Best Canadian Essays 2020 by Sarmishta Subramanian

Author:Sarmishta Subramanian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2020-09-22T20:26:19+00:00

Beauty Is a Method

Christina Sharpe

Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.

— Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.

— Toni Cade Bambara, “What It Is I think I’m Doing Anyhow.”

vessel:

a container (such as a cask, bottle, kettle, cup, or bowl) for holding something

a person into whom some quality (such as grace) is infused

a watercraft bigger than a rowboat; especially: ship

a tube or canal (such as an artery) in which a body fluid is contained and conveyed or circulated

a conducting tube in the xylem of a vascular plant formed by the fusion and loss of end walls of a series of cells

More than flesh, a body—your “beat and beating heart.”*

I’ve been revisiting what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible. How we might carry beauty’s knowledge with us and make new worlds.

With all of the work that my parents did to try to enter and stay in the middle class, precarity and more than precarity remained. That precarity looked and felt like winters without heat because there was no money for oil; holes in ceilings, walls, and floors from water damage that we could not afford to repair; the fears and reality of electricity and other utilities being cut for non-payment; fear of a lien being placed on the house because there was no, or not enough, money to pay property taxes. But through all that and more, my mother tried to make a small path through the wake. She brought beauty into that house in every way that she could; she worked at joy, and she made livable moments, spaces, and places in the midst of all that was unlivable there, in the town we lived in; in the schools we attended; in the violence we saw and felt inside the home while my father was living and outside it in the larger white world before, during, and after his death. Though she was not part of any organized Black movements, except in how one’s life and mind are organized by and positioned to apprehend the world through the optic of the door and antiblackness , my mother was politically and socially astute. She was attuned not only to our individual circumstances but also to those circumstances as they were an indication of, and related to, the larger antiblack world that structured all of our lives.**

We lived in a town that used and hated and feared its Black population.

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