Fugitive Time

Matthew Omelsky’s Fugitive Time: Global Aesthetics and the Black Beyond is a groundbreaking exploration of global Black aesthetics that makes palpable what, in Omelsky’s words, it “might feel like to be free of the violence that has consumed blackness throughout the world for centuries” (3). Fugitive time, then, is how Omelsky names this imagination, an imagination that is rooted in anticipatory moments and that chases freedom and the unburdening sensation that accompanies dreaming it into existence. Omelsky’s ambitious book takes on the task of examining a concept that is, by definition, temporally expansive: fugitivity spans time periods, moving from past and present struggles to future ways of being. It is also a concept that is, by definition, spatially expansive: fugitive time moves from spaces and places of confinement to spaces and places of freedom. Therefore, it is no wonder that Omelsky’s archive is likewise temporally and geographically capacious. He begins with Toni Morrison’s depiction of chattel slavery in North America, then turns to Aimé Césaire and Wilfredo Lam in the Caribbean during a time of increasing anticolonial demonstrations, and then unpacks the Black Audio Film Collective’s London in the 1980s before turning to an examination of the American jazz musician San Ra and the Senegalese sculptor poet and performance artist Issa Samb in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, Omelsky lands on the African continent, where he looks at the more recent work of Zimbabwean writers Yvonne Vera and NoViolet Bulawayo.It is a testament to Omelsky’s skill and control as a writer that each of these temporalities and geographies feels meticulously selected, not only to mark the different temporal entanglements and dureés that Omelsky elaborates upon, but also to make a key intervention in global Black cultural studies, one that Omelsky writes, “frames black life and diaspora as globally differentiated, where the African continent is not just a historical source but a diverse, vital, and coeval contributor to diasporic circulations and belongings” (5). Here, Omelsky acknowledges his debt to thinkers like Tsitsi Jaji, whose concept of “stereomodernism” re-envisions how we think through and listen for Pan-African solidarity, and Keguro Macharia, whose concept of “frottage” looks at some of the complex ways that desires across the Black diaspora rub up against each other. Building on these works, as well as others, Omelsky focuses his own attention on the corporeal experiences of time as a freedom yet to come. This emphasis on corporeal experience as well as Omelsky’s privileging of the body and its sensations is one of the more unique and provocative aspects of his argument. As Omelsky writes in his introduction, “fugitive time’s utopia lies in the anticipated moment when pain has at last vanished from the body [ . . . ] bringing with it a new form of being and being-in-the-world” (3). Though Omelsky acknowledges that this moment might always remain elusive, what is so compelling about this book is that this anticipatory release is often rooted in the physical and visceral, in the desire for ecstasy or what Morrison calls “easefulness.”As Omelsky argues in his first chapter, a chapter that lays the conceptual foundation for those that follow, Morrison uses the word “easefulness” as a way to map the utopian yearnings layered throughout the novels Sula (1982) and Beloved (2004). Omelsky writes, “In the dozen or so times [Morrison] uses it—mostly as verb or adjective—there’s a sense of bodily relief and comfort that corresponds to a similarly relieving and comforting affective state” (34). For instance, in his discussion of easefulness in Beloved, Omelsky contends that “depending on the context, the term can connote a range of meanings, including safety, love, relief, and peace, but also personal autonomy and self-knowledge” (35). Throughout the chapter, Omelsky argues through close reading and attention to narrative form that ease in Morrison’s novels is both fleeting and utopian, at times burying itself deep within memory. But what he demonstrates is that ease and the quest for it are tethered to fugitive time, “just beyond the now” (60), taking flight from temporal linearity, and constantly in pursuit “of those crevices where it might catch a breath of air” (60).In the following chapter, the quest for easefulness seen in Morrison’s work shifts to the unexpected ways of reading the time and the body in Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939) and Wilfredo Lam’s illustration of the Cuban edition. Omelsky shows how Lam’s images “enact an improvisatory riff on the poem” (63) that centers the materiality of the body and shows how it is the source of utopian time. As was the case with Morrison’s novels, in Césaire’s poetry and Lam’s drawings, we see a “blurring of trauma and utopia, wounding and desire” that is very much tied to the corporeal, to the violence of the flesh, that demands better, that needs nourishment, and that is propelled toward new life (63). But Omelsky also highlights the inescapability of bodily experience beyond the aesthetic, namely in Césaire’s politics, which, notably contradict so much of his poets. As is well known, Césaire was not just a utopian poet but also a career politician, one who led Martinique not to national independence but rather to the system of departmentalism. Of this, Omelsky writes that it is important to “sit with the tension of this contradiction” (95), and he makes a point of noting that Césaire was creating images of escape while he himself was in Paris. This moment in Fugitive Time is important because here Omelsky points to an instance when the situatedness of the physical body makes the project of fugitivity particularly opaque. Maybe, Omelsky speculates, Césaire’s poetic self is fleeing his political self. Maybe this is a case when we see one of the lessons of fugitivity uncomfortably clear: that which is promised is always already in flux, that the chase is never complete.In fact, it is in Omelsky’s final chapter, in his reading of Vera’s Without a Name (2002) and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013), that we see most precisely how alienation is registered in and through the body and in its constant deferral of disalienation. (And here “disalienation” is what Omelsky, thinking through Frantz Fanon, describes as the process of imagining, in advance, a time beyond colonial interpellation.) Omelsky reads both Zimbabwean novels in this chapter as national allegories that track the emergence of this fugitive time consciousness and argues that the protagonists in both books imagine moments when their bodies are free from the crushing weight of violence, repression, and poverty. In a particularly poignant reading of a scene in We Need New Names, for instance, Omelsky discusses how the protagonist Darling visits a wealthy neighborhood and sees a clean, put-together woman smacking her lips as she eats a decadent treat. Though Darling herself does not recognize the treat, she too swallows and observes her throat tingling. Omelsky writes, “A metonym for an idealized country, the treat enables Darling to live in advance of herself, however fleetingly, outside of her immediate moment and location, beyond the confines of her alienation” (193). But, of course, this living in advance, this escape from the bodily dis-ease of daily life, does disappear and recede.Omelsky’s Fugitive Time speaks both to the traumatic memories that haunt global Black experiences and to the anticipatory dreaming that envisions new futures beyond the quagmires of the present. But, at the same time, Fugitive Time is very much a book that situates itself in that present. As Omelsky writes in his introduction, “The resurgence of protests in recent years, at least in part, points to alternative pathways, visions not aimed at reforming institutions or correcting democratic processes but at the necessity of other worlds, new life” (2). Given that we are, still and also once again, in an era in which the guarantees of freedom, justice, and equality are elusive, it is clear that Fugitive Time, with its emphasis on the politics of imagining possibilities “beyond the law, beyond the state, in some cases even beyond this world” (2), is a book that is for the now

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