Standing Outside Myself: The Black Ecstatic

I was grateful to devise and facilitate a workshop called “Standing Outside Myself: The Black Ecstatic.” I began by drawing on ecstasy’s etymology as a framework for our thinking—the idea of “standing outside oneself” or “displacement from the proper place” became a guiding thrust as we explored ecstasy in the black tradition with a three-pronged approach: ecstasy and spirituality, ecstasy and sex/love, and ecstasy and nature. 

The first object I asked participants to encounter was an untitled, black-and-white photograph by Roy DeCarava, in which the blurred subject displays open palms. I asked what associations came up upon viewing the photograph, and was met with incredible answers from participants, including ones like praise dancing, jubilation, surrender, and grief. I had hoped this photo would provide a visual articulation that could belong in either or all of the three categories we were to discuss. 

We then did a close reading of Wanda Coleman’s poem “Requiem for a Nest,” as a poetic example of ecstasy and nature. We had a rich discussion about ecstasy’s relationship to decay. We surmised as a group that ecstasy is capacious enough to hold instances of death and waste, as evidenced in the poem by the provocative image of the bird’s nest made of various discarded objects. One participant brilliantly zeroed in on the word hatchery, noting that it signals the industrial interventions humans have made to animals, and the decay and abuse that has resulted from it. 

As we moved into the category of ecstasy and spirituality, we sat a spell with Amiri Baraka’s “An Agony. As Now.” One aspect that really stood out in our discussion of this poem was the idea of the “split self” that Baraka draws out from the very beginning. The speaker is peering out from inside themselves. I drew a connection back to our initial definition of ecstasy as standing outside oneself, to illustrate that though Baraka’s speaker is experiencing the inverse of that, they are still just as displaced. This displacement could be one between the spirit and the body or between the self as a whole and the body it exists inside. 

We then meditated on ecstasy as it relates to sex and love by way of Alison C. Rollins’s poem “Love in Outer Space.” We lingered with the powerful alliteration and spoke about the sonic atmosphere it creates, how that repetition can lift off into a portal of ecstatic feeling. We noted the duality of the metaphors in the poem (“She is stardust,” for example) and drew a connection to other dualities we discussed, such as life and decay in Coleman’s poem, and inside and outside in Baraka’s. 

I asked participants to write an ecstatic ode to a love object or a feature of nature, or an ode that was spiritual in some way. For an added challenge, I encouraged participants to choose a stylistic feature in one of the poems we discussed (alliteration or provocative image, to name two examples) in their response. The responses yielded were stunning and varied. It was truly extraordinary to witness the participants’ composition in real time.

We closed by watching a video of Sun Ra Arkestra performing “Love in Outer Space,” which Rollins’s title honors. The dynamics and build of this particular song, the layering of its various moving parts and instruments, felt very much like it embodied all of the stylistic elements of the three poems we read together. If there’s anyone to help move us into an ecstatic space and give us a parting word, it’s Sun Ra.