Showcased partially in an exhibition curated by Lisa J. Sutcliffe, and then organized at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive by Julia M. White and Stephanie Cannizzo, the curated amalgam of images in The San Quentin Project: Nigel Poor and the Men of San Quentin presents a small cross-section of the vast photo archival collection kept by San Quentin State Prison. The show includes a series of essays, written exercises, photographs from the prison’s archives and audio interviews. Guided by the increasing number of conversations about criminal justice reform, the show seeks to use art as a vehicle for questioning assumptions commonly made about incarcerated people and as a means of reframing public narratives. The show closed over a month ago; I’ve been unsettled by it since.

It feels naïve to admit to being surprised that the notorious San Quentin State Prison has such a diverse photographic archive. And still I was. But an archive is simply the deliberate collection of documents or records. If an archive can be kept for a library or for a family in the form of photo albums, then of course San Quentin has an archive. The question, then, is the purpose that particular visual archive serves.

It felt uncomfortable and almost paradoxically intrusive to witness; the prison is a state-funded institution, after all, and its dealings should be made known to the public. And even still I felt like I was peering into a world that I should not know anything about. I was entering a space deliberately cordoned off from the world, a black site whose violent dealings are only known intimately by those who inflict violence and those upon whom violence is inflicted (the latter category includes systems-affected families and friends and communities and not simply imprisoned people themselves). It was unnerving to bear witness to the varied gaze of the panopticon, but I’m not sure why I was surprised; of course it must record and document every act. Some of the images were sweet and funny: family visitations, leisurely ball games, a shared Passover kiss. Others were decidedly less so: cloth materials used for suicide attempts or escape, assaulted inmates and officers, self-inflicted wounds, chalk drawings marking the scene of murder. A couple of images marked “public relations” were presumably intended as institutional propaganda. Photos of hardworking men would not be used to unequivocally humanize the subjects and their potential to learn and be educated, but to tout the rehabilitative potential, success, and social necessity of the prison. Regardless of content or aesthetic value, every single shot is imbued with the specter of violence.

Art and carcerality are not uncommon bedfellows; they, in many ways, share a hegemonic position. From the prison drawings of Joe Massey being revealingly described as art’s “Next Big Thing” to Aperture Magazine’s spring 2018 “Prisoner Nation” issue (which features Poor’s work in the prison’s archives) to the Smithsonian’s expressed interest in acquiring drawings made by detained migrant children, we are intrigued by any glimpses we can manage of life on the inside. But a great deal of this fascination stems from the apparent novelty of the racialized prisoner-artist (or prisoner-intellectual) based on gatekept conventional notions of who truly is and who is allowed to be an artist. “The archetypically brutal, brutish, unthinking, and uncultured inmate can draw!” goes the novelty. In the age of diversity and inclusion in art, the incarcerated outsider artist is sexy, but decarceration and prison abolition are not. The curiosity is not an attempt to have the subaltern prisoner speak, but to commodify expression in a way that reinscribes and reifies their subalternity. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation and consistent patron of the arts, announced that the foundation would support a proposal to move people incarcerated at Rikers to four new smaller detention centers in an effort to close the infamous jail. Nuance, he calls it.

Time and time again, incarcerated people — people experiencing violent conditions of detention — offer critical standpoints and intimate relationships to violence and the overreaching regulation of personhood exerted by the state through incarceration. These perspectives are every bit as legible in drawings, prison writings, and archival commentary as they are in labor stoppages and prison strikes and clandestine documentaries. Nowhere are the evolution of the plantation, the loophole of the 13th Amendment, racist exploitations of labor, or treatments of people as chattel illustrated better than within the prison.

One part of the exhibition introduces the Archival Mapping Project, and this is where incarcerated men become active speakers. Poor began teaching visual studies classes to men inside of San Quentin as a part of the Prison University Project in 2011; assignments from her a course called Visual Concern in Photography are displayed in this show. For one exercise in her class, she assigned archival images from the prison to her students in her class to interpret because of their familiarity with the subject matter and with San Quentin itself. It was a powerful opportunity for the incarcerated subjects of the surveillant prison gaze — carceral images all serve a classificatory function — to respond to it. The archive, of course, is synecdochic for the prison: the archival map is the charting of their relationship to the institution, but also to one another and to themselves. The museum wall text describes how their work “make[s] life inside prison visible to external audiences,” which necessarily compels us to question the exhibition’s intended audience. In a way, the exhibition acts as space for audiences — specifically audiences that are not particularly familiar with the inner workings of carceral structures — to negotiate with their own morality. One’s own virtuosity permits them to truly see and empathize with these incarcerated men, but it may be limited because these men in San Quentin are confined to their cages in Marin County (and the flattened trope of a remorseful, keen to be rehabilitated prisoner might be limited to our imaginations). But do we extend this same generosity to non-white children swept up in the school-to-prison pipeline as young as preschool? Are we curious enough about the interiorities of young men in Richmond and Oakland and around the Bay Area to listen to what they have to say, or do we prefer to entangle ourselves with the lives of these men only as we are able to hold them at a geographic and social distance and never engage them fully as human?

The image “Fish Caught at Ranch 9–17–75” depicts a small statured Latino-appearing man holding a fish. Monta Kevin Tindall responds to the image 38 years later in 2013; his red and black and gold writing around the borders describes the immaculate tying of the bandanna around the man’s head, the symmetry of the fish scales within the photograph’s composition, the prison’s rules that may forbid this man from getting to enjoy his catch. Tindall titles his response “Prison at Peace?” which is mirrored and punctuated by three words directly beneath the image: “who’s really caught!” These responses reflect the self-reflectiveness that we typically deny incarcerated people save, perhaps, our favorite celebrities or Black nationalist prison writings (or Gramsci).

Incarceration also yields a warped relationship to temporality. There is a deliberate disconnection of the prison’s zone of non-being from the “real world,” which produces, for many incarcerated people (especially those sentenced to sensory-depriving solitary confinement), a sense of being left behind by the world. Encased in glass is Michael Nelson’s response to Assignment №2, the second assignment in Poor’s visual studies course. Students were to compare and contrast two video still images: one by Hiroshi Sugimoto and another by Richard Misrach. Nelson was twenty-eight and serving in solitary while completing his assignment. He wrote that “the two photographs remind me of those who get left behind by not being able to keep up with the change that lives and breathes throughout time.” He goes on to say that in prison, “time seems to stand still while the world outside moves on without me. I think of the two picture screens who are being replaced by technology which they have no chance of competing with.” Languishing in prison, to Michael, is not unlike the built-in technological obsolescence that makes us abandon our old phones for newer ones. The prison is not designed as a space for reform. Prison is a stunting of personhood, a deliberate social and emotional underdevelopment accentuated (for some) by the torturous solitude of administrative segregation. It’s not simply Michael’s melancholic thoughtfulness that’s heart-rending in itself, but his articulation of abandonment and the self-referential application of what is meant when we talk about prisons and social death.

Also encased in glass is one of the few pieces of prison archival ephemera: an old book containing images of the now shuttered Joliet Correctional Center. It’s a famous prison, featured in Blues Brothers (1980) and many more movies since its closure in 2002, as well as the serial drama Prison Break. An image in the book shows a few men sitting on one another’s shoulders in a mounted pillow fight staged to “help relieve some of the tension built up by confinement.” It chillingly evokes what are presently described as “gladiator fights,” where correctional officers pit inmates against one another for their own voyeuristic pleasure. A show like this feels timely because a show like this demands that we do two things: it asks us to listen to the images and how their subjects relate to them (and to their own representations by proxy), and it asks us to honestly evaluate our own motivations in looking at the exhibition’s images.

San Quentin and this Berkeley institution are just sixteen miles apart, but they could not be further apart in our political imaginations. But every day that I take the ferry to work, I pass by the prison. Sometimes, depending on when I leave for or return from San Francisco, the yard is empty. Other times, the yard is full: full of people playing ball or interacting, and sometimes they wave at our passing boat. The show quite clearly premises itself on the idea that we might be surprised at our very wrong assumptions about incarcerated people (here, specifically, incarcerated men), which forecloses any possibility of the intelligence, clarity, and humanity of incarcerated people in the same breath that it positions itself as an advocate or artistic interlocutor. Perhaps in the future, we will collaborate with presently or formerly incarcerated people or abolitionist organizations: perhaps we will begin to engage and embrace a plurality of more explicitly politicized representations of prison life rather than seeking to appeal to unaffected and relatively uninformed audiences. Otherwise, we stand to perpetuate the same patronizing, criminalizing gaze as this horrifyingly omnipresent archive.

The very same process can and does also occur within our relationship to the written word. Seeing is believing, yes. But written and verbal articulations also lends themselves to particular ways of seeing and interpreting (this is, I think, why we have art critics: to create an interaction and feedback loop between cultural production/producers and audiences consuming and evaluating their work). But what happens in the cases of misarticulation, of cowardly and even improper uses of the written word?

Two examples.

The first example is the case of the recently proposed Boston Straight Pride event that would, permit permitting, happen in August. The prevailing response, of course, has been to laugh. I laughed. The necessity of “Straight Pride” is as equally amusing and insulting and trivializing to commemorations of queer and trans struggles/liberation/community celebration as “White History Month” is as an observed and apparently celebratory foil to the calendar of cultural heritage months. But missing from so much of the reporting scoffing at the ridiculousness of the event if the fact that the organizer, Mark Sahady, is a Proud Boy-affiliated, anti-Marxist (in the way that the far-right is pointedly anti-Marxist) figure: that this “Straight Pride” event and its basic ethos that “it’s okay to be straight” is a repackaging of the idea that “it’s okay to be white” that has been adopted and parroted by the far-right in its celebration of white civilizational excellence. (There is no such thing as white civilization. Whiteness itself is not civilizational; whiteness is new, and it is culturally vacuous because the specific cultures of peoples described as white in the United States— western and eastern European cultures — are erased in order to become assimilated into a higher order of dominant identity, i.e. whiteness).

Laughter is seductive and cathartic, but laughter alone is improperly equipped to address the threat this parade potentially poses if violent Proud Boys and white supremacist figures successfully mobilize in the streets of Boston. And laughter fails to address the way that this is an attempt for fascists to insert far-right positions into public discourse as legitimate positions and “opinions.” Heterosexuality is being treated (by the organizers, and the right writ large) as an aspect of white supremacist cultural purity: pride in straightness (and requisite desire for and to procreate with white women) is deployed as a resistance to bully pulpit “left identity politics” in an era of “political correctness run amok.” To them homosexuality and transgender identities are mental illnesses, deviations from sexual and cultural norms, elements of cultural marxism, symptoms of social degeneracy and the erosion of real masculinity— and so they must be weeded out from a [white ethnonationalist] society that is to thrive at all costs. It is curious that more journalists have not foregrounded their reporting of the parade with the politics of the organizer and the subtext of the event, both of which are easy to find. In a media landscape that truly fancies itself equipped to #resist Trump’s ushering in of American fascism, one would think (or hope) that incredulity would be generously coupled with information and context. It largely has not been.

The other conversation that has often been dangerously voided of urgency is that of the state’s treatment of migrant children. While analogies between present-day America and the early stages of the Nazi Holocaust have been made with increasing frequency over the past months, there seems some allergy to calling these “federally-contracted migration shelters” what they clearly are: concentration camps. There are political-grammatical purists who have decided “concentration camp” cannot be used in the absence of some arbitrary criteria of badness. But the death tolls witnessed in German (both in Europe and South West Africa), Ottoman, Italian, British, and other historical concentration camps do not solely define the function of the camp: not only can concentration camps function as a space for mass extermination or labor, they can also be used for detention and indefinite internment as were the camps used to hold Japanese-Americans during World War II. These distinctions are important for precise taxonomy’s (and, sometimes, pedantry’s) sake, but what kind of cowardice do we nurture when we adopt and re-use the same euphemistic language offered by a violent state? Migrant children are being separated from their families, neglected, traumatized, and killed (yes, death as a result of improper care and neglect is murder); pregnant migrant women are being denied medical care and miscarrying while in detention; another trans woman, Salvadoran Johana Medina León, has died in custody after her pleas for medical care were ignored (mirroring the death of Roxsana Hernández, a trans woman from Honduras who died in ICE custody after similarly being refused medical care. Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, commented on the nature of this camp system: that it is expanding, that there is little persistent popular opposition, and that opposition within the state apparatus has been purged.

We repeatedly share the information about the stages of genocide to locate and track which stage the Trump administration has placed us in, with the confidence that with education will come the motivation to take action — that we, in the 21st century United States, will not succumb to the same mistakes of the German populace. But white supremacy is always already pre-genocidal: with identity- and class-based hierarchies come the production of populations that are expendable and disposable. The United States, a settler state, is already centuries into indigenous genocide and centuries into a horrific necropolitical management of Black people (that has endured even after formal emancipation). If being able to track the stages theoretically enables us to interfere and prevent greater losses of life in the future, what does it mean that we are so unable to communicate political urgencies in our writing? And what does it mean for our ability to prevent future violence by the state or non-state actors not only if we are afraid to pointedly describe social-political realities?

The imprecision of language, which is informed by our politics as writers/commentators as well as the kinds of demands and language standards made by editors, colors our reality. And this linguistic mystification has a tragic human cost.

The show being celebrated inside, assembled by assistant curator Natasha Matteson, examines the nature of self-representation and self-determination, asking “How does the concept of portraiture shift when categories are in crisis and visibility itself is problematic?” The introduction to the show invokes the biblical story of Esther, who reveals her Jewishness in an attempt to save her people, calling it “an archetypal Jewish story of claiming and declaring the self as one wants to be seen.” It invokes, too, the legacies of legendary French Surrealist artists and lovers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore who were, rebelliously, openly gender-nonconforming, queer, and Jewish in a 20th century moment where antisemitism and queerantagonisms were at a genocidal fever pitch.

Micah Bazant, a co-organizer of the protest, said: “Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore are such precious ancestors to me as a trans Jewish artist. Their lives and art were decimated by a genocidal occupation — how could we possibly celebrate them in a museum that supports another genocidal occupation?” Echoing this, co-organizer Jordan Reznick wrote to me that “in 1938 Cahun signed the manifesto of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art that stated: ‘There will be no freedom until everyone is free.’ These are the same words we hear from movements today that stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine. When you look at the major funding sources and people in leadership roles at the CJM it is clear that this institution is on the side of genocide and apartheid, not the principles of liberation that Cahun and Moore put their lives on the line for.”

These three figures are positioned alongside the 10 contemporary artists in the show — Nicole Eisenman, Rhonda Holberton, Hiwa K, Young Joon Kwak, Zanele Muholi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Gabby Rosenberg, Tschabalala Self, Davina Semo, and Isabel Yellin — who created work about the particularities of their own selves or some aspect of self-fashioning and self-expression.

Considering the institution’s aforementioned financial relationships, one must ask: What exactly is the idea of self-determination being put forward by this particular show within this particular institution? Who is able to access that coveted agency and autonomy — when and where and how?

Self-determination, agency over the future of one’s community, is a dream, particularly for those of us within a given subjugated diaspora. The word “diaspora” comes from the Greek word diaspeirein, meaning “to scatter across.” The term first appeared in early Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible. The book of Deuteronomy has a phrase that reads “esē diaspora en pasais basileias tēs gēs” or “thou shalt be a dispersion in all kingdoms of the earth,” a reference to Moses leading the Israelites through the wilderness before they would reach the Promised Land. “Diaspora,” thusly and appropriately, has also come to describe the scattering of peoples from the African continent whether through enslavement, colonial outflows, and other kinds of migration.

The historical persecutions of Jewish and African-descended peoples places diasporic struggles for self-determination into a natural conversation, from Theodor Herzl’s Zionism to “recolonization” to Marcus Garvey’s imagined exodus of Black Americans “back to Africa” (a Black Zionism modeled after Herzl’s). In the introduction to the anthology Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, Nicholas Mirzoeff writes that “Africans and Jews have long looked to each other for an explanation of what it means to be in diaspora.” In fact, he adds, the diaspora as an imagined community cannot be fully understood outside of its interaction with other diasporas.

The inclusion of Black women artists in such a show, then, feels appropriate and necessary. And the three Black artists in the show — Zanele Muholi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Tschabalala Self — all offer perspectives on African and Afro-diasporic identity and representation. Muholi is famed for their community portraits and black & white self-portraiture, often featuring an almost unnervingly steady, imploring gaze. They want you to see, to inquire about, and perhaps even fear them — but command you always respect them. Meanwhile, in her externalized autobiographical inquiries into place, social dislocation, and immigrant wandering, Nigerian-born Ojih Odutola offers her own elegant renderings of Black people detailed with a chromaticism that makes them seem alive. Her use of pen and pencil and charcoal produces rich complexions flecked with light — she wants to convey what brown skin looks like. And Self’s mixed-media work has a three-dimensionality while still employing a “painting language” that serves the task of representing the Black feminine form. The contrived single dimensionality of racist misogynistic controlling images of Black womanhood and Black female sexuality are shattered through her breathing life into new gendered Black forms in her figure creations.

It is also necessary to question the possible instrumentation of these artists and some of the contradictions that accompany their inclusion. Understanding the work of these three particular artists within this show and within the confines of this creative institution invokes the pitting of “the political” against “the aesthetic.” Writing urgently as fascist ideas and military forces were spreading rapidly across Europe, Walter Benjamin famously notes how the aestheticization of the political (the transformation of material politics into a pure aesthetic through artistic and cultural propaganda) and the politicization of aesthetics (the rejection of the idea that aesthetics are not political and the infusion of overt political overtures in artistic work) are placed in opposition to one another. He writes that the aestheticization of politics is practiced by fascism, and that “[humankind’s] self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.” As described by Ariella Azoulay, an Israeli scholar that has long been critical of the state of Israel in her work on photography and archival politics, “the judgment ‘political’/‘not political’ refers to works of art that deal with subjects that are identified as political.” These judgments ultimately determine how images are classified and evaluated.

Per Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a supporter of the protest: “The Contemporary Jewish Museum sought legitimacy by including queer and trans artists of color in an exhibition. However, the paradox here is that it is an institution [funded by donors who also support] anti-Muslim and anti-Arab groups.” The political act of artwashing — a description of the way pro-Israel politics use art to sanitize Israeli state violence and “utilize the arts to counter misconceptions about Israel in the media and popular culture” — serves as a depoliticization of art by furthering the idea that it exists within a social vacuum unaffected by societal influences and ideologies. Reznick describes how artwashing functions similarly to “pinkwashing,” which they describe as “the ways in which the Israeli state publicly asserts its liberal acceptance of queer and trans subjects as a display of the ‘freedoms’ the state’s citizens enjoy.” (“There is no queer liberation without Palestinian liberation. Any celebration of queer and trans freedom that…isn’t committed to racial justice, is just white supremacy,” writes Bazant.) They described how the United States government used abstract expressionism during the Cold War to describe the conflict as “defending the apparent freedoms of American citizens against the restraints of communism.” Similarly, “Israel pours millions of dollars into [public relations] campaigns to promote itself as an oasis of liberal freedoms to make people believe that its campaign against the Palestinian people is one of freedom vs. repression and modernity vs. primitivity.”

One response to this manipulation of artistic projects and discourse is the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s calls for a cultural boycott. This has ranged from appeals to boycott Eurovision which was hosted in Tel Aviv this year to compelling musicians like Lorde and Radiohead to refuse to play in Israel, just as there was a politically equivalent call for artists to refuse to play in the resort complex Sun City during South African apartheid.

Those protesting Show Me were there to remind us that the artwork inside a museum must necessarily be viewed within the context of that institution’s politics. The action was described to me by Bazant as being in explicit support of and in dialogue with the actions taken by Decolonize this Place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. The vice chairman of the museum, Warren Kanders, is the founder and chairman of Safariland, the weapons manufacturer that made the teargas the United States government fired at the Central American migrant caravan at the end of 2018 (and Forensic Archictecture’s contribution to the 2019 Whitney Biennial reveals Kander’s company may have been complicit in war crimes “in fourteen countries, including six states or territories of the United States,” including Palestine).

The fliers handed out at the protest described why the Contemporary Jewish Museum is in violation of the guidelines of the BDS movement. In addition to receiving funding from the Israeli Consulate, one funder of the museum is the Koret Foundation, an organization named by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network’s (IJAN) 2015 report, “Business of Backlash” as also being a major funder of anti-Palestine solidarity work, having donated over $64 million to complementary conservative organizations between 2010 and 2015. While artwashing arguments position art as not being motivated by politics (and so capable of bringing together opposing factions of contentious political divides), IJAN notes that the foundation uses artistic spaces to forward its political interests. In 2009, the foundation withdrew its funding from the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival after the festival refused to remove the film Rachel, a documentary feature about American activist Rachel Corrie who was killed while trying to block an Israeli military bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip during the Second Intifada, from its lineup. Another funder of the museum is the Helen Diller Family Foundation, which is named in the IJAN report as having donated $10,000 to the Amcha Initiative, which strategically targets university campuses considered hubs of Palestine solidarity organizing. Bazant added that “the CJM’s new Director, Lori Starr, was hired despite being widely criticized in her previous position (as [Executive Director] of the Koffler Centre for the Arts in Toronto) for censoring a Jewish anti-Zionist artist.”

The flier describes that they protested the exhibition because it uses anti-fascist artists Cahun and Moore as the foundation for an expansive and radical notion of self-determination, “yet is situated within an institution that disavows the selfhood of Palestinians and sanctions their dispossession.” We might also understand the positioning of the displayed Black artists’ work as the kind of cultural exploitation that Aruna D’Souza describes in her book Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts. When art is used as a means of sparking open dialogue, D’Souza writes, it is contradictorily inhered with “de facto limits of who can speak and what can be said.” The allegedly open dialogue is always already policed and censored.

This artistic exploitation rests on the back of Israel’s self-branding as a “progressive democracy in the Middle East” (despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s embrace of fascist leaders including Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro abroad and the ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit party domestically) and belies the fact that Black people in Israel are not included within this structure of self-determination. Israel has historically mistreated Ethiopian Jews (dumping and rejecting donated blood for fear that it was “contaminated” with HIV, and even administering sterilizing Depo-Provera contraception to Ethiopian Jewish women without their consent), and detaining and deporting already vulnerable African migrants. And, of course, the state of Israel has hamstrung and suppressed opportunities of and any potential for self-determination for Palestinians through forced displacements and evictions, grossly disproportionate uses of military force and retaliatory collective punishment, the ongoing maintenance of international law-violating settlements, and, perhaps most devastatingly, the denial of the Palestinian diaspora’s right to return to their homeland.

The politics within Show Me as I Want to be Seen remind us that neither art nor museum institutions are and can never be value-neutral. Reznick shared that it was upsetting to centralize the theme of self-determination when this is a right so violently denied to Palestinians. “As a trans non-binary person,” they said, “gender self-determination means not only the freedom to live as the person that I feel myself to be, but it means that my own self-determination is entangled with that of others…To have gender self-determination stripped of its solidarity with other forms of self-determination is to cleanse it of its politics and pretend that it is only aesthetic or merely an act of individualism.” Bhutto described how these individualistic and often oppositional understandings of self-determination ultimately make already vulnerable marginalized communities even more so. He lamented that “Arabs and Muslims are not being listened to, we are being shunned, our voices and concerns silenced. If this is the current reality on the ground then it brings me tremendous grief to ask: What hope do we have of political and creative solidarity with Palestinians (of all faiths), Arabs and Muslims around the world?”

This was my first time at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and I arrived at the opening reception enthusiastic about this opportunity to engage inter-diasporic interactions about self-making and to see the work of three of my favorite [Black] visual artists. But after interacting with the protests, a bad taste was left in my mouth. Their work was as impressive as I’d anticipated it would be and Matteson is a capable curator, but I wasn’t able to concentrate on the art. I was preoccupied with the protest and the way that it forced me to further politicize not only the work and the curation, but also the institutional container holding the work. I wavered about writing this given the fraughtness of the topic at hand, but I am steadfastly critical of the use of Black creative labor in the implicit support of a politic that Black people are punished for opposing in public. Black art deserves better than that.

I, the great general of the German soldiers, send this letter to the Hereros. The Hereros are German subjects no longer. They have killed, stolen, cut off the ears and other parts of the body of wounded soldiers, and now are too cowardly to want to fight any longer. I announce to the people that whoever hands me one of the chiefs shall receive 1,000 marks, and 5,000 marks for Samuel Maherero. The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the ‘long tube’ (cannon). Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children. I shall give the order to drive them away and fire on them. Such are my words to the Herero people.

All Herero (and Nama) people became enemy combatants. They were summarily executed on sight, per the order, and they were driven into the desert to die of dehydration. Others, still, were corralled into labor camps (like the infamous camp at Shark Island) where they died of overwork, elemental exposure, and disease. The Herero and Nama Genocide provided a blueprint for the Nazi Holocaust, both in colonial ideology and in the genocidal mechanics themselves. Heinrich Göring, father of high-ranking Nazi official Hermann Göring, was Germany’s first Reichskommissar in South West Africa. German anthropologist Eugen Fischer conducted experiments on mixed race Basters from Rehoboth in South West Africa: the results of his work in Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen (The Rehoboth Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation Among Humans) provided the scientific justification for the Nazi Nuremberg Laws. In 2014, the skulls taken by Fischer from South West Africa for further experimentation were finally repatriated to Namibia — others have yet to be returned 110 years after the genocide’s conclusion. By the end of the Herero Wars or Herero and Nama genocide — the framing is entirely subjective — half of the Nama population and 60–70% of the Herero population had been killed.

The 1985 United Nations’ Whitaker Report classified the German war as a wholesale extermination attempt, one of the 20th century’s earliest; in 1998, German President Roman Herzog visited with Herero leaders, and when Ovaherero Paramount Chief Munjuku Nguvauva demanded an apology and reparations, he expressed regret and denied the latter noting that reparations law did not exist in 1907. In 2004, Germany’s Minister for Economic Development and Cooperation declared in a speech that “We Germans accept our historical and moral responsibility and the guilt incurred by Germans at that time” but also ruled out the possibility for reparations. In 2017, the Herero and Nama descendants filed an ongoing class action lawsuit against the German government in US federal court.

In trying to learn more about contemporary Namibian politics, I visited Heroes’ Acre this weekend. Heroes’ Acre, like the one in Harare, is memorial in Windhoek commemorating seminal figures in the more than 100 years of Namibia’s anti-colonial struggle — from Nama chief Hendrik Witbooi (or ǃNanseb gaib ǀGâbemab, the captain who disappears in the grass) and Herero paramount chief Samuel Maharero, to Moses Mague ǁGaroëb and Andimba Toivo Ya Toivo and Anton Lubowski and former/first President Sam Nujoma and other participants in the liberation war. American politician John McCain died of brain cancer this past weekend. He is praised and eulogized by both parties as a patriot, a hero and prisoner of war, a principled man who made sacrifices, and so on. Terence Ranger has a handy historiographic concept called “patriotic history,” which describes either the continual reinscription and remembrance of revolutionary and traditional history in contemporary memory or the hijacking of the present by said past (depending on your perspective). In Namibia, the present ruling party SWAPO is still the South West African People’s Organization of revolutionary yesteryear despite political evolutions and present shortcomings; similarly, the 2018 ZANU-PF of newly inaugurated President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, the ruling party marked by cronyism and corruption, is the party of the still ongoing chimurenga. Patriotic history is the tension between chinyakare and chimanjemanje, an attempt to synthesize the old traditional and new modern, as Zimbabwean writer Panashe Chigumadzi notes.

Shortly before the weekend, the memetic white nationalist war cry of “white genocide” reached the United States’ highest office, with President Trump tweeting about the need to investigate supposed phenomenon after a Tucker Carlson report on Fox News. The white settler, the nativist invader in another’s land, is always experiencing a state of emergency especially as a numerical minority or as a majority being threatened by “demographic changes.” The alleged white genocide is a fabrication as well as the idea of “post”-colonialism, “post”-apartheid, and full indigenous sovereignty — the land still does not belong to us, nor do our political endeavors and our economies. And nor do our heroes, both physically (many of their bones still remain in European empires) and within our individual and collective memories.

And then there’s a kind of existential pain that exists beyond even useful theoretical description. One can easily explain hagiographic revisions of a former senator’s war criminal history for the sake of the bi/multi-partisan unity that keeps the American political project and its mythos intact. One can even explain the purpose of Holocaust exceptionalism and Holocaust analogies that territorially narrate human suffering as zero-sum and relies upon the white-appearing bodies of the Führer’s Jewish victims to calibrate our ability to see atrocity. But despite the vast scholarship that provides a framework for understanding social death and Black materiality in the afterlife of enslavement and in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, I can’t translate the intense feeling of sadness, the overwhelming inability to fathom the sadism and psychopathy of whiteness/white supremacy. It’s an inter-generational ache of unfulfilled ambition and freedom dreams deferred, an indescribable rage and vicarious humiliation in hearing the stories of others and witnessing the conditions in which too many live.

An example. This past Thursday, my uncle took me to a township in Windhoek called Katutura. It was created in 1961 after a period of forcible white displacement of Black natives from the Old Location, the name of the segregated area reserved for Blacks under the apartheid system. The allocated lots for Black housing were even smaller than in their previous residential areas, functionally preventing people from constructing gardens (used as food sources). It was also difficult economically because Black residents had to pay rent to the Windhoek municipality AND pay extra money to commute to city center for work. “Katutura” in Otjiherero means “the place where people do not want to live,” a desperately sad but nevertheless fitting descriptor of always profane Black existence.

In her essay “A Cemetery of Images: Meditations on the Burial of Photographs,” Jane Blocker describes how the act-obligation of bearing witness is troubled when you’re confronting phenomenon or atrocities that demand you create a grammar for processing what you see as you’re seeing it. She writes that

…an eyewitness, because he does not recognize and cannot comprehend the horror at which he is looking, is forced to try to imagine it-that is, by definition to “form a mental image of something not present to the senses.” Yet an eyewitness must engage in imagining even as the material facts of atrocity are presented to him, even as he is in fact seeing them. To be a witness, then, means simultaneously to see and to imagine, but from Gourevitch's description we learn that imagining is not a free and boundless form of creative work, but rather it is disciplined by the rules and habits of photographs, their discursive formation. These rules involve not only the habits of depiction and of viewing depictions, but also of imagining oneself relative to what is depicted. In addition to having to imagine the atrocity, then, Gourevitch must also struggle to imagine his own witnessing of it, to see himself seeing.

Learning about this “forgotten”/ignored/erased African genocide has forced a confrontation of my own birthright and my own family’s experiences with colonial atrocities, a kind of meta-learning and remembering that is and must always be reflexive and self-referential. It’s not even been a week, but it’s been a strange and jarring hurt because you can’t necessarily anticipate what to steel yourself for, you can’t know what kind of hurt exists until you stumble into it. It’s a part of witnessing, interpreting, memory- and future-making that’s just as important as “fact” itself.

I’m 25 now. I’m the same age that my mother was when she first became a mother.

My mother is not always an easy person. She is stubborn, (overly?) reactive, a little meddling sometimes. She can be frustrating, and in response, sometimes I yell and say things I will not take back but nevertheless regret. And yet my deepest and most fulfilling love affair has been with this sometimes difficult woman. Seeing Okwui Okpokwasili’s Poor People’s TV Room reminded me of this.

Poor People’s TV Room is a choreographed collective embodiment — because “show” and “play” feel inadequate — about Igbo/Nigerian/African/Black womanhood, ancestry, loss & discovery, protest, maternality, intergenerationality. The performers — Thuli Dumakude, Katrina Reid, and Nehemoyia Young, alongside Okpokwasili — contort themselves into unnatural shapes that are punctuated by both staccatoed and fluid movement, refusing the respectable idea that Black women’s pain is made legible through the nobility of our suffering and our capacity to swallow and endure (even as we choke). Through the ugliness of this pain, a refusal to translate it into something more palatable and so intelligible, we can often best and most deeply understand their lives and losses and the metaphysical condition(s) in which they exist. One of the processes of embedding slaves within whiteness’ social death is the denial of natality: stripping a person/a people of a source, a lineage, ancestors, a notion of family beyond strict regulation (or breeding). And so Saidiya Hartman traces the slave route attempting to find her lost mother(s), to produce further sense of self through that negation by attempting to locate and find her/them/herself. Her ancestors were counted, but they did not count (to borrow from the show).

As soon as Dumakude spoke her first line, I knew she was South African. She was both of my southern African grandmothers, one of whom was beloved and the other of whom hated me (I think, because she hated my mother). My paternal grandmother intermittently lived with me throughout my life and I never was able to understand her. She passed away in 2016 and I was unexpectedly devastated at that loss because our relationship was largely marked by a mutual indifference. I did not visit her home in Zimbabwe in 2015 when I had the opportunity because I was emotionally unprepared to be rejected yet again. So I had no resolution, I never came to know her, and I was racked with guilt until my aunt — my father’s sister, my grandmother’s caregiver at the end of her life — visited me in Harare while I was healing from an unexpected emergency surgery at the beginning of 2017. She reminded me that closure is a myth and that self-forgiveness beats a lifetime of self-flagellation. I knew my mother’s mother, my gogo, for only a few weeks as a child. She died in America during her visit. I think it was 1997, so I was not yet 4 years old. I don’t think I understood death well but the photographs from her memorial service, in which I looked forlornly into the camera or was captured hesitantly-tenderly touching her paled face, showed I understood something well enough. I may not have understood death, but, per those photographs, I think I could grasp what it meant to have love stolen from me or at least the solemnity of that mournful moment. I shared my gogo with the world because she was loved by the world; I lost my favorite playmate but my mother lost the love of her life. For years after, I had vivid nighttime dreams and daytime hallucinations of her. I thought, in my tweenage/preteen confusion, that I was going crazy and that maybe the schizophrenia in my family was expressing itself. And then Okpokwasili reminded me, through her performance and staging, something I should know better than to forget — that the boundary between the human world and ancestral planes is porous and undefined, that time is cyclical and not linear, that even though we look to our ancestors for guidance we are already ancestors in the making.

My mother is often a mediator of that boundary, an interlocutor between ancestor knowledge and history and present materiality. For years, though, she denied me of that knowledge: of her native tongue and so of access to indigenous archive and to my memory. My early non-concern about that denial slithered into a resentment at the humiliation of being forced to learn these basics in my adulthood. But I didn’t understand the trauma behind that denial, that it was an instinctual defense of her self and my self as an extension of her.

My mother wanted me to have access to a life, a peace, that colonialism denied her (why did she raise me in America?).

My mother was born in a mission hospital in Rhodesia in 1961. She came to the United States shortly after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. By all accounts, my parents did the American Dream thing successfully. They urged my brother and I to assimilate into whiteness while simultaneously reminding us we would never be the white people they aspired for us to be. Only in my adulthood did I come to understand the root of that assimilatory impulse. I always, for example, begged for a dog, but my mother has always been repulsed by them, which I assumed was an African immigrant parent idiosyncrasy more than anything else. Last year I shared an article on Facebook detailing how a white Maryland family was awarded over a million dollars after their dog was shot and killed by a police officer. Her triggered response took me aback. “I grew up in a context where dogs owned by whites ate from the table while Black employees ate food even the dogs wouldn’t eat,” her comment began. She recalled “seeing Black employees [sitting] on open truck cabs in the pouring rain while the dog was the passenger.” She offered explanation to my childhood lament: “I actually can’t stand dogs for that reason…they remind me too much of growing up in an apartheid state.”

Okpokwasili’s gesture reminded me that we often cannot find our mothers until we excavate and tunnel through the archives of their pain. And even then, sometimes they remain lost because the pain of alienation, abuse, misunderstanding, arrogance, treachery, unwillingness is too great. Her gesture reminds us that sometimes trauma invites a kind of emotional arrested development, and so the clarity that supposedly accompanies age is dulled and the responsibility for maintenance and sustenance and preservation and reassurance is reversed. The gesture reminded me that to know your pain is to know your mother’s pain and the pain of women who preceded her, all of whom also exist in/as you.

“You can’t just see what you want, you must see what I see.”

Through phenomenological intervention around gendered trauma — where empirics and “rationality” are not preferred tools, but where the body and dance and movement and all levels of consciousness and psychic reception are privileged as heuristics for investigation and understanding — Okpokwasili urged me, when I lose my mother(s) again, to never stop seeking her out.

Despite arguably demonstrating herself to be a Good Immigrant, my mother never wanted to stay in the United States; I feel guilty that the births of my brother and I locked her into a permanent American residence, eventually stripping her of her Zimbabwean citizenship, her legal claim to home. Two Novembers ago, Donald Trump was elected president; I didn’t learn about her reaction until later, but I felt like she was having or going to have some kind of nervous break. The dictatorial elements of Ian Smith and then now deposed Robert Mugabe had followed her to this so-called “land of the free.” She was not naïve to America’s racial reality after raising two Black children, but was confronted by the particular revelation that the belly of Cecil Rhodes’ beast and the belly of this ship are not so dissimilar because Black motherhood is “the principal point of passage between the human and the non-human world” regardless of geography [1]. And that the “birth canal of Black women or women who birth blackness…is another kind of Middle Passage. The belly of the ship births blackness; the birth canal remains in, and as, the hold” [2]. But this moment was, ironically, also something of a gift: confronting this trauma freed her! It made her more vulnerable and candid and offering of herself, but also permitted her to refuse. And she was able to stand ground on a firmer foundation, and I was able to offer her a vocabulary for her life and her experience.

I am an extension of my mother, not in a possessive way where a child’s “value” determines one’s value as a parent/person. But I represent a nostalgia and a potential, a resistance and an agency that she was not so able to actualize in her youth. I possess a grammar that she was not privy to until her 50s, a tie to home through my learning from her and forcing her to remember and re-articulate (and resolve). Finding my mother hasn’t simply been my acquiescence to my traditional role as a good subservient daughter or begrudging resignation about her habits in her age; we’ve helped the other to find the other, we’ve found one another.

[1] Spillers, Hortense J. 2003. “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words.”
[2] Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.