Thank You for Loving Me Long and Loud and Deep and Dear

May 9, 2023

Dearest Jenée,

In Parable of the Sower,¹ Octavia Butler reminds us, “There is no end to what a living world will demand of you.” Somewhere amidst this year’s insistences, I fell out of the dual intimacy on which my life depends: that of my support system of chosen sisters and my writing practice. The conditions I need to be in rhythm and not unfurl at my own expense are both/and in nature. As Toni Morrison advises, I have to “pay as much attention to [my] nurturing sensibilities as to [my] ambition.”²

Before I proceed, I want to lay out a framework for us, and as always, riff as you please in your response—

This support system, this sisterhood, is:

A relational ethic that hinges on sincere and unrelenting investment in the actualization of one another’s desires on all levels, i.e., mind, body, heart, and spirit;

A commitment to extending one another’s conception of our boundlessness and a dedication to revel in and celebrate one another’s immensity;

A sanctified willingness to coax one another back into the palm of delight such that we may craft lives we actually want to inhabit; and

A site where we can support one another in devising ways to make the enactment of our work more pleasurable and more viable through earnest truth-telling and critique on personal and structural levels.

When I say “structural level,” I mean work itself is an inherently extractive concept that we experience in the “art world” we labor within. Because of our positionality within this modus operandi, experiencing the nourishing relationship to our work that we both desire is not something that happens haphazardly. It is through persistent practices of concerted refusal—i.e., “the rejection of the status quo as livable” per Tina Campt—that we improvise towards conditions conducive to the nourishing relationship to work and one another I mentioned above.³

What does it take to actively relate to our own and one another’s creative labor in modes that transcend extraction and trans-acting? What does it look like to center inter-acting, intimacy, and pleasure instead? Well, one answer is sisterhood—our sisterhood.

I wonder if Elizabeth Catlett was thinking along these lines when she sat down to create Gossip (2004-05). The piece undeniably embodies the relational intimacy, pleasure, and nourishment I yearn for. Watching the two people behold one another, it strikes me that their witnessing is a mode of sustenance, which is what it feels like to be loved by you: an ineffable kind of satiation charged by the promise of protection. Like us, the pair in Gossip seem suspended in an atmosphere of their own making, an environment laden with the safety needed to reconcile the irreconcilable.

What I realize is the route back to a relationship with our work, one that is aligned with both ease and rigor, is the same as it has always been: a complete refusal to participate in extractive logics, an active and ceaseless devotion to our sisterhood, which is also to say thank you for loving me long and loud and deep and dear.

Until soon and with gratitude,
CGB

May 11, 2023

Dearest Camille,

Over the course of this year, I have found that the extractive conditions of this world and the demands of this work usher me toward isolation—far from the ecosystems from which I derive the relational intimacy, pleasure, and nourishment you mention. Over the course of our friendship, I find within the inimitable ecosystem of our sisterhood lies the liberty to dream and draft a new architecture of reality. If you unfurled the blueprint of my existence and assessed the contents of its foundation, you would find my liberation interlocked with yours—healing in communion, as bell hooks instructs.⁴ I elect to witness your recovery, and your presence is undoubtedly with me as I embark on my own reckoning.

I must redefine the relational ethics of this work and this world to make both the doing and the existing far more pleasurable. The extractive paradigms you mention continue to fester and grow in this “art world,” where relationality is often only deemed helpful in advancing the self. It is through the lens of Black feminist practices that the work becomes satiable; through the lens of sisterhood I avow my curatorial work can no longer be conducted as a solitary act.

The etymological intention of curate, from the Latin curare, was to imply the care of objects—to curate means to care. But care for whom, I ask? The application of such care, consideration, and nourishment must also be extended to myself, my work, and my world. I have chosen to curate/curare/care for a collective, liberated experience as exemplified in this sisterhood.

As I survey the scene Denzil Forrester crafted in Night Strobe (1985), I am reminded of the many nights our conversations transcended into an embodied language, swept onto the dance floor by the gravitational pull of deep house and jazz-funk. The dance floor has consistently been a place where our Black bodies . . . our dancing bodies . . . our Black dancing bodies (CC: Brenda Dixon Gottschild) testify to the enactment of our desires, boundlessness, immensities, delights, and pleasures.⁵ Our mechanisms of protection are extended here—a sanctuary if you will. If healing occurs in communion, then dancing must be our baptism; the dance floor, a site of exaltation where the testimony is only legible in the literature of embodiment.

Thus, to riff on your framework, I propose–

Sisterhood is also:
A surveying eye that scans the room to determine in which corner our purses will be most protected; a lonesome corner, within our sightline, ensuring no objects will obstruct our choreography;

An outstretched palm multiplied to become two intertwined hands, charging toward an empty dance floor where possibilities of existence are infinite;

A dancing body, a Black body, a Black dancing body testifying with and affirming another dancing body, another Black body, another Black dancing body; and

A steadfast plow through pulsating bodies to leave the dance floor far more saturated than we found it.

Legacy Russell notes the body “is a world-building word, filled with potential . . . filled with movement.”⁶ Thus, one can only imagine the dormant thresholds and alternate realities that will emerge in the world at large and in our work as a direct result of our improvised duets.

Camille, I have come to realize that it is on the dance floor that we draft the architecture of our realities. A shared reality in which we consider the we. I can only imagine that in the expansive reach of our relational being, someone like Forrester is witnessing, scribbling, and painting a new utopia.

Yours always,
JDS

May 15, 2023

You know, so much of me depends on your capacity to craft lexicons of love, Jenée, and on all the ways you coax that sensibility out of me too. Your letter serves as a reminder that settles the tectonic plates of my being. Here’s to relationality that calls forth the polyphonic rather than the solitary and, in so doing, allows us to wield our work in service of the collective. As you have said elsewhere, here’s also to “no longer being secretive about the ways we are in concert.”

In addition to Russell’s proposition of the body as a “world-building” word, she also cautions us against the compulsion to define and the blade hidden behind such compulsions: to define is also to flatten.⁷ It is with such an understanding that I return to the burgeoning scene in Night Strobe and read it once more with attention trained toward the blur. Here, the bodies figured are indistinguishable from one another in their movement. It seems that, for Forrester, a brushstroke laid in service of one is a brushstroke laid in service of the collective. As such, the painting embodies an impulse that exceeds individuality and categorization. Their bodies blur because signification doesn’t matter here. After all, meaning is manifold here. Instead, what matters is the contrapuntal modes of being (after Ming Smith and Christina Sharpe) that emerge from the willingness to understand oneself in communion with others.⁸

On this note, because Forrester’s painting is called Night Strobe, we might assume that the beams emanating from within the frame represent the luminosity that lines the club’s ceiling. But, in the spirit of the Black feminist practices that underpin our work—embodying wayward imagination, in this case—I propose that we read the beams more obliquely as a visualization of breath. When we dance together, we breathe together. When we breathe together, we extend one another’s aliveness. An Duplan suggests that “to locate liberation, one has to locate a third space. This alter-space is not ‘outside of,’ ‘away from,’ or ‘other than our present world. Instead, it is an intensification, or deepening, of mundane reality.”⁹

I ask: What’s more mundane than breath? And in the same gesture, what is more miraculous than a sisterhood that makes breath more possible?

This line of thinking reminds me of a haiku penned by Sonia Sanchez in honor of Catlett. In it, Sanchez writes: “O how you / help us catch / each other’s breath. . . . i pick / up your breath and / remember me . . . your hands / humming hurricanes / of beauty.”¹⁰ In Sanchez’s poem, breath/ing is posited as a collective effort. That is, I catch your breath, you catch mine, I move, you move, we mirror. As the beat loops, enveloping us in the glory of our experiments in redemptive reality-writing, I sit in perpetual celebration of the fact that no one taught us how to be together. Yet, here we are, improvising in the name of our collective dreams.

Alas, this remains true: when we breathe together, the world bends around the expanse of our desires.

Yours always and all-ways also,
CGB

May 16, 2023

Camille,

The cadence of our synchronized breaths eradicates my disquietude. Through your unyielding presence, I gain both strength and softness, gumption and frivolity, rest and resurrection. Tears well in me at the thought of our breath “extend[ing] one another’s aliveness,” particularly in this time of witnessing countless acts of one withholding air from another. This sisterhood has led me to dwell in the expanse of the third space, and I can only thank you, Camille, for gesturing delicately toward the miracles that lie within its mundanity.

I am certain a sisterhood such as ours led Catlett to create Gossip. I find myself reading this work more closely after hearing you recall the melodic utterances of Sonia Sanchez. “i pick / up your breath and / remember me” lingers in my mind as I gaze at the two figures indulging in each other’s company. It reads, to me, as if Sanchez was so deeply intertwined in their relational intimacy that relinquishing her being to the rhythmic expanse and collapse of Catlett’s lungs felt only natural. This rhythm extends into a scenic journey that Sanchez traverses, leading her to re-member herself—assembling the previously scattered parts. Sanchez’s words, coupled with Catlett’s work, remind me that the reverence of sisterhood enables us to return to ourselves—and thus, our work—with buoyancy. I feel held by the thought of Catlett’s figures sustaining Sanchez’s poems, just as I feel held by your breath replenishing mine.

We both fell out of intimacy with the sources from which we derive pleasure and make our work more pleasurable. Thus, the centrality of rest in our homecoming is crucial. The subjects of Danielle Mckinney’s languorous scenes come to mind. In a recent work aptly titled Dreamer (2021), the lone subject rests on her back in a dimly lit space, tucked into sorbet-colored sheets with a seashell pressed to her cheek—seemingly held by its own accord. To read this work, I propose we linger in our wayward imaginings a little longer. I envision the subject’s auditory experience to be not that of the ocean but rather the waves of her atmosphere. I envision she is tapping into a multifaceted hymn derived from the convergence of the ancestral, the present, and the future—listening closely for certainty in selfhood.

If our breaths are catalysts for world bending, our dreams are incubatory wombs lined with mirrors, swelling to the infinite expanse of our desires. In the mundanity of breath, sleep, and rest, our worlds grow lungs of their own. If, as Okwui Enwezor suggests, we exist “in relation to, next to, adjacent to, and between worlds of our own making . . . by choice and by circumstance,” then I am most grateful for the choices and circumstances that led us to build worlds in concert with each other.¹¹
Much like the cyclical nature of breathing, the inhale relies on the exhale, just as Sanchez is on Catlett, Mckinney’s figure is on the shell, and I am on you. I’d like to think that our breath in tandem, our dancing bodies, our relishing in togetherness contests forces that “conspire against our conspiring.”

Yours always,
JDS