The alternative is endorsing a praxis of “wake work” as a means to attend to black life in the aftermaths and ongoing subjections of slavery and captivity. The analytic of wake work ruptures the normative conceptions of black life, the “scraps of the archive”, and transforms it into a new orthography, one that is not predicated upon the hold of the slave ship.

If, as I have so far suggested, we think the metaphor of the wake in the entirety of its meanings (the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness) and we join the wake with work in order that we might make the wake and wake work our analytic, we might continue to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery’s afterlives, to survive (and more) the afterlife of property. In short, I mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives. With that analytic we might imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery. Dionne Brand does this wake work as she imagines otherwise in Verso 55, a verso in which she not only revisits A Map to the Door of No Return’s imagining of diaspora consciousness’s relation to that door as mythic and real location but also imagines an encounter between the returned from diaspora and those who were held in the cells of the forts.25 She imagines those who were held, reconfiguring—coming back together in wonder—the traces of their former selves rising up in greeting. Here the ancestors are like Marie Ursule, who, in At the Full and Change of the Moon, reanimates those Ursuline nuns who were her enslavers for the purpose of looking after her daughter Bola whom she dreams into a, into the, future. In Verso 55, Brand imagines that with the entrance of the pilgrims those who were held reconstitute from where they “lay in their corners, on their disintegrated floors, they lay on their wall of skin dust,” and stand to greet them; the ancestors, the only gods we had, their traces so much dust and haunt in those holding rooms. With these words Brand produces into the wake other than the “production of nothing—empty rooms, and silence, and lives reduced to waste”; she imagines other uses for “the scraps of the archive” (Hartman 2008, 4).26 Brand, like Hartman, encounters these rooms, this pain of and in the archive, but those rooms are not empty, and though the scraps of cotton, new world slave crop, may in fact be insufficient to our needs and to theirs, they are what we have to offer. And those dwellers of the rooms who had no thoughts of visitors, could not know, but might imagine, that anything, any part, of them would survive the holding, the shipping, the water, and the weather, drink those visitors in like violet tea and lemon air. Verso 55 is filled with the knowledge that this holding, these deaths, that shipping ought never to have happened, and with that knowledge and “the scraps of the archive” Brand imagines something that feels completely new. The rooms are not empty and the scraps are what we have to offer. But even if those Africans who were in the holds, who left something of their prior selves in those rooms as a trace to be discovered, and who passed through the doors of no return did not survive the holding and the sea, they, like us, are alive in hydrogen, in oxygen; in carbon, in phosphorous, and iron; in sodium and chlorine. This is what we know about those Africans thrown, jumped, dumped overboard in Middle Passage; they are with us still, in the time of the wake, known as residence time. They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen. (Brand 2015) Brand does this in A Map to the Door of No Return as well, particularly with her “Ruttier for the Marooned in Diaspora,” which bristles with her refusal to think return, her dislodging of belonging, and her hard insisting on the facts of displacement and the living in and as the displaced of diaspora. NourbeSe Philip does this in Zong! through her destruction of the archive in order to tell “the story that cannot be told” but must still be told (Saunders 2008a, 65). We must be (and we already are) about the work of what I am calling wake work as a theory and praxis of the wake; a theory and a praxis of Black being in diaspora. I am trying to find the language for this work, find the form for this work. Language and form fracture more every day. I am trying, too, to find the words that will articulate care and the words to think what Keguro Macharia (2015) calls those “we formations.” I am trying to think how to perform the labor of them. Or what Tinsley (2008, 191) calls a “feeling and a feeling for” and what Glissant ([1995] 2006, 9) refers to as “knowing ourselves as part and as crowd.” This is what I am calling wake work. With Brand and Philip, I want to sound this language anew, sound a new language. Thinking, still, with Brand and Philip, who demand, always, a new thinking, I want to distinguish what I am calling Black being in the wake and wake work from the work of melancholia and mourning.27 And though wake work is, at least in part, attentive to mourning and the mourning work that takes place on local and trans*local and global levels, and even as we know that mourning an event might be interminable, how does one mourn the interminable event? Just as wake work troubles mourning, so too do the wake and wake work trouble the ways most museums and memorials take up trauma and memory. That is, if museums and memorials materialize a kind of reparation (repair) and enact their own pedagogies as they position visitors to have a particular experience or set of experiences about an event that is seen to be past, how does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are unfolding still? How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing? Might we instead understand the absence of a National Slavery Museum in the United States as recognition of the ongoingness of the conditions of capture? Because how does one memorialize the everyday? How does one, in the words so often used by such institutions, “come to terms with” (which usually means move past) ongoing and quotidian atrocity? Put another way, I’m interested in ways of seeing and imagining responses to terror in the varied and various ways that our Black lives are lived under occupation; ways that attest to the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, and despite Black death. And I want to think about what this imagining calls forth, to think through what it calls on “us” to do, think, feel in the wake of slavery—which is to say in an ongoing present of subjection and resistance; which is to say wake work, wake theory. I want, too, to distinguish what I am calling and calling for as care from state-imposed regimes of surveillance.28 How can we think (and rethink and rethink) care laterally, in the register of the intramural, in a different relation than that of the violence of the state? In what ways do we remember the dead, those lost in the Middle Passage, those who arrived reluctantly, and those still arriving? To quote Gaston Bachelard, whom I arrived at through Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s “Heavy Waters,” “water is an element ‘which remembers the dead’” (DeLoughrey 2010, 704). What, then, are the ongoing coordinates and effects of the wake, and what does it mean to inhabit that Fanonian “zone of non-Being” within and after slavery’s denial of Black humanity?29 Inhabiting here is the state of being inhabited/occupied and also being or dwelling in. In activating the multiple registers of “wake,” I have turned to images, poetry, and literature that take up the wake as a way toward understanding how slavery’s continued unfolding is constitutive of the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, and material dimensions of Black non/being as well as Black aesthetic and other modes of deformation and interruption. That set of work by Black artists, poets, writers, and thinkers is positioned against a set of quotidian catastrophic events and their reporting that together comprise what I am calling the orthography of the wake. The latter is a dysgraphia of disaster, and these disasters arrive by way of the rapid, deliberate, repetitive, and wide circulation on television and social media of Black social, material, and psychic death. This orthography makes domination in/visible and not/visceral. This orthography is an instance of what I am calling the Weather; it registers and produces the conventions of antiblackness in the present and into the future. A reprise and an elaboration: Wakes are processes; through them we think about the dead and about our relations to them; they are rituals through which to enact grief and memory. Wakes allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the dead through ritual; they are the watching of relatives and friends beside the body of the deceased from death to burial and the accompanying drinking, feasting, and other observances, a watching practiced as a religious observance. But wakes are also “the track left on the water’s surface by a ship (figure 1.4); the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water; the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow; in the line of sight of (an observed object); and (something) in the line of recoil of (a gun)”; finally, wake means being awake and, also, consciousness. In the wake, the semiotics of the slave ship continue: from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and the refugee, to the regulation of Black people in North American streets and neighborhoods, to those ongoing crossings of and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, to the brutal colonial reimaginings of the slave ship and the ark; to the reappearances of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school. As we go about wake work, we must think through containment, regulation, punishment, capture, and captivity and the ways the manifold representations of blackness become the symbol, par excellence, for the less-than-human being condemned to death. We must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work; think the ways the hold cannot and does not hold even as the hold remains in the form of the semiotics of the slave ship hold, the prison, the womb, and elsewhere in and as the tension between being and instrumentality that is Black being in the wake. At stake is not recognizing antiblackness as total climate. At stake, too, is not recognizing an insistent Black visualsonic resistance to that imposition of non/being. How might we stay in the wake with and as those whom the state positions to die ungrievable deaths and live lives meant to be unlivable? These are questions of temporality, the longue durée, the residence and hold time of the wake. At stake, then is to stay in this wake time toward inhabiting a blackened consciousness that would rupture the structural silences produced and facilitated by, and that produce and facilitate, Black social and physical death. For, if we are lucky, we live in the knowledge that the wake has positioned us as no-citizen.30 If we are lucky, the knowledge of this positioning avails us particular ways of re/seeing, re/inhabiting, and re/imagining the world. And we might use these ways of being in the wake in our responses to terror and the varied and various ways that our Black lives are lived under occupation. I want In the Wake to declare that we are Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black death: to think and be and act from there. It is my particular hope that the praxis of the wake and wake work, the theory and performance of the wake and wake work, as modes of attending to Black life and Black suffering, are imagined and performed here with enough specificity to attend to the direness of the multiple and overlapping presents that we face; it is also my hope that the praxis of the wake and wake work might have enough capaciousness to travel and do work that I have not here been able to imagine or anticipate.