Elementor #491

There is a woman who is sensed but never seen, leaving a trace in soot stain on the
pillowcase. Tears slip down strands of her hair left behind in >~~~< (passage, wakes, tears), and
their iridescence is mirrored in indigo. Michaela Bridgemohan creates a slippery sheen all
across the domestic scenes of soot stain on the pillowcase which have been lived in, have been
full of feeling and memory. And now we stand here, in this place, bringing our own bodies into
the wake. A new pattern/rhythm/orientation is created in this indigo                           water.
                                                                                                                                                    wake.
Like Bridgemohan, I come to this place as a mixed race person and a settler child of
immigrants. I am here both by chance and by choice—choices made by me and before me. I am
here, as all settlers are, because of migration. Bodies moving across, between, and in-spite of
borders become attuned to new geographies. For diasporic groups these geographies create
new cultural compasses. soot stain on the pillowcase lays out some of these geographies as
Bridgemohan holds and cares for the tensions of Black womanhood in the breathing wake of
diaspora.
In the introduction for her book Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies
Of Struggle, Dr. Katherine McKittrick notes that despite racist efforts to ignore the rootedness of
Blackness, and particularly Black femininity on the land, it is specifically “the relationship
between black women and geography [that] opens up a conceptual arena through which more
humanly workable geographies can be and are imagined.” (McKittirck, xii) What do we imagine
these new geographies to look like? What does it mean to orient ourselves towards workable
humanity? To encounter the humanity of those around us and those before us is integral to this
process — to see the imprints of fingers, to witness the closeness of sisters sharing a telephone,
to look at worn edges, to be here, right now. These items placed and precious to the woman who
has gone before, are landmarks of living. The presence of these pieces change our movement
patterns, they assert a new geography which is “not conceptualized as simply subordinate, or
buried, or lost, but rather are indicative of an unresolved story.” (McKittrick, xviii) Bridgemohan
asserts the sacredness of this new terrain. She praises the precarity of migration. She summons
the spectre of this story. In air, and light, and movement, we sense the things unseen as they
root us to the past.
We are in the wake. Dr. Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, is a
poetic exploration of the cross-temporal reverberations of transatlantic slavery on contemporary
Black existence in the diaspora. The wake’s movement surrounds and surprises; “in the wake,
the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.” (Sharpe, 9) The language of
rupturing is kinetic and urgent. So too is the need for wake work, a holistic approach to
addressing the intricacies of contemporary Black being and culture. As a framework and a praxis,
wake work resists racist domination, and it asserts dignity in everyday life. Celebrating existence,
history, and ancestors in this place is radical. Indigo sits oleaginous in duppy-catcher. Earth
meets light, folktale meets family. Duppy, the Caribbean folk being, moves with and in the wake.
Diaspora cannot detach the already incorporeal.
Within the domestic scenes of indigo-hued memories, Duppy lingers, their presence
defying temporal boundaries. In soot stain on the pillowcase, Michaela Bridgemohan unearths
geographies of family and legend—a wake where past and present converge. In these spectral
echoes, indigo emerges as both a symbol of resilience and a portal to the sacred terrain where
the domestic becomes a resurrected landmark. Now we stand here, in this place, reading new
landscapes for the first time, hearing old voices, and feeling the breath that moves here between
you and the woman unseen.

Text by Karis Dimas-Lehndorf

Works Cited
hooks, bell. “Appalachian Elegy (Sections 1-6).”, 2012, Poetry Foundation,
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148751/appalachian-elegy-1-6. Accessed 11 Sept.
2023.
McKittrick, Katherine. “Introduction,” Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of
Struggle, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, pp. ix-xxxi,
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/31692.
Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Duke University Press, 2016.