Earl’s grief: in defense of the dead

by Vusumzi Nkomo

A still of the artist from the video

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“/I just want to be of use to my ancestors/“ -- Abbey Lincoln

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Bra Willie’s absence in Thebe’s life makes an appearance in the film//video, as grief in/as mourning.Bra Willie, a once-deracinated-being-returned-home, as object of ‘defense’, deserving of defense, he

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Bra Willie’s projection/portrayal as something to be mourned, an object of “wake work”1, to be tend/ed to, as a subject of umlindo, a /sometimes/ nocturnal vigil, his casket sits isolated tho, stuffed with snow-white armless wrinkled hands of men too many to count without losing your mind.

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Impilo isesandleni.

From Ear Sweatshirt's Nowhere Nobody

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An ageing Black man, composed, grey-haired black/ened face, right eye open & compo$ed, eye piercing thru the white nothingness. An ageing Black man, composed, stands in-place of Bra Willie. Bra Willie, Son of the Soil, appears as the soil upon which this/the greenery foliage forming, that is to say growing, actually grows. He is shown, seen. The leaves are removed, thus unburdening him, thru the twin hands-as-implement [first held by Thebe & then by a young unidentifiable Black womxn].

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. . .ebe as embalmer; Kgositsile-senior embalmed. [an attempt to painstakingly repair fractured Black kinship ties as a necessary pre-condition for any ethical black social-political life]. Bra Willie’s body is smeared messily from halfway thru in his back with a powdery-white water-color-esque substance leaving his face Black + untouched, a process that might pass easily as the ancient embalmment practice meant to preserve [a corpse] from imminent decay, originally with natural spices [the green leaves?]. It would be interesting to note that an archaic meaning of embalm is to give a pleasant fragrance to something.

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nowhere nobody 2. No-where, No-body. Though a prominent literary figure in the Black diasporic cultural cross-continental movement in exile, he remained a citizen of no-where, no-fixed-abode kinda’ no-whereness,a scribbling runaway hobo, an existence of ‘geen’ guarantees, absence of cartographic integrity. to un-exist, Nowhere. Such was the life of Bra Willie, the life of Black people. A Black No-body, an open vulnerability to all violences; to be preceded and exceeded by such gratuitousness. To be in a no-body that magnetizes phobias and all sorts of pathologies. However, the supreme political imperative is one that 1) resists the discarding of our bodies to Nowhere and to find a Somewhere& defend it, and 2) to condemn the ‘thingification’ of our bodies to no-bodies.

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“Sitting (together) in the pain” (Sharpe 2016). To wallow in the sorrow. For Bra Willie, for all Black deaths and lives & things he gave life to. To do so in service of memory-ing, of remembering, as this “visualsonic resistance” project by Thebe does. “Bend we don’t break”, Thebe raps. Ethics and politics of care.

1. See Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: onBlackness and being

2. Earl Sweatshirt, “Nowhere Nobody”, available on YouTube.