Pacing the 950 square foot apartment, equipped with basic amenities, my body is oddly aware of every inch from corner to corner not because I wanted to know but because I am always noticing. Experiencing myself in 3 dimensions, I calculate how many steps it takes to reach the bed, to the toilet, the microwave, measuring that distance against how much energy my body has to expend in its journey. Each inch counts when your body has barely enough to maintain homeostasis. My awareness of how natural light moves in each season, the path it takes to reach one side of the bed to the other, is measured not by linear time but by the slowly creeping of light on my cotton sheets. Today’s prediction, by how morning light lit the tiny bedroom, the sun is strong, summer is here. In these moments I am reminded that I need both interior and exterior surroundings to help locate and tether parts of myself. Some observers would flatten this kind of knowingness, clinically labeling my behavior as a “hyperawareness that’s clearly a byproduct of chronic exposure to trauma,” but for me this acquired knowledge is a technology deployed for survival that is informed by the multiplicity of being Black, Mad, and disabled.
In the book, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, La Marr Jurelle Bruce extensively lays forth his research on the subject of Black Madness from slavery to the current day. Bruce’s theory of madness weaves four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as “rage,” and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms. I agree with Bruce’s definition and further believe that to be Mad or to live with Madness allows individuals to opt into a submarginal identity that locates one’s experience living with neurodiversity. Black Madness Theory (BMT) speculates that Black Madness is a neurodiverse psychic state that acts as a catalyst for technological intervention through creative dissidence leading to the disruption of biological, psychological, and social status quo of neurotypical hegemony. This theory defines technology as a system of knowledge that assists the progression of a field of study or people group. The function of Madness is as a key psychic rupture leading to alternative speculation and approaches to revisioning systems.
The Technology of Code Switching-
There’s a cross-cultural fluency that I attempt to embody for everyday survival. A code switching when social hierarchies reward the preserving of the status quo, which often requires me to be legible and easily accessible. W.E.B DuBois classifies the experience of seeing one’s self through the eyes of another as double consciousness in his book, The Souls of Black Folk. The performance of code switching, which for me is a protective social cloak used for temporary assimilation, is a deep analysis of social and cultural capital. In the past I’ve located the integration of this observational data in my body, noticing my resting exhale when leaving an office where I was the only Black person on staff. My mind often rehearses responses in an attempt to foreshadow the workday’s forced social interaction. Practicing banter non-Black constituents could easily access, that comes off as socially passing, but still resemble some version of self. But there’s an anxiety in knowing that not only did I not truly belong, I was being measured for replication which naturally invokes a protectiveness of the essence of Blackness that I carry, a culture that so often cycles through being intentionally misinterpreted, appropriated, and monetized. My knowingness, a socially forced observation, is an accumulation of data aggregated through pattern recognition which is the foundation to prediction. A specialized foreseeing of danger.
The Technology of Creative Dissidence-
Egyptian feminist theorist and writer, Nawal El Saadawi, documents the struggle towards Egyptian women’s liberation in the early 2000’s. Her writing expanded the socio, political, and cultural importances of the creative process to the path of resistance. In her essay Creativity, Dissidence and Women, she defines dissident as the struggle to liberate one’s self and community from hegemonic patriarchal systems of understanding. She stresses the role of creativity in resistance work describing it as a sensitivity to paradoxes that require an emotional investigation or attention. This understanding of creativity and its relationship to dissidence lends itself to BMT. Black creative expression has steered the conversation in the struggle of resistance across multiple forms and mediums. Expressiveness as one of the foundational building blocks of Black creativity. This has also been a point of tension, as the outsider has decoded Black expressiveness as a site of pathology by a predominantly white male hegemonic medical model of a classifying body of knowledge. As we collectively untether ourselves from systems that are deeply rooted in anti-blackness, BMT is a means to access, acknowledge legitimacy, and expand ways of collective understanding outside of western bodies of knowledge and technologies. How does one reimagine themselves within their own social political context, definitions, and understanding while escaping the grips of subjugation?
The Technology of Speculation-
Pivoting from what feels like a death march into oblivion’s direction asks of me to envision something, somewhere else. It takes courage to see what is not there while struggling to make new meaning of the same struggles. Audre Lorde warns us that we cannot just simply retool what’s been used to build oppressive systems, a new world requires a collective imagining that’s inclusive of those in the margins, or often forgotten. Designing new tools requires completely different approaches which come with trial and error, this is where courage is required. I often reflect on the interpersonal investment it takes to put down the master’s tools. Barriers set in front of me, my mind wanders into dreaming and speculation. What would a world require to contain for the preservation of this earth and its inhabitants? Somedays, an answer is at my fingertips, there’s movement in a direction due to a new discovery or experience. I don’t have the answers, I can recognize how far I’ve pushed past my own understanding to a collective understanding of what it takes to veer towards a collective liberation.
More about Rashni Stanford and Mel Brown’s book published by LPP:
In what ways do those with mental health challenges in Philadelphia work to support the mental health of themselves and their community outside the structures of Western medical models?
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