of practicing harm but it cannot be nor produce nor practice a life of joy and celebration. It fails at its own attempt. There is an inventive capacity in black life that white supremacy cannot endure...