Midnight Cry, Black Sky

written by roame jasmin.

“Spaceships are lifting off of a dying world. And millions are left behind while the sky burns. -Frank Ocean, Strawberry Swim

October 1844.

The hills tremble while holding a congregation of flight.

Prophetic hopefuls, bible-keeping saints, clergy. 

All looking, running to a black sun under a pale moon. Waiting for a trumpet to peel the sky open from one end to the other.

A choir to descend without mercy- put a saxophone to the temple and blow. 

The year prior, a comet came soaring through the sky and astronomers recognized it as the great comet of 1843. These folks weren’t looking for a comet. They were looking for a christ. I was a curious kid with vivid imagination learning about raptures and oncoming apocalyptic futures. I was scared as hell, too. Damned directly to it through the black and the queer, a gendered line to Eve and all her curiosity, all her uprising. I tried to picture it. Some hundred adventists, then Millerites, out in wide open fields of grass or shrouded forests with no socks or shoes on. Maybe.

No luggage, just body, my guess -- held at the precipice of an end against a whirlwind of cosmic shifts. Jumping from trees and rooftops to some ancient heaven in born-again adrenaline. Selling businesses and real estate, quitting careers and relationships. This is what I saw as Frank Ocean filled my quaint Brooklyn apartment built on a small corner just one stop before the end of the M line living with two white roommates, doubling over my own footsteps and unbelievable piles of debt. The gravity of a breaking world caving in my chest, you know the feeling? Every panic attack feels like an end. Like if there is a next breath, an edge is all that is left and whatever is over that edge may very well come void with no return. A black hole. I was taught to panic as early as I learned to run. Paranoia clogged all up in the bloodline and I think we call this lineage / survival / being born again.

I tried to picture it.

Stampedes of them sprinting through crisp October leaves- crushing those skinny little twigs that forests hold right next to hallow evenings in the depths of fall. I saw them in my imagination: (1) preparing their households for abandon; (2) closing down their lives in unbelievable love; (3) quitting their jobs; (4) losing their insurance; (5) and minds in bewildering conviction, insurmountable hope and necessary desperation. In this weighted pace there was paranoia, dazzling hysteria, and hydrated fear gripping the reins while gasping for another breath. Just one more. When October 22nd came and went, with no rapture or return, this day was nationally sealed off as The Great Disappointment. And of these people in escape of this world, running toward rapture, some one of them were black. And enough of them married black, made love black, birthed black and, like many Millerites, were all the while convicted by the seventh-day adventist church. The eccentric long lost cousin to pentecostals, adventists were the ones standing out on the corners, walking the streets yelling about the end times. The last days. 

My mother arrived from thin air. Beautiful and premature.

Brown-faced baby girl adopted by a mother of the church.

My father was a country boy raised poor by the sweat of the south. His mother cleaned the bathrooms of the church that she worshipped in; all the while holding onto that hem of a better day, afterwhile.

Both of my parents were raised in this faith of the advent and so the belief of another world had been instilled in each of us at our conception.

All of us grew up looking to the sky

black and needing it to tear open.

I was small so I wondered about small things. The detail of prophecy:

Would there be food? How far were the hills from my block? How many hours does a judgment day take? How do we get to hell?

Who makes sure we don’t go to heaven, crying after the departure of loved ones?

Who? Who? Who?

In the adventist tradition to make possession of escape, this unattainable impossibility places something else in this grasp.This grasp of that other, or that else at the tip of our fingers comes at a cost. The goal of the grasp of the Other, as Edouard Glissant colors it, when attempted by forces of fascism, or the allure of hegemonic ideal, makes territory or property out of its altering grasp, returning the Other, the materials of else to its own body in appropriation or ‘a gesture of enclosure.’ So much so that adventism has a cultural ailment of clinging onto biblical commandments that enslave blackness in all its queerness, its flamboyant difference and adornment. Its evolution. Its cussin’ tongue. This is why when you walk on a few of their church or college campuses you’ll see faces of folks who want to be free but will not give up the very god that enslaves them. They will unshackle themselves from their freedom here and now in preparation for an afterlife of freedom. I worry. When god beame a God we should have all worried then. I wonder about the ways in which colonialism humanized its spiritual and personal policing through Christianity- where salvation was made accessible through a prescribed set of personalities, beliefs, permissible acts of love and value. The God who we love is also the oppressor we hope to abolish, sharing similar views of the world and posturing the same existence while roaming our minds. We have made territory, property and absolute out of a vast inanimately animated being. We have covered god in a mouth of circumstances formed by the English language’s measure of validity. In the format in which we attempt to summon divinity and turn it into possession we turn ourselves into an institutionalized God’s property, a bounded territory, living under divine enslavement and religious subjugation. And perhaps god, if we are looking to know, is the very unhinging of these things. If we are looking to know, god is the liberator from subjugation-the thief in the night, and on the tongue, acting upon the divine criminality of freeing the Free. An improper noun. Like many departures from tradition, adventism began as this unhinging from the mainstreams of Christianity but regenerated its enslavement in an enclosed grasp [think Glissant] to the grips of an un-evolving bible, read the same way year by year, without epiphany, improv, or audacity. All that was left to love was rule: a uniformed police of the church, the body, the sexuality, the gender. Through its own lens, however, adventism holds the possibility to move beyond itself, and to crack the sky of every stronghold restraining us from flight; as this is the church that holds onto the hem of arriving worlds. Perhaps, black adventists, like abolitionists, hold the tools to be the thieves of the night. The masked black face cracking the sky of every singular institution that seeks confinement of the body. From the sanctuary to the streets. Stealing its freedom from the colonizing grips of purism. In every religion from adventism to taoism we are called to be free. We are called into the land of suffering and to find the opening beyond it. To be truly adventist or a person who holds any protestant faith to the chest then is to send its church into departure, force its evolution and act as hands of the maker of our advent.The question arrives for you from the other end of the cross in which I hope we are prepared to leave our egos, abandon our undying desire for righteousness: who are you without your god? Perhaps that is all god has ever wanted to know even while in the making of you.

The matter of black life, when met with neo-liberalism and its pacifying urgency to silence black rage and departure beyond, is entangled into the rusted webs of representation, and the aestheticism of capitalism that requires a mule for its irreducible labor. In this way we name that which restrains us after the very thing that needs freeing. We cloak ourselves in totems of identity by clinging to nationalist projects and ideals; we refuse failure and make the system successful; we register voters and damn the rioters; and we will desperately avoid our debasement by climbing the ladder of class from lower to upper like heaven is at the top. And so like changing the name of the street we live on, blackness becomes hard to find. Nevertheless, this is a treasure we must hold to our chest, keep tucked under our hoods. Liberation is buried out in the open for only the lost to see through the dark. We are called out of sight. And we can’t be afraid to go through the black to the very end of this world. Like Saul did for Paul.

There is a critical distinction that Glissant draws between that grasp of enclosure and a grasp that opens the world beyond totality. In the grasp of enclosure our desires become a project gearing itself toward making concise that which is opaque. The difference Glissant makes in his own vision of grasping the Other is a call for us to imagine a life where, rather than creating an enclosure, our grasp of opacity opens totality beyond its own idea of absolute truths or capacity of being understood into its opacity or refusal of transparency. In the enclosed state of this grasping of the Other, in affect, the hands grabbing at the hem of materiality do so by way of  an advanced degree, marriage, tenure, celebrity, wealth, popularity as a process of transmutation or ‘transfer into transparency.’(i) Inaugurations, graduations and promotions silhouette these moments of attempt to make shadow out of that which is phantom. To make intellect clear and validated through streams of a fixed education or prescribed way of thinking and viewing the world also invests in making that opacity clear, validated and transparent. That desire and grasp  for a world beyond incessant doom, the world over the hills, gets tangled in refined institutional webs of purity, of hypervisibility (identity politics or politics in general), microwaved eternal life or generational wealth, esteem, pomp and circumstance. But how do we use our grasps at the Other to open rather than enclose? What would a life that refuses the seduction of making sense feel like? To echo Fred Moten’s inquiry, “What would a life be that wasn’t interested in leaving a trace of human habitation?” (ii) If we may, can we tilt our heads to look closer at that rupture above that we might see the striking difference between the crack in the sky and  one in a dome. Can we, for a moment, see? Where all that beauty goes when we allow our opacities to flow on  through and out of the structures of transparency or institutions of absolute truth? Can we further see what it goes without?

We are not only queering the material ploys of capitalism or patriarchy in this breaking world. Its spiritual making lulls me to an exploration within the walls of its spiritual un-making. If the shout of black adventism or blackness, at all, has wailed toward that crack in the sky, rioting, and howling all along the way toward the opening of worlds beyond this one, then we are in the making of a living that is altered, removed from this manufactured frame and all its work; out of the procedure of reform into an embrace of abolition- a dysfunction refusing its dead old axis. Consequently, black adventism hopes to steal, or loot, away home joining the chorus of the negro spiritual singing, “I ain’t got long to stay here.” This irreverent refusal speaks to the the imprudent time for progress. Stealing away is an alterity, a subjective opening to roam the territory of one’s own way of stealing its way home but that it must be taken from the other and used to open into another world rather than enclose and withhold from making a freer world possible and tangible. Therefore, the material, the dead-end of aestheticism and the performative activism of this world, in all its technology, only encloses and makes property/possession of the schematic escape of blackness but refuses its lived liberation at every coded turn. We must be free to be free. We can go off-script, refuse the script, while knowing all the risks and still cast our lots - commit black living to its queer vogue; its improvised route beyond cages of survival. Saidiya Hartman names this (dys)functioning as living otherwise (iii) that is, in turn, living a life of alterity where our queerness incites departure from enclosure. We discover in the midst of our fugitivity, in our queer living which bends toward rapture, that the impossibility extended out of reach is really at an imposition made tangible through  psychic and physical breaking from all positions, and, as a result, is ruptured  from confined locality of the body, of identity, of the spirit. A shout, a praise break, a mumble rap, a gentle climax between the thighs… in the middle of a pandemic-are all moments of rapture or otherwise living that Hartman calls us toward when she writes our archive in all its making. Think of the use of the erotic, as Audre Lorde suggests, “of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives,” (iv) that in the erotic, in the allure of naught, we grasp our release. 

Consider the congregation: the bowed head tilts all the way back and lifts up a howl and that body then distorts, service erupts and time moves under the church’s feet. You can tell who is a guest by their stiff neck. They are tourists in that space and it shows through their eyes, that controls body language, how a shriek from seemingly nowhere  frightens  their regular disposition of knowing where every sound around them comes from. They are unaccustomed to little irruptions that do not harm them or keep them safe. Not here. Oh not here. Safety ain’t sure. Cause  if the shout washes over them deep enough and they forget or don’t care no more that everybody’s lookin’  they become a wailing nomad by the end of the service. Just like the rest of everybody else. A tilted neck, a bent wrist and a hip out of socket.

Outside of the sanctuary, outside of the hold, there was another field: the classroom.

And we were reading about Dana in Kindred. Zipping back and forth out between present and past scenario folding into and out of one another in improvised unscripted collisions - without touching. We were turning pages in Beloved and there! I found it again, those feet of escape. Or again - that  flight of fantasy in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl intrigued my wonder about this lineage of unhinged freedom and flight toward another world. ‘Slave narratives’, what they called them, were embedded into my imagination, read much like those open fields of hidden grass plaguing my prescribed anticipation of an advent christ, an unrealized world, turning without axis. These images of ‘end times’ merged together for me in black fugitivity as in all the movies, all the textbooks, we were already in the hills-on foot, without luggage, under a dying moon with only the body in dispossession against the whim of conviction. Redemption at an exhaust, here. In this subliminal life, futurity was sowed in the shadows as a living creation. Even at precipice our free living is taking place in a ruptured world - - at the hands of the sublime.

“You are to be a peculiar people.” (in loose reference: 1 Peter 2:9)

This was said in good faith- meant to assuage the guilt of missing out on birthday parties, school dances, homecoming games, movie nights or any “secular” activity occurring on a Friday night. This idea of peculiarity always struck me the most in those hours waning toward sunset. This adventist faith being marginal to christian and black american life held our heads to the sky watching for sabbath to open or break. Our peculiarity belonged to our desire to live and live beyond. Peculiarity, from the Latin meaning of peculiaris translating to ‘of private property’, brings us to a queer lens of seeing peculiarity in relation to space; where peculiarity is unhinged  from its public world as it comes and goes without position, or standpoint. Removed from the frame and without a seat at the table. At its inception, adventism sought its pecularity in the church’s departure from Constantine’s rule and into the making of an unfounded standpoint, a queer standpoint which is to say, at its core and perhaps at its horizon- adventism and, more particularly, black adventism is made of, by and with queerness. It is opaque in its hold of privacy, of boundless unhinged territory of faith and belief. What I found within this peculiar adventist shout of black folk congregated in a sanctuary, holding church in their arms on a Saturday, kneeling at the unpopular edges of the week, divesting from labor and frivolous spending and, in turn, protesting the advances of capitalism, was this shout for an irrevocable afterlife. A world without void - made from all its allegorical immaterial. What Edouard Glissant might name as opacitè would reveal its face here in this radical refusal of transparency. There’s this black hole, this inscape of fugitivity, an opaque depth in which blackness resides all up and through the world, fully in display and under surveillance while out of code and logic, made mythical and invisible to the covered white eye. I could hear it clearly and incomprehensibly in that shriek that stretches out from seemingly nowhere in the middle of our congregations or the abyss of our neighborhoods; anchored in that howl sounding off into the distance, of wild sacred madness were black people. Blackness pulls us out of the world’s manufactured socket. We have been called out of the power that suffocates the earth, starves us of our own resources, takes from us our shelter, robs us of our income, makes impossible our care, targets our protection, constrains our endless god-given freedoms. Tells us we ain’t infinite and lies through the teeth with a hand on the Bible. We are called out of the diploma, the degree of which we measure intellect, genius and brilliance. The mind holds no matter. We cannot weigh it and we dare not try. We are called out of the personality, out of the profile, out of the popularity contest in which we weigh our value and substantiate our living. We are called out of the charm and allure, the incredulous seduction of Hollywood, the robotic celebrity that is out of reach by its own grasp of enclosure, its obsession with security, it’s back-up house - the third and fourth one, too; its multi-million dollar luxury of holding a clean shoe on our necks with little to no taxes. We are called out of the political machinery, the suit, the uniform that sinks into our skin, becoming another layer of body and transforming us into disciples of sexism, racism, greed, patriarchy, professionalism, elitism, classism, liberalism choosing all, if not one, of these things over our own freedoms and those nearby, overseas and below. We belong out of place if we hope to be vast. May we never push ourselves into nobody’s place. For we have been called out and out we go. There is no return to normal, no reform, that rears its head without turning itself into a pillar of salt. For the bible tells us so.

Walter Hawkins sings from the organ:  

 “It won’t be very long! (I’m goin’ away) 

You will look for me (I’m goin away) 

And I’ll be gone,…. 

Where I’ll sing and shout! 

Won’t be nobody there to put me out...”

Tramaine sings from the pew,

“If you wanna know….Where I'm going…..Where I'm going, soon

If anybody asked you…..Where I'm going…..Where I'm going soon

I'm goin' up yonder….I'm goin' up yonder…I'm goin' up yonder.

To be with my Lord….I can take the pain.

The heartaches they bring…The comfort in knowing

…I'll soon be gone  

As a babygirl, I’d watch the church levitate in a praise attached and detached from the events of the week. Its ligaments harnessed into fixed ladylike or handsome postures of reverence and then sometimes, damn near every time, that ruptured shout would pull this prescribed and constrained posture into every which direction in retaliation to the whole world crumbling outside. In the guttural shout, this throat of paranoid praise, of escaping worship, the victory is already won- and lived without standpoint, without axis, as already over yonder, as already beyond here. Pushing the world off this rotational imbalance- off this kilter maintaining impenetrable sensations of normalcy. The yonder being that other place over there out of sight but in view. 

So I come with an open grasp of that otherworld and all its marvelous dissimilitude, its messy detour, its audacity to be a bad motherfucker in church. In school or without. In our homes or without. On stage or without. In the hold and without. That world, that new day, over the hills, beyond horizon arrives here in this place of rupture from body, rapture from flesh, an opening always occurring under our medley of unscripted touch in that ghostly movement beyond and without script. Without its translatable transparency or legitimacy. No burning house, no matter how glamorous or promising, or goddamn “progressive” can house my blackest, queerest or most unfathomable liberations. It will linger in every corner of a mansion and every crevice of an abandoned row home. It don’t matter. Cause it’s not matter. For something to matter it will have to be of legible substance. And blackness has moved beyond the negotiation of mattering or being legible, baptized and made transparent. So our matter is illegible. We are unfathomable. Fermented beyond this world’s discernible material of matter, my liberation, my very living, resides in the elsewhere, in the afterlife that presents itself now and only to me, to the unscripted, to the black, that  after having been so scattered and multiplied broken up by the communion of violence, the charisma of scandal, resides in the nothingness of its begotten opacity decorating my living and surviving my many deaths 10 times over. Like tithe. 

That world at grasp opens to me every time I kiss mi amorcita, mi cielo in public or in hiding. Standing in the face of capitalism black, poor and snarling. Taking gender off this body brick by brick. Lighting a j in the middle of a protest and sending the smoke over a barricade. Putting a finger on a map with my eyes closed and landing there, holding borders in the middle of my palm. Staying in bed all day like I was made there. Here in this world or in that black hole of passion when I am naked, overflowing, and miles from ashamed is where the rapture is made. In this labor of reappearance into that Other, of feeling past, yet through, sensation and salacious pleasure, we are pulling apart worlds : tearing away at one another, turning shards of glass into clay, water to wine.

Right here. Right now.

Baby yes.

The sky is a ruptured one. And in its breaking is my secret place, my hidden figure, my queer fugitivity. A shout of silence.

Frank sings from the world’s jukebox,“The entire Earth is fighting, all the world is at its end”

Just in case, an atom bomb, comes falling on my lawn

I should say and you should hear I've loved,

I've loved the good times here, I've loved our good times here

I can see it on every news station and every face I have ever loved.

hear it mingling in the distances  

isolating us from isolation. 

To live under a ruptured sky is to know the advent of another.

On the way out I say to you:

This is not the end of times for time has no end, 

we are living in times of an end. And we can bring this one to its rubble, offer it its dust. We can do this with grieving joy - scraped together from nothing, with our eyes closed, playing on our backs, in tender embrace, wrapped in that vast hold of love.

That stretches so wide and thick. I know we already have 

and readily are doing so…

though we may know not what we do.

Footnotes

(i) Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990).

(ii) Fred Moten, “The Black Outdoors” (sermon, Duke University, Durham, NC, October 5, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tUZ6dybrc.

(iii) Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2019).

(iv) Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1965).