“To Resee, To Refeel, To Rehurt”: How Mora Supports Us to Resight/site/cite Freedom

• In Event: Growing, Sharpening and Envisioning Our Tools: The Mapping Carcerality, Imagining Freedom, and (Re)Membering Selves Project

Abstract

Objectives: The objective of this paper is to critically and poetically honor the theory, praxis and power of a work written by an abolitionist and freedom fighter, Mora, who travelled to Alabama to bear witness to carceral pasts and presents, and to resight abolitionist futures (Davis, 2016). The piece will be divided into three components of poetic analysis and reflection, to honor the intervention offered by the refrain that Mora offers as she reflects upon sites of anti-Black violence and reparation: “To Resee, To Refeel, To Rehurt.” In turn, my poetic honoring will be divided into three stanzas with analytic liner notes: 1) To Resight; 2) To Resite; and 3) To Recite.

Methodology & Data: This poetic honoring follows a collaborative retreat organized by the Miguel Casar and the Arts for Healing and Justice Network. Designed as an action research exchange, the 6-day research trip invited systems impacted young people and co-conspirators, including Mora, to come to Birmingham to co-investigate the parameters of carcerality, and possibilities for freedom. I was invited to co-host and co-participate. Informed by my background as an anti-colonial anthropologist, educator and artist, I co-engaged in a series of art-based reflections and critical dialogues with and alongside young people across the trip.

Theoretical Framework: The decision to come to Alabama reflected a theoretical grounding in how carcerality was particularly developed to capture, enslave and contain African peoples to work for what scholars like Robinson (1983) have referred to as “racial capitalism.” This acknowledgement centers how anti-Blackness is a foundation for carcerality, as well as the abolitionist movements that have long worked to build worlds otherwise, based in collective and expansive visions of freedom (Davis, 2016). A key aspect of this abolitionist work has been poetics and the establishment of what intellectuals like Glissant (2024) have referred to as a “poetics of relation.” Cesaire (1982), Fanon (1963), and Glissant (2024), among others, have called attention to how the logics, “reason” and languaging of the hegemonically bourgeois, secular and imperial genre-specific version of being human descended from Europe (whom Wynter refers to as “Man”) continues to foreclose our discourses on freedom (Wynter & McKittrick, 2014). Accordingly, poetics becomes a means to set a different epistemic, ontological and axiological foundation for struggle, engagement and imagination that is critical to the project of abolition.

Substantiated Conclusions & Scholarly Significance: My poetic honoring will consider how Mora invites us to spatially and temporally resight outside of linearity and “objectivity,” towards embodied affectivity and ethical relationality. Mora’s work also challenges us to resite our conceptualizations of place, home and accountability towards a love-politics of mutual responsibility. As part of our turn to a mutual responsibility that works outside of the spatial and temporal bounds of coloniality and carcerality, Mora’s work reminds us that knowledge is “dead” outside of embodied recognition, and must be continually rehearsed and recited together if we are to realize worlds “Of Love, Community, Connection.” In this way, Mora’s work is significant to those concerned with liberatory futures, affective analysis and love-politics (Nash, 2013).

Authors

• Casey Philip Wong, Georgia State University

• Mora Greer, Arts for Healing and Justice Network