REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE by lee hooper

"Frank B. Wilderson III writes on Afropessimism, an idea that societal structure is dependent on upholding antiblackness and its violence. Black life is not relational; it is the site of perpetual structural violence. In lee hooper’s REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE we begin here, in that space of unmooring. The project is urgent, raw, and unfiltered. Recorded, performed, and released in a single week, it captures a moment of immediate reaction to the world hooper inhabits—a world structured by antiblackness, where survival is never guaranteed. There is only reaction, no time to soften the edges of what is lived and what is, and can still be, taken.

manifesto (for Huey P. Newton) is a reading of an excerpt from Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide.
“We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible.”
To speak these words into a world structured to deny life is to insist on life with radical clarity, radical love, even at the risk of nonexistence. To love that deeply is beyond what many of us are taught. And hooper leaves us with the question: “Who really taught you how to love?”.

hoyt-schermerhorn (for Sandra Bland and Saniyah Cheatham) erupts with hooper’s emergence into rap. Set over a hymn-like beat that becomes ritualistic in its urgency, the vocals are energetic, jagged, and alive with the grief of insistence. Here, they reiterate that Black life is inseparable from structural violence; and you hear hooper’s tenacity in their sound; in fragmentation; in their biting humor, asking the listener to reckon with the absurdity of denial. Like, how y'all really gonna try and tell us we done this to ourselves?

rhinoceros woman (for Assata Shakur) moves differently. This delicate duet between lee hooper and Keenyn Omari is a beautiful breath. The trading melodies drift between each other, creating space for reflection? Meditation? Or maybe just a moment to drop your shoulders. The power of Shakur’s poem, Rhinoceros Woman, reveals figures of strength, resilience, and the fortitude of care. Here, survival is demonstrated in the discipline of hope.

The speed, intensity, and experimentation of this project are inseparable from its meaning. If we are to live in opposition of antiblackness, then we must accept that Black suffering is structural, perpetual, and unavoidable. lee hooper’s REVOLUTIONARY SUICIDE embodies this lesson and in doing so, asks us to listen deeply: to the words, the grief, the breath, the music. To hold Black suffering and Black survival in the same palm and with it create possibility. To feel what it means to insist on life when life itself is always at risk."
-Shara Lunon

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