5 - Places: Black Consciousness Ecologies of Futurity

Summary

This chapter investigates political powers of the erotic in order to open ecologies of futures beyond the dominant culture's anti-Black linear progress narrative. It centres around the death of a revolutionary that gives others the will to live. It is about death rituals ferried from Tswana customs and funeral rites, whose import across the Atlantic soothes the hearts of African Americans. It is about grief and embracing its underside, finding love as a propulsive force towards engaging in purposeful action. This affective poetics is studied in this chapter as it is manifested in Kgositsile's personal life and work and rendered in his short story ‘The Favorite Grandson’ (Black World, November 1972), which revisits and transmutes feelings surrounding the death of his grandmother. He translates that context into the political context of Malcolm X's death in his essay ‘Brother Malcolm and the Black Revolution’ (Negro Digest, November 1968), republished as ‘Malcolm X and the Black Revolution: the Tragedy of a Dream Deferred’ in another crucial BAM text Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (1969), edited by John Henry Clarke.

I frame this chapter with a lesser-known medium from Kgositsile's literary corpus, a short story which, in its personal nature, reveals the world of interiority, interrogating his devastation and grief. The story, which includes a letter written by the narrator when he was only a child, recreates intimate dialogues between beloved grandma and grandson, in which the elder matriarch offers comforting wisdom that becomes salve and guidance, in turn giving the boy a will to live. She reminds him of the dualities of being: life and death, destruction and construction, and beginnings and endings, all within a dynamic of continuity. The boy writes:

Mami, I do not know what has happened to me since a few days after they took you to the village graveyard. I do not understand it any more than I understand some of the things you have told me. Once, for instance, you said that every natural loss results in some gain; the way of nature's balance, you said it was. Is death such a loss? If it is, what gain results from it? And what then is life? (1972: 57)