Lecture Notes: Wake Work, Life Work
With Kola Abimbola’s Freshman Seminar lecture, “Omoluwabi: Self Actualization and Communal Responsibility,” we were reminded of the profound insight that having life, having existence (iwa) is also having character (iwa). We ought to live for something, to live for something is to acknowledge how we have lived. And now it is to also acknowledge that life has been uprooted, destabilized, compromised, by what Sylvia Wynter calls the “present order of knowledge.”[1] Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being reminds us also that we have always known these things, but what we need now, more than ever is to connect ourselves to re-memory. Sharpe renders Black life as “the wake,” always being “in consequence of” someone else’s meaning for our existence and always being “conscious” of the very fact that this is not existence. What she calls “wake work” is a call to be undisciplined, to take the present order of knowledge as an obfuscation, as dysgraphia, as not knowing at all. And to turn to our ways of knowing, our own ruttiers, as paths out, as paths of retour. We are in the wake because we are placed there; we are in the wake because we have to be. “We are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to this overwhelming force, we are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force” (16; 134).
Sharpe’s intervention is also an introduction to new ways of seeing, new ways of editing, adding, making our lives. This wake work relies on a coterie of thinkers and scholars whose work we would do well to read and reread, whose visions of the world animate existence in forms and spaces that call for our inhabitation, for our togetherness. We inhabit their words and worlds with Sharpe, so that we can re-see, re-vision. So that we can be again. So we remain beholden by their insistence on and of Black being. Fred Moten and Hortense Spillers are in conversation with Dionne Brand and Kamau Brathwaite. Western civilization is critiqued, imagined anew as being made, as being the ship. Toni Morrison and M. NourbeSe Philip are in conversation with Kara Walker and Rodney Leon. We must not think the ship is all we can be, for it contains more than cargo. It trans*mutes, but does not trans*form us into things. Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, and Saidiya Hartman appear with us, reminding us that our subjection make us want to be, to breathe; they do not negate our being. And with them we connect to ancestors, those whose ancestry came too soon, those the Weather of anti-Blackness swept: Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Michael Brown, Hadiya Pendleton. We mourn, but also remember that there is otherwise. We have always trans*’d this corruption of life. So we will breathe, because the present ecology of life is a disruption, not a destination. We “are held, and held.”[2]
Wake work is life work. We are working on life, and living. And to live is to have lived. To have existed. To have character. To have iwa. It is with Sharpe’s reminders of these perennial questions of human existence and its meaning that we endeavor to live even more. In consequence of—who we are.
[1] See Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, It’s Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (Fall 2003): 322.
[2] Dionne Brand quoted on page 68.
