On Apocalypse

TW: Sexual Assault, Religious Domination, Settler Colonial Violence

“The music is a riotous solemnity, a terrible beauty. It hurts so much that we have to celebrate.”—Fred Moten, Black and Blur: Consent not to be a Single Being

“This is a story within a story—so slippery at the edges that one wonders when and where it started and whether it will ever end.”—Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

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Let’s begin this way:

The world, or a version of it, ended in the winter of my 21st year. I say a version, to signal something here about time and (authorial) perspective.

This is my way of inviting you to sit with me. A way of saying: “I am telling you this story, this way, for a reason.” Both to show you something, and to hide something away.  

I need to start this story here, at the end of the world, for many reasons I can’t (& won’t) explain. If we are to be bound by time, this story is ten years old today. In a decade, it has learned to tell itself. Its lungs are fleshy. It has leaden bones. It has a face, and a spine and a name. In ten years, this story has grown many-voiced, written as it was, in many voices. (I’m thinking here, of CAConrad’s “hum of seeds”).

It’s tricky writing a book about trauma, hey. Authorship offers many-a shiny, illusory fruit. My favourite (the juiciest), is the illusion of control. Narrative manipulation is deliciously godlike.

I’ve come to learn something about the end of the world, though.

I know now, that apocalyptic, world-ending violence is constant and cyclical. This does not make it inevitable. It is measured and handed out along rigid classed, raced, and gendered lines. It is felt keenly and particularly by minds and bodies (or bodyminds, following sweetlove J. Logan Smilges) visited by and living with Madness and disability. In the last three years, I’ve learned that when the end of a world visits you, (& its attendant echoes) you cannot leave your body behind.  

This is a re-remembering that I encounter again & again in the work of trans poets like Kopano Maroga, jzl jmz, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Kemi Alabi, KB Brookins, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Kai Cheng Thom, Akwaeke Emezi, and and and…

Those of us scribbling ourselves in the margins, (and the margins of the margins) experience & understand the body as a site of multiple timed and timeless apocalypses, passed on along ancestral hereditary channels, carried like a tender secret from ear to ear.

In Love After the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit & Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, Joshua Whitehead asks:  “Who names an event apocalyptic and whom must an apocalypse affect in order for it to be thought of as “canon”? How do we pluralize apocalypse? Apocalypses as ellipses? Who is omitted from such a saving of space, whose material is relegated to the immaterial?”

I offer a beginning, instead of an answer. In its most primal form, my first encounter with apocalypse came from My Book of Bible Stories. I remember sounding out ten of my favourite letters from a newly glistening word, hidden in a chapter of the dirty-gold book, named “The End of All Badness”.

In this story, I am six, learning how to spell, and in this story the letters take on matter and meaning, while shaking themselves loose from my mouth as enunciated english sound. A first taste. A little invocation and chant: ay, ar, em, ay, jee, ee, dee, dee, oh, en.

ay, ar,

em, ay,

jee, ee,

dee, dee,

oh, en.

“a         r           m         a          g         e         d         d         o         n”

A         R         M         A         G         E         D         D         O         N

This is what happens when I try to write about god. Time slips, and language loosens itself on the inhale. I find myself reaching forward—a directional longing already written into the recoil.

Is the first node in an unknotting an Unknot? Can you unmake a memory by remembering?

Best to say it plainly, and move from there:

It’s been ten years since my sexual assault. This last day of July marks the tenth winter since a shatter—I am a decade away from the night-room—the ghost in the machine of my body measures this distance dually in spacetime. we come to the page to imagine & remember. We come to the page to chant. Because I can’t help myself, what we chant in this place are names.

Like Fred Moten, who leans against me and nuzzles a warm reminder in black tongue, that chanting can provide a suspended moment of “devoted instantiation, sustenance and defense of the irregular.”

This chanting arrives, already insisting on its right to be irregular, in its black birthright to opacity and fugitivity. The chant insists (& invokes) its right to be opaque, multiple, messy, unsedimented and wide. It leans queerly on Mam’ Brenda Fassie as she spits, in perfect refusal,

“Hayi Hayi he e he e

Indaba yam'istraight

Ayifun'iruler”

Mam’ Brenda’s dual gesture of repudiation and invitation echoed & invoked carefully by brightlight Koleka Putuma (so that they sing together, if you listen carefully): 

“Hallo, hallo, hallo, Bye bye!

Koko, koko, koko, Come in!” 

Here, at the end of the world, where I mark it, all text is intertext. All song is many-voiced, all of us, singing with our backs to you. Grief stretches and flexes itself as a silence, and here sweetbright J Logan Smilges beams at me over a cup of tea in the sunlight with a soft chide:

“No matter the context behind a given silence—

whether willfully deployed

or violently enforced—

it always signifies something.”

Painful as it is, flattened by time, I’m here because I don’t want to tell this story anymore, and can’t help myself in the telling. In my deep desire to tell another story, (any other story! please!) this story tells itself anew. And in my silence, Gabeba Baderoon hands me the dripping fruit of a “leaking of meaning”.

In a decade, I learn that all distance from violence is nearness too, all untelling and retelling is memory, made multiple.

A survivor comes up to me in Cape Town, pointing her abuser out in the audience of a reading, in a whisper. We stare at him in silence, and I offer another poem to the air. A survivor DM’s me on a Wednesday and says her abuser’s name, just for me, and a shimmer of recognition places a careful crack in the world. A survivor eats a mango and forgets, wears a shirt and becomes another, the words, the date and the time don’t matter as much as the slant of the light, the diffusion of terror, the brutal-normal, the looking-away, the imagining otherwise.

Ever-enduring, ever-echoing, and ever-uttered is the cry: Ilizwe lifile, the world is dead, first uttered in on this land in 1510, and again in 1652, and again in 1910, and again in 1913. I look to Prof. Tshepo Madlingozi’s work here, particularly “Ilizwe Lifile/Nakba: Le-fatse & Crises of Constitution is (Neo)Settler Colonies, in which he insists that:

“The fundamental consequence of land

dispossession was the severance

of people from a cosmic harmony

 between land, non-human beings,

the living-dead and the yet-to-be-born, 

or in other words Ilizwe Lifile.”  

 This cry flattens time with its force until it’s silky—smoothing me out with it, I’m smaller and quieter than I’ve ever been. But just then, Ntate Don Mattera touches my palm from across the veil (“Maneo, Memory is the Weapon, don’t you remember?”)

And I do: I remember 1913, and 2003, and 2036, and yesterday.

In Puleng Mongale’s multi-selved “Sehopotso (2021)”, a question hides itself in a memory, or rather a memorialisation: Seho(potso). As a tribute to her grandmother, Puleng gives us multiple versions of herself, as if to say: her wounds are mine, and though the bind that clings itself to me isn’t mine, I will tend to it just the same.

One Sunday, I talk to Vuyiswa Xekatwane (cupping my hands and clapping twice for uGogo Mahlodi) about conflict and time. We speak both as ourselves and as Others. We may rhyme now, but we speak in cosmic tones, in cosmic time. In speech, conflict is both metaphor and memory. Our speech is an avenue and an affirmation (against the survivor’s ever-itch to apologise for enduring injury inelegantly).  

Through the last decade’s writing, I’ve found that grief has only made me more scatterbrained and blasphemous, brittle and erudite, many-minded and rageful, hilariously guarded, deliciously soft, and prone to panic. I write in scattered sentences now, line-breaks erupting into reams of negative space that shirk negation, page-white swallowing all sense, black ink everywhere. Sometimes, I recognise myself, voice twisted into sense and nonsense. But I think I’ve come to love meeting and naming myself anew.

What is this impulse to mark and memorialise the fracture? Can I trust it? Perhaps, this is another way of asking: can I trust you?

I don’t want to tell you, but I need you to know. Writing as reluctant rite, right, riot and running away. Daddy Moten clears his throat again here, at the close, and arrives with an answer via Hortense Spillers:

“Exhaustive celebration of, in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured, is black study. That continually rewound and remade claim upon our monstrosity—our miracle, our showing, which is neither near nor far, as Spillers shows—is black feminism, the animaterial ecology of black and thoughtful stolen life as it steals away.”

False buchu blooming, long after the end of the world:  

i

(still)

don’t care

if you

believe me

 _______