In her beautiful and devastating 2016 book In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, scholar Christina Sharpe delivers a stark rallying cry: “We must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work.” Drawing inspiration and strength from Sharpe’s words, interdisciplinary poet Julianknxx brings together sound, image and performance in a discursive, enfleshed poetic practice. His work is deeply connected both to the foundational stories and languages of his birth place of Freetown, Sierra Leone, and to the sounds and voices of his current home in London. It is the passage between these places, and their twin histories of conflict and colonialism, that the poet seeks to document, penning what he calls a “history from below.”
For his Fact Residency, which coincides with his artist residency at 180 The Strand, the poet selected a line from his stunning visual poem In Praise Of Still Boys, “you are what’s left of us”, as a lens through which to consider the world left in the wake of a global pandemic. Thus “you are what’s left of us” becomes We Are What’s Left Us, as Julianknxx takes stock of his friends and family, his collaborators and influences, as he traces an expansive and ongoing conversation between the many voices, past and present, that make up the cultural patchwork of his life. “What are we holding?” he asks. “The air is different now, we need to think about how we breathe.”
The act of breathing is politically and socially charged in 2021, whether it’s omnipresent paranoia surrounding the air we share with those around us in the time of COVID-19, or the breath George Floyd, Eric Garner, Elijah McClain and countless others were cheated out of at the hands of violent police officers, or the extreme air pollution that claimed the life of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah. “We have to breath differently,” reflects the poet, “so this is what’s left of us.”
Julianknxx’s investigation and activation of these various different contexts for breathing can be understood in the terms of Christina Sharpe’s formulation of ‘aspiration’, which she in part defines as “what it takes, in the midst of the singularity, the virulent antiblackness everywhere and always remotivated, to keep breath in the Black body.” Coding it as a form of “wake work”, the “hard emotional, physical and intellectual work” required from those living in the wake of “the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery,” Sharpe identifies aspiration as a primary strategy for Black bodies moving in spaces that are structured against them. Like Julianknxx, Sharpe understands “the necessity of breath, to breathing space, to the breathtaking spaces in the wake in which we live.” What the poet outlines as a commonality in those left in the wake is an appreciation of this necessity to breathe differently, as well as the power of the speech and song formed by these breaths.
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