I got this image from the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites. That’s the real name.
Yesterday I had the great honor of visiting Passage/way/s an installation by the artist Jessica Valoris at VisArts in Rockville, Maryland. Jessica and I have known each other for years and I was so lucky that she was available to walk me through the entire exhibit, a series of doorways, portals, poems and artifacts of her daily practice of honoring our fugitive ancestors.
Not so far from the eastern shore where my ancestors and Harriet Tubman and the oysters and the stars collaborated on their own impossible freedom, Jessica is doing this deeply researched, cosmic loving ceremony. Visit if you can. Every piece moved me, the doorway called “Night Sky” the big and little dipper spoons, the shoreline dance with Saidiya’s words, the zines become windows, the fugitive marbles, the people who could fly and the tools they left behind, the capture ads turned to love poems by Jessica’s careful eye and heart. I love all of it.
Jessica Valoris in the world she made visible.
And the piece I’m still reflecting on this morning is called “Spot in the Sun” which on first listen sounds like what I want and what every tourist board in the Caribbean is trying to tell me. A place where I can feel the warmth kiss my skin. Or what my ego says I want, all the shine and attention a dying enlightenment system of thought can bestow upon me.
But Jessica Valoris’s “Spot in the Sun” is about Nat Turner’s cosmic vision. In February 1831 Nat Turner watched the moon come directly into alignment with the earth and blot out the sun. Darkness in the middle of the work day. A sign. Turner believed that God was ready for a different situation. Because isn’t everything a matter of perspective? On the other side of the moon total sunlight and down here on earth dark days. Or for those working from can’t see (in the morning) to can’t see (in the night) a forced labor situation so oppressive it hurt to look at it.
Can you imagine the audacity of a survivor of enslavement who dared to challenge the supremacy of the sun? To imagine another cosmic relation? What made him think he could do that? Well. I know one thing he did. He took a month off. Yup. A whole moon cycle.
Oh you didn’t know our ancestors were out here taking sabbaticals from slavery? Yes. And I am underlining this point for anyone who is a recovering (or not) workaholic like me, and for everyone who thought they knew what Nat Turner’s most rebellious acts were (like I thought I knew) and for all my fellow urgent revolutionaries.
In the 1800s an enslaved Nat Turner hid in the woods and took a whole month off. Kinda dims the lights on all the reasons we think we can’t take a break, huh? But as those of us who have read historian ancestor Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom (a major influence on Jessica’s art practice) know, this was a common practice of rebellion, a way of temporarily escaping enslavement without leaving your people behind.
As Tricia Hersey and many others remind us, rest is revolutionary. And it was revolutionary for Nat Turner. After that month off, Nat Turner could hear God and see signs. He came back to the plantation ready to wreck shop. And after the eclipse brazenly imposed sudden naptime on the birds and work the nocturnal mammals up early, he knew anything could happen.
And wouldn’t you know, the very earth herself collaborated with Nat Turner. Yes she did. In August of the same year the mouthpiece of Earth that some call Mount St Helens erupted from all the way over in Virginia, the debris in the air looked (at least to Nat Turner) looked like the sun was blotted out again. And Nat said, let’s go.
Now I don’t know how I feel about The Confessions of Nat Turner being “transcribed” and interpreted by a white writer swept up in and benefiting from the terror and shock at the existence of Nat Turner and Nat Turner’s own credibility in his community struck in the hearts of every enslaver who had erstwhile assumed their crimes had cosmic support. Jessica’s exhibit focuses more on how Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia inspired liberationists in Maryland. I don’t know if Nat Turner’s plan was really to kill all white people, or to eventually spare children and allies or what. But I do have my own confession.
The whole idea called “white people” and the way it was made up to enact violence, the way it constructs personhood and normalizes isolation, violence and despair across the planet? I’m over it. And I am trying to kill the white supremacist logic inside me. All of it. And I think the moon and the mountains support me too.
I remember the first time I took a whole month off. It was November and I called it the month of “No.” Unlike Nat Turner, I didn’t have to hide in the woods and fear capture and death, but I did have to save up for months. And when I tell you that when, like some sort of inverse Shonda Rhimes, I tried and failed every day for 30 days to say no to every offer, request or demand that came my way it shifted something. I could see signs. I could hear the God in me. I mean it. I have written every day since then. Every day.
Like Nat Turner, that one month of refusal, gave me my belief in total freedom. Another relation is possible. And if you watch the sky, everything is a sign. Let’s go. Because you already know something that will make the systems that your extracted labor supports unworkable. Your freedom could make every lie about power shake in its sheets.
And the most important thing was that I freed myself from the lies I believed about scarcity. And by the way whiteness is a lie shaped by and insisting upon scarcity, based on and reproducing the idea of never having enough and never being enough. Imagine working in service of that idea every day. Oh right. You don’t have to imagine.
One month taught me that I had to free myself from my belief that I couldn’t say no, because this might be my only opportunity (internalized white supremacy). Or that I couldn’t say no, because I had to prove how capable I was (internalized ableism). Or that I couldn’t say no because I was scared of my emotions would teach me if I paused long enough to feel them. I feared what the signs and wonders would show me if didn’t fill all the space up with work. And guess what. That’s the contradiction. There is no way for me to help create a world free from sexual violence in an every day context where I reproduce my trauma by telling myself I can never say no. No.
Because if, as Jessica’s exhibit so powerfully reminded me yesterday, our fugitive ancestors could say no to the system and yes to themselves in a million ways on a million days, who I am I to play-act slavery in my work for our liberation? No. No. No.
So I learned to say no. And sometimes I still need a reminder, so thank you Jess. Because now I remember what lights me up and how beautiful it is to shut everything down. I remember now how I found this life where love flows freely. And now I live here. My spot in the sun.
Langston Emet with Jessica Valoris’s “Spot in the Sun.”
P.S. Do you know what Zora Neale Hurston meant when she talked about being “drenched in light?” Check out our Black Feminist Breathing Meditation series to learn more.
