Transcript: TIFFANY LETHABO KING on The Black Shoals [with brontë velez], Part One /315
brontë velez Hello, my name is brontë velez and I am so humbled to introduce this special episode on For The Wild. In this conversation, I joined as a guest host to interview the brilliant, and phenomenal, and heart-centered, and generous, and right-on-time, Tiffany Lethabo King.
Tiffany Lethabo King We also felt that too, we also felt Indigenous genocide, and that shaped our experience of enslavement. So that's the kind of ferocity that I'm talking about, and that's the kind of porosity that deeply affected me. I didn't know what to do with that knowledge.
brontë velez Tiffany Lethabo King, she/they, is a descendant of African people enslaved in the US South. She grew up in Lenapehoking and currently resides on Monacan lands. King is an Associate Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Virginia. She is also a Co-Director of the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Tiffany is the author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, published by Duke University Press in 2019. If you ain’t got a copy, pick it up–for you, a loved one, one of those free book libraries in your neighborhood. Get your copy. As a scholar and teacher, she is committed to thinking about how centuries-long relationships between Black and Indigenous peoples have provided openings to alternative paths, presents, and futures. Black and Indigenous liberation struggles informed by feminist and queer politics as well as artistic production and quotidian acts of survival and experimentation inspire her forthcoming, scholarly, and community-building work.
I loved this conversation with Tiffany and I am so grateful for what emerged in our time together, our conversation traverses sacred laughter, Black and Indigenous feminisms, sexuality, liberation, ceremony, and protocol. It was recorded in January of 2021. Elements of our conversations score a project called Can I Get A Witness? A collaboration between For The Wild and Lead to Live. Can I Get A Witness? Is a transmedia project that traces two queer Black Latinx femmes, myself and Steph Hewett dancing before and being danced by the ecology, memory, and stories of the Tongass National Forests and Glacier Bay in southeast Alaska–unceded Haida, Tsimshian, Tlingit territories, scored by field recordings and music by Jiordi Rosales and José Rivera, interviews from For The Wild Podcast with Tiffany King, what you’re about to hear, Wanda Kashudoha and Kasyyahgei, matriarchal Tlingit elders and lifelong forest defenders of the Tongass and Glacier Bay, interviewed by Ayana Young, with footage from Molly Leebove and Jade Begay. The film and constellated media utilizes dance as a grammar to hold the complexity of its narrative, tracing connections between melting ice in Alaska and the disappearing Caribbean, the separation of Black and Indigenous relations, and the critical suture that Black and Indigenous femme survival requires the Earth’s health
“Dance as a grammar” and “the land's refusal to be separated from flesh” are beautiful offerings and signifiers you'll hear from Tiffany King and this interview. I want to extend my deepest gratitude to the brilliant and dear jazmín calderón torres, who is my research and thought partner, my chismerx, my spiritual companion for this interview, I appreciate you so much. Thank you jazmín for your study, heart, wisdom, and prayer, all that you contributed for the interview to be possible. Dear listeners, I hope this conversation between Tiffany and I opens imagination and healing for you. I hope it brings you joy. I encourage you to also encounter the filmic aspects of this conversation through Can I Get A Witness?, enjoy.
Creator offer up my gratitude for the snowed kiss high desert valley of the Pueblo people where I currently am, among sagebrush, mountain, and coyote. I come in humility and reverence to these lands and the lineages of this land and pray our conversation is in service to the Indigenous folks of this place. Thank you for the life of Tiffany Lethabo King, who I have the pleasure of being in conversation with today. Thank you for her prophetic attention, for the opportunity to read her scholarship as scripture. May this be an exegesis. Thank you creator for the way Tiffany allows the grammar of the land to speak through her so that we might come to know, love, and care for one another with deeper and more rigorous intimacy. I come in profound gratitude to this interview today with a prayer that like the root of the word interview, we might see one another. And as my friend, Arielle Marie says, “meet the art of interview as Oracle,” may the shoal, the alluvium, the glaciers, the desert, the rivers, the trees, the soil, the mountains, the ecotones, speak through us. May we find the groove and the glitch. May we talk that shit today? I give thanks for the lineage of the Black radical tradition, for Black and Indigenous feminist scholarship, for the ancestors, both biological and chosen, who jumped us here, and for Tiffany's profound trust and love in Black folks and herself to offer reimagined epistemologies, ontologies, and historiographies that can rewrite us and allow us to become otherwise, thank you for the way her offering has changed me at a molecular level.
I dedicate this conversation to my departed friend MonteQarlo, and their friend Kiwan Benson, two queer Black folks who offered the refuge of DIY queer party spaces in Atlanta, and who both passed two and a half years ago, dancing and performing on a shoal, not knowing the pace of the tide in Tybee Island. I am thinking of MonteQarlo saying in an interview with ArtsATL, “Through my art, I am my own well, our choices have far reaching, often unseen effects on other people. So we have to consistently hold each other accountable, whatever personal privilege you have, use it to improve other people's quality of life and promote tangible equity. As an artist, I feel it's my job to remind people that they're powerful and have a responsibility to use that power to dismantle all fuckery” may our conversation be an offering to dismantling the fuckery, to being our own wells, to tangible accountability and equity for all of life, àṣẹ.
Tiffany as I open in dedication, it's a practice and reflecting the way I see you honor and practice the art of dedication and I'm curious if before we begin, if there are any dedications you might also want to offer.
Tiffany Lethabo King Thank you for that, thank you for bringing my heart and spirit into this ceremonial space that you created for me. Just a moment of like a little bit of release, I just need to thank the Creator for the mute button because you are extreme, extremely funny. And just to allow my goofiness to come out, and yeah, I want to talk shit. Dedication to all the bishops, the priestesses of Black joy and the way that they understand that the Creator replenishes us with that sweet river of joy as a place to come and gather around, dive into and connect with one another. So all the practitioners of Black joy, I want to make a dedication to you, you sustain us and are the folks that traditionally, as Black folks have known, that they needed to seek out the joy of Indigenous people for us to be whole. So that's my dedication. Thank you.
brontë velez Thank you. I just learned that, from Tiffany, in our pre interview moment, that your middle name means joy, and that your mother's name means joy. So I'm just so grateful for that lineage to come in, and for laughter to come in. I actually was talking to my partner last night about the shoal, which we'll get into, but thinking about the shoal as trickster, as comedy, and where can humor be a part of reconciling the distance between us? I remember being in a class in undergrad on the phenomenology of laughter and I don't remember the scholar, but they were saying the phenomena of laughter is a reconciliation between us knowing that we have an infinite self, but we're in a finite body and humor trying to collapse that distance, and laughter collapsing that distance. And I'm curious what laughter and comedy have to do with Black and Indigenous relations, and hope that humor can come in, even in the midst of stories and lineages of grief and suffering and violence?
Tiffany Lethabo King No, that's brilliant and that articulation of what laughter does, and that kind of bridging. I've never thought about that and you know, you'll definitely have to give me that person's name again, I just got caught up in what you and they were thinking about. But you reminded me of an episode that The Red Nation did on their podcast, and I can't remember if it was Lindsay Nixon, or Cutcha Risling Baldy, both people we should be engaging, were talking about the use of laughter, humor, comedy for Indigenous people, like not just as a mode of mere survival, but creativity, and creating realities and possibilities through humor, right.
So it makes me think about something that a scholar who works on digital humanities, André Brock, who was thinking about the space and the use of humor on Black Twitter and was thinking about how the emergence of Black Twitter or that convergence of what we now call Black Twitter around the moment when Black Lives Matter was organizing and after Michael Brown's murder, André Brock was articulating that our response to that kind of trauma was the emergence of some of the humor that comes out in Black Twitter, right, like, in the space of Black Death, in the space of a global pandemic, he was talking about how we have some of the funniest moments of like, Black ridiculousness on Black Twitter, right? He's like those things are related to one another, right? It's not just a release, but literally the creation of other possibilities, planes, universes for us to kind of exist in and what you were talking about that your friend said about this kind of collapsing and bridging? Definitely, I think our communities share that. Indigenous communities and Black communities have relied on humor as a particular kind of spiritual force and I think that's something we need to, we need to take seriously. I mean, that could be ceremony like cracking each other up, right. Goofy and ridiculous. That definitely can be a gathering space. Definitely.
brontë velez I love that, to take humor seriously. And yeah, that was my partner Jiordi Rosales, who I was in conversation with last night and it makes me think of a book I just saw that came out called We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff, which I want to get my hands on. And yeah, it makes me think of folks like Dallas Goldtooth and just the mimetics and the power of mimetics, to change culture. And what you're saying makes me think of reframing, yeah, how we relate to the spacetime. Can you remind me of the scholar that was talking about Black Twitter?
Tiffany Lethabo King André Brock, I think it’s called Distributed Blackness.
brontë velez Yeah, there's something about that of being able to reimagine how you're relating to space through comedy. I've thought a lot about the ways that mockery and satire allow something else to become possible, and they feel like their own shoals, which I look forward to talking with you about, and the ways I was shoaled by your book and blessed when I first encountered the texts, I was recalling a breakfast that I had been at a kind of home centered around hospitality in Berlin, called Matthews Table and this brother John, I was with a dear friend visiting Berlin, and this person John, who hosts this space, him and his wife, Gail are really committed to the lineages of Christian hospitality and he prayed in the morning, “God, please interrupt us with someone we can bless today.” And I was like, I kind of opened my eyes like, “Oh, that's a prayer to pray.” And I'm praying that today, which I think your book feels like that kind of prayer of interruption and I think of the way your text is a blessed interruption in conversation with that moment, I think about the hospitality of your texts. And what you describe as in the texts, you write, “I write back to a porous and forever transforming practice, that's an ethical project concerned with encounter. I write this because I trust Black people, I trust the radical and always shifting ground of Black freedom dreams. I also trust Black freedom dreams, when they consider Native freedom.” I wonder if you might speak to some of this language around around trust, and what your project is doing around extending that trust back to Black studies.
Tiffany Lethabo King brontë, thank you for reading that passage back to me, because it brought me right back to some of the violence of the academy that I was subjected to. You know, certainly, the academy, even the humanities, and places, departments that call themselves critical and committed to social justice, fundamentally, do not want and are never prepared for Black folks and Indigenous folks to show up as students, professors, and certainly people who produce thought, right? And so I was in a Ph.D program and had a lot of support from Black feminists, Black queer feminist faculty and Black queer students, but of course, like our love and support, our spaces of ceremony for one another, you know, are not enough in themselves to really topple those violent structures. So I was dealing with a field American Studies that was starting to take seriously and really give a lot of credibility to white settler colonial studies, like a field that does important work. It's really some dedicated white men who at the time the field defining leaders were folks like the late Patrick Wolfe, who we get this notion of invasion as a structure not an event, and then his colleagues, Lorenzo Veracini and Ed Cavanaugh who are doing important work, particularly in Australia and thinking about how Indigenous folks have occupied, or are the first folks to have relationship with the land that they have settlers are on. So they created a kind of an important conversation between white settlers and Indigenous folks, right.
So that really took up a lot of space, even in the U.S. academy and was presented to me as the model and as the work, as a way to think about everyone's relationship to Indigeneity and the land that they're on. And while it's important to think about what that scholarship offers, it also had a way of planting a flag and then also erasing all of the deep, deep time and history and connection that one, African people had done with Indigenous people of this hemisphere for centuries, right? And it imposed a kind of forgetting on one, the field and then also on the Black and Indigenous people who struggle to exist in these academic spaces. It was like, erase the ways that you've been thinking about how you all have been surviving with one another, all of the Black and Indigenous insurrection that has happened, all the conflict and the ways that Black folks had to participate in, just thinking about Jessica Marie Johnson's work when she's writing about the Chickasaw Wars, how Black people were conscripted into that and baited in order to gain their freedom, the ways that what we call the Five Civilized Tribes, the Chickasaw, the Cherokee, right, some of the Muskogee Creek, right, were also baited in that lie of like “If you participate in the institution of slavery, we’re going to recognize you and you will be understood as sovereign, the ways that we have had to create these kinds of, as Harriet Jacobs says, these loopholes of retreat, to get out of those binds and find ways to relate to one another on other terms, right?
So I'm so grateful for the ways that I think it's Amber Starks, who is Melanin Mvskok, and folks like Holiday Simmons are using their own histories as Afro-Indigenous people to “No, we have these histories, of collaboration, of insurrection, of love, erotica, of humor for centuries. And you're not going to erase that.” And I had to dip into that and remember, no, there is another way for Black people to talk about the ways that we have tried to actually get around white people as folks who could mediate that relationship between Black and Indigenous people and I'm not going to let white settler colonial studies dictate how I talk about how Black people relate to Indigenous people, it doesn't make sense, and it doesn't feel right. And even though that is a particular trend, and that's how you get published, I decided I couldn't do it. It just doesn't honor the way that Black folks and Indigenous folks have moved in relationship to one another. And also, you know, it shits on Black people and it shits on a Black feminist tradition. Sharon Holland was doing work on this before in the 90s, early 2000s, before people had heard of Patrick Wolfe and these white dudes coming out of Australia right? So like the work we've been doing the work and I'm not going to let people forget that. So that's where my trust of Black people came from.
brontë velez Wow. I love the way that your trust reads as refusal, and I read that in the way that you talk about you wrote this text so that you can live with yourself. And I'm so grateful for that refusal to engage a type of historiography where we were only surrogates for white supremacy and that's the only way we related to one another, but that actually there were also so many other ways that we were connecting and caring and loving one another which I think I'd love to continue talking about later in the conversation around love and eros, I just want to signal signal that. Holiday Simmons, a little side note, my mentor from like childhood like when I was a teenager it's a very deep.
Tiffany Lethabo King Holiday calling you into the space. They make the best brunch. I can't wait to be in their company again. Good people.
brontë velez Well, I'm struck by, before we get into, you know we're gonna get there about what is a shoal and before we go there, I want to keep following this thread of refusal, and the way that our lives and our ontologies are actually shaped in conversation. And when I say our, I mean Black folks in conversation with Indigenous peoples in Turtle Island, and I want to bring up this moment in your text and the preface, where you speak to hearing and Anishnaabe woman's story and having a physiological, and psychological, and spiritual impact on your body, that you were shapeshifted by hearing her story, that even your face took on a new life and you were marked by this moment. And I want to just quote back to you something you say in the preface, where you named “That when I felt around and realized the new and unfamiliar about the slavery with which I have become so comfortable. It changed me. And I do not mean changed in a neat, orderly, or containable way. It unmoored and disassemble me in ways that I and others did not expect. I can no longer be accountable only to myself, my ancestors, and my story of experiencing blackness. And its slavery that had been passed down over my lifetime. When I say unmoored, I mean that I could not continue life as I knew it.” Would you talk about that unmooring and what it was to meet this woman's story?
Tiffany Lethabo King Yeah, I was deeply blessed to be able to be in Toronto in 2006, 2007, in part of 2008, and one of the organizations that really helped me connect to a number of dope Black and Indigenous and People of Color organizers was actually INCITE! And so it was actually someone from INCITE!, and I can’t remember, introduced me to [?] who had come down to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to do some work and connected me to them when I went to Toronto, so they were doing work around prison abolition with [?] and they introduced me to a few Anishnaabe women. So this figure is like a composite, but also a particular Anishnaabe woman, Christine [?], the four of us, in addition to Larissa Cairncross, who created an INCITE! Toronto chapter and we would do a lot of ceremony work, I would also connect with Zainab Amadahy, who is actually a Black and Cherokee woman who actually moved to Toronto.
So I was doing this deep and profound ceremony work with Black and Indigenous women, right? So the more I was able to sit with, burn tobacco with, literally watch, smoke, rise and fall and just be in that deeply sacred space with folks like it really started to tell me something about how Indigenous genocide and the violence of genocide clearly had marked me, like I was feeling it in an intense way in Toronto, in a way that I had not felt on the U.S. eastern seaboard, because there's a way that on the U.S., on the East Coast, you know that it segregates and it creates distance between Black and Indigenous people, we're not allowed, we're not in proximity to one another in the cities, suburbs, rural areas that we live in, right and the way that that's possible in spaces like Toronto, or maybe even the Midwest, and the west coast where you are, and so to literally be inhaling the same smoke and breath with other Indigenous women allowed me to feel my ancestors and what they had not experienced justice, people who were enslaved, tortured. Again, labor is not the only story that we can tell about being enslaved. It's not just being on a labor campus. So many other things happen to Black people as enslaved, fungible bodies right, that exceed like that labor, but we also were inhabiting the same spaces where brutal, just genocidal acts are committed against Indigenous people, even if we did not see them on the plantation, right? So Black people felt that and that's what I am talking about, about the porosity. Right? And so to understand that we carried and coexisted with that violence, even when we didn't share spaces with Indigenous people, and because of the work of Zainab Amadahy, for instance, who told me that her family that was coming off of the plantation in Green Virginia, she knows that both her Cherokee ancestors and Black ancestors were enslaved by white people at the same time. So that also messes up our narrative of Cherokee enslavement, right? So we have all of these kinds of intimate knowledge of Indigenous genocide through being enslaved on the plantation, being enslaved by them, being enslaved next to them. Also being on the ground where genocidal violence happened, that again, the U.S. forces us to forget and when I was allowed to be in that sacred space, that deep relational space with folks like Christine, and Zainab, I could touch down into that and sit in that again and realize that my ancestors, were saying no, we also felt that too, we also felt Indigenous genocide, and that shaped our experience of enslavement and Blackness. So that's the kind of porosity that I'm talking about. And that's the kind of ferocity that deeply affected me. And I didn't know what to do with that knowledge, right? I didn't necessarily have the skills and even the folks who were holding me and supporting me, couldn't do all the kind of the caretaking that I needed. So I needed to take a break, I needed to take a break and I needed to actually leave the Academy for a little bit, to just let it change me and take me to a different place and take me to a different place so I could do this work and engage in all the deep pain of it and the joy of it.
brontë velez Wow. Wow, there's something about the smoke, the smoke and breathing the same breath, and realizing we've been breathing the same breath, and sending up the same prayers that feels really, really strong to hear. And there's something about you leaving the academy to actually be impacted, to actually let it impact you. That is really both, I feel the grief of what that moment was and can feel you in that moment having to actually leave, that the academy couldn't hold you and the spiritual experience of being reshaped and also your dignity to know that you needed to do something different. I've definitely been thinking about how today is Friday when we're chatting and I have a practice of honoring Shabbat Sabbath coming toward the evening. And so there's something about Sabbath for me that feels like a refusal, feels like leaving, and you going into that sabbatical, into another space-time to allow it to work on you is, is really powerful because I think this kind of what you call conquistador humanisms, or white settler colonial time, can’t hold that kind of shape-shifting.
Tiffany Lethabo King I'm just sighing and umming my way through what you’re saying, just the one where you had me shift for a moment was when you were repeating what I was saying about being in ceremony space and being able to breathe in the same smoke and other people's breath, share breath. And I'm thinking about how that hit me in my gut on that I've been missing other people's breath. Right. I have been interacting with my loved ones, my friends, through a barrier, right literally to protect each other from one another's breath. We've been wearing masks, right so I have done birthday parties, just speaking about having spent time with Holiday and brunch, I was in a mask in Holiday’s house with other folks and so I'm missing people's breath. Like when you said that, that hit me on a really profound level, people's breath changes you, not just to build immune systems, right which my friend Bettina Jud reminded me of, but just as a relational kind of eating, like a kind of meal, a kind of sustenance, you need someone else's breath on different scales, from your partner, from your loved ones, from community, you need other folks breath and so that kind of work that Indigenous folks, particularly I'm noticing and paying attention to the work of Indigenous and Black femmes like our attention to that is something that also, even the most progressive kind of white radical politics that is starting to acknowledge the demand for land back and acknowledged the most radical kinds of elements of Black abolition cannot give me. Right? It can never be a substitute for the kinds of decolonial imaginaries and transformative abolitionist politics that Black and Indigenous folks have been sharing with one another, right? It's just, it's never a substitute for that.
brontë velez Wow. Yeah, it makes me think of Ashon Crawley’s work on Blackpenetecostal Breath, and the first time I was able to reconnect to the spirituality, the Christian mega church spirituality, that had really disturbed me. I remember on our pre interview just talking about spiritual violence and it really disturbed me to be in that church in Atlanta, New Birth, but then to have a rereading of that moment through Crawley's work of thinking about how the cadence of specifically Black femme pastors or ministers, voices change, change the cadence and rhythm in our own bodies. And he goes through like, or they go through, I don't know their pronouns, Shirley Caesar kind of going through this cadence of the like, “Well and I told you,” you know that the breath actually takes on a new life and it's in that trance state that the congregation is compelled to reach out and worship and praise and to start running and to start stomping and to pass out. And that it's actually them allowing for more breath, Black women's bodies, allowing for more breath to come in that allows for us to meet the Holy Ghost, to go into trance states, and to render ourselves free and to literally like ascend through. So I really feel that, I really feel that what you're saying about the pandemic and and the absence of that, and it brings me to thinking about how you language that this project was a 10 year ritual, you could have used so many other terms, but you described it as a ritual which I think the academy could never provide. And I'm curious about how ritual, you know, serves as a shoal to the project of the academy, and how ceremony does that. It changes how we think about liberation and time and space and connection. And I really, really see your work doing that. I'm curious what you meant by when you said this project was a ritual.
Tiffany Lethabo King Oh, yeah. brontë you are wearing me down in a way that I love, and I needed it, thank you birthday twin for speaking to my heart and being on my vibration, and calling all the people that you did into the space, and it's speaking in such a healing way to all of us who have had to grow up in a Black church where that institution tried to contain us, and not to say that people, the pasto,rs and ministerial staff, all the people that work to make the Black church an institution had nefarious intent or are out to get us, or completely usher us into white supremacist violence, but even as people were trying to do their best to connect to spirit and formalize it, I'm not going to say ritualize it, but formalize it, institutionalize it, it did some violence, right? It absolutely did some violence.
I grew up in an AME Church and I guess, because of issues of funding, being a part of that first district, they had to have white Jesus in the stained glass, right. They had not had any female embodied or feminine folks in the pulpit, like I experienced all sorts of self-negating energy and spirit up in that space. And it's so deep that the person that I'm in a therapeutic relationship with, I chose her because she pastors a church, a progressive, affirming, and inclusive Church. And I thought I was like, I was in a space where I was like, “Yeah, I could never engage Black church again.”, Instead, I wanted to work out the stuff around spirit with her, and work with a person who had known something else, who had been able to, inspite of the violence that was also in that space, allowed to experience something else in the well, and I listened to, listen to your work on the well, and the course of folks who are doing that work with you, and those structures of genocide and slavery cannot contain that. The anti-Black violence cannot contain that work of spirit and breath. Right?
So it's so deep to me that in talking with this woman who is a healer, like people can both come out of that, that space of a Black church, deeply damaged or having experienced something else, right in the moments of getting caught up in the inflection of the voice that lets someone escape a particular form of violent homophobia. All those things are happening at the same time. Right? So I could never, I'm at a place now where I don't, I do not know that I'll ever be a part of a congregation, but I can go back and appreciate the desire to come together to search out spirit, I get that, as a fundamental kind of practice of Black church folks are reaching towards right? That ceremonial space of not transcending like a deep eminence, but a tapping into another kind of possibility with each other. That yeah, I value, I seek it out. I'm looking for it now and I think this project was just the beginning. For me, it was me hoping to be able to create a path where I could break out of some of the strictures of academic practices of knowledge production, and create an opportunity for other people that see me and thank you, brontë for seeing me where I could start to do a different kind of work.
It reminds me of the way that Jacqui Alexander moves through the space at the University of Toronto, when I was there. Jacqui was on some other stuff. If this work ain’t breaking you down and creating a crisis for you, I don't know what you're doing. And lowkey, I don't have time, I don’t have time for you. Get it together, when you're willing to be transformed by this work, let's talk until then I don't have time. If that not love for Black Studies and all the people you just named, that just came to mind, your relationship to Black Studies has to be one of waiting to be and needing to be transformed. So this conversation and the conversations that I've just had with folks from Electric Marronage and Dark Laboratory, have given me so much joy because there are folks who want to do this work, to share breath and have it change them and, and help them reimagine and reconceptualize how they relate to one another in the academy, our students, how we literally steal resources for folks who are not in the academy that we want to build with, and be in a ceremonial relationship with. And how do we make sure that people see that we're trying to meet them? So this was a part of the project for me. So thank you again for the invitation and seeing me, I was trying to reach out to you and didn’t know it.
brontë velez I heard the call. I heard the call. Yeah, what you're saying about how Black Studies is a commitment to being transformed makes me think of a poem that I read recently from Lucille Clifton that I had never seen called After Kent State. And she's talking about the violence that happened at Kent State, but now I'm thinking about it in relationship to just the university, the afterlife of the university and the impact of the academy, which I felt so deeply in preparing for this interview in all transparency of that kind of discourse, that Black feminist discourse allows us to actually speak, I think, through love, and through witnessing, and through ceremony, which is what I've done after the academy, to come back to the earth and to reroute my language, which I see you doing through The Black Shoals and I noticed that kind of demonic energy that that rears up in the kind of ways that the academy makes you think you don't have your shit together, you know, or that you don't know or privileges a certain kind of epistemology. And in that poem, After Kent State, Lucille writes about how white ways are the ways of death and then she invites them to come into the black and live. And I loved I've just been loving this line to come into the black and live, which I feel your project is doing, around how there's, I've heard you speak to and I think it's McKittrick, I'm not sure, around livingness to that Black Studies, you can actually receive more life and come into more life and that the friction and the challenge is actually a rite of passage, which I see you approaching in that way when you speak to ritual, or when you speak to ceremony, which is the way I want to relate to Black Studies. And kind of come out, release it from the academy or the institution or the church and to be around fire and water and in the soil with one another. So that we might live, so that we can live. So thank you for, for doing that. And the way that I feel like I can bring where I am to your scholarship and bring ceremony to your scholarship that feels so rare. Feels very, very rare.
Tiffany Lethabo King No, thank you for that. Thank you for saying that and I'm just thinking about all the folks that you were telling me, you are engaging with that I haven’t. It’s so interesting, like all the folks, like for instance, who is that sister who is the Nap Bishop?
brontë velez Tricia Hersey
Tiffany Lethabo King Tricia Hersey, thank you, who also found her space struggling in the academy, right? Also found herself in that space and thinking about how I was just able to connect with one of my colleagues who I literally was in a PhD program, and on the same campus with, we weren't in the same departments, Jessica Marie Johnson, but didn't get to engage her in the deep, wonderful way that I literally did just this week on a Monday and had spent years with her in the same place, people with the same desire to you, like you said, be up in the fire, right, be in the water, be in the ceremony space, but literally all of the violent kinds of barriers that we have to negotiate literally, if we're sitting in the same room together in the academy, that prevents us from being able to connect to breath, to breath on that level.
So like, it just makes me think of all the kinds of scholars that I know that one, if they have not already been put down or put on with you, brontë wouldn't want to be that like have a deep desire to be, and so the work that you're doing and the ways that you're trying to connect with organizers and creatives from different mediums and scholars is deeply important to that particular practice and commitment to what you said was correctly Katherine McKittrick, this notion of like Black living, and that's what I was trying to draw on and I was trying to take seriously the ways that McKittrick has been challenging, all the kind of deadly moves we have to make in the academy when we study Black people, right? So even impulses within Black Studies that are overly devoted to studying how we die and suffer are missing out, right? Are not necessarily heeding to that call, that there is Black livingness, nonetheless, right next to that Black kind of death, right? That we can choose to move with, we can choose to move with that current. And that work is going to look deeply different. It might be more difficult, there might not be a roadmap and it might require a particular moving with brontë, with Lead to Life, and moving with let me check out this sister who is in the Candler Department of Religion, who is doing the Nap Ministry, right? Isn’t it that maybe we just need to connect on that piece and not in the seminar room? Right, so like how do we get around the bullshit to jump into the fire?
brontë velez Man I love that. I love that, thank you for that affirmation in the way it relaxes my nervous system.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to part one of brontë velez’s conversation with Tiffany Lethabo King. To listen to part two, tune in next week. The music featured in this episode was by Larkhall, MonteQarlo, and Stoney Creation. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.