On Being Prone in the Archive: Black British Erotic Power and Sexual Healing

Sound and vision are critical to my multi-­sensorial archival methodology and to my praxis of storytelling. From my position as a PhDJ, a professor and a DJ, my practice involves deep listening as opposed to close reading that centers the full human sensorium to embrace an embodied experience. To me a syllabus is a mixtape. I see DJing and educating as analogous antiphonal processes that require a call and response of curation. Remixing is critical to my praxis as a Black woman living in the United States, because my simple physical presence defies expectations in both industries. I am always assumed to be the assistant and never the assistant professor. I am also never assumed to be a DJ, even when I am DJing, because I am a woman.¹

For cultural theorists like me who write about the human traffic of the transatlantic slave trade and what I call “racial indenture,” working in the colonial archive is what historian Jennifer Morgan has described as occupying a place on the verge of  “breakthrough” and “breakdown.” Thus, reckoning with the affective toll and labor of archival research, I extend these concerns to imagine the potentiality of the European colonial archive as a space for sexual healing. Not dissimilar from the sacred and the profane terrain that Marvin Gaye oscillated between—of gospel tradition and R&B, I fantasize about an archival space that can be a site of transgression, of catharsis, and potentially elation. In the potential for elation lies the possibility of sexual healing, that is empowerment through the embodied libidinal experience as a resource.

The coloniality of the archive is both holy and full of terror, if we listen closely enough for the violence of the past.² Political economy without consideration of the sexual economy of the plantation is an incomplete rendering of modernity. Sexual violence with impunity against Black women and Native women continues to determine what Cedric Robinson called racial capitalism, and the attendant histories of racial enslavement, indenture, and ecological extraction. Transgressive acts, such as clandestine forms of listening, and in particular what I identify as powerful or “erotic listening,” become possible at the door, the threshold. There is liminal power in listening, to channel Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic as distinguished from the purely pornographic in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”

“What is your after-hours fantasy in the archive, Tao?” This question was posed to me by an audience member of the Inward Outward symposium on archives, race, and coloniality. For my presentation there I designed a visual soundtrack that is a mashup of the visual/sonic aesthetic of Black British artists Isaac Julien, Floetry,  Sade, and FKA twigs. To address the topic of intimacy in the archive here, I offer an accompaniment, a visual essay, as an answer to the question posed, in seven vignettes (see image on following page).

This text and the visual essay reflect on the call of the first panel of the symposium to “Reimagine the Archive.” Visuality as opposed to centering words adds a sensual dimension of intimacy to the cold, bloodless European archive of colonial accounting. To gesture to the anonymity of the archive, in my visual essay, I’ve chosen an image (bottom left) of archival boxes stacked on shelves. What room is there for intimacy on the dark shelves of the archive?

I follow in the tradition of Black British filmmaker Isaac Julien and his exploration of the place of intimacy in the physical archive of imperialism in his eight-minute film The Attendant (1993). While Julien presents an after-hours SM fantasy with whips, leather, and chains in a British museum between an older Black man gallery attendant and a young white man, a patron, I am centering the role of the Black British woman Julien gives us in this triangulation of desire as a way to understand my after-hours archive fantasy. It occurs to me that as a child growing up in London, my aunt who was visiting from America, lost me at the British Museum when I was four years old. Feeling lost in the colonial archive has resonated with me as a memory of confusion rather than trauma. I felt enveloped by the archaeon as I wandered past the cases of Egyptian mummies wondering if I would find my family again. Four-year-old Tao consigned herself to having to stay in the British Museum after hours and being closed up in a sarcophagus.

In many forms the colonial archive, the museum, is such a trap, an oscillation between burial and excavation. There is only one way in and no way out. From my position as a PhDJ I sonically and visually remixed and transformed Isaac Julien’s The Attendant to examine how being stuck in the trap of the museum could be a power position. Remixing in a Jamaican resonance, I inverted the color scheme of Julien’s film with an X-ray filter, a photo negative effect to draw attention to the opacity and transparency of film. Inward Outward co-panelist Eliza Steinbock reminded me of the history of the significance of the X-ray for science, providing medical transparency in spite of the opacity of the body, of bones. As audio to my

remixing of The Attendant for the symposium, I mixed a haunting track featuring Black British songstresses Sade (“Slave Song”), FKA twigs (“Home with You”), and Floetry (“Say Yes”).

The middle row of images in my visual essay here show a progression of three scenes from The Attendant that capture the oscillating dynamic possible in sadomasochism. On the left middle, the young white man is chained and whipped in the prone position. In the middle scene the museum guard, an older Black man, is face down on the floor, trading positions with the young white man. In the rightmost screenshot in the middle row we see the woman named by Julien in the credits as the conservator. She is the Black woman, my subject of interest, listening at the threshold to erotic noises between two men. They moan and she smiles with her ear against the wall, perhaps she derives pleasure because she is in on the homoerotic secret of the clandestine tryst.

In Julien’s film, the lovers, the two men, enact a tableau vivant of the famous painting The Slave ­Trade by Auguste Francois Biard (1833). I’ve included an image of the classic painting in the bottom right corner of my visual essay. Julien’s characters oscillate between the supposed “power” position on top and the prone position on the bottom. This is significant when we con­sider that when Black Panther, Afro-Trinidadian revolutionary Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) was asked about what position women in the move­ment could hold, he responded “prone.” Face down. While what he said may have been intended playfully or as a joke, the word prone, gestures to the intersectionality of exclusion against Black women who face racism multiplied by sexism and misogyny. It follows that legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw who coined “intersectionality” in 1989 would also rally the call to #SayHerName through the African American Policy Forum in response to the silence surrounding the death of Black women and girls due to police brutality. Who cracks the whip? This was a question co-panelist Wig­berston Julian Isenia asked of the radical SM politics of Dr. Betty Paërl as well. Who is gagged in submission at the intersection of racialized sexual healing? The violence of the plantation whip is always the subtext. The woman between the men in Julien’s film, an older Black woman, a conservator in this postcolonial fantasy of sexual reparation for the transatlantic African slave trade is silent. But all the characters are, only moaning. What is the Black conservator’s fantasy after hours in the archive?

Perhaps my fantasy is to know hers? Julien shows us the many roles Black women play to conserve institutions. Not only is this figure the museum conservator, she is also the wife of the museum guard, conserving domestic sanctity. In the quaint English home, before the attendant leaves for his shift he dutifully kisses his wife, the Black woman, goodbye. Won’t he see her at work? The Black British woman’s power to conserve the performance of a heteronormative household is in her silence. And yet at the end of the installation film she sings dolefully Dido’s Lament, “When I am laid in the earth” from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas. It is poetic and bittersweet. Though Julien does not center Black women’s erotic desire, he gives her the last aria, “Remember me, remember me, but ah! Forget my fate.”

These words could have easily been sung by another Black British contemporary artist, singer FKA twigs. In the visual essay, I juxtapose these X-ray filtered vignettes of Julien’s historical and sexual reckoning with FKA twigs’ music video for “Papi Pacify” (2013). In the song, she sings in a register of entwined pleasure and pain about difficult love as an act of endurance and sustenance from abuse. In the image in the top half of the visual essay, a Black man’s hands frame FKA twigs’ face and throat in an intimate act of (erotic) almost-strangulation. The threshold between pain and pleasure is important and blurry. The Black man’s hands suffocate the Black woman. FKA twigs has described the song as being about the perverse erotic dependency of an abusive relationship from which one cannot walk away. How do we understand the gendered, racialized intersectionality of such pain? Is there a possibility for sexual healing in the prone position? The center image of the bottom row is another screenshot from the “Papi Pacify” music video. I reference this emotionally abusive dynamic to dwell on the complicity of men of color, of Black men regardless of sexual orientation in the lives of women of color, of Black women regardless of sexual orientation. The juxtaposition comments on what Lorde describes as “using.” She writes, “to share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a kleenex” (90). Lorde emphasizes that “use without consent of the used is abuse” (90). This is the oscillating dynamic in question in The Attendant.

On the uses of the Black woman in the archive, sexual healing becomes relevant again. FKA twigs has engaged with Lorde and on her own role as a healer through gesture. In her short film We are the Womxn (2020), twigs draws on pole dancing as a resource for erotic exploration with dancers in Atlanta as well as with Black spiritual healer Queen Afua. In conversation with Clarissa Brooks, FKA twigs says, “as a womxn of color, the lineage of pain within my bloodline can be deafening.” Indeed, the mixed register of metaphors here speaks to “erotic listening” as the duality, the potential for the pleasure of poetics, or creativity, as much as it is a genealogy of inherited pain.

Shhh! We are meant to be quiet in the archive, in the library. Do we hear the shushing of the dominatrix, finger against pursed lips making noise without words in order to police, or is it the shushing of the sexy librarian, the sexy museum guard? The physical archive is a space where a decibel above a whisper is transgressive. Sonic and media archives offer different possibilities for listening, albeit within the privacy of headphones. Multimedia archives offer an occasion for a specific type of listening, listening for affect, for intonation, for intimacy. If we were to tune into the imperial archive and listen closely for instead of to, as Black feminist scholar Tina Campt recommends, I believe we would hear the reverberating din of a billion screams at once. Of pleasure or pain? Breakdown or breakthrough? The sexual healing of the imperial archive is located in the oscillation of uncertainty because both, pain and pleasure, can be true after hours in the archive of colonialism. There is beauty in the breakdown.