Will Magazine
Torie Crivello
As a Black masc genderqueer lesbian, to turn away from this evidence of imperial violence would be to turn away from Sandra Bland, from Mike Brown, from Tamir Rice, from the anti-Black state violence that has, on digital display, taken hundreds of young Black lives over the last decade.
Instead, my faith will reach out to touch your face sweetly, like my wife Alana once touched mine. Our terrorized bodies will find resonance in protest and will find armor in our congregational acts of public mourning. Together, in the millions and in every country, we will build a new demographic: the grievers. And we bereaved will remind those who seek to disenfranchise our loss, confiscate our hope, and weaponize our identity: We will rise from rubble, we will dance like the dust. Wherever our love is, there will be living, after all.
there are decades
that shatter everything you are
collapse it, stomach to back
till the three dimensions it once was
now fit, flat onto the page
maybe our children will read the story of us
maybe one day our children
those who survive the 21st century
will read that there were years littered with human longing
loss stretched across the memory
exponential
a shadow over 3,650 afternoons
shade from an unbearable blinding,
an unbearably binding truth
this artery of land where my memory is sunless, hungry and alone
or, a trial that always finds me guilty,
insufficient
weaker than I meant to be
I follow it, then, through back streets and alleyways
back to the moon in your eyes
and am reminded, again
if you wondering what I been up to
if you came to ask after me
I been a crescent moon
defended against the soft night
I been a world war
training for freedom
for that day when hope and history align
when dead languages let me speak to you again
alive
but I will not pick up the parts of myself
discarded by disease and distorted relations of power
I leave my loving on the ground
plant it like old seed in new earth
my memory will unpave the streets
my love will carry on the wind
Then, on the morning of May 5, a video of the killing, filmed by a friend of the McMichaels, hit the internet like a plume of tear gas. The video lifted the shroud of invisibility from the case. It made it impossible for the world not to see Ahmaud.
Ahmaud continued working out in the years after high school and running whenever he could. He dreamed of opening up a karate dojo with his father, Marcus Arbery Sr.; of rapping with his cousins; of training to be an electrician like his uncles. He had enrolled in South Georgia Technical College to start his electrician training this fall.
As it first began to spread across America, the pandemic actually helped obscure the crime committed against Ahmaud. It helped him further disappear. As his mother and the community tried to find answers, they also had to contend with the sudden complication of sheltering in place. And they had to push harder to discover the truth in a country that seemed under too much duress to care about one Black death in Georgia.
In an ironic twist, the void and despair brought by the pandemic have accelerated protests across the country and propelled people to the streets. Black people now must work out a lethal calculus: We must weigh the odds of contracting a deadly virus against the opportunity of standing up to another terror that could continue ravaging us for generations.
Mere moments before he died, Ahmaud ventured into an unfinished eggshell-white home on Satilla Drive. The security footage will be shown ad nauseam until the trial is over, because nothing paints a picture of a Black man deserving to die like seeing him on a black-and-white surveillance video. The video will point to the fact that Ahmaud appears to be trespassing, which means he was a Black man who technically broke the law. Never mind that the security camera also captured instances when white children and a white couple ventured inside that house. Never mind that nothing was ever taken from that house. Never mind that the owner of that house himself said he figured Ahmaud was stopping by for water on his run.
Will Rawls excavates edges and bolsters breakdowns. He is a choreographer who makes dances but also uses choreographic thinking and dance to reconstitute what it means to make videos, sculptures, installations, and prints. He creates works where bodies slip out from taxonomies, genres reveal their underbellies, and spectators reperceive the relationship between labor and performance under racial capitalism.
His newest work, [siccer] (2023), is an ensemble performance and accompanying expanded cinema installation that uses stop-motion animation to examine how lens-based medias capture and circulate Black movement, simultaneously evoking the ways that Black movement evades capture and slips out from circulation. [siccer] is taking shape over a series of institutional iterations and simultaneous installs, premiering this past spring at The Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago. It will continue this fall at On The Boards in Seattle and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.
EP The green screens, for example. In the installation, there are the video monitors displaying moving images, but then around them there are a profusion of green screens, a kind of fragmented monochrome of green canvases that imply the green screen as a technical object but also seem to imply more. How do green screens signify for you? What are your associations with green?
Ethan Philbrick is a cellist, artist, and writer. His book Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence was recently published by Fordham University Press. He is currently a curator-in-residence at The Poetry Project and teaches at The New School, Wesleyan University, and Yale University.
JoeWait. (pause) George saw some deer last night. No turkeys, though. (pause) So how do you come to terms with narrative structure in your relation to the shattering of language, and the creation of meaning? The two seem somehow at odds, which is probably the most exciting thing about it. Do you see narrative, in play form, as somehow like a body?
Will McCarren Park. He was cheating, Joe. He kept calling all my shots out, and they were like five inches in. He had an unbelievable serve, though. He kept screaming his own name. Just really wound up.
Will Yeah, not really. In these hectic times, no one would really stand for a 57-hour-long shot of a guy in a chair at a desk, occasionally getting up and going somewhere and then coming back. I would like to see it just because I think deeply boring people are under-represented in films and television. Not in the theater, though, generally.
Joe Thanks. (to Will) So right to it. Do you remember that series of short plays you were working on a bunch of years ago? They were really, really short, just long enough for the curtain to go up. Once it was up, wait a beat; then it came down. The play was to be a series of images on the stage. One was a person in an office eating Chinese food, then the curtain came down, then back up to show two people kissing, curtain down, then up, and you had a bicycle lying there with one wheel spinning. Right? Stuff like that?
Joe Sola has recently exhibited at the LA Hammer Museum and at SFMOMA. He will be in the upcoming Hard Targets: Masculinity and Contemporary American Sports at the LA County Museum. He is working a book, Shopping with my Wife in Los Angeles, with the Paris-based publisher One Star Press, and is represented by Bespoke Gallery in New York.
And then I watched him lie about the dog shut in the upstairs bedroom. I watched his fear when I stood on the stairwell to move my suitcase from his path. I watched his panicked insistence that I stay closed in the office bedroom from midnight until dawn whenever I slept over.
I have learned certain things have power. Uncle taught me this, not explicitly, but through example. Midnight has power in the West: it is the witching hour, the time of night when ghosts are most powerful. It is the time when Uncle and I are in our rooms and there are footsteps in the hall and down the stairs.
I want to open the door, but I have always been told not to. I am afraid to open it, to warn Uncle away from what he must know, even better than me, is coming slowly and inexorably closer. I wish now that I knew the old stories of witchcraft that Uncle transcribes himself. I wish I had not thought I would never need such information, or even, when I first heard the stories, that they were the rickety beliefs of the old, the foolish, and the ignorant. I want the protection of something, and I want my uncle to be safe.
I tell myself Uncle is fine, and then I tell myself I am a bad liar, that the silence is too heavy to be natural, and that the next unnatural silence will come from me. The footsteps have stopped completely, but still I wait. I count to thirty, to fifty, to seventy-five, before knowing Uncle could really be hurt overpowers my cowardice. I open the door fully conscious of the hairs rising on the back of my neck and the goosebumps prickling my arms. The sound of the beads scritching over the wooden door does nothing to soothe my nerves. Outside my room it is dark, but the light over the stairwell is on. I poke my head over the threshold and feel the beads from the lintel sliding cool on the back of my neck.
With a snap like a rubber band or a sparked synapse, I am outside myself. I feel nothing. I think I must go somewhere, but I do not know or care where that place is. I only know my body is walking away from me, out of the kitchen and into the living room, and I feel nothing about this but mild curiosity: why am I not inside my body? A knife hangs casually from the hand that was mine. I wonder what it is for.
I have spent much of my life waiting. Much of my life thinking. There is little living to do without a body to do it with. There have been three long waits in my life, before and after my death. I dwell on my memories, review them, pick at them like wounds made to fester and seethe. I replay my life and my rage, and the memories give me strength to finish the task I have set for myself: I will kill my Baba.
c80f0f1006