In the annals of agony, most fall silently. As we finished the last of the white wine after Sinead’s friend up from Kerry went to bed, it happened again. The moon touched houses lightly and lay across recently cut fields while I sunk again to the place of forgetting, and Sinead remembered everything. When understanding man-made misery, it helps to be there. I knew this from years working in US American tech publishing, where the loss of Twitter and the wholesale billionaire buy of the press spelled the invisible death of investigative journalism—and with it, all its promise of public demands for answers. We were not sending people to be there anymore before they tell us what happened. Increasingly, the stories of some are never told.
Sinead knew there-ness from being a human rights attorney. At the moment we were passing through Stormont, home of the Government of Northern Ireland in the ‘90s. Bodies are still missing from the Troubles. We had just left collapsing buildings on Gay Street in New York City, where my landlord and government tortured me for seven years while telling me what is happening is not happening while fellow academics stalk me in order to discredit my work because I am Roma. Now all over the city people who have fled horrors for refuge disappear off the street. Sinead’s father’s doctor was taken too. Pol Pot and his fear of people with glasses came next. We trade notes on humanity’s collective suffering, tracing time threads for the secret that would stop the weaving of cruelty.
I met Annette a couple weeks ago just steps from the White House at the Dance Studies Association Conference at George Washington University. Her insights on Windrush and British imperial history joined me at the picnic table while Sinead cozied up in her hooded jumper, leaned back in her chair against her cottage and looked up at the stars. The only thing that becomes clear in the mass of black collapsing in around us is this: we must keep telling each other of the screams heard in the night, and the blood spilled in broad daylight. We listen for these lights so that they may pierce the dark of all that we have not yet accounted for.
We must keep telling each other of the screams heard in the night, and the blood spilled in broad daylight.
With a colonial military lineage pulling me back three or four centuries on Turtle Island, my complete right-ear deafness and my sexuality prevented me from defending democracy with arms. As twenty people today are crushed in Gaza as they seek food and the US military supports genocide, I see the fantasy. I have continually been an activist, but this approach falters. Was capitalism really welcoming us in, or just giving us a late start in a race already won? Still, I was carried across the dance floor in the rise and shuffle of my father’s waltzing steps. My mother taught me to rise and grind across the kitchen floor. This pulled me up from gypsyism, pandemic obesity and now, the fall of my country: U.S. America. I can rise—and maybe if I stomp loud enough I can be heard.
This macabre speech continues through the night and follows me through herb-walk chats, across my whiskey rocks in an Irish trad session in Ennistymon and now across computer screen of precious metals most likely harvested in part by slaves. We trade notes on dangers never far away. What would happen if we all stopped just to listen? Maria screams with the sea. Artist have represented transatlantic slave trade. Dancers hear it. Maybe in our batters, shuffles and rallies we keep the sounds going. Maybe the rattles never stopped.
At a dance conference this year senior scholar laughed as he dismissed my work, “What does all this really mean? Can’t we just have fun?” I recall the woodcut of the Englishman dancing a hornpipe in fetters1 and I see the question’s honest premise: can we have fun with the suffering of others? The long history of colonial enforcement and its perpetual systems of racism, patriarchy and bodily coercion for profit point to the presence of punishment in dance: the taming of the many-headed hydra of commoners, sailors and slaves in revolt. This experience of oppression, felt so acutely and chronically by the oppressed, is invisible to those privileged by colonialism.
For example, when Charles Dickens visited New York in his travelogue American Notes, he observed of the founder of American Tap Dance, William Henry Lane (“Master Juba”):
Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fingers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fingers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs—what is this to him? And in what walk of life, or dance of life, does man ever get such stimulating applause as thunders about him, when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!
American Notes for General Circulation. iBooks edition, 1842, pp. 249–250.
For most of my tenure in academia I have seen scholars and practitioners alike delight in this whimsical, racist representation of a genius who broke through brutal systems designed to suppress him. He went on to bring his performance to Britain and Ireland, where his presence is last recorded in 1851. Since I first read this text in 2014, it has struck me as a grotesque: at best the writings of someone trying to cash in on what he did not understand. To Dickens, Lane’s dance was whirling, dazzling nonsense. To those who carry lineages of impact—of violence—we know what we are listening to, and what we are moving beyond.
To dance with impact is not just an invitation to autonomy of time, space and energy—of what it is to be you, here, now. It is a deep state of listening to the annals of agony and performing the repertoire of the risen. We will undoubtedly keep trying to speak and write for the fallen, as well as stand in silence. In between the beats of slaps, claps, taps and stomps something else happens: moments of listening to the hearts of the taken, and the drumming of the risen on the ground.
Sinead and I continue our conversations as we trade notes humanity’s weaving, the baskets that have carried innovations of kindness through fire, pillaging and plague. We will not know if it is suffering or kindness that we have woven until we look into the eyes of those left carrying the burden down the road. We will know what we have written in the annals until we catch them—or let them fall.
Chains or manacles around the ankles and sometimes hands used to restrain prisoners and the enslaved.