Sapphire Woods
Circle, a community-engaged project by Syrus Marcus Ware, was a direct-action commentary on feminized labour within Black activist movements. Direct action is the spirit of liberation and a unified will for change enacted in real time. It involves art and emotional exchange, to create a narrative that shifts the very fabric of society. The specific labour of direct action within Circle was to hold the essence of ‘community’ through the joint witnessing of memory around multiplicitous Black experiences, across varying timelines. Syrus Marcus-Ware gathered folks to sew memories; connecting past and present, each new stitch a moment and re-living in the making.
As I threaded my needle and submerged myself in this process, I contemplated Diana Taylor’s idea that we can witness events as performance; an “embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, (performance) offers a way of knowing” (1).
To participate in Syrus’ Circle was to engage in a collective labour of witnessing that often gets invisibilized and goes unacknowledged. As participants and performers, we enacted this labour by sitting together and engaging in the cultural practice of banner making. The performance took place in a grey warehouse room, a long plastic table draped in black fabric sat at its centre. Bursting from the banner, curls of patterned textiles and twists of mismatched fabrics invited us to touch. Hands pulled in and out, some learning to sew for the first time, others practicing a particular stitch. Some belonged to those who have traveled all the way from the Continent in search of artist community. And some, like those of Toronto-based seamstresses, learned this labour out of economic necessity. All of them have silently contributed to their families and friends, households, communities, movements, cities.
The banner became a fabric archive of geographical landmarks of safety, peace, enjoyment, and pleasure in Toronto: the waterfront, the Island, High Park and its cherry blossoms. Touching the colors and shapes of a shoreline image, Syrus and I recounted memories of our families. Syrus shared that he enjoys being in water, and that his co-parent had to learn to swim out of necessity for their child. Although I am scared of being in water, I need to be close to it. My partner and I moved closer to water so that we could feel a sense of movement and evolution. In the act of being together, we witness each others’ stories; we sew in and out in ways that connect and intersect.
In another moment of sharing, Syrus recounted how the May 13, 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia was told to him. The last Circle Project session marked thirty-four years and one day since the Philadelphia police and fire commissioner discharged 10,000 rounds of ammunition into the MOVE home before dropping a satchel bomb and dynamite substitute. Syrus still writes to Mumia Abu-Jamal in all caps to ritualize and memorialize Jon Africa, who is remembered for his all caps letters and notes. He tells me how, allegedly, the Philadelphia police shot the MOVE children who had survived the blast and were trying to escape out the back of the house. He also tells me the story of how one of the pregnant Africa household members went on a 2 mile run previous to giving birth to her child, cutting the umbilical cord with her teeth before calling Ware and another friend “to tell us what she had done”.
There is a responsibility to hold these stories of delight and devastation; to place and secure them firmly within the archive of this banner. For Black trans women, femmes, and gender non-conforming people, each literal and figurative stitch weighs heavy on the work, contributing to the performance. Recognition of the labour that is required in creating a final work often goes missing within activism, and is constantly overlooked. The performance of Circle was for those for whom the work is done, interwoven through a fabric of care. Between the performers was the sacred labour of mutual assistance.
The act of showing up to hold each other down is mutual assistance. In Saidiya Hartman’s words: “[Mutual assistance] made good the ideals of the commons, the collective, the ensemble, the always-more-than-one of existing in the world. The mutual aid society of black survival” (2). Foundational to this labour of mutual assistance are Black queertrans folks, femmes, and women. For Marcus, it is imperative that cis, trans men and masc folks participate in the quintessential labour of witnessing those who you share timelines with in real time, in physical space. If it were not for these spaces, where could we remember? There is labour in holding down memory and physical space – a building made into a household, a classroom; a letter in all caps; a banner – that we commit to. Each hand holding the cloth that, with each stitch, we are accountable to.
The act of witnessing each other in this invisibilized labour is what made this work a performance. The construction of the banner represents a real-time covenant making, as we promise to remember. Banner making, here, is archival process of witnessing multiple timelines, experiences, and stories of people who have created an abstract community of multiplicitous experience, and who recognize each other as individuals within a collective. These are moments in time, in history, which require worthy physical space within the cityscape; where mutual creation and assistance are central in the performance of activism. There have been multiple attempts at securing a hub for Black activists in Toronto that honours this work, and multiple rejections from land-owners who see Black people gathering and creating as a threat. And they are correct in feeling the inherent power of unavoidable change that Black people require when labouring against erasure.
On witnessing the banner, made in this impermanent space and time, will someone sign the word ‘beautiful’ and, without hearing soca in the background, feel the Blackness of the cloth’s print? I wonder if someone will imagine the sonic similarity between a crashing wave and a blazing fire. Will my loosened stitch give way to a High Park cherry blossom and, when it falls, will someone pick it up and know that I thought of them when I tried to secure a memory? The banner accounts for what is both archived and continuously disappearing – the knowing that lies in the performance of labour itself.
Before leaving I laughed to Syrus: “This gives a whole new definition to free labour.” He replied, “Free-ing labour.” Free to hold space, express ourselves, and work collectively next to each other. With the last of my thread, Syrus and I held the same pattern in our hands, working from either end towards the center. All the while, I received stories of historical Black activist movements and moments where hands and hearts worked collectively in resistance to being taken from. For Black queertrans folks, femmes, and women who resist invisibilization: we have the right for our work together to be seen as the catalyst for activism. The invisible performance is where movement-building happens, to witness is our labour.
1. Taylor, Diana. “The Archive and the Repertoire.” Duke University Press, 2003, 3–5.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822385318.
2. Hartman, Saidiya. “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner.” SouthAtlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (2018):465–90.https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942093.