On Beauty and Aliveness

Jennifer C. Nash

Review of Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being by Kevin Quashie. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

Scholars have long danced around the spiritual dimensions of black feminist theory, even as calls to spirit and the sacred have pervaded black feminist thought. M. Jacqui Alexander, for example, argues that “It is a paradox that a feminism that has insisted on a politics of a historicized self has rendered that self so secularized, that it has paid very little attention to the ways in which spiritual labor and spiritual knowing is primarily a project of self-knowing and transformation that constantly invokes community simply because it requires it.”1 Audre Lorde famously calls us to think about the erotic as existing on a “spiritual plane,” and reminds us that “we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect.”2 And Ntozake Shange’s choreo-poem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide concludes with its characters chanting “I found god in myself and I loved her. I loved her fiercely.”3

Kevin Quashie’s Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being offers both a careful attention to and performance of black feminism’s spiritual attunements. For Quashie, aliveness is “an ethical habitat” that asserts that “what we owe is to ourselves—love and generosity, the will and willingness to be better in our being” (148). It is this insistence on tenderness, relationality, and an “ethical orientation in a world that is not ethically oriented” that constitutes Quashie’s articulation of a black feminist spiritual praxis that he might simply call oneness (154). Quashie’s project ensures that spirituality, spirit, and the sacred can no longer be circumvented in conversations about the black feminist theoretical archive. Instead, his work insists that a commitment to black aliveness requires writing with an attachment to poetry, vulnerability, sensuality, and slowness.

Black Aliveness is an important intervention in a conversation that has come to dominate black studies in recent years, under a variety of different names: the question of the human, black ontology, the (im)possibility of black subjectivity, and afropessimism. In the midst of a moment, it is always hard to truly document the significance of it. But I would argue that the conversations unfolding in afropessimism have fundamentally altered the theoretical, political, and even quotidian life of black studies, so much so that one’s attachment to (or detachment from) afropessimism have often come to define a scholar’s investments. Quashie’s book offers a loving response to and reorientation of a field that has come to read blackness as synonymous with death, and antiblackness as constitutive of black life. He writes, “My difference from black pessimism might be in my attempt to displace antiblackness from the center of my thinking. That is, though I don’t deny the terribleness of the world we live in, nor its antiblack perpetuity, I am interested in conceptualizing an aesthetic imaginary founded on black worldness” (9). While Quashie never seeks to “deny” what he terms “antiblack perpetuity,” he attends to it differently than scholars who work in the tradition of afropessimism: he tracks black worlds, worlding, and worldmaking. He lingers in imagination and aesthetics as evidence of a kind of vitality, rich interiority, and spiritual life that he suggests afropessimism ignores. His critical response to a moment that has pulled the field of black studies toward theorizing death, loss, and trauma is to urge “caution” about the “declarative assertion of nonbeing and its slippery poetics” (9).

Part of his engagement with afropessimism is his instance on the term “aliveness” as opposed to black life or living. For Quashie, black aliveness is an invitation to think not just about black life but about black worlding, about black being “as it is, in its beingness, in its terribleness and wonder and particularity” (5). As he notes, “I am interested in conceptualizing an aesthetic imaginary founded on black worldness. Death, nonbeing, the ‘ontological terror’ aptly named by theorist Calvin L. Warren—these are conditions of black being, but they are not total in my appreciation of aliveness” (9). Quashie then resists what he calls the “specific register of black pessimism’s declaration of totality” (9) and replaces it with an investment in the heterogeneous and wildly creative “black world,” one which he aligns with Saidiya Hartman’s conception of the wayward, with the black feminist poetic archive he mines, with the invitation to think, dream, and imagine myriad forms of black relationality. As he insists the book is “a process, not an answer: not a recipe or how to be, certainly not a chastisement to any of us, but a study, a determination to try to think about the being of one’s being” (141). Perhaps it is Quashie’s embrace of uncertainty, of “process” rather than declaration, that constitutes his most profound challenge to the logics of afropessimism.

Quashie’s exploration begins by asking “What would it mean to consider black aliveness, especially given how readily—and literally—blackness is indexed to death?” (1). As Quashie insists, simply posing this provocation is an act of black love and tenderness. He writes, “It is also a love letter to myself, made as if in a black world where the capacities of being can be taken for granted. Indeed ‘imagine a black world is a love gesture that says to the one: Be as you are. You will become and you will undo. As you are, you are and are worthy—inhabit that and unfurl in and into the world” (147). The rest of the book unfolds as a consideration of “black aliveness” through a provocation that is central to the book’s argument and spiritual epistemology: “imagine a black world” (1). As Quashie reminds us, a black world is one where “black being is capacious and right—not-more-right-than, just right-as-is” (10), one that is “full of ways to breathe” (11), and one where “what we expect and get from black people is beingness” (10). Even as Quashie offers the term “black world” in the singular, the book is always attentive to the myriad imaginings of a black world, and Quashie emphasizes that a “black world” “names an aesthetic imaginary that encompasses heterogeneity” (11). What imagining a black world does is to “postpones the logics of address, dominance, and misrecognition—the terms of an antiblack world—that interfere with beholding both black aliveness and a black ethic of relation” (13). The book unfolds as a rigorous engagement with creative work that has taken up this imaginative labor, and thus the book is fundamentally concerned with black worldmaking as an aesthetic activity, one that is at its most visible in the creative work of black women cultural producers, particularly Lucille Clifton and Toni Morrison who Quashie treats as worldmakers and world-imaginers par excellence. As in Quashie’s earlier book, it is black women’s creative work that are primary archives, black women who are most imaginative in their capacity to envision and make black worlds. In both books, it remains an open question what it is about black women’s creative production—and about black female subjectivity—that sparks particular forms of worlding and imagination.

Quashie’s mode of analysis is close reading, and he is particularly interested in sitting with how black women writers deploy pronouns (“one,” “we,” “I”) and how these pronouns index black women writers’ thinking about personhood and relationality. For Quashie, it is this archive’s commitment to relationality alongside “oneness” that marks black aliveness. Quashie reminds us, “A black world is of relation, and relation unsettles rather than affirms identity—relation invites one into the world of becoming. Racism and antiblackness make essential that we have to figure out being through the language of community, but the oneness of relation is also our right. We need both; we need the worldmaking of oneness too. Sigh” (142). And it is here that Quashie deepens his conception of “oneness”—one which he began to articulate in his earlier book Sovereignty of Quiet—as the “name for the praxis of beholding one’s self” (32). If Quashie’s earlier work attended to the quiet, wild space of black interiority—pulsing with life and always unknowable, fugitive, and refusing to make itself fully apparent—Black Aliveness continues that work by treating quiet and oneness as signs of life and living.

As readers of Quashie’s second book Sovereignty of Quiet well know, Quashie is a lyrical, poetic writer, one who can write a sentence like “This is a story of us—there are and could be many stories, and this is just one, a story of aliveness rather than of life, since I am determined to avoid the trouble that comes in trying to represent life’s unrepresentability” (14). The book’s very title insists that poetics is part of black being, and/or that black being is in and of itself a kind of poetry. The form of his writing, the time of it (its slowness and deliberation, its non-linearity, its willingness to slip into language that is sensual) is, indeed, part of the argument of the book. For Quashie, black aliveness is marked by what Audre Lorde called eroticism, by deep forms of attention, connection, and vulnerability. At the same time, while Quashie wants to trace the pulse of black life and its possibility, he does not want to prescribe what black aliveness is or can be. Instead, the book pulses with the charge of uncertainty in Quashie’s insistence on black aliveness as heterogeneous, varied, and multiple. As he tells readers, “If this book is anything, it is a process, not an answer” (141). Indeed, Quashie suggests that uncertainty might be both a hallmark of black aliveness and of black women’s creative work, an ethic worth our attention.

Finally, Quashie audibly sighs a lot in this book. He writes the word “sigh.” As in: “Sigh: I am trying to read Baraka’s poem through the surrender and magic of its conclusion” (17) or “Sigh: What I want is the ethos of a world like the one Hartman reveals” (41). At first, I understood these “sighs” as a commitment to slowness, to asking readers to slow the pace at which we move through scholarly prose, with an attention to argument, intervention, and method. But I also understand it as the insertion of Quashie’s breath into the text. Whether the sigh is from tiredness or relief, tenderness or love, exhilaration or ecstasy, I cannot be sure. But I am certain that its presence in the text puts the reader into conversation with Quashie’s breath in a way that seems foundational to the ethic of his text.

Jennifer C. Nash is Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of The Black Body in Ecstasy, Black Feminism Reimagined, and Birthing Black Mothers, all on Duke University Press.