Proper 8 (13) Black Canadian academic, Rinaldo Walcott claims that black life in the Western Hemisphere/black Atlantic is framed and inaugurated by death. He claims that an African cosmology – in which death is not considered the end of life, and the dead exist in the present alongside with the living – survived the Middle Passage. Walcott struggles with the desire for freedom from white supremacy naming and shaping of black life/death with what it means to be human; and the “inability to lay [the] dead to rest” in the throes of unfreedom, which is in the midst of death – the inaugural point of black life.[1] Certainly in the past weeks as we mourn the desecration of black sacred spaces and black life, we have to realize and understand that there are no safe spaces for black people in America (and by America I do mean the United States—but I also mean the Western Hemisphere, North, Central, South, and Latin Americas). We have just seen, heard, tasted another installment of domestic terrorism. Yes. Dylan Roof is a terrorist. The confederate flag is a terrorist symbol that has been harbored and protected under the American flag…. (I’ll leave that there). This latest installment of white supremacist terrorism has outlined for us the very nature of black life in the Western Hemisphere… a life, lives, futures and past lives that have been continually performing death.
Looking to the lectionary readings for this Sunday, each text performs and reperforms death. Lamentations talks about a spiritual and social death – having been rejected by God (“the Lord does not reject forever”); and the famous gospel passage about – the woman, who is socially dead, with the issue of blood intertwined with the story of Jairus’ dead daughter, Talitha. If we look at these texts in relation to the events in the past weeks, months, years, centuries in the United States – people of color have been rejected, in a continual cycle of various forms of social death(s), in that they are/have been interpellated as those who do not belong, and therefore have the inability to assimilate into majoritarian society. [2] Certainly the woman with the so-called issue of blood and the dead little girl could never assimilate into majoritarian society as they are both female; but they are both dead because society has labeled them as being a problem, unclean, sick, dead… ghosts… ghouls…zombies…living in a spook house… where we hear “maddening screams and the soft strains of death…”[3]
“but you promised me… you promised me. Somebody. Anybody. Sing a black girl’s song…” [4]
The woman with the so-called issue, knowing she was unseen, unheard, and socially dead, reaches for Jesus’ garment anyway. Even as her very body performs the death that it was socially constructed and instructed to perform, the healing of the bleeding woman in Mark – rather her reaching for a promise — indicates a life beyond the death that society has overdetermined for her. Living with dead time. In his essay, “The Scene of Occupation,” Tavia Nyong’o discusses the scene of masked dancing protesters at Occupy London. While performing a dance that resembles Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” – these protesters occupy a liminal space where the movement and substance of precarious lives under capitalism live with/through dead time.[5] The immanent “danger of being human”[6] calls for a zombification such that “the zombie performs the body as an accumulation strategy: an accumulation of genre, of history, of gesture, and of race. The zombie dance is a survival skill for living with dead time.”[7] The zombie dance is not only a survival skill, but it is a movement beyond survival…toward a futurity… Insisting on living in the face of death.
The 5 year old girl and her auntie who played dead in Mother Emanuel AME Church know something about the insistence on living in the face of death. Her future hinged on her performing herself as dead. Living with dead time. Though Talitha in the scripture was actually dead, Jesus’ call for her to wake up is a kind of promise. How did the little girl know it was time to wake up that night? Did she hear Jesus’ promise? Or did she reach out for it? “You promised me. You promised me. Somebody, anybody… sing a black girl’s song.”[8] I’m not going to finish by saying that Jesus is the promise or that Jesus sings the songs of promised hope and possibility, even though that is what I believe. But I will say that we have to sing those songs. The scale, length and reach of Bree Newsome tearing down the Rebel flag in South Carolina reaches for what we’ve been promised. We have to continue to promise, reach for the promise and hold society accountable for coercing black death into existence. We have to make manifest life in the face of death. We have to do more than live with dead time. We must insist on living, and singing so that black people can have a future, because our lives – our past, present and future lives matter. We must sing the righteous gospel that is our future, our possibilities, our lives.
—Cecilia Olusola Tribble is an artistic and worship consultant, and cultural and arts educator with a Master of Theological Studies from Vanderbilt University Divinity School and a Master of Arts in Performance Studies from New York University.
[1] Rinaldo Walcott, “Black Queer Studies, Freedom, and Other Human Possibilities,” in Understanding Blackness Through Performance: Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity, ed. by Anne Crémieux, Xavier Lemoine, and Jean-Paul Rocchi, (New York, Palgrave MacMillan: 2013) p. 145.
[2] Orlando Patterson, “Alienation, Authority and Social Death,” in African American Religion Thought: An Anthology ed. by Cornel West and Eddie Glaude, Jr. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), p. 109.
[3] Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. (Scribner Poetry: New York, 1997), p. 2.
[4] Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. (Scribner Poetry: New York, 1997), p. 3.
[5] Tavia Nyong’o, “The Scene of Occupation,” The Drama Review, Volume 56, Number 4, (MIT Press: 2012), p. 139. [6] Nyong’o p. 140.
8] Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. (Scribner Poetry: New York, 1997), p. 4.
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