3. Slipstream Shuffle

Squanto and the Dance-Off

“Refusal is a symptom, a practice, a possibility for doing things differently, for thinking beyond the recognition paradigm that is the agreed-upon ‘antidote’ for rendering justice in deeply unequal scenes of articulation.”1 Jakes did not seek himself in Roy’s gaze. He blurred Roy’s gaze. And then directed it into crisp focus. Certainly he refused the unequal lock of Roy’s cowardice and of Roy’s threat. He refused fear of the imminent and inevitable, guaranteed in the coming of the behemoth storm and life in the school–prison trust. And he refused Roy’s authority over those. Powerfully, he refused Roy’s conquest assumption that he alone could shape truth and feeling, knowledge and its denial. That he could determine the terms of the debate,2 or that there would even be a debate.

Jakes made Roy a pitiful, weak, and frightened pilgrim, a foolish audience, and a total outsider. Counting coup on Roy, Jakes turned Roy’s gaze back on himself. Roy was the subject of his own derision, a subject that withered against the Cupid Shuffle. He did not ask Roy to recognize him, or Squanto, or Indigenous life. “An enemy has to be defeated in battle, but an adversary’s different. You must outwit an adversary. So you do have to know them very well.”3

In the Cupid Shuffle, the pilgrims and plimoth plantation cower, if even for a moment. Jakes creates community—of joy, expression, knowledge—and banishes Roy from it. He recognizes himself, and Squanto, Game, and the other young men, and refuses Roy, an agent of the carceral conquest state.

But what exactly or how exactly did Jakes do what he did? What does refusal feel like? We start with joy, because the mockery was at its apex a hilarious, creative celebration deliberately crafted for collective freedom that, in prison, is insurgently eruptive in character. It was a particularly dazzling mockery, because in it Jakes marshaled a caricature lodged deep in the colonial psyche, anticipating and recalling the worldmaking ideology of the school–prison trust.

“The indigenous inhabitants of North America,” states Louis Owens, “can stand anywhere on the continent and look in every direction at home usurped and colonized by strangers who, from the very beginning, laid claim not merely to the land and resources but to the very definition of natives.”4 As Jakes stands in a prison classroom and looks into the face of the teacherman, who, with Linda and myriad schooling others, lays claim to the very definition of Natives, he mocks Roy with the fatuousness of his own racism, his own fear, his own threat. He illuminates the banalities conquest agents inhabit. He frightens Roy in the full freedom of his comic joy and his command of us, who laughed and sobbed—then and now—in part by calling on ancestors, merging the real and the white imagination, and so stealing back what Roy thought he knew as a thief by trade and by tradition. Jakes’ refusal was a hurricane of force, irony, and humor.

In some instances, to command the attention of those in power, to resist, refuse, or convey, a Native person might step into the mask and enact the Indian constructed by america.5 Might pose as the fake, the Edward Curtis Indian. In this instance, Jakes interweaves the fake with the real, dancing an act of refusal that is both a “social mirror,” as artist Gregg Deal said to describe his own performance piece The Last American Indian on Earth,6 and a free expression.

Multiplicities

Jakes was also refusing-as-creating something else entirely. Everyone thought Jakes was Black. He was Black. And he was Native. And everyone thought so. At least, the young men did. He was Native and he was Black. And, a “lilbitta some kinda white somewhere in me.” That’s all nothing new or surprising or unusual. But there was a rupturing dimension to what he said. He was not seeking recognition from anyone and yet from many, but on self-determined terms: “Why I gotta pick? Like, why do these fucki—ooh, oops, sorry! Why everybody think like you Black with a Indian granny or you Indian and your people got up with some slaves or sup’m. Like, what is you, really?” And his really was multiple and synergistic. He described himself as recognizably physically and aesthetically “Indian”7 and, without contradiction, as similarly Black. He identified with communities, cultural practices, politics, ancestries.

“‘Race’ is not something certain bodies possess,” writes Deborah Thomas.

Race, here, is not an “elective identity marker” but a historical, structured, and relational experience. This experience, of course, is grounded in local landscapes of power and aspiration, themselves structured by the specific colonial histories that imbue these landscapes with significance.8

Our role here isn’t to interpret identity—to say what Jakes is or what anyone is, a condition some think is the purview of a nation, others the purview of a cultural community, yet others the dominion of science and biology, and still others the domain of our relations with a divinity or our ancestors.9 And it is not ours to say what and who is Indigenous and not—that would be to take up Trust logics. We can identify what we understand as some of the limits: race and property no more make or negate Indigeneity than do firstness and diaspora. Removals, migrations, and movements—forced and chosen and in between—should not serve to vacate people of their relationships to place.10 And as we’ve said before, ways of relationships to place, to its life, are central to our thinking: “what the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms.”11 But this is also not a rubric. To be clear, we’re not offering Venn diagrams of race and Indigeneity or consenting to any new, progressive colonial mathematics of being. Rather, here we consider the broadly complex vectors of refusal, relation, and self-determination. Moreover, we are considering what Jakes’ particular praxis reveals about possibility in the context of Trust. In the Cupid Shuffle appears an invocation that says Indigenous does not have to be boundaried and also does not have to be all things and so nothing. Indigenous refuses conquest colonization and refuses historic purity forged through historic and historical lies.

Jakes, Black Squanto—not simply phenotypically, archivally Black but culturally, actively, politically, historically, presently Black—commands consideration and authors new histories. Jakes’ identification is anti-imperial practice. In it, Jakes invokes Squanto in name and Fanon in practice: “what Fanon alerts us to is how the act of disciplining of thought (the process of habitually delimiting what we know about blackness according to colonial perimeters) stabilizes race and perpetuates anti-blackness.”12 And the process of habitually delimiting what we know about Indigeneity through conquest parameters achieves anti-Indigeneity. And those two are interknit through multiple threads, some of which are the same thread.

Those disciplined thought perimeters and parameters regularly iterate as deterministic control—over myths of purity and their instantiating materialities. Jakes’ self-determined habitation of identity, his wholeness-as-plurality, is an affront to that puritanical and ethnonationalist control. Across his refusals, he defies fragmented, fractionalized notions of race and descent, of what it means to be a person and so free.

What is you really? is the anemic lifeblood of trusteeship, conquest life-support nursed along by coerced and collusive transfusions: quantums and one-drops and enrollments and recognitions13 and missing and murder. Purity and its antitheses—dilution, fractionalization, contamination—are imperial fictions that have long been embedded in the legal structures of the United States and the concomitant ideas of peoples. Less than whole. Reduced to a hand. Dismembered. These disciplining forces of thought pump the very heart of Trust and are parts of its desperate invention. They write the DNA of unfreedom. But dilutions and fractions are diasporic conditions, and diaspora is not simply a condition of having been scattered but rather one of possibility, generativity, invention, and freedom.14

Lifeblood—tainted, fractional—is in fact water, and whole. “Water is about the movement and form of when and how and with whom we know, and not merely what we claim or make claims on.”15 Stalked by the claim-staking interrogative What is you really? Jakes undresses the entrapping, regulatory performativity of it all, laying bare a possibility through active radical refusal: joy. In this refusal, Jakes unfurls frail plantation cartographies that link Plimoth to the Mississippi Delta to the hills of Rome, thanksgivings to slave codes to papal bulls, 1492 to 1619 to 1865 to 1924 to 1954, and Squanto to Luther Standing Bear to Jakes to the Sabines.

The law, race, progressive conquest time, rape, numbers, and the plantation and reservation draw us back to our apogee questions of what it means to be self-determined, to be human, in the school–prison trust. What it means to consider refusal, humor, music, dance, laughter—the affective dimensions of experience. We have suggested that self-determination is an enactment of sovereignty, and perhaps an umbrella for what sovereignty feels like. Jakes’ self-determination here is a convergence and a disruption of the determined alignment of individuals, communities, nations, and race. He mobilizes identity not as a coagulated claim to disciplined purities but rather as a relational practice of difference.

As Stuart Hall writes, identity occurs in discursive relationship—through an always-ongoing, uneven process of identification—is never whole, and is unsettled in character:

Identities are never unified and . . . increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions. . . . We need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites. . . . Moreover, they emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical, naturally constituted unity. . . . Above all . . . identities are constructed through, not outside, difference.16

Complex processes of identification17 and disidentification18 have offered us dynamic anticolonial understandings and possibilities,19 particularly as we think about the historical and institutional sites of the school–prison trust. At the crux of these processes is imperialism.

In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said writes, “New alignments made across borders, types, nations and essences . . . now provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism.”20 We take seriously the identity-based disciplining of thought that entrenches conquest power and stalls insurgent freedom. As Said writes, identity was imperialism’s “worst and most paradoxical gift.”21

Its worst and most paradoxical gift is also, instructively, one of imperialism’s vulnerabilities. In Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, Robinson connects imperialism’s identity forces to racial regime decay:

With respect to the social terrain, the degeneration of racial regimes occurs with some frequency for two reasons. First, apparent difference in identity is an attempt to mask shared identities. . . . A second source of regime entropy ensues from the fact that because the regimes are cultural artifices, which catalogue only fragments of the real, they inevitably generate fugitive, unaccounted-for elements of reality.22

As he wrote in Black Movements, it was indeed the grand lie of white racial solidarity (a solidarity imagined to trump class and all other powered dimensions of societal life but which shatters at the moment it encounters those dimensions), and ongoing white collusion with it, that masked shared identities around other domains of human life.23

This grand lie is as evident in the continuous making of the school–prison trust as anywhere, and it is as tied in that Trust context to the imperialist union of identity and nation expressed in national identity as necessary for upholding supremacist destinies. In his invocations and performances of identity as dis/identification, we understand Jakes’ joyful, angry, incisive refusals as processes of anti-imperialism, movements against the identity–nation–destiny circuitry of the governing ideas of Trust. To be self-determining, to shrug off the colonial naming mechanisms (via contamination or dilution or fractionation), to counter imperialist disciplining through identity and nation, is to point to free futures.

Confiscated Time, and One Futurity

“When we ask ourselves whether it’s inhumane to inflict a certain technology on someone, we have to make sure it’s not just the unfamiliarity that spooks us.” Thus is framed the philosophical question that guides one devastating experiment in carcerality.25

Western philosophical thought can ask, without being instantaneously disintegrated by the horrifically impossible contradiction of moral atoms colliding, if inflicting something on someone can be understood as humane (to the inflictor, we assume). There’s this received convention in critical circles that power doesn’t get decided around a table in smoky, windowless rooms. But actually that’s sometimes precisely how it gets decided. Often in the case of western philosophical thought, it is as if its philosophers sit at their pleasant, liberal, genocidal dinner table swirling Bordeaux, discerning types of humans and their therefore relative experience of humanity in the same breath as shoes or vacations or vapid politics or whatever it is they discuss.

At one such table, the hors d’oeuvres have been served and “a team of scholars [is] focused upon the ways futuristic technologies might transform punishment”—specifically, how they might make it “worse.”26 How delightful. Along with the carpaccio. The delicious rawness of it all.

And the specific topic of their deliberative attention? Time. It seems that drug or computer intercession on the mind could modify the imprisoned person’s experience of time, converting hours into years, or a millennium. This is no hyperbole on our part. In an interview, philosopher Roache explained,

If the speed-up were a factor of a million, a millennium of thinking would be accomplished in eight and a half hours. . . . Uploading the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time.27

There is utility here, they might imagine, joyriding one particular western philosophical tradition. But it alone does not answer nagging ethical considerations, particularly in the empire progenitor context, where this question is being taken up (and funded).

Time, its making and unmaking, its assignation of beginnings, its geometric flattening into lines, has always been an implement of conquest. This philosophers’ torture party reveals ways in which western conquest is innate to liberal western thought and inimical to any freedom. The confiscation of human time as a sustained act of conquest is warcraft. It works in cosmic and intimate scales to pillage a future.

This future-plunder is of the most barbaric sort. The proposition is simple, and in it the zenith and nadir of conquest terror meet. By speeding up time, these philosophers, these lovers of pure form, are suggesting removing the possibility for relationality. They are in fact describing a kind of solitary confinement previously unimagined—one that guts what it means to be human with a jagged paring knife. Prisons, for all their horror, are still places where people form and forge reciprocal, refusal relationships, where disciplining of thought—for all its architectural, psychological, panoptical industriousness—is still very much contested, resisted, negotiated. Where—for all the efforts at spirit murder28 and its agnates—human beings can still dream self-determinedly. What these thought conquerors suggest is to kill the dream in him and leave a placeless, relationless carcass with only a mind to observe that total terror.

“And a man without dreams is just a meaty machine with a broken gauge.”29

Resonant Futurities

Langston Hughes understands that the world is marked on its own terms, by earth, life, and water:

Conquest cartographers marked the world on parchment—most often the untreated skins of animals ransacked for the properties of their carcasses, properties of susceptibility to the recording of plunder and all its claims. As they marked the former home of the creature with their most permanent ink, they made heaviest the lines that were meant to reveal the shape of land. Almost as if natural and eternal borders encased place.

But we know that heavy line to be, in actuality, a place among the most volatile, most pliable, most definitively impermanent.38 Where the shore and the ocean meet is abundantly, exuberantly relational. No two tides mark the same shadow as they recede. No sand or pebble stays locked in place. No droplets of water crash together or swirl in the same way twice. Yet an entire teeming world lives there—between low and high tide; between storm and calm; ice and currents—reminding us that bounded permanence, too, is a controlling invention of conquest.

There are other futures, unbounded. The future is an idea/idea is the future. In “Some Like Indians Endure,” Paula Gunn Allen writes,

The idea is a resonant link. We’ve watched the idea of memory as self-determined, relationally refusing. We’ve seen the idea of time as partner and slipstream. We’ve heard the idea of names and watched their puff emerge as powerful actors. The idea is a willing willful movement from and toward unpredictable and yet practiced possibility—of worlds outside conquest, of dimensions unimaginable in empire cartographies and calendars, of names we’ll remember when we hear them for the first time—where we will find out what is there, and where we know one thing for certain: abiding, deep connection will be our guide.

Life Is Precious

Life is precious40 not because or when it’s exceptional—exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. Most of us most of the time are just moving through or being in the simple, mundane of our hours and days. Sometimes we’re funny, and sometimes we’re jerks, and sometimes for a minute we’re pretty insightful.

In this hour of this day, Desmond was working blandly on a multiple-choice handout. He was a serious, though not terribly thoughtful, young person. I often wondered if he was just fundamentally tired. At any rate, he had asked me to help him out, even though there was nothing to help with. He was smart. This was inane busy work. So I sat with him on the long side of the work table to keep him company, and we both pretended I was helping.

Across the table, Jakes drew insect-headed, semi-human-bodied anime-like figures on his handout. They jumped around the questions, stretched into the margins, dallied between choices. I strained my eyes to read their speech bubbles—upside down and in dull, prison-issued number 2 pencil.

The time moved on this way, Desmond and I pretending our roles, Jakes lost in another universe, me glancing over regularly in admiration and curiosity. There was no particular beginning or end. Or middle.

But there were moments, of all sorts. This one was Jakes and our teeth.

Looking at a particularly odd multiple-choice question on Desmond’s handout, I apparently enlisted my facial expression in my thinking. Occasionally in life, I squinch up my brow, press my tongue against the back of my top teeth, and mutter something to the effect of “huh.” In this expression, my front two teeth show in full.

“Hey!” Jakes must have taken a pause from his worksheet bugworld-making and seen me. “Hey! Sabina!”

“Yeah?” I looked up. He was pointing up at his front teeth.

“Check it out. See? We got the same cracked tooth.” He pressed his pointer finger against the small cutout in his upper right tooth.

I prefer “chipped” to “cracked,” I thought, but went along with it. “I was wondering if you were gonna notice that,” I smiled.

“Dude,” Jakes whisper-yelled to Desmond as the teacher glanced over in a halfhearted threat. “Dude, check it out. We got matching tooth cracks.”

Desmond looked at the two of us, revealing our chipped teeth for him. He nodded. “Yeah, man.”

“How you get yours?” Jakes asked, gesturing at my face with his chin. Avoiding the teacher’s interest, Desmond pointed to something on his handout, and I looked down.

“Beat the crap out of someone,” I said, nonchalant, not looking up. It was a little bit smart-ass teasing, a little bit making fun of myself. (I think, actually, I got it opening a lid to something. Unexciting and probably embarrassing, if I thought too much about it.)

“What about you?” I followed casually.

“Actually beat the crap out of someone.” I could hear the priceless satisfaction in his deft, quick retort.

“Well, yours is pretty,” I said to Jakes, looking up.

“Yeah?” Suddenly he was sweetness and yearning.

“Yeah,” I confirmed.

“Yeah, man,” said Desmond.

Desmond and I returned to pretending. Jakes went back to his other-universe doodles. His multiple-choice, slipstream handout a portal to a teeming world of insect-humans, with a cracked-tooth leader named Jakes.