Into The Clear, Unreal, Idyllic Light of the Beginning | A Will of the Night
By Felicia Denaud
Notes for a New Year
“The clear, unreal, idyllic light of the beginning is followed by a semi-darkness that bewilders the senses.”
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
“The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarter.”
- Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
I.
They imagined us “surging into the forbidden” —socially therapeutic descents into the otherwise repressed grounds of a counterplan. I call this reverie afroassembly against the master conception, against the regulating categories of political authority and violence. [1] I call this reverie an idea becoming blood, becoming life itself: “le yon lide rantre nan mas pèp la / nan nannan lavi-a / li tounen san tounen fòs tounen / lavi menm.” [2]
As a conceptual shorthand, afroassembly refers to those instances where an idea enters a people to become the essence of their life. It names the set of relations and space of action born out of a shared experience of political devotion. Afroassembly also refers to the economy of war and sacrifice that structures Black political life. “We too are veterans,” Safiya Bukhari of the U.S Black Panther Party writes in The War Before, “of an all-out multiphasic war designed to stifle dissent in America in general and in the Black community in particular” (1020). We too are veterans. Bukhari refuses the interstate system’s proprietary claim to war, its suggestion that there are no real wars, official political prisoners, or actual veterans within the political problem-space of white-over-black. [3] Afroassembly — which really is a roving placeholder for “off-continuum” gatherings and uprisings — unfolds within an unforgiving distribution of risk and reward. [4] Bukhari continues:
Our intense belief in the rightness and justness of our cause, and that things would be different when we returned to the streets, our awareness that we are still alive while our people’s conditions have grown worse despite all our sacrifices—all this produces a traumatic shock to our system. This is the ultimate shock. We survived while others died. Despite all their intents and purposes, their deaths were in vain. The struggle hasn’t been won. I contend that these elements have caused us to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (1020).
Political abandonment is a powerful strategy of containment. When radical variables cannot be shoehorned into the state’s account of itself, they must be disappeared, alienated, and trivialized. The Black political prisoner remains a historical figment. The scope/scale of political language remains interred within civic formations and their respective legal imaginations: there is no diagnostic space for multiphasic war here. As a terrain of devotion, then, afroassembly is neither romantic nor dogmatic; it summons chilling conditions of (internal) betrayal and (external) predation; it entails breathtaking contingency alongside devastating reconfigurations of alliance and power.
[Maurice Bishop. Photo courtesy Grenada National Museum]
Western conquest, Frantz Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth, creates a social order of “generalized homicide” (251). These are the founding conditions out of which political desire and strategy emerge. To think clearly about these conditions, as Aimé Césaire reminds, is to think dangerously about them. Clarity of mind, when it concerns the conditions that condition us, is dangerous. Yet, it can also encourage us to conduct necessary philosophical, strategic, and interpersonal postmortems that convert what Bukhari calls the “ultimate shock” — that some survive while others die, and that these deaths could be in vain — into underground lifelines. How organizations, people, and their ideas survive repression is one question. How they move on in the face of a repression they cannot survive is another. We are responsible for these two questions and more importantly the lives that are shaped by unimaginable sacrifice.
I’ve always been swept up by Bukhari’s diagnostic clarity and the pulse of her writing. It’s like sinking one’s hands into soil for the first time. The idea of an afroassembly comes from a desire to read Safiya Bukhari and Maurice Bishop, the Grenadian revolutionary, together. I consider them among the mysteries of the earth. Through Bishop, I’ve come to dwell on the New Jewel Movement’s original commitment to democratic assembly: “At first, NJM would not call itself a party. Bishop’s Movement for Assemblies of the People had been a ‘movement’ for representative ‘assemblies’ of the people, and this movement was interested in popular democracy.” [5] From Bukhari, I am not only attuned to the complex interactions between repression and the “fratricidal elements within” but the vexed process of principled reasoning within a paranoid field of struggle.
[Black Panther Party Food Distribution, Black Community Survival Conference Rally at Greenman Field, March 28-31, 1972]
Her analysis, in turn, has given me better questions and fresher eyes with which to study the Grenadian Revolution. Over the years, my work and interest have grown more l preoccupied with the Grenadian Revolution and the US invasion “as the last proxy battle of the Cold War.” Bishop, it should be remembered, was executed by firing squad but also by a fatal schism. The set of events triggered by that schism make up a living wound. As Patsy Lewis, Gary Williams, and Peter Clegg note in Grenada: Revolution and Invasion:
The killing of Bishop and the US invasion had the effect of cementing the existing schisms in Grenadian society and creating new ones, threatening its social fabric. Division emerged along the following: between those who were in favour of the revolution, seeing it as a force of good, and those who were against the revolution, convinced that it was doomed to failure; those who were pro–Maurice Bishop but were against the revolution, believing that Bishop was a good man hijacked by bad people (in other words, that he had good intentions but the revolution was essentially bad); those who were supportive of revolution and Maurice Bishop but hostile to Deputy Prime Minister Bernard Coard, who, they believed, had destroyed the revolution; and those, albeit a small minority, who reviled Maurice Bishop for betraying the revolution and paving the way for its collapse and the US invasion.
Ideological differences can function as cosmetic squabbles, but they can also amount to world-historical subversions. Only serious study can help discern and anticipate the difference. Revolutions shatter into a sea of frontlines. Only the nature of relation — the interplay of conflicting, converging, and sometimes compromised devotions —determines how and in what ways this shattering occurs.
[Mileston Summer volunteer carpenter, Jim Boebel, and a local resident post a shotgun watch at the community center against a firebomb threat. Mileston, MS: June 1964. Community Center Construction. Freedom Summer, 1964]
To this end, I write to understand the devotional exchange that underwrites a genre of militant Black political experience. The images included with this essay all express — in the most subtle and haunting ways — acts of the faithful. Each image unfolds within a field of real— that is always incipient— violence. Each image discloses a moment of touch that can only be described as the “clear, unreal, idyllic light of the beginning.” I write from the fingers framing Bishop’s chin. I live through the hands grasping the grocery bag. I feel from the eyes keeping vigil over Freedom Summer.
II.
In defiling the forbidden, writes Fanon, the native becomes historical, that is “decides to embody history in her own person” (40). Having been nailed to time, the damnés become time. The present is infiltrated, taken over, delivered back to the people. From “lifeless chaos” and “crushing inessentiality” to the glorious and glaring “floodlights of history,” the journey out from existential arrest is cleansing and absolute (36). An order “strewn with prohibitions” is broken open so that life may begin. A dialectic of deliverance indeed! Along, the uncertain shorelines of the 21st century, The Wretched of the Earth appears as an ancestral portrait of “embryonic heresies and instincts” becoming “moving force” and “warming light.”
Have you noticed the play of light at the scene of every metamorphosis? Fanon speaks of the “clear, unreal, idyllic light of the beginning” and the glaring floodlights of history. He celebrates the pursuit of that warming, light-giving center by means of which “man and citizen develop and enrich their experience” (81). For Wilson Harris, slow-motion lightning names and visualizes the “energies of the cosmos as sleeping/ waking life, as station and expedition, as the transfiguration of technologies into a therapeutic edge within the malaise of gross materialism that threatens to destroy our planet.” [6] Slow-motion lightning is a matter of substance becoming life, a matter of technological transfiguration toward the therapeutic edge. And finally, Yvonne Vera speaks of the suffusing light of national birth: a light that “dispels uncertainty…guides the young out of the darkness of trepidation into the glory of dawn,” a light sourced from the “birth of the earth.” [7] Genres of illumination swell alongside the silent glow of nocturnal resources, those unreconstructed shadows that persist and remember and suspect. The beginning is always a breathtaking light show.
And yet, “the body politic is posited as a unity it can never be,” reminds Judith Butler. [8] This is the bewildering semi-darkness Fanon refers to in The Wretched of the Earth. The “lightning flashes of consciousness” that initiate political action are provisional: “that intense emotion of the first few hours falls to pieces if it is left to feed on its own substance” (139). Upon such unstable ground, dis/assembly and (what Fanon calls) a process of “social treason” collide. [9] This is the matrix in which devotional exchange becomes a shattering, becomes a site of devotional wounds. Perhaps we will forge a way/will to struggle from the mystery of the earth, from the time before beginning. Let there be light! Let there be a nocturnal power, a will of the night, that grows within and survives the bewildering semi-darkness too.
Notes
[1] Among Western fundamentalism’s paradigmatic — though analytically marginalized — contributions to the political is the democratic institutionalization of master power. Therein lies an intractable though mercurial dilemma at the heart of western order: the juridical distribution of coercive capacity between master and state. In my work, I call this the master function/conception and the master/state complex. In her essay “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis,” Sylvia Wynter uses the idea of the “master conception” to discuss C.L.R James’ counterdoctrine to the bourgeois social imaginary. Western fundamentalism here refers to political orders secured by capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy.
[2] See Paul Laraque andJack Hirschman (eds.). Open Gate: An Anthology of Haitian Creole Poetry. Curbstone Press, 2001. The translation reads: “When an idea enters the mass of people / in the essence of their life / it becomes blood becomes strength / becomes life itself.”
[3] See Anthony Paul Farley. “Perfecting Slavery.” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2004.
[4] See Joy James. “On Abolition: 7 Lessons in 1 Abolitionist Notebook.” Abolition Journal, 2019.
[5] See Patsy Lewis, et al. Grenada: Revolution and Invasion. University of the West Indies Press, 2015.
[6] See Wilson Harris. Carnival Trilogy. Faber & Faber, 2013.
[7] See Yvonne Vera,. Nehanda. Baobab Books, 1993.
[8] See Judith Butler. Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press, 2018.
[9] The full quote reads: “The clear, unreal, idyllic light of the beginning is followed by a semi-darkness that bewilders the senses. The people find that the iniquitous fact of exploitation can wear a black face, or an Arab one; and they raise the cry of ‘Treason!’ But the cry is mistaken; and the mistake must be corrected. The treason is not national, it is social” (145).
References
Bukhari, Safiya. The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind. Ed. Laura Whitehorn. Feminist Press, 2010.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Pref. by Jean-Paul Sartre. Grove Press, 1968.
Cover Photo Credit: Tessa Mars, “Untitled,” Praying for the visa series (2019).
Dr. Felicia Denaud is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Denaud graduated from Brown University (Spring 2022) where she completed her dissertation “Of Master and State: Juridical Order, Political Form, and Administrative Abstraction as Unnameable War." Her dissertation submits Western war power to a critical treatment that identifies and interrogates liberal legalism’s war in form or its social process of unnameable war. This critical treatment brings together a discussion of the atom bomb, absolutism, enslaved pregnant rebels, and Black power politics and literature in an unruly attempt to clarify the relationship between war and Afromodernity. Dr. Denaud’s body of work recognizes Sylvia Wynter’s call for a “counter-doctrine to the dictatorship of the master conception” as the outstanding task of the times. In defiance of the war power with no name — its overseers and apologists — she writes toward the “unexchangeable singularity” we must become.