Open Water

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Saidiya Hartman describes the journey of Black people from chattel to men and women, and how this new status was a type of freedom if only by name; that the re-subordination of those emancipated was only natural considering the power structures in which this freedom was and continues to operate within. Rendering the Black body as a species body, encouraging a Blackness which is defined as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational and infectious, finding yourself being constrained in a way you did not ask for, in a way which could not possibly contain all that you are, all that you could be, could want to be. That is what you are being framed as, a container, a vessel, a body, you have been made a body, all those years ago, before your lifetime, before anyone else who is currently in your lifetime, and now you are here, a body, you have been made a body, and sometimes this is hard, because you know you are so much more.