THE DEVIL IN ALL BLACK
This is an offering for lives,—as fragile as the fluttering wings of the newborn luna moth—extinguished far before ever being fully lived. Of futures that will never be. Of dreams that will never be realized. Of memories that will never be made. There will be no weddings. There will be no high school graduations or school dances. There will be no pictures of your unborn children who were once granted physical permanence through the medium of film. There are no futures here.
This place is precisely no-place; teetering between the unmapped liminal and the bloodied precision of Descartes’ obligation to conquer the abject barbarity of the Other, and ultimately lay claim to conquering the wilds of man. What I am describing has many names (yet no name at all): «El más allá», the undercommons, black sites, the necropolis (the Dead City) , etc., but I prefer the colloquial familiarity of the bends.
The year is 2012 (or perhaps it is 1734)—I find myself surrounded by the lost boys in an abandoned house in Northeast Ohio (or perhaps my flesh has just been purchased by François Poulin). There is little to no lettered documentation of this period of my being, aside from the digital archives recording our various arrests. It was as if all that had occurred within the confines of that dilapidated haunt had never really happened at all. It was as if all that remained were the smoldering cinders of Old Montréal after having burned the whole-fucking-city to the ground. The state has digital records of our shared criminality (an archive collection in Canada also houses the nearly three-hundred-year-old validation of my delinquency).
An obituary of my late great-grandmother Irene “Budmah” Boyd.
The Devil in All Black is a short film/a visual/a semiotic/an album/a documentary/a eulogy/a diptych/a cautionary tale/a potter’s field. It could be argued that it is the latter half/extension of a chapbook of poetry (D E A T H D A N C E, pending publication) originally crafted during my time at Case Western Reserve University, but my great-grandmother Irene (who has been dead since 2002) would presently tell you that it is a project that started far before my birth—far before the restraints and perimeters of my body. I was born with the caul, so I cannot assure you if these intentions have origin in 2012, 2018, 1991, or even 1734.
My father’s taxi license from the early ‘70s.
The field of hauntology has been popularized by theorists like Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher, but I am searching for something deeper; something that predates the written by thousands and thousands of years; something that is a priori and consistent with genetic memory or postmemory. This is a non-Western tradition that was intricately passed down from those who sought drowning themselves in place of granting servitude to the Devil himself. This is an act of mourning and healing that transcends the limitations of «La ciudad letrada». Influenced by the Yoruba/Berber/Fon cosmologies, temporalities, ontologies, and epistemologies of my childhood; The Devil in All Black creates a non-linear wormhole between the past and the present that exhumes the countless dead who have gone unrecognized and unheard.
From left-to-right: My sister (Marie) with my brother (Aaron); my late mother (Deljnetta) holds my newborn niece (Winter); my mother before going into work; my mother cradles me as a newborn baby alongside my brother.
The Devil in All Black will premiere 9 APRIL 2025 at the University of Pittsburgh. Additional screenings will be announced shortly for: LOS ANGELES, CA; CLEVELAND, OH; NEW YORK, NY; CÁDIZ, ESPAÑA.
