Sinners: Come Forth Dark Prince of the Bends
Jack O’Connell in as Remmick in Sinners (Warner Bros. Pictures)
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING ANALYSIS CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FILM SINNERS.
As many of you know, much of my work focuses on the multigenerational transference of non-Western epistemologies and ontologies in Black diaspora and Indigenous American communities via their interactions with the ancestral (un)dead.
I focus on how these non-Western epistemologies and ontologies, usually passed down by non-lettered methodologies (semiotic or sonic), offer access to potential ways of being that do not depend on models or formulations of “Man” that have been dictated by the racist synergies upholding the plantation mansion that is Aristotelian logic.
Our flesh has always been coded as fungible, lacking the biopower necessary to claim the privileges of the sovereign citizen. What does it mean to be born-dead? I have memories of police officers harassing me and my childhood friends for simply walking through affluent neighborhoods: “You niggers won’t live to make it to 25.” Unfortunately, those officers were correct—many of my peers died before they were even 18. I have dedicated my life to telling their stories through acts of conjure, whether that be through lettered/written means, or oratory and visual performances.
Liminal spaces have always been key to Black and Indigenous communities. I think of enslaved persons who were forced to endure a doubled discrimination on indigo plantations. I think of the quilombos who escaped the brutalities of slavery and found new beginnings in the vacuum of untouched nature. I think of the clearing that offered Baby Suggs a place to perpetuate and teach self-love and healing to enslaved Africans and African-Americans in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I think of the shifting «caracoles» that were pivotal to distributing both goods and knowledges within the Zapatista movement. I think of being homeless in 2012, squatting in abandoned or foreclosed houses, stealing food just to survive: I have titled these shifting localities throughout Northeast Ohio as the bends.
A picture of myself and my friend Edward during the summer of 2012. We spent most of that summer squatting in abandoned/foreclosed houses throughout Greater Cleveland before being incarcerated.
Very little was ever recorded or written down in those structures. The most tangible evidence of our physical presence is recorded in various photos and digitized arrest records housed by the state. What really happened in those “abandos” in 2012? Were gang members present? What about drug dealers? Is it true that there was a séance held there to summon the spirit of a newborn baby who died of SIDS? What about the pimp that drove around the looping and entangled streets for hours and hours who wanted to kill us? Did we wrong him? Did it really happen, or was it all just a dream? That was the summer that Brian died at a house party; could I have saved him had I not been slipping behind the veil? My heart shimmers and blinks in the infinity of the sublime. What about Earl? What about Tommy? What about my cousins Mario and Jermaine?
“Can’T nobody
diss my nigga—
damn,
I miss my nigga.”
Ryan Coogler does an excellent job utilizing the juke-joint in Sinners as a liminal space (We call them “after hours” joints in Cleveland! Fun-fact: my mother and father met for the first time at an after hours joint that hosted Blues musicians into the early hours of the morning. My mom was of Black/West African heritage, while my father is of Irish/German ancestry. Can you imagine how I see reflections of my own family in this film?). His focus on music and dance being a tool of transference for selfhood is key—colonized peoples have often weaponized non-lettered technologies to produce and spread autochthonous knowledges that combat the wake of colonialism.
In Sinners, these are spirituals being belted out at a church house, or Delta Slim busking for money while taking sips of moonshine, or Remmick stomping his feet to a jig in 6/8- or 9/8-time signatures (a prominent feature of my childhood that extends its roots all the way back to Limerick, Ireland). These traditions, escaping the soundness (erroneously) associated with models of logic formulated around a posteriori observations, enable future generations to mold themselves in past patterns and archetypes that are not chained to the post-Enlightenment haunting of the Other or modalities of humanity molded in an image that dehumanizes and delegitimizes those who are Indigenous and Black.
The focus on music and dance as harbingers of hope and healing is crucial. Colonized peoples, especially in the Global North, were often restricted from learning or mastering the dominant language. This was no new tool of conquest—the late Ángel Rama argues how the gatekeeping of literacy was perfected during the colonization of the Américas. Colonized peoples preserved indigenous epistemologies and ontologies through non-lettered technologies that acted as conduits between the living and the (un)dead. Song and dance were often the only method of communication within Black and Indigenous communities. Even when these abstract ideas and beliefs could be expressed via the non-lettered, colonized groups faced restrictions that prohibited them from congregating in groups of more than four-to-five.
A common critique of Sinners is the rebuke of Remmick’s army of the (un)dead by the colonized living. This is a complicated and multilayered situation: Smoke is offered to willingly join Remmick’s army of the (un)dead, which does offer a space of anticolonial praxis, but he is coerced to repulse against becoming a part of this undercommons of the unholy. Smoke embodies a schism still relevant in the lives of many Black Americans: The demonization of West African indigenous (commonly Yoruba) religious practices that survived the systemic erasure ensured by the bureaucracies of chattel slavery. I am not saying that these conflicts don’t exist throughout Black diaspora, but Black folk outside of the United States are typically more comfortable engaging in/with precolonial socioreligious ceremonies or technologies.
I want to refer to my theory of the dissociated-self, which acts as a voyeur to the many potential trajectories and paths of acts that could be realized by colonized peoples. We prefer to see Smoke aligned with Remmick, but we must consider generation after generation of postmemory internalized by not only himself, but by his ancestors. Learning to be true to ourselves and denounce the prejudices or biases of colonization is a constant and lifelong process. It is not an act that can be mastered, as falsely displayed through the instant gratification of social media and the commodification of radical activism.
Decolonization is a constant act of self-creation/destruction (the perpetual slippage and flux). Ego, linked to Western notions of meritocracy, allude to the possibility of being a master/owner/gatekeeper of a particular knowledge: the truth is that we will know very little throughout our finite time here (in contrast to the limitless accumulation of all human knowledge), and we should be dedicated to constantly engaging with critical thinking when in the presence of knowledges that adequately challenge our prior selves. People have labeled me as an aspiration due to being able to survive the pitfalls of the necropolis and reform myself within the upper echelon of whiteness (“the ivory tower”), but very much like Kendrick: “I am not your savior.”
Smoke is torn between the past/present/future: his perceptions of barbarity linked to rootwork (the precolonial past), as spotlighted by his doubts casted on Annie’s mojo bags or divination ceremonies. He has aligned himself with the industrialization of the modern world after witnessing the technological feats of World War I weaponry and the embrace of laissez-faire capitalism by the gangsters of the Midwest (which reminds me of how drug cartels in México are defamiliarized mirrors of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists). Smoke knows that the future of the United States will always reside in capital (all money is blood money). We seek perfection in Smoke in his quest to conquer the ills of colonialism after losing his twin brother, without realizing that these very same fault and blunders live within ourselves as we trudge through the wake.
I am flawed. I contradict myself. I am haunted by my past. I am still capable of doing destructive and negative things (and will misstep and make mistakes). I am not sanctified. I don’t want to be your role model. I don’t want to be worshipped (nor held on a pedestal). Do not follow my path, because it is tumultuous and dark; it will endanger your life; it will follow you even after claiming to have been reformed and reshaped: I am, very much like Remmick, one of the many princes of the bends. I can offer praxis and new possibilities, but they will entail significant sacrifice. I can’t promise perfection or balance, but I can promise something that is significantly different from the world we’re trying to survive in.
This is a long and ongoing battle that has been fought far longer than previously stated by dominant historiographical narratives published by Western academics. It is a fight that will continue long after my physical being has perished from this earth. It is a battle that will take many forms and constantly reshape (just as whiteness shifts and morphs into new forms and manifestations). I have a lot more to say about the mythology of twins in Black and Indigenous cultures, mirrors and mirror-creatures, Jungian psychology (the anima and animus), the uncanny valley, Beloved, Stoker’s Dracula and the recolonization of the New Europe by the vampires of Old Europe (just as Old World Remmick recolonizes New World North America with his (un)dead army), but we’ll see how readers respond to this post before venturing more into those concepts.
