Sunday Elegy

On Dawoud Bey and the In Between Times

Happy Sunday evening, friends. I am writing this from a bit of a sick bed, which happens to be a favorite if infrequently visited place of mine. My beloved has tucked me away with our cat, dog and a pile of books, and placed a cup of tea in my favorite bird tea cup next to me. (If you know me, then you know how unwell I must be, if I am drinking tea instead of my usual cup of mud with a little sweetened condensed milk.) This is my happiest place.

This is a special time of year for me, a kind of bardo, in which I spend a lot of time reflecting on my four and a half day labor with my first born, Olive. I am presently on my third day, my water having broken on February 23rd and the birth not coming until the 27th. It was a time of both mourning and immense joy. Although I was fully conscious and alive to the whole experience, I only remember a few things—the walk down to our pond at our house with my doula, the soft peach lining in the shower of the birth center, the rough hands of the head midwife called in to get the job done, and the kind eyes of the doctor when we arrived at the hospital who offered to follow my lead. But I do remember that through the whole interlude, I had this keen knowing, even while I worked so hard to bring forth that little life, that I was saying goodbye to another life I would never recover, and the absolute thrill of a new kind of freedom was on its way. It was an in-between time that seemed to go on forever, and I remember that I heard myself in contraction as if I was listening to someone else. The sounds one emits in labor, as new life is about to burst through, are not unlike the sounds one makes in mourning, when old life is about to be put in the ground. It was a kind of corporeal joy and sorrow not easily captured in words, and there is nothing else to which I could ever compare that time.

In other ways, too, I have lately been reflecting on the way the past is lost to us forever but still lingers in the present-time, always pushing us towards a future unseen. This morning I went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, just a few blocks from our home, to see Dawoud Bey’s exhibition, Elegy. I had been meaning to go for several months and today was the closing day. As with everything in my life, I made it just in time. Aside from the beauty of the work, about which I cannot say very much, as I am not an art critic or even minimally knowledgable about art, that it is on exhibition at all here is quite remarkable. The presence of the masterpiece, which is generous in its breadth and type of media—it includes two films (one black and white, and the other a a triptych in color), and three rich photographic series—is a testament to this city’s transformation and serious work of self-inquiry. We are in a process of racial reformation and re-membering in Richmond, and nowhere was this more evident to me than at the exhibition today.

Elegy, part of which captures the Trail of Enslavement along the James River, takes as its subject the “unseen black presence in the landscape,” according to the artist. The viewer is brought onto the trail at eye-level, and the lens brings one’s gaze up to the sky, down to the dirt below, and out onto the water of the James through leaves and twisted branches of trees along the path. We are meant to imagine the countless women, men and children brought to and from the slave market in Richmond along this trail. The work is suggestive, in that it is entirely about black bodies, and yet there are none anywhere in it. The only forms of life, other than the plants, are a few ducks floating by in the water, the sounds of horses’ hooves on cobblestone, and some faint moaning and singing. It is visually arresting and spiritually penetrating, and we walked out having never quite experienced something like it before. I am ever grateful to Bey for his contributions to art, to the ongoing dialogue between the past and the present, for the reminder of how we are always and evermore living somewhere between the past and a future not yet imagined, unburdening and be-coming. Hopefully, moving towards a freedom we have not yet known.

Images above: James River Through the Opening 2022; Twisted Branches 2022