on death and birth
My favorite Basquiat painting is called “Riding with Death.” The colors are all organic. There’s an ochre background with a brown figure, stick-armed and flesh-bodied, riding a skeleton crawling on all fours. The colors are comforting to me, a quintessential Virgo who loves earth tones and earthly things. And there are few things more earthly than death.
I hesitated to buy the print off of Art.com 2 1/2 ago. I was afraid of inviting “death energy” into my home. Afraid I was manifesting darkness into my life, as if we aren’t surrounded by death every day and as if humans aren’t in a constant state of decay.
I found myself thinking about “Riding with Death” very much in 2020. I thought about the painting in April when the pandemic was still fresh and I suddenly realized that any and everyone I know and love could perish at any time. I thought about it in June, in the throes of the BLM protests and the reminders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others who look like me who were murdered by police. When I felt so very aware of my mortality as a Black person on American soil.
I think of lineage and ancestry often. We can never run from who we are because it’s in our bones. No matter how disconnected I feel from the Yoruba diaspora at times, the fact remains that I am from my mother, who is from her mother, who is from her mother, and so on. I think about people like Jessica Krug and Rachel Dolezal who’ve somehow convinced themselves that box braids and proximity to Blackness is the same as Blackness. As if Black people don’t inherit our resilience and as if our joys and traumas aren’t embedded in our DNA after centuries of oppression. As if our identity is something one can just wear like a trendy dashiki. What would their ancestors think?
We live with our dead because we’ve descended from them. So really, death has always been around us. It just feels more acute now, during a pandemic and what is some kind of political death in the US. Two weeks ago the world watched a violent mob attempt to disrupt the democratic process that’s upheld the United States for 250 years. Surely we watched something die in that moment. We’ve been witnessing death since 45 took office - death in decorum, in order, in precedents, in what’s always been. Death and birth coexist, though. What is being born right now, while all these things crumble around us? What kind of dawn is death carrying us to?