Namwali Serpell on Sun Ra's Glittering Black Matter

In the new issue of NYRB, Namwali Serpell reflects on Sun Ra's life, theologies, poems, references, and person as seen in photographs: "In the center of the photo, from the coarse bright orb of his headdress, Sun Ra's back rays out and down, grains of light strewn like stars, tumbling down pleated dunes," writes Serpell about an image by artist Ming Smith. More:

Black matter itself—outer space, with all its velvety richness of the nil—becomes the source of black energy, black futures. On the one hand, Sun Ra says, “the darkness. Nobody made that. It just happens. Light and all that—someone made that; it’s written that they did. But nobody made the darkness. My music is about dark tradition. Dark tradition means a lot more than black tradition.” On the other, Sun Ra named himself for the sun itself, that roiling source of a light that glows and splatters and bolts out of that universal darkness.

In his poetry, he writes:

Out of nowhere they come like
   embers suddenly aflame
     With living reach
       Spiral infinity
         Being.

Yes, Out of nowhere they come
   from the no point

[…]

His jazz, too, oscillates wildly, swerving from muddle to melody, riding dissonance into harmonics, skittering between sparkling notes and abrupt silence—the syncope that makes a rhythm a rhythm. Sun Ra’s art in all forms offers this challenge to black people: If we’re nothing, if we’re just myths, why not make that literal, why not make it material? Why not create, why not become, glittering black matter?

Read on at New York Review of Books.