Ripples, Rhythms and Rapture 
 SOUNDING SPIRITUAL TECHNOLOGIES AS MARRONAGE ZARA JULIUS 
 
 (in partial fulfilment of a Master of Art in Fine Arts under the supervision of Donna Kukama) University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg School of  Art (WSOA) SENATE PLAGIARISM POLICY Declaration by Students   I, Zara Julius (Student number: 538968) am a student registered for a MAFA in the year 2018.  
 I hereby declare the following: • I am aware that plagiarism (the use of someone else’s work without their permission and/ or without acknowledging the original source) is wrong. • I confirm that ALL the work submitted for assessment for the above course is my own unaided work except where I have explicitly indicated otherwise. • I have followed the required conventions in referencing the thoughts and ideas of others. • I understand that the University of the Witwatersrand may take disciplinary action against me if there is a belief that this in not my own unaided work or that I have failed to acknowledge the source of the ideas or words in my writing. •   Signature: Date: 28 May 2021 To Prof. Francis Nyamnjoh (for helping my politics find their words) & Great-granny “Manning” 
 (for reminding me that our namelessness and collective loss is not theoretical) 1 * The pages that follow are an offering to, and exploration of rituals of survival through waters and 
 
 across oceans; a survival that is not necessarily biological, but a survival of a 
 different kind. The survival of peoples, of consciousness, 
 spirit(s) and ritual that mutate along 
 sprawling networks and 
 journeys.
 2 3 4 mumbo jumbo 
 [Mandingo mā-mā-gyo-mbō, “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away”: mā-mā, grandmother+gyo, trouble+ mbō, to leave.] 
 From the Indian Ocean and Red Sea coasts of Africa, to the Pacific islands of Vanuatu and Hawaii, there lives a fish as big as a human. It is amongst the most powerful and populous in the sea. Despite its size, it is an astonishingly agile hunter both in and out of the water. Mostly solitary, this fish gathers amongst the southern archipelagos of Mozambique with others just like it for only a few weeks a year to embark on an extraordinary pilgrimage inland, to the Mtentu river in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This group of giant trevally are lead by their ‘king’ upstream into fresh waters. As if steadily seduced in a sermon, the demeanour of these fish trance-forms from determined hunters into faithful devotees; traveling to the very limits of their survival needs of water depth, temperature and salinity, and in response to an unknown cue, the fish stop swimming, and begin to circle. Like a group of whirling dervishes, these spiralling trevally appear to be entranced - a mysterious meditation of sorts that is said to serve no biological purpose such as feeding, courting or spawning. After about an hour of this necessary (though unexplainable) annual dance, the fish make their way back eastwards to resume their solitary lives hunting in the world’s warmer oceans. 5 THE IDEA OF SCRIPTURE Spiritual or religious texts are texts that belong to a spiritual or religious tradition. They offer a compilation or discussion of beliefs, mythologies, ritual practices, ethical considerations, and spiritual aspirations. They are enforced through community across generations, and in turn, they foster community. These texts also serve a ceremonial and liturgical role in their performance of time. Sacred texts are divinely inspired. Religious texts present us with narratives that are discursive in nature. 
 
 This text is both. 
 
 This text belongs to a (geographically and culturally) expanded conception of the Black Radical Tradition (Robinson, 1983) . It dances with and sings alongside many others - oral, aural, 1 performed, material, visual and written texts - that have emerged in the face of anti-black and anti-indigenous violence. Those texts that present necessarily syncretic, opaque (Glissant, 1990) and intricately networked possibilities beyond Blackness’ ongoing abjection. This text presents a 2 decidedly fragmented, yet collective utterance with the cries of centuries from Africa and its diaspora in the wake (Sharpe, 2016) of the impositions of domination and oppression brought by racial slavery and settler colonialism . This text performs a refracted mapping and imagining 3 through and across waters and polyrhythmic time; past, present, future, past continuous… Concerned with the (Black) spirit (Warren, 2017), this text is inspired by experiences of and 4 aspirations for rapture - both my own, and those of many others. It asks what it might look, feel and sound like if there was a radical sharing of these experiences, aspirations and strategies of This text is in line with Asher Gamedze’s (2018: 2) observation of “Africa’s epistemological absence in much of the 1 Black radical tradition, beyond minor essentialised and, at times, romanticised notions of an irretrievable source, a point of origin, or a site generally relegated to the past”. My working definition of Blackness loosely follows that of Steve Biko’s (1987) Black Consciousness ideals, in that it 2 takes on an expanded understanding of Blackness beyond the phenotype, and towards an understanding of Blackness as a mental attitude and political stance pertaining to those who have, by law or tradition, been politically, economically and socially discriminated against as a group. In the South African context, this would include folks racialised as ‘black African’, ‘coloured’ and ‘indian’ under the apartheid regime. My use of the term, however, is applied to a broader geographical context, and would in this instance include black and indigenous communities in the Americas, and those folk who have been on the receiving end of racialisation and dispossession (of land, culture, language, time, and human life), and whose mobility (geographic, economic and political) has been controlled or annexed by hegemonic groups and systems of power through slavery, imperialism and apartheids. In the Latin American context, this would not apply to white-tinos or those wholly profiting off the violence of settler generations. Similarly Afrikaaner communities in southern Africa — whilst technically “creole” — continue to benefit from racial imperialism and white supremacy. This expanded working definition develops Biko’s lament on the “fragmentation of the Black resistance” and thinks through a strategic lobbying of racialised persons who have, for generations, been reduced to units of labour and have reckoned with loss in manifold ways. Settler colonialism is an important analytical category in so far as it generated a crucible for explicit racialisation, 3 tribalisation, and categorisation of race and humanness, where colonial “subjects” are identified and racialised within broader constructions of racial and ethnic hierarchical structures with the enduring presence of whiteness, and its various forms of “decentralized despotism” in the present day (Mamdani, 1996). The use of the word spirit here is multilayered; the pneuma, pneumatology, the supernatural (Anderson, 1992), as well 4 as a reference to a paraontological conception of blackness that insists on the creative potentiality of blackness (Moten, 2003). 6 and for Black survival; a corporal and spiritual survival of the everyday in the context of historical trauma and coloniality in the global south. The scriptures and spiritual technologies presented in this text serve as brief vignettes of a significantly larger, ever-shifting network of enraptured experiences and improvisations engaged in a feedback loop across localities. They articulate brief moments in the ever-unfolding temporal world; propositions for breath and fugitivity. It is from an extended interest in Black spiritualisms, Black Liberation Theology, Black study (Harney & Moten, 2013), Pan-Africanist and post-colonial thought, accompanied by a sustained frustration with the lack of collaboration in the everyday across black human geographies (McKittrick, 2006) that this work arises. Following a nuanced 5 understanding of the many histories and experiences of unfreedom across the global south, this work traces the historical, cultural and spiritual commonalities amongst folks racialised and subjected to systemic oppression and dispossession. Rather than flattening history and situated phenomena, this transnational approach presents us with a site of spirited possibility towards a kind of collective fugitivity. Refer to ‘Un Santo Negro’ for an expanded exploration of ‘the work’.5 7 spirit /ˈspɪrɪt/ noun: spirit; plural noun: spirits 1. the non-physical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character; the soul; pneuma 2. the non-physical part of a person regarded as their true self and as capable of surviving physical death, separation or dislocation. 3. the non-physical part of a person regarded as their true self and as capable of surviving political death 4. an esoteric entity that reveals itself to us and evades scientific and metaphysical captivity; it precedes and exceeds ontology 5. a supernatural being 6. strong distilled alcoholic drink, such as those used for libation 7. creative potentiality in social life verb: spirit; 3rd person present: spirits; past tense: spirited; past participle: spirited; gerund or present participle: spiriting 1. convey rapidly and secretly. This text is to be used and respected as the handbook and grimoire of a high priestess and diviner; she who is both a teacher and a student. She who acts as media(tion) between a world of suffering imposed by history, and a world beyond ‘the wake’ (Sharpe, 2016) of gratuitous violence (Wilderson, 2010). She who, reaching beyond what we can name, selectively and intentionally facilitates this reaching for others. Some of the tools for this facilitated ‘reaching’ can be found at the priestess’ botanica , and experienced through her mpoho . The priestess insists on the 6 7 animation of a spiritual terrain, where spiritual movements exceed the locomotive and philosophical constraints of coloniality. We know, now, where the priestess situates her practice. But I have yet to detail how she situates herself. How does one describe the practice of a medium who, in part, operates according to the laws of opacity and concealment? It is my hope that her apparitions throughout this text will do this work. 
 It must not be assumed that all who study this text (and the numerous texts within it) can/will reach rapture - the ontological outside (The Black Outdoors, 2016) - or even decode the spirit (Warren, 2018). Rapture is evasive. Ephemeral. And though the spirit moves through the flesh, it is not in the flesh. It cannot be quantified. This liturgical text is accompanied by a hymn book of ecstatic songs to be engaged throughout this offering. The intended recipients of this tradition 8 will know how these songs are sung. You and your forebears would have sung these songs, and many like them, for generations before this moment A retail store that sells folk medicine, religious candles and statuary, amulets, and other products regarded as magical 6 or as alternative medicine. These stores are common in many Latin American countries and communities elsewhere. Mpoho is a ritual prayer song in the Zion Christian Church musical tradition which is normally sung when there are 7 issues that need to be addressed by the church (Lebeloane & Madise, no date). Unlike hymns and choruses, mpoho are not derived from missionary Christian tradition. Their musical and non-semantic textural structure are a deliberate introduction of Pedi tradition into the Church (Vít Zdrálek, 2015: 174). This hymn book is to be read along the lines of Tina Campt’s (2017) Listening to Images where the sonic resonance of 8 each hymn is foregrounded in front of any formal visual analysis. It asks that you attune your senses to the other affective frequencies through which these hymns may register. 8 “Flight generally entails borders. Whether prison walls, plot boundaries, or borders between states, being fugitive implies that borders have been and/or are still to be overcome. One might assume that flight ends when the borders that stood between the captive and their freedom have been successfully crossed. Enslaved African Americans frequently fled their enslavers and legal owners in North America to gain freedom by, for instance, crossing the demarcating lines between slave plantation and the wilderness or the Mason-Dixon Line, the Ohio River, and the borders to Canada and Mexico into ‘free’ territory. However, with legislation such as the Fugitive Slave Acts, a fugitive slave remained retrievable property even in the supposedly ‘Free North’ so that freedom for a fugitive slave in nineteenth century North America was only a constrained form of freedom, if the term applies at all.” (von Gleich, 2017) Preaching to the choir If you are a member of the choir, then this particular sermon is not news to you. If you are a member of the choir, then in all fairness, you need not read this section. There is nothing written in the English language that can comprehensively or compassionately articulate the many forms and varieties of unfreedom. Yet all religious texts present us with at least one origin story of sorts. And so to remain true to the form, I must comply. 
 The emergence and construction of racial thinking in Western civilisation did not develop only at Europe’s contact with non-European peoples. From its inception, racism emerged as a material force categorising, first, the "internal" relations of European peoples. Here, the construction of race had social and ideological consequences in the organisation of labour under early capitalism that eventually spread far beyond the confines of feudal Europe with the imperial project. Racism operated as a convention in the pursuit of the evolution, organisation and expansion of both capitalist society and of the social structures that emerged from capitalism; accelerating with Europe’s eventual colonial encounters with Africa and the Americas (Robinson, 1983: 2-3). In Black Marxism, Robinson (2006: 2) describes this process as “racial capitalism”; a process with an enduring and prevailing “historical agency”. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, Blackness and race have constituted the very heart of the expansion of the project of modernity. Here, the construction of race - the fictitious wielding of skin and colour — as a “foundational category that is at once material and phantasmic” (Mbembe, 2017: 2) set centuries of massacre, psychic devastation, displacement, and dispossession in motion for those racialised and colonised against the hegemonic categories of whiteness, Europeanness and modernity. 
 A marked moment of this project is apparent in the Atlantic slave trade; a long history of European contact with Africa that crossed both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck established the Cape Colony at the Cape of Good Hope, where the Dutch East India Company (VOC) introduced the slavery and Forced Labour Model. From 1653 until 1822, enslaved persons were introduced into the Dutch settler-colony agricultural economy. Whilst many of the initially enslaved were from indigenous Khoikhoi and San societies, the Dutch bought enslaved persons from ships traveling from Madagascar, Angola, Indonesia, Mozambique and the Indian subcontinent once those indigenous populations were largely diminished. Whilst some of these slave ships had the Cape Colony as their final destination, majority of these ships did not belong to the VOC and were run by other European colonial empires that merely docked and traded in the Cape en route to colonies in the Americas and Caribbean. This expanded geographic network of forced migration, land dispossession and racial capitalism laid the initial groundwork for the racial violence and continued dispossessions carried out by the apartheid regime that would follow, and the exploitative and racialised migrant labour system that endures in contemporary South Africa that mirror legacies of racial subjugation in the Americas. Whilst South Africa was one of the few settler colonies on the African continent, similar processes of enslavement, forced 9 migration and violence occurred throughout central and west Africa; transporting enslaved Africans to the Americas, establishing European settler (plantation and extraction) colonies and in many cases, devastating indigenous American and Caribbean populations as a result of the introduction of European diseases, massacres and arduous forced labour. 
 Of course, the Atlantic slave trade could not have taken place without the relative cooperation, or complicity, of many Africans. However it is through the slave trade and settler-colonialism that men and women from Africa were transformed into human-objects, labouring bodies, human- cargo and human-money (ibid: 2); ‘kaffir’, ‘negro’, ‘nigger’, ‘savage’. It is through European colonial encounters in Africa and the Americas, and the construction of race and Blackness that Africans, indigenous folk and their descendants were and still are deprived of their own names , 9 lands, and languages. Here Africa in general, and Blackness in particular were constructed as the ‘heart of darkness’ - void of the human, categorised by (no)thingness and capital. To be Black was to be a nonperson from a juridical, economic and socio-political standpoint. 
 As stated by Mbembe, “it would be a mistake to believe that we have left behind the regime that began with the slave trade and flourished in plantation and extraction colonies” (2017: 13). The production of Blackness was, and continues to be the production of a “social link of subjection and a body of extraction” (ibid: 18); an exploitable object, relegated to the domain of generational suffering, from which the maximum amount of profit is extracted. Space and place in the settler post-colony are accentuated by racist paradigms of the past and their ongoing hierarchical patterns. Whilst the implications of slavery, settler colonialism and coloniality (Mignolo, 2000) are vastly different in the diaspora and the African continent, I would argue for similarities between the contemporary Black diasporic experience(s) and the Black experiences in settler-postcolonies like South Africa, where black dispossession and ancestral, geographical, temporal and intergenerational displacement and dislocation endures beyond the colonial moment. The transnationalisation of the Black condition was a formative moment for Western modernity, with the ocean as its incubator (Mbembe, 2017: 15). Whilst colonisation is supposed to be a question of the past, the world continues to go through the globalisation and reinforcement of “a civilization system that has coloniality [and capitalist expansion] as its basis” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016: 1). Consequently, in his Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality, Maldonado-Torres argues that we find ourselves in a “nexus of knowledge, power and being that sustains an endless war on specific bodies, cultures, knowledges, nature, and peoples” (2016 :2). It is this enduring neocolonial project of the modern Western world that Christina Sharpe refers to as “the ship”; a Enslaved persons across the diaspora were named with surnames of their slave-masters, or with the month in which 9 they were bought and sold. In the US, it is not uncommon to find African-descendants with the surname “Smith”, for example — the name of a prominent plantation owner. In South Africa, surnames like September and February are not uncommon amongst black creole communities that are locally referred to as ‘coloured’. “The slave names at the Cape were descriptive tags that constantly reminded householders of their slaves’ racial descent, origin, language, sometimes parenthood, but always their slave status” (South African History Online, 2019). 10 reminder and remainder of colonisation, the middle passage for those in the diaspora, and “a signifier of the im/possibility of Black life” under these conditions (2016: 46). Central to the formation of anti-black axioms and coloniality has been the negation that the lives of racialised persons comprise of interior worlds. Worlds in which we love, laugh and hold intimacy. Worlds in which we cultivate joy and life and spirit. Against this backdrop, humanness is made known through the refusal of Black life. 
 Stars in the ocean
 
 Moving beyond the political ontological focus of Afropessimism and the universal humanist assumptions of black optimism, the high priestess must engage blackness in a manner that abandons ontology in pursuit of the black spirit…a pursuit of the mystical. That which, for a glimmering moment, exists outside. In the beginning of Paul Taylor’s (2016: 1) book, “Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics”, he relays an eyewitness account from 1790 where, upon the arrival of a slave ship in the Dutch Gold Coast in Suriname, slaves were found to have etched stars in their hair. The account details the ways enslaved Africans, of various cultural and geographical backgrounds, had shaved their heads whilst in the hold, leaving patches of hair in the shapes of half moons and stars, with the help of a broken glass bottle (Thompson, 1962). Taylor explains how, despite the colonial attempts to strip the enslaved of their culture, and reduce Africans to ‘niggers’ in the project of racialisation, those in the hold of the ship built wholly new practices and life-worlds out of various old worlds. This human act of self-fashioning shared life demonstrates the irrepressible cultural vitality of those in the hold in the face of extreme dehumanisation; “a stylized barrier between [the enslaved] and the new social forces with which they would be forced to contend” (Taylor, 2016: 2). According to Taylor, it is these improvised moments of agency, beauty and meaning that present us with a bricolage of resistance . Taylor’s thinking on the formation of black aesthetics in the 10 African Diaspora provides a useful framework for looking at Black spiritualisms and the ritual 11 devices they employ; as that which emerges under the crucible of racialisation, as an assemblage Of course these moments of aesthetic improvisation are likely to have emerged out of practical necessity, such as 10 astronomical navigation for example. Everywhere in Black aesthetics, we are met with the ways function, necessity and survival emerge in beautiful ways. It is rare that aesthetics are simply aesthetics. The domain of the spiritual, sacred and religious in the global south has been conceptualised (through academia and 11 mission stations) according to a largely Eurocentric fundamentalist epistemological framework that intended to reconstruct landscapes and ideologies along its binary understandings of the world – tradition and culture set up against modernity and rationality. Africa, Latin America, African and Afro-diasporic spiritualities, all of which comprise of the subaltern side of the colonial difference, have continued to be written and circulated as necessarily alter – deviations from a Western norm and thus pertaining to a residual category (Shepherd & Haber, 2011). This entrenches the racial/ethnic hierarchy in the European/non-European divide, where Eurocentric forms of knowledge, modernisation, spirituality, and the cultural/ideological process tend to subordinate subalternised knowledge in Africa and the Americas (Grosfoguel, 2008: 10). 11 and entanglement at the point(s) of encounter with difference and violence, and indeed that which allows its bearers to traverse, survive and momentarily transcend the aftermath of this encounter. Following these same trajectories of encounter, genesis and acculturation are what cultural anthropologists, historians and theologians term ‘syncretic religions’. Those religious and spiritual formations that have emerged as the consequence of a dominant culture forcing its own religion on a culture of minority or less systemic power, so as to make it the official religion (Leopold & Jensen, 2004: 4-5). When considering the co-implication of missionary Christianity, slavery and colonial domination in Africa and the Americas, religious and cultural syncretism become improvised, oft-concealed, utterances of resistance, and an insistence on relevance; even if it is to newly birthed cultures, such as that created by those who shaved stars in their hair. It is in these moments - the carnival, the vigil, the maroon, the droster, the shrine, the revolt, the libation, the pilgrimage, the masquerade, the altar, the song, the dance - that we may consider survival strategy as spiritual technology , and find momentary rapture and briefly (trance)end the violence 12 of the everyday. This is the work. 
 This text is a response to Nyamnjoh’s (2017b) call for a “conviviality” that makes space for a reading of popular African, and Afro-diasporic ideas and experiences as legitimate, and “recognises the deep power of collective imagination and the importance of interconnections and nuanced complexities”. Advocating for the work of Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola, Nyamnjoh asks that we “drink from the cosmic gourd”, and “collapse the dichotomies...between nature and culture, the visible and invisible, tradition and modernity, Africa and Europe, gods, spirits, ghosts, animals and kindred creatures of the bushes, and humans”. Following from this, the high priestess insists on a praxis that, contrary to Eurocentric epistemology, does not discredit the collective The use of the term ‘spiritual technology’ here is an attempt to disrupt the binaries of language and coloniality; belief/12 reality, religion/science, primitive/civilised, polytheism/ monotheism; and acknowledge ritual practices as legitimate archives of knowledge and purpose. 12 RAPTURE rap·ture | \ ‘rap-cher \ noun
 1. an expression or manifestation of ecstasy or passion 2. a state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion 3. a mystical experience in which the spirit is exalted to a knowledge of 
 divine things imagination of the theological and the mystical . It is here, within the nectar of Tutuola’s “cosmic 13 gourd” that we may find a grammar to imagine an escape from anti-blackness and coloniality (even if a permanent escape is not possible). Indeed, this text demonstrates an engagement with the expanded possibilities afforded the high priestess and the diviner; decidedly undisciplined in their privileging mediumship over the primacy of medium. A resistance and affirmation of its own kind (Nyamnjoh, 2017b: 267). True to form, it offers both a compilation and discussion of mythologies , ritual practices, ethical considerations, 14 and spiritual aspirations. It asks how we, as African and Afro-diasporic folk “survive (and more) the afterlife of property” (Sharpe, 2016: 18). It explores the technologies and modalities of rapture, breath and fugitivity that embody an insistence on black survival(s) in Africa and the African diaspora (both at the juncture of colonial encounters, and in the contemporary age). 
 My practice is transdisciplinary. Given my background as a student of anthropology in the academy, part of this project is an engagement with the discipline and practice of anthropology, however it is not of anthropology. Nor is it pure comparative ethnography. Similarly, this project demonstrates an engagement with the expanded possibilities of (re)presentation afforded ‘the artist’ in the visual and sonic arts, as part of my practice has been as a photographer, filmmaker, object-maker and a vinyl deejay, but it is not wholly concerned with the specificity and primacy of medium. Instead, I am interested in how both my writing and aesthetic practice(s) may live decidedly undisciplined, too. The pairing of art and anthropology in this way challenges what Schneider and Wright (2010: 1) term the “iconophobia” & “chromophobia” within the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology - anthropology’s fear of both phenotypical & chromatic colour. Above all, I am concerned with the agency of what we might term, ‘the archive’, the ways it may be written through gesture and affect, and developing a type of on-going syncretic projective remembrance through various kinds of social practice. But of course, this is not really about me… 
 The priestess is a traveler who resists classification and the western epistemological foregrounding of binarised thinking, where the ‘rational’, ‘a priori’ is that which legitimises knowledge as true. She conducts her work behind a curtain of cowries; facilitating the deep listening of frequencies and waves, in sounds and plants and dreams and oceans. She asks, “what elicits rapture?” in communion with a congregation similarly in pursuit of flight. She is persistently caught by, in and with the groove. She resists the crass assumption that something ought to be exposed in order to be felt and understood. Her heart expands to the sound of the This is not to suggest that religious, mystical, and spiritual discourse is not, at times, saturated with anti-black 13 sentiment, but it is to suggest that we need additional grammars and lexical imaginations to counter these sediments and sentiments. The word ‘mythology’ is not used to discount the validity or weight of such stories. It is not to relegate the contents of 14 such narratives to the domain of belief. Rather it is used to refer to narratives that have endured time, and do the work of holding community. They are beyond belief. 13 clave, and her eyes swell with the waters of the oceans that lick multiple coasts on multiple continents. The priestess is a selector. Hers is the power of sound and frequency — not the music itself, but the music on the self. In the beginning was the sound, rhythm: Fuel for a kaleidophonic rapture steeped in improvisation, meditation, repetition, myth and ritual. This is the journey of the spirits, and their experiments remain in the listener affirming that creative energy is ancestral energy. She is a medium — a traveller between realms, dimensions, time signatures, and temporal realities. A media(tion) between this living world and a world beyond ‘the wake’. She is a child of the stars ; thinking herself and technologies through the senses as she mourns the various forms 15 of black death, and insists on Black life through these ineffable things we call joy, and rapture and flight 
 The high priestess is interested in the “though not absolutely”; those moments in which we improvise and imagine new algorithms of attending to Black life and Black suffering (Sharpe, 2016: 22) that allow us to rupture “the wake” through rapture, if only momentarily. She demands that we create space for these syncretised technologies to engage in a feedback loop through waters and across oceans on their own terms, according to their own internal logics. Consequently, this text is written in “the pursuit of endogeneity”, so as to avoid “the epistemology of alterity” (Adesina, 2011: 48). As defined by Adesina (ibid), endogeneity commits one to a centering of localised “discourses and experiences as the basis of one’s…work”. In critically engaging with the ways Africa and Latin America have been written, this text demonstrates a different project of ‘the subaltern’ through an obligation to co-production in an “intercorporeal and intersubjective endeavor” (Nyamnjoh, 2012: 86; Adesina, 2011: 98). The priestess asks, how might these improvisations provide fertile, ecstatic, immersive and legitimate archives (Taylor, 2003) from which we may imagine life differently? How might we listen to these improvised utterances?
 Furthermore, the priestess demands that we take seriously the constitutive force and ephemerality of the waters through which these technologies have, and continue to travel; rivers, bodies, oceans. These currents consume, hold, undo, refract and re-assemble. The ocean is According to the Waite-Rider deck of tarot cards, the high priestess is lead by (and shares) her intuition. She is the 15 “daughter of the stars” (Waite, 1909: 76) 14 
 “It’s like when [John] Coltrane, having been shown a transcription of his solo on ‘Chasin’ the Trane’, was unable to sight-read what he’d improvised. The beautiful distance between sound and the writing of sound requires a kind of faith…” (Moten, 2003: 60) saturated in both life and death. It is a zone of interdetermination, aquapelagic entanglement 16 and tidalectics . A generator of a transcultural pantheon of spirits. A space of interrelation 17 between the terrestrial and the subterranean; that which is under, outside and beyond complete grasp. Water transforms and transports. It remembers what we have forgotten, and sweeps it ashore.
 Coined by Philip Hayward, in the field of Island Studies, ‘aquapelago’ refers to an aggregation of marine and 16 terrestrial elements, in which aquatic ecologies are key to community livelihoods and senses of selves. Aquapelagic assemblages identify processes of transformation along aquatic spaces at the interface of human sociality and marine environments. (Hayward, 2012) Coined by Kamau Brathwaite, ‘tidalectics’ is an analytical methodology that aims to formulate an oceanic worldview, 17 reflective of the rhythmic fluidity of water and the unabated ebb and flow of the tides as governed by the moon. (Refer to ‘Sonic Tidalectics & Rhythmic Ruptures’ for a more in-depth exploration of the concept.) 15 
 16 
 Through looking at identity, Glissant embraces the necessity of complexities in the world, the “chaos-monde” (a multirelational world), acknowledging the ways structuralist attempts to categorise undermine the integrity of the whole. He insists, thus, that “we [must] demand the right to opacity” (1990: 189); an ethical assertion against imperialism and the fixities implied by colonial domination. He calls for the opaque, the irreducible, that which exceeds categories of identifiable difference in pursuit of a successful radical democratic project. In doing so, he asserts the proposition that individuals, and culture need not be exposed in ways that are easily identifiable and digestible. Glissant’s ideal of opacity, or the refusal to be a single being, embraces ambiguity, ambivalence, and the opaque as a form of resistance in the simultaneous acts of revealing and concealing. 
 SOME OF THE MANY NAMES OF THE MOTHER WATER SPIRIT 18 Mawu-Lisu (sometimes seen as an aspect of Mami Wata)  Benin Yemonjá (or Yemanjá; becoming popularly identified with the spirit)  Brazil Kuitikuiti, Mboze, Makanga, Bunzi, Kambizi  Republic of the Congo Mohana, Madre de agua ("Mother of Water")  Colombia Yemanya (or Yemaya; becoming popularly identified with the spirit)  Cuba La Sirène ("The Mermaid"), Madame Poisson ("Mistress Fish"), Mamba Muntu  Democratic Republic of the Congo Maman de l'Eau ("Mother of the Water"), Maman Dlo, Mama Glo  Dominica Mamy Wata  Guinea Mamadilo  French Guiana Maame Water  Ghana Mamadjo  Grenada Maman de l'Eau, Maman Dlo  Guadeloupe Watramama  Guyana Zulu: Mamlambo; Ndebele: NoMlambo  South Africa La Sirène, La Baleine ("The Whale"; a Rada loa that is a cross between La Sirène and Erzulie Balianne); (Erzulie and Simbi are also identified with La Sirène)  Haiti River Mumma, River Mama, River Maiden  Jamaica Lamanté (A probable distortion of the name "Lamantin" which is the French name for the manatee, animal on which Van Stipriaan suggested she may be based. That animal gave its name to a town of Martinique, Le Lamentin...), Manman Dlo, Maman Dilo  Martinique Maman de l'Eau, Maman Dlo  Netherlands Antilles Igbo: Mmuommiri ("Lady of the waters"), Edo: Obanamen/Oba n'amen ("King/Queen of the waters"), Yoruba: Yemoja, Ibibio/Efik: Ndém  Nigeria Watermama, Watramama  Suriname Maman de l'Eau, Mama Dlo, Maman Dglo, Maman Dlo, Mama Glow  Trinidad and Tobago Mami Wata is directly translated to mean ‘Mother Water’. Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in African and Its 18 Diasporas was an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum for African Art in 2009. It explored the world of water deities and demonstrates how art bot reflects and actively contributes to belief, religious practices, and globalisation of the water goddess. https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/mamiwata/intro.html 17 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yemonj%C3%A1&action=edit&redlink=1 https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/mamiwata/intro.html Tio Guachupecito - Leonor González Mina (2000)
 18 En los ríos del litoral pacifico, hay un pez negro largo y flaco llamado guachupe. A todo negro largo y flaco le dicen guachupe y por cariño lo nombran guachupecito, Todo negro viejo es tío y todo negro joven sobrino.   El tío Guachupecito va subiendo por el rió, con su recatón y su palanca empujando su canoa, Cuando los sobrinos que están en la orilla, Le alcanzan a ver y le gritan...   Tio Guachupecito, siéntese, siéntese, siéntese Paraíto nada más, hay sobrinos, Paraíto nada más, hay sobrinos, Paraíto nada más. . . . 
 
 En el cielo pintan santos, yo también quiero pintar, pintar a un santo negro, y hoy lo vamos a celebrar.   Hay pintajaron, hay pintajaron, hay pintajaron, hay pintajaron. . . .
 Hay celebrar hay celebrar, hay celebrar… *English translation In the rivers of the Pacific coast, there is a long, skinny black fish called guachupe, All of the long and skinny dark skinned men are called guachupe, and they affectionately call them guachupecito, All black old men are uncles and all the black youth are nephews.   Uncle Guachupecito goes up stream by the river, with his pick and lever, he pushes the canoe. When the nephews who are on the shore, see him in time and they shout ...   Uncle Guachupecito, sit down, sit down, sit down I'll just stand a bit, oh nephews I'll just stand a bit, oh nephews I'll just stand a bit, (and) nothing more. . . . They paint saints in heaven, I also want to paint, to paint a black saint, And today we're going to celebrate.   Oh they painted, oh they painted, oh they painted, oh they painted . . . 
 Oh they celebrated, oh they celebrated, oh they celebrated… 19 20 “Otherwise, as word—otherwise possibilities, as phrase—announces the fact of infinite alternatives to what is. And what is is about being, about existence, about ontology. But if infinite alternatives exist, if otherwise possibility is a resource that is never exhausted, what is, what exists, is but one of many. Otherwise possibilities exist alongside that which we can detect with our finite sensual capacities. Or, otherwise possibilities exist and the register of imagination, the epistemology through which sensual detection occurs—that is, the way we think the world— has to be altered in order to get at what’s there. Moving in and through us like the trillions of neutrinos that pass through each square inch of Earth every second, there but undetected until we create and utilize certain technologies in the service of harnessing that which is unseen to naked eyes. How to detect such sensuality, such possibility otherwise, such alternative to what is as a means to disrupt the current configurations of power and inequity? How to detect, how to produce and inhabit otherwise epistemological fields, is the question of Black Study.” (Crawley, 2016: 2-3) Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility
 THE WORK OF ‘UN SANTO NEGRO’ / A BLACK SAINT
 
 To detect, to produce and inhabit otherwise is The Work. Miriam Makeba’s work. Alice Coltrane’s work. The work of Thomas Sankara, Caster Semenya, Celia Cruz, Isaiah Shembe, Herbie Hancock, Serena Williams, Las Adelitas…and The Black Madonna. The work of simultaneous insistence and refusal. The work of creating a new world out of various old worlds. The forms of social life and practices of care that emerge in, and that are conditioned by what Afropessimists term “social death” (Sexton, 2011). A methodology of spirit that turns away from blackness’ ongoing abjection, and toward apprehending an ethics of engagement, and a poetics of relation (Glissant, 1990) that insists that “there are ways to make Black life visible, if only momentarily” 
 (Hartman in In the Wake, 2017). 21 Black being Afropessimism seems to offer us very little in terms of imagination of ourselves and what we could be or do as a collective. As a congregation. However, (following from the notion of coloniality and the understanding of blackness as a constructed residual category under modernist commerce), Afropessimism and its interlocutors - black optimism and what Calvin Warren (2017) terms 19 ‘black mysticism’ - offer useful departure points against which we may understand the necessity and significance of the high priestess, The Work (of this text and the many texts it sings with), its propositions for rapture and fugitivity. 
 Afropessimist theorists like Wilderson (2010) and Sexton (2011) argue that the question of blackness is an entirely political ontological one. Following from blackness’ construction under slavery as a violent discourse to subject and denigrate African being, blackness is not from Africa, but is rather thrust upon Africa and its diaspora. Afropessimism maintains that blackness emerges as “pure means” (Warren, 2017: 223), and not as a feature of human difference . On this, we 20 agree. Blackness here is non-ontology; contained within the symbolic order of whiteness, under a (neo)colonial arrangement of enduring anti-blackness. In this matrix, Afropessimists reach the conclusion that political programs will do very little to bring blacks into the realm of humanity (ibid: 220) as anti-blackness fundamentally excludes black people from civil society. For thinkers like Wilderson and Sexton, political transformation is not possible. ‘Blackness is [always] slave’, inextricably bound by a psychopathology received from the “interiorisation of the white psyche” (Curry, 2019), which maintains an inevitable and necessary hopelessness of the black condition. 
 Coloniality persists, and significant aspects of racism are structural, cultural, reproductive and unchanging, and Afropessimism provides us with a useful framework for thinking through the political position we find ourselves in. The ontological argument of Afropessimism, however, insists that the reproduction of ‘blackness, the slave’ within the hegemonic symbolic order dissolves or assimilates all the resources of the black psyche. It relegates blackness to the death- scape of the political, and a “social death” (Sexton, 2011) that denies blackness’ potential to imagine or project itself outside of anti-blackness; it’s potential to produce rapture, and thus “The term black optimist describes a diverse group of scholars committed to humanism. Although these scholars do 19 not self-identify as black optimists, the term dockets a humanist desire either to fold blacks into humanity and resolve the ontological problem, or to move beyond race and embrace an optimistic future of universal humanism” (Warren, 2017: 220) where blacks are included in a Civil society in which political transformation is possible. The recipient of derogatory racial terminology associated with blackness and the African subject has always been a 20 moving target of otherness that initially had very little to do with phenotype, but rather a maintenance of an other. For example, the term kaffir was an intentionally pejorative term used by Muslims in the 16th century reserved to refer to non-believers throughout what is now the East African coast, India, and Afghanistan. The term was then used as a racial slur in reference to any black African under apartheid South Africa. Its usage is now legally actionable in the post- apartheid context. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/world/africa/south-africa-hate-speech.html, https:// www.etymonline.com/word/kaffir 22 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/world/africa/south-africa-hate-speech.html https://www.etymonline.com/word/kaffir https://www.etymonline.com/word/kaffir become enraptured. Indeed, it is against this very assumption that the need for rapture becomes salient as a means to rupture this political-ontological matrix. Here I am interested in the disruptive capacities found in the otherwise world of the enraptured — how the embodied expression of ecstasy and the mystical (both within the flesh and somewhere ‘outside’) — may “produce a break with the known, the normative, the violent world of western thought and material condition” (Crawley, 2016: 4-5). For the priestess, blackness has, does, and continues to possess the capacity for rapture. 
 In an online discussion on race and civil disorder between Tina Campt, Ekow Eshun, Saidiya Hartman and John Akomfrah, Ghanaian-born Akomfrah emphasised the powerful continuities, and echoing breathlessness in Black experiences across the diaspora in reference to his 1986 film essay Handsworth Songs (Lisson Gallery, 2020). The film explores the civil disturbances of September and October 1985 in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in the urban centres of London. Running throughout the film is the idea that the riots were the outcome of an enduring suppression by British society and police of black presence subsequent to the arrival of the Windrush generation in the UK from the Caribbean. In the discussion Akomfrah notes that, 21 whilst there are of course discontinuities in Black experience, he is interested in thinking through 22 these continuities — some of which are joyful, and some of which are immensely painful — that are not just about what we do, but also about what gets done to us; the ways in which systemic white supremacy ensures our breathlessness as a form of spectacle.
 Over the years, breathlessness has emerged as a refrain in the face of systemic anti-black violence. During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s amnesty trials, it emerged that strangulation was the preferred method of murder carried out by the apartheid counterinsurgency unit at Vlakplaas in their missions to disappear anti-apartheid activists. The reason for this was to ensure that no blood evidence was left behind. This emerged especially in reference to the state- sanctioned abduction and subsequent killings of Jeffrey Sibaya, Samuel Ledwaba, Matthews Lerutla, and Oupa Mohale, who disappeared on August 17 1987 in Mamelodi, South Africa during political protests (Maughan, 2019). On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner repeatedly exclaimed “I cant breathe” eleven times while lying face down on the sidewalk in a chokehold before being murdered by New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo in attempting to arrest him for supposed “The Windrush generation” refers to those arriving in the UK between 1948 and 1971 from mostly anglophone 21 countries. The term is in reference to the ship MV Empire Windrush, which arrived at Tilbury Docks, Essex, on 22 June 1948, bringing workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and other islands, as a response to post-war labour shortages in the UK. The ship carried 492 passengers - many of them children. In 2018, the legal immigration status of these children who arrived on their parents passport’s from Commonwealth countries was thrown into dispute, despite the fact that these individuals helped create the modern economy that UK prides itself on. Throughout the conversation, Akomfrah’s use of the word “Black” refers to Blackness as a political identity of the 22 formerly colonised and not just to racial signifier, as it was championed by the black consciousness movements between the 60s and 80s. His use of the word extends to include those of south-asian descent. 23 suspicious activity. His murder was captured on camera phones , causing the footage and the 23 protest hashtag #ICantBreathe to go viral. In 2020, this refrain has continued its echo, with the murder of George Floyd on May 25 by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, killing him by mechanical asphyxiation. Handcuffed and pinned face down by three police officers in an attempted arrest, with a fourth preventing onlookers from intervening, Floyd too repeats this refrain, “I cant breathe” multiple times before he dies captured on camera. 10 days later, Tshegofatso Pule was found hanging from a tree in Roodeport, South Africa. Pule was 8 months pregnant, and a victim of an on-going gender based violence crisis in South Africa where black women are raped and murdered at disproportionately high rates. This echoed refrain of black breathless in the face of systemic white supremacist patriarchy occurs throughout Frantz Fanon’s writing, where he uses terms like “suffocated” and “smothered” to describe the experience of black being in colonial Algeria (1963; 1965). In Black Skin White Masks, Fanon states, we revolt “quite simply” because it has become “impossible […] to breathe”, in more than one sense of the word. (1952: 176). Breath amongst this breathless condition, then, is “combat breathing” (Fanon, 1965: 65). 
 Throughout history there have been moments of marronage, slave revolts, radical histories of Africanist thought, anti-colonial movements and (oft subversively complicit) religious and spiritual orders that I would argue have not been limited by the world imaginary of the white culture of the symbolic order, in absolute terms (Sharpe, 2016). The innovative diagnosis proposed by Afropessimism, however, whilst baring political validity around our collective breathlessness, appears hamstrung by what seems to be an ahistorical denial of the creative potentiality of blackness. Whilst racialisation was created under a particular oppressive political and economic project of capitalist imperialism (Robison, 1983), we need not look at blackness only in terms of political ends — whether or not it’s still under a colonial or neocolonial arrangement — but we must also endeavour to understand what the culture is producing. It is this approach that allows us to break away from the claim of the universalisation of blackness as an ontological category (Curry, 2019), where the ontological internalisation of a specific set of signs, like ‘blackness, the slave’ is not placed within black people completely. It is through the work of Fred Moten (2003) and his black mysticism that The Work can be read not as mere deluded hallucinations of freedom, but rather as moments of rapture toward freedom — however fleeting and seemingly trapped. A petite marronage, where freedom is not a destination but an on-going praxis. Black mysticism provides us with a gap, between the Afropessimist and black optimist opposition, and steps into The Black Outdoors (Duke University, 2016). Instead of ascertaining the efficacy of political action to resolve the problem of ontology and black humanity, black mysticism seeks to abandon both ontology and politics (Warren, 2017: 220); embracing a
 Further reading: Death in the Browser Tab by Teju Cole
23 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/magazine/death-in-the-browser-tab.html 24 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/24/magazine/death-in-the-browser-tab.html 
 25 Los Angeles–based artist and filmmaker, Kahlil Joseph’s BLKNWS (2018 - ongoing) is an unending ever-shifting series of newsreels that create a visual register for Black excellence, critical thought, social life and resistance in the USA. Produced in the genre of the news broadcast, the on-going two channel video installations present us with what it might look like if newscasts were targeted with black liberation and black social life in mind. The BLKNWS newscast splices appropriated historical and contemporary found news and social media footage with newly shot scenes of news room and documentary reportage. Challenging “They thought that by fumigating the Place Congo in the 1890s when people were doing the Bamboula the Chacta the Babouille the Counjaille the Juba the Congo and the VooDoo that this would put an end to it. That it was merely a fad. But they did not understand that the Jes Grew epidemic was unlike physical plagues. Actually Jes Grew was an anti-plague. Some plagues caused the body to waste away; Jes Grew enlivened the host. Other plagues were accompanied by bad air (malaria). Jes Grew victims said that the air was as clear as they had ever seen it and that there was the aroma of roses and perfumes which had never before enticed their nostrils. Some plagues arise from decomposing animals, but Jes Grew is electric as life and is characterized by ebullience and ecstasy. Terrible plagues were due to the wrath of God; but Jes Grew is the delight of the gods.” (Reed, 1972: 6) Mumbo Jumbo: A Novel 26 verb: marronage 1. the collective act of physically isolating from a surrounding society in order to create a fully autonomous community 2. the flight of those who escaped slavery with intention to create independent communities on the outskirts of slave societies 3. Integral to interpreting ‘freedom’ as a concept in Suriname, noun: grand marronage 1. people who permanently removed themselves from the plantations or mines on which they were enslaved 2. permanent marronage carried out by individuals, small groups, or it could be the result of plantation/mine-wide or even colony-wide rebellions. 
 noun: petite marronage 1. a strategy of resistance, whereby enslaved individuals or small groups escaped their plantations/mines for a number of reasons, for a short period of days or weeks and then returned. 2. The act of temporarily fleeing enslavement in order to carry out smaller acts of resistance, such as religious gatherings, or organising cross-plantation strategies of resistance and escape, such as the underground railway or colony-wide rebellions. noun: maroon; plural noun: maroons 1. A person who has fled from enslaved society; either temporarily or permanently 2. A person who has separated themselves from slave society, but does not necessarily live in isolation. Interactions with colonists, indigenous peoples and other maroons was/is common noun: maroon society; plural: maroon societies 1. An autonomous community created by maroons who have fled enslavement; often in a perpetual state of war against colonialists.
 
 maroon societies; mocambos (Brazil), cumbes (Venezeuela), drosters (South Africa), palenques (Colombia), quilombos (Brazil) , rancherias, diamamouves (Mauritius), ladeiras, magotes (Cuba), maneires kind of murky optimism that gears itself to the creative potentiality of blackness and the utility of the social realm to which it has been relegated. Within Moten’s philosophical enterprise, a distinction is made between blacks as a constructed political-ontology under the hegemonic symbolic order, and Blackness as paraontology; that which precedes the political ontological moment, and is thus beyond the symbolic order of whiteness. Consequently, Moten (2013) works against the conflation of Blackness with black ‘things’ and introduces a mystical framework for an escape from total ontological dread. Here blackness emerges as an abstraction appearing to the world; an apparition, the epitome of transcendence, and the site of a desire to flee that which we can no longer engage. Whether intentional or not, Moten’s embrace of the theological or mystical imagination presents us with an expanded grammar with which we may imagine and enact this escape (Warren, 2017). Perhaps this reaching is more aligned with what Ashon Crawley terms the “atheology-aphilosophy of blackness” (2016: 28) in his analysis of the utility and imaginative possibilities of the Blackpentecostal tradition in the USA as it extends beyond the exploitation, alienation and abstraction of the theological project created under the Eurocentric, patriarchal, heteronormative, modernist epistemological order through the tradition’s use of shouting, tongues, praise and sociality. The same could be said for the Ziyoni worship tradition in Southern Africa and the many other Afro-syncretic religious traditions of the global south. 27 Since 1997, Colombia’s Santiago de Cali (Cali) has hosted the largest gathering of Afro-Pacific music, The Petronio Álvarez Festival (Petronio). Named after one of the most prominent interpreters and composers of Afro-Colombian rhythms, the festival brings musical ensembles from across the Pacific coast to perform folkloric music and participate in an annual competition in front of a 600 000 strong audience. The music here is as varied as the coast. You can hear salsa choké, currulao, bunde, chirimia, as well as jazz fusions of them all in one. Whilst the week- long festival is usually headlined by mega stars, like Hugo Candelario and Yuri Buenaventura, the competition is an opportunity for more regional ensembles to gain recognition and win cash prizes. It is also an important opportunity for the City of Cali to market itself to both local and international publics as a unique destination of cultural tourism. 
 Cali is often touted as the second largest ‘black-city’ of Latin America — admittedly, this was a big drawcard in my applying for an artist residency there. A few days into this residency, the cohort and myself went for a hike up Cali’s equivalent of Cape Town’s Lion’s Head — El Cerro De Las Tres Cruces (The Hill of Three Crosses). Once we reached the top, we were greeted by an expansive view of the city. Pointing out the city’s different urban landmarks, one of the residency’s administrators said “…y eso es Cali negro / and that is black Cali”, as he gestured to the outskirts of the city. Whilst I’m unsurprised by the concept of racial segregation, I still felt quite affronted by the flippant statement, which was void of any acknowledgement of the history and contemporary injustices embroiled in said segregation. It seemed commonplace for white Caleños to speak of “black Cali” as an afterthought, as some amorphous yet homogeneous place where ‘the poor blacks live’. Whilst the Caleña population is about 27% Afro-Colombian, urban spatialisation has occurred mostly along class and racial lines. Much like in Cape Town, race and space in Cali presents a hauntology of racial colonialism, urban migration, disproportionate economic opportunities and unequal service delivery. During Spanish colonisation of Colombia, Cali held a strategic position for trade with its strategic location between gold mining regions, and the still- active sugar cane plantations that surround the city. Of course both sectors profited almost exclusively off Black and indigenous labour. Coincidentally, Petronio coincides with the annual sugar cane field burning season and, come nightfall, the hills surrounding the city often glow a golden-red; a hautonology of a different kind. 
 Apart from commuting street vendors, Afro-Colombian and indigenous populations are mostly pushed to the residential areas on the outskirts of the city’s centre or the affluent southern suburbs. In Cali, you just don’t really see that many Black folk….unless it’s Petronio. Petronio is the one time of the year that the city honours the Afro-Colombian influence in the city, and Black communities show up and show out! But it’s bittersweet; the festival creates a platform for Afro- Pacific music to receive an audience, but it simultaneously strips much of the ritual and function from these musical traditions by forcing them to adhere to festival regulations, conventional stage set-ups, commercialisation and most of all, competition. 28 
 True to global trends of cultural appropriation, Petronio has become a place that many white Colombian youth identify as a trendy party, where they go to don ‘ethnic’ headwraps and Moyo- esque ‘tribal’ face paint. Additionally, they remain oblivious to the fact that smoking (of cigarettes or cannabis), party-drugs and drinking hard liquor or beer is considered culturally offensive in this context. In order to try keep Afro-Pacific communities as the true beneficiaries of the festival, community leaders lobbied to ban the sale of non Afro-Colombian consumables. Here, you can only buy variations of viche (the artisanal sugarcane liquor of the Pacific region) and foods from the Pacific coast. Even so, Nidia Gongora (the proverbial songbird of the Afro-Pacific) is left wanting. Every night of Petronio, Gongora — a famed canatadora originally from Timbiquí — hosts what she calls “arrullos en el barrio”; lullabies for the spirits in her mother’s alley in Ciudad Cordoba. From about 11pm, each home along this alley is host to packed, sweaty vigils of feverish, communal and spontaneous singing, dancing & playing of marimbas and drums in a call and response that continues until well after sunrise the next day. This is not just an after party. For Gongora, this collective kaleidophonic rapture is essential. Arrullos en el barrio both revitalise the music and facilitate the necessary process of filling the musician and the community back up with spirit after engaging with the commercial nature of Petronio. For it is this ‘spirit’ that allows us to give and receive the music. This is Black Cali; expansive, restorative, collective. 
 
 
 
 noun: cantadora f. (plural: cantadoras) 1. One who hands down myths and stories by word of mouth or song; storyteller
 29 According to Moten, the relegation of blackness to the social (and political death) is not the death sentence Afropessimism might suggest. Instead it presents us with a site of spirited possibility and fugitivity where the social enjoys an intimacy with ‘life’. It exists as a sacred space, producing sacred texts, which is untranslatable and unsinkable. It insists on opacity as survival strategy since ontology and Blackness are unavailable for each other, and “offers a mystical space of existential reconfiguration” (Warren, 2017). It is here that ‘the work’ becomes paramount in its ability to partially reveal blackness to itself as that which must free itself from ontological expectation and insist upon black subjectivity (Moten, 2003: 1). For Moten, “this imperative is not something up ahead, to which blackness aspires; it is the labor, which must not be mistaken for Sisyphean, that blackness serially commits” (2013, 749-750) as ‘social life’. Here, blackness is being, it is in a dialectical wave that synthesises into something we can only call ‘the mystical’ or ‘the spiritual’. That which we cannot fully apprehend in written language as there exists no grammar outside of ontology to describe the paraontological (Warren, 2017: 225-226). It is through black social life—black spirit—that Blackness, as mystical entity, may become momentarily visible as it manifests through black bodies and beings. The priestess is invested in conjuring this spirit; demonstrating resilience in ephemeral social moments and sacred texts, and revealing enraptured beauty within conditions of extreme ugliness (Warren, 2017).
 This act of generating life, “in the hold of the ship” and in the wake of slavery, is what Christina Sharpe terms “wake work” (2016: 17)—the work of imagining and living beyond incessant coloniality and the cycles of death and trauma(s) of Black being in the settler-postcolony. By extension, Fanon (1965: 65) might refer to this as “combat breathing”. According to Sharpe, this is life in “the wake”, where black lives are “swept up...produced and determined, though not absolutely, by the afterlives of slavery” (2016: 8). Thus Blackness (capital ‘B’)—as mystical entity, as the spirit—is the sublime aspect of blackness (small ‘b’). Made manifest through The Work, it is an insistence on joy and mystical ecstasy. The Work, thus, is an improvised and inspired declaration of rapture, and a reminder of the creative potentiality of the phenomenology of black spirit that passes through us. This is the work of the high priestess and those many others ordained in the church of Black life; of joy and rapture. 30 31 “…My instrument is deepening and widening; it’s because I’m possessed of the spirit/I learned it from my mother—the preacher, that’s what they called her…/You gotta sing a song; you can’t sing jazz/When Bird was around he knew he wasn’t playing jazz. He was playing his spirit. And I think that’s the problem for a lot of the musicians on the scene now. They think that they’re playing jazz. But there’s no such thing, really/I’m possessed of my own spirit/This is the music of the African muse/I just want to be of use to my ancestors/It’s holy work and it’s dangerous not to know that ‘cause you could die like an animal down here” 
 
 Abbey Lincoln at Ford Foundation Jazz Study Group, Columbia University, November 1999 (Moten, 2003: 23) Fig. 1 Poster and programme from the ‘Rapture Institute’ “The whole point of escape is that it’s an activity” 
 (Moten in The Black Outdoors, 2016). In his seven minute video ‘Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death’, Arthur Jafa (2016) attempts to create a visual language for the African-American experience; as that which is riddled and trapped within gratuitous violence and anti-blackness. Within this film, he addresses this notion of social death through a seven minute rapid fire montage depicting the complexity and paradox of black pain, joy and alienation set against Kanye West’s Ultralight Beam. In spite of the speed at which the images appear on the screen, Jafa’s work reveals and exposes these moments in ways that the pain of black-being seems amplified; swelling with intensity like the image of the bubbling hot plasma-filled sun that repeats several times throughout the film. Jafa often shamelessly and freshingly states that he creates work with Black folk in mind. We are his intended audience. Yet we live this intensity everyday. Indeed, it is important for our lives to be mirrored back to us (by us), but Jafa’s work begs the question of whether we need to be consistently retriggered by the trauma of our everyday, where we are anyway confronted with manifold iterations of black death, anti-black micro and macro aggressions, and the enduring afterlives of colonialism. I choose to look elsewhere, as I am unconvinced by the efficacy of turning black suffering into the spectacular. 
 Black people living on the African continent are accustomed to seeing images of their people dying on screens, for the consumption of those elsewhere; so as to try coax empathy out of them around certain depictions of genocide in Rwanda, famines in Ethiopia and Sudan, or the refugee crisis of Africans attempting to cross the Mediterranean. Or perhaps more overt forms of systemic anti-black violence, such as the accounts made during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa’s transition out of apartheid; with the pain, terror and grief of black people on display for all the world to see. Our relationship to seeing our people dying on screens is different to those in the west. It is no mistake that we do not see droves of images of white bodies dying or dead. Of course, the systemic structures ensure that these types of bodies are not dying in quite the same numbers. They do not experience constraint of being. And almost more notably, empathy is already assumed. In referring to Frederick Douglass’s account of the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester, who was whipped and verbally assaulted by her slave master after sharing intimacy with another enslaved man, Moten speaks to “the uncertain line between witness and spectator” (2003:3). He states that “rather than try convey the routinised violence of slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, [he has] chosen to…consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned…to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shock spectacle” (ibid). There is an entanglement of joy and pain in Black life, an entanglement of breath and breathlessness. We can see the suffering and constraint of being even when it is not displayed and exposed for all to see. Within the sublime lives terror (Ray, 2005). It is irreducibly present in the prayer, and in the joy. 32 This work is concerned with the moments in which we may find and insist on black life, despite, and outside of the overwhelming presence of anti-blackness, and black death. Following Moten’s black mysticism, the high priestess is primarily engaged with the spirit of Blackness, and not the phenomenology of anti-blackness. She is engaged with joy, intimacy and ecstasy that may, because of Fanon (1968: 85), be considered guerrilla warfare, an intervention into the emergence into the normative subject-object position (Crawley, 2016: 287).
 
 
 Furthermore, she is one of the many mediators of a cult that recognises the primacy of collective imagination; a space of intersubjectivity that exists by virtue of a kind of code-sharing. Some might call this cult the Black Radical Tradition; a space of musical, religious, artistic, physical, political, spiritual, social and theoretical articulation of black strategy of resistance and radicalisms in Africa and her diaspora. The everyday incantations that insist on black survival, the survival of the ‘black spirit’ in spite of coloniality. Those things that are referred to here as spiritual technologies, where “pneumatology is about the relation of spirit to flesh” (Crawley, 2016: 27). Following Crawley’s exploration of Blackpentecostalism, the priestess is interested in how the spiritual technologies of Black life and joy constitute a disruptive force, ripe for imagining otherwise modes of social organisation and mobilisation. He states that “these sensual experiences [are] not merely performed through duress but [are] the instantiation and sign of life and love. As life and love, these performative dances, songs, noises, and tongues illustrate how enjoyment, desire, and joy are important for the tradition that antiphonally speaks back against aversion, embarrassment, and abandonment, against the debasement and denigration of blackness” (2016: 7-8). Here he speaks of the aesthetic, performative technologies of Blackpentecostalism not just as resistance to the systemic racial oppression in mainline American pentecostalism. The priestess would go a step further to suggest that it is precisely through imagination and creativity that we not only demonstrate resistance or denounce the disavowal of black potentiality but we find freedom from the legacies of a white supremacist object ownership oriented theology-philosophy...even if just through fleeting moments of the kind of rapture that black imaginative improvisation creativity and adaptation provides. 
 33 cult |kəlt| noun • a system of veneration and devotion directed toward a particular object or state: the cult of rapture. • a contained group of people having spiritual beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister; oftentimes characterised by relative secrecy. synonym: The Black Radical Tradition In Cedric Robisnon’s (1983) “Black Marxism”, he maps numerous histories of Black radicalism across Africa, the Caribbean and North America. He details moments of slave revolts in the slave castles in Africa as collective attempts to repair the discontinuity produced by enslavement, as well as the various forms of marronage that took place within colonial settlements, where the syncretic cultural identities emergent from the social mixing pot of slave organisation withdrew beyond the presence of exploitation to forge new runaway societies; “drosters” in the Dutch Cape colony, “palenques” in the Spanish colonies, and “polinks” in the English colonies (ibid: 122). 
 Furthermore, he considers how such moments triggered the trajectory and basis of independence and liberation movements from Haiti, to Burkina Faso and South Africa, as well as intellectual projects concerning the black experience amongst descendants of slaves and freed persons. In his describing of the distillation of what in retrospect has been termed the Black Radical 24 Tradition, Robinson (1983: xxxi-xxxii) states: It is important to acknowledge that these actions and moments were often as a result of numerous improvisations, 24 they were very rarely employed in the moment as consciously functioning as ‘spiritual technology’ in the ways in which it is referred in this text. 34 Fig. 2 Still from ‘Sacred Feedback Loop’ session, 18 October 2018 “…Africans [and Afro-descendants were] subjected to similar and interrelated systems of servitude and oppression, and mobilized by identical impulses [what Moten might term “Blackness”] to recover their dignity. And over the centuries, the liberation projects of these men and women in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas acquired similar emergent collective forms in rebellion and marronage, similar ethical and moral articulations of resistance” Distilled from racial antagonisms, the objectifications, segregationist policies, temporal and geographic dislocation, forced religious conversions, missionary movements, dress, hair , and 25 limited mobility (ibid: xxxi), the Black Radical Tradition demonstrates “the magnificence of the… spirit: the inextricable resolve to refashion society according to some powerful but imperfect moral vision” (ibid: xxvii). These moments of marronage and revolt may be considered examples of political liberation, but they also generated intricate, syncretic and complex cross-continental networks of social, cultural and aesthetic life throughout history, and into the contemporary era. This tradition extends itself beyond the political, and has insinuated itself into song, into worship, into friendship, and into Black social life across and beyond geographical borders. 
 In the Caribbean, intricate hair braiding patterns were used as maps to help the enslaved flee plantations. 25 Furthermore, hair braiding / cornrows were used to conceal and transport seeds and grains from Africa in forced migration across the Atlantic Ocean. https://www.africanexponent.com/post/7891-how-cornrows-were-used-by-slaves- to-escape-slavery-in-south-america 35 https://www.africanexponent.com/post/7891-how-cornrows-were-used-by-slaves-to-escape-slavery-in-south-america https://www.africanexponent.com/post/7891-how-cornrows-were-used-by-slaves-to-escape-slavery-in-south-america Miriam Makeba was born 4 March 1932 in the black township of Prospect, near Johannesburg. Those who are familiar with the spirit of her voice will not be surprised to read that Miriam was born to a lineage of healers. In the early fifties, she began her professional musical career singing with the South African all-male close harmony group, the Cuban Brothers; a prophetic start, given she would receive a honorary citizenship to Cuba from Fidel Castro some twenty years later. By 1960, Miriam’s career had reached international acclaim, and she began to tour extensively. She rarely sung explicitly political music, but her international success had led to an increase in awareness of apartheid and the antiapartheid movement. Soon after the Sharpeville massacre, Miriam found that she had been exiled from South Africa when she attempted to return home after her US tour to attend the funeral of her mother. Her passport was revoked, and Makeba commenced the work of imagining more humanly working geographies, where she became an increasingly outspoken critic of the apartheid government and informed much of the Black Power movement. Throughout her exile, Miriam lived in the United States, Guinea and Belgium, and toured extensively throughout the African continent in support African independence from colonial rule and African unity. She sang at the independence ceremonies of Kenya, Angola, Zambia, Tanzania and Mozambique. During this time, she received honorary citizenship and passports to Cuba, Tanzania, Guinea, Ghana…..Additionally, she became a diplomat for Ghana and was appointed Guinea’s official delegate to UN in 1975. This was during a period when Guinean President Sékou Touré implemented a radical cultural policy that, aimed at creating a new style of post- independence African music, endorsed musical supergroups, and ensured state support of musicians with a minimum wage if they practiced for a certain number of hours a day. Indeed, this is The Work. In 1974, Miriam performed alongside artists such as Cuba’s Celia Cruz, rumba artist, Tabu Lay Rocherea, Bill Withers and Hugh Masekela in the groundbreaking Zaire 74 festival in Kinshasa. The festival was intended to present and promote racial and cultural solidarity between African American and African people. Indeed, it was a radical display of the utility of black song, black social life, and of Black spirit. In 1977, Makeba was also described as the highlight of FESTAC 77, the groundbreaking pan-African arts festival that took place in Nigeria. 36 In 30 years of exile, Makeba redefined pan Africanism and participated in events and produced art that shaped public cultures on the African continent and around the world. Her work calls into question the limits of existing spatial paradigms of not just the so-called “Bantu woman” in apartheid South Africa, but also exemplifies a rupture of the borders imposed on citizens of ‘the nation state’ through her utility of Black social life; song, resistance and a physical mobility that insisted on the porosity of borders. The mobility and work of Miriam Makeba demonstrate how geography and Blackness may work together to advance a different way of imagining the world. She offers what Marlene Nourbese Philip calls “‘a public genealogy of resistance’: histories, names and places of black pain, language, and opposition, what are ‘spoken with the whole body’ and present to the world, to our geography, other rhythms, other times, other spaces” (Philip in McKittrick, 2006: xxvii); The Work. Miriam Makeba was a woman with no pass, but she was a Black African woman with nine passports and honorary citizenship in 10 countries (Chimurenga Chronic, 2018). 
 37 World-traveling: traveling whilst black In Achille Mbembe’s (2018) essay, The Idea of a Borderless World, he laments that “at a deep historical level, African and diasporic struggles for freedom and self-determination have always been intertwined with the aspiration to move unchained. Whether under conditions of slavery or under colonial rule, the loss of our sovereignty automatically resulted in the loss of our right to free movement”. Indeed, much of the mess we find ourselves in has been as a result of constant displacement and confinement, forced migrations, forced removals and forced labour. The scramble for Africa in the 19th century and the Berlin convention meant the carving of the continent along colonial lines, and the creation of boundaries and borders that turned the continent into what Mbembe calls “a massive carceral space”; the antithesis of movement, of freedom of movement, where the biggest problem of the colonial state in the continent of Africa was to make sure that the colonial subject stayed in the same place. 
 Slavery in Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean was first predicated on the forceful displacement of African persons, and then the subsequent entrapment of these enslaved Africans and their decedents to plantations and mines for the exploitation of their labour. In southern Africa, we have seen restriction of movement, the exploitation of black labour, and the concentration camps of the Nama and Herero, which provided fertile ground for what is in effect, a land grab that has left descendants of indigenous persons confined to living on reservations. In this region, we have also seen the implementation of the Bantustans labour reserves and the pass laws of apartheid, which severely limited the mobility of black South Africans, and inextricably tied their movement to the exploitation of their labour. The legacies of this confinement and labour migration are enduring far beyond the end of apartheid legislation. In present day Colombia, the country with the highest Black population in the Hispanophone world, it is no mistake that the regions with the highest concentration of Afro-descendants along the pacific coast remain largely geographically isolated from the rest of the country in terms of transport and road infrastructure. This, in conjunction with severe state abandonment has left Afro-Colombian communities to disproportionately bear the brunt of the enduring civil war conflict between paramilitary, narco-26 traffickers and guerrilla groups; leading only to further displacement and trauma (Francois, 2020). In each case, “to be African and to be black has meant to be consigned to one or the other of the many spaces of confinement modernity has invented” (Mbembe, 2018). It is no wonder, then, that so many struggles for emancipation and racial justice have been braided with the struggles for the right to move freely (Ibid). Whilst a peace treaty was signed in 2016 between the paramilitary and FARC to end the ongoing civil war in 26 Colombia, conflict is still ongoing as the government-backed paramilitary continue to carry arms. Furthermore, this peace process has largely excluded the involvement of civil society, ethnic minorities, communities and even other armed groups involved in the conflict. Instead, the peace treaty has become the backdrop against which the Colombian government has gained corporate investment, where further state-sanctioned forced removals have occurred in Afro- Colombian territories in the name of development (Francois, 2019). 38 
 In her exploration of Black women and the cartographies of struggle in North America, Katherine McKittrick states that, “if past human categorisation was spatialised, in ships and on plantations, in homes, communities, nations, islands, and regions, it also evidences the ways in which some of the impressions of transatlantic slavery [and other forms of violent spatialisation] leak into the future, in essence recycling the displacement of difference” (2006: xvii). The question thus is how we may imagine and harness networks, journeys, and crossroads that rupture the many spaces of confinement modernity has invented. Furthermore, how can we think black geographies differently, and in what ways does black mysticism allow us to do this work? If practices of subjection are also spatial acts, then the ways in which black social life negotiates with its surroundings are intertwined with necessary respatialisations and remapping, as traditional geographies and borders (which are reinforced by the hegemonic symbolic order) cannot allow for the emancipatory work to which “blackness serially commits” (Moten, 2013; 750). Black populations and our attendant geographies are not “ungeographic” as western philosophy- theology might have us believe, but rather they exist entirely outside of this geographic convention all together. 39 “In August 1967 I arrived for the first time in Guinea…My first impressions were— you know, I didn’t know what to think because I had never been to an independent country south of the Sahara…To me it was like an opening of a new world. I mean, it is breathtaking. I had never seen such beauty for a long time. And I became more homesick just looking at the beauty of this country when I first came here […] And so the president said to me, ‘ If you ever came to stay in Guinea where would you like to stay?’ And I chose the region, Dalaba. It reminded a lot of home, being in Dalaba […] It was a wonderful experience for me. And the striking thing too is that even though the people were poor, they didn’t have much, but when they were told that I was a visitor coming from a troubled country like South Africa, the people would cry for me! At first I didn’t really understand, but then I did understand that wherever they are standing, is there’s. It’s their land. And they can live wherever they want without anyone telling them ‘you can’t live there, you can’t go there’. And that was the big difference between here and home”. (Miriam Makeba in Guinea, date unknown) — Miriam Makeba on her time in Guinea 
 40 
 41 The Kala Pani — translated to mean ‘black water’ represents the taboo of the ocean in ancient Indian and especially Hindu tradition. According to this proscription, crossing the seas (and leaving the home of the sacred river Ganga) causes the loss of one’s varna status, no matter one’s initial ranking. To fall out of this caste system is to be ostracised as an outcaste or ‘untouchable’, where one’s social respectability is lost, and cultural character and posterity are putrefied. One of the reasons behind this Vedic restriction of sea voyages is that one is unable to carry out reincarnation rituals associated with the Gange’s regenerating waters. Another is the sin of contact with Mleccha — a Sanskrit term referring to all foreign or non-Vedic peoples who were thought to be uncivilised, impure and inferior barbarians. The Kala Pani features prominently in Indo-Caribbean and South African Indian histories as it relates to histories of indenture in post-slavery British colonies. Here, the British often placed large cauldrons of water from the Ganges on the ships to appease the doubts of the indentured as they were transported to other colonial territories. Whilst crossing the Kala Pani might have dire consequences for those higher up in the caste hierarchy — i.e. the ruling classes — crossing the ocean may have different implications for those at the bottom of the caste system, or those who have already lost their varna status. What kinds of possibilities may the ocean offer for escape, radical re-imagining and futurity for those already deemed ‘untouchable’, and without cultural character? In this regard, Khal Torabully, who is partly of Indo-Mauritian descent, describes the Kala Pani as a source of not just the dissolution of identity, but also of beauty and reconstruction, leading to what he terms a “coral imaginary” and “coolitude”; the articulation of future imaginaries of inter and transcultural exchange and mosaic identity construction of those who have been excluded from history and its futures. (Torabully, 1996: 13-17) 
 
 42 Fig. 3 Untitled, 35mm photograph, Zara Julius 2013 
 43 Coelacanths are elusive creatures living in the deepest depths of the ocean. They thought the coelacanth had gone extinct with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But the fish has been busy in the living waters; journeying back and forth between the dreams of diviner-healers, and the bodies of spirit-seekers. Those on the coast of Madagascar have known the fish all this time. It was not put here to be the object of scientific fascination, nor incite debates about the evolution of ocean-dwellers into land-dwellers. It is more than a ‘living fossil’ with paired lobe fins that extend away from its body like legs, moving in an alternating pattern. The coelacanth is an agent of the Black Madonna; moving to the rhythm of the Black technological in(ter)ventions it carries through the oceans, through living waters. Its movement is not alternating, it is syncopated — right in the pocket of our groove. As old as it is, it has seen all the dislocation and flight from the bottom of the waters. It is its imperative to carry any and all moments that undo this alienation through the deep. But it must remain scarce and conceal these secrets of rebellion. Concealment is strategy. We don’t want these technologies appearing on the next high fashion runway, surely. SONIC TIDALECTICS & RHYTHMIC RUPTURES Getting messed up is best happened in groups / There by the (storefront) church / There by the kiki / There by the jol / Where you know what it is to be emptied out and filled up / And infused with Spirit / From the outside / A powerful external force // A hymn book is like an album / A hymn book is like a book of essays / Of secrete Black technological interventions / That produces a kind of listening and singing and / Breathing / That’s maybe a bit deeper / Subaquatic / Because it’s under a little bit of duress / That transfers your consciousness across temporal / Hydrous and geographical boundaries / Through sound. 
 Sub-aquatic snake or mermaid divinities find home in multiple cosmologies around the Afro- diaspora. They are cosmic generators of life, fertility and water, and their borderlessness is not a matter of coincidence. If practices of subjection are spatial acts, then the ways Black social life (and the radical aesthetics and spirit it produces) negotiates with its surroundings are intertwined with a necessary respatialisation and remapping, as traditional geographies and borders cannot allow for the emancipatory work to which “blackness serially commits” (Moten, 2013; 750). That which we produce as Black life possesses an agency and potency all of its own.
 Border-being The forced-labour systems and annexations embroiled in plantation and mining contexts necessitated the impossibility of black humanity, sustained white supremacy and geographically codified notions of race (McKittrick, 2016: 82) in ways that have endured into the present day and have required our on-going work of radical imagination. According to Mbembe (2018), “the power of utopianism lies in its ability to instantiate borderlessness, movement and place”. Currently, the Anthropocene has generated a simultaneous increase in the mobility of capital and a hampering of the physical movement of racialised bodies with a heightened territorialisation of neoliberal nation states . Consequently, Mbembe encourages us to consult the repository of knowledge 27 found in pre-colonial African conceptions of sovereignty to aid in our imagining ourselves free. Present in this archive are numerous examples of not complete borderlessness as such, but rather a porosity and permeability of the shifting territories that might have existed, for “the business of a border is, in fact, to be crossed” (2018). Throughout African histories and literary traditions we find evidence of long-distance trade and circulation, which was fundamental in generating political, cultural, social economic and religious formations and transformation across the continent; where the instinctive principle of spatial organisation was continuous movement. This is most perversely evident in Donald Trump’s building a wall between Mexico and the United States to stop Latin 27 American immigration, and the increased presence of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the brutal detention of undocumented migrants. Similarly, South Africa has seen increasing restrictions of their immigration policies towards undocumented African migrants, endorsing unlawful long-term detentions of undocumented folk in inhuman centres such as the infamous Lindela Repatriation Centre. When it comes to issues of immigration and exceptionalism, South Africa is indeed the USA of Africa. 44 Sovereignty, thus, was expressed through networks, crossroads, and flows of (and between) people and nature . Movement itself was not necessarily akin to displacement. Mbembe states 28 that “what mattered the most was the extent to which flows and their intensities intersected and interacted with other flows, and the new forms they could take when they intensified” (2018). 
 Of course, the importance of mobility as a vehicle for transformation and change is still part of present day culture, yet syncretistic formations often go unnoticed as they emerge as the natural outcome of contact in a world in flux (Leopold & Jensen, 2004: 4). Increasingly, being on the move is the “very condition of [one’s] survival”, especially in moments of crisis (Mbembe, 2018). In this regard, Francis Nyamnjoh’s prolific works about border-being and mobility in Cameroon all speak to the history of flexible mobility, encounters and fluidity of identities that make frontier 29 communities — those that exist on multiple sides of multiple borders — of African societies as inherently subversive. Drawing from his analysis of the enduring presence of crossroads and networks in Amos Tutoala’s novels, Nyamnjoh asks us “to see and relate to frontier Africa and frontier Africans…as people and places subverting the boundaries within which they are confined on the zero sum game of completeness” (Nyamnjoh, 2017: 259). What Nyamnjoh is advocating for here is not just a subversion of the Enlightenment pursuit of ‘the whole’, but also a subversion of the Enlightenment notion of dialectics, where a + b = c. Instead, there is an ebb and flow, a tidalectic, between border porosity and resultant cultural circulations that defy the logic of fixedness in the western archive (Mbembe, 2018). The Mfecane and the Difaqane were a series of Nguni wars and forced migrations of the early 19th century that 28 changed the demographic, social, and political geography of southern, central and parts of eastern Africa. The pattern of the Mfecane — in which ethnic groups were set against each other over an ever-increasing radius — was highly successful in areas weakened by overpopulation and overgrazing. As a result of the Mfecane, some groups scattered, others were completely destroyed, and new groups formed. Consequently, some of the most formidable kingdoms to oppose white-settler penetration in Southern Africa were created, namely the Basotho, amaNdebele, emaSwati and the Gaza Empire. It also facilitated the rise of Shaka’s Zulu kingdom during a time of severe drought. (South African History Online, 2011). What’s useful here is that despite the Mfecane occurring inland, it did not follow a linear dialectic model, but it rather traced multiple networks across the southeastern region of Africa, depicting flows of movement that simultaneously and rhythmically tell stories of surge and absorption. Nyamnjoh’s analytical propositions around frontier-being flows alongside Glissant’s call for opacity, and Trobully’s 29 “coral imaginary”. 45 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/demographic 46 Fig. 4 Mapping the Spirit, pencil on paper, Zara Julius 2019 In 2015, I spent three months in Havana. I was working on a film project that broadly thought through the networks between (spiritual) faith, physical health and the faith people have in the remittances they receive from family members who live off the island. In Havana, when you ask, “¿tiene fé? / do you have faith” it is not just an inquiry into someone’s spiritual faith, but it is a telling play on words that turns ‘fé’ into an acronym to mean “familia en el extranjero/ family abroad” or “familia en el exterior/ family on the outside”. For many in the city, to have a family member who has managed to achieve some sense of geographic mobility , means a higher 30 standard of living of those still on the island . 31 During these three months, El Malecón emerged as a prominent site that seems to capture the imagination of locals and tourists. The Malecón is a broad esplanade and seawall that stretches 8km along the harbour, the most historic districts of the city, and ends at the mouth of Almendares River. Most nights, you will find people of all ages sitting along its walls, drinking rum, talking, laughing, listening to reggaeton playing from a cellphone or a boombox. Many nightclubs in the city are targeted towards tourist budgets. The ocean, its waves licking the sea wall — sometimes leisurely, sometimes violently — is where folks come to enjoy themselves on the cheap. It is not uncommon to find remnants of watermelons, split in half, floating along the rocky shores of the malecón: This is also where folks come to give their offerings to Yemayá. In Santería or regla de ocha, Yemayá is the mother of all living things as well as the owner of the 32 oceans, seas and rains. Oshún, the river Orisha of feminine beauty, likes fine cakes, laughter, joy and music. Yemayá likes watermelons, sweet custards and coconuts. She is fiercely protective of her children, as she comforts and cleanses them of sorrow. During this trip to Havana, I met a young man, affectionately nicknamed Bobo. He had tried to leave Cuba three times by boat, to seek a different life in the US. Each time, the boat he was on was intercepted by United States Coast Guard, and he was subsequently returned back home. Before making such trips, many lucumí practitioners come to the malecón to make an offering to Yemayá as they ask her for protection as they traverse her waters. Bobo did not. Bobo no tiene fé.
 Due to the economic difficulties imposed by the US economic embargo, Cuba’s particular brand of socialism, and the 30 mere fact of it island-nature, has meant that access to international travel has been historically difficult for many Cuban citizens. Whilst some travel restrictions have eased considerably over recent years, access to foreign capital, the cost of a passport and visas remain major obstacles to the average Cuban citizen wishing to emigrate or travel abroad for leisure. This translates to matters of both physical and material wellness. Throughout my multiple visits to Havana, I have met 31 people who have received items such as sewing thread, prescription medication, building materials for their home improvement projects, smartphones, digital tablets, and laptops. I also worked with a santera (a spiritual practitioner of Santeria) who asked me to bring her fabrics in the colors of her Orishas (saints) for her altars. Of course, this is over and above the Western Union wire transfers most of us in the global south have sent or received to/from loved ones. It feels important to note, too, that despite folks’ desires for material mobility of the aforementioned kind, the island country is in its own flux, and is not “trapped in a time warp” of “dilapidation” as Lonely Planet would have you believe. https:// www.lonelyplanet.com/cuba Santería is often also referred to as, lucumí. 32 47 https://www.lonelyplanet.com/cuba https://www.lonelyplanet.com/cuba 
 “infinite possibilities coming back around i know we are more than circles coming back around to love ourselves fully infinite possibilities we are not di