ONE

___  ‘Water is the first thing in my imagination. [...] All beginning in water, all ending in water. Turquoise, aquamarine, deep green, deep blue, ink blue, navy, blue-black cerulean water. . . .[...] Water is the first thing in my memory. [1]  
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___  ‘I, and my lesbian sisters and gay brothers . . . are not a new fashion. . . . We return to the sea and the shores and once upon a time, which transposes into this time, which it always was. . . . the past simultaneously forever embedded in the present, in the pain and inevitable horrors confronted by conscientious unblinking memory, in the tragedies and occasional triumphs of history always raveled by so much needless suffering, by the unbearable human misery that we must not, for our collective sakes and the continued growth of this body we call “humanity,” ever be denied. [2]

___  ‘The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger’.  [10]
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___  MATI. SHIPMATE. ‘She who survived the middle passage with me’  [11]
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___  ‘Queer not in the sense of a “gay” or same-sex loving identity waiting to be excavated from the ocean floor but as a praxis of resistance. Queer in the sense of marking disruption to the violence of normative order and powerfully so: connecting in ways that commodified flesh was never supposed to, loving your own kind when your kind was supposed to cease to exist, forging interpersonal connections that counteract imperial desires for Africans’ living deaths. [...] Perhaps, as Brand writes, black queers really have no ancestry except the black water.’ [12] (“We have no ancestry except the black water and the Door of No Return”’  [13]
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___  Ditto + Ditto Take a Trip To Port Authority.

2.
Glave, Words to Our Now cited by Tinsley

1.
Brand,A Map to the Door of No Return cited by Tinsley

Have you been to the Slavery Museum? Who among you have ever been to the Middle Passage? Who has been confronted with the water? Have you heard the retching? Sharpe says ‘How does one account for surviving the ship when the ship and the un/survival repeat?’ How do we reckon with this re/membering? [5]
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___  ‘[...] vio- lence and blackness is (always already and only) cast inside the mathematics of unlivingness (data/scientifically proven/certified violation/asterisk) where black comes to be (a bit). Indeed, if blackness originates and emerges in violence and death, black futures are foreclosed by the dead and dying asterisks. And if the dead and dying are the archival and asterisked cosmogonies of blackness, within our present system of knowledge-a system, [...] where the subhuman is invited to become human on terms that require anti- black sentiment - scraps and bits of black Iife and death and narrative are guaranteed to move toward, to progress into, unliving- ness and anti-blackness.’ [6]
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___  ‘[...]think the violence of transatlantic slavery as a numerical moment through which anti-blackness was engendered and came to underwrite post-slave emancipation promises, [...] The post-slave system, its emancipatory terms, guarantees and profits from and repeats anti-black violence.’ [7]
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___  ‘[...] dwell on the archival display of the violated body, the corpse, the death sentences, the economic inventories of cargo, the whip as the tool that writes blackness into existence. How might we take this evidence and venture toward another mode of human being - so that when we encounter the lists, the ledgers, the commodities of slavery, we notice that our collective unbearable past, which is unrepresentable except for the archival mechanics that usher in blackness vis-a-vis violence, is about something else altogether.’ How does one account for surviving the future when the zong repeats?  [8]
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___  ‘Hapticality, the capacity to feel though others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you, this feel of the shipped is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem. Or perhaps we could say these are now recomposed in the wake of the shipped. [...]  Refused these things, we first refuse them, in the contained, amongst the contained, lying together in the ship, the boxcar, the prison, the hostel. Skin, against epidermalisation, senses touching. Thrown together touching each other we were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Though forced to touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no space, though refused sentiment, history and home, we feel (for) each other.’  [9]

TWO