Khaleb Brooks: Jupiter’s Song Revived

“Jupiter’s Song Revived” began as an opportunity to revisit archival materials related to slavery, diaspora, and ancestral memory in the context of personal narrative. It acted as a revival, a new song, praise dance, allegory, and development of the research I conducted last year at the International Slavery Museum. That research created access to lesser known stories of the Middle Passage and resulted in the exhibition “Jupiter’s Song” – an experimentation in transmutation that offered sites of memory through grief objects. After deeply exploring methods of storytelling for the disembodied, I began to ask, what of the embodied? In what ways can the legacy of the slave trade provide information on current identities of blackness and engage further with current historical processes? I deep dived into these questions in the context of Brazil and started my research in Rio de Janeiro.

Home of Samba, Carnival, Christ the Redeemer, Copacabana, and Ipanema. Home of black people, Candomblé, Umbanda, and trans people dancing in the streets of Lapa. Home to Valongo Wharf, a dock built in 1811, specifically designed for the landing of enslaved Africans. Brazil’s largest port, a place of arrival, a million stolen, on its shores. After research in Liverpool where the majority of slave ships departed, I found myself at another dock, a place of arrival. Brazil, where nearly half of all enslaved people arrived at an estimated 5.5 million. Where the largest African diaspora in the world resides, the largest home of African ancestry outside of the continent of Africa.

Sites of memory offer us a portal into identity formation, what is worth recording, forgetting, and what perspective is prioritized. In addition to the Valongo Wharf, there is Pedra do Sal, the site of an old Quilombo where escaped and freed slaves took refuge, Jardim Suspenso do Valongo, a historic garden for Rio’s elite, Largo do Depósito, now known as Stakeman’s Square which was once the warehouses of slave traders, Cemitério dos Pretos Novos, a degrading burial site for “new blacks” who died after disembarking slave ships or before being sold, Centro Cultural José Bonifácio, a cultural center celebrating Afro-Brazilian cultural heritage, and the Orisha statues at Dique do Tororó in Salvador, eight huge depictions of Candomblé deities. I visited these sites and others and became aware of the devastating long lasting effects of the trade. This was not through plaques, pamphlets or statues but through the apparent devastation of today’s people, houseless, struggling with addiction and entrenched poverty. Again, I was brought back to the fragments of people’s stories: the young pregnant woman who approached me for money in front of Valongo Wharf, the drug users in front of Jardim Suspenso that made me nervous as I awaited my Uber, the man pulling the stereo at the steps of Pedra do Sal who told me there was a party later that evening. I was reminded of Toni Morrison’s concept of “rememory”: “You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world” (from “Beloved”).

I continued to encounter these stories of people and grew to understand how they intersect with my own story. For the first time I was able to meet the family of Demetrio Campos, a black transgender activist and friend who committed suicide in 2020. I have been in touch with his mother since his passing and developed strong relationships with the trans community in Brazil. I stayed with his family for a few days in the city of São João where we remembered him together, grieved together, and discussed the impact of the state on trans lives. It was a reminder of the ways communities endure to create safety. It was a reminder of the ways black trans people and their communities are continuously failed. It reminded me of my search for queer and trans narratives connected to slavery, their elusiveness, their hiding, their silence. It reminded me that my practice is one based on lived experiences of racialized violence, my encounters with the police, a healing practice that offers a foundation when the wake, the ship, the substances, the loss has created a fragmented history but an abundant site of memory.

“Jupiter’s Song Revived” rather than just a review of archival material has created two new intersecting points of entry for my work. This past April, 800 square miles of land was returned to indigenous peoples in Brazil, including 2,100 square miles of the Amazon Rainforest to the Nadöb people, expanding their territory by 37%. In indigenous dtudies, the term “black indigeneity” usually equates African Americans to Neo-settler-colonialists who are attempting to assimilate to the original project of colonization. Ultimately taking part in the dispossession of land from indigenous folks. The history of the Atlantic Slave Trade becomes null in void as that was an intention to exploit labor, while with indigenous folks the colonial project was to take away land. Yet considering the impact on both communities and their intersection, I am interested in creating work that interrogates the nuances of blackness in relationship to indigeneity. Can descendants of the enslaved truly participate in settler colonialism while being targeted under a police state? What of the acknowledgement of people who are both black and indigenous? And what would happen if we understood spatiality as not just land but a construction of identity itself in relationship to dispossession? Ever flowing, moving, changing as we claim ourselves and our diaspora. These questions uncovered truths in my own family about my Choctaw Nation ancestry and have brought me closer to the land and my relationship with understanding it.

This work along with my processing of police violence in Brazil has pushed me to revive my performance practice. In what ways has my body grieved, been policed, criminalized, resilient, transcended, healed, and how can I share that process of lived experience/ personal narrative with others? I have researched and begun designing “transformation masks”. These masks are inspired by the Kwakwaka'wakw of British Colombia and Vancouver Island, where the mask begins as a representation of one thing and then mechanically transforms into another. These masks will be paired with a “Butoh” styled performance, also known as a “dance of darkness” offering insight into and transformation of lived trauma.

I was recently accepted as an artist in residence to the program “Dance of Spores” at Spazio ‘500 per le Arti in Vigolo Vattaro in Italy from August 30 to September 9, 2023. For 10 days, I will be exploring different approaches to Butō with an international group of guides: Yumiko Yoshioka (Japan), Julie Becton Gillum (USA), Alexandra Jane Wynne (Australia), Yi Chen (China), Anna Kushnerova (UK) and Alessia Mallardo (Italy). This work will include 6 hours a day of in-depth practice, 2 performance days, evening Butō jams and site-specific explorations. Ultimately, “Jupiter’s Song Revived” has led me to an art form that offers true embodiment of ancestral memory where I can develop a performance piece rooted in Afro-Indigeneity.