The last seven years have felt like a long hesitation, or cycles of contraction and release. I’m guided by Oliveros’s breath and by Pema Chodron’s words (drop the storyline, feel the energy) [2] into an article by Alia Al-Saji, [3] a philosopher I encountered through a footnote somewhere and whose words lit a small warm flame inside my doubting self. She's addressing the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, a society of philosophers in which she is a part, and she begins with a hesitation about how her identity as an Arab, Muslim, Iraqi woman relates to her long belonging within the U.S.-centered society to which she speaks. She wonders aloud how this hesitation "might be constitutive, and not simply marginal":

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Can I find the resources within philosophy to survive this lived tension, this hesitation—and to think it—without reducing it to a mere schema or dismissing it as an accidental sideline of history?  [4]

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Among the people she gathers around her words, people who also have felt their way into hesitations, she focuses on Henri Bergson (La pensée et le mouvant, 1938) and Frantz Fanon (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952) because "instead of resolving hesitation, they do not seem to be afraid to dwell with it, to perform and sustain it, to think it." [5]

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Dwelling with hesitation joins with Christina Sharpe's "wake work," which necessitates dwelling in, inhabiting, the ongoing wake of slavery; "theorizing the multiple meanings of that abjection . . . through living them in and as consciousness." [6] The wake is a past that isn't past [7], and hesitation is one way for the body to show that it recognizes this ongoing history, to stay in it even as the surrounding narrative insists on moving forward. 

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Christina Sharpe offers this initial definition of a wake, a definition that she revisits, stays with/in as it shifts into different forms [8], all the while maintaining its presence:

 

Wake: the track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming or moved, in water; it is the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow. [9]

 

Wake work extends beyond hesitation, folds it into patterns of movement and stillness that respond to the present impact of (not-yet) past traumas. Sharpe's visceral metaphors, "the track left on the water's surface," "the disturbance," fold time into space. These folds make space for what she calls "lateral reworkings" of the violence done by the state: acts of care, of witnessing, that reach across the textures of violence and hold them with their presence. [10]

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Al-Saji echoes Sharpe's language as she calls for a critical hesitation that not only "creates an opening into which memories could come flowing back," but also remakes the past from which those memories flow:

 

What is needed, I think, is that hesitation be not only an interruption of the present but also a critical reconfiguration of the past. This is a deeper hesitation, leading to what might be a critical phenomenology. Critical hesitation, on my account, draws in the past so that it, too, hesitates. It is not a masterly, or direct, reiteration of the past—of our pasts, of philosophies past—but indirect and faltering. Feeling its way with care, even love, it is a lateral reworking of the past along with the present. [11]​

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The words care and love feel pivotal in this paragraph. In the “even” with which she qualifies “even love,” I hear (or perhaps insert) the same hesitation I feel when I’m sharing something that feels radiantly truthful and I see blankness in the person or audience I’m speaking to. It’s a hesitancy to say a word that feels full inside yourself and is reflected back as something flimsy, or just something that doesn’t belong—doesn’t belong in philosophical discourse, in academia.

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So I want to gather bell hooks’s compassionately and bravely theoretical book all about love as a companion and conversation-partner for her words, and reflect back a big YES to Al-Saji's mention of love. [12]​

 

The way in which Alia Al-Saji gives shape to her methodology of critical hesitation feels like an action of love, something beginning with her perception of hesitation in herself and a willingness to care for it, to listen to what it might be saying: to draw close to it, rather than to judge it as productive or not productive.  This closeness becomes, in Al-Saji's words, a "caring-remembering" [13], a way of attending to the past, as the living attend to the dead in Christina Sharpe's wake work [14]. 

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. . .

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I never met my great-aunt Kimi Takimoto, but I've ended up with her teacup, a crackle-finish Japanese cup featuring an ink drawing of a Tanuki, the impish and immodest mythological creature who during the Edo period developed a reputation for using their supposedly expandable testicles as everything from flotation devices to raincoats. [15] (The Tanuki drawing isn't crucial to my discussion here, but come on.) 

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Kimi dedicated much of her life to teaching, helping to organize temporary schooling for the children among the over 8,000 Japanese Canadians who were sent through the Hastings Park clearing station before being shipped inland, [16] and later leading a volunteer-run school when she was interned in Kaslo, eventually serving as principal of the first official Security Commission School there [17]. She went on after the war to teach students with disabilities at schools in Ontario. Starting in 1971, she suffered a series of mental breakdowns and was in and out of hospitals until her death in 1994. [18] 

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I recognize in what I know of her life story the outlines of high achievement on overdrive, a brilliant woman working doubly hard to prove her worthiness against a background of racist hatred that painted her as fundamentally inferior. [19] My mother writes of how, a few years after her first mental breakdown, and following a trip she took to Japan, Kimi "had [. . .] adopted a different attitude."  [20] "[S]he spoke with her friend . . . about easing up on work and planned to do creative things. She was fed up, having spent more than half of her life fighting for causes and accommodating others, and felt now it was time to forget the past, and change." She devoted herself to writing poetry and a play about the "evacuation" (as the Canadian government had called the forced displacement and internment of Japanese Canadians). [21]​

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In fall of 1975, her health had worsened again, and my mom writes that she was "picked up by the police for singing and dancing in a parking lot. She said she was rehearsing her play." [22]​

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When I first heard of her play, I scoured her notes with my heart in my mouth, wanting to champion her writing and give it the place it hadn't had during her lifetime. But reading her words left me hesitant, maybe even a little embarrassed— was it flatness that I was reacting to? or just the sound of someone not being heard?

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. . .

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In the light of love and the words of this person I never knew, I pick up Auntie Kimi's teacup, put it down, light a candle.

 

The eggshell crackle glaze reflects the light and makes me think of the Australian Aboriginal aesthetic of bir'yun, which Deborah Bird Rose translates as "shimmer" and links to an all-night dance in which she experienced "a kind of foregrounding and backgrounding, flipping back and forth to the point where the music and the dance become iridescent (or shimmer) with ancestral power." [23]

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I join this with the complex love with which the writer Junichiro Tanizaki describes an aesthetic of darkness in his essay "In Praise of Shadows." [24] His words bring me both expansive identification and curling shame, an alternation of closeness and distance. Here, for instance, is his lovely encomium to a particular traditional Japanese toilet:

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As I have said there are certain prerequisites: a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quiet so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kantō region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. [25]

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And beside that I hold the sensations in my body as I read the racialized and misogynistic fear that has seeped into his evaluation of darkness, as he describes the bodies of "traditional Japanese women" (in contrast to the full-breasted and gleaming figures of European women) as "stick dolls" that are "nothing more than poles upon which to hang clothes," for their skin that hides its darkness under a "translucent whiteness." [26] Does he know how my young ballet classmate's casual remark ("hey, you look like a stick") hardened my deepest wish for my flat-chested body to be anything other than what it was? Or does he know, more importantly, how years earlier, before other voices had seeped in, I had looked at my mother's straight figure and hoped that I would be as beautiful as she was?

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But Tanizaki turns his attention away from the figures themselves, darkness or whiteness, to the flickering between these points: "we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates." [27]

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I breathe into my curling shoulders, wonder what my Auntie Kimi felt, whether these strange social norms ever touched her too. My question makes me laugh a little bit. Of course they must have. I feel both sad and happy, less alone. I pour us both some tea, take a sip.

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Among the poems that Kimi left in her journals, I'm drawn to a haiku:

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Between the spaces

always there are more fine lines

than meets the quick eye

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In my mind, the parking lot where Auntie Kimi was singing and dancing is dark, lit by a streetlight. I stay with her gestures of refusal, with the tensions and releases that hatch the distance between us.

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I wonder whether hesitation is actually slow-motion iridescence.