A Love Ethic for the End of the World

Because of these glaring realities, I found it incumbent to share this platform with the fearless and devoted political theorist and educator Dr. Joy James. I first discovered James at some point during the early days of the pandemic, perhaps 2020, when my sorrow and trepidation, precipitated by mass death and widespread state neglect, almost got the better of me. James appeared like a buoy in the water, with ideas and language to hold onto. That is not to say that Dr. Joy James is new on whatever supposed scene we like to place our thinkers, artists, and critics. James has been fearlessly writing, teaching, thinking, and, most importantly, struggling for several decades. 

What separates Dr. Joy James from many of her academic and intellectual contemporaries is her deep and abiding accountability to the most vulnerable among us. Not simply conceptually or intellectually, but materially. James reminds us that there is dignity in struggle, not simply in what we can accumulate, often putting her own position and comfort on the line to organize around political prisoners in their efforts to be freed from state captivity. I joined Dr. James on a tranquil afternoon via Zoom from my perch in Bahia; she was just finishing up a call with Mumia Abu Jamal, the revolutionary journalist, currently imprisoned in Pennsylvania. Dr. Joy James has worked alongside Mumia’s team for years contributing to efforts towards his release, and he has written the afterword for her latest book, In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love (2022). It’s a necessary and declarative offering comprised of interview transcripts and essays on themes surrounding abolition, the contradictions of Black feminisms, and, of course, love.

James expounds on the world-shifting love that transforms our reality and creates possibility in seemingly impossible conditions. Agape, the love of/from the divine that requires our sacrifice and commitment in a world of narcissism, disposability, and greed. We are called upon to sit with James in the contradictions of our current predicament and tarry. Both of us at home within the domain of the nonlinear, James encourages us to come together and reason, despite the chasms that breach. There are bridges to be built, and there are children to be fed. And somebody must worship the old gods. 

Ja’Tovia Gary: Your work creates this space for really expansive thinking that challenges the reader to move beyond where they may feel most comfortable. You’ve written how the “captive maternal” is an ungendered figure that provides labor in the form of sustained care, but that often the state has absorbed this labor and uses it to sustain itself. I was listening to the conversation with Kim Holder and the folks at Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Kim was talking about raising his daughter and having to reach out to Black women and how this is gendered labor that he didn’t want to necessarily erase. But in reality, we came over here ungendered. You and other thinkers like Hortense Spillers have asserted that the period of enslavement collapsed or erased gender categories for Black folks via labor, indexing, and the violence, etc. I think that’s something you are elucidating via the captive maternal, how gender and thus gendered labor is obscured for Black folks and how that colors our relationships to each other and to the state. 

Dr. Joy James: I’m wrestling with it. The question is, though: how much do we acknowledge and honor about what we’re doing which appears to be normative? It’s like, well, based on whoever raised you, you’ve inculcated or interiorized what you’re supposed to be doing. How do we understand our acceptance of ourselves and the rebel within? That’s what I think stirs the anxiety, that people want to applaud the anomaly of being a good parent or a good person but they don’t want to touch that rail that literally would electrify them, based on the persona they assume to be safe in this kind of democracy and state.

JG: I’m currently in Bahia, overlooking where the river meets the ocean. I am a practitioner of Lukumí¹, and I am what is called a daughter of two waters. Yemọja has my head, but Oshun is always right here whispering in my ear. She’s never too far away. And I have to acknowledge both. Whatever I do for Yemọja, I must also do for Oshun. So, here I am overlooking the river meeting the ocean, and I’m wondering what propelled you to consider Oshun’s flight. In the text you include the story of Oshun sacrificing herself—taking flight on a dangerous journey in order to bring the fresh waters back for creation. She embodies courageous and sacrificial love, love as a verb. So, I’m interested in your engagement with Oshun for the text.

JJ: Wow, nobody’s ever asked me that before. OK, this may take a minute, more than a minute, and it may sound a bit garbled, but I don’t do linear thinking, which you already know.

JG: Neither do I.

JJ: Well, the waters always flow, and they find currents, and the rains come. . . . After I got the doctorate, I walked away from letters because I was only trained in European philosophy, and the white male conservatives who gave me—they didn’t give it to me; I earned the degree. But I found their presentation of self as intellectuals within an empire and as owners, and I didn’t want to be owned. I wasn’t going to be property. 

Then I talked to my madrina² a lot about my hatred for academia and the feeling that I was captive, even though I said I wouldn’t be captured. So, I got this job and that job. She told me, “You can’t keep running. You have to stay.” I was fleeing for years. I probably started running when I was 7. I would run to tree houses, get a bunch of books, and just stay out there and hide till the sun went down and I had to come back in. Anyway, once Covid hit, people were bored, and they were like, “Hey, let’s just go talk to her.” Then this small press in London, Divided, which is run by white feminists, is like, “Do you have a book?” I said, “No, I don’t.” Then I said, “Oh, wait. We’ve been in conversation. Let’s transcribe these podcasts.”

Once they were all transcribed and I was looking at them, it wasn’t enough. Oshun had to come in to present the order of things in terms of sacrifice and care and also courage. She’s known for her beauty, but then she looks like a vulture by the time the radiation of the sun has gotten to her because she’s going into flight, to bring the waters back to humans and animal life and plant life—and she’s doing it solo. So, there is a beauty and courage that maybe we haven’t focused on because so much of the empire is about glamour and glitter. There was something about this willingness to become a mutation of beauty but still radiate it deeply.

It was just a fierce love to return the waters, and she did her job. There’s nothing more beautiful than that.

JG: She did, and it reminds me of a mother. How pregnancy and childbirth will disfigure the body, will change the body. Women lose hair and teeth, and your entire body changes. I’ve never been pregnant or given birth, but I’ve seen and heard a lot. A number of friends have recently given birth, and they have become completely different people. It’s really interesting to see who welcomes that change and who says, “Oh, yeah, these are my war marks, my scars for survival,” instead of, “Oh, these horrific stretch marks on my stomach.” They claim them: “This is how I got my baby. I’ve become someone else now.”

JJ: That is so beautiful and insightful. It’s the surface of things. It’s the appearance of things. We know we’re valued because we have beauty. . . . Whether or not they come out of your body or whether or not you adopt them, you will see the wrinkles, the gray hair. Just like your nervous system, I don’t want to say it’s under attack, but it is being taxed. To create newborns, political concepts, physical babies, emotional life, environmental sustainability, flowers—

JG: Creative work.

JJ: —creative work, be an artist. I like what you said: These are our warrior marks. OK, this is a stretch for some people. If you’ve never been to war, you’ve never lived because you don’t know how precious life is until you’re willing to shed some of it in order to encounter the deeper reality of living. There’s no way you skate through with no pain or loss. The decomposition is part of the composition of new life.

JG: Nobody makes it out alive.

JJ: No. But the cool thing is, while we’re transitioning, we’re shedding and leaving a legacy. We’re leaving something behind, like trace elements, whatever you want to call it, nutrients. People can see just the decay and say, “Oh my God, that’s ugly.” To be able to continue to create as an artist, as an intellect, as a lover under the conditions of war, I think that’s the highest level of functioning.

JG: It’s amazing that we’ve gotten here organically, because this is how I envision the work that I do, that I am leaving behind an heirloom or a survival guide/quilt. . . .

JJ: Grandmother’s quilt.

JG: They’re these abstractions that are heavily coded and we can make meaning from them right now, of course, because our conditions have not totally changed. However, really, and I’ve said this many times before, they’re for an audience that has not even been born yet. I’m leaving these things behind so that in 2076 someone can say, “Oh, wow. OK, so this is what they were dealing with,” and maybe they can draw some sort of parallel to whatever is happening in their reality right now, the conditions that they face right now, as much as I can draw a parallel from what Fred Hampton was talking about to what I’m experiencing now. 

It’s really a kind of roadmap or a record. It’s breadcrumbs in the forest. It’s like the hieroglyphic on the wall. It’s me attempting to code some sort of roadmap that helps us think and act our way out of these conditions. What Baldwin says about Malcolm, he corroborated our reality. He let us know that we weren’t crazy. He was saying the thing that we were thinking.

JJ: That is so spot on. When you were talking, I was thinking about reproductive organs. So, artists have reproductive organs, but they’re inside their bodies but also outside their bodies. You are producing new life. Again, whether or not they find it in two years or 20 or 200 . . . you really can’t control time. I don’t even know, some people would say it’s not what you think it is, time. It’s complicated. But the way in which we flow tells you that we’re constantly alive and we’re constantly signaling each other. When people are ready, they will find it. But the problem that I was saying, I think it’s a problem, the level of anxiety people have for clarity.

I never said Afro-pessimism was a perfect tag. I just said, “Oh, yeah, this makes sense, but now I’ve got to do some captive maternal stuff because then I don’t quite understand the concept unless I add X, Y, and Z.” So, the quilting—I’ll take this rag, that rag, there’s supposed to be rags, but at the end of it, your 80-year-old grandmother created art out of what was supposed to be garbage. It was never garbage. She simply saw what it was and then presented it to you so that you could see and that future generations could see and be comforted by it. Whether you put it on the wall or whether you put it on your bed and you just nestle in. This is how I know we’re alive. 

JG: What you’re describing is a Black feminist ethic, this idea of taking the scraps, taking the leftovers, the pot liquor, the bad ends of the pig, the torn curtain, the raggedy dress, and making something absolutely resplendent and nurturing or delicious, beautiful, and comforting.

JJ: Do you think that Black feminism has morphed more into a state presentation or high glamour or managerial efficiency, you know what I mean? Whatever Black feminism meant and was, it’s been so absorbed and rewarded . . . I will not say it’s performative, because I don’t believe it’s performative. I actually believe it has an ethic, but the ethics have been realigned so that it’s compatible with state feminism.

JG: I agree. It’s definitely something that I wrestle with. I feel like there’s been a declawing of it. I feel like there has been a glamorization of it. As an artist whose work is inspired by Black feminist thought, I’ve had to sit in some contradictions. Particularly when the work is commodified, you are then implicated. So, I have to include myself in this critique.

This doesn’t get talked about often because most people who are reviewing The Giverny Suite or The Giverny Document are not Black feminists, but in many ways that’s what these films are about at their core. You have this Black woman in this luxurious, bucolic, and historically resonant artistic space, Claude Monet’s garden in France, but she is wrestling with the discomfort of the garden. She is in fact affronted by it and the horrors within and everything that space represents—to the point where she begins to transgress against it. So, you have this image of the Negress, myself, in the garden juxtaposed with Diamond Reynolds, a Black woman living a waking nightmare of watching her partner be murdered by the state with her child present.

The question then becomes, what does the Negress in the garden, who has reached a certain level of upward mobility and access to luxury and power, what then does she owe those who are outside of the garden? How can we deal with this tension that comes about? Moten says, “Upward mobility is me getting closer and closer to the people who are trying to kill me.” So, even though I feel disrupted and threatened in the garden, my life does not necessarily have the same level of precarity as Diamond Reynolds. Even though when the rubber meets the road, that violence that she is experiencing could very well occur to me at any moment.

This false sense of safety has lulled us, I think, especially those who are “successful,” into a kind of declawed existence, I think that’s why I try to place myself in situations like this where there can be this generative tension, calling back to reality and to the table. I come from working-class Black people, folks who worked in factories processing chicken, preachers, farmers who raised hogs, cucumbers, potatoes, and tomatoes. Rural, working people. 

But what has been infused in me is this striving. You need to be more. We sent you to these good schools with these white folks, and we need you to be more. So, how does one reckon with all of that while understanding that I too am under siege? Even when I’m at the schools with these white folks, I’m under siege. Even when I’m at the dinner or the champagne opening, I am under siege. So, it’s a lot for me to . . . I’m trying to work through it, of course—artistically, spiritually.

JJ: It is really what you said about being in a garden in which there are predators. The beauty of it is just stunning, but there are these cuts, cuts to self-esteem, cuts to ego, cuts to aesthetic, cuts to . . .“Why is this person even at the table?” “Oh, we need a color to be at the . . .” It’s, “Oh, now we can have three. Then after DEI dies, we kill it. Then we only need to have one again or none.”

This is why I like Malcolm as an ancestor. I think about him and King and others. They could have all had a church or a mosque and made some real money and then just get applauded, like the mega-church or the mega-mosque. That would be their way of climbing the ladder.

JG: Easy.

JJ: They dismantled the ladder. For me, it’s something akin to John the Baptist, honey and locust, do your thing until they take your head. I don’t know, as a collective of people, the mass, if we have a desire for that. I don’t think that we would have the courage to do what we’re trying to do consistently unless we understand that the reality is not about accumulation. Our parents were told that if you accumulate, your kids would live longer. You won’t have to visit them in prison. So, for them, that was their insurance policy, if we just followed white elites. 

So, I think we have to rebirth ourselves into zones that we don’t want to be in. That, I think, is very difficult. 

JG: I want to talk about hope. Recently, maybe two years ago now, there was a very large gathering of Black women, artists, intellectuals, writers. It was in Europe. It was beautiful, but it was also fraught. I’m not here to drag anybody. I was happy to be invited. It was in 2022, so we were in the thick of the pandemic. I’ve been living in Texas for the last couple of years, and during the time of this trip, I have to say, I was really psychologically destabilized during this time. The pandemic did a number on me. Here I am at this space where there’s all of these Black women, many of whom are noted, famous, whether they be scholars or artists or whomever. It’s a great time. But there were also these moments of tension, maybe even danger. It was in fascist Italy, so we were being accosted often, told to be quiet on the street, at restaurants, at exhibits. Our volume and our presence was being policed . . .

JJ: It was too high for them.

JG: Yes. “You guys are too loud. There’s too many of you.” But also keeping it one hundred, just because we’re all Black doesn’t mean we’re all friends. Just because we’re all Black feminists, which is something you said in Architects of Abolition, I need to know where you lie on the political spectrum. The label “Black feminist” doesn’t mean that we’re all the same. What is your ideology? What is your relationship to precarity?

Anyway, long story short, I was presenting some of the work, which can sometimes be quite jarring and quite difficult because we’re dealing with state violence. Formally, it can be disruptive because there are a lot of staccato cuts, this kind of Soviet montage editing technique. So, I give this trigger warning after the fact. Then I say something to the effect of, “I don’t really believe in hope right now,” to a room of 700 Black women. And I remember looking out in the audience, and most people were doing this, like, a blank stare. Quiet as a church mouse. You could hear a pin drop. 

I said it because I was like, I’m in this space psychologically where things are very difficult. Mass death is all around us. I’m trying to pull myself out of a depressive hole. Usually I’m really good at performing and talking about my work, but at this moment, because there were so many Black women there, I felt like I could unmask. And I was wrong. I couldn’t. At that moment, I felt like I had said the wrong thing and that I was misrepresenting my work. 

I was met with a smattering of applause, but afterwards there were young people there from Spelman and from other colleges. They came up to me. Some of these folks, they understood what I was getting at. They felt it. Maybe it was convoluted to the established folks. It felt maybe a little unguarded and unpolished to the people who were used to my recitations and performance and presentations. But these young people were like, “No, I understand what you’re saying.” They understood hope as a disciplining force that is often used against us, this idea that you must keep this positivity, you must make sure that you hold out hope. This wrestling with despair. 

It felt like no one in that instance was willing to wrestle with me in my despair. It felt like I was just kind of hanging out to dry by myself. I expected something different. But I know now, you know what I’m saying, I feel like I know now that, just because we’re all “Black feminists,” that sometimes you have to guard yourself even in spaces deemed “safe.” We don’t all have the same ends. We don’t all have the same goals.

JJ: Also, I would say we don’t all have the same capacity for dealing with realism. The people who feel safe are the people who want to feel that way. It doesn’t even mean that they actually are. I think this goes back to the DEI stuff. So, you’re going to be overconfident and deeply invested in a hopefulness that does not exist unless empire tells you, “OK, you can have hope right now.”

See, the thing is, we can’t deliver on hope. It’s like capitalism/imperialism tells you how much, when, what corner to stand at, or what line to be in to get your modicum of it. But what we’re supposed to present is a trust or a fidelity in the structure, which clearly has brutalized people across the globe. I want to have fidelity, and it’s not to hope. It’s a fidelity to love and struggle. If I’m hopeful about anything, it’s clearly the artists, the activists, the organizers, the risk takers, the rebels—we will do what we’re supposed to do. In that case, we’re actually engaged in a struggle. We’re not narrating it or wearing it as another piece of jewelry or another diploma on the wall.

JG: Or interpreting it for power. 

JJ: I think all of our journeys are going to be painful. I think there’s no way around it. But they’re not going to end with us being depleted. Because in some way, just to start the journey, we have been rewarded. Hope is struggle. It is love. It is resistance. If those become synonyms for hope, then believe me, I’m hopeful.

JG: Yeah, wow. I love the redefinition of hope, that those who are not struggling have no right to define what hope is for the masses. 

JJ: Your beauty is quite striking and clear, and you have clarity of thought and you have devotion. That makes me hopeful. I am so glad I met you.

JG: Thank you so much. You’re doing really important work. And I’m just grateful. 

JJ: Thank you.