i.
As always, because Wambui Mwangi teaches me, I start from where I am. A sister with asthma. An inhaler. 6 years separate us. I am spared the worst of her struggles.
Was I 11 when my father’s lung collapsed? A doctor, he taught me how to administer a modified form of CPR, so he could breathe. An oxygen tank became part of the furniture. My mother installed a bell—an annoying bird—that he’d press when he couldn’t breathe. When I needed to turn on the oxygen tank.
Bell. Tank. Breath.
Bell. Tank. Breath.
Bell. Tank. Breath.
A voice struggling to say oxygen, saying air, because it’s shorter.
air
air
air
the breath to say, “I can’t breathe.”
ii.
air:
Air is an object held in common, an object that we come to know through a collective participation within it as it enters and exits flesh. The process by which we participate in this common object, with this common admixture, not only must be thought about but must be consumed and expelled through repetition in order to think. The always more than double gesture of inhalation and exhalation is a matter of grave concern given the overwhelming presence of air as shared object, the overwhelming presence of breathing as shared, common performance. In each movement of dilation is a displacement of one kind of matter in the space and plane of another. To fill lungs with air is to displace the carbonate matter that was previously within.
—Ashon Crawley, BlackPentecostal Breath
iii.
Unlike Alex Haley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Christina Sharpe, and Sowande’ Mustakeem, I do not know how to stay in the hold, how to hear its cries, how to smell its fetid air.
The inability to breathe worsened slaves’ conditions as they crossed the Atlantic. “I have seen their breasts heaving, and observed them draw their breath with all those laborious and anxious efforts for life,” one surgeon detailed, arguing that respiratory problems frequently emerged through immersion in and the ingestion of toxic air from bodily fluids and excrement.
—Sowande’ Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea
fetid
Regardless of the methods used to prevent unsanitary conditions, slave ships were well known for the smells they emitted. Captain Thomas Wilson shared that his officers and crew regularly “complained of the noxious smell . . . insomuch that they dreaded some infection.” Platforms, decks, and defecation tubs containing the blood, urine, fecal matter, and vomit of slaves were the primary catalysts for the offensive stench.
—Sowande’ Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea
fetid.
No matter a ship’s origin in traveling from Africa, a stigma of filth became associated with a ship’s sail and Atlantic arrival within different ports.
—Sowande’ Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea
iv.
the records are partial, lacking the many ways Africans experienced and desired scent, the sense-apprehension of enslavement
fetid
v.
Aspiration:
I’ve been thinking about what it take, in the midst of the singularity, the virulent antiblackness everywhere and always remotivated, to keep breath in the Black body. What ruttier, internalized, is necessary now to do what I am calling wake work as aspiration, that keeping breath in the Black body?
—Christina Sharpe, In the Wake
aspiration
I’ve been thinking aspiration in the complementary senses of the word: the withdrawal of fluid from the body and the taking in of foreign matter (usually fluid) into the lungs with the respiratory current, and as audible breath that accompanies or comprises a speech sound.
—Christina Sharpe, In the Wake
aspiration
oxygen
air
vi.
air is a soft exhalation, a word that almost disappears, a word you learn to hear
(again, at my father’s side, learning to hear “air,” because “oxygen” is too much, the risk of missing it
“air”)
aspirate
vii.
breath.aspirate
What is the word for keeping and putting breath back in the body? What is the word for how we must approach the archives of slavery (to “tell the story that cannot be told”) and the histories and presents of violent extraction in slavery and incarceration; the calamities and catastrophes that sometimes answer to the names of occupation, colonialism, imperialism, tourism, militarism, or humanitarian aid and intervention? What are the words and forms for the ways we must continue to think and imagine laterally, across a series of relations in the hold, in multiple Black everydays of the wake? That word that I arrived at for such imagining and for keeping and putting breath back in the Black body in hostile weather is aspiration (and aspiration is violent and life-saving).
—Christina Sharpe, In the Wake
viii.
ether
What is at stake when black flesh fugitively undulates into and as ether and, in so doing, un/makes the world itself? What might it mean to think about blackness as enacting an un/making, as enacting amid regimes of settlement an unsettling that is also an un/holding, a release of self from its entrapment within property into an alternate intimacy?
—J. Kameron Carter & Sarah Jane Cervenak, “Black Ether”
ether; n.
In ancient cosmological speculation: an element conceived as filling all space beyond the sphere of the moon, and being the constituent substance of the stars and planets and of their spheres.
Physics. An extremely rarefied and elastic substance formerly thought to permeate all space, including the interstices between the particles of ordinary matter.
Ether is the deregulated, simultaneously brute and ecstatic matter that buttresses the world as we know it.
—J. Kameron Carter & Sarah Jane Cervenak, “Black Ether”
ether. aspirate. ether.
Even as it is exhausted and arrested and even as the state finds ways to mythicize black creativities as ever-present death-bound potentialities, the ether of blackness countermythically moves alongside wounded black flesh as the safe house and harbor at world’s end. Put differently, blackness’s very deregulatedness, its alchemical and metaphysical play with earth, wind, and fire, always enabled and ended the world as we know it.
—J. Kameron Carter & Sarah Jane Cervenak, “Black Ether”
to fill (the space between)
ix.
ether
Where breathless escape undulates into an alternate rhythm of inhalation and exhalation, an otherwise communion or sanctum of sound, para-hymns of another way.
—J. Kameron Carter & Sarah Jane Cervenak, “Black Ether”
ether
Ether and the sea.
—J. Kameron Carter & Sarah Jane Cervenak, “Black Ether”
x.
I dare not linger here
xi.
breathing
Imagination is necessary for thinking and breathing into the capacities of infinite alternatives.
—Ashon Crawley, BlackPentecostal Breath