Being with Moten and a rainbow

As I sat to watch the rainbow until it disappeared, I thought of Teju Cole playing with the phonetic similarities between 'witness' and 'with-ness'. PIC/Rosalyn d'mello

Some days ago, because I was on top of all my deadlines and felt like beginning on a new book - Fred Moten's Black and Blur, part one of his trilogy, consent not to be a single being, I went to a cafe a stone's throw away from where I live, ordered a coffee and a chocolate croissant and settled into my seat. I had watched a video of Moten reading his poems at a TS Eliot memorial reading, and had heard him speak profoundly about Blackness, and I was keen to enter his philosophical universe. I didn't expect to feel so thrown off, though.

Moten writes elegantly, infusing his sentences, always, with a touch of vulnerability usually lacking in most forms of philosophical treatise. As a practising poet, sometimes a phrase really blazes through your field of vision. Could I offer a summary of his preface? Possibly not.

I have not been trained to decipher such tonalities. And yet, reading Moten is richly rewarding, if you surrender to the text and allow it to enter you, without obsessing always about whether you are able to comprehend it or not. In the preface, for instance, he speaks about Black radical aesthetic and its responsorial relation to anti-blackness.

He says, "To celebrate is to solemnify, in practice. This is done not to avoid or ameliorate the hard truths of anti-blackness but in the service of its violent eradication. There is an open set of sentences of the kind blackness is x and we should chant them all, not only for and in the residual critique of mastery such chanting bears but also in devoted instantiation, sustenance and defence of the irregular. What is endowment that it can be rewound? What is it to rewind the given? What is it to wound it? What is it to be given to this wounding and rewinding? Mobilized in predication, blackness mobilizes predication not only against but also before itself."

Do you see what I mean? These are not easy sentences, and yet, I feel the spirit heaving between them. I like accessing the weight of it, sometimes in the hope that some of it will rub off on me. Moten, among other Black philosophers, has been critiquing the inherent racism within Western philosophical discourse, and for me, it's refreshing.

In his writing, one can find ways of approaching textual and artistic work by marginalised identities and their relationship to mainstream discourses. There's great heft and great fragility too, which is invigorating, even if it means I can only read him in small doses, a few pages at a time because there's a limit to my intellectual capacity to un-entangle and make meaning.

When I finished the preface, my coffee, and my croissant, I decided to go to the pharmacy to get my partner the mosquito repellent he needed for his fieldwork. I reached into my bag to look for my mask and put away what was in my hand, and suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a shard of a rainbow. I looked towards the horizon, and indeed there was a glorious arc spread across the valley.

This was the third time I had encountered a rainbow in Südtirol. It was utterly spectacular, and I stood in awe at what lay before me. I had this sudden impulse to walk towards it to feast on it. Around me were locals and tourists, walking up and down this very main street, all with their eyes centred in front of them or focussed on the ground.

And there I was, gaping, arrested, unable to move. I stood in place just to soak it all in, and there was indeed a wide spread of prismatic flesh. A ten or eleven-year-old boy noticed me looking and started to look himself. Then drew out his phone and began to take pictures, like me. It was a lovely moment. We were alone together, both of us bearing witness, aware of each other's presence, but sharing space silently.

His looking validated my sense of awe as around us, people continued walking, as if either totally oblivious to the phenomena unfolding in the sky, or as if hardened by being continually surrounded by beauty.

After I emerged from the pharmacy, surprised to see the rainbow still firmly in place, I decided to walk towards an elevated point so that I could see it more clearly, and 'be' with it. I climbed the stairs up to the Sankt Jakob chapel, and sat on a bench at the back, from where I could access a panoramic view of Tramin.

I thought of the address Teju Cole gave introducing Moten at the TS Eliot Memorial Reading; he played with the phonetic similarities of the two words 'witness' and 'with-ness'. I stayed with the rainbow until it disappeared completely.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper

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