choke:interval

author's note: I had just finished writing this prose-poem, just found the words to talk about one way that Black men like me encounter certain gruesomely intimate police murders of Black people. And then it happened again. -- o.r.

Photo credit: Thomas Altfather Good / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

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by Omar Ricks

“All of it is now It is always now” -- Toni Morrison

"I wait for me. In the interval..." -- Frantz Fanon

"I can't breathe." -- [Eric Garner, George Floyd, countless]

It was always already there, waiting on the pavement that day. In the warm expanse of wetness on my leg. The sour smear of my sweat on your arms as we sink, as I grasp desperately for something more than the lines on the sidewalk. The veiny bulge of your neck next to mine, and the bend of your elbow in between them. The stench on your dark blue collar of your tired cologne’s last stand at the end of your shift. Your coffeed breath whispering into my ear tiny, almost inaudible, French Roast farts of air as you tighten your grip on my capacity to breathe. 

You have become the conductor of my body without my knowledge or consent. And despite my struggle to stay breathing, I have rapidly entered the vertigo of a timeless symphony coming to its finale, missing its drums, and its only winds my whimpering wheeze. And, no, the tufts of breath you huff into my ears with each ratcheting grip are not proxy rhythms to my life because they do not animate it. They are ending it.

“Stop resisting,” someone says, as if this were possible. The more I fight, the tighter your grip. The less I fight, the tighter your grip. I guess I’m captive. I guess you have your way. The wet patch tells the tale. 

The fact is that you willed the end of my life before you knew of my individual existence. That is the truest thing I know about you. In fact, it is almost like you told me, as you whisper to me things that no one else knows about you. 

“Does your wife know this about you?” I imagine myself asking, if I could will myself to cause my mouth to form words.

“Nahhhhhhhhhh,” comes the guttural wheeze from somewhere between your straining sternocleidomastoid muscles.

“Yeah,” I would say. “I know. This is your too-authentic self. After all, she wouldn’t understand.”

That’s just what I like to imagine: that you don’t share this self with her. The way your vocal pitch sounds like that of a child, beneath the manly gruff and fuzz of your exterior-- a small part of me would long to tell her this, if all of me weren’t struggling to open my breathing passages.

“Deep down, you’re just a fucked-up little boy, aren’t you?,” I would say.

“Yeahhhhhhhh,” you seem to whisper inside these moments, as though you heard the thoughts I can only now issue through gaping mouth, flared nostrils, and horrified eyes, as you exert every ounce of your energy toward a project of asphyxiation, as though I were an existential threat to you, as though your life actually depended on this chokehold.

“Do you pretend to breathe this way with her?,” I would ask you. “So passionately? Do you give her the illusion of this -- a passion that is alive in the present? Or maybe she knows that what you give her is fake and she plays along anyway as though you two have a real thing going on because...”

“Naahhhhhhhhhhh,” your grunt whispers through gritted teeth.

I bet I know you, my personified Cause of Death, better now than she ever has or ever will. I would like to imagine the moment she finds out you are a fake, false, fuckaround of a husband. Cuz if I were there to hear her wonder aloud “What is your passion? What do you live for?,” I could tell her, because now I know: Choking Black men to death.

My deception that she would consider what you are doing to me an act of infidelity, that she would care even if I did tell her what you are doing-- all of that long ago faded from my mind. At some point, I knew that as long as you wash the nigger sweat off and come to your nigger-free neighborhood and kiss the kids goodnight so they can get up in the morning and go to their nigger-free school, she will say that you were doing what needed doing and the nigger probably deserved it— and that’s if she ever finds out that there was an “it.” 

As long as you come home to her-- as long as her father came home to her mother after a long day of Rodney Kinging the Rodney Kings, as long as her grandfather came home to her grandmother after a long day of Emmett Tilling the Emmett Tills-- she has been conditioned— intergenerationally— to forgive your white man’s burden, that alloy of white masculinity with the violence that it takes to maintain white people and whiteness at the top of a genocidal structure, to respect it, to celebrate it— shit, to love it, to live for it. For all I know, her toes will spread and curl for the first time in years.

My deception is that my murder would make any negative difference to you as an individual or a social and familial being— whether you have a woman or a man, multiple partners or no one at all—that the knowledge of my murder would not, in fact, enhance your standing as a family man or a lover. My deception is that, were the person who desires you the one wearing the blue instead of you, that person wouldn’t desire the same ending of me every bit as much as you do. It’s all a distraction from the fact that you are committing murder, a distraction I clung to for too long when I was among those who drew breath.

But my deepest deception of all is that I was ever in control of my body. And that self-deception was my inheritance.

“The way you walk,” my mother used to tell me, “you just look suspicious, like you up to no good.” I guess she meant by that the way I sort of slouched my neck into my shirt. 

If I’d had the words then, I would have told her, “I don’t mean to. It’s not conscious on my part.”

“As if I didn’t already know that,” she would have shot back. 

“I know,” I would have said. 

“If you know,” she would reply, “you must do something about it! If you know that the world taught you early that a long, tall Black neck in a world full of swinging nooses and knives is a major liability, if you know that the world shapes your body to keep your head down, how do you not protest that world with placards in the streets? With votes? Of course, it don’t require no thoughtful intention for you to keep your head down. We all know that. But do you just give in to it?”

"Mama, the world just hates Black people so much," I would begin before the thought choked me from continuing-- that it (the world) exerts a specific gravity on Black bodies. It acts through a combination: Real-time threats of potential bodily harm that follow your body wherever you go on one hand, and your nerve impulses for self-preservation centered in your brain and spinal column on the other hand. No wonder I hunch. No wonder granddaddy hunched. It's dodging the swing that's always coming for you. “I don’t mean it,” I would whimper in my terror.

“Now, now, my son,” she would shush me, hold me against her chest so I don’t blame myself, where I could feel the rising and falling of her breath. She knows. The shrinking happens as an extension of my consciousness. It is autonomic, voluntary only to the extent that breathing is voluntary. And I would think, as I did periodically, ya know, I suppose I can walk taller. And I would step back from her embrace. Straighten up. Inhale.

“Yes,” my mother would tell me. “That’s the way. It helps you breathe better. Doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Lifts your mood.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“It’s good posture. And it makes me proud of you.” 

“Thank you, Mom.”

“It’s a choice we made in my generation. We said we’d refuse to keep our heads down any longer. It’s a choice we passed on to you and your generation. And you must make it too.”

Deception. Never mind that every unconscious survival impulse that makes it meaningful to say that I am alive is arrayed against making this choice. Of course, I can choose to coerce those survival impulses away--something that, in itself, is also a survival impulse since no one wants to just allow themselves to be killed. Like I can choose to hold my breath when I go underwater at the pool. If anything, my ability to hold my breath--and then allow myself to breathe again-- is what makes me conscious that I am alive, lets me feel the pleasures of the opiate called “agency,” like the scintillating sensations of beads of water tracing glimmering trains of chills down my bare skin as I emerge and my lungs fill with the air of reality again.

But this analogy of control breaks down: The moment I lift my head and stretch my neck to the sky, go for a jog, assert myself, argue that I’m not bothering anybody, tell you I was just here breaking up a fight, that I’m tired of you telling me where I can’t stand, that I need air— that is the moment that I can’t breathe because of you. It is not an accident. Something within you endlessly desires the ending of everything within me and everything you see when you see me. And that is something that binds you to other “youse.”

In my life, you long ago ceased to be a singular “you” because you wear a uniform to make you indistinguishable from the others you “protect and serve” alongside. “You” are a force-- not just a physical force. Shit, I have physical force-- a strong body, a big voice, a beating fucking heart. You, however, are a grotesquely violent social force networked across time and space. You are the state. Your violence is presumed legitimate, even when you kill a 7-year-old girl on her grandmother’s couch or kill a 92-year-old grandmother in her house and plant drugs in her basement. 

But you are also the Hollywood movies and TV shows that assume—and suture us into the assumption— that cops, except the few bad ones, are heroes, are the ones we should identify with. An entire genre of movies and TV shows prepares the way for you to be considered legitimate, decent, fair-minded-- and, especially, human. You have been created not just by the illegal chokeholds you have learned to do, but also by “cops are just people” and “hug a cop” and “blue lives matter” (as though blue were a color you were born rather than something you can just take off and hang in a closet). I have been created by labels I cannot remove because they are indexed to my Black body and to every Black thing about me. I am always already “the superpredator” and “the wolf pack” and “the black brute,” archetypes that always deserve it, whatever "it" the playground of your fancies can conjure from the ancient cauldrons of collective genocidal fantasies.

You need never fear being called to account for whatever else you and your symbolic “brothers in blue” have done. You must be so sure of all that, it must defeat any qualm or compunction you might have about what you’re doing in this moment. And so you approach me with a knowledge that you don’t even need to learn. It’s just there for you to step into.

In a strange way, I feel like we know each other, since what we share is unique, for me at least. You are my killer. Very personal. For you, however, it’s just another night, just another nigger. That is why, for me, this thing between us also feels primordial. It feels constitutive. Like long ago, this “relationship,” I guess you could call it, was etched into the wood on the slave ship, Like before you knew me, you had killed me.

You are a force that acts as though I am not, that feels an incessant need to coerce every life impulse out of me so that it can know itself as alive. You are the punch that acted as though its target were 6 inches behind my body. You are not just the physical force you use to pervert my life into your plaything. You are a 500-year-old project of theft and annihilation.

If there is a certain outcome of this moment, I don’t know it. Cuz I am absolutely fighting for my life. 

When I came here today to make it so I have something to put on the table in front of a girl-child who is still learning what the world is and so I had something to offer a woman besides an empty dent in the bed— I meant that nothing would stop me. I meant that my every impulse would be channeled into being the force that turned on a faucet to water their gardens for one more day. For one more day I would grit the molars together and gut it out and make a way out of no way. One more day I would put up with the jabs and the jokes and the microscopic gaze of people like you, settlers in a colonized city like this one right here and now. All of that would be worth it, if I could just make one more day.

And your grip on my windpipe is rapidly closing the curtains to all that, fading to black on all that I loved and hoped for. The scent of lovemaking with my chosen partner. The sound of my daughter’s laughter. A cigarette. So many things-- snagged in the bend at your elbow, curtailed by the constrictor called your bicep. 

Your spreading enjoyment tells all. What is left to discuss when your enjoyment, your very being, requires my expiration? When your every gasp for air means I can’t breathe, when all other possibilities have receded, what else can be my hope in the middle of dying?

I resort to what I can see with my eyes closed and my body in the control of a murderer. Since I am clearly losing my life in deference to your fantasies about me. My heaven— the most ethical place I can go to— is my memory of a very real past and my imagination of a possible future in which justice is created, even for fleeting moments, against you, “the law,” and your utter lawlessness.

A mutual defense group of abolitionist, freedom-fighting Black people who forced federal marshals to retreat from capturing fugitives from slavery in 1851 at Christiana, Pennsylvania— and killed the slaveholder Edward Gorsuch.

Celia bashing in the skull of her pedophilic rapist slaveholder, Robert Newsom, in 1855 Missouri.

Robert Charles’ skillful dispatching of 6 members of the police-led lynch mob that came for him in 1900 New Orleans.

Gavin Long. Micah Xavier Johnson. Lovelle Mixon. Christopher Dorner. 

It was always already there. Waiting. You have made all these moments more than likely, more than necessary--you have made them ethical. Both after the fact and before the fact. "All of it is now." You have hastened the bloody interval, and amplified the force that will be necessary. More will have to die because of what you do to me. You know. When that interval comes back around, don’t wonder why.

copyright 2020 Omar Ricks. All rights reserved.