Some books can’t be reviewed.
Ashon Crawley’s The Lonely Letters is one of them.
You might try, of course. Analytic tools in hand, you approach the text ready to decipher a thesis and decipher the text’s “contributions” to scholarship.
But then you open the pages and read the first words: And it begins this way. You know the book is different, but you haven’t given up. You try anyway. The thesis must be there, you think. But, try as you might, with each turn of the page, the book increasingly refuses your cognitive grasp. Instead of finding an argument, you hear about girlfriendofthreeyears and arguments at bars; you hear about, and perhaps begin to smell, sweat—the sweat of black flesh enraptured in blackpentecostal shouting, the sweat of black flesh in the heat of intimacy. This text is refusing that part of you—the part that would try and siphon out the “theoretical” or “methodological” or “conceptual” parts to put a review together.
You’re no fool, of course; you know that the book is broken into six different . . . somethings. “and,” “breath,” “shouting,” “noise,” “tongues,” and “nothing” organize the letters. But it’s hard to call them chapters. They don’t feel like that. They don’t function that way. Chapters make arguments, and these . . . somethings—perhaps you call them “movements”—do not. They do not have theses. They do not review literature. The “interventions” they make cannot be fully captured by disciplinary logics.
Eventually, you realize: this book isn’t about “argumentation,” “intervention,” and “scholarly contributions”; it’s about relation. Or, more precisely, it is a relation—between the two characters A and Moth, between them and you. After a while, you might start seeing yourself in one or both of them. You never hear from Moth directly—all the letters are A’s—but in A’s letters you begin to hear from (and then not hear from) Moth. You know he’s going to seminary; you know he’s conflicted about the intimacy he and A share.
And you know A desires Moth, desires to remain in relation with him. And you know that A and Moth’s relationship is a queer one. Sure, it’s queer because A is also (presumably) a man. But it’s also queer because A knows the term “queer” is as much a modifier as it is a verb. Queerness, blackqueerness, blackqueering is an enactment of relation; A wants to cultivate a relationship with Moth in a way that isn’t coercive, that isn’t possessive.
And it extends beyond A’s relationship with Moth. You’re entranced by the way A queers the blackpentecostal tradition, how A criticizes the virulently homophobic doctrines of blackpentecostal theologies while holding space for the “romance” of blackpentecostal praise and sermonizing. A isn’t writing a queer theory; he’s theorizing blackqueerness in and through and as relation—with Moth, with his friends, with blackpentecostalism. You see how, for A, queerness isn’t limited to the confines of sexual intimacy and sexual orientation. It’s something more (and perhaps less) than that.
You’re becoming undone. Your scholarly capacities are failing you.
But you’re a scholar. So, you try and regain your footing. You go back to taking notes. You highlight the deep research that went into this text, marveling at A’s capacity to read black flesh, blackqueerness, and blackpentecostalism through physics. And perhaps like A, you, too, have read a little bit of medieval Christian mystical literature. So, as A discusses—and then criticizes—mysticism for its lack of attention to flesh, you might say to yourself: it isn’t that simple; some of the mystics were deeply fleshy in their theologies.
But then A starts modulating: “I’m not attacking particular people within the… tradition,” he writes; you start to see how he’s drawing from and critiquing that tradition to claim that “marronage is a mysticism to which we can attend, a Black mysticism” (95). You’re losing your footing again. But perhaps that’s a good thing. Because now, you’re thinking differently. You’re being undone by A’s enactment of blackqueer desire and relation through his thinking, his creativity. And you’re reminded: this is what blackqueerness does.
Speaking of creativity, you’re struck by the paintings—by their beauty and their depth, by how they’re made, how A turns a tambourine into an occasion for visual artistic expression, how shouting feet become the occasion for color. And you recognize that A has turned the practice of shouting, of “getting happy,” into an outlet for continuing to try and find relation, of trying to cultivate joy as a practice.
And then, you encounter these words. And the game is over.
And what I mean is this: I think I love you. No question mark.
And what I mean is this: I have not stopped telling everyone about you, about the joy you have brought and continue to bring. . .
And what I mean is this: I want a consensuality with you, a continued consent to be together, a way of life that will always have friendship as the first and always plural operation. (135)
You give in. You’re caught up. You’re invested. You know it now: the entire book—everything, even the vulnerable discussions of loneliness—all of it is in service of cultivating joy and intimacy and noncoercive relation.
You’re no longer reading; you’re relating. You’re no longer dispassionate and distanced; you’re enraptured. The epistolary structure of the text dispossesses you of your analytic—perhaps philosophical—capacities. The style of the prose—as intimate as it is vulnerable, as theoretical as it is impassioned—has gotten you caught up. This book is changing you. You can’t feel the neutrinos passing through you, but you know they’re there.
This isn’t a book anymore; it’s something else. By the time you’re finished, you’re listening to your breathing like A does. You’re making art; you’re finding your joy.
You now know; you can’t review this book.
Because you haven’t just read a book. You’ve had an encounter. A beautiful, blackqueer, encounter.
Some books can’t be reviewed.
Ashon Crawley’s The Lonely Letters is one of them.
Biko Gray is assistant professor of religion at Syracuse University.
Biko Mandela Gray
Date Of Review:
May 29, 2022
