The following is a creative response in conversation with Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. In the piece, a haunting longing to return to Virginia offers a blueprint for a speaker to meander and experiment with their life, prompted by a question woven into Wayward Lives: how will I live? In waywardness as a mood, as a possibility, a “map of what might be” emerges out of the shift and rupture of one’s body, one’s moving sense of place, and the canopy under which they stand. In returning, the speaker here listens for the possibility of flight among the canopy. In many ways, the canopy in my bioregion, occupied Monacan Territory, was a blueprint holding my personal dwellings on ‘how will I live?’ In this gesture, held in the refuge and companionship of the canopy, I explore life unfolding amid the beauty of the mundane. I also share a few photos of ash trees (taken by me) that I have been getting to know and where I spent my time reading and listening to Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Among them, I can hear.
“the map of what might be” // canopy as a compass
in conversation with Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman, a blueprint unfolding, a shy choreography
i. “the map of what might be”
Leaving Virginia was simple:
no torn esophagus, and nobody was dead.
Ten summers pass then the need for a seam,
for some redbirds to pick at the aseasonal grief.
Going back to Virginia is another wild, tireless idea.
The train decides to be a southern-bound page,
wayward, each line rocking from one stop to the next.
The tree crowns arches over the highway,
hinting at the horizon, the map of what might be.
I decide this time in Virginia, I will cooperate
with my body. Outside, It’s almost arbor day
and there is no riot. I dance with people
who are not people but forsythia and redbuds blooming, singing songs of flight.
ii. canopy as a compass
The map of what might be
is a shy choreography.
Tree crowns and their refusal
to touch is on my mind.
We don’t touch how they want us to. I still get hiccups in Virginia,
the ruptures a place I go
in preparation for flight.
A history of too close,
the diaphragm remains
a partition hedged in my body.
The canopy a parachute
toward the otherwise.
