Transcript: Transcript: TIFFANY LETHABO KING on The Black Shoals [with brontë velez], Part Two /316
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 The land remembers you, right, the land is making space for you, remembers you, it's calling and pulling you towards it.
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.
I love that. Thank you for that affirmation and the way it relaxes my nervous system and tells me, affirms and confirms, that that I'm on the right path and what you shared about moving toward Black livingness as opposed to an archive or you know, an excavation around Black death made me think of someone I was trained under Professor Greg Childs, who was at Brandeis University, who talked about–I remember the first time I heard him speak, he talked about a project he was working on looking at an enslaved rebellion in Brazil, in the 18th century. And he's talking about how he was going through the archive in an attempt to kind of locate how this main instigator of the rebellion went about their sedition, and he found himself, in his excavation, actually taking on the life and posture of slave catcher. And he was saying, you know, finding this will perhaps be good for my book, or for the academy, or the conferences I go to, to have this writing or texts that no one has ever had, but actually, for those people at that moment, those Black folks in Brazil to not be found, allows them to still be free and to be fugitive. And what am I really trying to find? And I loved that re-approach to protecting fugitivity, protecting marronage, and what Julietta Singh talks about, this idea that no archive will restore you. I really love this kind of like, how do we not? How do we be careful with how we approach history, how we approach historiography, and in that, I want to kind of come back. I want to come back to the shoal and what happened where you began to use the shoal is what you call your, your organizing metaphor, and how did the shoal–it sounded like the shoal encountered you through kind of continuing to pass Flat Shoals Rd, which I grew up right near. I'm curious how the shoal encountered you to reimagine your scholarship around Black and Native Studies and relations. And where were you before you encountered the shoal? How are you approaching the work?
Tiffany Lethabo King No, thank you for all of that. We're gonna have to definitely come back to what your professor was saying about like taking on the persona embodiment of slave catchers, that people are so close to having that happen all the time in the academy, you have to actively work against that. So thank you for that reminder. And in all forms of work, I'm sure. But, you know, I often tell this story about the geography that you grew up around and on, right, when I'm talking to folks about this organizing metaphor of the shore, I know that I was looking for a space of encounter both between Black and Indigenous folks and the metaphors that academic fields often rely on like the Black Atlantic or the Oceanic for diaspora Block folks, right? And like terra and land for Indigenous folks, and I'm like, where do those metaphors and geographies meet up and touch each other and become something different? And for a while, I was probably three years deep into actually working on the manuscript and was dealing with the shoreline, right? I had all these files, I was working on like an intro, chapter one, chapter two, and I kept coming back to the intro and I was thinking and reworking and always struggling with the fact that the shore wasn't enough. Like it was just something that the shore wasn't doing for me, it was like, well, I don't know, is it that like the shore is something that nations often claim, right? They get incorporated into nation states and become a part of territory that very easily, if you look at any kind of like television or film, that kind of recreation of a scene of conquest where the explorers and conquistadors are coming on the shore, they plant a flag there and I'm like, I that's not what I'm, that's not the place. That's not the place, right?
I was just struggling and searching and doing a lot of labor to figure out something else and I couldn't write myself into it like literally, w-r-i-t-e, I couldn’t write myself into it. And so I was, you know, on a very deep subconscious level in a place of searching but just doing a very mundane thing of driving like a lot of my other mundane kinds of activities of like unfortunately like being on my phone before bed or washing dishes other things would come to me right when I wasn't so aggressively and actively trying to sort things out and analytically just in the kind of act of driving and letting myself flow with a particular kind of urban and even gentrified, geography that now flat shoals is, things just started to like, move, right? There was a certain when I stopped being so muscular about the searching, like all of these things, then I could be aware of and be more open to so literally after years of driving down Flat Shoals in this space of need and openness, right? Moving through the landscape, I decided to pay attention, right, my body was just ready to pay attention, in a deeper and more meaningful way to how these geographical markers, even some of them being settler markers, right, that street sign did not emerge, because of Muskogee people naming this place. So again, the white kind of shifting of geographies and using this metaphor I was like, what is a shoal? Right.
I thought about what I need. Because a shoal is not only a place where the ocean floor comes up to meet the surface of the water, it moves, right, if it's a sand formation over time that shoal’s not going to be in the same place. It's elusive. Also, shoals are dangerous right? Before the 19th century there was a way to do things like a cross-section of the ocean and people had been able to map through sound where the ocean floor rose up, ships would be wrecked, people would die, right? The entire cargo would be lost, right? They're dangerous, right? They force these vessels where I imagine these white conquistadors where they are enslaving people, they have to be careful, their lives are at jeopardy, so like the shoal does so much. I have to think about it, it's giving me something that the shore is not.
So it also made me think about the different kinds of attentions we have with our bodies, right, like what it means to be creating work, and where we have to listen and where we have to feel. And that this is not just a fully cerebral kind of project, and that cerebral kind of activities are things that the university privileges, and they, even if people are having, really white subjects, are having experiences like these, that rely on other kinds of senses, you're not supposed to talk about that, because that's not real intellectual labor. But I was like “No, I have to actually acknowledge all of the ways that spirit conspired, that the landscape conspired, that a landscape that has been dominated and reworked and gentrified through our fucked up notion of what the human has to do to space and land broke through that day and gave me something else, and the geography where you grew up, right, was pulsing and speaking to me. Yeah, that's how that happened.
brontë velez That is potent. It makes me tingle all over thinking about, I think so much about a scholar, A. Laurie Palmer, who I believe is from UC Santa Cruz, whose texts In The Aura of a Hole has really impacted me. It's about sites of material extraction, and she's visiting all of these different places that are out of view, where they're extracting helium and aluminum and processing all of these elements that are so essential to our material lives and she has this part in her opening where she talks about imagining agential matter, and how difficult some of these elements are to actually process, the millions of dollars of manufacturing going into taking them out of the ground and can we imagine that the matter has agency and refusal to be extracted and that they're making people do a lot of fucking work to take them out of their resting place and I just imagine that what you just said, that feels like it's from another part of the body and spirit of the shoal. Even if displaced, and even if, even if the geography has been paved over and cemented, and gentrified and changed and you no longer know what the earth there is like even still, they snuck their way into the sign for you to see the street sign. Even if disturbed by the colonial project of, you know, the street sign, they still found their way through, which I think is really, really powerful of imagining the Earth as in concert with the work that you're doing. And I keep thinking about how you use geologic grammar. And I'm wondering about how, yeah, the Earth changed your relationship to English, because I've noticed in the texts you're letting the shoal literally straight up, speak through you. And yeah, I'm just wondering how that changed your relationship to English?
Tiffany Lethabo King Ooh, that's a deep question and I think that I don't even know, again, timing is key. The fact that I'm having this conversation with you after Monday is allowing so many things to come together for me because I just had a conversation with folks from Dark Laboratory, like Tao Leigh Goffe, and Electric Marronage’s Jessica Marie Johnson and Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vasquez, who we were talking about decoloniality and we got to senses through Yomaira's work Decolonizing Diasporas, there's a chapter in her book Destierro, where she’s talking about the violent process of ripping Black and Indigenous people from the land, and how we reconnect to land and soil. And she talks about characters in a novel, and they're consuming grass, right and eating the earth and we're talking about pica, right? So in Spanish, right, and things that cannot be translated and there is no true English translation that gets at the violence or that kind of craving an appetite of pica for land. Right. And so there is a way that you're right, the shoal is doing something that always exceeds English, but also exceeds what language as far as like the written kind of orthographic, putting letters on and markings on a page and even what we think can be translated into human language, like there's a way that our ecologies transcend that mode of communication.
Yomaira made me think about the work of LaMonda Stallings, L.H. Stallings, who recently wrote a Dirty South Manifesto, and LaMonda talks about, in a context of the U.S. South, and then she also talks about this craving of dirt in particular. So not necessarily soil, something with nutrients, but dirt, matter that has been displaced, often because of violent modes of genocide and enslavement and displacement, but Black people's desire for that whether it's in urban spaces on the continent, in Africa, or in the U.S, South, and certainly Yomaira could pull us to the Caribbean, but this desire to eat dirt–she reframes it as actually the lands refusal to be separated from flesh, that sent me. Like your actual bodily desire is a pulling from the Earth because the Earth refuses to be separated from you. So it makes you crave it right. So talk about agency and that sense of the erotic and I had brontë, so as a part of like, my scaffolding that everything that could bring me to the shoal, it brought me back to I think it was 2014 so this is before I even had a book project, I was like still thinking about, I just wrote a dissertation I have nothing in me. There's no way I can write. I'm probably gonna lose my job like I just do whatever. I just wrote a whole ass dissertation, I don’t know what y’all want from me, right? But it takes me back to like how the land was working on me.
I went on this incredible hike with these two Black folks who, one had left Russia, the other was a brother who had grown up in like Portland, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, they met on some interesting dating site that was like, Black people who fuck with nature. Literally, this Black woman from Russia, and this Black U.S.-born man come together and in the mountains of Bahia, take me on this hike on a dry riverbed and I was freaked out on brontë, I told this story on Monday, I was like, you know, I had gotten into this weird mode where I was kind of out of balance and not dipping into like moving with joy. So I hadn't really liked worked my heart and my lungs in the way I needed to before going on this hike. And they're like, be ready, like, make sure you know your limber, doing your movements, I didn't listen. Showed up unprepared. Didn't do what they said, I was freaking out because it really required a lot of exertion like right before then we had climbed for like 800 meters. Like literally using my hands and my feet to climb. And then we're on this river bed, I was exhausted. And it was kind of still slick, right? So there wasn't water coursing through it, but it's still slick. Moss, other kinds of life are there. And I felt like I was gonna twist an ankle or twist a knee and I was freaking out and I had to calm myself down. And when I was like the spirit of breathing and trust was there, and when I was moving after I had calmed down and just kind of surrendered to the energy of that river bed. Without a lot of effort, rarely any, like, there was always a place to put my foot, like a small space that was perfectly made for like the tip of my foot, a ball of my foot that put me on secure ground. So I could deeply relate to what LaMonda was talking about and what Jacqui Alexander is talking about, the land remembers you, right, the land is making space for you or remembers you, it's calling and pulling you towards it. And so I think that 2014 experience also worked on my body in a way to prepare me to be in a place to be open to the shoal, right? Even a shoal that was invisibilized, like you said, manipulated, English language-ed, and appeared on a sign for me, right? There's all this other stuff that happened before I got to writing this book. Right?
brontë velez Wow, wow, Bahia will do it. Bahia will really do it. I feel that about that place. Very deeply. And yeah, tracing back, a moment of just thinking of two years ago, on my birthday, I was leaving. I had I felt like I was going through an initiation after a ceremony that Lead to Life held in Oakland, unceded Ohlone territory, where we had transformed guns with the crucible into these molds that were stars that were the constellations above Oscar Grant, the evening he was murdered 10 years prior, and there had just been a lot of calling of like, okay, I want to be working at a different level. And I started to speak without care, or protection, I started to say that I wanted an initiation, which I really wish I hadn't said in that way or had been more specific, which I'm learning now when you know, invoke things you need to be really specific. And I went on our birthday to Salvador, and I was feeling called to be there because it's the day that they honor Iemanjá, and I wanted to feel this kind of initiatory moment with land, with the orishas, with my solar return, and all to say, I ended up getting on, our birthday, I got attacked. And while in Brazil, I got robbed and my offerings almost got taken. But my whole bag and I had these offerings to give to the ocean and I had already gotten in the water and I just started asking Iemanjá for things for my life and there was no presence. And this is not to say that, you know, if I would have prayed I wouldn't have been hurt. It doesn't, it's not that simple. But there was this correction, I felt, a spiritual correction, I felt after I was safe, I was fine, it did not, I was able to look at this person where it really felt spiritual and to look them in their eyes and be like you don't know who you're fucking with, you don't know who you're robbing right now, you don't know what state I'm in and what impact this is going to have. And it also brought me into this moment of Black American-hood and Black, Black man in Brazil, taken from me and there was just so much going on a spiritual level. And I remember after shaking, the sun is now rising, it's our birthday and the fireworks are going and the offerings are beginning to be taken out to the water. And I ended up now finding my friends again, and we can barely understand each other, I was set up with them. We're trying to speak between Spanish and Portuguese. And they told me to just bring my hands in the water because my hand had been injured in this event. And I remember coming to the water shaking, I was completely shaking. And I felt that the ocean there took me in the way that I think my body wanted to, I think my body actually is not on some, like I deserve the hurt. But that, that that ocean, and what I had come for was actually that I wanted to come with that level of reverence for my body to be in that state of shaking, of trance of the Holy Ghost, and of coming to, of coming to water with reverence. And I've never related to the Earth flippantly since, I've never gone since and it makes me I've never gone back to the Earth without bringing my offerings. And without giving thanks and without acknowledging where I am. And trusting what it means that there are other powers at play moving and it makes me think about some of you when we're talking about the flesh, and the Earth and the Earth actually wanting our flesh. It makes me think about your language around Black feminist flesh analytics and Native feminists flesh analytics. And I don't know, I think I know what you mean. But I would love to hear how that how that language weaves in to and how your theory around the flesh analytics weaves into this this craving of the Earth for our presence with them, not for our death, which I think white supremacy and terrorism and all of these things has meant that our bodies have come back to the Earth too early. But rather this actual this eros, this erotic relationship of our bodies and the land.
Tiffany Lethabo King Oh, that was heavy brontë. Yes. Heavy. Yeah. Oh, thank you for that. That was a lot of deep sharing right there and I agree that the Atlantic Ocean in particular does not play, oh my gosh, it does not play. I had an experience with the Atlantic in Puerto Rico on a similar kind of taking for granted that I was on a day excursion in between conference sessions when our conference should not have even been in Puerto Rico. Number one. So again, diasporan people watch how you travel, right? The ethics of travel, how you decide to encounter other diasporan people who are saying look, we're colonized now, we're in an antagonistic relationship with the nation that you're coming from. I will step carefully, perhaps come when you're invited. Right. I didn't do that. And I thought I was gonna have a pleasurable experience, like just wading with the Atlantic. I got worked. There were moments I was scared and I'm a pretty a pretty strong swimmer. I've been swimming for a long time, my daddy taught me really early, the ocean was like not today hun. Try again on some other terms not today. We're not playing with you. Um, but yeah, like to get back to your question of flesh and alchemy as a flesh, I'm starting to think and feel through it seriously really for the first time like right now, to like give it some deep attention. I'm not done with the flesh, I know that it has become a heavily circulated keyword, that's what I'm going to say, in the academy, in the humanities right now, and used all kinds of ways some that I recognize, resonate with, totally appreciate and vibe with, you know, the way that people have given attention to what Hortense Spillers is doing is really important. There are other people doing wild stuff with it. People who don't want to be transformed by a Black feminist word are doing wild stuff with it and I'm trying to let that notion of flesh particularly around it's erotic lines and pulses change me in the way that you're saying. And so, one of the things that I appreciate that you just said is I want to deal with how the fleshiness of the Earth works on us, and calls us, particularly Black folks.
I had been a little bit stuck, and one of my colleagues helped me get unstuck and what I mean by that is I was in, wow, again, another space where the academy invited me as well as some other colleagues, Hawaii, right. Another space that I didn't have enough contexts, like I was able to connect with the brilliant artist and poet Joy [?], who helped us create space and introduced us to, re-introduced us to some spaces that we needed to be in right relationship with while we were in Hawaii, but I was on a panel and I was struggling. And I was, I was trying to articulate that. I wondered if there was a way for Indigenous folks and Black folks or Indigenous folks of many nations and Black folks of many ethnicities and nations and kinds of identities that exceeded nation and state to develop a shared language. And I was struggling with it. And I was open, we just kind of struggling with where are the spaces that we’re code switching or speaking the same language, but specifically about land. And I was like, I don't know if we necessarily have it. And I don't know if that's a problem. It's certainly not a deficiency on Black Studies, per Black peoples part and my colleague Xhercis Méndez, was like, maybe you're focusing too much on language itself, and there are some restrictions around it just in the way that you're talking about English, brontë, everything is not about language, what you say or write, some of it is is in dance, right? And she was like, you know, think about the dance for Iemanjá, right. That's deeply about the water and ecology, that's its own kind of grammar, right? What happens at the level of the body that again, can't be translated, has to be experienced, co-witnessed between Black and Indigenous people.
So it's bringing me to Black and Indigenous spaces of ceremony perhaps even since you gifted me with this laughter right? Gut busting laughter, right? That's the space of the flesh. And that's the alchemy I'm trying to get to, like the doing, and the changing, and the transforming that I'm trying to get to and articulate and will certainly be thinking with the work you're doing particularly dance that you're doing, I can't wait to see some pieces of this project, at least those that could have been, I guess archived for us through video, moving image, and even still, again, beyond the body but the flesh, what is flesh, flesh both at the ecological level land, water sky, and our flesh is deeply connected to that. What does that mean? What does that changing and shaping and manifesting and giving us so that's what I'm, I think that I'm feeling through and working through right now. And we'll see what it means to bring that to language and what other tools I have to use, perhaps, performance and voice and some non=spoken things to get to that.
brontë velez Wow. Thank you. Oh, wow. Thank you. Thank you for bringing in the dance. It feels like that. And I was thinking about how you, you're kind of dancing, I don't recall what chapter, I think it's your chapter around the erotic and Black and Indigenous relations, where you start to kind of speak about this dance or this distance between the language of sovereignty and abolition. And this question, can the word coalition do it for us, you talked about how, “perhaps ‘coalition’ as Billy-Ray Belcourt argues about sovereignty has been weighted down in political speak. I contend that discourses of coalition often forclose conversations about sex, erotics, and Black and Indigenous futures” and I've been thinking about this kind of your questions that I feel are so critical around the concepts of Native sovereignty and anti-Black racism, and all of the things that sovereignty means. And is it the word, is it about place? Is it about the Earth? Is it about the nation state? And you offer this question, “While Native sovereignty as a concept has stretched and changed due to the stress of internal pressure? Can it change in relation to Black people's needs and desires?” I wonder if you might speak more around complicating the concepts of sovereignty and also you spoke to a reviewer challenging you back about they said, “For whom is sovereignty important? And at what moment?” And so I wonder about this dance between sovereignty and Black abolition? Where does Black Liberation live in Native sovereignty? Where does Native sovereignty and Black liberation or Native liberation, find discord or friction? And how might intimacy or queerness kind of shift that relationship? And where does language fail us in that imagination?
Tiffany Lethabo King Yeah, that was a chapter that really challenged me for a number of reasons just to, again, right at the right at that edge and the limits of language that Billy-Ray Belcourt really helped me think about, right. His work was critical for allowing an opening, right, I see Belcourt’s work as pressing on the question of Native sovereignty in a deep way, in which one, Billy-Ray Belcourt is invested in Native peoples liberation and freedom and emancipation, like seriously as a pre-person, right? And had an ethical engagement with perhaps some of the hard edges of the way that political speak tracked these really capacious and porous notions of sovereignty, right? And was, as a poet, was paying attention to where Western language in notions of like bounded individual selves, crept into, in violent ways, Indigenous notions of flashiness, right of, erotics, of a capacity to change and change in relationship to the other. And I extended his discussion of that space of erotics. And he's explicitly as a queer and Indigenous queer theorist talking about sex and fucking right. It's literally talking about that space as being a space of radical encounter. Right. And saying that, yeah, there's something that political speech is not giving us, that our own erotic practices in desires can give us, a need to turn to that, if we really want to think about Indigenous futures, right? And wasn't explicitly trying to speak to Black Studies, but I thought I found him deeply engaged with some of the ways that Afropessimist I think, speaking specifically of Jared Sexton’s The Vel of Slavery was troubling Native Studies and I really think that there was a conflation happening between white settler colonial studies and Native Studies and calling them the same thing when they're not right, because it's certainly his form of Native Studies or Native decolonization was one that didn’t account for Billy-Ray Belcourt’s thoughts, and Billy-Ray Belcourt’s notion of what Indigenous futurity meant, and so I was really trying to deal with this debate. Right, that said, you know, Native sovereignty is really about recognition and that's something that Black folks don't have, and I was like I don't think so. Yeah, with us not talking to each other, which is not the fault of the individual scholar, right. There's a way that Black Studies gets cordoned off or sequestered from Native Studies when you're an academic, right, and when you produce from the space of the academy, and you're not necessarily in relationship with I'm not gonna say, in coalition with, in relationship with Indigenous folks outside of the academy, and even outside of political spaces, like nonprofit organizations, or a formal coalitional group, there's a lot that you miss, about how Black folks and Indigenous folks are trying to relate to one another. Right. They're not just nuances, but the kind of fleshy, fleshy transformative experiences that we have with one another, like in the trenches with one another, right? And Melanie Yazzie, Shanya Cordis, and I were on a roundtable at Spelman and this sister who I really feel like she is from, perhaps the Southwest, and I don't want to definitely miss name her and her nation and her people, but she was talking about her experience of being a sex worker, and living with another sex worker and negotiating the kind of violence that they both experienced and caring for one another. So her sister was in need of surgery. And so she was talking about how she had to go on, I think it was Backpage, at the time, there was a I forget who I don't know if it was Kamala Harris, who was trying to, like criminalize the use of that particular classified space in publications, print and online publicationsthat sex workers were using, they were trying to regulate it in the name of helping out sex workers, right, both talking about having to do some sex work, that was precarious in order to help her friend get the medical care that she needed. And so she was talking about that as like deep relational space. And so I'm like, when folks in the academy talk about coalition and Black and Indigenous relations as being fraught and hindered by notions of sovereignty, they don't think about those spaces like the everyday spaces where we need each other to survive and what we're willing to risk put on the line care for each other that again, like Billy-Ray Belcourt is saying, exceeds language, like it's not this issue of sovereignty, both for Black and Indigenous people cannot be overwritten as something that's already resolved or decided for us by Western language if we get really honest with ourselves, and our desire and attraction for people particularly interracially like who we're deciding to partner with and fuck we're doing a lot of stuff that folks say is deeply coalitional right but you don't call it that because it's your personal life and you don't want to bring it to the surface and have people scrutinize it. But people are working out their relationship to white people, Indigenous people, folks of color, Black folks are doing this through like fucking and who they choose to have as, as partners. Right, talk about that. And that's where the stuff gets real. That's where we figure out how we're invested in one another's well being in futurity. And those are the terms in which we need to probably discuss it like we can. Like Billy-Ray Belcourt is like, we can't keep it cute. Like, we really can't. This stuff is complicated and we're working it out sometimes through fucking and other things. And that needs to be a space of theory. Like, let's be honest.
brontë velez Yeah, it makes me think, how critical pleasure is to this work and how often the relationship is about some sort of, the relationship is about organizing. Or, you know, yeah, changing our conditions, or speaking to the state or imagining that the state is what will kind of give us our power. And what our work is to do is to kind of collaborate in order to receive those reparations or freedom from the state, rather than to perhaps find what is possible between one another? And what's possible beyond. Yeah, what's possible beyond, what's possible inside of other sites of power, it makes me think in your new text, that you are the anthology that you're editing, that you just edited, otherwise worlds, Chris Finley comes in and talks about this kind of language of failing our way into intimacy, and how we might embrace failure and the attempt towards intimacy and says, “After all, isn't working together a move toward intimacy? Hasn't this always been a bit icky, scary, and awkward? Why do we expect each other to be perfectly formed political subjects, when we've all been institutionalized, to think badly of each other, and ourselves.” And I loved this kind of imagining of marronage and the possibilities and pleasure that could come through failure, which I think is something we're too afraid to actually be willing to do and I think that we're going to fail. And I think there's, I think there's grief in that. And I think grief, as a part of the practice, needs to be there. When I think of fucking and the energy that that brings, I also think about the possibilities of ceremony and grief work and rage and hurt, what the body is allowed to do when in that deep eros to scream and yell out, to transcend, to share breath, you know, these other things we were talking about, to stay in the body. To be loved, really, to be loved. And I think there's, yeah, there's so many spaces. I feel like that we haven't imagined that could allow us to do that for one another.
So yeah, I'm curious, as we close. I remember last night when I was talking to my partner, Jiordi, we were talking about where do we meet beyond the wound, Black and Indigenous folks, is the wound the only place that we can meet? We were thinking of Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, a colleague and friend, language that he often brings up around dehiscence, it's a surgical complication where the edges of a wound no longer meet, and I was thinking a lot about this. Not wanting to only focus on our wounds, but are wounds the only place that we meet, and I see you and your project describing you know “Dragging settler colonial logic offshore.” What does that provide to the dance of how we get free with one another? And is the shoal we were talking about, is the shoal actually a time, not a place and how we might want to displace liberation? Because we were chatting about this elder Orlando Bishop who said to me when I was headed from Oakland to Memphis to be in, to stay at the Lorraine Motel before Lead to Life’s 50th Anniversary Ceremonies of Dr. King’s assassination, I said to him, I don't know why I'm taking the train, and he said it’s because you're going to a time, not a place. And the act of marching was actually the anticipation of knowing that we were committing and agreeing to another relationship to time, to our freedom. And so the body and the gesture moving through place, was just acknowledging that agreement. And so a couple of different things there as we end, failure, intimacy, time, and what's beyond the wound here for us, with Black and Indigenous folks, if you might leave us with a little prophecy.
Tiffany Lethabo King You can't leave me with that, dwindling time and we will reconnect on this, but I think you've said it Wow. Like, marching is the creation of time, right? And the preparation for a shift. This is about moving to a time, and it makes me think, to try to encapsulate some of my thoughts and move towards where you're thinking, of taking us beyond the wound of Black and Indigenous betrayal, or where we may have been perceived to betray each other. I had just had the opportunity on Monday to think about this, because someone who was in the audience of our panel for Dark Laboratory and Electric Marronage was asking specifically about a map that I look at an 18th century map in my second chapter, and why I had not focused more on the Cherokee practice of slavery, right? And it was like, I definitely want to address that and talk to talk to that, but I also was challenged to and invited the challenge of a thinking about a time before that became the central narrative about Cherokee and Black people's relationship and it was a time where I could locate a time, right that 1757 map, where Black life and Indigenous life was oriented towards insurrection, right, and a resistance, a mutual kind of resistance to fell a particular kind of conquistador settler order. So on that map, I see that, right, that was before–not that there hadn't been moments of betrayal, where the Cherokee we're not returning captors, but before slavery had become an institution, right, and a capital making kind of venture for the Cherokee Nation, right. It was before that, and there was also a place where I was talking to Jessica Marie Johnson, about the use of forts, the ways that can be sourced, settlers were using forts, they were also places of imprisonment. They were holding cells, right? There were places where both folks who had been captured, Cherokee folks who have been captured who are part of warring forces who were trying to beat back the settlers, and also enslaved folks who were planning insurrection or in planning, planning, slave rebellions. They were held together, right? They were held in those forts as captives together. So our initial spaces of incarceration, right, were ones that were Black and Indigenous spaces of capture. Right. And so I was thinking about, we not only have a wound, right, of the Cherokee practice of slavery, but we have a time before then where that deal had not been wagered. Right. That part, those particular terms of Cherokee sovereignty had not had not been settled, right. And so we have times while we still have the wound, we have times before, we have times after, right, not that the afterlife of slavery and that traumas is still with us, particularly around the freedmen, right, but still, we have times to revisit and think about our relationship of rebellion to conquest and the settler colonial project here and I feel again, the pulse of that, a revisiting of that time so forcefully right now, brontë through the work you're doing, the work that my colleagues are doing, particularly Indigenous and Native feminists are doing, because we can access those times, we do have the capacity to access those moments, right and reinvigorate them and reactivate them and bring them into a now. We do. Yeah. Oh, thank you for that offering of time, right, another kind of depot.
brontë velez Wow. Thank you so much Tiffany, for this. Such a powerful conversation, I'm reminded of a Muskogee elder when I was in Atlanta for those King ceremonies, in April of 2018, someone connected us to have a conversation and I don't remember this brother's name, but I remember he closed the conversation saying that we continue to walk each other home, and so I pray that we continue to do that, that Black and Indigenous folks continue to do that for one another, and that it's not necessarily, yeah, my friend Esperanza shared recently of her mom reading an article about a houseless family and they were interviewing the child and being like, how, how does it feel now to have a house and he said, “Oh, we were never, we always had a home. We just needed a house to put our home into.” So I'm just feeling that that home as something that is offshore, and that can't be found in this story of the state, can’t be given to us. So thank you for your practice in fugitivity and your scholarship and this amazing conversation. I'm so excited to talk to you.
Tiffany Lethabo King Happy Birthday, birthday twin. I look forward to talking to you.
brontë velez Thank you, happy birthday.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to part two of brontë velez’s two part conversation with Tiffany Lethabo King. The music you heard today was by Ashia Karana and Jiordi Rosales. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.