Crown of Sun, Hive of Mirrors

I have been away for close to eight years. A voluntary disappearance, one might say — though the body never truly vanishes; it only learns new latitudes in which to become invisible. I began re-entering public space four years ago. I must be honest: I feel myself contracting again, drawing inward like a sea anemone touched by a curious and careless finger, retreating into the comfortable dark of my own shell.

I left South Africa in 2019 and set course for China. China was perfect for someone who wished to inhabit a twilight zone of their own engineering. I did not speak or understand a word of Mandarin then — language, that social ligament, severed clean. I have since grown into conversations of a basic register, sentences that function like small bridges over wide, uncertain water. But at the time: blissful, chosen muteness.

Then came the crowning. The coronation of the sun, as I call it — Corona, that bright and terrible king. And in China, we lived inside a bubble of fabricated safety, each citizen sealed in their glass capsule. One could order anything online and receive it within days, as long as one did not receive the Red QR Code — that small crimson verdict, that digital stigmata — and find the police and the ambulance waiting at the foot of one's tower block like patient, uniformed pallbearers.

I moved. I was never redded.

I fell ill before the coronation had been named. But here is what I noticed, what the melanin-rich body knew before the scientists stooped to admit it: if you were touched by the sun — if you were the sun's child — your skin was a kind of armour. The children of the sun did not sicken as expected. The melanin persisted, stubborn and luminous as ever.

And so the system, true to its ancient and reflexive nature, blamed them. When things go wrong in the world, black it on the children of the sun. It is the oldest script; the pages are worn soft with use.

But the melanin persisted.

It was only when we recovered — when we could not be blamed — that the outspend began. They called it Airborne. Long lines formed for checkups. White-suited site-men and site-women inserted cotton swabs into nostrils and throats with the detached focus of entomologists pinning specimens. Some were threatened with joblessness, with exile from hotels and restaurants, if they refused what I call the jabberwocky — that needle of uncertain alchemy. Some complied and lost their lives to it. My grandparents were healthy when I last spoke to them. Today they are gone. Dead under the heavy, soft hand of the state.

That was then.

Now I wish to speak of what we have become — in the aftermath of the crowning, in the public space Michael Warner theorises as both constituted and fractured by bodies like mine, by the soliloquies we perform for an audience that may or may not be listening, by the counterpublics that form in the crevices where the dominant public refuses to hold us. Warner's Chapter VII lingers in me like a bruise: the soliloquy as racial performance, the public sphere as a stage designed to exclude certain bodies while demanding they justify their presence. The street. The gallery. The feed. All of it — stage.

Some of us woke as robots. Slaves to our devices. They walk now with heads bowed to their black mirrors, genuflecting before the altar of the screen, a congregation without a god except the algorithm.

Others became walking billboards — the ones the corporates call influencers — who have constructed entire currencies from views and likes, who have made of their faces a commodity as fungible as grain.

Some became better homebodies: unaffected, unvaccinated, still human, still longing — as all humans have ever longed — for connection that arrives without a password. These people, and I would say we, are learning again to stand outdoors for more days than not, to resist the gravity of social anxiety, to let the sun find us again.

And what of those who depended on others for the architecture of their happiness? I suppose they became addicted to online shopping. The dopamine of the delivered parcel — the small coffin-shaped box on the doorstep, full of objects to stand in for the presence of another person.

Then there is the ticking application — the bomb disguised as a stage — guaranteed to make one famous in exchange for one's personal data and the data of everyone who chose to follow. Welcome to what I call the hive. The hive mind. The hive economy. Each cell identical and industrious and warm.

It became most apparent to me at an exhibition entitled Your Curious Journey by Olafur Eliasson — an invitation, the wall text promised, to engage with art as an active participant. The invitation was sincere. But one cannot invite people to be present when they have already left their bodies, when the body stands in the gallery while the self crouches inside a phone screen, hunting for an angle.

Everyone — myself included, I will not pretend otherwise — retreated into their devices. The curation was ignored. We became the spectacle. We became the subject of the very condition the exhibition might have hoped to diagnose. Warner might say this is the logic of the public sphere made grotesquely literal: the space purportedly for encounter and exchange becomes instead a performance of private consumption in public. The counterpublic never fully materialises; it is dissolved into data before it can speak.

Exhibitions have become opportunities to ingest an artist's work into a device, to deliver it to the great processing organs of big technology, where — if prompted correctly — it may be regurgitated by an LLM as something that resembles art but contains no wound, no risk, no choice. The artist is exploited again. Not only by galleries or curators or the academic machine, but now by the public itself — and soon, inevitably, by the fashionistas. But that is another story, and I am not ready to tell it yet.

For now: put your crown on.

Get back out into the sun.

We were built for it — this is what the melanin has always known.

Informed by Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics (2002), particularly Chapter VII's meditation on race, the soliloquy, and the contested geography of public space in New York — the way Black and brown bodies are simultaneously hypervisible and systematically unaddressed within the public sphere; the way counterpublics form not in opposition to that exclusion, but in spite of it, and in the flesh.