BAR Book Forum: Azeezat Johnson, Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Beth Kamunge’s “The Fire Now”

Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor

14 Aug 2019

A new book highlights what contemporary prohibitions on Black life look like in various geographical and socio-political spaces.

“Simply knowing what must come to an end is not the same as envisioning futures.”

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Azeezat Johnson, Remi Joseph-Salisbury, and Beth Kamunge.They are editors of the new book, The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence. Beth Kamunge was kind enough to participate in the interview below.

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

Beth Kamunge: The Fire Now was initially conceived of as a response to two significant events in 2016: the success of the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election. However, the book grew into being about more than Trump and Brexit, and became a text that allowed us to center the familiar yet intensified ways in which Black communities continue to experience restrictions in our freedoms to live, move and have our being. The chapters highlight what contemporary prohibitions on Black life look like in various geographical and socio-political spaces, both in terms of interpersonal dynamics, and systems and structures. The book shines a light on how these oppressive rubrics are resisted through various imaginations of liveable worlds (Sharpe, 2018: xvii). The book also works to remind us of the erasures that we too perpetuate as we attempt to address our current political and social climates: there is a need to pay more (and not less) attention to the relationality and interdependence of scales (Massey, 2004). We use The Fire Now to remind ourselves and the reader that what happens in London or Washington does not stay in London or Washington. Indeed, it has implications elsewhere, and many other people “are forced to pay attention” (Macharia, 2017 cited in Kamunge et al., 2018: 4 emphasis added) due to ongoing legacies of colonialist and white supremacist systems. However, Other(ed) cities and villages are not just reactive to more socially privileged geographical places and spaces (Marston et al., 2005). The book therefore also seeks to listen and learn from what is happening “elsewhere” that has implications for life ‘here’ and vice versa.

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

We hope that other activists and community organizers will know that they are not alone.

Oppressive, unliveable systems and encounters are - by definition - exhausting and isolating. Because of this, we hope The Fire Now offers an opportunity to seek respite by connecting with the many other people and communities that are trying to make sense of our yet-to-be-named problems. This is particularly important for communities who tend to be marginalised in other hermeneutically influential spaces (Fricker, 2007) such as academia (e.g. Johnson, 2018; see also, Johnson and Joseph-Salisbury, 2018); various feminist organizing spaces (Milner and Aromolaran, 2018) and even “alternative” social media spaces which once provided respite and community but are increasingly growing hostile to Black life, in ways that have enforced hiatus or retreat (e.g. Trudy, 2015; Fleming, 2019; Loza, 2014). We hope that this book in the hands of various marginalized scholars, activists, and community organizers will indeed read as a “collaborative love letter” as it was generously described by Yasmin Gunaratnam. Additionally, we want readers to finish this book with an understanding of the incredible amount of effort and labor that it takes to maintain oppressive systems and structures (Mills, 1997; Spelman, 2007); and yet part of our commitment to “writing with fire” includes honoring the incredible amount of effort and labor that our communities have put forth as we resist structures of dehumanization (Kamunge et al., 2018: 3).

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

The current political climate has seen an increase in explicit white supremacist thinking and organizing that requires our intellectual engagement and material resistance. However – in the text that inspired ours – James Baldwin brings his “charge” to those who “have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it, and do not want to know it” (Baldwin, 1993:5 emphasis added). Communities and individuals whose oppressive nature is explicit, tend to know that they are destroying lives and in fact celebrate (sometimes literally) that destruction of life. Contributors to the book speak to these experiences, sometimes giving personal witness (e.g. Kamunge, Mwangi and Ali, 2018). Yet at the same time, we need to pay attention to those who insist on not knowing how they remain culpable in the destruction of life (e.g. Mills, 2018). These are the people to whom Baldwin (1993:5) addressed his charge; the, often liberal communities who allow events to unfold “like a joke” and later become surprised (Forman, 2006), wondering, “how did we get here?” (Fleming, 2016 cited in Johnson, 2018:17). Thus the book continues in the feminist critical race traditions that encourage us to engage with the “inverted epistemologies”(Mills, 1997:18-19) that create the necessary and sufficient conditions for that violence to inevitably exist (Salem, 2019) in the first place.

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

There are a number of academic authors to which this book refers. However, we also know that “not all…intellectuals are educated…[or] work in academia [but also, not all employed academics] are automatically intellectuals” (Collins, 1991:14-15 emphasis in original). We repeat this here to value and affirm the intellectual traditions of communities that are often unnamed in our citational practices. I (Beth) will say that the intellectual heroes who inspire my work are Black women outside of academia. This is not to diminish the role of Black female academics, a number of whom have provided spaces for mutual and enriching friendship, mentorship, and respite. However, and similarly to Kristie Dotson, “I learned how to be a black-feminist at my mama and grand-mama’s knees” (Kristie Dotson cited in Lewis, 2015 n.p.). I have been reminded, in the last 9 months, of how much I owe these women, indeed starting with my own mama and grand-mamas. This was a season in which the “heat and burdens of the day” (Sharpe, 2018: xix) were even more pronounced, ranging from the obligations that come with/from finishing and defending a doctoral thesis and entering academia, to brutally learning about the death of a family member on social media before my mama had had a chance to alert us, and coming to personal terms with living with a lifelong chronic medical condition. Practically this meant being limited in some forms of intellectual thinking during this time. These ‘limitations’ were even related to this project such as not participating in the forums arranged to launch this book or consider it further within academic contexts, to reading the actual published book 10 months after its publication. However as I have recalibrated my everyday existence in light of evolving realities, I realized that even my academic intellectual thinking had been enriched rather than diminished, as I had been enmeshed in community with other Black women who poetically enabled me to “make room for imagining not just how things are, but how and why they could be” (see also Lorde, 1984: 36-40).

In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?

The book helps us to imagine new worlds in a number of ways, but I (Beth) want to highlight one specifically: The Fire Now invites us to consider the limits of particular ways and forms of thinking and recover ways to theorize otherwise. Whilst Derrais Carter (2018: 38-44) speaks most explicitly to this, it is also enacted through offerings that break with the rhymes and reasons that academic disciplines requires of us (e.g. see Abdi, 2018:13-14; Murray, 2018:59). These and other pieces were not space-fillers or a tokenistic nod to other ways of theorizing. Rather, we recognize that “language that unmasks power relations” (Christian, 1988:68) is a fundamental contributor to our survival now and then. Allowing ourselves this wiggle room (cf. Ahmed, 2014, n.p) enables us to do the hard work of examining how we’ve gotten to these socio-political contexts that we refuse to accept. Yet simply knowing what must come to an end is not the same as envisioning futures. Part of this book includes developing tools to take us forward; to uncover the “old and forgotten [ideas], new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves, along with the renewed courage to try them out.” (Lorde, 1984:38). The Fire Now is one of the ways that we forge a collective courage to refuse the violence of this moment.

Roberto Sirvent is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network. He is co-author, with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong, of the new book, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.

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