Lucifer, son of the Morning

You are Guilty

by Association

Everywhere.

Everyone

will find a way

to detonate your name

to destroy what you have made

there is nothing to be done about this.

Let it fall down

Let it die a desperate death

nothing here is worth being cherished

nothing here is worth fake love.

***

Lucifer, son of the Morning, you are the Wretched of the Earth…

“I’m from the Murder Capital where they Murder for Capital.”

One of the first things you must learn to do in this life is accept your devilization. This is a separate yet unequal issue to the question of demonization since the latter implies that the Other has gotten you all wrong. Devilization is a demonization that sticks not because it is true or false, but because the equation of transparency through which the binary of true or false comes to matter – ceases to matter – at the site of being one’s own black flesh.

There is a dark reality I speak to, and a sad truth I utter: it is through accepting one’s nakedness before the Law, one’s bareness from the range of Life and Light, that one is made into a Lucifer. It is through an entrance into the heart of darkness, the valley of the shadow of death, that is the World and its sheer hideousness that one comes to see oneself again as a bringer of Light. No one who enters leaves unscathed. There is a darker reality I know. This black flesh always stands naked before the Law, open to any assemblage of violence, phobias, and affects that the World may offer. Devilization is the acceptance of the stakes. To be less than nothing than what one is. To be less than nothing. To be lesser than what they say, when one is already as low as can be – to stick with the mud, to stick with the low lives, the dead-beats, the no-bodies, and the feens. To see difference and yet no evil, to see suffering and hear no evil, to stick around and Be the evil they had already seen you as before you had any idea around what it was to Be to Be-gin with.

See: Every nigga that’s every said, “I care,” must scream in silence for it to mean anything at all. Lucifer learns his lesson in the refusal of recognition. What a dive into despair. And yet, there seems to be no other way. Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you, Wilderson states (Afropessimism, 79). Lucifer knows that they are always after him. They’re never letting him go. He is always already a fixture and figment in the mind to which this Black flesh is always already a hidden signifier for. He knows because every nigga knows that there is only one redemption, if ever, if only, in death and dying. Every nigga knows and yet, Lucifer must swallow his pride, and submit to dying an infinity of deaths. Every nigga dies an infinity of deaths. What makes Lucifer a bringer of Light is his submission to Darkness. The refusal of recognition for one’s death, for one’s dying, and for one’s ambivalent positionality within the structure of anti-Blackness sets the mandates of speaking the hieroglyph against oneself. Perhaps, this is why Jared Sexton describes the “countersurveillance” of a self-analysis as an avenue for Lucifer’s falling away from the masculinist imperatives of dictating “the terms of engagement.” Sexton states:

rather than continue attempting to escape the indignity, anxiety, and vulnerability involved in his hyper-visibility, he blends with the power of the all-seeing eye and assumes his appearance, actively playing the role of the subdued and allowing the plot to unfold. His countersurveillance—including personal observations, candid photographs, and fact-checking text messages to Rod (his lifeline to a black elsewhere)—becomes effective only when he lets go of his desire to dictate the terms of engagement: to talk his way through the awkward visit, to set firm boundaries when his interlocutors intrude, and, at the extreme, to muscle his way out the scene when he is finally surrounded. His conventionally masculine approach gives way to an affirmatively feminized one, a reorientation away from the white father’s project and toward the black mother’s potentiality. (Black Men, Black Feminism, 90).

Every nigga that’s every said, “I care,” are singing it towards the black mother’s potentiality or else it does not mean anything at all. Lucifer learns his lesson in the refusal of reciprocity. What a dive into an abyss. And yet, there seems to be no other way. It was then that it struck me: the thing that I had never before been able to get hold of in words. I feared a death without meaning. A death without a story to it, a chain of events that would make sense to who survived me, a clear and logical chain of events that anyone could read, and when they finished, lift their heads from the page and say, I can see why he died (Afropessimism, 85-86). Here, everyone sees you die and no one knows why but most are sure… you got what you deserved.