Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

Abstract

Black scholars work with multimodal and interdisciplinary texts and ideas. If we read across black studies, from slave narratives to the present, we can observe that black creatives and intellectuals and organizers thread together the arts, the hard sciences, history, sociology, music, math, ecology, architecture, dance, economics, and more. In bringing together multiple sets of ideas, these thinkers and artists challenge the hierarchical organizing of knowledge. In some instances—as in Sylvia Wynter's work, as well as her analyses of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire—they pair the sciences and poetics. This pairing (what Sylvia Wynter calls bios-mythoi) asks that we think relationally about humanity and the figure of the human; this allows us to glean how the corporeal—the body—is not purely biological; the body, the very biologics of our flesh, is produced through story-and-with-physiology. Put otherwise, biology is narrated (we tell stories about what biology is, we tell and retell each other biology is natural) and stories are biologic (we feel stories, stories move us physiologically and affectively). This pairing, this simultaneity, challenges erroneous narratives such as “survival of the fittest” (and with that, intelligence measures, craniology, and so on), because it exposes how we narrativize the sciences (we make science what it is—biology is not purely biological because “purely biological” is a narrative account describing biology). Plus: We know this (e.g., race is socially produced). At the same time, the pairing, the simultaneity of biology and narration, displaces scientific racism without abandoning biology [this also challenges step-by-step ideas such as biology comes first, social production comes second, our social discourse is (third) applied to biology, and biology is therefore (fourth) denaturalized]. This simultaneity displaces and in fact shatters the idea that some people are more evolved than others because it messes with the teleological hierarchy of Darwinian (biocentric) thought while also honoring that we are flesh and blood and feeling (biological) beings. This is a rewriting of scientific knowledge that offers, at least momentarily, relief from prevailing systems of knowledge that rely on the racist (seemingly natural) hierarchical categorization of humans.m. nourbeSe philip enters this conversation in meaningful ways. philip offers us many many stories, poems, theories, that center science and scientific knowledge. From her work on “DNA molecules at the heart of all life” (from “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy,” 1997a) to the ecologies that move through her poetry cycle Zong! (2008), philip employs multimodal and interdisciplinary knowledge systems and interrupts teleological–biocentric–racist understandings of humanity. She does this through affixing biology to narrative and affixing narrative to biology. Her works with narratives of science are studied interrogations that explode the insufferable human wreckage that is, in part, enacted through the coloniality of scientific racism. Indeed, philip shows that poetry (narrative) has the capacity to, and does, condition the natural sciences—which is a direction both Aimé Césaire (1990) and Sylvia Wynter (Wynter and McKittrick 2015) ask us to think about (the latter through her analysis of Césaire as well as her unique concept of bios-mythoi, the former through his essay “Poetry and Knowledge”: Césaire 1990). In my reading, philip writes science as a brutal system of exclusion that opens up pathways for her to rewrite blackness outside scientific racism. Remember that her beautiful book of poems She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks cannot be read without pausing on and paying attention to dream-skin (“Dream-Skin,” in philip 1989, 32–34). I mean, think of it: dream-skin. What does that give us!? It poetically writes what we are as a species physiologically (flesh–water–keratinocytes–tissue), and this physiology (flesh–water–keratinocytes–tissue) requires and engenders a realm of unwakefulness or disassociation (the dream). We can take this pairing (dream-skin, unwakefulness-physiology) and tether it to neurobiology (dream, brainwaves, sleep, rest, respite) and other embodied processes that come with unwakefulness (and those interested can revisit Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and other works that discuss sleepy and unconscious (neurological–physiological) thoughts and emotions). This kind of complexity, the poetics of bios-mythois, unwrites or rewrites or rethinks enfleshment outside scientific racism because it cannot be entrapped by the overdetermining logics of race thinking and its attendant visual economy. Across her creative works and essays, philip theorizes–creates the suturing of biology (skin) and narrative (dream); she produces a poetic study of blackness without dwelling on the harmful scripts that animate biological determinism. Imagine that. Dream-skin. With this, philip's work and words have the capacity to move us; her interlocutors, her readers, her listeners, are invited to read, hear, and therefore affectively respond to her writing. In her work, in her poetry, we are not asked to passively consume the text. We are invited into the text, and as we inhabit the text we feel and respond to its aesthetics (form, sound, font, pause, stanza, sound, form, punctuation, stop). Notably, philip often asks that Zong! be read aloud and that multiple people participate and co-read the poetry cycle with her. Her insistence that we collaboratively live with, inhabit, speak, and tell the story of black loss does something to us physiologically—or at least it does something to me. It is a moment of difficult and relational storytelling, and it is a moment where the story, the poem, becomes, in Wynter's words, a new science of human discourse (from “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being” and elsewhere). Imagine that. Respite.“What is the frequency of these images?/Quiet.” (Campt 2017, 45). In her essay “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice,” Sylvia Wynter addresses how representations of blackness are expressed as a system of knowledge that denies black humanity (Wynter 1992b). She teases out the layers of aesthetics—high, low, public, communicative, cultivated, impure, pure, coded—to identify how blackness comes to be negatively marked within these layers and, as well, how some criticism of black cultural production shores up this negativity. The problem, Wynter argues, is the way representations of black people (captive, ostracized, high-risk, gunman-cum-drug dealer, poor, jobless) are read as verifying an a priori stable truth. Thus, normative and commonsense representations of black criminality and deviance and lewdness are understood to be natural and already existing biological expressions of blackness. A much more textured way of life is enunciated within and through black aesthetics, of course, but it is not always visible and is often undermined by negativity. The problem is, too, that the process of verification is profitable and self-replicating and comes to represent how the world (already, normally, always) feels about black people and representations of blackness. Wynter focuses on what she calls the psycho-affective field; this field pushes us to think not only about the proliferation of negative representations and misrepresentations of blackness, but also how we become psychically attached to, and invest in, this already-normally-always system of knowledge that cannot comprehend black humanity. Indeed, this system and our attachments to this system require the ongoing production of the less-than-human figure of the black because it functions to sustain raciological norms and inequities.What one learns from Wynter is that there is a tendency to describe and therefore come to affectively know blackness and representations of black people within the mathematizable terms of colonial and plantation violence; the tendency to describe, as I have suggested elsewhere, relies heavily on accounts of the subordinated and oppressed black body (McKittrick 2016, 6–18). Wynter thus draws attention to how describing black negativity affirms (affectively and empirically verifies) black subjugation and limits our imagination by foreclosing other ways of being. She develops what she calls a “deciphering practice”—which is a reading practice that considers multiple social realities and differential psycho-affective fields while also exposing the intense weight of our governing (affective-empirical-already-normal-always-descriptive-colonial) system of knowledge. A deciphering practice recognizes the intense weight and how it induces how we feel and know the world; this recognition, importantly, signals and has the capacity to honor other ways of feeling and knowing the world. A deciphering practice notices that the tendency to describe black (as less than human, defective, captive) is not a measure of black life. A deciphering practice imagines and enacts an aesthetics of black life outside the intense weight.Andrea Fatona observes that black Canadian visual art provides the means for black identities to emerge and reemerge out of colonialism and oppression. Rather than offering a typical multicultural “race” story (one of erasure/disappearance/nonexistence that is followed by reclamation/presence/fraught inclusion), Fatona shows how the practice of making black art in Canada is one of expressing the complexity of a blackness that is already here, in this purportedly blackless place (2006). Put otherwise, Fatona urges us to think through how making black art in Canada is in excess of formal and institutional practices of racist exclusion. She is not eschewing structural racism and other forms of racial violence; she is showing how state-sanctioned exclusion and violence provide the conditions for black Canadian art to emerge and reemerge (see Fatona 2006; Lee 2019).Fatona's discussion of Melinda Mollineaux's pinhole photography signals emergence and reemergence as an art practice that defies the terms of multicultural exclusion and inclusion; black art dwells and enunciates, it does not move from erasure to presence. But she also offers us something more. Fatona describes how the pinhole photographs map—that is, represent and delineate—disavowal; the creative representation and delineation of disavowal results in a range of psychic and physiological responses (she writes of her visceral reaction, and then her comfort, and then feeling as though she moved through time and space) (Fatona 2006, 231) The pinhole photography produces a psycho-affective feeling that pulls her into “undulating depths of fields,” and we learn that the art itself offers “other possibilities for imagining blackness” (Fatona 2006, 231; Pearson Clarke 2018). Notable, then, is Fatona's knotted presentation of how black art is and how black art feels and how this reorders how we know and engage black Canada. What is black and what feels black refuse typical narrations of black Canada that rely on an erasure-to-presence linearity. The representation of black negativity—and in Canada this can be viewed as an admixture of never-here and an unwelcome-abject-presence—is thrown into disarray. Indeed, bringing Fatona's work into conversation with Wynter's call to rethink aesthetics and employ a deciphering practice provides a generative method for engaging black Canadian art: not as a process of excavation and retrieval, not as an absence followed by a presence, and not as a site to narrate and describe black oppression, but instead as work that creatively explores and uncovers the ways black communities navigate but are not absolutely defined by racist logics and processes of disavowal.The task ahead: How do we decipher the textures of black art in a way that does not totally lean on black subjugation and the subordinated body, yet honors how racial violence and oppression have structured black lives and resistances? How might we notice the work of black Canadian creatives as comprised of affective and material energies? And, what ideas and meanings emerge when black Canadian art is and feels? How might we “imagine a racial future . . . outside the parameters of how we [black people] are seen in this culture” (Alexander 2004, 5, emphasis added)? I turn to Charmaine Lurch to work through the task. Lurch's art can be thought about alongside several black visual artists who center black life as linked to, but not defined by, systems of oppression. The art of Renée Green, Sarah Stefana Smith, Sandra Brewster, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Alma Thomas, Krista Franklin, and Barby Asante, among many others, features tables, flowers, books, radios, turntables, pianos, pressed glass jars, patterns of light and brightness, wire shapes and wire memories; black folks are alone, in families, blurred, in sharp focus, held, holding, still, unvisible.These creative texts provide an entry into thinking about black art as aesthetic possibility. They center black life and they also consider how creative representations of black life offer a politic that demands a reading practice that is not beholden to prevailing negative descriptions of blackness. This is not to suggest these artists uncritically exalt blackness. Rather, it draws attention to how a focus on black life—a mode of living that is not always burdened and distraught and violated—provides a way to think race differently because it engages a politics of representation that does not begin with, and dwell on, subjugation. In this, we are given a glimpse into how (and when and where) black communities struggle against racial violence and other practices of marginalization and find relief within that oppressive system.Charmaine Lurch's portfolio includes giant wire sculptures of bees, a large metallic installation that recalls the Blackburn Taxi Company, painted figures of women resting within washes of blues and purples. Wires appear and reappear across many of her images. Thin wires are threaded together, barely visible, tying together multiple images. Wires are bundled to form thick landscapes. Wires hold exoskeletons and wings together. The wires cast shadows. Lurch's attention to racism is subtle and knowing. She seeks out and creates ways to visualize race otherwise—in insects and transportation, in shadows and blur, in black dance, rest, movement. Visualizing race otherwise, at least for me, draws attention to a kind of affective familiarity that discloses how black liberation might, or does, feel. Engaging Lurch's creative portfolio allows us to expand and stretch how we know and feel black art. Her creative labor points to difficult and promising worlds outside the art itself. Lurch's art, specifically her charcoal drawings, forms an analytic of quiet happiness that draws attention to what Richard Iton calls “diasporic breathing spaces”: moments and places and narratives that enable critical engagement with the limits of liberal democracy and its promises, while noticing how black aesthetics offer sensibilities that resist hierarchy, hegemony, and racial violence (read: affective-empirical-already-normal-always-descriptive-colonial-system of knowledge) (Iton 2008, 200–201).Charmaine Lurch's charcoal drawings were exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum during early to mid 2018. The series, Being, Belonging and Grace, is comprised of five charcoal drawings on white parchment paper. The five different charcoal drawings feature a young black woman in various poses. The drawings butt against each other to create a work that is 23 feet wide by 10 feet high. The parchment is secured to rusted metal patina on wood and there are microthin charcoal lines connecting the images. There are narratives that accompany the exhibit, speaking to space, place, and black belonging.1 The gray and black charcoal lines scuff and float on the white parchment paper. The young woman is patient, reading, walking. The drawings are quiet. By this I mean that the patterns, lines, outlines, blends, are soundless, while the young woman's corporeal sentiment expresses comfortable exuberance. The young woman smiles, bends, studies. She is happy. This kind of joy and quiet movement situates the young woman outside the racial economy that denies the worldviews of black women and girls (Simmons 2015; Cox 2015). This kind of joy and quiet movement offers a sense of place that is structured by, but not beholden to, racism-sexism. The viewer is offered a moment where intensity (the weight) dissipates. The quiet happiness is imperfect. It reminds me that she must find joy in a world that dehumanizes black women. It reminds me that the quiet happiness and her grace are nested in something else—something hard and awful and difficult. It reminds me that I want her exuberance to last forever because I know it signifies, in part, a difficult world. The soundlessness and the quiet happiness and the inaudible movement bring moments of relief precisely because Lurch allows the viewer to engage with structures of feeling that do not begin with, or get weighed down by, racism and oppression. In beginning with and sustaining modes of black life, she draws, and draws us into, a psycho-affective field and a form of representation that narrates black womanhood anew. In this field and through the centering of black life, we might, we can, feel and envision and know “liberated life-ways, however provisional” (Wilson Gilmore 2017, 228). This world is a promise; this world engenders a diasporic breathing space.Within that breathing space, we can notice how the charcoal, parchment (plant-based cellulose), wood, and metal components of the drawings complement an analytic of quiet happiness. In expressing and narrating and capturing joy through charcoal, parchment, wood, and metal, Lurch subtly connects black life to ecological matter, drawing attention to human–environmental relationalities. Together, this bundle—representations of black femininity amid quiet happiness, the psycho-affective fields of the viewer, the ecologies of art supplies—allows us to decenter the body, momentarily, and address other worlds and economies that impact upon black life. Indeed, the specificity of the charcoal allows us to link art worlds to fuel, fire, deforestation, and purification. The wood animates millennial old organics, shade, shelter, sugar, fruit, and canopies of leaves. The paper, fragile, holds sustenance and conviviality. The rusted metal patina recalls empire—oxidation on aged monuments and buildings—while also signaling countless natural resources (heavy metals, brittle metals, white metals, refractory metals, light metals, precious metals) mined and cherished. Metal flourishes: computer hard drives, vascular stents, coins and cars, nails, wires. Finance, empire, environmental decay, exploitation. As the quietness of the young black girl sits with us, and gives us a moment of stillness, extraction interrupts.2 Shelter. Indeed, the materials evince that Lurch's visual art requires a studied deciphering practice that is expansive and fluid. She asks that we hold on to grace and joy and soundlessness. She draws and draws us into how liberation might look and feel and sound, and she subtly cues the difficult worlds that generate moments of grateful relief.Things do not move quickly in the intellectual world Sylvia Wynter has constructed for us. As I was preparing this narrative, I began to think about how precious and expansive the world of Sylvia Wynter is, and how her intellectual work upends market time precisely because she sits with ideas for months and years and weeks. She is a careful and patient writer, and in this implicitly critiques a world that values fast-paced intellectual production and high-speed theorization, all of which are manufactured to resonate with the scroll and the scan. The scroll and the scan are seemingly innocuous practices that, as Marcus Gilroy-Ware notes, are tied to logics of seemingly limitless discovery and temporal blurriness that, together, produce a kind of compulsion for new versions of capitalist objectification (Gilroy-Ware 2017, 29–71). This compulsion—I think Wynter would call it reflexive response—does not have time for a restful contemplation of, and writing toward, new ways of being. The compulsion, the scanning and swiping and posting, is failed intellectual endurance.As I was preparing this narrative, I wondered how Sylvia Wynter fits into this swipe and post activity: Does her name moving across the screen spark curiosity, does it lead to exhaustion and endless scrolling? What does it mean when her words, and her monumental reconceptualization of humanity, are rendered technological currency? How do we post, quickly and succinctly, the ideas of Sylvia Wynter without appropriating her voice? In her writings on artificial intelligence (AI), Sylvia Wynter notes that this technology is a crude iteration—almost archaic even when presented as modish—of colonial thinking (2003, 311–12). Indeed, one can read her work on AI as anticipating the “rampant textuality” (Gilroy 1993, 78) that busily crosses social media platforms, wherein the world of techno-coloniality projects a system of knowledge that normalizes, layers, and reproduces affective economies of accumulation that deepen inequities. Without launching into a long critique of social media and algorithmic oppression, what I am trying to think about is how we might read Wynter, as well as her stunning critique of AI, in a world that profits from situating her as a data-byte that is open to extraction (see Noble 2018). How do we share her ideas without putting them through the very logic she cautioned us about—a techno-colonial logic that is invested in, and profits from, rapidly reproducing the world as it already is. How do we honour the Sylvia Wynter, who laughed as I picked up my iPhone and told me: “That is your bible.” And she was, of course, correct.Perhaps I am entering this conversation ungracefully. As usual, I am entering this story ungracefully. I am treading water. Things don't move fast in the world she constructed for us. I prefer not to translate her ideas, I cannot speak for Wynter, but I am in love with her work, and I am deeply grateful for her friendship, so I will try my best to walk through this story without misreading–misinterpreting her immense and beautiful archive.I started reading Sylvia Wynter late in my undergraduate degrees—first at the University of Ottawa and later at York University. It was very challenging to read her work, and it took me a few years to get through just two essays: I read and reread her essay on Glissant (“Beyond the Word of Man,” 1989) and her essay on James (“Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception,” 1992a) multiple times; both essays baffled me.3 I kept reading (we keep reading).4 Things don't move quickly in the intellectual world Wynter has constructed for us. Midway through my MA degree I read Wynter's “Beyond Miranda's Meanings” (1990). I reread it several times during my PhD candidacy and began to work out some of the conceptual substructures and methods Wynter offered. While I still struggled to grasp the fullness of her project, from “Beyond Miranda's Meanings” I learned that, due to prevailing and normative systems of knowledge, Caribbean women are conceptualized outside the category of human and for this reason they—inhabiting demonic ground—offer innovative and imaginative ways of understanding humanity and, as well, engender modes–praxes of liberation that are outside Western Eurocentricities and their attendant racial logics. They see and access the prevailing system of knowledge differently than others, and this difference of seeing provides a critique that cannot easily replicate that system of knowledge. This is a genre of humanity that is unrecognizable within the terms of normative monohumanism! And: It emerges from blackness but is not reserved for black folks due to its refiguring of modernity outside a teleological (biologically determinist) rationale. The key, I began to observe, was not only identifying resistances to oppressive social systems, but recognizing that many figures who are positioned outside of colonial genres of humanity provide an alternative pathway to knowing who and what we are (collectively) because the system (which is beholden to a semantic closure principle) cannot and will not comprehend black humanity and thus provides the conditions for black women to invent a genre of what it means to be human that cannot be captured by dominant (liberal, colonial, and so on) ways of knowing. This means, of course that black humanity is the assertion of black life under duress, rather than a subhuman/less-than-human/nonhuman/no-humans-involved category that is only in ontological relation to white supremacy (as subhuman/less-than-human/non-human/NHI). And for this reason, sometimes analyses of Wynter's work wherein “Man = human = wrong” are not enough (this inevitably leads to reifying the biological sciences as absolutely determinist rather than dwelling in Scientia; it inevitably clings to describing rather than doing). If one meaningful substructure is the demonic grounds (inhabited by Caribbean women), something else is at play, right?When I first engaged the world and work of Sylvia Wynter, one of the reasons I found her work so difficult to read and comprehend was that I was positioning her arguments within our present system of knowledge. This is to say that I was reading her work as an interruption to, in opposition to, an extension of, existing epistemologies (e.g., she offered a critique of monohumanism, she offered an alternative to monohumanism, she rethought monohumanism). When I began reading Sylvia Wynter, it took me time to grasp that she was inventing a heretical (interdisciplined–interhuman–interecological) analytical frame that exceeded typical ways of knowing. It is obvious now, of course—she inhabits demonic ground—but there is more, too. What opened my mind and heart was that Wynter was and is writing in excess of philosophy and other prevailing studies of knowledge, including feminism and other identity-epistemologies (she has betrayed philosophy, she has betrayed feminism, some decry). She refutes commonsense studies of knowledge and knowing, and normative theories of knowledge and knowing, because they are often interlinked with a recursive self-replicating system that dishonors the heretical aspects of black thought. At the same time, and related, she notices that the production of knowledge—even counternarratives (e.g., feminism and other identity-epistemologies)—is often folded into normative ideological tracts, striving for the same old normative world, the techno-colonial world. Early on I was, in part, misreading Wynter because I situated her within the very recursive system her ideas point out and breach. As I read and reread and read again—her writings are hard to read, still, the words wear me down—what falls into place is not a lesson in oppressive-ideology-leads-to-opposition-leads-to-freedom but rather a genre of humanity (bios-mythoi) that both generates and expresses a capacious pedagogy (poetics) of who and what we are (black) that is an undoing and unraveling of plantocratic-colonial time-space.Sylvia Wynter's contributions to collections and anthologies and journals reflect, at least in part, what I am trying to draw attention to in this short story. That is: addressing her intellectual and creative contributions in a way that does not dilute the grandness of her intellectual project; attending to her wide-ranging interdisciplinary connections with other scholars as well as the specificity of her knowledge; encountering her work not to master it, but rather as a pedagogical opening that is laden with what we cannot possibly know. These themes are animated by my remarks, in the preceding, on technology and my own struggles to learn from, rather than about, Sylvia Wynter (cf. Britzman 1998). I think we are faced with twin tensions wherein the ownership of black ideas, and the politics of expeditious citation, enunciate the magic of colonial thinking wherein intellectual appropriation, cloaked in rampant references, is disavowing black time. Put otherwise, the long and forever work of black studies, the layers of diasporic literacy that are required to situate this research and writing within a broader anticolonial project—the stretching of time that is, in my view, perfected by a range of anticolonial scholars and creatives—is sometimes (not always) obscured by market time.5How might we hold all of this together, and ethically reach for what we learn from Sylvia Wynter?Wynter's creative work and her writings on creative texts, included within collections like Her True-True Name (Mordecai and Wilson 1989), Mixed Company (Brewster 2012), Out of the Kumbla (see Wynter 1990), and more, as well as her contributions to a range of journals, function to signify not a singular narrative, but overlapping articulations of anticolonial thought that are both precise and expansive (Owens 2017). More specifically, it is in the process of anthologization—her placement within the edited collection—that Wynter's intellectual creative project is tethered to a series of other debates, creative works, and contexts. In Her True-True Name and Mixed Company and Out of the Kumbla, for example, the insurgency of many Caribbean creatives is brought together. In this togetherness, Caribbean creatives express what Demetrius Eudell describes as an anticolonial literary canon that “disenchanted the discourse of imperial history” (Eudell 2010, 314). Thus, Wynter's placement in anthologies that center creative texts draws attention to a multifarious counterpoetic archive that signals how the practice of rewriting knowledge is necessarily an aesthetic act. What stands out, then, is not simply Wynter but a cascade of ideas; an anthology forces us to think about common threads among several diverse texts while also recognizing the singularity offered by each author. The anthology is specific and expansive.With this, as Carole Boyce Davies, Kendall Witaszek, Asha Tall, and Demetrius Eudell persuasively argue, one cannot delink Wynter's creative and theoretical work.6 Her discursive output is, like the anthology, complex, yet it identifies her unique contribution to Caribbean studies, black studies, and studies of race and liberation. Indeed, Witaszek proposes that Wynter's Maskarade and The Hills of Hebron are interdisciplinary texts, not simply creative works, and that the interdisciplinarity narrative allows us to think about how the creative text anticipates and expresses and overlaps with Wynter's more explicitly theoretical insights. Witaszek is also arguing, in my view, that these creative works function as relational methodologies. Scholars who study Wynter's creative works continually offer methodological guidelines that are tied to the comprehensive and generous contextualization of her work. In short, you cannot “parse out” or “tease apart” Wynter, fully and completely. If you have tasked yourself to work with her creative and intellectual ideas, if you are faced with one sentence or a text that is placed within another text, there is, I think, an intellectual imperative to wade through the density and think through how her ideas are made. Her work is an invitation to take part in a wider anticolonial project that totally undoes a biocentric version of humanity precisely because the creative text cannot be delinked from the theoretical text. One of Wynter's most important insights, for me, is her powerful concept of bios-mythoi (not the human, bios-mythoi); when it is understood with the creative text in mind, it demonstrates the possibility of intellectual revolution.It is useful to theorize Wynter's writings—both creative and intellectual—through the essay form, which is etymologically tied to the verb “to attempt” or “to try.” There are many essay forms, and the history of the essay is animated by all sorts of thinkers, globally. However, for purposes of this reflection, I want to tie the etymology (the attempt) with a rudimentary description of the essay, which identifies the essay as a systemic composition. And I want to nest these two characteristics (the attempt, the systemic composition) within the context of anticolonialism: The rise of the essay corresponds with sixteenth-century imperialism and its aftermath, which Wynter describes as the “ecosystemic and global sociosytemic ‘interrelatedness’ of our contemporary situation” (1995, 8).We might, perhaps, imagine all Wynter's writings (her dance, too) as long creative essays, studied systemic compositions, intellectual and written attempts, anticolonial narratives, that are understood in relation to Caribbean thought and global black studies in their various and varying rearticulations of modernity. As essayist producing essays, Wynter's archive is both incoherent and coherent—it is scattered in edited collections, anthologies, journals, letters, interviews, friendships, her library, her plays, her radio performances, her dance, and all these ideas are expressed through her monumental and sophisticated reimagining of interhuman worlds. I have three copies of The Hills of Hebron, and the latest version was sent to me by Wynter around 2011, when the book was reissued and reprinted by Ian Randle Publishers. Part of her inscription to me is: “Where it all began—a luta—just under half a century ago,” and each time I read that inscription my heart opens. Hills begins on Saturday, and “he dreams of many things and his body is muddled and he becomes a house of dreams” (Wynter 2010, 1).Thank you: Sylvia Wynter, Carole Boyce Davies, Yaniya Lee, Charmaine Lurch, Leslie Sanders, m. nourbeSe philip, Simona Bertacco.