Split/Spilt

By Dr. John Murillo III

Shard – May 2015

We stood in a circle in front of the memorial site, holding hands to form a circuit to channel the shared intensity of our rage and sorrow, collectively conjuring the countless named and unnamed loves and lives of those we had lost, of those we were worried about losing, and of those we were still to lose. In our sorrow we asked those we conjured to guide Nephi Arreguin into the aether with gentle hands caressing the base of his neck, pressing the small of his back, stilling the tremble of his palms.

He was lost. We were lost.

I am lost: split/spilt. I am open and rife with tears, a wounded outpouring of liquid words.

My hands pick at my hair. Index, thumb, and middle compulsively feel about for tiny knots among the curls, pulling, isolating, plucking, examining, and discarding one after another.

On paper I aspire to bear the unbearable black water. It overflows and overwhelms the hands trying to contain and to direct it into disciplined intelligibility—that form of legibility made available by the constrictions of a certain kind of training and a certain set of expectations—as I seek to channel the tempest into lyrical flows, the oceanic questions swirling and surging forth from bone, mind, and soul.

Stitch – July 2017

A whole, fluid world of words and boom baps sangs, twangs, and flows through the stanky staccato of click-clacks and crackalacks like oil in the skillet crackling from Regina Bradley’s keyboard. A Kollage of Black Southern life unfolds.

Of the Southern tribe of Ink Benders, the outkasted community of ink-wielding world-renderers with thick, winding roots in Dungeons, plantations, and the front yards of grandmamma and great-grandmamma’s houses, Bradley, the Red Clay Scholar, knows best the essence of the South’s creative, big, kritical flow.

She bends, in Boondock Kollage, some of the something that the South got to say into stories on pages that are spaces where we, too, might feel and experience the full, fully strange, and strangely loving brilliance that comes with wielding words to make ways out of no way.

I am split/spilt, splintered, shattered beyond repair, broken by the overwhelming tidal forces emanating from the Black (w)hole whose gravity warps the fabric of everything. My pieces, tumbling towards infinite oblivions of possibility and obliteration, coalesce into words. Words that, like all writing swept up and overtaken in the wake, are failed attempts to recollect, to hold and behold the atomized shards of selves “flung out and dispersed,” to contain and tame oceans.

Shard – May 2015

Nephi was lost.

Driving with a companion in search of a friend’s home. His companion knocked on a door, on the wrong door, on the door of one who would soon come to dole out death. Afraid, like all suburban Death Dealers are, the homeowner called the “Police.” The Space Enforcers, as we knew them, travel faster than the fastest tachyon at the Death Dealer’s call. The black-and-whites of their vehicles unmistakably signify in, through, across, and against space and spaces that which is being enforced: the strict, rigid boundaries between polar absolutes, between being and nothingness, between life and death, and between the pristine space of everywhere else and Black space.

Their mode of conveyance, the way they move through, interrupt, and warp the domain of their “patrol,” – by their mere presence alone they establish the jurisdiction upon which their violence is inflicted.

Vehicles for territorial terrorism.     

Daily this world marshals increasingly terrifying and imaginative social, political, environmental, psychological, theological and technological forces in order to disproportionately and uniquely mutilate Black bodies, disavow and imperil Black lives, and hungrily demand Black death.

Black existence in this world – characterized by a violent dislocation from and by normative notions of time and space – is a statelessness of being. For to belong while Black – which is a belonging to Blackness – is to be split and spilt across untimely time and displaced space, to be torn between a vulnerable subjection to the overwhelming, oceanic forces levied upon our flesh, our minds, and our spirits, and a unique and unimaginable capacity for water-bending and –bearing. Such is the astounding, catastrophic condition with and against which Black beings – like my mother, my love, Chinyere, my brothers, and so, so many others – must bear, the unbearable black waters we bend, aspiring to make ways and whens out of no way, and to hold one another in worlds of words, images, and gestures that might, at least, “sound an ordinary note of care” for one another in the name of small revolutions of speech, touch, and movement.

Shard – May 2015

Like they often say of us, they say that he attempted the impossible. It is reported that as they confronted him at his driver’s side window, and after he refused to exit his vehicle, he flew into enough of a frenzy to try impossibly to run over the officers to his left. Fearing they might be crushed via a violation of basic physical principles, they fired, striking him (at least) in the heart.

Violently ejected from his flesh, his soul could only watch alongside the Space Enforcers with their guns drawn as his vacant body careened into a fire hydrant, the water of which burst and struck loose electrical wires overhead. According to the Space Enforcers, this is why his body was inaccessible to paramedics: the wires created a hazardous environment, and they would not endanger themselves to reach his lifeless form.

But we knew, and we know…

Nexus, every word here; every utterance is a convergence, a crossing of all time and space by the axis mundi carved out by countervailing trauma and joy. Crucial are the eyes that bear witness to the threads then, for the knots become peculiar, personal, specific, shifted by whatever labyrinthine machine whirs to life, computes, and processes between my ears. And so I strive to translate being split/spilt into something legible, perhaps even lyrical; I am conduit, wholly holey as I might be, and carry the breaking wake in the flesh, mind, and spirit in my own strange ways. The cracks in my vessel, the knots and tangles in my hair, and the glint and gloss of my eyes are my own, and comprise the peculiar terrain that I attempt to map.

The points evade plotting in entropic swirls of black water. This spatiotemporal cartography seems only to locate a kind of narrative disarray; trace timelines, connect the dots, and the plot’s knot only thickens, grows unwieldy. Such seems to be inevitable when mapping the scatter of scenes of subjection that comprise everything we know about

Being

Black

There Here Wherever Everywhere

Then Now Whenever Always

Fingers find hair. Pinch. Pull. Parse. Pluck. My eyes dart behind closed eyelids in staccato, dreamily searching the twists and turns of memory for the stories of the wheres and whens we tried to belong, all the fragmented life and death sentences punctuated by thunderous ellipses.

Stitch – June 2017

Red Clay say that when the dam broke during the cataclysmic “Hurricane Bitch,” and the hydrocution waters washed away New Jackson, turning it into the Soup, I wondered about the kinds of nourishment suddenly made possible and impossible in this space flooded, threatened with looming, watery doom.

Hydrocution waters – the waste waters of a new form of execution that pulverize convicted Black bodies into small pools of liquid energy and produced waters polluted with the fleshy Black refuse of what we once were, wanted to be, and could have been – spelled structural, interpersonal, and individual doom for the Soup and all its resident norms and folks. Waters laced with Black death mutated us at every level: how we held space for one another, how we shared space with one another, and how we bore the catastrophe of the flood in the flesh all warped in ugly, violent ways.

“Light nigga, dark nigga, faux nigga, real nigga, rich nigga, poor nigga, house nigga, field nigga:” like Shawn says, what many Black folk have said before. To the waters of the Soup, to the raging winds of the Hurricane, and to the World beyond, the World that facilitated, watched, and enjoyed the prior and ensuing decay, we all “still niggas…still niggas.”

There is no belonging in a world to which we belong(ed) as (at least) physical, political, and imaginary property. Even as we innovate new ways to hold one another in person and across the vexed time and space of the internet (e.g. Black Twitter), the old-but-new perils of being out of place and time advance as new technologies emerge to enhance the enforcement of our displacement from the here and now, the everywhere and always.

Shard – May 2015

He and his companion were described by the death dealer as “being out of place,” double-emphasis on being. There was no place, here, or anywhere, for him, or for her, and because he was Black in his refusal to be removed from where he was parked, from where he, in that moment, wanted and needed to be, because he defied the imposition of their jurisdiction upon his existence, he was removed from life itself.

Our mourning that evening interrupted the space of Pires Ave, at the corner where pictures of him hung with messages and quotes illuminated by candlelight. We held each other to behold the echoes of his presence; we stood, Black and out of place in the name of his absence, in the glaring headlights/gaze of Space Enforcers surveillance. We knew of their gleeful overseeing, acknowledged it in our periphery. But our eyes were watching each other.

Feeling this in our flesh, flesh ever in flight from danger, we steal away into each others’ arms, eyes, and imaginations. Not because we believe we can escape the nigh cosmic horrors before us, but because we know that our only real hope lies in boldly creating the Black places, moments, and embraces where and when no world has been before. “Here,” in the singularities of the Black stories that Black bodies necessarily tell, lay the seeds of a yet-to-be-imagined, otherworldly marronage where the fullest experiment of what we glimpse in and amongst each other as ‘Black life’ might be born.

Stitch – July 2017

The Red Clay Scholar bent ink into a lesson about how we make arrangements for one another. A parable of space-making, about how we hold space where we might, for a moment, belong, in those old places outside the city lines and beyond the reach of the psychosocial tendrils of “Why-FIE,” those rich, ancient homes our Maw Maws hold for themselves and for us in the countryside.

If we are to bend words into literary worlds and make homes for we who are on our Black and wayward journeys in ways that are as insurgent as they are haptical, what matter we hold in our rooms and how we hold it there matters. For retribution, for love, for protection, for mourning, for joy, for everything, forever, what we choose to make, hold, and maintain affects the kind of intimacy we might share with one another. The kinds of transformative magic we conjure to arrange and rearrange those spaces, to make them more or less hospitable to one another, transforms the way relationality might or might not happen when we share space and time with one another.

Pinch. Pull. Pluck. I continue the plunder of my hair, trying to find a “Stitch in Time,” clear some space around my mind. Spilt split ends and knots dance with the gusts of the ceiling fan, inching closer to the edge of the desk, and falling and fluttering out of view. I keep writing lines, life and death sentences that might bear the surging and unbearable tides.

First published in MAKE 17—Belonging, March 16, 2018. Image courtesy of the issue’s graphic designer, Josh Hauth.