5/18/25 Update: Rather than these rambling thoughts, I encourage interested readers to check out my lengthier essay examining this topic.

As part of a reading group, for our last meeting I selected the following texts: “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” by Hortense Spillers; “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” by Jared Sexton; and, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” also by Jared Sexton. As part of our meetings, those who choose the readings for the week have to do a written response as to how the readings incorporate into their research interests in general. In discussion with the reading group crew, I’ve decided to publish my response publicly in an effort to move our endeavor forward. If you’re interested in joining our group, reach out to me. The only requirements being that you’re bilingual (Spanish/English) and that you’re down to burn this all to the ground.

As I grapple with the three texts we read for this week, I cannot but help view them – as I am currently viewing everything – through the lens of Palestine. Therefore, I’m interested in doing what Frank Wilderson firmly disavows: a comparative reading of Palestine through the lens of Afro-Pessimism. I believe that doing so can offer insights on the current situation in Palestine and also on the arguments put forward by Spillers and Sexton. I want to acknowledge that to do so does great injustice to both narratives and subjects. Despite appreciable claims of Black-Palestinian solidarity, they cannot be conflated along the lines of historical experience nor ontological construction. At least not linearly nor literally. I believe metaphorically, however, there are openings or sites for exploration that I wish to delve into here.

The first metaphorical linkage is beyond doubt the most problematic. This is to read the Middle Passage as akin to the Nakba. The historical inaccuracies of comparing these two don’t interest me here, as I am well aware of them. What interests me is the act of severing. Of creating Dionne Brand’s “door of no return.” Of being ripped from a place, a history, a continuum, a lineage, a culture, and how that renders or undoes a subject. As Spillers writes, “Loss of the indigenous name/land provides a metaphor of displacement for other human and cultural features and relations, including the displacement of the genitalia, the female’s and the male’s desire that engenders future” (73). While post-Nakba, if such a time exists, Palestinians were not enslaved, during the process of the Nakba, they were undifferentiated objects, ethnic constructs to be purged. Here is where Spillers’s argument hits home for me, where “the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific” (67). Men and women alike, undifferentiated, were forced to flee or to be massacred with equal fervor. As Africans in the Middle Passage, they were rendered as “flesh,” though to be discarded, rather than enslaved. I would argue in the current moment where they are the “human animals,” “bestial,” “barbaric,” they continue to remain as “flesh” rather than “body,” “that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions” (67). The Palestinian, like the Black, is constructed along the lines of ethnicity, and as Spillers points out, “The flesh is the concentration of ‘ethnicity’ that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor discourse away” (67).

            Reading during the genocide of Gaza also has me thinking of pessimism. While Afro-Pessimism is specifically concerned with the ontological position of being Black (shout out to Calvin Warren), I am interested in what pessimism offers more generally. As Sexton wrote about Blackness, “How might it be thought that there exists a being about which the question of its particular being is the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility for any thought about being whatsoever? What can be said about such a being, and how, if at stake in the question is the very possibility of human being and perhaps even possibility as such? What is the being of a problem? (7)” I would posit that for Zionists and their supporters, the being of Palestinianhood is the being of a problem. The Zionist project itself is impossible so long as Palestinians exist, so Palestinians must not exist, or must have been invented, or fine, if they do exist, they must be gotten rid of both materially and psychically while also time negating their existence as they are destroyed. At the same time, Palestinians must exist for Zionists to be a reference point to what Zionists are not, and thus how Zionists may come to understand themselves. “What is it like to be a problem?” “What is the being of a problem?” What would it mean from the position of Palestinian liberation to assume a pessimistic perspective of oneself? If we jettison hope, liberal humanism, and the like and imagine what it is like to be a person in Gaza right now, how can there be any position but pessimism? How can pessimism inform action? To riff off of Sexton, how can one think Palestinian without anti-Palestinian? Or ante-anti-Palestinian? If social death is the plight meted out by modernity for the Palestinian people, where is the social life? As Sexton would argue, its to be found embracing the pessimism of being a problem. “So you see, in this perverse sense, black social death is black social life….The most radical negation of the antiblack world is the most radical affirmation of a blackened world. Afro-pessimism is “not but nothing other than” black optimism” (37).

            If the Palestinian is a captive, fleshy suobject(?) embracing the problemhood of its ontological existence, what is the recourse? Wilderson notes that Afro-Pessimism is descriptive, not prescriptive. Yet he also advocates burning down the plantations and slave ships from the inside out. In the pessimism of an impossible, genocided existence, where do we find resistance, agency, and the most troubling of all terms, violence? Again, I return to Sexton – who, it should be noted, turned to Spillers – when thinking about this. He writes, “There is no rejection of the notion of agency in advance, but rather an endeavor to think rigorously about its conditions of possibility” (6). What is the condition of possibility of agency for Palestinians? How does agency manifest itself? I honestly have no answer and don’t think it’s a question that is mine to answer. I sit on this quote and mull it over: “If black rage and hope are thought to combine into a non-compliant but non-violent alloy, is there not a way to think by contrast about a violence indifferent to hope, violence unmotivated by rage, violence irreducible to the dialectics of love and hate? Is there a violence that, as Nikki Giovanni once said, simply ‘cannot take the weight of a constant degradation,’ a violence that operates as a response per se, as what we might call defense without positive content” (11)? I don’t want to be misconstrued and have it thought that the actions of Hamas on October 7 fit into this rubric of violence, as I don’t believe they do. But what is the violence of pessimism? What response can be offered? How can Palestinians offer a “defense without positive content”? Is that even what is called for? Again, I have no answers to these questions and probably shouldn’t be providing them if I did. Perhaps this is an offensive, speculative endeavor, but it’s where my mind is at. To end on a quote from Sexton:

“What kind of politics might be possible across this gap, as wide as a river, as thin as a veil? It is a powerful misrecognition that enables an understanding of afro-pessimism as moving against black life, in other words, of pathologizing blackness. Blackness is not the pathogen in the afro-pessimist imagination and it is a wonder how one could read it so even as it is no wonder at all. No, blackness is not the pathogen in afro-pessimism, the world is. Not the earth, but the world, and maybe even the whole possibility of and desire for a world. This is not to say that blackness is the cure, either. It is and it isn’t” (31).