00:08:00.180thank you for bringing my heart and spirit into this ceremonial space that you've created
00:08:04.700for me just a moment of like a little bit of release I just need to thank the creator for
00:08:11.640the mute button because you are extremely funny and enjoy and just allow my goofiness to come out0.89
00:08:20.840and yeah I want to talk shit so I just dedication to all the bishops the priestess of black joy0.88
00:08:29.180and the way that they understand that the creator replenishes us with that sweet river of joy0.99
00:08:35.360as a place to come and gather around, dive into, and connect with one another. So
00:08:41.600all the practitioners of Black joy, I want to make a dedication to you, sustain us, and are the folks
00:08:48.660that traditionally, as Black folks, have known that they've needed to seek out the joy of
00:08:55.200indigenous people for us to be whole so that's my dedication thank you thank you I just learned that
00:09:03.080from Tiffany in our pre-interview moment that your middle name means joy and that your mother's name
00:09:11.700means joy so I'm just so grateful for that lineage to come in and for laughter to come in I actually
00:09:18.740I was talking to my partner last night about the shoal, which we'll get into, but is the shoal, yeah, thinking about the shoal as trickster, as comedy, and where can humor be a part of reconciling the distance between us?
00:09:38.140I remember being in a class in undergrad on the phenomenology of laughter, and I don't remember the scholar, but they were saying, is laughter, is the phenomena of laughter a reconciliation between us knowing that we have an infinite self, but we're in a finite body?
00:10:03.080and humor trying to collapse that distance
00:10:07.080and laughter collapsing that distance.
00:10:09.840And I'm curious what laughter and comedy have to do
00:14:05.360I think it's called Distributive Blackness.0.93
00:14:08.080Yeah, there's something about that of being able to reimagine how you're relating to space through comedy.0.96
00:14:17.240I've thought a lot about the ways that mockery and satire allow something else to become possible.
00:14:25.700And they feel like their own shoals, which I look forward to talking with you about.
00:14:32.620And the ways I was shoaled by your book and blessed.
00:14:38.100When I first encountered the text, I was recalling a breakfast that I had been at at a kind of home centered around hospitality in Berlin called Matthew's Table.
00:14:54.340and this brother john i was with a dear friend visiting berlin and this person who's john who
00:15:02.720hosts this space him and his wife gail are really committed to the lineages of christian hospitality
00:15:09.580and he prayed in the morning god please interrupt us with someone we can bless today and i was like
00:15:17.220i look i kind of opened my eyes like oh that's that's a prayer to pray and i am praying that
00:15:22.800today which I think your book feels like that kind of prayer of interruption and I think of
00:15:28.940the way your text is a blessed interruption in conversation with that moment I think about the
00:15:35.020hospitality of your text and what you describe as in the text you write quote I write back to a
00:15:43.500porous and forever transforming practice that's an ethical project concerned with encounter I write
00:15:50.820this because I trust black people. I trust the radical and always shifting ground of black1.00
00:15:56.020freedom dreams. I also trust black freedom dreams when they consider native freedom, unquote.0.92
00:16:04.340I wonder if you might speak to some of this language around trust and what your project0.58
00:16:12.380is doing around extending that trust, that trust back to black studies.
00:16:19.260Rante, thank you. Thank you for reading that passage back to me, because it brought me right0.98
00:16:26.060back to some of the violence of the academy that I was subjected to, you know, certainly
00:16:33.040the academy, even the humanities and places, departments that call themselves critical and1.00
00:16:41.060committed to social justice, fundamentally do not want and are never prepared for Black folks1.00
00:16:48.180and Indigenous folks to show up as students, professors, and certainly people who produce1.00
00:16:54.120thought, right? And so I was in a PhD program and had a lot of support from Black feminists,1.00
00:17:02.860Black queer feminist faculty, and Black queer students. But of course, like our love and
00:17:08.840support our spaces of ceremony for one another, you know, are not enough in themselves to really
00:17:16.020topple those violent structures. So I was dealing with a field, American Studies, that was starting
00:17:23.820to take seriously and really give a lot of credibility to white settler colonial studies,
00:17:33.220It's like a field that does important work.0.98
00:17:36.000It's really some dedicated white men0.58
00:23:22.940Wow. I love the way that your trust, yeah, reads as refusal. And I read that in the way that you
00:23:37.220talk about, you wrote this text so that you could live with yourself. And I'm so grateful for that
00:23:44.720refusal to engage a type of historiography where we were only surrogates for white supremacy.
00:23:51.940and that's the only way we related to one another but that actually there were also
00:23:57.000so many other ways that we were connecting and caring and loving one another which I think I'd
00:24:04.900love to continue talking about later in the conversation around love and eros I just want to
00:24:11.540signal signal that holiday simmons a little side note my my mentor from like childhood like when I
00:24:19.340as a teenager it's very deep holiday calling you into the space thank you holiday we love you
00:24:29.420they make the best brunch i can't wait to be in their company again yeah good people
00:24:36.100well i'm struck by before we get into you know we're gonna get there about what is
00:24:43.200a shoal and before we go there I want to keep following this thread of of refusal and the way
00:24:53.700that our lives and our our ontologies are actually shaped in conversation and when I say our I mean
00:25:02.120black folks in conversation with indigenous peoples in Turtle Island and I want to bring up
00:25:09.920this moment um in your text in the preface where you speak to hearing an Anishinaabe woman's story
00:25:19.840and having a physiological and psychological and spiritual impact on your body um that
00:25:28.240you were shape-shifted by hearing her story um that even your face took on a new life and you
00:25:36.720were you were marked by this moment and I want to just quote back to you something you say in the
00:25:44.580preface where you named quote that when I felt around and realized the new and unfamiliar about
00:25:52.260the slavery with which I have become so comfortable it changed me and I do not mean changed in a neat
00:25:59.440orderly or containable way it unmoored and disassembled me in ways that I and others did
00:26:05.240not expect I could no longer be accountable only to myself my ancestors and my story of experiencing
00:26:11.640blackness and its slavery that had been passed down over my lifetime when I say unmoored I mean0.99
00:26:18.780that I could not continue life as I knew it would you talk about that unmooring and what it was0.89
00:26:26.060to meet this woman's story? Yeah, I was deeply blessed to be able to be in Toronto in 2006,
00:26:39.9002007, and a part of 2008. And one of the organizations that really helped me connect
00:26:48.220to a number of dope Black and Indigenous
00:26:53.080and people of color organizers was actually Insight.
00:26:57.200And I was actually, someone from Insight,
00:27:03.560and I can't remember, introduced me to Abby Sololema,
00:27:08.100Rika Schwant, who had come down to New Orleans
00:27:12.280after Hurricane Katrina to do some work
00:27:14.460And so connected me to them when I went to Toronto.
00:27:20.040So they were doing work around prison abolition with PJAC and they introduced me to a few Anishinaabek women.
00:27:29.500So this figure is like a composite, but also a particular Anishinaabeg woman, Christine Luzza, who, of the four of us, in addition to Larissa Cancross, created a Insight Toronto chapter, and we would do a lot of ceremony work.
00:27:50.120I would also connect with Zainab Amadehi, who is actually a Black and Cherokee woman who actually moved to Toronto. So I was doing this deep and profound ceremony work with Black and Indigenous women, right?
00:28:09.200And so the more I was able to sit with, burn tobacco with, literally watch smoke rise and fall and just be in that deeply sacred space with folks,
00:28:26.660Like, it really started to tell me something about how Indigenous genocide and the violence of genocide clearly had marked me.
00:28:39.600Like, I was feeling it in an intense way in Toronto, in a way that I had not felt on the U.S. Eastern seaboard.
00:28:46.380because there's a way that on the U.S., on the East Coast, you know that it segregates and it
00:28:53.300creates distance between Black and Indigenous people. We're not allowed, we're not in proximity
00:28:58.820to one another in the cities, suburbs, rural areas that we live in, right, in the way that that's
00:29:04.240possible in spaces like Toronto, maybe even the Midwest and the West Coast where you are. And so
00:29:10.460to literally be inhaling the same smoke and breath with other indigenous women allowed me to feel
00:29:19.900my ancestors and what they had not experienced just as people who were enslaved, tortured.
00:29:27.600Again, labor is not the only story that we can tell about being enslaved. It's not just being
00:29:33.600on a labor camp. So many other things happen to Black people as enslaved, fungible bodies,1.00
00:29:39.060right that exceed that labor but we we also were inhabiting the same spaces where brutal
00:29:48.340genocidal acts were committed against indigenous people even if we did not see them on the
00:29:54.240plantation right so black people felt that and that's what i i'm talking about about the porosity0.64
00:29:59.540right and so to understand that we carried and coexisted with that violence um even
00:30:08.940when we didn't share spaces with indigenous people. And because of the work of Zainab
00:30:14.820Amadehi, for instance, who told me that her family that was coming off of the plantation
00:30:20.760in Green, Virginia, she knows that both her Cherokee ancestors and Black ancestors were
00:30:29.040enslaved by white people at the same time. So that also messes up our narrative of Cherokee
00:30:34.220enslavement, right? So we have all of these kinds of intimate knowledge of Indigenous genocide
00:30:41.280through being enslaved on the plantation, being enslaved by them, right? Being enslaved next to
00:30:46.480them, also being on the ground where genocidal violence happened, that again, the U.S. forces
00:30:53.320us to forget. And when I was allowed to be in that sacred space, that deep relational space
00:30:58.540with folks like Christine and like Zainab,
00:31:14.020and that shaped our experience of enslavement and Blackness.0.97
00:31:17.560So that's the kind of porosity that I'm talking about.1.00
00:31:20.840And that's the kind of porosity that deeply affected me.
00:31:24.420I didn't know what to do with that knowledge, right?
00:31:28.120I didn't necessarily have the skills and even the folks who were holding me and supporting me couldn't do all the kind of the caretaking that I needed.
00:31:39.980I needed to take a break and I needed to actually leave the academy for a little bit to just let it change me and take me to a different place and take me to a different place so I could do this work and engage in all the deep pain of it and the joy of it.
00:31:55.860Wow, there's something about the smoke, the smoke and breathing the same breath and realizing we've been breathing the same breath and sending up the same prayers that feels really, really strong to hear.
00:32:15.720And there's something about you leaving the academy to actually be impacted, to actually let it impact you.
00:32:25.860that is really both I feel the grief of what that moment was
00:32:31.080and can feel you in that moment having to actually leave
00:36:59.600Wow. Yeah, it makes me think of Ashton Crawley's work on Black Pentecostal breath. And the first time I was able to reconnect to the spirituality, the Christian megachurch spirituality I had, that had really disturbed me.
00:37:20.820I remember on our pre-interview just talking about spiritual violence, and it really disturbed me to be in that church in Atlanta, New Birth, but then to have a rereading of that moment through Crawley's work of thinking about how the cadence of specifically black femme pastors or ministers0.71
00:37:50.100voices change change the change the change the cadence and rhythm in our own bodies and he he
00:37:59.820goes through like uh or they go through i don't know their pronouns shirley chisholm not shirley
00:38:05.340chisholm um what is her name shirley caesar shirley caesar shirley yeah oh shirley chisholm did it
00:38:13.400too. Shirley Caesar kind of going through this cadence of the like, well, and I told you,
00:38:22.160you know, that the breath actually takes on a new life. And it's in that trance state that
00:38:29.660the congregation is compelled to reach out and worship and praise and to start running and to
00:38:38.280start stomping and to pass out and that it's actually them allowing for more breath black
00:38:45.380women's bodies allowing for more breath to come in that allows for us to meet the holy ghost to1.00
00:38:52.320go into trance states and to render ourselves free and to literally like a sin through through0.90
00:39:00.660the pneuma so i really feel that i really feel that what you're saying about the pandemic and
00:39:07.760and the absence of that and it brings me to thinking about how you you language that this
00:39:14.840project was a 10-year ritual you don't say it was you could have used so many other terms but you
00:39:22.700described it as a ritual which I think the academy could never provide um and I'm yeah I'm curious
00:39:30.680about how ritual, you know, serves as a shoal to the project of the academy and how ceremony
00:39:39.200does that. It changes how we think about liberation and time and space and connection.
00:39:45.400And I really, really see your work doing that. I'm curious what you meant by
00:39:51.860when you said this project was a ritual.
00:40:10.140thank you birthday twins for like speaking to my heart
00:40:13.980and being on my vibration and calling all the people
00:40:17.940that you did into the space won't Ashan do it to you
00:40:21.720And it's speaking in such a healing way to all of us who have had to grow up in a Black church where that institution tried to contain us, right?
00:40:40.420And not to say that people, the pastors, the ministerial staff, all the people that work to make the Black church an institution had nefarious intent or were out to get us or completely usher us into white supremacist violence.
00:40:57.460but even as people were trying to do their best to connect to spirit and formalize it I'm not
00:41:07.740going to say ritualize it but formalize it institutionalize it it did some violence right
00:41:13.820it absolutely did some violence I grew up in an AME church and I guess because of issues of funding
00:41:20.880um being a part of that first district they had to have um white jesus in the stained glass
00:41:29.320right they they had not had any female embodied or feminine folks in the pulpit like i experienced
00:41:38.280all sorts of um self-negating energy and spirit up in that space and it's so deep that the person
00:41:48.160that I'm doing, that I'm in a therapeutic relationship with, I chose her because she
00:41:54.020pastors a church, a progressive or affirming and inclusive church. And instead, I thought I was
00:42:00.380like, I was in a space where I was like, yeah, I could never engage Black church again. And I wanted0.99
00:42:05.380to work out this stuff around spirit with her and work with a person who had known something else,
00:42:11.440who had known what a Sean knew, right, who had been able to, in spite of the violence that was
00:42:18.600also in that space, allowed to experience something else in the well. And I listened to you. I listened
00:42:26.560to your work on the well and the course of folks who are doing that piece with you. And those
00:42:34.400structures of genocide and slavery cannot contain that. The anti-Black violence cannot contain that
00:42:40.520work of spirit and breath, right? So it's so deep to me that in talking with this woman who is a
00:42:48.380healer, like people can both come out of that space of the Black church deeply damaged or having
00:42:56.640experienced something else, right? And the moments of getting caught up in the inflection of a voice0.60
00:43:04.800that lets someone escape a particular form of violent homophobia. All those things are happening
00:43:10.700at the same time, right? So I could never, I'm at a place now where I don't, I do not know that I'll
00:43:17.080ever be a part of a congregation, but I can go back and appreciate the desire to come together
00:43:24.420to search out spirit, like in Baby Soong Holy's clearing, right? I get that as a fundamental kind
00:43:32.340a practice that black church folks are reaching towards right that ceremonial space of not
00:43:39.780transcending like a deep eminence but tapping into another kind of possibility with each other
00:43:45.900that yeah I value I seek it out I'm looking for it now and I think that I mean this project was
00:43:56.460just the beginning for me it was me hoping to be able to create a path where I could break out
00:44:02.100with some of the strictures of academic practices
00:44:07.200of knowledge production and create an opportunity
00:44:55.860And that's what I love about Black Studies and all the people that you just named,
00:45:00.300with Sean in particular that just came to mind, your relationship to Black studies has to be one
00:45:07.400of waiting to be and needing to be transformed. And so this conversation, the conversations that
00:45:14.620I've just had with folks from Electric Marinage and Dark Laboratory have given me so much joy
00:45:22.700because there are folks who want to do this work to share breath and have it change them and help
00:45:28.480them reimagine and reconceptualize how they relate to one another in the academy, our students,
00:45:36.560how we literally steal resources for folks who are not in the academy that we want to build with
00:45:41.920and be in a ceremonial relationship with. And how do we make sure that people see that we're
00:45:49.360trying to meet them? So this was a part of the project for me. So thank you again for the
00:45:54.400invitation and seeing me I was trying to reach out to you and didn't know it I heard the call
00:46:01.520I heard the call yeah what you're saying about how black studies is a commitment to being transformed
00:46:10.200makes me think of a poem that I read recently from Lucille Clifton that had never seen called
00:46:18.480after Kent State and she's talking about the violence that happened at Kent State but now I'm
00:46:27.280thinking about it in relationship to just the university the afterlife of the university and
00:46:33.200the impact of the academy which I felt so deeply in preparing for this interview in all transparency
00:46:40.460of of of what of of that kind of discourse that um black feminist discourse allows us to actually
00:46:49.720speak i think through love and through witnessing and through ceremony which is what i've done
00:46:54.600after the academy to come back to the earth and to reroute my language which i see you doing
00:47:00.080through the black shoals and i noticed the that kind of demonic energy that that rears up um0.99
00:47:09.220in the kind of ways that the academy makes you think you don't have your shit together,0.97
00:47:19.940you know, or that you don't know or privileges a certain kind of epistemology.0.99
00:47:26.520And in that poem after Kent State, Lucille writes about how white ways are the ways of death.0.58
00:47:35.480And then she invites them to come into the black and live.0.75
00:47:39.220And I loved, I've just been loving this line to come into the black and live, which I feel your project is doing around how there's, I've heard you speak to, and I think it's McKittrick, I'm not sure, around livingness to that black studies, you can actually receive more life and come into more life.0.86
00:48:01.440And that the friction and the challenge is actually a rite of passage, which I see you approaching in that way when you speak to ritual or when you speak to ceremony, which is the way I want to relate to black studies and kind of come out, release it from the academy or the institution or the church.
00:48:21.160and to be around fire and water and in the soil with one another
00:48:28.380so that we might live, so that we can live.
00:48:32.720So thank you for doing that and the way that I feel like I can bring
00:48:38.820where I am to your scholarship and bring ceremony to your scholarship.
00:48:46.280no thank you for that thank you for saying that and I'm just thinking about all the folks that you
00:48:56.960were telling me you were engaging that that I I haven't it's so interesting like all the folks
00:49:04.640like for instance oh the sister who is the nap bishop she does the nap ministry
00:49:13.740mm-hmm trisha hersey trisha hersey thank you who also found her space struggling in the academy
00:49:22.160i also found her in that found herself in that space and thinking about how i was just able to
00:49:30.440connect with one of my colleagues who i literally was in a phd program and on the same campus with
00:49:37.660we weren't in the same departments jessica marie johnson but didn't get to engage her in the deep
00:49:42.660wonderful way that I literally did just this week on a Monday and had spent years with her in the
00:49:47.980same place people with the same desire to like you like you said be up in the fire right be in
00:49:56.580the water be in the ceremony space but literally all of the violent kinds of barriers that we have
00:50:07.000to negotiate literally if we're sitting in the same room together in the academy that prevents
00:50:12.000us from being able to connect to breath to breath on that level right so like it just makes me think
00:50:20.180of all the the kinds of scholars that I know that one if they're not have not already been put down
00:50:26.660or put on with you Bronte would want to be and like have a deep desire to be and so the work
00:50:34.520that you're doing and the ways that you're trying to connect with organizers and creatives
00:50:40.320from different mediums and scholars is deeply important to that particular practice
00:50:49.740and commitment to what you said was correctly,
00:50:54.200Catherine McKittrick's notion of like Black livingness.
00:50:56.920And that's what I was trying to draw on.
00:50:59.380And I was trying to take seriously the ways that McKittrick has been challenging
00:51:03.860all the kind of deadly moves we have to make in the academy0.88
00:51:08.260I mean, when we study Black people, right, so even impulses within Black studies that are overly devoted to studying how we die and suffer are missing out, right, are not necessarily heeding to that call, that there is Black livingness nonetheless, right, next to that Black kind of death, right, that we can choose to move with.0.97
00:51:34.740if we can choose to move with that current and that work is going to look
00:51:39.740deeply different, it might be more difficult.
00:51:42.280There might not be a roadmap and it might require, no, not might.
00:51:47.000It requires a particular moving with Bronte and led to life, right?0.99
00:51:53.660And moving with, let me check out this sister who is in,0.94
00:51:58.060in the Candler department of religion, who's doing the,