[1] Tina Campt, ‘Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal’, Women & Performance, February 25, 2019, https://www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand/29-1/campt?rq=tina%20campt.
[2] Tarell Alvin McCraney, In moonlight, black boys look Bbue (2003).
[3] FKA twigs and Future, ‘holy terrain,’ track 4 on MAGDALENE, Young Turks Recording, 2019.
[4] Solange, ‘Can I hold the mic (interlude),’ track 5 on When I get home, Columbia Records, 2019.
[5] Blood Orange, ‘Jewelry,’ track 5 on Negro swan, Domino Recording, 2018.
[6]Tongues untied, directed by Marlon T. Riggs (1989; San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel, 1989), video.
[7] Blood Orange, ‘Champagne coast,’ track 10 on Coastal grooves, Domino Recording, 2011.
[8] Yrsa Daley-Ward, ‘things it takes twenty years and a bad liver to figure out,’ in Bone (Penguin, 2017), 67.
[9] Riggs, Tongues untied.
[10] Lauren Berlant, ‘Affect in the present,’ in Cruel optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 1-22.
[11] Riggs, Tongues untied.
[12] Soul!, ‘James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, A Conversation,’ produced by Ellis Haizlip, aired December 15 and 22, 1971, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZmBy7C9gHQ.
[13] Daughters of the dust, directed by Julie Dash (1991; New York City, NY: Kino International, 1999), DVD.
[14] Moses Sumney, ‘Doomed,’ track 9 on Aromanticism, Jagjaguwar, 2017.
[15] Dash, Daughters of the dust.
[16] Space is the place – uncut version, directed by John Coney (1972), video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZso7bNq-dI.
[17] Riggs, Tongues untied.
[18] Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan, Fumbling towards repair: A workbook for community Accountability facilitators (California: AK Press, 2019).
Sourced from: Umang Sagar and adrienne maree brown, ‘Pleasure activism with adrienne maree brown,’ June 11, 2019, in Possibilities podcast, audio, https://anchor.fm/possibilities-podcast/episodes/Pleasure-Activism-with-adrienne-maree-brown-e4a3ne.
[19] Alexis Pauline Gumbs, ‘From the lab notes of the last experiments,’ in M Archive: After the end of the world (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 9.
[20] Christina Sharpe, ‘In the Wake,’ in In the wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 1-24.
[21] Solange, ‘Stay flo,’ track 6 on When I get home, Columbia Records, 2019.
[22] Kelela, ‘Take me apart,’ track 3 on Take me apart, Warp Records, 2017.
[23] Dash, Daughters of the dust.
[24] Riggs, Tongues untied.
[25] Riggs.
[26] When I get home (Director’s Cut), directed by Solange Knowles (2019), video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q55AVeXzqeE.
[28] Campt, ‘Black visuality and the practice of refusal.’
[29] Lafawndah, ‘Deep see,’ Concordia, 2020.
[30] Gumbs, ‘From the lab notes of the last experiments,’ 11.
[31] Riggs, Tongues untied.
[32] Riggs
[33] Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of Anger,’ Women’s studies quarterly 25, no. 1/2, Looking back, moving forward: 25 years of women's studies history (1997): 280.
[34] Kelsey Lu, ‘Morning after coffee,’ track 3 on Church, True Panther Sounds, 2016.
[35] Knowles, When I get home (Director’s Cut).
[35] Campt, ‘Black visuality and the practice of refusal.”
[36] Solange, ‘Nothing without intention (interlude),’ track 8 on When I get home, Columbia Records, 2019.
[37] Knowles, When I get home (Director’s Cut).
[38] Jasbir Puar, ‘Conclusion: Queer times, terrorist assemblages,” in Terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 204-222.
[39] Moses Sumney, Black in deep red, 2014, Jagjaguwar, 2018.
[40] Moses Sumney, ‘Power?,’ track 1 on Black in deep red, 2014, Jagjaguwar, 2018.
[41] Moses Sumney, ‘Neither/Nor,’ track 11 on græ: Part 1, Jagjaguwar, 2020.
[42] Arundhati Roy, The God of small things (Flamingo, 1997), 306-7.
[43] Toni Morrison, Beloved (Chatto & Windus, 1987).
[44] Solange, ‘Almeda,’ track 9 on When I get home, Columbia Records, 2019.
[45] Ocean Vuong, ‘Immigrant haibun,’ in Night sky with exit wounds (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017), 15.
[46] Dash, Daughters of the dust.
[47] Knowles, “Dreams (Demo 2),” in When I get home (Director’s Cut).
is this what black speculative hope moves like?
maybe hope climbs out of this water, shakes
salt off like dry earth
& kisses dust rising; a prayer
we keep in the soil
seeds could grow out of dark dust
(the negation of it all like:) (Tina Campt)
do tears still taste salty when black skin glows blue?
(Tarell Alvin McCraney) (FKA twigs)
‘my rivers’ / cross over borders of skin
(Solange)
chords waver before ‘Nigga I’m feeling myself’
(Blood Orange / Dev Hynes)
in hollow turn to the rap (Marlon T. Riggs)
black joy through pain
who cries out when blue skin bleeds free?
we love to the shape of foamy tide: a champagne coast (Blood Orange / Dev Hynes)
its cyclical presence is slow breathing
like water we circumnavigate death
& edges stay flat
but you’d still crack bone for a smile; open mouth / & blood
(Yrsa Daley-Ward)
which bodies emerge from dark salty depths?
slip out of water & line river banks
pearls on string it’s biblical
(we speak in tongues, too) (Marlon T. Riggs)
tears dry salty on still waters &
reflect glimmer of / cruel motion/ings to trip up into (Lauren Berlant)
did we touch the border between silence and a flimsy truth?
truth falls us backwards, splinters
on the way down but
hovers, dusty
in back of throat, cuts sharp
almost breaks skin.
~ / ~
In crack of dawn smoky like a last breath
tongues fall loose out mouth,
teeth hit pavement, tinkle like piano key
blood forms new language, beckoning, (Marlon T. Riggs)
it’s holy:
if the kid is the griot is the ancestor (Nikki Giovanni x James Baldwin)
(Julie Dash)
from whence
(Moses Sumney)
does our soil speak?
flesh is shallow after all
plant our dues in it when we / cross into new worlds
will you take me where you go? (Julie Dash)
walk on the other side of time with me, (Sun Ra)
baby : our deaths are buried (Marlon T. Riggs)
before our births &
eulogy is futures placed into soil
tilting towards pale dust
tumbling towards death. (Mariame Kaba & Shira Hassan)
where do bodies go to break?
black people rise / hungry
skin salty
tongues unfurling
from murky water (hydrogen & oxygen dance two-to-one)
a body is elemental / it too (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)
breaks down (to a beat of two-two-one)
~ / ~
in faint dawn where blue skin turns white,
we’ll wake
(noun:) (Christina Sharpe)
line of water or people,
stretchy grief floating; fishy body / oily sea
hold me & I could wade in: swim to the current of
river-time, count to the beat of
‘down down down’ with the flow
(Solange)
when rivers slow (Kelela)
wet pebbles weigh our lives against hard thumb-print of death
& dust falls like silence in large rooms
lodges in
echoing cavity of throat
it’s ancient, remembered
the daughters of whom / return from dust? (Julie Dash)
(we can’t move time
if we can’t move.)
flickering lives (Marlon T. Riggs)
catch in throats like small stones / each breath holds weight
the stones are from the river / can we
skip across time like that?
wait for the quiet implosion (Marlon T. Riggs)
did you hear it in a river stone tremor?
names cry out in photonegative
water under moonlight: glowing in the dark.
the image is this: sea of black people
or
black man rides horse down suburban Texan street. doesn’t die.
(Solange / a dreamscape)
can you hear the image breathe?
(Tina Campt)
~ / ~
orange sun is traffic orb, makes blue skin golden
blue skin thaws / dead people warm
deep-see luminescence (Lafawndah) (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)
fierce love trembles across life-death border (Marlon T. Riggs)
threatens to overflow us out of
angry watery bodies (Marlon T. Riggs)
& rage floats on: slick fuel (Audre Lorde)
love falls between angry life & angry death like blades of
tall grass or dreams not mine
mine those spaces; shiver down spine is
reminder the body remembers
& waits in wake
bruises heal but callouses remain, or
sweet fruit can be rotten
sour & salty coexist: in blood
& anger
soiled nails brim with heat
fingers pucker, dried fig
less sweet: soured fruit is cherry-stained anger
left outside in January blister
clenched fists at the ready
‘when I sleep, I dream’ (Kelsey Lu)
in black & blue
~ / ~
glimpse sun through layers of trees
hanging like an eye, silent witness leaking pus
river breaking bank
in the deep wet I will / dance before I drown
(maybe part of me is still reaching
backwards for that salty water)
when sun shines on black men on horses in Texas suburbia (Solange)
it is revelation:
church is three beats & black skin pressed together,
motion not cold finality,
it is magic to be warm & fleshy
bodies move in concentric circles
still black life, images release a round chorus of refusal (Tina Campt)
& we make formations
to break them
joy is multiples of three-plus
swing death around in a two-step
move with intention; (Solange)
writhe to the sound of a black glow
to live in the gap between the circle and the square (Solange)
tentative love,
like strips of pale grey on blue ceiling
where the light spills like a body
in excess of its own minimal containers (Jasbir Puar)
time going again like circular flow of wet bodies
always fleeting,
slowly,
away & away
~ / ~
where on my skin can I mark the lines of my own citations?
black in dark red / currents (Moses Sumney)
are deep shocks: do we live forever? “do we have power?”
ctrl + s may grant internet salvation
but embedded links on raw skin
are chains of a different sort
in grey static of the in/between (Moses Sumney)
sharp embrace / electricity & water
we keep reaching
towards whirlpool formations
in a river that reasserts itself. trembling
with weight of ‘doing time’:
free / black bodies, we do our own time:
history / is just swimming upstream in salty rivers
bridging small loud houses (Arundhati Roy)
(Toni Morrison)
~ / ~
at midnight in bright sky / watching the water
where island people
reached out and froze time
I move over piano riffs with care
across a vocal interlude
(in circles & squares)
inhabit the space between ‘black / berry
(bury) the masses’ (Solange)
the blank promise within an ampersand (Ocean Vuong)
I’ll settle in the curved body of a question mark
surfacing like a wish
gently trace my archival footage
with your tongue:
saltwater black bodies (Julie Dash)
slip in between browser tabs
(we’re going home) (Solange)
~ / ~
Kiki Amberber lives and makes work on Gadigal Land.
She is interested in modes of futurity that emerge in small and shattering ways; through the zones of digital intimacy, diaspora, movement, and archival practice. Her work attempts to create or expose time-space fractures that open lines from the ancestral to the not-yet-here. In this way, she hopes to orient herself towards new worlds that disrupt colonial acts of violence.
She mostly works in poetry, prose, and audio. She has been published in Voiceworks, writes for Honi Soit, and presents and produces at FBi Radio.
Her influences include Afrofuturism, experimental documentary, narratives of the griot, and queer understandings of utopia, the future, and affective bodily flows.
She is currently studying a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Gender Studies and Media at the University of Sydney. She is really into stone fruit, the sun, Dev Hynes' music, water, poc joy, and Toni Morrison's words.
Saccharin is a work of citational poetry and audio that responds to three films and attempts to unearth something new in the process. It asks how documentary can be love practice — where watery bodies are fleshy moving archives, creating porous intimate spaces of collective survival.
All the audio comes from the films:
Daughters of the dust - directed by Julie Dash (1991)
Tongues untied - directed by Marlon T. Riggs (1989)
When I get home (Director's Cut) - directed by Solange Knowles (2019)
is this what black speculative hope moves like?
maybe hope climbs out of this water, shakes
salt off like dry earth
& kisses dust rising; a prayer
we keep in the soil
seeds could grow out of dark dust
(the negation of it all like:) (Tina Campt)
do tears still taste salty when black skin glows blue?
(Tarell Alvin McCraney) (FKA twigs)
‘my rivers’ / cross over borders of skin
(Solange)
chords waver before ‘Nigga I’m feeling myself’
(Blood Orange / Dev Hynes)
in hollow turn to the rap (Marlon T. Riggs)
black joy through pain
who cries out when blue skin bleeds free?
we love to the shape of foamy tide: a champagne coast (Blood Orange / Dev Hynes)
its cyclical presence is slow breathing
like water we circumnavigate death
& edges stay flat
but you’d still crack bone for a smile; open mouth / & blood
(Yrsa Daley-Ward)
which bodies emerge from dark salty depths?
slip out of water & line river banks
pearls on string it’s biblical
(we speak in tongues, too) (Marlon T. Riggs)
tears dry salty on still waters &
reflect glimmer of / cruel motion/ings to trip up into (Lauren Berlant)
did we touch the border between silence and a flimsy truth?
truth falls us backwards, splinters
on the way down but
hovers, dusty
in back of throat, cuts sharp
almost breaks skin.
~ / ~
In crack of dawn smoky like a last breath
tongues fall loose out mouth,
teeth hit pavement, tinkle like piano key
blood forms new language, beckoning, (Marlon T. Riggs)
it’s holy:
if the kid is the griot is the ancestor (Nikki Giovanni x James Baldwin)
(Julie Dash)
from whence
(Moses Sumney)
does our soil speak?
flesh is shallow after all
plant our dues in it when we / cross into new worlds
will you take me where you go? (Julie Dash)
walk on the other side of time with me, (Sun Ra)
baby : our deaths are buried (Marlon T. Riggs)
before our births &
eulogy is futures placed into soil
tilting towards pale dust
tumbling towards death. (Mariame Kaba & Shira Hassan)
where do bodies go to break?
black people rise / hungry
skin salty
tongues unfurling
from murky water (hydrogen & oxygen dance two-to-one)
a body is elemental / it too (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)
breaks down (to a beat of two-two-one)
~ / ~
in faint dawn where blue skin turns white,
we’ll wake
(noun:) (Christina Sharpe)
line of water or people,
stretchy grief floating; fishy body / oily sea
hold me & I could wade in: swim to the current of
river-time, count to the beat of
‘down down down’ with the flow
(Solange)
when rivers slow (Kelela)
wet pebbles weigh our lives against hard thumb-print of death
& dust falls like silence in large rooms
lodges in
echoing cavity of throat
it’s ancient, remembered
the daughters of whom / return from dust? (Julie Dash)
(we can’t move time
if we can’t move.)
flickering lives (Marlon T. Riggs)
catch in throats like small stones / each breath holds weight
the stones are from the river / can we
skip across time like that?
wait for the quiet implosion (Marlon T. Riggs)
did you hear it in a river stone tremor?
names cry out in photonegative
water under moonlight: glowing in the dark.
the image is this: sea of black people
or
black man rides horse down suburban Texan street. doesn’t die.
(Solange / a dreamscape)
can you hear the image breathe?
(Tina Campt)
~ / ~
orange sun is traffic orb, makes blue skin golden
blue skin thaws / dead people warm
deep-see luminescence (Lafawndah) (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)
fierce love trembles across life-death border (Marlon T. Riggs)
threatens to overflow us out of
angry watery bodies (Marlon T. Riggs)
& rage floats on: slick fuel (Audre Lorde)
love falls between angry life & angry death like blades of
tall grass or dreams not mine
mine those spaces; shiver down spine is
reminder the body remembers
& waits in wake
bruises heal but callouses remain, or
sweet fruit can be rotten
sour & salty coexist: in blood
& anger
soiled nails brim with heat
fingers pucker, dried fig
less sweet: soured fruit is cherry-stained anger
left outside in January blister
clenched fists at the ready
‘when I sleep, I dream’ (Kelsey Lu)
in black & blue
~ / ~
glimpse sun through layers of trees
hanging like an eye, silent witness leaking pus
river breaking bank
in the deep wet I will / dance before I drown
(maybe part of me is still reaching
backwards for that salty water)
when sun shines on black men on horses in Texas suburbia (Solange)
it is revelation:
church is three beats & black skin pressed together,
motion not cold finality,
it is magic to be warm & fleshy
bodies move in concentric circles
still black life, images release a round chorus of refusal (Tina Campt)
& we make formations
to break them
joy is multiples of three-plus
swing death around in a two-step
move with intention; (Solange)
writhe to the sound of a black glow
to live in the gap between the circle and the square (Solange)
tentative love,
like strips of pale grey on blue ceiling
where the light spills like a body
in excess of its own minimal containers (Jasbir Puar)
time going again like circular flow of wet bodies
always fleeting,
slowly,
away & away
~ / ~
where on my skin can I mark the lines of my own citations?
black in dark red / currents (Moses Sumney)
are deep shocks: do we live forever? “do we have power?”
ctrl + s may grant internet salvation
but embedded links on raw skin
are chains of a different sort
in grey static of the in/between (Moses Sumney)
sharp embrace / electricity & water
we keep reaching
towards whirlpool formations
in a river that reasserts itself. trembling
with weight of ‘doing time’:
free / black bodies, we do our own time:
history / is just swimming upstream in salty rivers
bridging small loud houses (Arundhati Roy)
(Toni Morrison)
~ / ~
at midnight in bright sky / watching the water
where island people
reached out and froze time
I move over piano riffs with care
across a vocal interlude
(in circles & squares)
inhabit the space between ‘black / berry
(bury) the masses’ (Solange)
the blank promise within an ampersand (Ocean Vuong)
I’ll settle in the curved body of a question mark
surfacing like a wish
gently trace my archival footage
with your tongue:
saltwater black bodies (Julie Dash)
slip in between browser tabs
(we’re going home) (Solange)
~ / ~
[1] Tina Campt, ‘Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal’, Women & Performance, February 25, 2019, https://www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand/29-1/campt?rq=tina%20campt.
[2] Tarell Alvin McCraney, In moonlight, black boys look Bbue (2003).
[3] FKA twigs and Future, ‘holy terrain,’ track 4 on MAGDALENE, Young Turks Recording, 2019.
[4] Solange, ‘Can I hold the mic (interlude),’ track 5 on When I get home, Columbia Records, 2019.
[5] Blood Orange, ‘Jewelry,’ track 5 on Negro swan, Domino Recording, 2018.
[6]Tongues untied, directed by Marlon T. Riggs (1989; San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel, 1989), video.
[7] Blood Orange, ‘Champagne coast,’ track 10 on Coastal grooves, Domino Recording, 2011.
[8] Yrsa Daley-Ward, ‘things it takes twenty years and a bad liver to figure out,’ in Bone (Penguin, 2017), 67.
[9] Riggs, Tongues untied.
[10] Lauren Berlant, ‘Affect in the present,’ in Cruel optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 1-22.
[11] Riggs, Tongues untied.
[12] Soul!, ‘James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, A Conversation,’ produced by Ellis Haizlip, aired December 15 and 22, 1971, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZmBy7C9gHQ.
[13] Daughters of the dust, directed by Julie Dash (1991; New York City, NY: Kino International, 1999), DVD.
[14] Moses Sumney, ‘Doomed,’ track 9 on Aromanticism, Jagjaguwar, 2017.
[15] Dash, Daughters of the dust.
[16] Space is the place – uncut version, directed by John Coney (1972), video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZso7bNq-dI.
[17] Riggs, Tongues untied.
[18] Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan, Fumbling towards repair: A workbook for community Accountability facilitators (California: AK Press, 2019).
Sourced from: Umang Sagar and adrienne maree brown, ‘Pleasure activism with adrienne maree brown,’ June 11, 2019, in Possibilities podcast, audio, https://anchor.fm/possibilities-podcast/episodes/Pleasure-Activism-with-adrienne-maree-brown-e4a3ne.
[19] Alexis Pauline Gumbs, ‘From the lab notes of the last experiments,’ in M Archive: After the end of the world (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 9.
[20] Christina Sharpe, ‘In the Wake,’ in In the wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 1-24.
[21] Solange, ‘Stay flo,’ track 6 on When I get home, Columbia Records, 2019.
[22] Kelela, ‘Take me apart,’ track 3 on Take me apart, Warp Records, 2017.
[23] Dash, Daughters of the dust.
[24] Riggs, Tongues untied.
[25] Riggs.
[26] When I get home (Director’s Cut), directed by Solange Knowles (2019), video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q55AVeXzqeE.
[28] Campt, ‘Black visuality and the practice of refusal.’
[29] Lafawndah, ‘Deep see,’ Concordia, 2020.
[30] Gumbs, ‘From the lab notes of the last experiments,’ 11.
[31] Riggs, Tongues untied.
[32] Riggs
[33] Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of Anger,’ Women’s studies quarterly 25, no. 1/2, Looking back, moving forward: 25 years of women's studies history (1997): 280.
[34] Kelsey Lu, ‘Morning after coffee,’ track 3 on Church, True Panther Sounds, 2016.
[35] Knowles, When I get home (Director’s Cut).
[35] Campt, ‘Black visuality and the practice of refusal.”
[36] Solange, ‘Nothing without intention (interlude),’ track 8 on When I get home, Columbia Records, 2019.
[37] Knowles, When I get home (Director’s Cut).
[38] Jasbir Puar, ‘Conclusion: Queer times, terrorist assemblages,” in Terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 204-222.
[39] Moses Sumney, Black in deep red, 2014, Jagjaguwar, 2018.
[40] Moses Sumney, ‘Power?,’ track 1 on Black in deep red, 2014, Jagjaguwar, 2018.
[41] Moses Sumney, ‘Neither/Nor,’ track 11 on græ: Part 1, Jagjaguwar, 2020.
[42] Arundhati Roy, The God of small things (Flamingo, 1997), 306-7.
[43] Toni Morrison, Beloved (Chatto & Windus, 1987).
[44] Solange, ‘Almeda,’ track 9 on When I get home, Columbia Records, 2019.
[45] Ocean Vuong, ‘Immigrant haibun,’ in Night sky with exit wounds (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017), 15.
[46] Dash, Daughters of the dust.
[47] Knowles, “Dreams (Demo 2),” in When I get home (Director’s Cut).
Kiki Amberber lives and makes work on Gadigal Land.
She is interested in modes of futurity that emerge in small and shattering ways; through the zones of digital intimacy, diaspora, movement, and archival practice. Her work attempts to create or expose time-space fractures that open lines from the ancestral to the not-yet-here. In this way, she hopes to orient herself towards new worlds that disrupt colonial acts of violence.
She mostly works in poetry, prose, and audio. She has been published in Voiceworks, writes for Honi Soit, and presents and produces at FBi Radio.
Her influences include Afrofuturism, experimental documentary, narratives of the griot, and queer understandings of utopia, the future, and affective bodily flows.
She is currently studying a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Gender Studies and Media at the University of Sydney. She is really into stone fruit, the sun, Dev Hynes' music, water, poc joy, and Toni Morrison's words.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.