everything i know, it don't look like i know
On Blackened Knowledge, Christina Sharpe, and My Grandmother
The first time I encountered the phrase “blackened knowledge” in Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, I didn’t look it up. I just sat with it, letting it settle into the spaces where I usually carry my imposter syndrome.
I think this is.. a kind of blackened knowledge, an unscientific method, that comes from observing that where one stands is relative to the door of no return and that moment of historical and ongoing rupture. — Christina Sharpe, In the Wake
Dionne Brand gave us the Door of No Return. It refers to the Mafaa. The conscious decision to violently deny Africans kidnapped and trafficked to this landmass their language, their lineage, and the ability to trace the line back. You don’t recover what’s on the other side of the door. You either orient yourself from the rupture, or you don’t orient at all.
Christina Sharpe names what gets built in the doorway. The past that is not past. Blackened knowledge.
I don’t have a degree. I am a Black woman with belly rolls, and natural hair and chronic pain. Everything I know … it don’t look like I know.
Chronic pain teaches you to read signals nobody else can see on a chart. You learn to track patterns across time with no external validation. You get good at trusting an interior data set that society in general and the medical establishment specifically, will spend considerable energy trying to convince you is unreliable. You learn to know anyway. And to act accordingly. You build, over years, a methodology of care out of necessity and stubbornness and the sheer accumulation of being right about your own body more often than the people with credentials were.
My Grandmother used to say, “I know what I know that I know.” Which, said another way is epistemology.
Soulwork was built from that same posture. Knowing travels, in our histories and our stories and in the particular way our grandmothers compared notes without calling it research.
The phrase “blackened knowledge” confirmed that what I’d been doing had a name. It validated that the messy, methodical way I know things is a method. A method rigorous in its own register.
Blackened knowledge doesn’t look like knowing to everybody.
But it looks exactly like knowing to me.
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MORE ON ‘IN THE WAKE’
what the water remembers
A few days ago, in our first Soulwork Reading Salon, we gathered in the wake of Christina Sharpe. We called names. We learned how to sit with the ache of what lingers.
the year of the disappeared: a syllabus for the departed
Note: All source material in this syllabus is listed in the footnotes and is open access—no barriers to entry here. Also. Monthly, annual, and founding member subscribers are invited to our first Soulwork Reading Salon: Lit Theory Live on Friady, November 14.