“Think not this grave shall keep her,
This marriage-bed confine;
Death may dig it deep and deeper
She shall climb it like a vine.
Body that was quick and sentient,
Dear as thought or speech,
Death could not, with one trenchant
Blow, snatch out of reach!” (Cullen 78)
Cullen describes how in death, the “brown girl” transcends that which holds her physical body to reveal how her “quick and sentient” body and expansive spoken/unspoken and imaginary are not so easily destroyed by the state of death (Cullen 78). This calls to the rhizomatic thinking of horizontalism that all life necessitates death and vice versa and thus none is more important than another and in death she reaches this state of unrestrained motion. Her descent from the living world of necropolitics where one's death and life are controlled and dictated as valuable by the state, as she describes how no human object will hold her down, as the “vine(s)” of the ecological world will grow and her presence and complex spirit will climb upwards away from the rigid categories of the world (Cullen 78). This experience is adjacent to the erotic and empowered feeling found in breaking hierarchical positions in society and feeling one's own self outside of social pressures and definitions. It is found frequently in brief moments hard to sustain, but those moments are where I believe the “brown girl” and her life are “out of reach” from the clutches of permanent death, as in life she was trapped as a racialized subject under the overwhelming force of white supremacy and capitalism. Her body is described as “quick,” reminiscent of being unbounded as she lay in a “marriage-bed” confined by her gender and status as a woman only defined by a man and as a human only defined against the white oppressors' understanding of liberal humanism and white supremacy found in the degradation of blackness and those proximal to blackness. She is “quick” to climb the vines away from a sign of her performance of womanhood, as marriage beds are meant to be a source of pride for chaste women who police their sexuality to romanticize a male feeling of ownership and authority over their bodies as another antithesized subject– as a woman.
This release in death is seen in the similarly entangled narrative of sex and pleasure seen in St.Juju, where Enid and Juju engage in an act of intimacy when discussing Enid's escape from the safety of an enclave which criminalizes their love and degrades Enid for a genetic trait she could not control which allows her to process trash into usable waste naming her as a “hound-mutant”. Her body is being commodified and her social role is on the run not belonging to any state, while Juju is a member of an enclave and could gain social status and success if she continues to conform and follow the rules which she knows to be arbitrary. In a discussion where Enid asks Juju to come with her and they can be together and free from the constraints of the enclave, Juju is convinced by the connection they share in an erotic moment. She describes that she “dissolve(s)” into her touch as she feels “shameless as a dog” as her body experiences a complete embodied transcendence into a state unconstrained by outside forces, she describes the “tender, wonderous, small, aching, and needy” she is in this moment and how her flesh becomes “pliable, weak” all as she is experiencing the presence of her very being and soul with another for the first time completely naked and revealed not wholly pristine but uniquely alive (Solomon 4). Her expression of "shameless(ness)" and relation to the “dog” show how she is breaking from the identification with the hound and a negative trait, instead it is being replaced by a feeling of sexuality and equalitarian freedom. Similarly, works like “small” and “needy” show how defining humanity does not revolve around perfection and acceptance of some variables, it is in fact the imperfection and raw emotions that connect us, like grief in the Cullen piece and the bonds we forge with ourselves and others in erotic moments (Solomon 4). The scene for Enid and Juju is warm and ablaze as she feels the radiation of Enid’s touch leaving her “skin still raw and inflamed” as her “brown skin peaks through” is a moment where as a reader we leave the dystopian realm and address how she is revealed in this moment outside of the realm of her mind. Ultimately both stories connect to the feelings of leaving a mental space of fugitivity for freedom of selfhood that can be found in the ecology around oneself particularly once leaving a frame of human superiority.