Blackness as Becoming

Notes on Aliveness and New Growth

"the roots of your hair/what turns back when we sweat, run, make love, dance, get afraid, get happy: the tell-tale sign of living." -Ntozake Shange

Photo by Jessica Felicio on Unsplash

My brilliant friend-kin Walter Gainer II discusses the outgrowth that emerges when we skill up to turn towards what is and learn new things, as new growth.

New growth: evidence that our hair does indeed grow. New growth: what your mother went to straighten or relax with a swiftness. New growth: that part of hair growing at the kitchen/nape of neck—and you had better cover it up.

But as you can see above in Ntozake Shange's prose, new growth is likewise a reflection of aliveness.

As a woman who has worn her natural hair that stretches toward the sun for most of my life, I know that straightening or relaxing your new growth may be putting some limits on your aliveness (or not/let’s not oversimplify).

After all, isn't sweat the body's way of announcing presence, making space, speaking without words about what it means to be alive; to be metabolizing?

I have Kevin Quashie's book Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being on my nightstand, in my bookbag (yes, I haul books at 46 years of age like I did when I was 9), and on my desk nowadays, and Quashie's theories have given me so much to recover about aliveness.

Right on time, Quashie's work breaks ground, to create space amidst the abundance of narratives about black death, recovering the truth that is so essential to keeping with what is arising—disturbances that we cannot afford to look away from, and this liturgy: blackness on its own is indeed a thing.

No cringy pity. No, not to be consumed. Blackness-as-becoming, a wellspring of how to both survive and thrive.

Blackness as force and portal. As in belonging to the global majority. As knowing something about what it is to make a life. As the sensing body, as consciousness and interiority, as openness, as surrender, as arising from encounter, as presence to presence encountering, and as engagement, container, and infinite with-ness. As towardness.

Blackness is an essential, sacred, divine consciousness, a mirror of life itself.

One of the best things about living where I do now is that I am in an intimate relationship with the earth. Relationship based on place; place-based aliveness.

Each morning, I go out front to look at what the darkness of night gave birth to. I sit with wonder just gazing at how mystery bears fruit above ground, and this contemplation teaches me darkness is a conduit for life.

That light and straight isn't the only way. That roots curl up and reach toward radical interconnectedness. That new growth can be small and vital to a whole garden blooming.

Slow down, for these are urgent times, as Dr. Bayo Akomolafe says.

In slowing down, we can incorporate new and distinct forms of knowledge mindfully and carefully into our life-worlds.

This act of slowing is a form of resistance, a radical refusal to be swept away by the relentless pace of modern life.

It allows us to attune to the subtle growth within us and around us, to honor the aliveness that Quashie speaks of, and to cultivate a deeper, more connected existence.

In this practice of slowing, we find the space to breathe, to stretch, and to live fully and expansively.

Amid such suffering, may we also honor becoming, the aliveness that permeates every aspect of our being.