On silence

Sun ablaze. The El train whips by overhead, roaring like a car window opened on a highway. Sahfeeah is yelling her story at me and Basir is challenging Kwaku to a rematch in connect-four. One time me and my cousin She says. We were kids. We got on one of those scooters treading down hill. So Fast. So dumb. No brakes. 

We pull up covered in scratches, black and blur, and my grandma looks at us, Sahfeeah looks at me, and mocks if we were wrong in the head. We only had no choice. She reasons. 

Either crash, scream, or Jump. Those 

were our only options. 

I should constantly remind myself that the real leap [the jump] consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself, writes Fanon. Is that what you did?

I asked Jazarett that day what she thought of restorative justice, a prompt already held within a provisional culture of test, as in something experimental, referential, and metallic. Moments before, she heard me ask Basir the same thing to which he sucked his teeth. You know it's about who we are, you know, it's about something. A patch of sweat begins to blossom in his blue shirt. 

Looking away and into some architectural corner, the block where someone is probably screaming right now and you have no idea if it's for joy or Aunt Hestor, she feigns presence. Jazarett attempts to obliterate “the last word” by fugitive evasion itself. She always does this. But pressed enough and eventually they’ll come up with an answer. At the moment I wasn't thinking; I was so caught up in the presence of the non-profit, the imperative that somehow to know is the only way that work generates value and fetish and further if it can be tested and brought forth through evidence, that is what we call impact. I don't really know, she finally surrenders, can you come back to me on that one. Micheal Jackons buzzes through the stereo. Remember the time. How do you remember time? 

Something about Juneteenth did not yet feel like Juneteenth because that might exactly be the point. How does a nation learn to create a culture in response to a prompt as opposed to the fitting of a prompt to a given culture. We asked for this. And yet it's still awkward. My neighbor went to the ocean, I'm certain, surrounded by whites. The water was luminous, she admits. So were we. 

The music was critical and far too fucking loud. Our booth at the event had a styrofoam banner tattooed with our logo on it and no real strength to attract the community. I was tired. There was also nothing to prove. The boys at this point had all perched themselves on the wooden fence that traced the ghost outline of what used to probably be a building but was now an untended patch of city grass; nature might just call it a forest. Over the music, which was again I cannot stress enough, far too loud, I am struggling to read Barracoons. The text is pushing me away or deeper into the loudness of the event. I can't hold on. Either crash, scream, or Jump. I think to myself. 

Quartered off to the side, a group of the elder men remained fraternizing. This felt like patriarchy to the extent that it looked like it. They seemed like a council of kings. If I brought biblical language here, it would probably be too racist and anthropological, but there was very much a baby boy running around with them, being fed fresh fruit by his white mother. A summer peach, opening up its electric yellow flesh to the grey summer atmosphere. We had food that day, and I know everyone eats, but what about those things that I don't know. Can you come back to me on that one? 

It's about the atmosphere I guess. I like the feeling of it, She offers. Restorative Justice has an affect to it, I quickly note. 

Da Silva traces the rise of a rational thinking subject to the decline of God as a moral authority to the continental tradition. The vacuum left by the civilizational function once served by piety to early political economies called forth a need for the metaphysics of the thinking individual. Man. Like those early enlightenment thinkers, it seems we have messed up real good, asking everyone to be so rational. Because that which falls prey to Reason by becoming its object has no place in the realm of Freedom. Da silva writes. I shouldn’t have asked the question. 

If what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence [Wittgenstein], then discourse is the translation of that which was once said through that silence. 

Is silence possible when the train breaks conversation, music drowns rationality, all this bloody noise making it hard to keep a white shirt clean? Shut up, I finally tell myself. Shut up and jump.