Rehumanising the Black Meme

Au Bal Nègre poster (1927), Herb Ritts photograph of Djimon Hounsou (1989), Legacy Russell's Black Meme (2024) and Deirdre Lewis photograph of Legacy Russell for Interview (2024).

‘The very idea that lynching postcards would become memorabilia means that there is still an economy around these materials. They would be kept and maintained and preserved, not necessarily always as a document of their violence, but often as other types of documents of correspondence or communication of intimacies that travelled across state and international lines: this was viral culture’.

LEGACY RUSSELL

INTRODUCTION

I've been invigorated by Legacy Russell's ongoing inquiries into how we come alive together. Whether she's encouraging us to think expansively about the connection between marine life and Black agency under duress, or pointing us towards the liberatory possibilities at the intersection of our bodies, genders and technologies, her work is evidence of her desire and drive to live in a world in which Black folks thrive. In our conversation, we explore the role Black people and our images have played, often against our will, in shaping the modern world; our responsibility as global and digital citizens to harness the internet to collectively push forward a generative vision of the future; and what we learn about Black self-determination from the ancestors who refused to survive the Middle Passage.

Legacy is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen, and her latest book Black Meme traces how viral culture and networked communication predate the internet altogether. From lynching postcards that travelled internationally in the early 1900s to the commodification of Black death on Getty Images today, she reveals how anti-Blackness has always operated through image circulation and economic extraction. But Black people are never only the worst thing done to us, and Legacy offers grief as a form of critical analysis that complements the essential effort of truth-telling at the core of her curatorial practice. It is only by aspiring to the truth, she says, that we can open up space for the imaginative world-building of our artists.

Black Meme with Legacy Russell is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Josh:

Legacy Russell, I am so supremely honoured to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much for accepting this invitation. 

Legacy:

I'm so grateful to be here and just really honoured to have the opportunity to just, I don't know, chop it up on a Friday. 

Josh:

For listeners, Legacy and I first met back in 2014, and it feels really wonderful to be back in each other's orbit. To open all of my conversations on Busy Being Black, I ask my guests the same question: How's your heart? 

Legacy:

My heart today is whole and full, and I think with some grief. There's a lot that's happening in the world, and as we continue to follow on and prepare for these months ahead, there is always this tinge of grief, recognition and awareness. But I'm trying to sit with it and be mindful today. 

Josh:

Looking into the scope and the body of your work and the particular intersections that you focus on, you really don't shy away from grief. And I would love for you to talk about how grief shows up for you in the work, or rather why it's so important to hold onto it so gently and so rigorously.

Legacy:

I think that grief can be instructive, right? Grief is one of the most profound articulations of love, and I aim to think deeply about what it means to have empathy inside of my creative and curatorial work, my academic practice, in terms of my writing and research—that's really critical. Often when we think about art history and the ways in which folks are remembered within our history, there is an assumption that our emotional self or somatic self is intended to be set apart. And I just believe that in this moment of visual culture, that needs to be redressed, that having a more integrated sense of self and also recognition, too, of those tender moments is part of the radical vulnerability that scholarship needs now.

Josh:

I had a conversation with Elijah McKinnon, who leads OTV, and they really blew my mind when they told me the difference between vulnerability and transparency. And that provocation that Elijah offers—that transparency is actually quite easy, but that move towards inhabiting vulnerability is a much more difficult endeavour, but much more generative as a result.

Legacy:

Being vulnerable means that you are truly allowing other people to see you, right? And also creating space for other people to be seen. It is definitely a great provocation to think about that relationship to transparency. I think some of the ways that transparency has often been bureaucratised are with this assumption that everything is seen, but in fact transparency is its own strategy of opacity and sometimes, actually, can do the opposite work. So I love that. It's an interesting call into presence, for sure, as we start this conversation. 

Josh:

I'd love you to take me back. How would you begin to talk about your first encounter with art as an awakening experience for you?

Legacy:

I grew up in a household where we didn't have a lot. I grew up in one room, in a studio apartment. My father moved from Harlem to downtown, and my mother had moved from Hawaii and was living in the East Village when they met. This was in the 1970s, and the rest is history, as they say. But I mention this because art was everywhere because I was in New York, right? And what an amazing thing to be a kid in New York. I appreciate that my home was filled with books and I had an amazing and enriching community, in terms of a kind of downtown milieu. My parents were very rigorous in taking me to all sorts of places. I grew up in the kind of downtown scene where there was this relationship between institutional space that was not inside of institutions. So literally in the church, in the bar, in the park, and then thinking very much so about the ways in which creative space would travel from sites beyond institutions into institutional sites, like museums. I was always going between these different types of institutional presences. And I also learned, too, that individuals can be institutions because, especially in a city like New York, I grew up with some deep understandings of such a rich history of performance and how the radical avant garde shaped what that vision looked like, with Black and queer people at the forefront of that. 

Running alongside of that, I will say that it was a bittersweet thing being in that moment of growing up in New York in the eighties and nineties, and really what occurred of the mass erasure of so many different types of creative spaces, small spaces and also institutions, as in individuals, right? Because the eighties and nineties were a period of time where folks who had moved through different models of gentrification and city change we're in and at risk of being extracted from, and then also moved away from the core parts of New York City. To be a creative person in that period and to make a decision to be inside of a creative community was a political decision in addition to an artistic one.

And so for me, I think that was really formative to learn as a lesson early on and then to be able to move between different institutional spaces and deepen in my understanding of what it meant to really feel entitled to be in those spaces, even though I had not come from them. Those were some of my early memories, and it was wonderful to think about, in my life trajectory, that some of the earliest institutions that I had spent time in were the Studio Museum in Harlem, which I now have had the immense pleasure of being a curator inside of, and then, of course, The Kitchen as well. So these are organisations that were part of my bedrock, and I still feel very grateful. My parents do not walk this earth now, but they are, of course, in the presence of some of the ways in which my life has taken its course. 

Josh:

Your response opens up that period of time when we first came into each other's orbit, and around that time that I was at Second Home, we hosted that round table dinner with The Serpentine about the role of public art and sculpture, and my mentor, Eric Collins, was there, and it was him who was really quantum leaping my understanding of what I love about art and who really challenged me to ask more provocative questions about the role of Black artists and Black art, which I think is a kind of never-ending, open-ended question...  

Legacy:

Always—and a deep and profound question. The questions of public space are really important, right? Who does it belong to? And one of the things that I think is really interesting about public art is that it is a private movement that moves through public space, right? Because someone has to pay for public art as it lives in public space, and oftentimes, that reveals how privatised funds are moving through a space that folks feel they are sharing as a commons. So within this, I think it's a really important history, because when we think about what it means to have folks occupy space and to be inside of public space or to create new models of privacy inside of public space, be it online or out in the world in physical space, this also too is part of a Black strategy. It's something that's really amazing. Blackness instructs us towards where those enclosures can occur and how those kinds of rips and tears and fissures can be generative and productive and exciting and rigorous. 

Josh:

There's a full circle moment here as well, because you're also speaking with experience of walking public streets with access to art that was genuinely, truly public and that didn't require the kind of machinations of the private industry behind it to make it capital-A art, as we understand it, right?

Legacy:

I definitely feel like the principles of that were really instructive and important [and feed into my work] at The Kitchen, which, of course, is an institution that has created an entire history of thinking about this idea of experimentalism in relationship to the ‘avant-garde’—and I put that in quotes because it's a history of failures of belonging, in addition to the moments where folks have felt engaged and included. And when I say ‘failures of belonging’, it's because I think there have been a wide number of discussions around the avant-garde and what that means as an identity, as a brand, as a reputation, institutionally or otherwise, but what we know is that so much of the avant-garde was not intended to live nor survive inside of institutional space, right?

Black folks, queer folks and historically oppressed folks have contributed to the avant-garde and really shaped its very possibility to sustain itself to this moment now. Projects like Just Above Midtown and Linda Goode Bryant's contributions there of creating a space for Black folks in a critical moment where institutions were not showing up to do that work here in New York City, that these were histories that ran concurrent to organisations like The Kitchen. And with that, I think it's a really important set of questions about what the diaspora of the avant-garde is and who is able to take on or claim public space and why, of course, it is so tender and monumental to think about the ways in which Black folks have changed our very understanding—not only a visual culture and representation, but really how we are intended to exist in public and to live, which is the great hope.

Mac Jackson, "Pluralized Precedent: Black Queer Culture in Art", The Kitchen, 31 July 2023. [Screenshot]

Josh:

You're making me think about the sense of entitlement I've taught myself to have in institutional spaces. I remember in 2017 going to the National Portrait Gallery at Trafalgar Square. And as I was walking around the building, it occurred to me that this building was probably built with money earned from the Transatlantic Slave Trade, right? And then we were having a conversation up at the restaurant at the top and looking out across London's iconic landscape, and I was like, ‘Oh, all of these buildings will have some sort of connection to the blood of my ancestors and our diasporic history. I belong here. Whether or not I'm on these walls, I'm in these walls’. 

Legacy:

Exactly. The question of belonging is really important, and the question of entitlement. I love that word as you brought us back to it, because I often use it. I do think folks should feel entitled to be inside of institutional spaces and entitled to understand the many spaces and passageways between them, in terms of folks having to find ways to innovate in the face of being closed out of institutional space. It's also part of the work to push further what culture should look like. I also believe deeply that, with all that has been generated by the fungibility of Blackness—that we have been an economy in and of ourselves, that we have been machinic and put to work in our labouring; and then we have been extracted and borrowed from, and recited and cited a thousand times over, both with and without credit and often without credit—finding ways to take back and reclaim space and to think through what authorship and conviviality can look like as we share space is a really important mission. Even just being in conversation in this way does some of that work because these are the intimacies that we need across Black people. 

Josh:

Listeners can't see me, but I'm blushing. 

Legacy:

I believe it deeply. I'm blushing, too. To even sit with you, it’s such a special thing.

Josh:

Thank you for saying that. So, I have Black Meme here. 

Legacy:

I've got it too. It makes my heart whole that you have it in your hands.

Josh:

Well, I tagged you in a million Stories because this is exactly the type of book—I feel like Oprah right now! ‘You need this book!’—but this is exactly the type of learning that I love to do. There are so many provocations in this book, and I had to choose somewhere to begin. So we won't get a chance to cover as much as I want to, and I'm encouraging listeners to get their copy of Black Meme. The first thing I want to ask, though, is when did you start thinking about what would become Black Meme?

Legacy:

This has been a kind of wild and crazy ride of research for years now. And for those who know me, I'm always collecting little bits like a magpie and thinking about the ways in which I'm seeing certain things in the world and saying, ‘Maybe actually this is an image that I need to be writing about,’ or I'm following a line or a thread about an artist who is doing really inspiring work. And so I have lots of wild Dropbox folders. My desktop is a mess. Too many tabs open. I think that the research for Black Meme was initiated by bringing together an amalgam of images and beginning to look at them and study them. And many of them have made it into the book. And we had to think deeply about what it meant to make some selections that would carry us across space and time from 1900 to the present day. But then, at the same time, some of the early thinking around it actually came in the form of a video that I made. Language is my first love, so I'm always writing and reading, but I also produce video works. And this is something that folks who have followed my work with Glitch Feminism may have seen as well. 

So I created this initial video and then began to do some lectures—and then the [Covid-19] pandemic hit. So it was a really interesting period of time because within those early months, I had just decided this has to be a book, and I think that this is something that I need to be investing space and time in, but of course, who would have imagined that stepping into formalising it, taking it out of the lecture space purely, and then having it become something that will become a material that people can hold in their hands would begin within a global catastrophe?

Josh:

And a global catastrophe that coincided with, or collided with, or combusted with the historic and ongoing pandemic of anti-Black police violence, right? 

Legacy:

That's right, and I think it's interesting because one of my first lectures around this was for the Atlanta Contemporary in the middle of the pandemic, and we were on Zoom, and it was a really deep and touching moment because the things that were, as you said, combusting all around this. And the discussion that occurred afterwards was incredibly impactful and transformative. As often happens with different types of scholarship, you wonder what place it will have in the world. You wonder often, when you are an author of any type of text, if you're taking it piece by piece and year by year, if it will be relevant at all when you complete it, right? These are some of the questions that I think creative folks are very familiar with. And the thing that was profound and devastating was that from 2020 to this May, when the book came into the world, the deepening of these discussions only became more urgent. One would hope actually that there would be no need for this book, but within the context that we have been in, and with the acceleration as well of images as they move and images as well of Black people, it becomes an incredibly important nexus to stand on and to think through how we create space to have this be a slow read of a fast topic.

Josh:

So, you're magpieing different ideas, images and themes; you're starting to weave them together ahead of the pandemic and ahead of the collision of Covid-19 and the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, among many thousands of others. Was there something that you had a hunch about that was confirmed for you in that collision?

Legacy:

I often say about that period of time that we went in that moment from almost 1990 to the present day within two months, in terms of the ways people romanticised and revisited different moments of the birth of cyberspace as we now know it. And then as well, how that all fell apart, right? We can remember that in the March and April period, everyone was sharing reading lists and talking about collectivising and reclaiming space and baking bread and doing all the things. They were banging the pots for their essential workers. Showing up for those who do the really unflagging, tireless and devoted work of caring for others. Those moments were so defining for so many people in all different corners of the world.

And then, of course, within that all the digital discourse, how folks were learning together inside of Zooms and having conversations and organising that would travel through and beyond our screens. And, by the time that we hit September, there were so many moments of that that had fallen apart or that folks felt disillusioned about and deeply alienated about because of the immensity and, as I mentioned before, the acceleration of social media. So much violence, as well. So many failures of the systems of care for folks during a period where so much was in a global collapse. All of that was set into the context of thinking around how this could come into being.

And for me, it was really important to also think through some of the questions as to why a book like this even exists. A book like this is intended to instruct us that images always live inside of other images and that we don't get the chance to divorce one image from another because, in fact, when we are looking and reading our world actively, we are seeing a thousand images that have been produced before, whether we are aware of it or not. And so some of our responsibility as citizens in this moment, as global citizens, is to think about the fact that every image has another image inside of it. And every image of Blackness is also bound up with the carrying of so many other images of Black people. And so the responsibility of that is huge.

When I'm inside classrooms or when I'm giving lectures, people often place a lot of blame on digital space, right? Folks will say, “Oh, it's because of the Internet that these things are happening, and that's the thing that needs to be fixed or solved.” But the accountability lives with human beings, and the reality is that regardless of whether we are inside of digital space or not, the existence of being on the internet is an integrated existence. And so that would be the great hope—that folks have a level of accountability and awareness about what is being engaged on their screens in a way that they would carry out into the world. Which then drives the thesis: perhaps some of these core questions, which are addressed in the book, predate the internet altogether. 

And that was my sneaking suspicion, as you had said. The hypothesis was that perhaps aspects of how we think about networked life and models of communication and image exchange exist in ways that have nothing to do with the screen as we define it now, but every screen that came before; and then, as well, has been informed and influenced by technologies that have allowed for us to view and exchange these images and that Black folks have been at the centre of it all.

So, I said, ‘Let me get started and take a look’—and lo and behold, what is evidenced within this research is that we can see that from the very beginning of media and scholarship as we have shaped it around media, that these changes have been prevalent and that the acceleration of it has been driven by individuals, but also at the same time [media and visual culture] has been uplifted and upheld by the contributions of Black people.

Josh:

When you flipped the lynching postcards into the legacy of Black memes, I was stunned, and so when you brought up that people blame it on the internet, on the technologies, the book refutes that position, right? Actually, look at the way that these lynching postcards travelled internationally, as you show in Black Meme, and the joy and revelry associated with that international travel: ‘Look where I was. Look how I'm documenting my life and aliveness as a white person, in contrast to Black death’.

Legacy:

And also how these things are kept, right? The very idea that lynching postcards would become memorabilia means that there is still an economy around these materials. They would be kept and maintained and preserved, not necessarily always as a document of their violence, but often as other types of documents of correspondence or communication of intimacies that travelled across state and international lines: this was viral culture. And so when we ask questions about speed and we say that the speed of viral culture is solely defined by digital space, it's important to look at how that has come into being and the ways we can think differently about our integrity and participation within that, in this moment now and as it has been set forward by the generations before.

Josh:

And I think another helpful offering here is also the fact that you can still purchase lynching postcards on Getty Images, and you list out the image sizes and the associated costs to buy these images of Black death that happened, as non-Black people like to tell us, ‘All that time ago’, right? ‘Let it go’. But yet, here it is. It's still commodified. It's still purchasable. It's still enabled as memorabilia. It cannot be divorced from that violence, right? 

Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, lynched 7 August 1930, Marion, Indiana. Photographed by Lawrence Beitler, commercialised by Getty Images. [Image modified out of respect.]

Legacy:

And I think the ongoing discourse around how these economies still function, as if they are separate in their economies from some of the ways in which we can think about what it means to acknowledge and dialogue around what is due to Black people, I think is a really important conversation. And it's sticky and it's hard, and it doesn't have a simple solution, but I believe that it's a really important thing to see the connectivity between those two dots and also to be able to understand that when we talk about digital media and the way images travel, these are conversations about the histories of an empowered economy or a dispossessed economy, and who is on either side of that comes with race, gender and class lines. 

Josh:

I hope you won't mind me reading a passage for listeners; it's from my favourite chapter. 

Legacy:

Oh, please do.

Josh:

I would just say that it sounds odd to say that my favourite chapter in Black Meme is ‘Eating the Other’, but we'll get into why. Okay. This is on page 43, and I want to read this because I really think it drives home this point. 

‘[There is an open] source model that drives what social scientist Kwame Holmes expands on as a form of “necrocapitalism”—an extension of political theorist Achille Mbembe's necropolitics—that makes “the value of black death” a fungible commodity, worthy of exchange. Holmes cites the rise in “home prices in the St. Paul suburb of Falcon Heights... at an impressive clip of 13%” in the wake of the murder of Philando Castile by officer Jeronimo Yanez, live-streamed by Castile's partner, Diamond Reynolds, calling it “the area's most robust bull market since the subprime speculative bubble.”’ (p.43, ‘Eating the Other’, Black Meme)

Legacy:

It's outrageous, right? And it's distressing. I had an early lecture with some students, and there was a student who got up and said, ‘What happened to you that made you want to write this?’ And I said, ‘Being born’. What an interesting question to come from a young person who is a non-Black person, because the very assumption, first of all, that something would have had to occur, as in a singular event, to be accountable to this history. And then also the very assumption that this is a Black issue: if I'm not a Black person, I don't have to care about this. These are the things that are very flawed in the logic that Black work is the ‘Black stuff’ that folks set apart and study.

These are the spaces that instruct the entire world towards models of liberation and change. We have seen that time and time again. And what it means to be able to take seriously that if this is happening here, that its implications are far and wide, and that it sets a standard and a blueprint for the ways this can happen to all sorts of people—and has continued to happen to all sorts of people in terms of histories of dispossession that are shared across the world. So the economies of it are deep, and when we make it a superficial issue, that it is about the entertainment purely, that it has nothing to do with economy and that the rigour of the discourse around the economics is something that we are not responsible for, we are really fooling ourselves and selling ourselves short because it's far more rich and interesting and far more devastating and nuanced than what often folks perceive.

Josh:

Part of my anger is that I did not know this information that Zimmerman was auctioning off the weapon that killed Trayvon Martin or that the murder of Philando Castile made a previously unattractive area attractive. I shouldn't be so surprised by that. I shouldn't be so devastated by that. 

Legacy:

It is devastating. And Josh, I really hold you in that. I get chicken skin talking about this because it is infuriating and it brings me so much grief that it can be hard to articulate because really what it shows is that what it means to feel safe in one's neighbourhood is predicated on supremacy. And that is an incredibly dangerous proposition, but actually it is an age-old one, and it is not new. So when we convince ourselves that in this modern world everything is new and that it is set apart and we have evolved, we give ourselves permission to distance ourselves from what really are these very mediaeval tactics. The kind of currency of exchange that is established by how economies resonate through these acts of violence is a really important thing to be reflecting on and to feel upset about—and to understand that the work is not to have the feeling stop there, but to move ourselves towards action and empowerment to better understand [how we bring about a] future of a world where Black people are truly loved. 

Josh:

And this is why regular listeners will hear me talking ad absurdum about grief and mourning. I had a conversation with Dagmawi Woubshet about the tremendous courage and bravery of public mourning rituals during the AIDS crisis, or during what Jafari Allen calls ‘the long 1980s’. I've got Assotto Saint's newly-released Collected Works here too. And there’s this idea that grief can not only be metabolised but that we grow around our grief: we become bigger in grief because we learn to accommodate that loss. At a time when their lives were on the line, these black creatives and writers and thinkers and movers and shakers decided to write through the storm anyway, to show up and they did it so intentionally, right? Was it Melvin Dixon who said he would be listening out for his name? And so I think that this anger that emerges is an old anger, right? It's not just mine. 

I come to you bearing witness to a broken heart; I come to you bearing witness to a broken body—but a witness to an unbroken spirit. Perhaps it is only to you that such witness can be brought and its jagged edges softened a bit and made meaningful.

MELVIN DIXON

Legacy:

Absolutely. There have been moments in conversation with folks across these many years, with pandemics and other things as they continue to occur in the world, where folks are in debate, right? What is the catalyst that really can come of rage? Is rage productive? If I feel this feeling, is it something that breaks things, or rather, does it make something new? And I think it's possible to be an immensely joyful, immensely optimistic and immensely hopeful person and still have a connectivity to the fact that there are these things that make us feel so wounded and so disappointed.

And at the same time, to have moments where that can come in the form of anger. These are motivating points, and the thing that is amazing about grief is that it has so much inside of it: the loss, the loneliness, the love, the anger and the hope, right? Grief is a hopeful emotion. It establishes forward what we would hope to resolve. And so that feeling of absence and presence living at the same time, I think, is one that, as human beings, we really struggle with, and that we as Black people are not provided the opportunity to synthesise effectively. God forbid that we admit that grief is an emotion that we share, nor when that emotion is rage. But rage is a natural human condition.

The question just becomes, what do you do with it? And how do you move from a place where that can be paralysis, where you're held without being able to consider what lies beyond it, to a horizon where you can invest in making something new and building something that can be productive and imbued with love? I think both things can be possible. And that's why it's really complicated. So often Black folks are asked to live through one reality and try to set apart another when that ask is actually not made of other folks, in terms of an equal ask for folks to be disassociated with some of those core emotions.

Josh:

This might be a stretch, so feel free to don't rein me in. 

Legacy:

Stretch! 

Josh:

I have Dionysus on my bicep, and on my neck I have one of the cats that the Maenads were carrying. He's my favourite of the Greek gods. So for those who don't know, Dionysus was a demigod; Zeus's wife was jealous and sent the Titans to rip him to shreds. Zeus took Dionysus's heart and sewed it into his thigh. When Dionysus was reborn, he was like, ‘Fuck this’, and he escaped into the forest, into the sea, and into the woods, where he became the god of Bacchanalia, orgies, revelry, etc. But is it not grief that motivated his journey into the world? That made him leave home? And in that joy-making, in that ecstasy, he created the world that he wanted to inhabit. 

Legacy:

Yeah, and truly feel through it, right? I think it's really hard to be a sentient being. To think about, as you said, what it means to travel from a place of injury to a place where you're thinking and feeling at the same time, and that can feel really empowering. It's also scary, right? Because again, if the lesson is that our feelings are different, pathological, that there is something wrong with moments where we recognise that sort of transfer of emotions, then, of course, we're going to program ourselves to react and think differently as a protective mechanism. So the work too is to think about, What are we entitled to? How do we create space that can be decadent and abundant and joyful, even inside of a moment where there are so many continued failures and so much more work to be done?

Josh:

I'm picturing both of us skipping among destructed buildings with a hammer, right? Joyful. [Laughter]

Legacy:

[Laughter] The dismantled house. Yes, for sure. 

Long before the poignant questions of the color line and the Negro problem registered in the black imagination, it seems that a more pressing problematic confronted the black citizen: how does it feel to be an energy source and foodstuff, to be consumed on the levels of body, sex, psyche, and soul?

VINCENT WOODARD

Josh:

So, I said that my favourite chapter in Black Meme is ‘Eating the Other’. I've been yelling loudly that people should be reading Vincent Woodard's The Delectable Negro since I read it a couple of years ago. I can't remember that I've read something so singularly affirming—to be able to finally name the looks I've received, the violence I've experienced, the cannibal horror that I have felt subjected to, and that I know men like me have been subjected to. And I've been telling people, ‘Oh my gosh, they were actually cannibals!’ So I was thrilled—again, that sounds quite morbid—but thrilled to see you reference Vincent Woodward in this chapter, ‘Eating the Other’. What is the connection? 

Legacy:

The work of talking about cannibalism within a visual culture is to push us further to think about cannibalism as more than just a metaphor, that we are active in those modes of consumption and how they occur. And the history runs deep and wide, right? It’s in the spiritualism and fetishism of Black people [white people], and that whiteness actually needs to consume to sustain itself. Is something that has happened both literally and figuratively as it has mapped out into the world, right?

So it lives together within a discussion of Black Meme and the ways folks have consumed Black culture, decorated themselves with Blackness, and created a souvenir of Blackness. This, too, is really critical and helps us think differently about some of the ways that we maybe have felt extracted from or consumed—and that it is literal. We’re kept from being able to really feel and acknowledge and recognise that, but Woodard's text does the work of showing us that this is not something that lives in the sky as a hypothetical, that it lives in an embodied self, and that we have seen it time and time again.

Black Meme takes that into the readership of images, but also this question of decoration, which is really critical: folks are donning trappings of Blackness, as if it is something that they are entitled to. The very idea is that Blackness itself is something that is meant to be worn. And so folks can wear that skin without any assumption that they're wearing it is a flawed logic. I really believe deeply that the text itself is all wrapped up in these conversations of how images travel and then also how we are eaten through those images.

Josh:

I've scribbled down Afropessimism on my notepad. I read a book recently that I don't have proximate to me, so I can't remember the name of the author, but it's in this book that I learned Afropessimism is not pessimistic about Black and Afro-diasporic people: Afropessimism is pessimistic about whiteness. Afropessimism gets quite a bad rap, right? People have a lot of critiques to lob at it, but I actually think there's a great deal of hopefulness found in Afropessimistic  ways of engaging with the truth and engaging with reality because what else becomes possible when we take as fact that at the core of everything is anti-Blackness? I just wanted to start there and invite you to talk about what Afropessimism means for you and your work and how you think about the future. 

Legacy:

For those who are keen to learn more about Afropessimism, there's a great book by Frank Wilderson. It's a dense text. You should give yourself a lot of time. It's not a beach read. So, you're going to be in there with all the citations and the notes and things underlined. But I will say that the way that this relates to Black Meme is to be thinking about anti-Blackness and the way that it can be analysed within a broader frame. As you noted, anti-Blackness exists at the centre of so much, and when we are reading anti-Blackness, that actually it is not purely a read through the lens of Black people but also seeing how anti-Blackness has created a blueprint and strategy for oppression across many global points.

You can find Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III and Darkening Blackness by Norman Ajari in Busy Being Black’s Bookshop.

Josh:

And the book I was talking about is Norman Ajari's Darkening Blackness, and so for those who would like a softer entry into Afropessimism, that would also be a really great place for you to begin as well. So I'll include a link to both of those books, alongside Black Meme and Glitch Feminism, in the show notes.

You gave a wonderful sermon at Loophole of Retreat in Venice a few years ago, and a few phrases stuck out to me that I want to call you into as we close our conversation. The first is ‘the imagination of abundance’. And this feels particularly important within not only the context of this conversation and Black Meme, but the context of the loophole of retreat and the sermon you gave. I would love to invite you to talk about how you're rethinking the Middle Passage as a site of abundance. 

Legacy:

To the point of Afropessimism, to take that thread and travel through your beautiful question, one of the strategies within the travel of the Middle Passage, forced travel of Black people as fungible assets, was to end one's life. And many folks have a hard time talking about this, right? Because I think it is a devastating part of a devastating history. But the strategy around ending one's life—folks who chose to throw themselves overboard—and what rose up around that—that in fact, there was a marine culture that was cultivated by those who were either forcibly thrown overboard or threw themselves overboard, right? Black people were sustaining a whole other ecology simply within the movement between different spaces and geographic points.

To talk about the radical work of what that meant, to make a decision to not see the other side and to be on one's own terms inside of a model of liberation is a devastating set of assumptions, right? But moves through an Afropessimist lens to think about what it means to be inside of an enclosure where one is able to dictate for themselves, with self-determination, how their lives should live—or not. Within this, I would hope for a different set of decisions for Black people into the future, but I also recognise that in itself, it is an early example of how quite literally different ecosystems have been sustained by the violence of supremacy.

And the kind of counterposition to that is to think, What does it mean to be able to truly live? And what does liberation look like? And how can folks maybe think about the strategies around that so that there is protection around our lives—in the policy of it, in the community of it, in the city planning of it, in the structural infrastructure and structural questions around it—and that these are also really urgent parts of the solution? It actually has to be seen in 360. It lives at every rhizome. It is something that exists in every part of our society, has to be taken into account and sometimes feels bigger than all of us. 

How can we feel empowered when these things continue to happen? And it feels as if they are happening to us without a choice. The lessons of the Middle Passage show us that there's always a choice, and that makes me want to cry, quite frankly, because the choice may be limited, but there's always a choice. And so every day, when we commit to doing this work and thinking about what it means to uplift and uphold Black people and to truly love us, and then to not only love but to sustain us, that is a different type of choice. And that is a choice that is not just a Black choice. 

Josh:

It brings to mind Cecilio M. Cooper's work on the Black Chthonic. They write, ‘[The wholesale positivist reclamation of Blackness as holiness]... obscures and squanders the insurrectionary potential of embracing Blackness’ cosmological alignment with the fallen, infernal and subterrestrial’. It also makes me think of Wangechi Mutu, right?

Legacy:

Exactly that. 

Josh:

And how utterly exhilarated I felt looking at the hooved, horned, biped at the Afrofuturist exhibition at the Hayward Gallery a couple years ago. What is our allegiance to the human form?! 

Legacy:

That’s right—and it's cyborgian. And I also think some of what Wangechi's work shows us is that we have always been a mutation and have been technological in our very form, and to think about how we can choose, with self-determination and care and an eye on liberation, how we want to be perceived and presented. And also in our perception of monstrousness, right? Because really some of this, too, is how we are surveyed as monsters and cyborgs; within that is an opportunity. And so this idea of even being seen or represented, and the truth of that, can be a very Black subject that can be defined by very Black means. And of course, artists always do the work of being able to instruct us towards how that can be viewed not as a hypothetical imagination but as something that lives on earth right here, right now.

Wangechi Mutu, The screamer island dreamer, 2014.

Josh:

To close our conversation, I want to ask you one final question. I believe, from hard-earned experience, that the creative process and the effort to live fully require the same approach. I've learned a lot from writers about the importance of destroying things to make way for new things, from painters who can often employ beauty to help us reckon with horrifying truths, and from musicians and poets who call us into a deeper relationship with our desires. What can we learn from the creativity and rigour required for a robust and enlivening curatorial practice? 

Legacy:

What a great question. I think it's about telling the truth. That seems like a simple thing to say, right? But I believe deeply that we need a future of institutions that are prepared to tell the truth. And artists are incredible and have always been incredible because they show us not only that there is a future and many truths, but they bring us into impactful truths, just as you said, across disciplines that change how we see. The work of a curator is not only to care, but to tell the truth and to identify what that means [for our ability] to create space for artists where truth is part of the work of reconciliation and liberation, and truth is part of the work of creating space where people can really see themselves and feel through a wide variety of organisational structures, creative or otherwise, with the support that they need. 

I think it's really hard as a curator to tell the truth because we are in a moment where truth itself is being questioned every day. We're seeing models of fact and fiction blurred and extracted from in all sorts of ways, as it is manipulated as a political tool. So it has always been a complicated thing to understand how to define truth. But curators are not just stewards of an art history that has already been written. It's about examining what's been written and asking who lives there and who has been shut out of that house. And also thinking differently about the ways some of the unwinding of the work is about acknowledging that maybe some of the things that have been told, said aloud, or perhaps ignored altogether have been part of shaping our understanding of visual culture and truth.

Josh:

Legacy. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. I adore you. 

Legacy:

Adore. Thank you so much for having me.

*

Busy Being Black transcripts are edited for clarity and readability.

The imaginative work of becoming undone

Photograph of Elijah McKinnon by DeLovie Kwagala.

‘The reason why I guard my softness is because I have experienced so much debilitating sorrow in my life that those parts of me are always healing. They are always in conversation with what I am experiencing in my world around me. And so in order to just humanise this hardness that I have had to endure and the resilience that I have had to embody, it is imperative that I allow myself the opportunity to experience softness and care and nourishment in a way that really informs and activates parts of my body here on this plane, on earth, right now.

ELIJAH MCKINNON

INTRODUCTION

Questioning and then breaching our limits is a salient and consequential concern—and a quest Elijah McKinnon undertakes as founder and executive diva of Open Television (OTV), a platform and media incubator for intersectional storytelling. Elijah’s insights into how their imagination is supported and encouraged by their pragmatism made me think and reflect on how I engage with my own, and we wax lyrical on a shared desire to become undone.

In our conversation, we explore the difference between surrender and intentional release, the differing demands of and confusion between transparency and vulnerability, and refusing to be bound by other people’s ideas and labels. Elijah reflects on their stewardship of OTV, the care required to sustain artistic vitality, and how an entitlement to softness has transformed their sense of duty to themselves and the communities they love.

Becoming Undone with Elijah McKinnon is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Josh Rivers:

Elijah, thank you so much for joining me on Busy Being Black. We've been having a conversation about having you on the show for what feels like an eternity. I'm so glad that it's happening now, on the eighth anniversary of OTV. I'm so proud of you, and I'm so glad that you're here.

Elijah McKinnon:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm so honoured and privileged to be in this space with you. I'm a deep admirer and fan of yours, so thank you for holding space for this sacred convening.

Josh:

As you know, to open my conversations on Busy Being Black, I ask all of my guests the same question: How's your heart?

Elijah:

My heart is full of love and pleasure and wonder. I'm thinking a lot about release and letting go, as opposed to surrendering, and so a lot of what fuels me and fills my heart right now is opportunities to get closer to that invitation to explore and be a bit more adventurous and courageous in my approach to calling what is sacred and divine in.

Josh:

Surrender is a word that I have tussled with, and it's so interesting to hear that you're moving away from surrender, particularly as it relates to the divine, because these two ideas, if you will, are almost always presented together, right? We surrender to some higher power, we surrender to some greater divinity, what have you. Talk to me more about this decision to move away from surrender. What is it about release and letting go that differs from surrender?

Elijah:

Surrendering has and holds a space in my heart that I think and believe, throughout the duration of my 20s, I had to wave the white flag, right? Like there was just moments in time where I just couldn't anymore, right? There was wisdom and knowledge that I did not have access to and so therefore I had to quite literally surrender. Entering into the third decade of my life has been an invitation for me to explore what it looks like to intentionally release or intentionally let go or intentionally transition, and so much of my work and my practice currently is about cultivating invitations to sunset: How do we send things off? A good friend of mine and sister-in-slayage often talks about how things need to die. Things actually need to be laid to rest so that other opportunities can bear the fruits of our labour, to really truly come alive.

Josh:

That's a really helpful way to think about the difference between surrendering and letting go. And of course, my resistance to surrender has always been not letting go of control. I'm not going to be told what to do by anyone: Ancestors, higher powers, my dad, nobody is going to tell me what to do. I will figure this out the hard way. But then that's also my attraction to surrender and letting go. Sometimes when I am gripping the steering wheel, I'm prone to veer off the cliff. What if I do get a little bit better at letting in? How do I open myself up? And I think that's the journey I've been on this year practicing sobriety. So much of that is about letting myself be touched and moved by the world, and not running from myself and other people and experiences. Surrender has a new texture for me now than it's had in previous years.

Elijah:

I really love that because it also is an invitation for you, right? To get a little bit closer to the ways in which our minds work, I think that the mind is such a fascinating object that we just hold within us, but also is outside of us. I think that that's what's so beautiful. The mind is actually influenced outside of us, right? Like we have a mind that is inside of our bodies, but it's actually influenced by what we see and what we hear and what we taste and what we touch, right? That's what actually gives our mind something to reflect and mirror back.

I think it’s so beautiful to be in constant communication with what is happening around you and what is happening inside of you and how we can get in—I don't even want to say better alignment, but with just more alignment between the two. So, I'm happy that this journey, in whatever practice that arrives at in your body, is something that feels nourishing and is centred and anchored in care because so much around the surrendering that you were talking about is usually by force. And I am just trying to live a life that is anchored in duty over obligation, an invitation versus like a forceful intrusion. And so that's where I get really excited. You're tuned in, you understand that there's actually work that we have to do collectively and individually to get to that space.

Josh:

Yeah, and the last thing I'll say on that is that idea of the mind is so interesting because it's not only that our mind is a consequence of and always an interaction with other ideas, people, moments and experiences outside of porous border of our bodies, but also our mind extends beyond the border of the self. Right? Our mind is also neurally networked, if you will, with people like us and not like us. And it really kind of troubles this distinction of the Western construct of the human, right? This kind of singular entity whose main productive goal in life—outside of reproduction and the propagation of the species—is actually to ascend some sort of individualistic higher plane. And so this idea that the mind actually is not confined to whatever space we believe it occupies within our body, but is actually part of some much more larger interconnected whole, I think is really invigorating as well. What's enchanting you at the minute?

Elijah:

Well, as a fantastical queen, I'm quite enchanted by very simple things. I think life is such a gift and it's so precious. And right now, what I'm most enchanted by is the practice of slowing down and paring down. Finding really beautiful, soft, tender, intimate moments to just exist beyond production or beyond labour or beyond service. Also understanding the privilege and the luxury that is held within that pursuit and how challenged I am by that: why being able to slow down is a luxury and a privilege and the ways capitalism and supremacy culture keep us so far away from that. I’m delighted by my ability to advance through life this way, with that perfect balance of grace and grit.

Oftentimes I am in these spaces where individuals talk about like, “Oh you have this light’, or, ‘You hold this light’, and I think for so long – because of ego – I was like, ‘Yes I am light’ and like, ‘I'm the chosen one’. But what I'm actually realising is that I'm a mirror for those who don't have access to that light source. So when they see me tapping into my power, it's not envy or jealousy. It's not anger or frustration. Those may be parts of it sometimes, but what they're actually seeing is someone who has actually cultivated the privilege to be able to tap into that.

So many people that I get to divine with and share space with see that as a window. And so it's been a beautiful space to divine in with the people who I hold sacred and the people who really understand ritual as a form of liberation. So those are some of the things that I think I've been musing and meditating on over the past couple of weeks.

Josh:

I love that. You’ve made me think about my own softness. I don't just want to be able to rest. I want to be able to be soft, to be tender, to be properly vulnerable. I was joking with my friend the other day that the vulnerability I sometimes embody feels like a fabricated one, right? Like it's safe, I know just how vulnerable I can be and I guard that kind of very specific vulnerability, if that makes sense. But there's still a barrier there that I’m working on taking out brick by brick.

Elijah:

Oh, it makes complete sense. I mean, there's something that is quickly coming up for me. I was attending a leadership training a couple of weeks ago and a fellow executive was practicing this modelling that I really, really loved. And it was: there's a difference between being vulnerable and being transparent … Oh, your face says it all!

Josh:

Well that says a lot considering the amount of Botox in my face. So if you're seeing an expression that means it's really hit home.

Elijah:

But it's so true. We can be really, really vulnerable in practice, or we can be very transparent in theory. What I've been trying to get closer to is, how do we have a bit more balance? Because I think I'm really good at being transparent. I'm very good at telling the truth: ‘This is what's happening’. And I'm learning how to become more vulnerable and sharing that with people who I build trust with. Being transparent doesn’t mean you establish trust. You're just telling people things and it's not deeply rooted in transaction. I don't have to listen to your response of my transparency, for example. I don't have to be engaged.

Josh:

My mind is blown because that is a really helpful heuristic. I can't think of a more accessible word than heuristic because I haven't thought about that transparency and vulnerability dichotomy. And that actually brings up a lot of questions for me in my mind, which I'll process offline, but thank you for putting that into my orbit.

I really love an Instagram post of yours. It's from a couple of years ago. And so I don't know if it's even appropriate to bring up, right? We all change so much in the course of the day, let alone a couple of years, but I imagine it might still resonate with you. The post says, ‘I'm allergic to your lack of imagination’. And the caption says, ‘The 2020s are definitely giving flop era vibes. Put me on ice and wake me in 2030. Or better yet, just keep me on ice and don't wake me till society has collectively decided to love, cherish and protect Black people as much as they do their greed, ego and patriarchy’.

And now, as then, it makes me think of a conversation with Patrisse Cullors. She was in conversation with Krista Tippett on On Being and said, I'm paraphrasing, someone imagined chains, someone imagined guns, someone imagined death. Our job is to imagine something else. How are you tending to your imagination in this moment?

Elijah:

That's a big question. And I think something that comes up for me as a quote by June Jordan: ‘If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable’. I like to think of my imagination as like a portal to a place that I know. I think sometimes we often we'll think of an imaginative space as this unknown, right? It's this other world. And while that can be true, because multiple truths can exist at once, I actually like to think of my imagination as like a place that I do know. It's a place that I do spend a lot of time at. It is this place that I'm very familiar with. And it brings up this notion around just like my upbringing.

When I hear that question and when I think about imagination, I didn't grow up in this incredibly fantastical, surrealist home. My upbringing and my roots are very pragmatic—through survival. As the child of a partnerless parent, I was taught to be pragmatic because that's how you survived. That's how you learned about the world around you. And I'm often quite weary of individuals who proclaim themselves to be visionary, but can't understand the difference between balancing dream with action. Because we can live in a world that interrogates all of these systems and dismantles everything, but if we're not simultaneously building something else and placing ourselves inside of that world right now, then when we dismantle all of these systems and when we interrogate all of the ways in which these solutions have failed us, we are not actually prepared and invested in what is on the other side.

And so I think a lot about my imagination and the grand visions that I have and hold through action. So a lot of that is listening and observing. It's been a lot of times that I’ve been listening to people and listening to what they don't say, so that I can deduce where my gifts bring value to a space. And I'm getting really good at this, which I'm really excited about, and also incredibly terrified about, but I'm so good at removing my gifts from the table. I'm really good at knowing when my gifts are not valued, honoured or respected and deciding to remove them from that space. And I’m not letting you know where they're going. I’m not giving you coordinates. These gifts no longer hold value in this space? Best of luck to you.

Josh:

Or as we say, be well.

Elijah:

Oh my goodness, bless your heart. I believe that my imagination is protected through solitude and reflection, that’s how I guard it. And I love that you pick up on that. There is an action in guarding one's beauty that resides within them, not like just external beauty, but like the internal beauty. And I think of gifts as a form of that. Whatever gift you hold, whatever wisdom you have garnered, whatever knowledge you feel called and compelled to share, it's such a gift and it's an honour that you hold that. What you choose to do with your gifts is actually where power resides. And so for me, when I think about the imagination, I'm thinking also about like the adult learning cycle: experience and action, and reflecting and thinking. I feel like imagination is like right in between those axes. Somewhere right in middle is where my imagination lies.

Josh:

That's so beautiful. I'm perhaps prone to do this, to think of the imagination as a protected space not for anyone else that isn't necessarily a part of me. It's a place I have access to, because I love my solitude, right? And I guard it fiercely, and I love being on my own. I find myself so entertaining, but I also just love being in my head and doing what pleases me. So solitude is immensely important for me. And it's also when I do that imagination tending, right? I think of my imagination more as a garden, and so what I'm learning about now is how am I taking what's in this beautiful, abstract place and actually living it. How am I bringing my imagination into the world. I suppose I do that with Busy Being Black, but there things I want for myself and for other people as well too. I think it's so helpful to see the imagination as something to be shared in a more generative way.

Elijah:

I love that you're on this journey, because it also means that everyone that you touch is also experiencing that along with you, right, in whatever ways in which it invites itself into their body. That to me is what is so powerful. It actually brings up something Patrisse Cullors said: we can feel sad, we can feel hurt, we can feel demoralised, but like we can't give up. That's the nucleus. We can feel all of these things, right? And every one of them can be true. But as long as we find some form of inspiration and drive to push us forward, that's the imaginative space that I want to be in.

Oftentimes people ask me what do I do? And I tell them I’m a pop star or executive diva because I won't be bound by some title or some idea or identity that you believe is what allows me to move throughout the world. What allows me to move throughout the world is my agency and autonomy over my f*cking body. That's it. And then whatever wig I decide to put on is what I have imagined. So, if I choose to wear a short kinky bob, then that's what it is today. It's a short kinky bob day. But tomorrow it may give a 40-inch yaki unit. And that's my imagination. That's what's so beautiful about also being Black and queer and holding the intersections that reside within them: there is this other space that we get to tap into.

Care is the seed of a radical political imagination. We become fugitives from the human through the development of an ethos of care, this fellow-feeling against the circumscription of our lives. We find radical politics in care by reframing who we care about and taking practical action to make other people’s lives better.

AKWUGO EMEJULU

Josh:

Congratulations on eight years of OTV. It's a tremendous accomplishment. For those who don't know, it might be helpful for you to talk about what OTV is: first, as a vision and then, what it does in the world – in action, as you might say.

Elijah:

I love that question and I, one, cannot believe I'm old enough to be the founder of an organisation that is eight years old. What was I doing? Shouldn't I have been out in the street somewhere? But yes, eight years, it's quite lovely and such an honour to be able to continue doing this work. And to have watched so many organisations that started around our inception that are unfortunately no longer here or that are continuing to do this great work, It's just amazing to be in an ecosystem that is actively challenging the way in which media portrays, identifies, mobilises and activates our stories that are oftentimes missing from not only the big screens, but even the small screens. OTV really serves as an intervention: a new way, an alternative way of making media. And so through our work over the last eight years, we have arrived at a non-profit streaming platform, as well as media incubator that really centres artistic vitality and expression by intersectional artists. Intersectional artists really being defined by individuals who are marginalised not only by market but also society because of the race, gender, sexuality, nationality, disability or other... identity markers that keep them from not only entering the market, but also allowing their stories to be told authentically. And so what we've done over the past eight years is really develop an ecosystem that is really void of the ways in which media has dictated the way that our stories get not only told, but the way that they arrive to our communities. We really sit kind of right at that intersection of, yes, empowering artists, but also engaging community.

And oftentimes as a media network or a platform or an incubator, you really have to kind of take one on, right? It's either you're going to engage in the artist or you're going to really stimulate the community. And what we've been able to do so beautifully over the last eight years is build a community that really supports our artists. And that is what I think continues to bring me back to this work and helps motivate new and exciting ways to engage in this really volatile industry.

Josh:

A phrase that stands out to me is artistic vitality. And just this morning I was reading an essay by Okwui Enwezor, the late art critic and curator. He's basically responsible for a reintroduction, or a recalibration of, the lens through which Black African people are seen in the art world. So he did these kind of huge installations and exhibitions—Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale—to kind of challenge the kind of white western vampiric lens, a way of looking at Black African people.

And I've also been reading John Berger, the late art critic who challenged our ways of seeing and understanding art as a product of an artist, who was going through things and experiencing the world and trying to say something, and that we have to pay more attention to the life of the artist. And so I guess artistic vitality is really standing out to me in this moment, particularly as it relates to the building of a community as well. How do you think about artistic vitality as something to aspire to and nurture? I guess how do you do it is what I'm asking. How do you vitalise the artist?

Elijah:

Oh, that is such a stunning question. I mean, I think it centres care. It centres care over production and extractive practices. I think that there's just history that dates beyond me, and several decades beyond me, around the harmful and extractive nature of the film and entertainment and media landscape. And so I believe, and OTV's mission believes, in a two pronged approach, in terms of a theory of change. The media ecosystem is very, very volatile to individuals who hold a multiple marginalised identities. And we don't even need to get into that because we universally know how challenging this ecosystem is. So our theory of change really positions itself to repair that, right? How do we really repair that? What are the ways in which we need to isolate and specifically call in the opportunities to minimise harm? So that's one.

And then two, simultaneously, we gotta build a whole new thing, right? Because we can't wait for that harm to be repaired. We gotta do something else on the periphery. And so, when I think of artistic vitality, and when I think about the ways of an artist having everything that they need to feel nourished and empowered, I think about bravery. This is just through our theory of change: the ways that our artists have come to us and been empowered to say, “this is what I want, this is what I need” have a ripple effect in a sector. Because once you expose someone to a possibility model, they can't unlearn that. Actually, I was just doing some random research around neurodivergence and it’s impossible for the brain to unlearn something. You don't unlearn it, you can isolate, but you don't unlearn. There's no control, alt, delete. So new possibility models are powerful because they spark opportunities for people to recall things that they've experienced with us when they go out into the world.

And bravery is such a big piece of the work that we do because it's not only providing an access point for someone who has a lived experience where they maybe have not been able to be incredibly brave, right? Or not had the opportunity to be steeped and surrounded in courageous opportunities or conversations. But when they leave, right, from whatever, you know, canon or opportunity or experience that we have been able to activate, they know that it exists. It's real. And so when I think of artistic vitality and thinking about something that is sustained through an ecosystem. It isn't something that is elected, and it isn't something that is done in isolation. It's something that everyone has to subscribe to or it doesn't work.

What I love about the work that we get to do and what I love about the stories that we get to amplify is that they're coming from the heart. I've talked about this a lot with Marvin Maddox over at FGUK around how storytelling is heart's work, right? It really is heart's work. And so we get to do that and we get to centre it in a way that reminds artists that their gifts bring value to the space, however they're arriving. And we are here to help you nourish that to the best of our abilities, so that when you re-engage in the big, big wild world, you're able to anchor in something that is tangible, that you created, that is of you and that no one can take away. And that is vital: it is yours. It is also what is most challenging about the work. It's really challenging to meet artists where they are, at the variety of spectrums in which we serve and help them out of where they are.

Josh:

The phrase that is bouncing around in my head, I feel like it was just given to me: ‘We become human again’. If we think about the ways queer Black people are objectified, fetishised and dehumanised; the ways that there are only certain queer Black stories that the media machine wants to amplify, there's an actual scarcity of opportunities, right? It’s not a fabricated scarcity. So much of this experience can be dehumanising and demoralising and I'm so enlivened by the idea that queer Black people encounter you and your team and the community at OTV and feel like they're becoming human again, right? That how they feel matters as much as the stories they wanna tell.

And the second thing is around storytelling. There's a wonderful quote from Chinua Achebe:

If you look at the world in terms of storytelling, you have, first of all, the man who agitates, the man who drums up the people. I call him the drummer. Then you have the warrior who goes forward and fights, but you also have the storyteller who recounts the event. And this is the one who survives, who outlives all the others. It is the storyteller, in fact, who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that survivors must have, otherwise, surviving would have no meaning. This is very, very important. Memory is necessary if surviving is going to be more than just a technical thing.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Elijah:

Oh, I love that. And that resonates with me so incredibly deeply, especially around like just outlasting like the test of time. Because that really is something that isn't on our side, right? It is something that is constantly progressing and constantly changing the ways in which we engage with the world. And so the storyteller really is the individual who is the keeper of our secrets, right? It is the angelic troublemaker who also has the opportunity to say like, this did happen or didn't happen or happened this way or from my recall, right? At the end of the day, I think a big part of artistic vitality is shape-shifting. It's being able to really allow yourself to mould and change the ways in which your gifts are able to land. That's really what it is.

Josh:

I'm having goosebumps, I just had a total a-ha! moment.

Elijah:

Yes, we love that.

Josh:

We are all already storytellers. If we think about the murder of our sibling O'Shea Sibley, or indeed any other murder of any other queer Black person since the advent of social media, the stories that we adopt and choose to share as social media citizens, as citizens of the world of the internet, means that we become the storytellers, right? And I think that so many of us have had that fact obscured from us. We don't see ourselves as the storytellers. We don't even see ourselves participating per se in the kind of weaving of a kind of larger, more damaging story. But that's actually what we've been made to do—even if we don't intend to—is be the storytellers of very limiting narratives about Black life broadly, but more specifically about who queer Black people can be in the world.

Elijah:

And just the OTV perspective, I think that that's what a lot of people don't understand is how much of a privilege it is to have our own platform. We aren't beholden to anyone beyond our community. We are not waiting for approval. We are not waiting for affirmation. We are not waiting for the industry to validate or affirm the work that we're doing, which then creates a whole other system of gatekeeping, right? Because we now are the keepers of a platform and we choose what is and isn't being platformed in any given moment.

And that comes with a huge duty and responsibility that I, in my role, am actively trying to learn because there's this thing that happens and that I've just witnessed over the last several years as an executive: I must be complete, right? I must know everything that must exist in the world around intersectionality, right? And every issue and any subject matter, and at every time of the day, I must have a recall and experience to relate. Or anytime I walk into the room, my transness or my queerness or my Blackness must speak for thousands of people, right?

Josh:

Of course, you’re supposed to be a promise of the future.

Elijah:

Exactly—and that, to me, comes with a huge invitation to dismantle, right? Because I do not speak for everyone, but I understand that when I show up into a space, I am never showing up alone. And I'm also not, you know, removed from the fact that also is where a lot of my anxiety is derived from, right? And that what fuels a lot of my depression is that weight that society places on bodies that look like ours. And so what is so important for us at OTV is that we are constantly taking moments for ourselves to centre and anchor in care, because at the end of the day, no one else is going to do that work for us.

And if we want to actually change a sector, we have to model that behaviour. It isn't something that is going to change overnight and it isn't something that we may even reap the benefits of in our lifetime, fully and holistically. But I know that the small actions that we take towards centring care and anchoring ourselves in something that is beyond production and labour is what allows the storytellers of our time to really show up bravely and authentically. And that, to me, is legacy work. That’s the thing that I’m more interested in that just entertainment.

Josh:

Yeah, and I want to connect you to my conversation with Mikael Owunna, the photographer, engineer and artist. In his research into queer African histories he found that the role of the queer and/or trans person in African cosmologies was as the shaman or the gatekeeper between worlds and planes; and that part of the role of the gatekeeper is as a conduit for messages, communication and to help people in their rituals. So we can understand gatekeeper, as you've challenged here, as someone keeping something from us, guarding an archive that either we are in and we need to get to, or keeping us out of a space that we have title to. And we can understand gatekeeper in the queer African sense of gatekeeping: as those who guard—as in protect and defend—the gates to enlightenment, completeness and wholeness. I wanted to offer that to you.

Elijah:

I love that. Thank you for that offering, it’s beautiful.

Josh:

One of the things I've been so attracted to in you is your softness and how you guard that softness and make space for it. It’s so intentional. So, as our conversation comes to a close, what is it about softness in particular that is so important to you?

Elijah:

Yeah, this is a really beautiful question, and I really enjoy any invitation to lean into the softness because so much of my life and the facade of being an executive diva is around this rigidity and harshness—and it's hard, right? Everything has to be so polished and presented in a really digestible and compact way; and the skin has to be popping and the beard has to be bearding and everything just needs to be something. And so I think when I meditate on softness, it is such a beautiful invitation for me to remind myself that I am not invincible, but my strength moves beyond measure, right? Like yes, I do break, right? I do have moments where I am tender and I have to heal my wounds.

But the reason why I guard my softness is because I have just experienced so much loss. I have experienced so much trauma. I have experienced so much debilitating sorrow in my life that those parts of me are always healing. They are always in conversation with what I am experiencing in my world around me. And so in order to just humanise this hardness that I have had to endure and the resilience that I have had to embody, it is imperative that I allow myself the opportunity to experience softness and care and nourishment in a way that really informs and activates parts of my body here on this plane, on earth, right now. We can talk about divining and we can talk about going to these other worlds, but what I have learned is that because of the body that I'm in, it is expected for me to endure pain and trauma—and in exuberant amounts—as a rite of passage. Like, how much can you burden before you crumble? And that is no longer a way that I want to live.

It's unfortunate that I've had to watch so many Black women, Black queer people, Black trans people, Black trans femmes have to burden and shoulder so much of the world's pain and still be, like you've said, that conduit, bridge builders or building opportunities or building anything where anything nothing exists, which is so much of what I know our experience is to hold. I need something to indulge in that is beyond my function and labour in this world. I don't want to die here and be like ‘that bitch worked’. That's not what I'm here for. I'm really here to spread some of that softness and that sweetness and the wisdom and the gifts that have been imparted upon me.

When I reflect on those gifts and that wisdom, I don't think about my mother as a resilient woman. Yes, she was, but what she really actually taught me was care, right? How to care for myself and care for other people and how doing both and-or one at the same time is beneficial to everyone. So when I think about softness and I think about how I can share it or why it's so close to me and why I revere something so precious is because I think I’m entitled to it. I’m entitled to be soft.

Josh:

Yes!

Elijah:

And that’s that on that. That’s on period.

Josh:

I want to share something with you: ‘If you hold me while I fantasise, I'll guard you while you sleep’.

Elijah:

Yes, absolutely. So much of this year in my current life is really getting close to the person I am when no one's watching …

Josh:

Oh my god, the ancestors just jumped on my back.

Elijah:

Oh, they’re on my neck all the time. I think we've talked about this before, but like so much around who I am, I learned through thousands of literal strangers, right? Like I have no idea who these people are, but they're telling me who I am, and I unfortunately believe them. And so now, I have such a beautiful invitation to myself: I actually get to have agency on who I'm becoming, right? Like, I have lived many lives and I will live many more, and so who I choose to become is a softer, more kind person in this world. And a part of that is by literally leading with softness because I just witnessed so many people be forceful, right? I witnessed so many people really exert power in a way that doesn't land with softness. I go to sleep every night and I sleep real sweetly. I let this world go and I go to another place and I love it there. And then spirit brings me back into body and then I wake up and I'm like, ‘Okay, I can do it here again, I guess’. You know what I mean? I can be down with this because I hold that softness as like a sacred part of my divination. I love that you brought in the undone because how do we become more undone? I want to be unraveled.

Josh:

Yeah – and coming undone is not only in this process of living many lives and becoming something else, but also knowing that we can come undone and be put back together, right? That's part of it too. I think that's the resistance to softness can be: I can't come undone here because who will put me back together? It is hard.

Elijah:

Well, because it's work. It is work. I wish that I could just say that I woke up like this. I mean, it's close, but it is the work. But it's the guarding of what is sacred that allows us to show up to this work that we have been called to do. And that to me is where the privilege and honour lies: I get to do this. I'm invited to do this. No one's forcing me. And you said it so beautifully that we do need people who are fighting. For me, my invitation is that my fight just looks different now. Same fight. Different type of fight.

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Busy Being Black transcripts are edited for clarity and readability.