Don’t Despair, Let’s End The World: A Word for Frank B. Wilderson III’s Afropessimism
Having now finished — (by finished I say that skeptically as well as loosely) Frank B. Wilderson III’s poignant, poetic, and metatheoretical memoir Afropessimism, I have been reminded of what has always (ontologically) separated me — the Black — the sentient being — the Slave — from the Human, (the white and nonBlack) who, from Wilderson’s numerous visceral accounts in Minneapolis, Berkeley, California, Berlin, and South Africa, describes the Black as “structurally inert props, implements for the execution of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures.”
In the epilogue of his memoir, Wilderson encounters his mother, whom she scrutinizes for his teachings of the Afropessimist framework to his college students and why he could not come to see the supposed greatness of the United States.
In part of his rebuttal to her, he explained that part of the work of ending antiBlackness was for all of us to acknowledge our hand in the collective unconscious — the reflexive vitriol the world has against the Black — that there should be no aspiration to want to be like the Human (the white or the nonBlack) — but to ‘end the world’ — the colonial, epistemological apparatus that exists along with it.
When I was first introduced to that phrase — a few years ago when I first read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World And Me, I took that phrase at face value, and I was reluctant to identify with what I first thought to be Black nihilism.
A few years later had passed and now I believe that I understand all along what Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, Fanon and other Afropessimist thinkers have been saying needed to be done about this current colonial world. Among the many quotes I could find from this book to speak on, only one of few speaks to me:
Afropessimism is Black people at their best. “Mad at the world” is Black folks at their best. Afropessimism gives us the freedom to say out loud what we would otherwise whisper or deny: that no Blacks are in the world, but, by the same token, there is no world without Blacks.
I felt that as I was reading through what Wilderson described himself as at the outset of his work—navigating the world as a nightmare, encapsulated the all of everything he was subjected to contend with—or rather, concurrently, white civil society and its junior partners—the nonBlack, were challenged to contend with—the ontology—the existence of Wilderson, as he is the “locus of abjection.”
In all spheres of life, I am able to confirm without overspeculating what other Black people and I have vented about in private—away from the settlers, settler-minded, and overseers that, “at one moment Blackness is a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon; at another moment” and conversely, “at another moment Blackness is a sentient implement to be joyously deployed for reasons and agendas that have little to do with Black liberation.”
Wilderson continues, “Black people have been instrumentalized for postcolonial, immigrant, feminist, LGBTQ, transgender, and workers’ agendas” and without speculation, I unequivocally agree. I felt as though there were an Afropessimist brewing in me, waiting to break through the fear of making them feel safe—my fat Black self being able to be—there—here—to be mad—to speak and leave the amplification of my voice unfiltered—to release these existential handcuffs from my abounding mind over my Black body holding it at an angle so as to not appear threatening because my madness does not matter in this world. He reflects on the difference between the Human and the Black, healing and the notion of sanity, saying,
The time of sanity is not a temporality that the Slave has ever known. To a fleeting eye their madness looks like mine. They go crazy from the pressures of racism, sexism, homophobia, [fatphobia, ableism] and colonial rule. The external forces of aggression become too much for them and they too find themselves bundled in the question, How does it feel to have a problem? My tensions (and those of the Black therapists who tried to heal me) are bundled in the question, How does it feel to be a problem? There’s no analogy between having and being.
There is much that Wilderson has said and addressed in this memoir that I’ve been taken aback from—that I am acclimating myself to accepting such as the words and language I use to address myself. Synthesizing this framework and heeding the lessons of Wilderson—what code of conduct I should utilize to further navigate the plantation for the rest of my days on this earth. Not much of it has changed of course, and perhaps while I have absorbed all of this knowledge intellectually—I am however, emotionally, philosophically, and physically, forced to contend with an ongoing moment of “disequilibrium.”
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian independent Goodreads author, writer, music producer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.
