Remember?

“I’m a star? I’d rather be a comet by far.” -Andre 3000

(in Skew it on the Bar-B, a critique of “spittin' all that bourgeois”)


It is Black history month and Monu says somehow cold air makes for an even clearer sky. Last night walking back to the hotel after the joy of eating with public university educators who are teaching black and queer and feminist and disabled and anti-colonial and amphibian futures the sky was indeed more clear. The moon is almost full.

And the green comet (more technically known as C 2022 E3 (ZTF)) was as close to the earth as she has been in the last 50,000 years. Don’t worry you didn’t miss her. Take your binoculars out tonight and look for her somewhere near Mars.

50,000 years is a long time. They say the green comet comes the long way around the sun from the distant Oort cloud, the furthest reaches of a solar system we are still trying to understand. The Oort cloud is theoretical, it is a place that Jan Oort theorized long orbit comets like these must be from, because they have to be from somewhere. Oort, the radio astronomer redefined the solar system by listening.

It is Black history month and I wonder. Have you ever listened for a place you could not see, that no one that you know has ever seen? An origin you could only guess about by obsessing over recent arrivals, a place defined entirely by what you heard? And is that what I am doing with my longing for authentic Blackness? Building a radio receptor to listen for some old precolonial sound? I mean astronomers have built radios strong enough to hear the static of the radiation residual of the big bang so why not? (Thank you forever to Black feminist cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and all your good citations!)

If I had a solar system radio show I would ask the green comet what she saw 50,000 years ago when last she came near Earth while our species was supposedly building life out of stone. And she might laugh and remind me that she also attended the founding moment of the universe. Don’t I have a question about that?

A comet is old. A remnant of the noise that made the universe. A comet is wise. She streaks across the sky and leaves behind two tails. Two stories. One of dust and one of ionic transformation, or everything the sun ignites into fundamental change.

And it would be something other than dead air, the sound of my mind bursting the limitations my own longing has placed on the story of who I am.

And a comet is also vulnerable. Her elliptical orbit can become hyperbolic any time she comes over this way. So while the astronomers who just noticed her last year predict that she was in the neighborhood 50,000 years ago, a massive presence seems to have shifted her out of that orbit (everyone’s blaming the irresistibility of stormy Jupiter) so she may not come back for a million years, or she may leave the solar system forever. Which is why I have to ask my questions now. Study now. Get out of my own way.

So I’ll rephrase in the service of this once in everyone’s lifetime interview.

Green comet. Heart of ice. How does it feel all those years in the dark before you come close blazing towards the sun? How does it feel right now, when all you are begins to melt and glow? Artifact of the first explosion, trailing dust a million miles, could you teach me to let go of all the choking thoughts I do not need? Ancestor comet, how can I be like your ionic tail. Leaving as a legacy only the parts of me that said yes to transformation, bright enough to smudge the coldest sky.

What do I know? I’m a lucky Justice League beneficiary who thought Green Lantern was always Black. I’m of a generation young enough that there was always Black Feminism but now old enough to see my sacred responsibility the act of teaching the world Black history criminalized by talk radio listeners who fear that I will leave them in the dust, who resent my glowing legacy of change. As if it is not also your own.

So I ask the so-called steward of the the stolen Seminole lands, inheritor of the colonizer John Broward’s mandate to dry out the earth, pretending that legislated ignorance is a fountain of youth and any other listeners listening now the same questions I am asking myself: What are we afraid to know? What dusty story chokes us out of our own breakthroughs? Am I green with forgetting or green with envy or green with promised life? And do you think if you cross out the names of our transformers creation will not be what it is? Did you forget what you are made of? Did you forget what we are made of? Can we forget the whole black sky? Don’t you know? I was there when the universe was born. We were there when the universe was born. Remember.


P.S. This is where I teach Black History. See you there.



Julia Wallace