#liveability

I think that this happens on a few levels. First, the inscription of behaviors, which also corresponds to a misattribution of responsibility. We are rightly adopting measurements—wash your hands, stay home—but this also transfers the attention from a systemic shortcoming to the citizens’ responsibility. It supports the State in its underperformance in providing healthcare and providing access to testing. Inscribing this responsibility into the citizen’s body partially allows the State not to be accountable. There is also what we are taking on, as a condition of living, in the long exposure to screen-time and anxiety. Something–the how we are living—is inscribed there, and what scares me is that the body is often not considered part of this conversation, neither in its biological nor non-biological part. A last thing that is currently (re)inscribed into the body is the reaffirmation of the dichotomy of private and public space that upholds the notion of urbanization. Architecture and the spaces that surrounded us are always inscribed into our bodies and behaviors. With the practice of self-isolation, the division of public and private space is reaffirmed and, through it, the preservation of the State is inscribed into our body. It continues to administer life, and we continue to perform tasks. The virus is also a space, since it is a system of rewriting how bodies are socialized but also, because the virus is hosted in our bodies, brings the conversation back to us, as [individual] users of spaces and as enclosures. I hope this will be the moment to recenter human geography; to acknowledge that cities, and the way cities are designed, are not aligned with public life, nor with health. Architect Hossein Sadri recently said that if we were to sit with the virus as a client, this virus would approve these densely populated cities we are designing now. Urbanity connects people together and allows different forms of socialization, but under urbanization–or the way cities are now designed, living on top of each other—our bodies will always be vulnerable to pandemics.

The perception that people of color don’t care about the environment has existed for a long time, and has been debunked for just as long. We can go back to [historian] W.E.B. DuBois, whose 1898 study on Philadelphia looked at the housing and health conditions of African Americans. People have described it as a sociological study, but if you read it, it is an environmental study, if ever there was one. He looked at the environmental conditions of these communities, but he linked them with social inequality and justice issues. Before that, look at Harriet Tubman. We tend to think of her as someone only successful on the Underground Railroad, but to be that successful she was steeped in environmental and ecological knowledge. She knew the Chesapeake Bay so well that the U.S. military used her at the head of their ships to identify landmines the Confederates had laid in the water and identified them based off what she understood about disturbances in the water. Slaves depended on ecological knowledge and were extremely effective at it — they used it to survive slavery. So the notion that we don’t care or know about the environment is just a fallacy.

But the longer I sat with this book the more choked, the more stagnant it became. The directions I followed and answers I found seemed too easy, too pat—and while this apparently pleased funders and tenure committees, it left me cold and uneasy. So I went back to texts I’d gathered for my project and other texts I’d loved in the past ten years, looking for what unexpected things they might have to say about Caribbean lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer experience that I was still missing. I quickly found my answer: nothing. This was because the vocabulary I had been using to describe these authors, the descriptors that they used for their own identities—queer, lesbian, transgender—appeared nowhere in their work. Nowhere. No characters, no narrators, no one in the novels used these words. Instead they talked about many kinds of desires, caresses, loves, bodies, and more. And over and over again, they talked about something that was such a big part of my life, but that I never expected to find in most queer fiction: spirituality, Afro-Caribbean religions. Not one of these authors wrote about “queers,” but almost everyone wrote about lwa—that is, about the spirit forces of the Haitian religion Vodou. And, finally, finally tuning into this other vocabulary, I was fascinated by the recurrence of one figure, who multiplied herself in these texts as if in a hall of mirrors: the beautiful femme queen, bull dyke, weeping willow, dagger mistress Ezili. Ezili is the name given to a pantheon of lwa who represent divine forces of love, sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and fertility. She’s also the force who protects madivin and masisi, that is, transmasculine and transfeminine Haitians. And Ezili, I was coming to see—Ezili, not queer politics, not gender theory—was the prism through which so many contemporary Caribbean authors were projecting their vision of creative genders and sexualities.

Last night Saidiya Hartman began with a question: How do we attend to Black Death? A question we must return to again and again, since our suffering to the degree that it is recognized, is exploited in the service of rehabilitating anti black and colonial institutions. The vampires continue to feed on us. Our deaths are not the prequel to a discussion about reforming institutions that were and remain instruments of colonial violence. Our work, each and every word we have ever written is a critique of this project and of the world built on stolen land, stolen lives, stolen labor, stolen objects, stolen futures. Saidiya and I reckon with Black Death, with black life in the wake with the intent of making possible other ways of living/other ways of inhabiting the earth. Don’t use our death, our suffering, our lives and our work to regenerate your projects. Don’t turn our flesh into gold again. We do not consent to this