Blue
by THE EDITORS
in Fall 2021
Bakari Akinyele, Untitled 5 (Oaxaca Series), 2017, 35mm film
As Louis Armstrong once sang, we are Black and we are blue. The blueness of our being addresses what Blackness feels like. It is the interior. It is the abyss. It is the color of the ocean, those passageways that took us away. And return us. The residence time of blue waters marks our consciousness, animates our memories. It is the color of our music. The worried note which is both response to our immediate reality and something more profound, more beautiful. For Julie Dash, it was the color of our overworked and exploited hands, those Africans who labored on South Carolina plantations.[1] And yet with meditations on the power of blue, we are also able to confront our connections to things infinite, things immemorial. That confrontation is ever necessary, for we remain so Black and must remain blue. We must remain open to the blue.
When we are open to the feeling of being blue, something happens. Our lives become reflections of realities that are not immediately visible or recognizable. The Blues are those unseen depths from which we have all emerged. And if those are the domains that birthed us, to feel blue is to anchor our concerns and our struggles to the retrieval of something more familiar, something more like home. Without indigo, without blue we would never know what that something was, we might never know that we were actually lost. The Blues are not sad. They are a reminder of the things we left, but can recover.
A Gathering Together is about such things. As we close out our fifth year of existence, we invite you to enter the blue. To feel its essence. For to feel its essence, is to touch our spirits and recognize that sadness and pain is not all there is.
References
[1] On residence time, as well as the work of Julie Dash see Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).