Emerging from my research practice, The Claudia Jones Project, Palimpsest takes place in Claudia Jones’ Harlem apartment, using glimmers from other moments in her life to puncture this sequence.
The Claudia Jones Project (CJP), an experimental ethnographic collective assembling 18 artists, archivists, and scholars across Philadelphia, Atlanta, New Orleans, Oakland, London, Port of Spain and Cape Town concerning the life and work of Claudia Jones: Black, woman, immigrant, Marxist, Trinidadian, Harlemite, Brixtonite, working class, artist, visionary, organizer. For Carol Boyce Davies (2011), “the strength of Jones is that she did not see any contradiction as she embraced all her identities and political positions.”
Originally convened over the summer and fall of 2021, and extending the project’s ritual attention to practices of community care, play, writing and inquiry, the project coalesces with to make a film based on the eponymous figure, who was a Harlem based labor organizer, journalist, mentee of DuBois, communist party leader, ‘proto-feminist’ and author of “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Women” (1949). Jones’ activism and writing lead to multiple arrests, extensive FBI surveillance through the Smith and McCarran Acts and her imprisonment and deportation to the UK.
During her time in London, Jones deepened her relationship with the burgeoning West Indian, African and South Asian communities, creating the West Indian Gazette and co-founding the Notting Hill Carnival. Through creative process and somatics, project members considered the role of the ensemble, the stakes of cultural organizing, the intellectual strands of Black radicalism and Cultural Studies, and the co-constitutive possibilities of fragmentary archives and memory as it is held in the body.
[image description: photograph of a handwritten archival letter “Tonight I Tried to Imagine What Life Would Be Like In The Future” written by Claudia Jones nested in a manila folder with silhouette shadow of person rendered against the text. Taken with permission from the Claudia Jones Memorial Library at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture]
Portrait of self in the archives. Portrait of the archival in the self. “Tonight I tried to imagine what life would be like in the future”.
This fragmentary future.
It keeps getting weirder here. More baleful and gruesome each day.
The here where I am collecting fragments, is a sort of balm to the wickedness. Gathering pieces, going back to fetch, to resurrect, to carry on, to extend the life, to remove the ego from this thing we call legacy, to be in and with the stakes of this work, life sustaining work across generations, spanning continents and lines. What is not indexed in a research guide, is the immediate feeling of recognition and tragedy that washes over in a split second, when nerve endings splay open, acuity in the face of remarkable beauty and fleeting life. How it is that we plot on in the most unfit conditions?
Try to imagine. Just try. Hope is a practice of trying, and of imagining. In this moment, I feel her asking us to move away from mere recuperation, and towards the real lesson – conviction, sincerity, finding the mettle. Surefootedness even as the ground is falling out from beneath you. Maybe because of the very fact that it is falling. Apply the pressure. If clay holds its shape best under fire, then I can be steadfast under heat.