Lately, I have not been searching for the Afrofuture. Instead, I have been overthinking and psychically resigning, isolating and then retreating, holding my breath, catching my breath, grinding my teeth, dreaming, romanticizing, hiding. I have been laid bare to, and driven by the choices of, the micro.
In the micro, I journey into the details of death. The types of death. The social and civil death. The death that hollows out the living. The death that is mass incarceration, police violence, and the perpetuation of a carceral state. The death that is leaving your fate in the hands of performative justice. This tricky death, embellished in colorful language and empty representation, does nothing to hold the ones left in the wake.
What is After the Afrofuture?
Jordan E. Cooper’s 2019 play Ain’t No Mo is a collection of vignettes featuring Black characters preparing for a mass exodus to an all-Black utopia. When it comes time for the plane to take off, the narrator throughout the play - a Black trans femme - has been left behind. There is no Afrofuture for her. Therefore, there will be no Afrofuture for any of us (Black people).
We (are Black) are Black and poised to gather. Without community there is no Afrofuture; within community there is the After the Afrofuture.
We (are Black) are glaringly aware of the complexities of movement(s) - we (are Black) know you rarely fight for yourself or by yourself.
When we (are Black) lose today, we (are Black) win 10 years from now. The rewards are hard fought and rarely seen, and often are not rewards at all.
What is After the Afrofuture?
Our group of friends who got all dressed up and went to go see Black Panther; our Lemonade and Black is King by Beyoncé watch parties; our quieted rooms as we read Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood; our broken attempts at copying the footwork on display in Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus’s “Never Catch Me.”
What is After the Afrofuture is me and you. It is what we (are Black) have here, now. It is here.
We (are Black) do not depend on an ultimate truth. We (are Black) do not depend on victory. Instead, we (are Black) simultaneously enjoy and we (are Black) work. So, when I think of our performance future, I think of the same. I think there is so much more savoring that can be had.
What is After the Afrofuture?
I think about the micro and the person to person and the intimate conversations and small visits and the one-on-ones that are the most (and sacred) we (are Black) can have during quarantine. I think about the rehearsal room and the dance studio and the smaller conversations that do not seem to make it out of that space but are the essential bits that lift us up and out of subjugation, out of social death through the vivid affirmation and recognition of the other. This is what is After the Afrofuture. And that is what we (are Black) live in now. That is what we (are Black) hope for now and what we (are Black) move through now because that is the space where we (are Black) can be critical yet caring and where we (are Black) can acknowledge that we (are Black) dream up a future, not for it to remain static, but for it to transform.
This essay was commissioned in collaboration with SideLight, an ongoing series of curated essays from a contingent of the next generation of artists and arts leaders. As the theater and entertainment industry rebuilds and reimagines, these pieces speak directly to our present, yet also seek to envision our future.
