An Interlude by Tiana Reid
What follows is a “breather” that was prompted by smell – that faculty of perception related to odor and wired through the nose – as a way to extend questions of the Black radical sensorium. As an academic, my mind initially ran through a litany of scholarship, poetry, writing, music, and eruptions about breath and smell (Caterina Albano, Franco Berardi, Leo Bersani, Aimé Césaire, Constance Classen, Ashon Crawley, Miles Davis, Frantz Fanon, George Floyd, Luce Irigaray, Andrew Kettler, Nathaniel Mackey, C. Riley Snorton, Cecil Taylor, Françoise Vergès, Jamieson Webster, etc.). Further still, the collective project of the Black radical tradition has thought and practiced much longer about the etymological origins of the word conspiracy, which has to do with breathing together. I had all these curricular ideas about how to approach this reflection that, though important, seemed insufficient.
“What is a place, besides every place, where we breathe together?
Where might we refuse or be refused from speaking about our collective breath?”
Then it hit me, like a wave, first faintly, barely a ripple, and then all at once: What is a place, besides every place, where we breathe together? Where might we refuse or be refused from speaking about our collective breath? As anti-Blackness has rendered asphyxiation into a structural condition amidst pandemic neglect and climate catastrophe, and the restraint of breath in the modern Americans transmuted into a rallying cry, it would be of great consequence to understand breath’s relationship to sexuality in our libidinal economy. As Christina Sharpe writes in Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, “there is no erotic […] without the other.”
Act 1
Sexuality has long been an important and sometimes under-discussed dimension of the Black radical tradition, shaping the development of psychopolitical dimensions of encounter and ideation. But what is the meaning of this sexuality? How do we get a sense of our senses? Sexuality and breath are everywhere, so far and wide that we often forget we do it, or wish to. Sex confounds even the most astute thinkers of sexuality, perhaps especially the most astute thinkers of sexuality. And sexuality’s prohibition has wreaked lifetimes of dispossession, trauma, and enforced silence.
“I realize now the hurt brought on by sex and sexuality is not confined to a single act,
but, given how sex marries breath and desire, comes together in a readiness to face death.”
Allow me an association. The main thing I remember about the first time I had sex was how much I did not know. I was fourteen. My boyfriend at the time, a little less young than me, had told me it was not his first time. (I found out later he lied. He, too, was bewildered by this universe of unknowing.) I was expecting him, a boy, to be more knowing. We both ventured into the unknowingness as teenagers not willing to acknowledge that which we did not know, and I felt we emerged even more confused, confused by what had just happened, confused with the lack of togetherness the sex act had brought us, confused by our disappointments. It was over, I thought. It will never be like that again, I told myself. I am lucky, I said. I could easily make an appointment at the clinic for emergency contraceptive (the condom had slipped off inside me, my genitals wanting to know more, consume more). I love my boyfriend, I thought, and omg, it didn’t hurt?! Everyone said it would hurt. And they meant physically. I realize now the hurt brought on by sex and sexuality is not confined to a single act, but, given how sex marries breath and desire, comes together in a readiness to face death. Césaire: “death breathes, crazed, in the ripened cane field of his arms.” Death “gallops,” “gleams,” and “hiccups.” Death is alive, verbed, held and withheld by the body.
I didn’t fuck for a few more years after that ex and I split, and the acute sense of unknowing only increased. I had had a presentiment, in the bottom of my heart, that I would never come to full understanding and the more I had sex over the next two decades, with different people, different genders, under different states, the more I tried to understand sexuality in the broadest of frameworks, related to but not entirely isolated to any one act.
Act 2
When I started to have gay sex, I was amazed at how prominent something like collective breath control was – in and out at the same time, in and out at punctuating intervals. I know what you’re thinking: straight people breathe too. Fine. But I was inculcated with both a compulsory heterosexuality and a performative queen-bitch hip-hop feminism that left much to be desired. I had also had a requisite history of sexual traumas in childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and realized that, for too long during sex, I had been effectively holding my breath instead of being receptive to having my breath held.
One must breathe to smell. In Toni Morrison’s 1981 novel Tar Baby, the association between smell and sexuality is determined. Across the novel: the smell of Caribbean curry, “citrus and oil” there and then gone, a “marvelous candy odor” where “smelling it was almost like having it,” that “delicious smell of Philadelphia,” knowing a drunk because of the wine on their breath, “the smell of a fasting, or starving,” a “pitchlike smell.”
The light-skinned, Sorbonne-educated Jadine tells Son, the impoverished Black man with whom she has a relationship, “You smell worse than anything I have ever smelled in my life.” And later: “I know you’re an animal because I smell you.” Still Son wishes to “breathe into her the smell of tar and its shiny consistency.” Where the olfactory is tied intimately to sexuality and to breath, Morrison draws out the associations between unruly sexuality, sexual violence, Blackness and animality such that breathing makes possible an inhabitation of ambivalent feelings: of breathing into the mouths of others, of carnal smells so strong they have the power to stop sleep, of body odors merging, of shared breath, of co-breathing as protection, even if for just the morning.
Act 3
“Acknowledging the links between sexuality and breath, I see how sexual encounters,
even if in search for a climax, must find satisfaction in the gasp, the scream,
the hiccup—the spaces between autonomy and the air that is in common.”
What I am also trying to get at are the kinds of agonizing and monstrous intimacies embedded in revolutionary practice, conspiracy, and collective breath. Sex doesn’t always feel good. Nothing does. Acknowledging the links between sexuality and breath, I see how sexual encounters, even if in search for a climax, must find satisfaction in the gasp, the scream, the hiccup—the spaces between autonomy and the air that is in common. When, in A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon wrote in the appendix to the first chapter about how, under occupation, “the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing,” he was writing about the Algerian war. Prompted by colonial debates about the figure of the Algerian woman, he invokes “combat breathing” to focalize the dissemblances, tricks, and defense mechanisms required by occupied people.
In organizing spaces, I have frequently heard people quote Toni Cade Bambara in order to express a desire to have fun at the action or be friends with your comrades. In a 1982 interview at her home in Atlanta, Georgia, the writer and activist said, “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” There are at least two meanings of irresistible. The first is that something is too attractive, too enchanting to resist; the second is that something is too powerful, too forceful, too potent to resist. It is somewhere in between these two meanings that lies sexuality, a social breath that is at once seductive and ungovernable.
Like most quotes, the context is often missing. “And one of the ways I attempt to [make revolution irresistible] is by celebrating those victories within the Black community,” Bambara continues.”I think the mere fact that we’re still breathing is a cause for celebration. And to critique reactionary behavior within the community and to keep certain kinds of calls out there.” This is Lucille Clifton’s kind of celebration, a celebration that might not look like the commercialized festivities we’re accustomed to, a celebration of the many ways the violence of the everyday has tried and failed to obstruct breath. In Bambara’s word irresistible is the word resist. The process of revolution might not be beautiful. We may not want it. But we also can’t not want it. That is when we may all stop breathing, together.
