still really thinking about the fugitive as one running backwards.
like i love that idea that now i'm running backwards
and taking all the things i don't want lost into the future with me —

Ei. Jane

From here forward, we consider the archive. We are here in a future history, a past tomorrow, a present tense. Regardless of how one chooses to calibrate their time — linear, cyclical, multidimensional — we cannot refute we are living in ubiquitous trajectories. Call that unknown whatever you need: a peace, a void, a heaven, another chance, a returning. If we can name Death, plainly here for a moment.—the material end of the act—it feels impossible to consider it with any sort of justice. How it is projected on the Black, the Queer, the Femme & divine & relentless. There is no conspiracy but centuries of language being undone. Black Queer art gutted & skinned. Black women’s labor suckled barren. The fatigue of declaring yourself human against deadly familial prejudice. The Black queer subject as Ei. Jane illuminates via Fred Moten, is fugitive (under the surveillance / policing within & outside of community) & the trajectory is not necessarily away but in recovery. This positions of fugitivity as a migration archive. The question returns: so what of the future?

If the present is any indicator, the renaissance of Black Queer & Trans visibility is finding its ways into lasting canons of popular culture. The “margins,” as diversity conversations love to romanticize, seems to be an increasingly archaic language for the narratives of the formerly silenced now finally burgeoning forth with hopeless abandon. The margins have been burned down & it’s gone viral & now it's a meme. Your Margin Crush Monday could never. Visibility, however, is nothing in this economy without consumption.

Before wrapping up with Michell’e, I asked her about this shift in visibility & what it means for our culture. She summarized it perfectly: We’ve always been in the background. We have stories on stories behind us. Times are changing & the girls are finally getting their graces. Pop culture changes & I think it’s amazing that everybody gets a chance when people live out loud…that’s when the lines will change. ’Cause it’s alway been us. We just haven’t gotten our recognition. It’s going to take people in the public eye to continue to be open & honest & give credit where credit is due. Artists are not recognized till they're fucking dead & that’s a problem.

So we return to Death, not as an end of the pursuit, but another cost of such a feat. Trying to change the future as some grand social project acts like a weather pattern in a void. Consider the liminal aspect of our lives reason to pour the most magnificent into it. To create in the Romantic requires abandon of many material fears for the vitality of being. We as the Black queer find the best way to slouch toward that excellence.