The Free List : Vol. 1, No. 2
SOME OF US ARE FUGITIVES SHOUTING OVER OUR SHOULDERS
SOME THOUGHTS ON TIME
When I say that time is running concurrently, I mean that the past is working and reworking right now and also that the future is here. I am saying that time travel is factual—not conceptual—and that we all have a responsibility to access the truth of time from where we stand. Not everyone has capacity, but all are capable. My work as an artist is to remind us that we are capable.
❂
Time is not about arrival. Arriving on time is a myth.
Freedom is and always has been. Freedom is not a place.
Justice is also not a destination. Justice is a practice.
Freedom is portal--a body of water that can be entered or exited, but not evaporated.
Freedom is and always has been.
❂
❂ ❂
Black people sound like we are from the future and are continually interested in a futuring practice because we are constantly being pushed out of and otherwise uncontained by small 't' time,
which is why Black Lives Matter is, yes, a civic statement, but it is, furthermore, an existential one. It is a molecular manifesto that demands Black people (who only exist as one group because of the need to create an underclass for global resource extraction; who have become a political, cultural, social, psychological, pseudo-physical and spiritual identity that contains billions of threads of difference, unified by the continued extraction and manufacture of resource and Understanding) be included in "time."
The present is the only Real Time.
Ancestral Time is also the only Real Time, which means Ancestral Time can only be found in the present,
which means that the Present is All Time.
The ALL is present and the ALL is presence.
Black people are demanding to be Present, as in existing in Real Time.
We must fight to be present to thrive and access Ancestral Present(s).
The present is where we access power.
The present is also where we can access the stream of freedom. Without the ability to be present, to have presence, there is no freedom.
Freedom only exists in the present, because the present is the only Real Time and Un-freedom is unreal.
Freedom is always present.
Freedom is and always has been.
Freedom is not a destination.
Freedom is and always has been.
Freedom is encoded in the music, food, dance, the drum. The caress of bae. Words and space between words.
Messages of freedom come through ancestral practice. Reminders. Black people are consciously and unconsciously kept "busy" by the "important" tasks of white supremacy to distract us from presence.
Presence cannot be enslaved.
Presence is.
Freedom is.
Freedom is and always has been.
❂
❂ ❂
❂ ❂ ❂
Some of those who have come to be known as white try to push us out, down and away from Real Time because they fear our ancestors, sure, but moreso, they fear their own, as well as the pain and the loss of their own tongues and traditions, traded in for what turned out to be empty.
And they fear Presence, for it means Freedom.
The rush and the hurriedness of capitalism is a trauma response. Enslaved peoples who worked sugar cane had a life expectancy of seven years. In Jamaica. The joke that Jamaicans always work 3 or more jobs. Isn't funny. But it is sweet. It is made of sugar.
Blue-Black from the sunshine, dropping dead amongst the cane, bleeding into the sugar. Black-Blue from the sunshine, sweat drying up in between sandy dirt and coagulated surface.
I've been in the car with my grandmother passing a cotton field on our ancestral land. She is remembering picking as a child, sure, and she is also remembering her grandmother, Alice, picking. The cotton gin, speeding up small "t" time for the enslaved. Moving boll weevils faster and faster off the plant to "keep up" the quota for the day. A bale. 500 pounds. A day. Bleeding hands keep up, don't fall "behind." Behind "time." No bailouts of Bales.
No bail/bale.
❂
❂ ❂
❂ ❂ ❂
❂ ❂ ❂ ❂
Time is not money.
It is not.
The present is the only Real Time.
We--
I want to be present.
Part of the fight happening right now is a fight over time.
But
The fight over Time is a loop.
And the loophole is REMEMBRANCE.
The medicine is REMEMBRANCE.
The TRUE 'GAME' is...
R E M E M B R A N C E.
Remember
Re
member
Remembering
that small "t" time is unreal and so, as we fight to obtain more access to "time", we must remember it is a passageway to getting resourced enough to be present.
We do not have to be fugitives if we give no power to the time that does not actually exist––the time imposed on us by white bodies so traumatized out of remembrance that they do not remember being traumatized. Those of us who have capacity and capability can remember this.
Some of us are fugitives shouting over our shoulders and no, there’s no hounds — not actual ones, not usually, but there are policies that bark just as loud and brown paper bags with somethin that could feel good enough to help us escape - do you know how much (linearly)sooner revolution would’ve come without all those liquor stores in the hood?. There are plans to ensure that unreal time is bought, sold, and traded. Policies that insist over and over that Time is a commodity.
Time is not a commodity.
Time is not money.
The only Real Time is Ancestral Time.
.
Rocks are ancestors, too.
.
When we cannot access this truth (and all of us are capable, but not all of us have capacity––as in space––because well, we cannot even breathe. We were wearing masks at birth. We have needed inhalers since we were webbed; floating in aminiotic fluid laced with the unpromise our mother did not want to give us, but had no choice. All of us are capable, but not all of us have capacity).
Some of us our fugitives shouting over our shoulders; forgetting that there was something else in the water.
There was something else
in that
W A T E R
And the waters are ancestors, too.
They do not stop speaking just because we are too busy running to hear them,
They have nowhere to go but the Present
where we too, are Free.
~
All of the work here is brought to you by the gifts of our Ancestors; seen and unseen, known and unknown. May we remember our rising, may we light the shadows. May we all together thrive.
