Claiming Geographic Space

“Winging one’s way through the vise and expulsion of history becomes possible in creative encounters with that history.”   —Toni Morrison The folklore of the flying Africans is a creative response to exile and captivity. “The people could fly. They flew like blackbirds up above with their wings shining against the blue sky,” the story…

Baby Suggs, the matriarch in Beloved, did not fully realize what freedom from slavery meant until she had crossed the Ohio River into Cincinnati, when she discovered that her body now belonged to her: “These hands belong to me. These my hands”  (166) Not to have legal ownership of one’s embodied self was a fundamental…

    Tomorrow we shall have to think up signs, sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan on the double page of day and paper. tomorrow, we shall have to invent, once more, the reality of this world.    — Octavio Paz, “January First” —trans. by Elizabeth Bishop   My title for this Reflections Q&A is a gloss…

“Imagine diffracted times coming together, without this imperial linear conception of time that Columbus brought with him” –Edouard Glissant Postcolonial artists in the Caribbean and United States  create spatio-temporal fluidities–found in music, literature, dance, sculpture and performance arts–where the past reanimates the present and different geographies seem to merge. Many of these  20th-21st century artists are…

“Black geographies allow us to consider alternative ways of imagining the world.”                      –Katherine McKittrick & Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place Consider the historical “Underground Railroad”: that vast network of people and places in the United States that aided runaway slaves on their…

“Ain’t nobody prayin’ for me.  Ain’t nobody prayin.’”  —Kendrick Lamar, lyrics from “Feel” (2017 Damn album) Late in Beloved, we readers find ourselves inside of a slave ship through the first-person narration of a young African girl.  She is crammed together with hundreds of other captives headed across the Atlantic to be sold as slaves; many…

  Late in Paradise, some of the Convent women who had been shot by the patriarchs from the all-black town of Ruby miraculously reappear.  Take Pallas Truelove, for example: carrying a sword along with her newborn, Pallas walks through a wall into her mother’s home. She picks up some huaraches there and then walks out through another…

A mineral scent was in the air; sweeping down from some Genesis time when volcanoes stirred and lava cooled quickly under relentless wind.Wind that scoured cold stone, then sculpted it and, finally, crumbled it to the bits rock hounds loved.The same wind that once lifted streams of Cheyenne/Arapaho hair also parted clumps of it from…