we pilot the blood

Our first video poem in this issue is part of a special insert from Good Symptom, a digital film anthology from The 3rd Thing Press.

Quenton Baker’s “we pilot the blood” is a time-based erasure, a video project that selects, culls, and arranges text from U.S. Senate documents detailing the events of an 1841 rebellion aboard the ship “Creole,” a mutiny that led to the escape of most of the ship’s enslaved people: “A long, bloody possession / a long bloody possession / we refuse this condition / we refuse this condition.”

As a project corresponding with one of the only extant records of successful slave rebellion, “we pilot the blood” is thinking about what page-based terms like “found,” “blackout” and “erasure” might connote further in histories of Black resistance. Across the video, Baker uses repetition as a form of insistence, rumination, and speculation: “consider ‘belonging’ to the slave / the sea without wound / the sea without wound / the sea without wound / the sea without wound /.” This is a video poem working in the tradition of an erasure without scissors or a blade. Instead, between footage of original documents overlaid with water, there is Baker’s voice cutting through the screen: “piece of God / return as a bowie knife / calling out / calling out / calling out / calling out in a crowded English.” 

In Baker’s footage, ripples on the surface of water move like a language thrumming in and out of focus, as the poet’s voice muscles against the limits of official records that, through their censorship, betray the excesses of suffering that defined the slave trade. Scholar Sadiya Hartman has asked, of the archive, “How does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated…as the practice of freedom?” And Baker has replied with video erasure, now a digital form of “un-telling”: “they could not kill / the sunlight in me.”

Good Symptom is A serial anthology of genre-fluid short films and critical essays, The 3rd Thing’s first time-based publication troubles the boundaries between cinematic and literary forms, showcasing innovative work that pushes the language of poetry, essay, memoir and fiction off the page and onto the screen. Every month, subscribers to Good Symptom receive 1-3 short films and accompanying critical essays by project curators.

– Sarah Minor, TriQuarterly Film Editor