After the Party. Joshua Chambers-Letson

a bar against the wall of a cramped, black, downstairs room and a platform set up at the front, before which people huddled on the floor, or stood wherever they could find a spot. Carmelita Tropicana emceed a host of performances for and inspired by you: Guinevere Turner read a concrete poem composed of your better voicemails, Matmos reperformed Darby Crash’s signature circle burn (burning a circle into the skin with a cigarette), and Nao Bustamante arrived as a grieving punk widow, draped in a fur coat with billowing black veils shrouding her face. The costume, an ostentatious bid for the role of prime griever, materialized what she would later describe as her performance’s “aesthetics of grief.”20 Before grieving, however, the awkward tedium of the live.

      Accompanied by a guitarist dressed in a horse mask, Jason Martin, Nao began assembling the stage. It took some time—too much time—and at one point Carmelita, who was working hard to fill the air, teased, “You know, I think they’re just going to do this and they’re not doing anything. It’s going to be a durational performance.” But soon enough, the performance began. Nao stood at the front of the space, dropping the coat, exposing her body to the room, with a skinny bikini-esque bottom and top, high-heeled boots, and the lengthy veil reaching down to her midsection. She danced enthusiastically to a vintage Spanish-language beach song before setting the record to a slower, sultrier number. Laying on the platform, torqueing her body in a host of directions and pulling a microphone to her face, she sang, but instead of singing she was screaming. Something between a Darby Crash or Alice Bag rendition of “Somewhere My Love” and the howl of indescribable grief.

      After I got the call that you were dead, I sat in the middle of the street for a few minutes, early morning Chicago traffic driving around me, before calmly walking back home and through the front door, where I began to howl. A few years later I sit in Nao’s Los Angeles studio and ask her about that performance. “All performance is an expression of pain,” she told me. “It’s kind of like a primal scream.”21 As she screamed the song her voice was frayed, shredding at its outermost limit and shrieking the lyrics into the broken air: “Someday we’ll meet again my love.” A lie, perhaps, but the truth was harder to bear, and as if to help her carry the burden, some people in the audience began to shriek along with her. She was bringing them together. Performance “is like hosting a party,” she says.22

      The naked vulnerability of Bustamante’s screaming body reminded me of your description of her 1992 performance, Rosa Does Joan, in which “exhibitionism is a mode of comportment that insists on a certain decibel of emotion, one that like many aspects of Latino culture are considered too loud or unharmonious by normative ears … [and] scrambles the public/private dictates of normative desire.”23 You called her a “vulnerability artist,” transforming her body into a conduit for “ugly feelings” and affective excess, while revaluing and revealing both to be queer, brown ways of creatively negotiating and living in a limiting world.24

      Figure P.1. Photo of America the Beautiful in Nao Bustamante’s studio, July 9, 2017. Photograph by the author. (Reproduced with artist’s permission.)

      It is a lot for one body to bear this kind of burden, but in performance the burden is shared out amongst the many. While she screamed into the microphone, one could catch shades of her character in America the Beautiful, who you described as “an individual in need of public feelings, a character representing a raw need for public emotion and recognition.”25 In that piece, Bustamante’s character (a brown woman) reaches to attain (and fails spectacularly to realize) the impossible, self-negating ideal of whiteness. The screaming mourner before us, however, stubbornly clings to the darkness and to the black and brown recesses of queer of color grief and rage. But she is no more likely to be successful since she was reaching for someone who could not come back.

      Martin’s guitar goes wild and Bustamante’s screaming stops as she slowly rolls her body off the platform and into the audience. They part, making way for her, as she swims through them like a body surfer floating on (or, rather, wriggling through) a mosh pit. The act was entirely improvised. “I didn’t have a plan for after. After the screaming. I didn’t have a plan,” she told me. “How do you get out of that kind of performance?”26 Then, as she made her way around the room, something happened: People started to reach out to touch her. At first to help her move, lifting and prodding her body through the packed space. But then it was something else, as if they were taking care of her. “It wasn’t rehearsed,” she said; “the whole point of the piece was to lose it.”27 In losing it, she became common to us and we become common with her.

      Touched by her breakdown, we reached out to touch her, sometimes literally, as if responding to and sharing her “raw need for public emotion and recognition.” “It was healing,” she surmised, “not that anyone can heal that quickly.”28 And then the performance didn’t end so much as she crawled up next to the bar, where she stood up and ordered a drink. She was “not letting it end by never ending it.”29 Which is maybe another way of saying that the end was just the beginning of a new durational performance: life in the time after your death.

      There is something communist about the way a performance can draw a room together, allowing radically different people to share life (and death) as they try to take care of each other. Each person touching Bustamante’s body had a different proximity to you, to her, or to the scream, and it was that difference that constituted the grounds of our being together. Whatever our relation of being together was, it was founded in difference, rather than a relation of equivalence. In the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx describes communism as a system of redistribution founded on relations of nonequivalence: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”30 Communism was necessary, Marx argued, because the capitalist mode of production takes things that are “distinct, possess different properties, are measured in different units, are incommensurable” and reduces them to “a numerical relationship” in which they are measured by way of a general equivalent, thereby “mak[ing] them commensurable.”31 In order to foster a world of boundless exchangeability, capitalism flattens difference into equivalence, making singularity into commensurability. In the place of capital’s commons of equivalence, communism calls for a commons of incommensurability: a sphere of relation structured less by the flat social fictions of possession, equality, and equivalence, than by a mode of sharing out, just redistribution, and being together in racial and sexual particularity.

      You located the communism of incommensurability in the work of, and relationship between, Eve Sedgwick and Gary Fisher:

      I use the term “communism” to help us think a certain communing of incommensurable singularities that can be enacted through even impersonal sex. But I also mean just plain communism. But let me be more exact, by “just plain communism” I do not mean to invoke the communism of a mythical society of equals, but, instead, the communism of living within a sense of the commons, a living in common.… Communism is first and foremost about the precondition for emancipation. But emancipation from what, we might ask? Here we come to understand emancipation as freedom from historical forces that dull or diminish our sense of the world. Nancy points out that Marx himself argued that the commune was the antithesis of empire. Communism would therefore be antithetical to our inner and outer colonialism, those blockages that disallow our arrival at an actual sense of the world, which is the world as a plurality of senses.32

      By placing decolonial praxis and minoritarian emancipation at the center of your conceptualization of communism, this conception of the communism of incommensurability calls for a form of “being-with, in difference and discord” where racial and sexual differences are not extinguished, but shared out with each other: “This commons, this experience of being-in-common-in-difference, offers [us] a map of life where singularities flow into the common, enacting a necessary communism.”33 Communism being necessary, here, because it labors to sustain freedom and More Life for queer and trans people of color. Minoritarian performance can be, as it was for those few flickering moments of Bustamante’s scream, the means through which this “necessary communism” shifts from mere ideality to (albeit ephemeral) reality.

      Performance, like communism, like the party, is an ephemeral, temporary happening in which singular beings crash into each other