Please cite as: Katherine McKittrick, “Keeping the Heartbreak,” from her Don’t Wear Down,

(http://katherinemckittrick.com/wornout), 2019: 22-25.

Yaniya Lee introduced me to “Cyphers,

Tissue, Blizzards, Exile” by Tau Lewis (2017).1

Comprised of video, photo, text, and

installation, the piece, as a whole, offers

uneasy geographies: Air Jamaica billboards,

empty concrete hallways, boat rides,

elongated sculpture reading a book that is

reminiscent of Wolfgang Tillmans’ End of

Broadcast. Part of this project is an outdoor

installation. Presented in the winter, there is

a concrete structure and inside the structure

there is a sculpted figure sitting on a chair,

holding a doll. There is a photograph on the

wall. Outside, among the snow and trees,

there is another sculpted figure, in pieces,

and another photograph. The figures are

made of and surrounded by found materials:

wire, plaster, fur, chains, denim, synthetics,

Excerpts from “Cyphers, Tissue, Blizzards, Exile” by
metal, stones, concrete, wood. The layers of Tau Lewis (2017)

material are endless, in fact, refusing capture.

1Tau Lewis, “Cyphers, Tissue, Blizzards, Exile,” Cooper Cole Gallery, 2017, Toronto, Canada:
https://coopercolegallery.com/art/tau-lewis-cyphers-tissue-blizzards-exile/. Accessed January 2018. Read with:
Yaniya Lee Lacharité, When and Where We Enter: Situating the Absented Presence of Black Canadian Art, MA
Thesis, (Queen’s University, March 2019).
22
The endlessness of the materials adds to the uneasy geographies, signaling how place, or more aptly

black places, are unfamiliar, layered, and without certain temporality. In this way, Lewis’ installation

offers a doubled sense of place: one can move through and engage the work, and notice the three-

dimensionality of the sculptures and the sites, but the materials themselves hide things—some

affective histories, lost objects, cannot be seen or tracked.

When Lewis and I met to discuss her visual art, she mentioned to me that part of her practice is to

find something—a special object—and enclose it in the art, so it can no longer be seen. The intention

is not to seek out and hide, from what I understand; rather in the process of putting things together,

objects are lost or obscured from view. In line with much of black studies, the question of

representation here is not only unfinished and momentary, it is comprised of things we cannot see or

capture. Even though the monumental work of racism presents our lives and our art and our

geographies as transparent, knowable, and always tied to oppression, there are some parts of

blackness they just cannot have or imagine or grasp.

In Lewis’ work, the seen and the unseen and what we cannot know, speaks to the radical

interdisciplinarity that, for me, defines all aspects of black life. The finding, gathering, and stitching

together do not end in conclusion, but instead offer uncomfortable openings and wonder. The

method and praxis are not about answers but about seeking. And, the narratives (creative materials,

words, songs, hues, grooves) are always intertextual and varied. This kind of messy intellectual and

creative praxis draws attention to what Sylvia Wynter calls the “perspective of struggle.”2 Here, the

art and the artist, the writer and their text, work outside normative expectations and instead draw

attention to the work of liberation. What I mean by this is that the infrastructures and purveyors of

2Sylvia Wynter, ‘Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles,’ World Literature
Today, 63, (Autumn 1989): 640.
23
capitalism, empire, and racism suffocate and demand black compliance with that suffocation, while the

work of black studies is the struggle against that demand for compliance. Put differently, and thinking

directly with Lewis’ work, her portraits and sculptures reframe blackness outside normative demands.

Her work does not easily translate as a treatise on “oppression” or “resistance” but instead asks that

we dwell on how to belong in a world that is underpinned by racial violence. The visuals she offers

are subtle and urgent without being overdetermined. This is terribly important, because when we

engage the work and recognize that we cannot totally know—that something is there and something

is hidden from view—we are left somewhat vulnerable and that vulnerability, when we are doing our

best work, invites curiosity and conversation.3

I read Lewis’ archives as giving form to visual black studies. I am jarred by the concrete walls. I despise

the snow. The sculpted figures upset me. I once had that doll. I have a version of the doll. When I

read across her archives the photos are familiar but I have never seen them before. The found objects

have different affective purposes. I am grateful for the dictionary. The figures resting, in chairs and on

the floor, bring comfort. The familiar wrests! I have not seen this before.

I wonder how this archive understands and speaks to belonging. We know, of course, that belonging

must be forged outside the terms of colonialism and white supremacy. We know that normative

modes of belonging—straight, white, able, financed—cannot bear black friendship or companionship.

We know that radical black belonging is a diasporic act, one that roams outside and across the

perimeters of nation but is never beholden to the nation-state. This means, as well, that black

belonging in Canada is an impossibility. But black belonging in Canada is a generative impossibility: for

if we are not here, what we invent, is not of this brutal nation but outside its logics. I wonder, then, if

3 cf. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Trans., Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
[1990]1997); Richa Nagar, Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism, (Urbana,
Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014).
24
Lewis’ archive might be read as a version of belonging that rests on unknowing. The hidden objects

make me wonder about hidden ways of being. In many ways, conceptualizing blackness as a way of

unknowing is an enunciation of black life and livingness precisely because those in power cannot

always profit from what they cannot see and grab up. There are things they cannot have. There are

things we can keep to ourselves. We can keep some love hidden. We can keep the song, the story,

the heartbreak, the notebook, hidden. I wonder if this kind of belonging is about something you can

have but can never get.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks: Yaniya Lee, Tau Lewis, and Sunny Kerr.

Works Cited

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation, Trans., Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
[1990]1997.

Lacharité, Yaniya Lee. When and Where We Enter: Situating the Absented Presence of Black Canadian Art,
MA Thesis, Queen’s University, March 2019.

Lewis, Tau. “Cyphers, Tissue, Blizzards, Exile,” Cooper Cole Gallery, 2017, Toronto, Canada:
https://coopercolegallery.com/art/tau-lewis-cyphers-tissue-blizzards-exile/. Accessed January 2018.

Nagar, Richa. Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms Across Scholarship and Activism. Urbana,
Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles,” World
Literature Today, 63, (Autumn 1989): 637-648.

25