You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
Heterotopias, place that opens behind the surface, holds an over-there-ness, represent a “reservoir of imagination” (MF). Within the fold. A garden as a microcosmic world build out of the juxtaposition or arrangement of elements. Place with temporal shifts and/or fragments. A cruise ship. An airport.
L’imaginaire de mon lieu est relié à la réalité imaginable des lieux du monde, et tout inversement. L’archipel est cette réalité source, non pas unique, d’où sont sécrétés ces imaginaires : le schème de l’appartenance et de la relation, en même temps.
Glissant, Édouard, Philosophie de la Relation, Paris, Gallimard, 2009.
“the imaginary of my place is related to the imaginable reality in all places …”
Releted(?) : heterotopias–“In Of Other Spaces Foucault coined the term “heterotopias” to signify “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture” which “are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” For Foucault, heterotopic spaces were first of all spaces of crisis, or transformative spaces …”
January 19, 2023, Joey Bada$$ covers Yasiin Bey’s ‘UMI Says.’
Umi said shine your light on the world
Shine your light for the world to see
[…]
I want black people to be free, to be free, to be free
All my people to be free, to be free, to be free
All black people to be free, to be free, to be free
Reach passed the “imposed conditions of apartness” (IF)
Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany
10 February 2023 – 15 October 2023
Negations of accumulation manifested in theft, fugitivity, praise meetings, and plots.[53] Stealing the crops, eating the livestock, and refusing to work diminished the output of the plantation.[54] The formation of fugitive communities emptied the plantation of its value.[55] Sharing information evaded supervisory control.[56] Coordinated poisonings of masters and overseers instilled fear of the slave population.[57] Arson destroyed sugar mills, masters’ houses, and entire fields, inflicting property damage and halting production.[58] These black negations are unwritten losses. They are neither failed nor successful. Their impact is incalculable. They operate beyond the rubrics of value and production. Rather they were grounded in “the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality” of blackness.[59]
Cameron Rowland: Amt 45 i
Maxwell Graham / Essex Street. Image via C&.
Aubade: East
Harlem, a.m.
Today’s the day, I can taste it.
Got my gray sweats pouting in a breeze
so soft, I feel like I’m still wrapped for sleeping
as I head uptown in my undercover power-suit,
bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.
This morning there ain’t nothing I can’t do.
This is my territory, I know all of it—
ten long blocks flanked by mighty water.
Walking any Avenue is like riding
a cosmic surfboard on the biggest wave
of the goddam century, the East River
twerking her bedazzled behind
while sky spills coin like a luck-crazed
Vegas granny flush at the slots. Today
I’m gonna make out like a bandit myself:
hook up with my buds to drop
a few shots on the courts, ogle the ladies,
then play the rest of the day
as it comes see where it goes
feeling good
feeling good
somewhere over the Hudson
the sun heading home
Rita Dove, via The Georgia Review, Spring 2016 and Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems.
““Aubade East,” is set in Harlem, N.Y. The cocky speaker, out for a walk, squints into the “bitch sunlight fingering the spaced-out tenements.” This is a hat-tip to Toni Morrison, who famously — famously in my house, anyway — wrote in “Sula,” “The sun was already rising like a hot white bitch.”” Dwight Garner, Houston Chronicle.
“… one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a [enchanted] lever, a means of inspiring fear” (JB)
