Exhuming a Grave. Or, How to Think About James Baldwin's Face
I return to my body as a site of resistance, as a site from which I might understand the echoes of this season. But first, a very short story. I woke up one morning to an unexpected bedmate, a black spider which, I promise, sounds more menacing than it looked. It was on my pillow, inches away from my head and eyes, its black stringy skin a sharp contrast to the white sheets. Panicked, I went in search for answers. Google of course! Do spiders kill? I ask. How long before spider bite takes effect? How can I tell which insect is poisonous? The answers were fractured, returning to me like prayers that reach the ceiling and bounce back to earth. And so, I deferred to Amazon, because where else does one turn in this hyper mediated capitalist age? So, bug spray, yes. Insect repellant, still yes. And now, an adjacent story: I am in a new apartment where I live alone, without the usual constrictions of roommates that attend American student life. Yet, strangely, of all the ways I can stretch my limbs in this new space, I find that I am most obsessed with what lies right outside: my mailbox. There are days (and I’m not proud to say this) when I check it more than five times, the mailbox I mean. Apart from a few books, I really don’t have any reason for paper correspondence. Still, I sniff around the box, my eyes darting left and right, watching for neighbors as I adjust the strip of paper that serves as my label on the box; I am acting out this little imagined script, playing my own detective, my own surveillance officer.
The other day, I was working on some archives in the library when I came upon a stack of 18th century drawings from a few regions along West Africa. These stacks of drawings were rendered on what looked to me as vintage parchment scrolls, yellowed with age, eaten around the edges, but thankfully, recently laminated, which meant that I did not feel I was tearing away at history by brushing my hands against the surface. The drawings were penciled renditions of Black bodies at the height of imperial conquest, glossed over with watercolor. But they were not observational drawings, which is to say the bodies were rendered by imagistic invocation, the conjuration of memory. An artist in their own thoughts, locked away within themselves from where they pull out secret things. I like the idea of history as a cartography, the body as a landscape from which you can point and trace a person’s life, their death, their suffering, their aliveness. Time captured in flesh but also flesh moving through time. As I trace my hands through the glossed drawings, I wonder what it would feel to touch those bodies from that century, I wonder what their rituals of body care are, body celebration, body grief.
Two things have been on my mind: poetry and exorcism, let me start with the latter, the body as a thing from which demons are expunged. Once, during a family house dedication, a preacher accused me of being possessed by certain spirits. And once, during prayers, a trusted person suddenly stricken by a vision asked to lay hands on my breasts, (I may have shared this before). Besides these two distinct incidents, I have also been in multiple spaces of body contestations, spiritual deliverances, familial violence. I have seen the ways in which bodies are cleansed; this attempt to exhume graves from our flesh, as if there is not one destiny for all—death. And now, this sonnet by Terrance Hayes
“Seven of the ten things I love in the face
Of James Baldwin concern the spiritual
Elasticity of his expressions. The sashay
Between left & right eyebrow, for example.
The crease between his eyes like a tuning
Fork or furrow, like a riverbed branching
Into tributaries like lines of rapturous sentences
Searching for a period. The dimple in his chin
Narrows & expands like a pupil. Most of all,
I love all of his eyes. And those wrinkles
The feel & color of wet driftwood in the mud
Around those eyes. Mud is made of
Simple rain & earth, the same baptismal
Spills & hills of dirt James Baldwin is made of.”
I am drawn, among other things, to this invocation of Baldwin’s face, a celebration of the flesh as a site and as a map, as canvas and as compass. The body (or face) distinct from the icon. That is, the body of the artist or activist as its own separate thing, worthy of affect and pause and celebration; the body as alive, the fact of embodiment as a fact of aliveness. I don’t necessarily want to condense my thoughts to the flatness of body positivity movement, although it is a great place to begin. And now, I return to my mailbox. If one could take a cartographical approach to my life, it would land them here, in this mailbox. The mailbox, then, maybe, an extension of my body? Okay, that’s a stretch but think about it: It does not matter all the previous places I have lived and loved; from the dingy crowded room of my pre-teenage years to my studio apartment in Lekki before my days in America—is this, too, not how our bodies move, through doorknobs and P.O boxes, across time?
In the beginning was the word, the scriptures say, and then the word became flesh, moving across time: God in a bag of skin, with human cells and sweat and smells. Sometimes the human body is just a body, sometimes it is more. Sometimes it is a story, a history, a destiny. The body is not life, but it is living. And it is not death, but it is dying. By this I mean to say that there are many ways of attending to this body, many ways to stand before the mirror, unclothed, to stare at a new spot, aging flesh, a stretch mark, a wrinkle. Many ways to speak about weakness and fatigue and disease. Many ways to be in disability. Many ways to exhume the things we fear or reject, beyond the tropes of violence and violation. Many ways to rest, to pause. Many ways to keep this body in prayer and in power and in prophecy. Many ways to think about dying but also, many ways to think about living. The body as a temple; holy and triumphant, the body as a custodian for something else. For many elses’. The aging body not always as an ending, but as a place to begin. An origin.
And now another origin, a beginning for me—the body as a thing that is not just dead but can liven up, the body as the bag of dead, dry bones becoming a living army, the body as a site of healing too, and restoration, so that as the season echoes to me, I speak back to it: In the beginning was the word, now, let there be light!