Chasing My Ghost Home

(Listen here for the soundtrack to this essay)

What does it mean to be invisible, unexceptional in the era of Black Girl Magic and Black excellence? When you're the Pluto in a solar system, an oddball that has a tilted and elliptical orbit, you straddle the margins almost out of reach of the sun's gravitational pull. You don’t become the North Star of a movement, ascend to leadership ranks in corporate America, or hit the traditional milestones of success and network your way into stability by 40. 

There is a higher likelihood that there is a prison bed that correlates to your primary school scores than there will be a public recognition of your existence upon your life’s sunset.  Your social capital is meager, a life existing in the periphery as an inconsequential faceless body in the collective memory of society and your peers. 

Nevertheless, the absence of credentials and accolades is not an objective valuation of your time earthside. “…To be undocumented [is] not to be unremembered.” Documentation means you exist but when paperwork and collective memory forgets you, never knew you, and doesn’t acknowledge you, invisibility conceals and isolates you, denying you of the fundamental need to belong. Who are you when you belong to no one? A faceless proletariat smudged from history, the white page printed with black text, the contrast giving black exceptionalism its distinction; an excluded body stepped over to build the partition encasing the MVPs of the culture. Its effects cascade into interpersonal relationships, cementing you into obscurity. Entombed to a lifetime role as a supporting character, existing to witness others, the contrast defining their exceptionalism. 

“Unnamed, she waits in the wings, but without her own part to play, the catalyst of nothing.” - Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful. Experiments 

Do you ever get to live when you lead an imperceptible life? A nagging question that plagues you.

In Black in Blues, Imani Perry grieves for the ancestors rendered invisible, a disappeared people  under the cloak of the Middle Passage. Perry laments “In the blue over the edge of the ship, one plummets to death. Hell was the bottom of the ocean floor until it became salvation.”  The limited aperture of others reducing your light in their eyes can be hell to one’s sense of self. It wreaks havoc on our identity for how do we define ourselves without kin? However, Hell can conversely be a surrender to an end. Though, it does not mean the story is over, for an end can also be a place of resurrection. Beneath the hull of the ship lay the ocean, a place of deliverance. Looking beyond the lens of others lies a sense of freedom.  To be “weightless to memory and suffering” is to etch a self from tabula rasa, a blank slate. 

There is both grief and jubilation—a unique sense of freedom outside predetermined constructs, choosing new beginnings and endings despite expectations. Surrendering to an end is an exhale. The journey continues. The inhale as we are submerged beneath the sea distancing ourselves from the terrestrial world begins a marronage of sorts. Faceless and nameless to society and our peers alike does not deem a life not lived well. 

The marronage parallels the abstract rhythms of jazz and obscurity via a passage from ‘Invisible Man’, noting ’invisibility…gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat…you slip into the breaks and move around.’ The breaks are the negative spaces in time, the abyss of the unseen - a psychological milky way. It exists as a space where you can make new meanings of a self unencumbered by the responsibilities of the routine orbits cementing our social solar system. You are jazz, you are the milky way, you are home at the end of the road less traveled.  

You embody the connection Perry ignites between Blues melodies and the existential questions of life denoting the rhythms of the genre. The asynchronous flow of the Blues prompts us to reflect on ‘Who said that life has to be lived on big terms? Who said that the minor key was not enough?” Blues ballads are songs in the key of life, a black art form that entered the zeitgeist nestled in the margins of mainstream culture, mimicking the nuanced vantage point of the periphery.  

So are you really invisible? A ghost to who? Not to you. You know you exist, you’re sure you exist. You run your fingers over your existence, you ruminate over the realities of your existence and yet the isolation of invisibility subsumes you into nothingness. Nothingness feels suffocating, feels irreparable, feels insurmountable. There is no light at the end of the tunnel because there is no tunnel, there is nothing. A room with no floors or doors or windows. 

And yet just as jazz flows asymmetrically, you somehow find liberation in the dark.  There is freedom in nothing; there is infinite possibility in nothing. Nothing means you can start over again and again, there are no eyes gazing, no minds caring, no bodies blocking what is invisible. They cannot discard you again and again. Invisibility means you are no longer bound by habit, convention, and custom - you are free to begin again. “It is improvisation with the terms of social existence…” writes Saidiya Hartman in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Invisibility is the warmth of a new love and invites imaginative hope and possibility within the despair.

Whether spitefully, intentionally, or accidentally you and I have survived in the periphery, indistinguishable from the masses. Yet in the journey to become the source of our own self regard as Toni Morrison asserted, we have bloomed into a beautiful experiment in radical intimate alchemy.

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cover image: “vignette” (2003) kerry james marshall

References

Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People — by Imani Perry

Invisible Man — by Ralph Ellison

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals — by Saidiya Hartman