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September 16 - September 19, 2022
If you are not a myth whose reality are you? If you are not a reality whose myth are you? Sun Ra
After all, what is endurance to a people who have already endured? What is it to someone who could, at that point, still touch the living hands of a family member who had survived being born into forced labor? Endurance, for some, was seeing what the dance floor could handle. It did not come down to the limits of the body when pushed toward an impossible feat of linear time. No. It was about having a powerful enough relationship with freedom that you understand its limitations.
people cannot only see themselves suffering, lest they believe themselves only worthy of pain, or only celebrated when that pain is overcome. Cornelius had a vision for Black people that was about movement on their own time, for their own purpose, and not in response to what a country might do for, or to, them.
An affection born out of having to make a home out of the confines of dance, or of physically holding up another person. A dream exhibit born out of desperation. I am obsessed with this, I imagine, because of how many times I have leaned into someone or something and called it love, because it had to be. Because if it wasn’t love, then something else would crumble. Sure, the stakes were not a hot meal, or a warm and sheltered place. The stakes for me were sometimes depression, sometimes loneliness, sometimes a morning I didn’t think I could make it to. I am in love with the idea of partnering
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Once, I had a conversation with a poet who also lost their mother. As we charted out our shared grief, the poet told me something they had learned from another poet. “Well, we have two mothers,” they began to tell me. “The one we keep with us in our hearts, and the corpse we can’t put down.”
I think about the small but important distance between gospel as popular music and gospel as a vehicle for salvation: how it is possible to take in the music without much concern for salvation, but still be carried off to a place that feels holy.
our grief decides when it is done with us.
If there is some kind of loophole in the rules of magic, it might be this: the one where a person is able to be invisible until they are desired. Where they are an echo of nonexistence until they can fulfill a need, or tell a story, or be a thread in the fabric of someone else’s grand design. The flawed magic of desiring a body more than an actual person. The magical negro is so replaceable that there is nothing left of them to mourn.
Shoutout to the things that I hope haunt you beyond whatever you might be searching for. This one goes out to the answers I do not have for you, or for myself, and this one goes out to the sins I cannot crawl myself out of in order to forgive the ones you might be buried under. This one goes out to all of the best stories I have never told. The ones I will hold close until I can pass them down to someone else who might pass them down. I have no real magic to promise any of you. I am praying for the most unspectacular of exits.
It would be humorous or fascinating if it wasn’t so suffocating.
The problem with approaching history in America is that too many people measure things by distance and not by impact.
The thing I find myself explaining most vigorously to people these days is that consumption and love are not equal parts of the same machine. To consume is not to love, and ideally love is not rooted solely in consumption.
If there is nowhere for a joke to land, it floats and floats and then is forgotten.
One way trauma can impact us is by the way it makes us consider a polite proximity to violence and oppression as comfort.
Everyone putting on different masks for different worlds and calling it freedom.
I first learned to code-switch through the musical movements of my people, and done among my people in this way, it didn’t feel like a shameful burden. It felt like a generosity—a celebration of the many modes we could all fit into.
survival is sometimes how to adapt until something better arrives. Be who you must be in the job interview or in the college admissions essay or with the elder you love but don’t respect. And then, as a reward for your survival, there may be a small world wherein you can thrive.
A country is something that happens to you. History is a series of thefts, or migrations, or escapes, and along the way, new bodies are added to a lineage. Someone finds a place where they think themselves meant to be, and they stop moving.
A foolish thing is when writers, or curious people who hold information, insist loudly that they wish more people would be talking about a topic and then continue to withhold vehicles for the starting of that conversation.
To look a familiar place in the eye and detail all of its old and unattractive blemishes—that, too, is a type of love for a place. A love not wedded to permanence or wrapped up in the memory of times past, as so much of my love is foolishly wrapped up in. To return to the site of the world coming into focus for you and offering newer, better eyes.
There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.
People ask me to offer them hope, but I’d rather offer them honesty.
If I am going to be afraid, I might as well do it honest. Arm in arm with everyone I love, adorned in blood and bruises, singing jokes on our way to a grave.
