A Note From the Editors

It’s logical: if you’re not going anywhere any road is the right one.

—Ikkyū Sojūn, Crow with No Mouth, 1989

How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.

—Toni Morrison Morrison, Paradise, 1997

The great lie of all our human stories is that apocalypse is an event and not a condition.

—Ayesha Siddiqi, “A Cow Died In Queens,” 2021

This issue is a grappling. To observe is a disciplinary act: a totalizing architecture, an omnipresent threat, an internalization of control. But observation also signals a growing closer to something—an expanding familiarity with the self; a waging on, side by side with those who have passed; an investment, as collaborators, in one another’s opacity and complexities.

We’re well past harbingers; already sitting in the unimaginable grief of a year that regularly feels like it severed our ability to stay connected. And we also recognize that loss—of life, privacy, sociality—is a loosening: an invitation to dissolve the boundaries between interior and exterior, to meet each other in more honest ways.

To observe is to sit in that attentive and intuitive place where we sense, as José Esteban Muñoz might put it, the missing. A possible untangling from the dreamy capitalist conditions that manipulate everyday embodiment. What is that giving away of self that lets you feel the messiness of paradox? That secret elastic space, in between watchful eyes and heartache and utopia, that lets us find our people while evading the gaze of the state.

For many of us, observation is mediated through the internet, and not always on terms that we accept or even comprehend. Drawing on the work of Legacy Russell and Édouard Glissant, Yume Murphy’s essay, “Unbecoming Online,” explores our relationships to versions of ourselves that exist on the world wide web. From the early days of virtual dress up games to contemporary social media platforms, digital space often reaches uneasily into life away from the keyboard, enforcing standards of legibility via algorithms that harken back to “the Western obsession with transparency.” Grieving the purity balls that sought to structure their youth, Cy X’s sonic reflection, “a ritual is, a ritual was,” pursues an avenue to glitch this invasive feeling of being examined. Moving beyond the frame of the visual, Cy locates the aural as a site of rupture and rebuilding; “the magical work,” in their words, “to transform this ritual space from that of surveillance into a tool of magic.”

In her essay, “The Palestinian Right to Remember,” Priya Prabhakar explores one such transformation: the occupied territory’s annual commemoration of the Nakba, the 1948 catastrophe in which the newly settled state of Israel forced over 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Mariana Peñaloza Morales’ short story, “A Week of Presidents,” invokes Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to reimagine last year’s parliamentary coup in Peru. While the state appropriates sound as weaponry (and liberals call for patience and quiet over justice), Morales suggests that the rhythm of a riot creates a present condition of freedom. The banging pots and pans of the cacerolazo are acknowledgements of our "inescapable network of mutuality": mobilizing bodies, disrupting a “peace” veiled by an “absence of tension,” and ushering in monuments to freedom from the ashes of memorials to power.

To observe is to recognize that our attachments are the things that impede our satisfaction. As Daonne Huff narrates throughout “In Search of Love Cocoons (An Uptown Nocturne),” her film inspired by what moves and arises when exploring the empty nighttime space of quarantined Harlem, “I go and see only as far as my legs can carry me.” Surrealist painter James Anderson expands on this perspective, reminding us that “there is much more to reality than most people would normally think or believe.” The artist’s augmented landscapes—adorned with floating instruments, checkered floorboards, and city skylines—envision a world beyond the periphery of confinement; a place created through the amalgamation of deep memory and psychic mystery. Dedicated to their ancestors, zavé martohardjono’s altar—a dance brought to life through candlelight in a dark room—is a portal to disidentify from the “i” and its tied up delusions of individualism. As they utter in the piece, “i” is a Western notion… as you die, “i” die too, eye die with you.”

Mutual aid disrupts panoptic logics by connecting us through the exchange of material resources, passions, and political knowledge. As founder of Bed-Stuy Strong, Sarah Thankam Matthews, offers in her conversation with Aliya Bhatia, mutual aid is the ordinary art of posing questions: citational work that emerges from a history of asking, “who are your people, and what are your needs?” In a video interview accompanied by photos of her protests and celebrations this past summer, founder of G.L.I.T.S. (Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society), Ceyenne Doroshow, reflects on bringing the dream of a Black trans housing project to life. “I’ve observed what we needed,” Ceyenne explains. “We need to be building better leaders...to leave a legacy behind.”

The past is continuously remade by the everyday. Walking, listening to music, thinking in the shower—our mundane habits exist in intimate relationship to the invisible; to the lost places and people we carry with us. In her essay, “To Penny’s,” Greer Gibney writes about the striking shadows of worlds that raised her: the trash cans, churches, gardens, and street corners she passes while walking to an odd house-sitting gig in her old neighborhood. Amalle Dublon and Sandra Wazaz, meanwhile, write about the discovery of a familiar place of self-touch; in an homage to the late music producer SOPHIE, they explain, “the idea that an imagined inner world is actually real is a trans idea.” While the traditional obituary serves to impose order and sense, any such reflection of SOPHIE’s iconic life must be as capacious as she was.

OBSERVANCE’s collaborative digital altar is a collection of little sanctities built by all of you. Rooted in the remembered and the collective, the altars included in “Common Prayer” are exercises in pausing, kneeling, and keeling. Our senses provide the information: the slight freedoms and refusals to forget; an orientation towards, as Octavia says, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change changes you.” These critical works are intended to be engaged with through deep listening. As always, each piece is paired with a fund of the author’s choice: a possible framework for moving away from extractive practices of knowledge-making and towards an ever-expanding relationship to reciprocity and redistribution.

This issue is indebted to the work of Sylvia Wynter, José Esteban Muñoz, Lauren Berlant, SOPHIE, Legacy Russell, John Berger, Saidiya Hartman, and the Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation.