Alabama Imagined
"Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure." Christina Sharpe
“Note 25—Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure.” (Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe. 2023)
I have had three conversations about Alabama in the past ten days. In the book I quote here—Ordinary Notes, by Christina Sharpe—the author writes about the experience of visiting the Legacy Museum in Birmingham Alabama. Sharpe writes from the perspective of a visitor and subject, as the so many people of the Americas may be visitors and subjects of such historical monuments to forced migration, the intransubstantiation of the differentiated body, slavery.
I am floored, and hold the emotional geography of “the American South” in my mind as I read this sentence. Every museum to atrocity contains its failure. Just days later, I am reading Greg Tate’s essay on Thornton Dial which invokes Sun Ra. Tate draws a critical geography surrounding the work of Dial with the same curiosity about the imagined American South. He wonders if the northeastern art critic’s inability to hold Alabama with any dignity, has to contribute to our collective inability to give Thornton Dial the premise of genius while Sun Ra (who hails the same provenance of Alabama) gets to be from Jupiter.
People hail from Alabama, don’t they.
We hail from places that expire in imagination. I hear “Alabama” and do not know what to picture today. Football, humidity, Selma. I don’t say this to rouse recommendation. I don’t say it like this to avoid learning. I say it to remember the difference between a history and a historiography. The difference between remembering where one is from, and knowing where we come from. The negotiation between information surrounding a past, shared only when opportune, and a narrative shared only when we decide an paean is less offensive than a curse, but as effective.
You can smoke them out with fire or lure them in with honey.
That sounds like something one might hear in Alabama. I am making up the fantasy of hailing provenance, of indigeneity as mercy not a wound, of a heart warm in the words I speak about home, a bed, even. A bed is somewhere comfortable. Somewhere welcome but private. Somewhere I can hold our thoughts as they are somnolent, where the dream is not to share any more wisdom with those who want more of it, but to rest inside of the origin of thoughts, its pubis (welcome and private), and lie completely still.