paint me Black angels
alt text provided for images + there are two post-scripts (in case your email gets cut off)
i been gone for a minute, now i'm back with the jump off! i'm not gon hold U, i been having quite a time offline over the last three and a half months. tryna get my chronic pain diagnosed and treated has been a journey that still stretches out before me. i spent most of January fighting with my rheumatologist and my insurance company, and i spent most of February fending off a flare that settled in its usual places (which is to say, just about everywhere), so let's all cross our fingers that March holds a lot more favor for me as i sort through my ongoing somatic woes.
on the upside of things, i've gotten two pieces of writing accepted into magazines! one piece is an erotic non-fiction essay, and the other is a short fiction story. i'm excited to share the latter once more details come out, but the former (submitted under a pseudonym) will be just for me to celebrate, maaaybe a couple of my niggas too if i stop feeling shy about it. i'm really excited at the prospect of sharing my words with more of the world, but more importantly, i'm just proud of me for taking chances and keeping promises to myself! ditto that to me joining Seeda School's Black feminist code coding program: in just three weeks, i coded my first ever webpage, which U can see here. i'm still working out some of the issues with connecting the survey to a real Google form on the back-end, but feel free to peep if U wanna see a project inspired by Assata Shakur!
keeping in the vein of things i've done behind the scenes, last month i co-organized SUBLIME, a love letter writing circle and film screening last month with my homies Cie and JOY, the gentle engines behind FOR OUR SIBS Collective. this was such a sweet, uplifting re-entry into organizing in-person events since this was the first one i've done since moving back to Georgia, and i'm looking forward to what the future holds as i continue prioritizing home-making and holding space for Black queer and trans folks. i suggested using Black angels as promotional imagery in part because writing this newsletter already had them at the forefront of my mind. [how's that for a segue?] below you'll find longform musings on angelic Blackness (aka one of my lifelong fascinations) and ways to (re-)make meaning from it.
paint me Black angels
mourning
Eartha Kitt performed an English translation of "Angelitos Negros" (Little Black Angels) in 1970, a song that started first as the poem "Píntame angelitos negros," by Venezuelan writer Andrés Eloy Blanco. based on the lamentations of a Black mother whose child had just died unexpectedly, the poem was later adapted to music and re-interpreted by Pedro Infante and Antonio Machín, then Eartha Kitt, who could more appropriately appeal to the importance of visual memory after the loss of Black life.
she opens by solemnly calling out the overwhelming whiteness in angelic art, uttering the "Why?" in a defiant rasp before the music surges and she lifts her chin to greet it. the righteous indignance of being forgotten by the song's shortsighted painter seamlessly morphs into sorrow at some point. it's not too apparent when Kitt begins to cry. one moment, her face is stern, dry. the next, it glistens with tears. i noticed them for the first time at "painter, show me that you care."
a year before this, Roberta Flack released a full-throated, funerary rendition of "Angelitos Negros" (en la letra original) on her debut album First Take. she devastates and enraptures against a stripped-down backdrop of piano, lilting strings, and battle-ready snare drags. the mournful atmosphere surges and seizes the heart as she carries the song to its climax, dragging out the vowels in "angelitos negros" then cresting into a wor(l)dless, heaven-shaking plea. this live performance heightens the melancholy further, especially when she lifts her hands from the keys and clutches at the air above her, a gesture of somber longing.
how might a brushstroke bend under saltwater, blood, and dirt to shape that which remains after the remains?
myth & memory
one of the first times i ever seen a Black angel was in Julius Lester's What a Truly Cool World, a book that entered my personal collection on May 20th, 2000 (according to a handwritten note left by my mom on the inner cover). even though the cast of celestial characters remained in heaven, i remember admiring how down-to-earth they all were, especially Shaniqua, "the angel in charge of everybody's business." accompanied by fellow angel Bruce, she assists God and Irene (His wife) in beautifying Earth after He creates it. once he sings flowers into being ("the shaped notes floated through space and down to earth and when they touched the ground, they turned into colors -- reds and blues and purples and yellows and pinks," page 12), Shaniqua does the same with butterflies, her voice causing tiny pieces of the planets to peel off and flutter down to keep the flowers company.
while flipping through the book recently, i took the time to read the foreword for the very first time, and i learned that this beloved childhood creation myth was not an original like i'd thought for all these years. it was actually his renewed reinterpretation of the folktale "How God Made Butterflies," originally shared in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men:
Lester expanded upon this creation myth in his anthology Black Folktales, penned in homage to Hurston. as expected, the core of the story remains the same in his version, but he embellishes, first by giving God an edge of petulance in response to the flowers' loneliness. he also complicates the origins behind the name for butterflies: instead of materializing through an accidental mispronunciation, Black folks strategically chose it. by bending this part of the narrative, Lester magnified the intent behind Zora Neale Hurston's work, which was to highlight the humor, dexterity, and ingenuity of Black people in the face of rampant white extraction/erasure.
finally, Lester took care to personalize the quiet and obedient hands that pass God's hand by connecting them to angels, a move that he committed to even further in What a Truly Cool World.
...My intention in Black Folktales was to reintroduce black folktales that were in danger of being forgotten. It was important that my retellings were faithful to the traditional tales and their story lines, and that my innovations were primarily of language and imagery. My purpose was to represent a people and their collective experience. What A Truly Cool World is a departure for me from this kind of storytelling...
I allow my imagination free play here, something I did not do in the previous work because of my obligation to tradition. Now, I want to be faithful to infinite world of the imagination and the profound pleasures that world has to offer this one, which is perhaps the truest way of being faithful to tradition."
Julius Lester, What A Truly Cool World
faithful he was, and i became a joyful beneficiary of this imaginative faith over twenty years ago, my child-mind unwittingly receiving a transmission of generations-old Black lore. etymologically, the word "angel" comes from the Greek for "messenger," and i was fortunate enough as a kid to engage with angels that carried affirmative messages not just about the divinity of Blackness, but also the importance of Black cosmogonies and myth-making. still, this early exposure was a singular one; over time, it was hard to ignore the scarcity that Roberta Flack and Eartha Kitt vocalized. anytime i saw illustrations of angels, their skin was always pearlescent, their hair always loose and fine, their painted wings proudly upholding the limitations of white mythology.
reasonably, i grew compelled to document examples of angels drawn in familiar hues, since the angels i recognize don't fly within the wide-reaching annals of western (medieval, Renaissance, baroque, Neoclassical, or Romantic) art. one of my favorites is the Dark Angel in the Aurora Consurgens. an uncommon example from the Renaissance period, this work of art features a Black angel standing upon a blackened planet with their emerald wings spread wide, and revealing a serpent-wrapped dagger sheathed in their stomach. this is how i view myself, an otherworldly and alchemical rarity.
another one of my favorites actually brings us back to the essay i wrote on The Empress (III), enslavement, and gynecology; Vinnie Bagwell created Victory Beyond Sims, a sculpture chosen by the people of East Harlem to replace the monument of J. Marion Sims. Bagwell's creation would have been a towering angel bearing a flame in one hand and an ouroboric scepter in the other. i say "would have been" because it appears that a freeze on public art funding in New York halted production, even though Bagwell was already awarded the money.
the are.na channel i created a few years ago has been a living, multimedia compendium of Black angels (including those aforementioned), and i've been re-conceptualizing depictions of angels in tarot as part of this archiving/documenting process. angels appear three times within the Major Arcana, but the one that sticks out to me the most lives on card 14, and not just because it's connected to my sun sign.
sharing celestial companionship with the angels on The Lovers (VI) and Judgment (XX), the angel of Temperance (XIV) is the only one who has joined the material world instead of presiding from above. common interpretations of this card include maintaining balance, striving for patience, keeping a cool head, and avoiding overindulgence (particularly in substances à la the Temperance Movement). whether characterized by restraint or equilibrium, Temperance carries the imperative of skirting extremes in favor of forging a middle path; even the root of the word temper brings to mind how a blacksmith painstakingly toils for a weaponizable midpoint between coolness and heat in order to yield a blade.
a vision of Immanence, they appear to deliver guidance and/or announce consequence. Immanence is not just divine presence in a material world, but Immanence as a way to understand the ubiquity of death for Black folks. this is where tarot as an allegory for the wake re-enters.
What does it look like, entail, and mean to attend to, care for, comfort, and defend, those already dead, those dying, and those living lives consigned to the possibility of always-imminent death, life lived in the presence of death; to live this imminence and immanence as and in the “wake”?
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake, page 38
Death precedes the angel of Temperance in the Major Arcana. i've seen diviners assuage anxieties about the Death card's literality by emphasizing its connection to significant spiritual transformation, but i don't think it's realistic for those us living in the afterlife of slavery to completely skirt around literal Death. whether she actually existed to inspire his work, the bereaved mother in Blanco's poem is firmly rooted in reality. i think of the Field of Angels memorial at the Whitney Plantation in Bulbancha, "dedicated to 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish between the 1820s and the 1860s...[the central] statue depicts a black angel carrying a baby to heaven."
palpable grief moved the tears on Eartha Kitt's face, the air between Roberta Flack's fingers, even the tongue in Muhammad Ali's cheek as he recounted a story from his childhood on Michael Parkinson's talk show in 1971:
"I said, ‘Mother, When we die, do we go to heaven?’
She said, ‘Naturally, we go to heaven.’I said, ‘What happened to all the Black angels when they took the pictures?’
** the audience laughs **
I said ‘Oh, I know: if the white folks was in heaven too, then the Black angels were in the kitchen preparing the milk and honey."
in the wake, Temperance is a reminder of our roles as memory-keepers and myth-bearers in the face of both individual loss and collective obsolescence. there's much to learn from the efforts put forth by Hurston and Lester alone, not to mention all the other storytellers in our families, on our blocks, locked away behind walls, growing from the ground underneath us, etc. there is much to be retold and rewritten. we must find ourselves, write/speak/imagine ourselves in, worry less about painted ceilings when we already belong to the skies, for better and for worse.
monstrosity
Temperance has astrological correspondence with Sagittarius, which is symbolically represented by an arrow-wielding centaur. hybrids of humans and horses, centaurs are variations of chimeras, the mythological creature comprised of a lion's head, a goat's body, and a dragon's tail. simply put, chimeras are monsters. things of myth, realness pending. to be a monster is to be "a divine omen," which aligns perfectly with the angel's role of divine messenger. and despite their common depictions as winged, human-like beings since the fourth century, angels have been described to occupy monstrous forms (like in the Bible's book of Ezekiel), which explains their association with the exhortation "be not afraid."
its own embodied form of ascribed monstrosity, Blackness can similarly confound the gaze and incite fear. such is our inherited Immanence, which can be compounded by any other types of monstrosity (as deemed by hegemony): disability, fatness, transness, queerness, you name it. it is no coincidence that this angel — already an intermediary between heaven and earth — splits their stance between land and water. the margins are our center, the middle path extends from the ground underneath us. the gaps that tried to swallow us whole become the places we survive, strategize, theorize, and love each another as the threats of Death that loom over us grow sharper and more coordinated. Temperance in the wake isn't just about avoiding extremes, it's about the rejection of binaries (and their violence) altogether, from that of "good" and "bad," to that of institutionalized gender.
here, i think of PET by Akwaeke Emezi, a wonder of abolitionist speculative fiction wherein Black trans girls are cherished, the monsters of cops and capitalists have been eradicated, and angels (summon)/(are summoned by) the spillage of blood. the titular angel disrupts time, space, and sentience to enlist Jam on a mission to "see the unseen" and find the monster still living in her post-revolution community. the gripping tale that follows challenges preconceived notions of monstrosity and throws into disarray the notion of static/unchanging utopia.
Angels aren't pretty pictures in old holy books, just like monsters aren't ugly pictures. It's all just people, doing hard things or doing bad things. But is all just people, our people.
Akwaeke Emezi, PET, page 14
a secondary, more generalized definition of chimera is "an illusion or fabrication of the mind, especially : an unrealizable dream." the possibilities at the center of Emezi's angelic tale seem impossible to conceive of in real life, let alone achieve, but they are within reach. stories like this make it so, which is why they are such a threat to the current global order. case in point: Emezi recently posted on their Instagram about how "a man had been arrested for threats of violence because PET is being taught as his daughter's school." this, a laceration amid the overall onslaught of gender fascism sweeping the so-called united states right now.
actualizing those dreamlike possibilities will require deep embrace and vigilant protection of fluidity, excess, spillage — that which cannot be contained or tamped down. there is fullness here, flamboyance, a warm and blinding light. it will require our discernment between who is called monstrous (simply for the body they inhabit) and who does monstrous things (yet is granted impunity for whatever reason). it will require honest reflections on where we have internalized myths of our sub/inhumanity, and whether we believe we'll ever truly have access to the realm of "Man" (Wynter). hard things.
as the one sent to reflect our chimeric nature back at us, the angel of Temperance asks: what would happen if more of us abandoned the mission to assimilate ourselves into a fragile myth of huManity that has always rejected us, and we instead carried forth the unrealizable dream of new ways of being, knowing, and relating to each other? the gap, the glitch, the liminal is this angel's domain, and we, too, must straddle dimensions of matter and spirit to catalyze and maintain everlasting change.
the Mothership and Myth-Science
John Akomfrah's and Edward George's Afrofuturist video essay The Last Angel of History depicts efforts to chart touchpoints of Black diasporic cultural production by way of the Data Thief, a "time-surfing roughneck, a shapeshifter, part human part cyborg, a gold-toothed, gold-chained recording angel from tomorrow." (Akomfrah and George, "The Last Angel of History," The Chimurenga Chronic). as the narrator, George opens the film with the myth of Robert Johnson, a Black man who reportedly sold his soul to the Devil at the Crossroads so he could play a "Black secret technology that we know now to be the blues." decades later, the Data Thief lands at the Crossroads to unearth (Mothership) connections between increasingly technology-driven (and therefore increasingly-encoded) genres, from the blues to P-Funk and free jazz to techno and jungle. Temperance is less about patience and more about spatiotemporal slippage as resistance, about "waiting/wading/weighting time." through traversing the watery dimensions of time and space, the Data Thief underscores Black musical cosmogonies that came to pass because of and despite alienation and displacement.
placing the Data Thief at the Crossroads consequently affirms the location's ability to summon Black creative and revolutionary potential. it is a deliberate act of mythological reclamation. the widespread mischaracterization of the Crossroads (and the entity who waits there) was one of many tools of colonial imagination that overwrote indigenous African religions and knowledge systems. data on Esu/Legba/etc. was deleted and replaced with Christian stories about Satan, or The Devil, which happens to follow Temperance in the Major Arcana's sequence.
since The Devil card is an invitation to assess one's commitments to anti-Black mythologies borne from the Ages of Discovery and Enlightenment, Temperance is the willingness to trouble those waters through exploring our sundry secret technologies. for me, i cannot think about the blues as code without my mind wandering to the spirituals and work songs that came before. given the tongue of their masters' God, enslaved people overlapped meaning, sublimated stories of old through scripture, used metaphors and melodies as north stars. remixing is a centuries-old praxis of liberation.
the Data Thief is an Angel of History is an angel of Temperance, a messenger at the convergence of Black pasts and futures, a Sankofa bird with wings outstretched between oblivion and (re)discovery. the Data Thief is not so interested in taking what doesn't belong to them because there is much they've already inherited. the Data Thief mainly wants to steal away.
in The Last Angel of History, the Data Thief's excavatory efforts reveal three stewards of the Afrofuturist musical canon: George Clinton, Lee Perry, and Sun Ra. i noticed that, though they each had their own particular flair, each employs ship related imagery within their bodies of work. Clinton's Mothership, Perry's Black Ark Studio, Sun Ra's Myth-Science Arkestra. the ship has been vehicle and symbol for trans-Atlantic containment and chattelization, so there's something ancestrally-linked within their convergence upon the ship as a vessel for reaching places Black people aren't typically envisioned, como los angelitos negros. they imagined Black folks taking our rightful place in the cosmos, or the heavens, both regularly conceived of as familiar places of origin and aspirational realms of freedom.
Sun Ra, a self-described angel* whose transcendent music came from Saturn and the stars beyond it, added visual texture to this concept of fleeing the World in his feature film Space is the Place. he disembarks his eye-shaped spacecraft in Oakland with the singular mission of liberating Black people, while the flashy, Blaxploitation-esque Overseer works to sabotage Ra, hoping to keep Black people under white supremacy's boot for his gain. fittingly, they use a tarot game as the setting stage, exchanging Major Arcana cards in a duel for the futures of Black folks. consider their table set up at the proverbial Crossroads. as Ra's adversary (and devotee to anti-Blackness), the Overseer reasonably plays the role of The Devil. though he pulls Judgment (XX) first, Sun Ra serves as the angel of Temperance within the film because of his role as a disruptive, earthbound messenger.
when Ra arrives at a neighborhood community center with an invitation to abscond to outer space, "the Black youth of planet Earth" question his authenticity. he responds by affirming their doubts:
"How do you know I'm real? I'm not real. I'm just like you. You don't exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn't be seeking equal rights. You're not real. If you were, you'd have some status among the nations of the world. So we're both myths. I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as the myth. Because that's what Black people are: myths."
Space is the Place, 24:30-24:56
we are myths, meaning no-bodies (mainly flesh) and no-things (yet still thingified), just mere figments of the global imagination. and we are myths in the way we have have long considered them: as sacred and informative bodies of tradition, as divine messages of immense world-building potential. by acknowledging the state of non-existence that Black people occupied, he lent the eye-searing clarity that Black people live in the confluence of innumerable apocalypses created by the hegemony of whiteness, yet the World as we know it still has yet to be collapsed by us. an angel among angels-in-waiting.
his attempts to change consciousness through a widely-publicized concert are nearly foiled by the Overseer's and NASA's machinations, but he thankfully makes it to the stage with his Arkestra and transmits his mind-opening music. triumphant, he raptures several worthy converts onto his ship before leaving, and the Earth explodes in its wake before the credits roll. we thus come full circle to June Tyson's chillingly-nebular introduction to the film: "It's after the end of the world, don't you know that yet?"
what might striving towards an Alter-Destiny look like in the here and now? maybe we don't have the power to plant scraps of heaven or the necessary technology to find a home in outer space, but we do have enough to defend and cultivate the land and water currently available to us. the Crossroads await.
Metadata & marronage
a more current advancement of the figure invented by Akomfrah and George is The Black Angel of History, aka the Metadata Thief, presented by Reynaldo Anderson and Tiffany E. Barber. this Angel was present alongside revolutionaries like "Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and Nanny, and carried them to heaven. The Black Angel has a message for us now. The Black Angel of History is the messenger of an African worldview in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and mass death within a post-U.S. world order, marked by twenty-first century Necrocapitalism." (Anderson and Barber). the Metadata Thief is an Angel of History is an angel of Temperance too, but this updated messenger takes flight from a Pan-African approach that positions the narratives and experiences of the African continent alongside those from the Black diaspora. (they call it Afrofuturism 2.0, but i think i'll consider the framework a collaboration between Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism)
Black folks in the diaspora (especially those of us embedded within imperial cores) have so many openings to strengthen our linkages to Africans living on the continent, our combined dreams and anxieties ripe for synthesis, strategy, and solidarity. to keep (Meta)data safe from surveillance, it must be encrypted, converted into hidden code; at the center of this process is the language of the crypt, that is, the dead and disappeared. as Black Angels of History, we have innumerable more indexes of myths and music to scour, analyze, and remix since Akomfrah and George shared their Afrofuturistic avatar in the '90s, so what of our other secret technologies now that Necrocapitalism permeates every aspect of our lives?
we may turn towards past practices of marronage as inspiration for creating new sanctuaries that enliven and needfully obscure those of us who are most vulnerable. the Temperate angels of hush harbors and hinterlands will tell us no lies. still, liberation must be a chimeric endeavor, pulled together from different bodies, nourished by different sources, made from the stuff of our dreams. the path to our Alter-Destiny won't be forged by escape alone, nor by music alone, nor by myth, violence, theory, performance, fantasy, fact...no, there must be synthesis of it all, so the synthesis will know no bounds.
to manifest a funky future of black (and) queer liberation, we gotta keep it funky & afrofuturistic, envisioning futures and performances of fugitivity beyond heteronormative and colonial frameworks [#KeepItFunkyLikeMissy]
in all our endeavors toward liberation, we must understand freedom not as a mere moment in time, but as a journey toward building alliances, toward undoing erasures, and toward writing/righting/rite-ing for our ancestors and for the generations we will be ancestors to.
Jaye Similton, "Liberation is a Velocity"
as stated in Mules and Men, "A world is somethin' ain't never finished." we will have no utopia, but we can move ever and ever towards making real the world we deserve. the angels in heaven (and on earth) done signed our names.
references
John Akomfrah and Edward George, "The Last Angel of History,"
Reynaldo Anderson and Tiffany E. Barber, "The Black Angel of History and the Age of Necrocapitalism"
Black Quantum Futurism, "Waiting Time/Wading Time/Weighting Time"
Andres Eloy Blanco, "Píntame angelitos negros"
Akwaeke Emezi, PET
Roberta Flack, "Angelitos Negros" (Live at KCET)
Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men
Eartha Kitt, "Black Little Angels"
Julius Lester, Black Folktales
Julius Lester and Joe Cepeda, What A Truly Cool World
here's a read-along video if U want to take in the story that way.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake
Jaye Similton, "Liberation is a Velocity"
my "paint me Black angels" are.na channel
post-script (Black angel material of honorable mention)
* from page 63 of Blutopia : Visions of the future and revisions of the past in the work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton: "I'm really of the Angel race. There ain't but two kinds of races here, you got the Angel race and the human race. The Angels are a race, most people don't know that. I'm of the Angel race." — Sun Ra
here's a link to an art exhibit based on The Black Angel of History/the Metadata Thief!
Lucille Bogan, blues trailblazer known for her highly erotic tunes, dropped Black Angel Blues as an ode to the sweet generosity of her lover and how he spread his...wings.
in her 2018-2019 exhibit Femmes Noires, Mickalene Thomas amplified the melancholy of Eartha Kitt's 1970 performance with her installation of the same name wherein she displayed multi-screen shots of Kitt's face alongside "contemporary women, including herself. Dressed like Kitt in black turtlenecks, they mimic her emotive gestures, extending Kitt’s presence like a chorus and suggesting the song’s continued relevance." https://burnaway.org/daily/mickalene-thomas-at-spelman/
an early example of a Black angel represented in film is the one who shows up in The Blood of Jesus, one of Spencer Williams' earliest directorial contributions. in the movie, Williams plays Ras, a faithless husband who accidentally shoots his wife Martha shortly after she is baptized. the angel (Rogenia Goldthwaite) arrives to guide Martha's soul to the Crossroads. there Martha must choose between Hell and Zion, damnation and salvation, the juke joint or the congregation. the Devil lies in wait, almost succeeding in leading her astray towards the temptation of jazz and flashy living, but Martha eventually finds redemption through her devotion to Jesus. she is baptized once again at the height of the film, this time with actual drops of His blood, and subsequently reborn into new life. to me, its conceit feels like a predecessor to that of The Last Angel of History: what once was fuel for moral panic eventually became compass for enlightenment and renewal of its own kind.
post post-script (other fun things)
earlier this week, Ibram X. Kendi released The Making of Butterflies, another vibrant (and necessary) reimagination of "How God Made the Butterflies!" it warms my heart to think that, like me, Black kids of this day and age will get to receive this story and all of its magic.
Jade T. Perry shared this quiz (Which Black folk hero are you?) in the Discord chat for her e-cousins -- if U a nigga, have a lil fun and try it out! this time around, i got The People Who Could Fly.
in The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, Martine Syms problematizes some of the illusory, fantastical elements of Afrofuturism and holds a more grounded viewpoint on "the possibilities of a new focus on black humanity: our science, technology, culture, politics, religions, individuality, needs, dreams, hopes, and failings."
i regularly call this newsletter a practice of Black feminist bricolage, and through researching for this issue, i felt affirmed to find that a scholar already connected this concept of meaningful sampling/synthesis to the responsibilities of a Data Thief:
"The excavation of the past is essential, for it is from those historical fragments that the data thief or bricoleur constructs visions of what is to come...Afrofuturistic bricolage asserts black people’s right to use whatever is at hand, to enter the technologically enhanced future through whatever door is closest and to do so without assimilation into a global monoculture."
Sofia Samatar, Toward a Planetary History of Afrofuturism
à la prochaine mes anges,
Dkéama