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Care in the Wake of Jazz Benjamin Papsun, Vassar College I was looking for more than the violence of the slave ship, the migrant and refugee ship, the container ship, and the medical ship. I saw that leaf in her hair, and with it I performed my own annotation that might open this image out into a life, however precarious, that was always there. That leaf is stuck in her still neat braids. And I think: Somebody braided her hair before that earthquake hit. (Sharpe 120) The wake, as theorized by Christina Sharpe in her cultural and critical study In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, is the set of conditions that create the framework for living while black. The wake is the afterlife of slavery; it is a “position of deep hurt and deep knowledge” (Sharpe 27), and to live in it is “to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (Sharpe 14). The wake is a violent realization of structures of oppression and of ideologies of white supremacy, enacted both subtly and overtly. Sharpe explores the various manifestations of the wake—through the histories of slave ships and the transmutation of black bodies into measurable property within their holds, through the disproportionate effects of natural disasters on black communities and refugees, and through the militaristic state attack on black people via incarceration and legally-sanctioned murder. These conditions are the reality of black life, yet they are themselves insufficient to define and describe it. A resolution is in order then, which bridges the wake itself and the ability for blackness to be meaningful. As Sharpe herself asked the audience at an October 2018 talk at Vassar College: “How are we to practice care? How are we to undo these violent relations?” There must be something we can do to carve a space for the personal into a context laden with violence. There is something we can do, argues Sharpe, something she terms “wake work.” Wake work is the action by which the wake is disrupted, which allows us to “imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery” (Sharpe 18). The particular mode of wake work that I would like to draw attention to is that of “care.” Sharpe describes a photograph of a young Haitian girl lying on a stretcher, injured by the catastrophic 2010 earthquake that struck her home, who has a piece of tape stuck to her forehead labeled “SHIP” (indicating to disaster responders that she is to be put on a ship to receive aid). This marking of “ship,” to Sharpe, recalls the history of the marking of
