It’s not that flight isn’t really happening. It’s that it isn’t really an index of agency or willfulness. https://twitter.com/_rawilcox/status/1300966049656066048

To say we do not control our movement (anymore than we control our imagination) is not to say we aren’t moving, but rather that the telos of this movement is never coherent, and that this incoherence is a function of total violence.

There is, obviously, the violence of slavery as social death; the violence to be “escaped”; the hold, the world qua plantation.

But there is also the violence of escape itself, of the fugitive “act”; of the sacrifices, the dangers and the paranoias; of the snake bites and the slaughtered children and the (ontological) imperative to “own nothing.” This, as Warren tells us, is not to be romanticized.

And it brings us to the fugitive narrative; to the discourse of escape and the work that discourse does to obfuscate violence; to overwrite ontological incapacity, to re/write agency as criminality, to offer potentialities and fantasies of the end as counterrevolutionary hope.

All of this comes to bear on the incoherence of agency and desire for the Black—where flight is always an impossible choice precisely insofar as the distance between escape and capture cannot be discerned. Hartman (1997) and Spillers (1987) are very instructive here.