Churching.

https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/blackpentecostal-breath/#churching

10.19.17 | Katherine McKittrick

Response

Churching.

I do not remember going to the Protestant church my family attended on Sundays in the early-1970s but, according to stories I have been told, I was there. I went to church. My most vivid memory of church is not the infrastructure or the rituals, but instead the long and beautiful and scratchy coat my grandmother made by hand, using fabric that was supposedly patterned with the family (McKittrick) tartan; this coat was accompanied by a soft white faux fur muff. The soft muff was only to be worn with the scratchy coat and I wore both to church. When I received by copy of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, by Ashon Crawley, I went to church. Again. And it was not easy. Situating his thinking in, with, and beyond the sounds of black theologies and aesthetics—whooping, noise, shouting, glossolalia—he offers blackpentecostalism, conceptually and empirically, as emerging from, yet refusing, the logics of white supremacy. The book is thick, bringing together black studies, queer and sexuality studies, studies of race, philosophy, religious and theological studies, and more, in order to imagine how blackness engenders what Crawley describes as atheological-aphilosphical practices. Atheological-aphilosophical practices hover outside and across normative theological and religious narratives, noticing not only how blackness and black belief systems are excised from normative monohumanist worldviews, but also how black life is in, but not necessarily of, the world (241). In and but not necessarily of: black life is thus a way of knowing and living and thinking and reading and hearing and sounding otherwise, where otherwise is illegibility (within the logics of colonialism) and, simultaneously, for many, a recognizable way of living black.

Crawley’s text works out how the brutality of anti-blackness and the violence of modernity produced the conditions through which black humanity tells itself outside normative modes of communication: in breath (pressure gradients between the lungs and atmosphere); in shouting (as choreosonic dance, moving together, moving with); in noise (decentered testimony, collective potential, joyfulness); in speaking in (glossolalic) tongues (incoherent spiritual reflection, endarkened logics). These alternative modes of communication privilege the unspeakable and the unwritten and draw attention to an expressive way of living with and against racial capitalism: pushing the air out, bringing air in, grooving, feeling sound physiologically, enunciating the unspeakable and unspoken. Blackpentecostal Breath is thus attentive to honoring the incomprehensibility of blackness as “aesthetic vitality” (235).

What is studied in Blackpentecostal Breath, I want to suggest, is livingness. The analytical sites in this text (breath, noise, ecstatic narrative, sound, movement) are, often, ungraspable. While Crawley certainly grounds his discussion a range of primary and secondary sources (archives, novels, scriptures, performances, theories, and so on), what he studies and what he wants us to dwell on, are the untethered contours of black life. Thus, the breath and the dance, the tongues and the joyful noise, are not always thick and knowable; the breath, dance, tongues, noise, are porous and unsettled. The porous and unsettled open up an ungrounded mooring. They move through and with the flesh and are thus sutured to blackness and black study and the density of collectivity and possibility. Put a different way, Crawley asks that we understand how resistances to racial violence, within the context of black religiosity, are ephemeral acts that signal deep sociality—deep sociality that is already practiced and always yet to come. Thus, the breath and the movement and the sound and the enunciations—unwritten and unspeakable ways of refusing white supremacy—map black life and livingness as the capacity to forge relational ties that are not typically honored within our prevailing system of knowledge. Here, the analytical move is to refuse a cosmogony (and analysis) of black breathlessness and expiration, and instead focus on how the production of black knowledge, all black knowledge forms, signal radical ways of living with. This attention to living with is threaded through the entire text—on my first reading I thought of it as a melancholic plea of (not for) life—and rests on understanding displacement ethically. And then, as one reads and scans and reads and rests, Moth’s Powder—an unpublished text by Crawley—interrupts. Moth’s Powder, where church’s infrastructure and architecture are undone from the inside, and it feels good (134).

Crawley put me in church. Not the infrastructure of church, but instead the aesthetic vibes that move outside and move through its walls. He put me in church by delineating an alternative (atheological-aphilosphical) belief system, one emerging from modernity, that is illegible and outside and elsewhere. In a world that despises blackness, in a world where so many poets and scholars and artists and writers and workers are scrambling to comprehend and talk through and undo the profound hatred for black, in a world that profits from circulating and analyzing obituaries (even our pleas for life are, it seems, undercut by death notices accumulating and assembling and then falling away). This is a frayed and awful world. The alternative belief system is a ritual of otherwise as an ongoing pronouncement of black humanity. Churching. To go to church is to go “where the love is felt” (22).

• 

  10.19.17 | Ashon Crawley

  Reply

  Memory

  Just breathe. And then, again, just breathe. I sat with my eyes closed after reading the opening to Katherine McKittrick’s response to Blackpentecostal Breath and was moved. Moved in ways varied, in ways multiple. I was moved by the recounting of the story of the scratchy coat, how what is most remembered for McKittrick’s inhabitation of church is the way cloth felt. Cloth for warmth, safety, concern, care. The recall of church is to recall a range of senses, some related and others not at all, to ritual and restored behavior of sanctuaries. The coat recalls the family tartan, the grandmother, the scratch of cloth. It’s like that sometimes, what we recall, what we remember, is attached to the sensual capacities with which we’ve each been gifted in our individuality. I was moved to think about how church, for McKittrick, meant scratchy coats, how scratchy coat is the memory of church itself, how it is the potentiality for recall.

  And the word scratchy with the word church moved me, moved in me, moved in me to recall and remember who we called Mother Andrews at the church in which I was reared. Lula Andrews was her name and she passed away when I was quite young. I remember walking into the church and seeing her seated on the right side in the second pew, seated with a hat almost each time she was there—I don’t think she wore wigs; I remember the gray hair. She would, each time she saw me, take her fingers with long nails and scratch my head. I’d say ouch, I’d laugh, she’d smile.

  This was church for me, too. Before doctrines that I could understand—or reject—before theologies I would accept, then lament over, then interrogate, then refuse, there was the feel of it all. The smell of food cooking on certain Sundays. The sound of hand claps and foot stomps. The feel of the blue and yellow robes. The hugs and kisses. The walks to the corner store during the sermon when I was maybe three or four years old to get packs of Now-and-Laters (or, really, nah-layders . . . because who pronounces it correctly anyway?) and sneak them into my mouth once back in the sanctuary without getting caught. Church was the sociality of it all, the being together with others, a space of comfort and warmth and protection. Church was the shared space of two or more gathered together, and we were there, always there, gathered there, in the cause of being with each other. Some saints spoke in tongues and shouted, others wept and clapped, all were moved outside themselves, outpoured one towards the other in the space of black sociality.

  I appreciate McKittrick’s engagement with Blackpentecostal Breath because she highlights what was evident but perhaps should have been more specific. The text is about thinking the aliveness, the liveliness, of black social life, thinking against notions of social death as a position to which we who are black must submit ourselves. The liveness is an epistemological shift, it is an otherwise possibility realized in the flesh against notions of modern man, modern thought, modern ways of normativity. Blackpentecostal Breath is about the breath of life, the ruach, the pneuma, it is about fundamentally the shared breath, the collective air, we must participate in, we must practice, in order for us to have and share in life.

  And breathing is not just an abstraction from and for thought but is a material thing, it is the mix of air and particles into and out of the lungs. The text, then, is not attempting thought that is disconnected from feeling, thought that is dis-enfleshed, but is thought that emerges through touch, thought that emerges through feeling. The text is about how it is an impossibility, the divisional line between thought and flesh, that life in blackness prepares for us a way to think this relation of commingling, this relation of sociality.

  Put a different way, Crawley asks that we understand how resistances to racial violence, within the context of black religiosity, are ephemeral acts that signal deep sociality—deep sociality that is already practiced and always yet to come.

  Ephemeral acts, indeed. I think it’s important that McKittrick points to the ephemeral nature of the acts I attempt to discuss because Blackpentecostalism, I will say again, is no utopic space. Not only do I remember, fondly, the scratching of my head by Mother Andrews, I also remember the pit of my stomach when I first connected the preaching about “faggots” and “bulldaggers” with my own erotic emergences, my own erotic longings. The homophobia, transphobia, sexism and classism are also in these spaces which is why Blackpentecostal aesthetics mark otherwise possibility without ever making a claim that these are the things that should be performed or lived or believed doctrinally for liberation.

  Acts ephemeral, these performances signal to something, point to something ecstatic, attempt to illustrate the ways we can enflesh ourselves communally towards the realization of otherwise modes of being. In the case of Blackpentecostalism, what is rejected are the decorous, quiet-privileging, flesh-hushing practices of western Christianities that target the body as in need of stilling for worship and reflection. In simple terms, hopefully, Blackpentecostal aesthetics attempt to say there are other ways to do this thing called breathing, other ways to do this thing called living, that do not aspire towards the normativity of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and its articulations in theology and philosophy. And this living otherwise can be realized against the very doctrines and dogmas preached rhetorically by Blackpentecostal adherents. The possibility for liberation is in the ephemeral performance of the flesh, flesh that dances and sings and speaks in tongues, flesh that produces memory of alternative modes of life.

  I have often wondered if there is a secret of blackness broken up and carried in various traditions. This brokenness and carried variously as a gift because no one tradition should ever think it carries the whole lest it be in danger of thinking it owns blackness as a kind of graspable object, lest it think the secret place of lowliness, dwelling in the undercommons, covered with feathers of centrifugitive flight is private property. So maybe in the handclaps and footstomps and Hammond B-3 of Blackpentecostals; so maybe in the making dua and prostrations and the arpeggiated, melismatic rupture of the Blackamerican Muslim adhans; maybe in the critical questioning and disbelief of black non-theists in their poetics and power and conviction and—when not aspiring to western ideals of rationality, reason and humanism—care; maybe in the reverence of ancestors, in the memory and memorial, in the joy of being mounted, the quest and carrying of the cowrie in Ifa and Candomblé and Santería; maybe in the vivification and aliveness of blackqueer relationality; maybe in so many other meditative zones we do not know but sense and feel and perform; maybe therein are broken and gifted the secret of blackness.

  Brokenness does not imply damage or burden but, as Nathaniel Mackey lets us know, brokenness still allows for the emanation of the trace of perfume, Christian scripture tells us that brokenness in spirit is a blessed station. Maybe, then, the memory of blackness recalled by the way cloth feels, the way joy feels, the way congregation feels, is a brokenness against western ruses of wholeness, completion, doneness, resolve, enclosure. Brokenness calls to us from some deep beyond to link, to join, to tarry with together.

  It is what McKittrick calls a deep sociality. This deep sociality, McKittrick is correct to say, is already and yet to come, these practices are against linear spacetime propulsion that would have it future-oriented. These practices, otherwise lived in the flesh, isn’t new and isn’t future-oriented, because it is here, it’s been here, with us. We have been living in the fact of the ephemera, the fact of anaesthetic (rather than aesthetic) possibility.