Gripping Mo(u)rning: Black Indignation, Artistic Rescue, and Fooling Death

Gripping Mo(u)rning: Black Indignation, Artistic Rescue, and Fooling Death by Hashim Khalil Pipkin | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Great is thy faithfulness! Great is thy faithfulness!Morning by morningnew mercies I see. All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided. Great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me!
—Thomas O. Chisholm
A mourning in fact and by right interminable, without possible normality, without reliable limit, in its reality or in its concept, between introjection and incorporation. But the same logic, as we suggested, responds to the injunction of a justice which, beyond right or law, rises up in the very respect owed to whoever is not, no longer or not yet, living, presently living.
—Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
These are strange times. That is no secret. The colonial idea of blackness -- as some type of elixir that crumbles personage into commodity, playground for militaristic state ideology, and de facto posture for capitalist exploitation-- has translated itself into a contemporary iteration that is still, embarrassingly, bound intimately with death. 
The names of our slain: Trayvon, Jordan, Renisha, Michael, and so many others are fixtures in our national lexicon and specters in our national memory. Their signatures on the story of black striving in this country confound my sensibilities, imagination, and courage to hope. I mourn for the return of their cohesion.
This desire did not last long. I was quickly reminded of the ontological safety granted by the tradition of black creative genius while watching the short film for Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar’s “Never Catch Me.”
Any attempt at summarizing this piece of art will undoubtedly fail (please follow the link). But for the purpose of this piece: this video places the viewer in the middle of the funeral of two black children whose spirits, how I understand it, dance becausethere is no tomorrow. And they dance. Their bodies carve the air around them meticulously and deliberately. There is technique; but more importantly there is emotional freedom.
This video is a testimony for the urgency to make our art now. Our creative locus can be our mourning. Our confusion can be our canvas. Our art is our protection from the rambunctiousness of normative time and hegemonic history. I have no idea what it feels like to lose a child. I have no point of reference for that type of anguish. I do not know what kind of gloss would fall over my eyes or what type of prayer I would be able to utter. But what I do know is that we must take solace knowing that even when our backs are touching the bottoms of coffins, the fierce artistry of black survival will always exceed the boundaries of death.
Day breaks and night ends; that was the salvific function I understood the idea of “morning” to possess. As the first excerpt that leads this piece suggests, one of the great hymns of the Christian church identifies “morning” as the temporal trace for the divine’s presence. The newness of day silenced the festering regret of night: what I wished I had done or said differently that day. But this same logic also makes “morning” something for which I have to wait. I am convinced that is a luxury we can no longer afford. What if we dared to import the salvific promise of “morning” into the artistic rage of black “mourning” now – and in turn, yield a new day for black artistic freedom that stretched morning into night?
What does this look like? I am not sure. But I think the short film for Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar’s song might provide some insight. It might just look like dancing at a funeral. It might require that level of courage – that degree of righteous anger and performative purpose. Because there is a generation of black life at stake, not too different from the group of black children who are still in the throngs of American living at the end of the video chasing after the hearse of their beloved. Like them, we must be in unflinching accord with the ancestral spirits who fooled the finitude of death because of their creative might.
In the second epigraph for this piece, Derrida refers to the condition of “justice” that longs to contain the boundlessness of mourning, so that; respect for those who are lost has a chance to be exercised. What I think “Never Catch Me” does is advance a practical meditation on the gaps in Derrida’s theoretical formulation by synthesizing artistic production with emotional health. Black art is our justice – we dance for those we’ve lost because like the institution of the black church, the context for this video -- black dance and other performative presentations testifying to black striving can serve as sites where black consciousness is organized – a task that not only honors black life, but undoubtedly escapes time.
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Hashim Pipkin, Writer, Cultural Critic, Ph.D. Candidate at Vanderbilt University.