The perplexity of Christmas trees: ageing, errantry, and intersectional time

Abstract

What is offered by considering ageing, ethics, and intersectionality from a critical phenomenological perspective that draws upon critical race theory? Based upon an extended ethnography of African Americans raising children with illnesses and disabilities, I consider the Christmas trees that a grandmother lovingly decorated each year. These annual trees are portals into the ethical horizons and poetics that permeated her life, not only as an individual but as a historical being whose personal experience was intertwined with, and speaks to, shared ethical horizons and generational time. A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to demonstrating that ageing is racially shaped, resulting in dramatic health disparities, especially among Black Americans in low‐income communities. This grandmother's life exemplifies these inequities. However, typifying social facts do not take us far enough in illuminating the kind of time being she is. In fact, they can be troublesomely deceptive: her life can appear too easy to explain. Informed by feminist phenomenologists, who reframe intersectionality as horizons of significance, alongside Glissant's notions of opacity and errantry, I consider how Christmas trees and other poetics exemplify the opacity and errant creativity of lived time.