‘You don’t have revolution without sound’: A Conversation between Christina Sharpe, Françoise Vergès and K’eguro Macharia

Christina Sharpe’s 2016 In The Wake: On Blackness and Being evokes multiple resonances of ‘the wake’ to discuss Black being in the afterlife of slavery: the trail left behind a ship, a ritual for commemorating the dead, a consciousness.¹ Here, the wake also becomes a practice – a means of tracing how the past fractures the present, a form of everyday memorialisation, and a mode of care for past, present and future others; it generates ripples that spill across and beyond the text. As she writes, to produce ‘legible work in the academy’, Black academics must often adhere to disciplinary research methods which do ‘violence to our own capacities to read, think, and imagine otherwise’.² To us, Sharpe’s work offers precisely this: a means of imagining, enacting and recalling forms being otherwise than modernity’s structures.³

When conceiving of this special issue as a series of conversations, we were interested in how ideas form through encounters in the present; how present words carry past voices with them; how conversations might, themselves, offer modes of thinking otherwise. As such, when we approached Christina about contributing to this issue, we were delighted that she suggested being in conversation with Françoise Vergès and K’eguro Macharia. To us, all of these writers engage, demand, and practise modes of imagining and relating otherwise. We were fascinated by the resonances across their work – as well as how their different approaches and disciplinary backgrounds might generate varied engagements with similar issues.

Based in Nairobi, K’eguro Macharia is an independent scholar. His work enacts a practice of thinking and speaking across disciplines, genres, histories and national contexts; recalling the intimacies, communities and queer relationalities that refuse the categorisations and boundaries imposed by colonial modernity. His award-winning Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora re-imagines Black diaspora through the concept – and lived histories – of ‘frottage’: a reference to both the painful ‘grinding’ and ‘grating’ of bodies, yet also a figure for the potentially generative proximities of diasporic relationality.⁴ Macharia pursues what he describes as a ‘broader reparative goal’ of recalling the traces – and the possibilities – of queer Black relationality in those spaces from which it has been ‘deemed absent.’⁵ Here, and elsewhere, his practice lingers on fragments, what is not said or what is half-said.⁶ Across his online and print publications, he opens dialogues, recalling the words and asides of others; allowing these voices to collect, to speak to each other, to interrupt, and to echo.

Over the past decades, the Franco-Reunionnese antiracist, decolonial writer, curator, activist and scholar, Françoise Vergès has published and worked extensively on postcoloniality, creolisation, slavery, the politics of dispossession, extraction and racialisation, and decolonial feminism. Growing up in Réunion Island, she learned with her anticolonial communist activist parents the importance of anti-imperialist, antiracist internationalism as a source of resistance. Before moving to the United States in 1983, where she completed her PhD in Political Theory at Berkeley, she worked with antiracist and anticolonial collectives in France and was a journalist for Women in Motion (Femmes en movement). She edited some books in the collection Femmes en luttes de tous les pays for Éditions des Femmes. Across her work, Vergès draws out the violent material, physical, psychic and social effects of racial capitalism, colonialism and gendered violence. Rejecting the claims of white, ‘civilisational’ feminism, she insists instead on the question of ‘who cleans the world?’, pointing to the waste and violence of capitalist modernity wreaks upon Black, Indigenous and Brown populations worldwide. Vergès’s careful articulation of the ‘decolonial’ evokes layered histories of activism, collective practice, relationality and care; many of her own projects are built through collaboration, including her conversations with Aimé Césaire (published in Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès), and the curation of a museum project at House of Civilizations and of La Réunion’s Unity, first conceptualised as a ‘Museum without Objects’.

Christina Sharpe is a writer and professor, currently Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Canada. Published seven years before In the Wake, her first book Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects discusses a number of literary and visual texts, exploring the representation of sexual violence, racialised subjugation and subjection during, and in the wake of, slavery. Her latest work is Ordinary Notes (2023). A new book Black. Still. Life is forthcoming in 2025.

This article forms part of the special issue of parallax, ‘Reading Otherwise: Decolonial Feminisms’. The issue features conversations which took place 2021-23. Prompts relating to the speakers’ work and the key terms of the issue were circulated ahead of this conversation. We started the conversation by asking what had brought them to their work.

Christina Sharpe: I don’t quite know where to begin. It’s a big question… I came to this through reading, through living in the regimes of anti-Blackness. I’ll start there. I could begin, arbitrarily, thinking back to being in university and reading John Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am. Reading the autobiography of Malcolm X. Reading the autobiography of Angela Davis; Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952); Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison, 1977); Sula (Toni Morrison, 1973). Reading a whole bunch of texts and having teachers like Kristin Hunter Lattany who really made me think about reading, and the work of reading, in relation to my life. Reading the work of Bessie Head made me think I wanted to be a scholar of some sort. So really, it was the process of reading and living in, and seeing how other people lived in, and survived, these anti-Black regimes, these deeply anti-feminist regimes. All of that made me think that I wanted to do a particular kind of work. I wanted to think about the ways that reading can direct, save a life, and intervene – reading and writing can intervene in practices of violence.

Françoise Vergès: Why don’t we start with books? I can say that books have quite often saved me. Reading has always been a haven, a light; sometimes in moments of sadness, or when something is hard, too hard, I’ll be reading something, and it will absolutely give me more energy again. Whenever I arrive somewhere I immediately look for a bookstore. I cannot live without books. They are very important for me. They offer consolation, not just learning, but consolation: voices, words, the fact that someone somewhere can translate into words a feeling I have had but have not been able to fully express to myself. So, I’m always looking for books.

I’m very curious about books on anti-Blackness, about the way in which capitalism and racism destroy minds and bodies, and yet resistance and life nonetheless persist, vibrant and defiant. And so, for instance, when I read Christina’s In the Wake, it totally floored me; it was like an incredible window opening. I did not know the work of K’eguro before we were set up in conversation and, for me, that’s also a kind of unforeseen moment where I discovered a book thanks to something that I had not even organised. It’s also beautiful for me. So, I’ve been reading and listening to him.

Christina: I hope we can transcribe that sound of your hands.

[As Françoise speaks, she moves her hands; her rings brush and click]

K’eguro Macharia: That’d be wonderful. My strategy of going last is a bad one! How does one follow you both? For me, I think it begins with poetry, and with the kind of undisciplining that poetry did for me. I’m thinking especially about poetry by women of the Harlem Renaissance – Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and others – which was the first time I read a body of work and I thought to myself: Oh, but this is wonderful. This is all here. This is so profound, and it’s absent from everything else I’m seeing written about what lifeworlds are and what imaginations are. And there’s such a smallness presumed to be in poetry by these Black women, where poetry is framed as a genre of smallness, but there is no smallness in what I’m reading.

And I think what reading poetry did for me was to undiscipline a kind of disciplining that was happening, which was telling me that I could only study African American or African or Caribbean. One had to choose. There are these fields in these disciplines and these ways of thinking that were tethered, if not to nation, to region, and to read across them was deemed either impossible or just bad strategy – you’re a bad scholar, stay in your lane. But none of the poetry did that. All the poetry moved across space and time. You read Claude McKay, and he’s in the Caribbean, and he’s in the US and he’s in Europe, and he’s in Africa. And so, poetry asked me: Well, what are you going to do about that? How are you going to read that? How do you read through poetry, not simply as a series of formal devices, but in the ways that poetry weaves things together and takes them apart and weaves them together and takes them apart and just creates whole new worlds to think with?

Oh, and Christina Sharpe. I have told Christina over and over and over and over and over, but I’ll repeat it now. Monstrous Intimacies gave me permission to write as I wanted to, precisely because it does that work of moving across time and space, with a lot of care.

Françoise: When you talked about poetry, I was just thinking of how, when I was working on setting up a museum in Réunion Island (Museum of the Living Present, 2002-2010), we asked, what words will resonate and circulate in the museum?⁷ Though the project was not realised because of local and national reactionary forces, the museum would have contested the French colonial narrative about Réunion Island, which claims that, since there was no native population, colonialism ‘birthed’ us. We would have inscribed the land and the people within the African-Asian oceanic millenary space of encounters and exchanges, with Europe on the periphery. French colonialism had taken people from around the Indian Ocean Rim (Madagascar, East Africa, Malaysia, Yemen, South India, China, New Caledonia) to work, enslaved and indentured, on the island, or people had come as migrants (Gujarat, South China, Vietnam…) and of course, there were the settlers. All brought their languages – they did not ‘lose’ them, as colonial narratives suggest, and they were spoken for a long time despite what a certain understanding of creolisation suggests – and with their languages, they brought a poetic of life and resistance.

When imagining the museum’s library, we said: let’s have poetry, just poetry, poetry from all over the Indian Ocean, in all the languages, and without translation. So, we’re going to hear Urdu, Swahili, Malagasy, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese… We thought that poetry was the best medium of circulation of feelings and dreams and aspirations and even if you did not understand the words, the music of poetry would be heard by the public. And so, it’s really beautiful what you say because for us it was about what is circulating in the Indian Ocean between Africa, Asia, and the Arab world. That created a creolised world. We wanted to challenge the hegemony of the Atlantic paradigm by adopting the Malagasy’s view that there is not a radical rupture between land and water, that each is a continuation of the other. It was important then to stress the singularity of the Indian Ocean, its seas and bodies of water and its connection with the Pacific Ocean. And thus to study the processes of creolisation in that space.

Maya Caspari: Thank you for these wonderful responses. I wonder how what you read or listen to – your discussion of the significance of poetry’s sound and potential for undisciplining for instance – relates to your own writing practice. Françoise, you so evocatively described reading as consolation: if reading is consolation, what is writing for you? Relatedly, who – if anyone – do you write for?

Christina: I’m going to start again because I had the pleasure of blurbing A Feminist Theory of Violence: A Decolonial Perspective (2022), Françoise’s recently translated book. In your acknowledgments you write,

To write is to owe a debt, a debt to all the authors of books, poems, novels, films, art installations. And to the activists who have explored, analysed, and theorised class, race, and gender based, colonial, imperialist, capitalist, sexist, and sexual oppression. I hereby acknowledge my debt. It is immense.⁸

When I read that I took a deep breath and held it. You’ve just said it all. To write is to owe a debt. I have more to say, but I will offer that. I’ll say one more thing: I come back often to an interview with Rod Ferguson in which he recalls Lisa Lowe telling him, the point isn’t to be brilliant in the work, the point is to write something that somebody else can use.⁹

Françoise: For me, the first question is, writing in which language? I write totally differently in French than in English. French is much more… it’s the [language of the] master. Thus, I don’t let my feelings be known. Whereas in English, I can let my feelings in … I mean, I can say ‘I’. It took me a long time to say ‘I’ in French, to write it. And if I write in Creole that is also totally different so it’s incredible how the language in which you write affects your writing. And then what Christina said has also been very important for me because of the incredible effort I have made to write less and less for academia. It started when I wrote the book with Césaire, Resolutely Black (2005). I thought about all the women of Martinique and Guadeloupe that I was seeing constantly working as maids or in hospitals in France, and I said I want this book to be for them so that they can say, Césaire is ours. For me it had to be their book and not a book that would belong to academic scholarship about Césaire. That opened something and from then on it has been a journey for me, and I continue to make the effort not to write down, but to write with and for these people because without them I would not be writing. From then on, I have had to think of with whom I want to write.

Christina: That’s a beautiful, beautiful answer and I was thinking that maybe the better question for me was no longer who I write for – though that was a very important question when I wrote In The Wake – but who I write with.

In Monstrous Intimacies I finally got to write the way that I really wanted to in the introduction and maybe in the Kara Walker chapter, but that book took me a very long time. It was my tenure book. So, it had to have a particular audience, at least at that moment. When I wrote In The Wake, I was thinking about Julie Dash saying that she made Daughters of the Dust (1991) for Black women first, then for Black people, and then for everyone else, and I really wanted to write In The Wake for Black women first, Black people and then everyone else and so that was really important to me.

And now, I’ve just finished Ordinary Notes (2023). I really mean it when I quote Lisa Lowe – I want the book to be read and to be of use – but again I think that the question for me now is: who do I write with? And who do I write alongside? And it’s a whole range of writers, thinkers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, and others who make thinking and writing possible. I have a long list. I don’t know if I should name them all, but of course, Françoise, K’eguro, Saidiya Hartman, Rinaldo Walcott, Ja’Tovia Gary, Jennifer Packer, Tina Campt, Savannah Shange, a whole range of people, Mariame Kaba, Alice Smith, Rizvana Bradley, Jared Sexton, Toni Morrison, Dionne Brand, Alberta Whittle, Bessie Head, Jafari Allen – I mean, I could go on and on and on. And I think that I wouldn’t be able to think or write anything without their company – Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, La Tanya Autry, Toni Cade Bambara… You know, thinking and working and finding someplace to land and to push myself wouldn’t be possible without the shifting and changing and clarifying work that they do.

Maya: In what ways do these concerns – such as your commitment to ‘speaking with’ – shape the choices you make when researching and writing? For instance, do you seek to enact a kind of relationality or ‘speaking with’ through your use of form, language or genre – to create new possibilities for, or otherwise than, subjectivity and the ‘I’?

Ruth Daly: We’ve been thinking about varied interventions on how to address histories and experiences of violence without replicating or re-centring violent modes of looking, from Audre Lorde’s oft-cited ‘master’s tools’ discussion, to Saidiya Hartman’s work on using the ‘personal’ to ‘tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction’, the violence of the archive.¹⁰ Of course, the significance and ‘use’ of earlier works [like Lorde’s] can also sometimes shift as they are taken up, canonised and even co-opted by the academy…

K’eguro: I’ve been thinking about how often that ‘master’s tools’ quote comes up and I was thinking about how frozen in time it seems because we’ve had almost 40 years of writing by Black feminists and Black scholars. We’ve had so many tools developed. A whole bunch of people went out and developed a whole bunch of things in film and in art, and in poetry and in dance, and in theory; Jessica Marie Johnson (@jmjafrx) who has this wonderful hashtag on Twitter – #BlackTheory, asked people, what do you classify as Black theory? There’s a whole directory of names and methods that came up. And there’s been so much good historical work, looking at how practices of cultivation were brought to the Americas by enslaved Africans. That doesn’t mean the ‘tools’ are just philosophical in whatever strategies Lorde was specifically addressing, but a lot of the things called ‘master’s tools’ in a lot of work makes me think we are not talking about the same things in the same way.

Christina: I was just thinking a very similar thing, K’eguro, so thank you. In relation to the question of whether the form of writing contributes to creating new possibilities for subjectivity, I’m not particularly interested in something called subjectivity, which I can’t think outside of the work that Hartman did in Scenes of Subjection and the question of burdened individualism as well as work that many people have done since then. And that to think about new possibilities for subjectivities is to try to rehabilitate the regimes that demand our continued disposable lives. It’s to try to resuscitate them. Subjectivity is another form of governance that produces our slow deaths. And so, I’m not interested in subjectivity, but I am interested in other forms and other ways of living, perhaps many of which may not even be immediately, or even beyond immediately, apprehendable.

Françoise: Recently, I convened a school called the Nomad Colony on the question of repair.¹¹ And the first question I asked was, what do we know to repair with our hands? What kind of repair? What are your tools? And the answers were about self-care and theory, and I said, no, I’m talking about what we can do with our hands. What can we repair with our hands? And there was total silence because it’s really easy – to return to the point K’eguro made – to take the tool as an abstract notion. I said: imagine that tomorrow we have to flee, to maroon. Who can build a roof, for instance, among us? Nobody knew how to. We were doomed because we were talking about ‘marooning’ and we could not even build a roof over our heads – the first thing you need is to have a roof, to be protected. I asked who knows how to make a fire? Nobody. It went on like that. Practically everyone knew how to repair bikes, but for instance, when it came to sewing, very few knew how to do it and so I said, okay, I can be the tailor because I know how to sew – at least I know that. So, for me, this question of ‘tools,’ is too often taken to mean tools in the abstract sense and not the tools that are needed to remain alive. Sometimes when we talk about tools, we don’t really know what we’re talking about…

Christina: May I ask two questions? Because that makes me think two things. It makes me think first about Françoise’s insistence on the question: who cleans the world? When we were on the panel together in Paris in 2018 that is the question that you began with.¹² And of course, that’s what you begin with in A Decolonial Feminism. In discussing COVID-19, you’ve been thinking about the kinds of violence that women who were working as domestic workers were subjected to, but also the violence and the vulnerability that the curfew left them open to as they were trying to make their way home. And then also, as Françoise was talking about sewing, I was thinking about you K’eguro, and your work on suture and the materiality of it: who sews? Who sutures? Who sees a suturing versus sewing? And also related questions of the work of improvisation, repair, and prevention of harm. Who does this work? And so, I wanted to ask both of you your thoughts on this, because I see where your work meets around this question of who cleans the world. And the question of the tool and the hand and building a life.

K’eguro: One, it’s certainly about the role of gendering and what gender means and how gender acts, and I’m interested in the ways those acts of cleaning are very gendering in particular ways. But it’s also of course about labour, and about what kinds of work are considered valuable, though I don’t want to use the word valuable. Let me move away from Kenya and jump into the US for a second because this then just makes me think about the pandemic obviously, in which people have been considered disposable because of their labour. So, who needs to go in to clean? When people are talking about health workers being provided with protective equipment, so little of that discourse was about cleaners and about regular staff. So much of it was about doctors, at least in Kenya, the emphasis was save the doctors, not even the nurses, just the doctors. Because I’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals over the last many years, I just kept thinking about the janitorial staff who come into hospital rooms six, seven, eight times a day whereas a doctor might show up once on their rounds. I can only hold onto that very palpable thing. So, I’m thinking about things like frequency, exposure to risk, but of course, also what they do when they come in, what they handle, what they touch, how protected or not protected they are. It’s about risk but it’s also about the way people are not considered to be at risk because they’re not visible. Risk is a kind of calculus that attaches to certain bodies and not to others. That’s all very, very depressing but this is where my mind goes.

Françoise: That question is really essential for me: who cleans the world? Since we are talking about the pandemic, I think of how racial capitalism produces a vast accumulation of waste and garbage. Waste that it dumps on Black and Brown bodies and Black and Brown environments. The toxicity is not just chemical, it’s about racism, premature death, health, bad housing, everything, it’s about making the world uninhabitable. White supremacy wants a clean/cleansed world and it wants its vast amount of waste to disappear from its sight. It effectively wants it gone. It’s a process of ‘whitening whiteness’. You know how advertisements for soap have to do with whiteness. Cleaning is associated with making something ‘clean white’ and that work is done by Black and Brown bodies. We know who washes the clothes of the white people: it’s Black women. And so, how can we make visible what the unfairness and incredible brutality of the world rests on? How do we make cleaning an anti-racist political struggle?

It’s not just a struggle for equality between men and women or the bourgeois feminist idea that domestic work is invisible or should be shared. No, the question is: how do we show how the racialisation of cleaning, its gender/class/race matrix, is at the foundation of racial capitalism? Without the daily work of cleaning done by Black, Indigenous and Brown women, there is no society to speak of. As you say, K’eguro, the doctor can come once a day because the janitor comes ten times a day. Racialised cleaning is an economy of exhaustion. The performance and the possibility of the work of the doctor rests on the exhaustion of the janitor’s body. As you said, it’s a job full of risks. Cleaning women will all tell you how their body is exhausted at the end of the day; it is a work that depletes the body and the mind.

Many told me they have to rely on anti-pain pills. To be able to work, they have to consume drugs controlled and produced by pharmaceutical companies, making huge profits on the working conditions fabricated by racial capitalist economy. They also told me how they need to have surgery done on their knees, wrists or elbows because they carry a lot of heavy loads. It’s really what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called […] ‘the state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’.¹³ It’s really a society whose bourgeois comfort and possibility rests on the extraction of the life force of Black women.

With the pandemic, the economy of exhaustion has reached incredible levels. White ecology never talks about the work of cleaning. It talks of making ‘clean energy,’ but there is no ‘clean’ energy. The uncleanliness of the ‘clean’ industry is externalised. Take what the French state calls ‘clean’ nuclear energy, right? It in fact means the extraction of uranium in Niger and hence, the contamination of its population, a high rate of cancer and the pollution and contamination of the land. So, white ecology does not talk about the cleaning that will be necessary for an antiracist clean environment, because it would have to acknowledge that its clean environment rests on historically externalising waste and the dumping of polluted/contaminated waste onto the poor, Black and Indigenous communities. Yes, who cleans the world is a fundamental question that cannot be resolved with the solution suggested by white feminism. The invisibility of the people who are cleaning is incredible. They work in airports, universities, offices, malls, schools, railway stations, and they are not seen. It’s incredible. Cleaning has been fabricated as a work without workers.

Christina: I recently taught Brett Story’s, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016). It is a documentary that looks at all of the ways that the prison structures life. In this film the actual prison-as-structure appears only at the very end, as the bus filled with women and children approaches Attica. The film shows us myriad ways that the prison is distributed across landscapes that one does not necessarily associate either with the prison itself or with carcerality more broadly. One such landscape is Marin County, California. In the film we see a fire burning out of control and we hear the voice of a woman who is incarcerated and a prison firefighter. And one of the things that Story says is that she does not highlight the question of how little the firefighter makes because for her that’s really not the issue. The issue is that this woman will have no opportunity to be a firefighter after she has served her sentence, because if you have a felony, you’re not allowed to be a firefighter once you are released from prison. And so, what Story says is:

prisons themselves lay waste, there’s the ecological damage, and then there’s the waste of holding all these people captive who have all sorts of creative capacity, people in the prime of their life who could be doing productive work. The problem is that their capacity to be productive is shut down. The idea of exploitation has to be thought of differently.¹⁴

And just thinking about all of that brings me to ‘The Terrible Beauty of the Slum,’ in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2017) where Hartman writes about what she calls scandalous waste: ‘It is a zone of extreme deprivation and scandalous waste. In the rows of tenements, the decent reside peacefully with the dissolute and the immoral. The Negro quarter is a place bereft of beauty and extravagant in its display of it’.¹⁵ This is the extravagance of the waste of all these people who have all kinds of possibilities and desires and ambitions, and they are simply thought of and produced as disposable. So that’s also what I was thinking about: this produced and enforced, accumulated disposability. What you’re extracting from them is all kinds of things, not necessarily labour, but you’re extracting them from society and producing them as waste. And there’s the violence upon violence at the kind of acts of the work of cleaning that is made invisible, but that everything depends upon. So, there’s the violence of the work itself, which is, as you say, knee problems, back problems, shoulder problems, and then there’s the violence of the utter disregard for the work that makes everything else work.

Françoise: I also have been thinking about the work of reparation, particularly of that which racial capitalism has fabricated as irreparable; the time it will take to repair the incredible wounds on the planet from all of the mining, extraction, dispossession, exploitation, deforestation… When a mine is empty, capitalism moves to another and leaves behind incredible destruction and devastation of the land, of the rivers, of the water, and of course of the people and animals. Wars leave behind polluted waste. How can we think about the irreparable not in terms of ‘Oh, god, it’s too sad’, but in terms of what we have to work with? How can we think of the irreparable not in a melancholic Western way, but as part of the world that we have to imagine because it will take centuries to repair the damage of racism? The question of the multiple temporalities of reparation are often in my mind: continuing to repair the past, repairing the present and already repairing the future, all together. Cleaning, building, imagining. When power tells us that ‘“we” all must save “the” world now’, it is still transforming its world into the world. But we want the end of that world, which was built by exploitation and racism, and which is now being made even more cruel for Black, Indigenous and Brown peoples with the climate… not crisis (it’s really no longer a crisis), but disaster. I’m not sure I’m being clear.

Christina: You are. It’s a huge question.

K’eguro: I’ll answer it sideways if I can. So, a friend had been asked to write about an African concept of the end, of eschatology. And so, they called me, and we had a conversation and we started thinking about folktales. Like, what’s the African folktale? And the thing we decided on – this is our frame; it might not be right – is that there’s always catastrophe happening in African folktales. The monster is always coming to eat everyone. The flood is coming, the earthquake, whatever, is exploding, but there is no sense of eschatology. There is no sense of the world ending. And so, I’ve been sitting in that gap, thinking, what does it mean to have an idea of catastrophe – and I love Françoise’s idea of the reparable – that is not the inevitability of an ending? And I think this has been more and more on my mind as I watch more people say, ‘the end is here, the end is here, the end is here’. I’m thinking to myself, that’s a really interesting way to approach everything, honestly, right. But what might it mean to hold that idea of catastrophe, not as an ending, but – and I think Françoise you said this – as a call for the need to move somewhere else, where there is space and time for earth to do what it needs to do and re-establish the sort of relations it needs to?

And as I think more with Indigenous thinkers, part of what they’ve given me is the question: what kind of relations are you forging with everything around you? So that moving is not abandoning something else. The farmers’ example would of course be, leave your land fallow: you’ve worked for a while just living fallow and don’t do anything for two years, five years, seven years. Those who’ve got time and space, do it for ten years. And see what will happen, which doesn’t mean there aren’t other practices of repair at work. Sometimes repair might be to leave alone, right? Other times repair might be more proactive, you know, growing plants, whatever indigenous grasses used to be here? But I’m really interested in what it might mean to have a worldview that does not have an ending, that is not eschatological, but understands catastrophe as almost part of a cycle. Catastrophe perhaps might be impending and might happen, which is often very much linked to the natural cycle, you know, volcanoes erupt. They do. Floods happen. They do. But that is not an ending. That’s not the world saying it’s done, we’re done.

Christina: Your responses made me think of Rinaldo Walcott’s On Property: Policing, Prisons, and the Call for Abolition (2021): that to think about living with the irreparable must also mean completely abandoning our relationship to property as something which is held and passed on. It has to be the end of borders; it has to mean the end of nation states. The irreparable must demand a new relation to the earth, to air, to water, to each other. Otherwise, it is the consignment of whole bodies of people to certain death. So, it demands nothing less than a complete reordering. It demands living with the irreparable because, as K’eguro says, it might take 100 years but you have to let land be fallow, you have to let the land heal, you have to stop the extraction and, as Françoise has said, it can’t be that you’re talking about clean energy, which is never clean. It simply means that someone else is left with the dirt and destruction and utter devastation of ways of life.

Kate Crawford’s book Atlas of AI was published in 2021 by MIT Press. A while ago I listened to an interview between her and the artist Martine Syms on Syms’ podcast Mirror with a Memory.¹⁶ It was the episode on ‘Land’ and they were talking about ‘infrastructures of power’, AI, cloud computing, and environmental impacts. About a third of the way in, Crawford offers the example of Alexa to illustrate these impacts. When we ask a simple question, ‘Alexa, what’s a recipe for making dinner tonight?’ we do so with little to no thought or comprehension of how much energy or how many resources one has just used. Crawford lays out the complicated and implicated systems, the rare earth minerals and lithium, and the cycle of waste that have been extracted and made in order to ask Alexa that question that you think nothing of. She says, do you have any idea how much more precarious you have just made life on this planet with that one act?

So, I think living with the irreparable is living with a whole different set of relations to each other and to the planet.

K’eguro: I love the Alexa example. I’m also thinking, what does it mean to use Facebook? Christina, you tweeted out a Time article about the Facebook moderators in East Africa which talks about the content moderators being paid very, very poorly, to filter out what doesn’t get onto Facebook.¹⁷ I’ve never really quite thought about how these are actual humans who are watching everything bad that doesn’t make it on Facebook, and there’s a lot that’s bad, but there’s a lot that’s just really, really bad. Which goes back to what Françoise was saying about how people are created as waste. So, you know you’re on Facebook and you’re like, I’m going to put on a family safe setting, or whatever it is. But that setting itself entails the production of not simply labour but also harm. There’re so many people who have to be the ones to make sure that you don’t see what you don’t want to see but they do.

Françoise: Racial capitalism entails constant destruction, devastation and then at the same time says that the world has to be saved and repaired – so let’s have a biosphere here, a bioreserve there. It cannot think in terms of the irreparable because that would mean racial capitalism had to acknowledge its destructive impulse and how a Black environment would look. That would mean, as you say, letting the forest, the river […] reconstitute themselves, not intervening. For me, living with the irreparable also means stopping the constant intervention through technology which entails a desire to clean the world so that we don’t see what has been destroyed and conceals the work of cleaning that is needed; it is pushed under the rug. For me, the irreparable is what we should look at and not be afraid of, and not be petrified by. Petrification is the affect that white environmental politics fabricates by showing us mountains of plastic and then making us agree it’s absolutely horrible, while still continuing to produce it.

Ruth: As I was listening to you speak about music earlier, I found myself thinking about vibration, how meaning is carried through sound – how we invent in language, how we bend, shape and twist language so that it can bear the meaning we need it to carry for us. I wondered about this notion of carrying in relation to what each person carries with them as they move through the world and how that might be held in an encounter – with the self, but also what is (and isn’t) carried in encounters with others. I don’t necessarily mean other people but encounters with art, literature, and so on.

Could you say a little bit about this relation between carrying and sound in the reading/writing encounter?

Maya: That also evokes some of the work we’ve been thinking with, including Ashon Crawley’s notion of ‘otherwise possibilities’: how potentialities for being otherwise than colonial modernity may emerge in the tactile, the sonic, the ‘choreographic’ encounter; how these encounters carry the past, while also producing ongoing reverberations that are not predictable or containable within the borders of single moments, bodies, selves, or within a linear progress narrative.

K’eguro: So, I’m going to have to take a stab at something which is the way sound carries a certain kind of thing. I’ll give a terrible example. Recently, there have been a series of revelations that songs that we thought we knew in Kenya sung by M’bilia Bel, who was a Congolese singer, which we thought were in Swahili, were really not, in that it was a series of nonsense words, but our ears were just so used to hearing it in Swahili, we were like, ‘Oh, sure, we understand what she’s saying.’ It also goes back to the earlier things we’ve spoken about, like just what sound does and what it carries and encounters. I don’t know. I guess I think a lot about sound as creating space, and then holding a space and acting on us in ways that we are not sure about. I guess my closest example would be how sometimes you’ll just watch a webinar because someone’s talking on it. You know, Saidiya Hartman’s talking. And you’re just like, ‘I really like her voice.’ You know, Dionne Brand is talking and you’re like, ‘I’m going to watch that.’ I don’t know if I’ll understand anything, but I love her voice. It happens with Fred Moten sometimes and with Christina, always. There’s something about a certain kind of… I like to use the word gathering, a certain kind of gathering that can happen through sound.

To go back to the earlier discussion about writing, one of the things I’ve worked on for a while, and I am also really inspired by people doing this, is to make the sound of what I write inviting, if not necessarily the meaning or the ideas. There’s something about how we invite people to engage with us, and some of this just comes from some of the early feminists I read whose work felt so inviting; the reason we all quote Audre Lorde is because she wrote some really beautiful sentences, right? The reason June Jordan is in many people’s mouths; the reason every so often, actually every day on the internet, someone quotes Lucille Clifton, ‘everyday something has tried to kill me’.¹⁸ The reason we turn so often to so many poets is because of the sound they give us. And sometimes it’s not a deep meaning, and I don’t mean that in a bad way; I just mean there’s something comforting about a certain kind of sound, sometimes familiar, sometimes strange and what it can hold for us, even if it’s simply repetition, repetition of it over and over and over again. That can create a certain kind of… not simply a sonic space – I like that idea of sonic spaces, but I think all space is sonic.

So for me it’s been important to think about things like sound as a space of invitation I want to create and occupy; that I want for others; that I want to be in with others who generate that. I think that’s a space academic work can make possible and has increasingly been made possible. I think there’s work that’s emerged that does that now, that is inviting. I don’t mean that makes it easy. I don’t think that makes it, you know, digestible. But I think it holds you in its beautiful sentences. And that holding lets you go where you need to go and sometimes these are very difficult places to be. I’ll go to a book that Christina cites a lot, [Hartman’s] Scenes of Subjection (1997), which is a beautiful book. It is a terrible book to encounter in many ways and you have to do a lot of work to sit with what it’s asking you to do. But there’s a craft to the book that is also saying I’ll hold you through this and that’s…what a gift to be that kind of writer. That’s what I want. Eventually.

Christina: I would say that that’s what you are, and I love your framing of encounter as an invitation and gathering. You’re always inviting us and you’re always bringing people into the room. And I think that is something beautiful about your work. And I have partial answers. I like the question. And the first thing that came to my mind is, of course, that moment in Beloved, before the word was the sound ‘and they all knew what the sound sounded like’.¹⁹ And then because I’ve just taught parts of Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017) along with Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document (2019), I was thinking about that moment in the introduction when Tina says something like all introductions are a kind of throat-clearing gesture, and this is mine in order to ask these questions. Campt then talks about being in the basement after her mother died, with her sister and her father, and her father humming and what that humming did, the kind of grief it held, the space it made, the memories it carried, but also that it was not only heard but also felt as vibration. That vibrational frequency informs her work. I just finished Ordinary Notes and, in that book, I am working with all of the meanings of note-as-sound, as an aid to memory, as note taking. And that is in part because I’m always interested in trying to hold together as many words’ meanings as I can. And so, I was trying to think about Black notes that might reach you and with them, you might be ‘held and held’ to quote Dionne Brand.²⁰

And so the sound is always important, and both the sound of the sentence, the sound of invitation, or disinvitation, the sound of who you bring into the room with you, and that might be because your prose begins to sound like theirs, or because you call them into the room. And that leads me again to Nikky Finney, who said in her beautiful acceptance speech when she won the National Book Award in 2011, ‘repetition is holy’.²¹ I was thinking about K’eguro and the question of repetition. But she also said something about making the decision that when her name was called, she would call these other names, and she would bring them into the room with her. So yeah, the question of sound, and what sound does and what it allows… what sound makes, and breaks, and transports, and arrests; I carry those sounds with me in my head and body.

Françoise: I was thinking of the sound of human voices, how they can be reassuring and bring a sense of peace. How, as a child, a voice will make you feel secure. And when human voices are carrying a message of threat and menace. I mean, it’s the same sound in a way, but it’s also about the tone in which a message is carried. I’m very sensitive to the sound and sometimes I hear the sound of aggressivity before I even hear the content of what is being said. You don’t even need a gesture; the voice itself is a voice of supremacy and domination. It’s as if there are two vocabularies or two languages even when people speak the same language. There is a voice of friends and companions and comrades which brings a sense of being surrounded by peacefulness and joy.

You don’t have rebellion and revolution without sound, without music. The regime of slavery or colonialism is a regime of unbreathing and to sing you have to open your lungs, you have to breathe. Otherwise, your voice will not come out. With resistance, uprising, insurrection, the lungs open, the voices come out and sing a song of freedom, and it’s sung by so many people and there is something… it effectively carries a political text, and I find this so moving. For me, it’s so moving. When I hear people singing in Iraq, in Algeria or in Syria or people singing in the United States during Black Lives Matter, there is something that encapsulates, for me, the strength of the human voice – a voice that’s also carrying something that breaks the racial politics of unbreathing, that affirms breathing as revolution.

Christina: I feel like that was a beautiful place to end.

K’eguro: It was beautiful, I agree.

The conversation took place in February 2022.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

K’eguro Macharia

K’eguro Macharia is an independent scholar from Nairobi, Kenya, who works at the seam of African and the Black Diaspora, trying to imagine and practice freedom. Email: [email protected]

Christina Sharpe

Christina Sharpe is a writer, professor, and tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University. Email: [email protected]

Françoise Vergès

Françoise Vergès is a writer, historian, film producer, independent curator, activist, public educator, and professor of Cultural Studies at The Africa Institute, Sharjah. Email: [email protected]

Maya Caspari

Maya Caspari is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Email: [email protected]

Ruth Daly

Ruth Daly is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Global Creative Industries at the University of Leeds. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Saidiya Hartman uses the phrase the ‘afterlife of slavery’ in Lose Your Mother.

2 Sharpe, In the Wake, 13.

3 Sharpe, In the Wake, 13.

4 Macharia, Frottage.

5 Macharia, Frottage, 5.

6 Macharia, The New Inquiry.

7 See Vergès, ‘Methodology for a Creole Museum, For a Postcolonial Museum of the Living Present’ and ‘A Museum without a Collection’.

8 Vergès, A Feminist Theory of Violence, 1.

9 See Mesle, ‘American Studies Takes Care: An Interview with ASA President Roderick Ferguson’.

10 Hartman, cited in Saunders, ‘Fugitive Dreams of Diaspora’, 5. Hartman is discussing Lose Your Mother and how to write about the lives of the enslaved in a way that counters the erasures and violent abstractions/reductions of their lives in the archive. See also: Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’; Lorde’s well-known comments were first delivered at a 1979 New York University Institute for the Humanities conference, as a critique of white feminism, and later published in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde.

11 See Vergès, ‘The Colony is reborn in a nomadic form: The Nomad Colony – Fragments of Repair’.

12 See Eshun et al., ‘What Would it Look Like to Refuse Antiblackness and Realize Black Futurity as a Radical Possibility for Living Otherwise?’.

13 Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 28.

14 Alli and Story, ‘Brett Story’.

15 Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.

16 See Syms, ‘Land’.

17 Perrigo, ‘Inside Facebook’s African Sweatshop’.

18 Clifton, ‘won’t you celebrate with me’.

19 Morrison, Beloved, 305.

20 Brand, Thirsty.

21 Finney, ‘Nikky Finney’s 2011 National Book Award in Poetry Acceptance Speech’.