Untitled (Portrait of Bo)
Saint Haarley (Shaza Tarig Elnour)
This photograph explores experiences of healing through an honest imagining of self within the grieving process. Produced in conversation with Mobólúwajídìde D. Joseph, this image delves into the human experience of navigating grief in moments when we may not be completely understood by those around us.
The concept of hole is manifested as a symbolic void left by loss, and simultaneously visualized as literal holes created by faults in the analog photo development process. The depths of grief and willingness to sit in such a hole are represented, allowing for a somber and profound understanding of the stillness and unquietness of grief.
scenes from the singularity
Mobólúwajídìde D. Joseph
epitaph
here is the boy, finally buried
his body posed in restless repose.
we dug this grave with a
lyric, then scored it with enjamb-
ment. here he li(n)es in state.
was he loved before his death?
we were falling asunder, falling as
under1 and into a gathering of
griefs. burning ball of gas burst apart and
become a bottomless absence. how does
one quantum loss? quantify a broken
bond – here is the corpse, casket cold,
cavern closed. lift the palms, tongue the
stigmata, doubter does a pulse still throb?
the hope is the hole we clamber
and make into a home, wholesold
haven, unsouled space, blank stretch
of infinity where a s*n was snuffed.
the boy in the black benz –
spaceship – orbits the event horizon. in
the Lagos go-slow, he learns of
his grandmother’s death in the alien-
native birth town of his father.
we celebrate the passing of elders,
his father’s tongue tells him but
his eyes in the rearview mirror
telegraph the contours of his ache
– the boy understands grief’s nascent pull.
to begin with, grief is an opaque thing,
a voracious thing, a black*thing. can infinities be
comprised of omission? the compact collapse
that sprawls once you explode a sun, fire gun at
a loved son, becomes an event horizon from
which no light can escape.
the perfect blackbody absorbs all radiation,
the perfect Black*body absorbs all violent relation.
is the sun a blackbody?
answered differently: the fallen son is almost always a
Black*body.
physics writes the truth hard, poetry tells it softly otherwise.
don’t mistake this for an etymology
– you see, grief is an opaque thing.
the boy’s mother tells stories of
a young man, newly arrived from
his studies abroad. from the prow
of his ship, he tumbles overboard
while leaning excitedly, to greet his
mother. she tries to empty the
ocean with a ladle in search
of his body. the stories sketch
the many ways it can happen
to me. this scything of s*ns.
elegies are for the living, polyphonic
scapes of funereal song weave to
warp the horizon with guttural weft –
the blackhole is not a silent site, nor
the darkness of its hold a salient sight
for the dead watching at our wake
their living keep blind watch and unravel
into the vacuum. what griever can escape
the pull into the belly of the hol(e/d)?
in it our lost hold us loved and sing in
polyphonic symphony – don’t you
know that elegies are for the living?
my cousin tells of staring down
a soldier’s barrel in Lagos go-slow.
na so life be for here.
a brother can fall anywhere; Lekki,
is not not Ferguson, or Toronto.
can fall, his body broken by
disease, blood gnawing on blood vessels
adrift the middle passage of viral
contamination. Tuskegee is not not Kinshasa.
na so life be for everywhere.
Black*death is the dark matter that scaffolds
the state as galaxy – theory of violent relationality that
orders the empire into meaning – sometimes it takes
a fatal frame to make truth legible, discernible, though
never fully visible.
one story holds that all dark matter comes from dark holes
birthed after the big bang. re: manifest destiny,
re: terra nullius,
re: partition & amalgamation,
re: assimilation, plantation, incarceration,
innumerable primordial collapses producing the dark matters,
against which we make life.
analogous to life is death’s rehearsal.
the boy’s childhood is littered with
warnings of his mortality – tales of
kin who died once their stars
began to climb. he dreams death
thickly. tries not to see it.
but there are too many like
me dying stupid deaths. doing ordinary
things: driving, or dancing, or diving
into the waters of the world.
we disrupt the dysgraphia of our dead,
depicted as dehuman, drawn as dreck,
instead, we Ramandu this shit – annotate
over the chalk outlines, and cop derived
autopsies to read, ‘this is not what a star is.’
in the hole of our grief, we hold, and are held,
amidst the endless void of loss, love recomposes
the weight of the crushing ache, makes of the
string of infinities, a ladder toward solace. It
all feels unending, the plunge, the interminable
tumble. we are falling asunder, we are all falling as
under. but brother none of us are falling alone.
- Borrowed from Ben Pulver, gratitude to my friend for the loan.
silverfish.digital 