“I wanted the world to see”

This chapter explains the scent and sensibility of linen incense burning late into the evening, its aromatic opulence lingering as if it too was bracing itself for the news to come. Smoke raised itself from the controlled flame like ancestors coming to bear witness, to signal devastation or cast warning in the belief of rainbows, either way there was a message on the way and they started preparing ourselves for it. Building on K. McKittrick’s in 2006 site and sight of memory, this Black feminist performance auto/ethnographic approach seek to re-present the Black subject in a world that has tirelessly labored to dehumanize and erase the possibility of interior lives. This method desires to reconstruct those interior lives with what remains—not the tools of dehumanization—but the remnants—sounds, music, colors, behaviors, and stories. The Black feminist arrangement represented aesthetic movements that made constraint and crawlspaces, capaciousness and exodus always and in all ways responded to the query.