In Senegambia it was important to randomize the flow of pathways “since evil travels in straight lines.”
Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit[1]
i.
There are many kinds of immortals. A ghost is not a vampyre. A zombie is not a zombi, however they all share qualities. How well we understand both the overt qualities and the subtleties that distinguish daemons, demons, and djinn from one another varies from culture to culture and person to person. What happens when deities, beings, lineages not meant to be understood, compared, and conflated in the languages they are rendered are conjured through the human processes of language, speech, and sight?
Many spirits live and meet near the water. They converge, diverge, make peace and, many times, war. Among other things, colonialism is a spiritual collision and a cataclysm. From this vantage point, you might consider my life and the lives of those in my community to be the results of many experiments, some successful, others gone awry. Chances taken on decisions made long before our arrival. As a writer in the English language, I am always exploring, reifying, or undoing the ties that bind and its knots, by right or by way of force. As such, no matter what I write, I am never quite satisfied. No matter when I believe and/or am told that I have done it well; something always nags, something haunts every single word.
ii.
In the short story, The Black Vampyre: Legend of Santo Domingo (1819), a child is murdered by his captor shortly after arriving in the “new world.” The boy’s descendent, Anthony Gibb narrates this fate, and describes the perishing of the boy’s family members on the journey from Guinea to the Caribbean. The child, however, is different. Following repeated attempts on his life by his captor, he is resurrected, revealing himself to be an immortal. Written in 1819 under the pseudonym Uriah Derick D’Arcy, the story is considered both the first published American vampire tale and the first to feature a Black vampire.
The Black Vampyre’s author remains unknown. Published in 1819 under the pseudonym, Uriah Derick D’Arcy, the work was reprinted in 1845 and attributed to Robert C. Sands. However, later scholarship points to another white American author, Robert Varick Dey.[2] The story’s events are set in the lead up to the Haitian Revolution. Through the course of the tale, Personne’s victim, the plantation’s prodigal son, returns in the form of a Moorish prince accompanied by Zembo, his assistant and vampiric son of Personne and the Prince’s former mistress, Euphemia. The Prince soon marries and impregnates Euphemia, turning her into a vampire and resurrecting Personne. The narrative then shifts, leading the reader to a set of caves where the monarchs of the immortal meet with the enslaved to plot their freedom. The rebellion planned in the caves is soon thwarted by Zembo, and he, Euphemia, and Personne see their vampirism cured. The trio then return to their lives as proper Christian whites thanks to the magic of those whose freedom they stole, leaving the colonial order disturbed but ultimately intact. Though the initial animating force that “turns” the young boy into the Prince is never quite identified, D’Arcy unites the story’s vampiric theme with both capitalism and the spiritual practices of the enslaved—in particular through the use of charms, amulets, and potions believed to be able to blur the line between the living and dead.
What happens when deities, beings, lineages not meant to be understood, compared, and conflated in the languages they are rendered are conjured through the human processes of language, speech, and sight?
The Black Vampyre is among other works of nineteenth-century literary fiction that wrestles with the reality and consequences of black people’s autonomy. Published in 1855, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno tells the story of Captain Delano, who spots the ship San Dominick in distress and sails toward it to assist. On board, he finds Captain Cereno seemingly under the care of Babo, a “trusted slave.” However, Delano’s racist assumptions lead him to miss the many signs reflecting the true nature of the vessel, which has been commandeered by Babo and the other revolting Africans previously held as cargo. In Melville’s novella, as in The Black Vampyre, the rebellion of the enslaved meets a violent end. At the same time, their spirit, desire, and gumption to take action toward freedom is portrayed, if only superficially, by Melville as bloodlust.
iii.
Imagine night for the newly arrived. Experts in deciphering the night sky, they are deprived of its expanse. Sleep, when possible, perhaps provides a brief escape. Maybe someone dreams of those who wait. Across the sea, standing or lying in pits carved in the earth, in stone cells along the coast, they wait for days and weeks on docked boats as more and more people are brought aboard. As more appear and disappear. Life and death, a mirage that bleeds indistinguishably, one state into another.
When slavery is understood to have always been yoked to freedom all throughout the history of man; when (the so-called free) man’s yoking to the figure of the slave is also, of necessity, understood to be yoked to his struggle against the free man for his freedom (and the ambiguity of “his” is, here, intentional), then what we’re talking about is better, if still inadequately, understood as durational field rather than event.
Fred Moten, Black and Blur[3]
What to share, what to keep—how to both prepare and spare the children? What is the value of a pursuit of beauty when you find yourself, your people, so often in a hell on earth? Across oceans, the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Black people have had to reckon with systemic violences, disembodiment, and disenfranchisement—estrangements from both our ethereal and material cultures. Yet, the creative impulse has served to foster and preserve a fugitivity of mind and spirit across generations.
In July 2025, Sacred Threads, a collection of the artist, Ryann Sterling’s work in video, collage, photography and sculptural assemblages, was exhibited in the Black Heritage Gallery at the historic city hall in her native Lake Charles, Louisiana. The previous July, she and I, along with the artists Ashley Teamer and Soraya Jean-Louis, hosted a collaborative lecture at New Orleans Museum of Art. Included in Sterling’s presentation then was the poem “Revery” by the proto–Harlem Renaissance poet Fenton Johnson.
Before the dawning
Of my life;
I was the river
Forever winding
To purple dreaming,[4]
That kind of “purple dreaming,” as a collective and self-referential look toward eternity, is echoed in one of Sterling’s featured works at the Black Heritage Gallery, a video piece called Feeding the Consciousness (2022). Featuring both original animations and archival footage of the musician Alice Coltrane, Sterling’s video sifts through the many contradictions of history and reassembles the artist’s lineages torn asunder following the many cataclysms still being unraveled bit by bit in Louisiana. Sterling’s multilayered vision presents a spiral pathway toward a spiritual order amid the chaos. In her work, beauty when held in its fullest capacities is a spiritual force rather than a trifle.
iv.
Some years ago, Marcus Akinlana, an artist and Chango priest in New Orleans, remarked that the city could just as easily be called “Ilu Bamana” (city of the Bambara.) His statement is a nod to the facts of history that led more Bambara people to be trafficked to Louisiana than anywhere else in North America. In and through the cataclysm of the Middle Passage, the Bambara’s descendants, both directly and via their cultural influence, engaged in a process of creating a new people in a new land, while still echoing their philosophy of yere wolo, giving birth to yourself. A birth that comes through the shedding of the superficial layers of identity and getting to the kolo, the kernel, the nucleus of the self or an aesthetic endeavor. The marks of this philosophy have been left permanently on the micro and macro aspects of culture in New Orleans.
Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites;
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno[5]
So, this story picks up, begins, ends, and begins again in New Orleans. Searching for the words that connect these ports and their literary and visual cultures, the points of human experience on the globe, takes time. Making my way through this story has not been, will not be linear. There will and must be many twists, turns, detours, and necessary loops back around to where I started. Here at the mouth of the Mississippi, where historically Black ethics and aesthetics are one in theory and praxis. A continuing emanation of the Bambara philosophies emphasizing individuality, self-protection, and group affiliation. Though so much has changed about the city in the two decades since Hurricane Katrina (and along with it the world), as I travel both physically and on the page through various port cities, I have come to observe a common tension between commerce and the cultures that surround them. Bodies conscripted into the labor of capitalism, the institutions invested in upholding the status quo, and the souls who challenge and resist it.
V.
Since my earliest readings of Moby-Dick, I always sensed Herman Melville’s deliberate misdirections: that he was telling some other story underneath the obvious one. . . . I understood that the massacre of violently rebelling slaves would be condoned in nineteenth-century “slave history” as the erasure of evil or the culling of herds. But I saw the equally violent response of the slaves on the ship as that of rational, if enraged, humans unwilling to be kidnapped for profit.
Toni Morrison, “Melville and the Language of Denial.”[6]
Back home after a month or so of traveling, I attended the Salon Supper Club at the New Orleans Museum of Art, an event held in tandem with the traveling exhibition New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, curated by Amanda M. Maples. Maples’s 2023 hiring as the Françoise Billion Richardson Curator of African Art was met with controversy and much public outcry, raising questions, maybe not of simple qualification, but of appropriateness given the city’s majority Black populace and both historic and contemporary contentions around systemic inequities. Maples’s appointment took place in the wake of, or what in more recent days feels like the fever dream of, the 2020–21 calls for reckoning within museums, arts institutions, and organizations. “Dismantle NOMA” was the local manifestation of a nationwide trend. As a result, NOMA’s hiring decision and press release was met with everything from anger to sheer incredulity.
A new chief curator at NOMA, Anne Collins Smith, was announced to the public in February 2025. She is the first Black native of New Orleans to hold the position. Smith previously served as director of the Xavier University of Louisiana Art Gallery and in curatorial roles at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, in Atlanta, and the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. When asked about Dismantle NOMA by the local news outlet Nola.com, Smith’s broad take on that period attributed much of the sentiment to the heightened tension and fear that surrounded the pandemic and the death of George Floyd: “We weren’t rational.”[7]
Standing in the “great hall” of New Orleans Museum of Art for the evening’s presentations, which included food from the renowned Senegalese chef Serigne Mbaye, I recognized the familiar feelings of interest and discomfort that had arisen a month earlier when I visited the newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In Julian Lucas’s review for the New Yorker, he recounts the opening events:
The renovation, which cost seventy million dollars, began in 2021, as a global campaign to decolonize Western museums was prompting some institutions to repatriate looted objects, and others to engage in tortured self-critique. Four years later, an America-first cultural crackdown has freed the Met to cast off the hair shirt of reckoning and celebrate its diverse holdings in a spirit of defiance. Tahitian dancers and Senegalese drummers performed at a festival to mark the reopening, spilling out onto the plaza on Fifth Avenue.[8]
Lingering in the new wing, I had been troubled and struck by the presence of Bambara boliw, portable altars constructed to be microcosms of the universe and manifestations of spiritual and political energy in physical form. I found myself in the same state of troubled interest while viewing New African Masquerades and enjoying the food and company of the Salon Supper Club. Before entering the main exhibition gallery at NOMA, I took in the works of Dapper Bruce Lafitte. His show, A Time Before Katrina, features his intricate, large-scale, ink-on-paper drawings, which function as maps of celebration and mourning and an archive of people, places, and a way of life.. Alongside Lafitte’s artworks, the presence of masquerade works by Chief Ekpenyong Bassey Nsa, Sheku “Goldenfinger” Fofanah, David Sanou, and Hervé Youmbi, contemporary African artists from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon (by way of the Central African Republic) feels a bit too linear a conclusion and too weak a salve for the wound of history that created its relationship.
The highlights of the evening included a reading by the New Orleans poet Sunni Patterson. Her command of the energy in the space as both a writer and orator was palpable. I enjoyed the shift in some of the audience’s mood from entertained to uncomfortable. It was hard at that moment to be exactly sure who was steering the ship. I welcomed the feeling, even if temporary, as I considered our presence, and the exhibition itself. Did it also undercut as much as it supported the work’s intellectual and spiritual autonomy?
vi.
Look, our thing is science fictional. Shit started with an alien abduction. We’re struggling to find a poetics which will allow us to not only describe but enact what we’ve already done and been.
Fred Moten, Blackness and Nonperformance
Contending with the expressions of the oppressed as the oppressed, one must approach notions about life, rebellion, death, or justice from the vantage point of those who, post abduction, occupied these holds. One must have the courage to deeply consider the possibilities, the multitudes that these nights contained for the human beings who lived and died through them. To engage in the struggle and the search for such poetics is to make an agreement with heartbreak. To know love is to know that in this “new world,” such a thing devastates.
“You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; “you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?”
“The negro.”
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
While researching and planning to travel again, I have been rereading the Iraqi novelist Ahmed Sadaawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013). Mary Shelley’s original novel did much to popularize writing about the undead in nineteenth-century literature. Sadaawi’s iteration takes up the consequences of war through Whatsitsname, a monster constructed from the dismembered body parts of those killed in conflict.
In 2015, I sat with Sadaawi and other colleagues at a cafe in Ferrara, Italy, while he spoke about the process of writing while living in Baghdad. The moment is immortalized by the Italian cartoonist Gianluca Constantini, with a quote by Sadaawi that I can’t forget: “Vivo en conflitto interiore, tra bisogno di scrivere romanzi e la mia paura della mort” (I live in internal conflict, between the need to write novels and my fear of death).
The Prince in the Black Vampyre, the mulatto son he leaves behind, and the cramp in the bowels of Mr. Gibbons that reminds him of his immortal lineage. Even in death, Babo in Benito Cereno lords over that which extinguished his life. The human heart has an indomitable drive toward the survival of that which would seek to destroy it. The uncanny ability to experience joy, create beauty amid nights whose truths continue to terrify, whose crimes have never been retributed. Experience functions like a constellation. Each incident a star, many stories, each with its own complex and unique qualities, but all a reflection and function of the all. I approach the night and sleep, and dreams of the captured often follow me. Rendered in the intelligible languages that lie in the recesses of my mind, this is an edifying and terrifying gift.
My bloodline has lost many languages in this process of acquiring and multiplying literacies. Words arrive to me through many filters. I have learned to trust through my disappointment that there is something useful that lies in the gaps. Something necessary, sacred, and profane in this practice of literal and spiritual translation. In a simpler, more naive time, I might have said that writing felt like moving toward freedom. This is before I understood the truer nature of escape. Lately, writing feels like being on the run, which is its own particular kind of horror and thrill. I’m aware these feelings are both my own and those of a collective experience for those for whom literacy was a fugitive act, or one applied through force. Understanding my life as a continuance of that positionality rather than a departure is a heart breaking on the page, a shedding, a death, a birth.
[1] Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy. New York: Random House US, 1983, p. 222.
[2] “The Black Vampyre; a Legend of St. Domingo (1819).” Just Teach One. Accessed September 16, 2025. https://jto.americanantiquarian.org/just-teach-one-homepage/the-black-vampyre/.
[3] Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017.).
[4] Fenton Johnson, “Revery,” in Visions of Dusk (Trachtenberg Co., 1915). https://poets.org/poem/revery.
[5] Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales, “Benito Cereno.” New York, Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 2017, p 57-142.
[6] Toni Morrison, “Melville and the Language of Denial.” The Nation, June 29, 2015. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/melville-and-language-denial/.
[7] Dave Walker. “Rooted in New Orleans, Noma’s New Chief Curator Is Ready to Manage ‘Visionary Programs.’” NOLA.com, March 20, 2025. https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/noma-chief-curator-anne-collins-smith/article_aa6bcf16-fdd8-11ef-a947-d3e133a56cad.html.
[8] Julian Lucas, “The Met’s Luminous New Rockefeller Wing Still Casts Some Shadows.” The New Yorker, June 30, 2025. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/07/the-mets-luminous-new-rockefeller-wing-still-casts-some-shadows.
[9] Moten, Blackness and Nonperformance, posted September 25, 2015 by The Museum of Modern Art, YouTube,1hour 58 min, 28 sec., https://www.youtube.com/live/G2leiFByIIg?si=7YoSAMQuBY7mtwPd.
[10] Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales, “Benito Cereno.” New York, Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 2017, p 57-142.
