Summer 2021. I am at home, comfortably sitting on my sofa. I am watching season 5 of Queen Sugar, one of my favourite TV shows. This family saga thematizes Black Americans’ access to land ownership and agricultural production in the state of Louisiana, as they are haunted by the history of enslaved plantation life. I am a loyal viewer of this TV show since its launch in 2016; I love to watch it while eating popcorn. I love the beauty of the characters and of the landscape, the depth and complexity of the personal and social relations unravelling on screen. I love the score (composed by Meshell Ndegeocello), and the photography that sublimes multifarious shades of Blackness. With all this being said, season 5 of the show is really intense. As intended by its screenwriters, it resonates with the past year—with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and the movement for Black lives. Watching episode 6 makes me re-live the month of May 2020: the horror of police officer Derek Chauvin’s racist murdering of George Floyd. 

On screen, the characters express their shock, anger and sadness. They have long conversations with each other and take part in the street demonstrations. It is realistic and rough, but it also makes me feel a kind of comfort. For once, my screen provides me with a space of political and emotional alignment. I feel aligned with Darla who worries about the consequences of the media’s treatment of police-led lynchings for her young son: “they shouldn’t be playing clips in a loop, it’s traumatic”, she says to her partner Ralph Angel. I feel comfort as I see Hollywood, a Black man in his fifties expressing his desire to know “how [George Floyd] lived” in a dialogue with his wife, Vi (Image 1).

This episode makes me realize that I have only very rarely encountered the name “George Floyd” put next to the word “life” in mainstream media and public discourses. The viral video of his lynching has given way to an expression which is just as viral: “the death of George Floyd”. This expression populates the web, media, political and academic discourses. It is used in multiple languages and contexts all over the world. It performs a double function. First, it functions as a time marker as it comes to signify that we are in a new political and historical period—that there was a before and an after May 2020. 

Often preceded by the preposition “since”, “after” or “post-“, the phrase signals a turn, the very instance that triggered uprisings, the debunking of statues, demands for police abolition, intense debates about racism and colonial legacies. Second, the phrase functions as a legitimizing formula. Using the name of a globally-known and recognized victim of racism allows one to give weight to one’s statements. The use of the expression gives relevance to fundraising and events that are associated with various forms of “anti-racism”. Those forms of anti-racism range from the most liberal to the most radical, and are claimed by Black and/or non-Black peoples both inside and outside of institutions. In sum, since 2020, the different variants of the expression “the death of George Floyd” constitute a form of capital. Saying or writing “after George Floyd”, “since George Floyd’s death” or “the post-George Floyd era” lets one situate oneself in the moment, as an individual or a group making demands that are urgent and of the highest importance. Using the phrase means attracting public attention and material resources.  

The expression works well, but I have questions about the effects of its constant use. How does it make us relate to Black lives? What would happen if everyone would say instead, “since the white supremacist murder committed by police officer Derek Chauvin and his accomplices”? Or “since the global Black radical uprising of 2020”? The expression seems to nurture a public obsession with Black death. Like Hollywood, I “feel some kind of way about it”. With this text, I seek to give space to what prompts this troubling feeling, but also this longing to know how George Floyd and so many others lived. It is anchored in Black feminist thought and activism, centred on the care for life. 

Racial capitalism and the desire for the death of Black people

“Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death”

Ruth Gilmore Wilson, 2007 Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, University of California Press, p. 28

Fall 2012. I take part in the conference Decolonize the City in Berlin [1]. I find myself exposed for the first time to the powerful words of the Black feminist abolitionist Ruth Gilmore Wilson. Her definition of racism strikes me: racism is a politics that produces the premature death for racially inferiorized groups. In order to be understood, her quote must be situated within the critical theory of racial capitalism. Ruth Gilmore Wilson and Cedric Robinson, amongst others, revise classical Marxists’ Eurocentrism by recalling that capitalism is a global system intimately tied to white supremacism. Indeed, it is the accumulation of commodity value, made possible by the slave trade, slavery and colonialism that instituted capitalism. Moreover, the latter continues to function through racial hierarchization and domination. Racial capitalism lets groups and territories marked as “white”—thus as racially superior—systematically accumulate symbolic and material resources by oppressing groups and territories defined as racially inferior, made less-human or non-human. Such a dehumanizing exploitation, insist Black Marxists, goes beyond the alienation of labor. It functions through social death—that is through the dispersal of community and kinship and through bodily mutilation. It causes premature physical death. Racism is death. 

Racism is also the desire for death, for Black people’s deaths. I come to this realization through my assiduous reading of Black feminist writers such as Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, Grada Kilomba, Hortense Spillers or Jovita dos Santos Pinto. Black feminists  insist on the affective and libidinal dimension of racial capitalism. They suggest that this machine designed to make profit depends on the incessant creation of consumerist desires [2]. The logic of capitalist profit and accumulation relies upon the public’s desire to consume the very goods whose production entails exploitative operations; operations that consume the lives of those oppressed. Thus, deadly oppression must be sold, and in doing so made desirable to the public through operations of entertainment. In “Western” societies, the white public learns to consume the products of (post-)colonial exploitation such as sugar, spices, cacao and coffee. It learns in the same move to enjoy spectacles that mock, violate and kill Black people. It enjoys minstrel shows, human zoos, freak shows, movies, or even public lynching. It waters itself with the voyeurism of naked, “savage”, “exotic” and hypersexualized bodies. There is a vital force at the origin of desire; racial capitalism captures it. It orients it towards the insatiable search for the feeling of power and pleasure, brought by the consumption of (living or dead) objects whose destinies are to consume themselves. It invents and propagates a vampiric whiteness. Such whiteness desires to profit from Black-people-made-objects, put in an eternal position of service or servitude, at disposal, but also disposable, waste-able, violable, killable. Racism is the desire for the deaths of Black people. 

It is this (still-unfolding) history of the fundamental and intimate link between the desire for Black death and racial capitalism which haunts the expression “the death of George Floyd”. The expression works well because it capitalizes on the structural desire for the premature deaths of Black people. The expression also works well because it conceals the morbid past and present it is haunted by. Its viral use, often poorly contextualized, obliviates that the death at hand, far from being exceptional or accidental, is the product of the capitalist and white supremacist desiring machine. The phrase suggests horror while stripping history, while evacuating from our view the processes and instances that enabled this horror. This is why it makes me feel some kind of way. The phrase seals a name to an actual death, while obscuring the historical and political causes of the latter. The footage in Queen Sugar touches me, because it deploys a politics of refusal. Hollywood refuses that the history of the desire for the death of Black people continues to banally unfold in the everyday. Yet, I also sense that this same footage goes beyond mere refusal, and opens up a horizon towards a desire that liberates… 

Black melancholia and the desire for life

August 2022. I am writing this text with difficulty. I am looking for the right words that could come to guide a non-morbid relationship to the multitude of Black lives unjustly interrupted. “He died and nobody saying nothing about how that man lived”. Hollywood’s words demonstrate a feeling too well-known amongst the Black diaspora, that impossible desire to be in relationship with a life whereas the latter is not anymore. It seems interesting to me to apprehend the footage of Queen Sugar with what Nathalie Etoké calls Melancholia Africana, and Nana Adosu Pokei calls Black Melancholia. According to the psychoanalytical Freudian approach, melancholia designates a pathology, or at least a feeling of sadness—a blues whose exact origin remains unknown and escapes consciousness.

Revised from the Black diasporic experience, the concept of melancholia takes another meaning. As Nathalie Etoké writes (2019, p. 9), it comes to designate “an affective state that is both individual and collective, public and private”, which refers to a “relationship with the world and with the self that is inexorably connected to loss”. There are the losses due to the history of colonialism and slavery: the loss of autonomy, of territories, of dignity. The loss of roots, culture, religion, language, the impossible return to the root, the dispersal of kinship ties across continents. There are the losses due to the legacy of this history: the loss caused by military or police murder, by drowning in the sea, by medical indifference or neglect, by air and soil intoxication, by economic precarity, by mass incarceration. There are the losses of our homes, the difficulties in maintaining family and friendship ties when we are dispersed across the planet. The loss of orientation and meaning engendered by our lives in societies centered on the norms of whiteness and capitalism. 

There is the loss of our histories. In her 2008 iconic essay “Venus in two Acts”, Saidiya Hartman expresses her feeling of powerlessness as she faces the dehumanizing archives of slavery. The existence—and very rarely the name—of those who were enslaved can only be detected through the angle of their loss registered in the archive. And this loss, recounted from the perspective of the captors, emerges in the language of commodity, as a loss of value for the sales, and other operations of exploitation and appropriation. Written by the dominants, the archives are “catacombs”. In sum, the diasporic Black experience is marked by a vertiginous entanglement of a multitude of losses. It is vertiginous to learn the names of our own once they are no more; to know that other names will surely make themselves known in the same way in the future. It is vertiginous to stumble on the impossibility of having access to an archive reflecting the thickness and the richness of our lives. Black melancholia is a response to this vertiginous. Whereas Freudian melancholia emerges from a feeling of loss escaping consciousness, Black melancholia erupts from a magma of losses very present in our consciousness, but escaping our knowledge due to its breath and content.

Me, too: I am moved by Black melancholia. I think of my Haitian ancestors, of their lives marked by the history of slavery and the genocide of the natives, the precise accounts of which escape me. I think of all the names I have chanted over the past three years in the demonstrations for Black lives, and against police violence organized by a coalition of collectives in French-speaking Switzerland (Image 2) [3]. I think of Nzoy, Mike Ben Peter, Hervé Mandundu, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Adama Traoré, Lamine Dieng, Lamin Fatty…I think of all the names that I forget or I do not know. I am aware of these losses, but I do not know how the people we lost lived, loved, resisted. I know that there are only a few traces of their lives in publicly accessible archives. I know that the traces left by the mainstream media or social networks perpetuate the violence done to these lives by a sensationalist and even criminalizing framing. I am moved, as I am fully conscious of the loss of a multitude of lives that evade my knowledge.

But I am also moved by the following certitude. Before being unjustly interrupted, those lives have resisted, desired, felt joy, cultivated relationships. They have always taken care of their own, worked to keep Black life alive, and this persistence has engendered my life. I am conscious that I am entangled with countless other Black lives, past and present. Moreover, this consciousness nurtures my deep desire to relate to those lives in a radically non-extractive and non-instrumental way. I recognize the same desire in Hollywood as he asks how the “brother” has lived, in Saidiya Hartman as she looks for a narrative form that disrupts the violence of the catacomb-archives. Faced with a life that only matters for media and politics at the moment of its interruption, faced with a name attached to the word “death” circulating virally, we “feel some kind of way”. We are out of place, out of alignment, out of frame. Ours is the frame of Black liberation. Ours is the desire for life, a desire erupting from our intense consciousness of loss, and from our immense gratitude for the persistence of Black lives. 

Taking care of our lives

I imagine it is September 2322. I imagine a young woman. I imagine she lives somewhere on earth in a breathable environment, where she can thrive. Her task is to cultivate a Black memory made of centuries-old narratives of the diaspora. Those diasporic archives remain dispersed, but are accessible thanks to a digital platform of open planetary knowledge. Her last name is Floyd. She knows it is a famous name. She knows the history of her ancestors, especially of the one whose name was George. On the platform, she found photos of him smiling, of his family, testimonies on how he lived, on what he did. She has seen photos of millions of people who chanted his name, who denounced the unjust and unacceptable interruption of his life. She particularly cherishes the words of Gianna, George’s daughter, who tells us how her dad made sure that she brushed her teeth every evening. These stories and images give her strength. Thanks to those past lives and actions she is here, on earth. I had planned to write a short text addressing the trouble and the desire of Hollywood in Queen Sugar.

I had planned to make sense of the damaging effects of a viral and morbid expression, to understand why, like Hollywood, I was longing to know how George Floyd lived. Instead, I find myself concluding with an exercise in fictive speculation. Writing has given me a sense of the desire for life cultivated in the artistic, intellectual and political movements of the Black diaspora. Such a desire requires care for the lives that are no longer, for those that are and also for those that will come. A daily work—demanding and rich. To be able to understand with precision the forms of violence that interrupt our futures. To name the forces that cause the premature death of Black people (for example naming Derek Chauvin, the police, white supremacism). To give attention to our emotions of anger, grief, solidarity, refusal, to our pain, our melancholia. And, also, to develop visions of radical transformation that sustain our loves, dreams and joys. To stop depending on catacomb-archives and sensationalist and criminalizing narratives. To grow thanks to our words, our images, our media and the archives of our lives, which honour the strength and beauty of our persistence and thriving pasts, presents and the times to come.

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[1] This historic three day conference was organized by an independent group of graduate and Ph.D. students of Color comprising Noa Ha, Anna Younes, Mahdis Azarmandi, Andrea Meza Torres and Veronika Zablotsky. It resulted in an edited book Decolonize the City!Zur Kolonialität der Stadt – Gespräche, Aushandlungen, Perspektiven.

[2] See for instance, Hortense Spillers’ Black, white and in color: Essay on American literature and Culture (2003), Grada Kilomba’s Plantation memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism (2008), Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery , and Self-making in ninetheeth-century America, and Jovita dos Santos Pinto’s “Spuren. Eine Geschichte Schwarzer Frauen in der Schweiz.”  In: Berlowitz, Shelley; Joris, Elisabeth; Meierhofer-Mangeli, Zeedah (éds.) Terra incognita? Der Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen in Zürich (p. 143-185). Zürich: Limmat Verlag.

[3] This is an non-exhaustive list of the political events for Black lives, organized by coalitions of collectives (such as Outrage, Kiboko, Faites des Vagues, Amani, AfroSwiss, Justice 4 Nzoy, Justice pour Mike),  that took place in the French-speaking part of Switzerland between 2020 and 2023: “Black lives matter” demonstration,  June 9th 2020, Geneva; “Rally against police violence in memory of the victims of racial discrimination”, June 13th 2020, Lausanne; “Antiracist demonstration against police violence”, July 3rd 2020, Geneva; “ Demonstration for Mike and all the victims of police violence” of the 31st october 2020, Lausanne; “Justice for Nzoy” demonstration, April 2nd 2022, Lausanne; “Rally on the memory of Mike Ben Peter”, March 1st 2023, Lausanne; “Justice for Mike Ben Peter” mobilization, June 3rd 2023.

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About the Black Voices Matter series
Black liberation is both beautiful and inspiring. It is equally noisy, infused with the hubbub of online discussions, hashtags and commentaries from the media, institutions and those economic and political leaders who have, until now, paid very little attention to the well-being of Black lives. In this context, ERIF has chosen to continue—now more than ever—to care for and cultivate the multilingual and diasporic frequencies of Black voices. #BlackVoicesMatter