Oh, where do you go? Joy that makes us…
from “Joy” by Kadhja Bonet
Maybe Art’s only purpose is to preserve the Self.
Sometimes I play a game in which my primitive craft fires
upon an alien ship whose intention is the destruction
of the earth. Other times I fall in love with a word
like somberness. Or moonlight juicing naked branches.
All species have a notion of emptiness, and yet
the flowers don’t quit opening.
from “Lighthead's Guide to the Galaxy” by Terrance Hayes
This EOY newsletter has taken on many forms. Since my last post in October, I found myself wrestling with a slew of emotions, the main one being uncertainty about the purpose of writing. On top of everything happening globally, personally I was very, very tired. Navigating an increasingly apathetic pandemic, workload and familial woes, writing became a burden, and I started to resent myself for even attempting to make a “career” of it in the first place. At first, I wanted to do a more formal “end of the year” summation, but that felt inauthentic. But I’ll still share a few moments of 2023 that were notable. I published my first collection of poetry. I traveled to Italy for the first time. I was a poet-in-residence at the San Francisco Museum of the African Diaspora. I taught my first poetry seminar. I saw Beyonce, Esperanza Spalding and Anita Baker in concert. And while this newsletter will return to more niche topics of eco-insurgency, climate communications and Black ecologies, I needed to get out something more, all encompassing if you will. Instead of writing, I wanted to experience. But of course, one informs the other, and here we are.
All of my work leading up to December has been about absence, mourning the spaces that remain when the physical is removed. So much deep, ancestral grief. When you are studying and teaching climate catastrophe, it is so easy to become overwhelmed by loss, seeing it in materialized in land loss, colonialism, genocide, resource extraction. A list of declared extinct species, majority birds and freshwater invertebrates, circulated various social media platforms and compounded that grief. But grief and rage are sisters – they feed each other, and perhaps, can motivate each other towards a better world. If we cannot rely on hope, perhaps we can do something with revenge.
During the month of November, I participated in a climate justice writing workshop with some fellow Bay Area writers that challenged me to think critically about the new world that is emerging from the mouth of the old, the one that we are shaping now in the present moment. I had to really dig deep, beyond the topsoil where my most immediate sense of doom lies, to the tough bedrock that grounds my sense of self. As much grief and despair as I feel, I am buttressed by an immeasurable sense of duty, discipline and love for my culture that compels me to keep on keeping on. My granny’s favorite Negro proverb takes on a whole new meaning: “All I gotta do is stay Black and die.”
Now, during Kwanzaa, I find myself returning to memories of celebrations, calls to action, moments of blessed community gatherings. The pandemic has horribly reshaped our notions of community and care, and I must admit this has probably been the loneliest holiday season yet. So I, like many folks who are isolated due to the government encouraged, hyper-individualism “you do you” attitude that has lead to over 1300 COVID related deaths in the past week, have been diving back into the self-archive to bring comfort this “unseasonably warm” holiday season. When I was little, Kwanzaa was a pretty big deal in my family. My mom would always participate in and attend Black community events: we would read stories of Black revolutionaries and martyrs, light the candle, study, celebrate and eat together as we looked forward to the new year. The story of Kwanzaa, like many Black stories, is complicated, filled with hope but also betrayal, and I invite you to read this article to better understand the tensions surrounding this holiday.
I wasn’t aware of Kwanzaa’s questionable origins until senior year of college, when I thought I was jaded but really wasn’t, and decided to divorce myself from the celebration. Now that I’m a bit more removed, I wonder how Kwanzaa can be interpreted not as a holiday, but as a framework, a ritual, a manifestation, for better vocalizing our goals as members of a Pan-African community. Beyond that, how can these principles help shape our ecological future as Black peoples? Below, I’ve considered some socio-ecological implications of Kwanzaa:
1.Umoja//Unity
To stay united in the family, community, and nation
How can we, as eco-insurgents, commit to our unity? What work needs to be done to divorce ourselves from heteronormative, white patriarchal boundaries of family and obligation? As Black people, how do we see ourselves situated in the United States, as both globally and internally displaced peoples? In the words of Derek Walcott (which is also one of the epigraphs of my poetry collection, Heirloom): “I had no nation now but the imagination.” As a formerly colonized and currently oppressed people, how are we becoming architects of new worlds beyond this current one of greed, environmental exploitation and hyper-individualism? How can we better become enmeshed in our ecological future while acknowledging our fractured ecological present? What wounds do we need to wash? What wounds can we inflict to build stronger bones for the future?
2.Kujichagulia//Self-determination
To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves
Videos, screengrabs, documentaries flood my timelines of freedom fighters, once herdsmen, once artists, once farmers, once carpenters, once fishermen, now called “terrorists,” “incendiaries,” “pirates,” being radicalized in such a way that compels them to physically resist and protect their land and their peoples. Resisting occupation and extraction turns land caregivers into land defenders (though I don’t want to draw too much of a distinction between the two, as they are enmeshed in each other), and I am reminded of Arundhati Roy’s quote: “Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theater. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation.”
3.Ujima//Collective Work and Responsibility
To build and maintain our community together and make our community’s problems our problems and to solve them together
For many of us who are returning to indigenous ways of knowing, or reclaiming insurgent knowledges learned outside of capitalism, life is all about reciprocity: when we receive a lot we must give a lot. Everything is a ritual of gratitude. The earth is grateful to be in relation with us, which is why she shows off her flowering trees, orange and red scaffolded deserts, snow capped mountains, coral reefs, you name it. There are so many ways she is beautiful and there are always seasons of abundance. Winter brings squash and hearty greens, spring and summer greet us with a plethora of stone fruit. I approach my writing practice with the similar relation, hoping to articulate this desire for abundance, not out of greed, but to step out of an extractive mode of being, and instead bear witness to, and celebrate, the earth. Besides, how can you look at the intricate pinks of an orchid mantis, or behold the majesty of a saguaro cactus, or get lost in the intricacies of a crown of thorns starfish, and not be filled with a happiness that almost feels excessive?
Part of our power is our capaciousness, but also our inability to be neatly defined, to refuse definition, to become treasonous in our fugitivity. Less interested in providing comfort or being spectacle, Black and Indigenous art practices demand that we embrace our abundance. It demands that we see ourselves in the future, and in the words of the late great June Jordan, “commit to the friction and the undertaking of the pearl.”
4.Ujamaa//Cooperative Economics
To create and maintain African-American owned businesses and to profit from them together
Here, I am less interested in the “business” aspect of things, but more in the profit together aspect of Ujamaa. With more and more Black bourgeoisie functioning as white masters, how can we usurp capitalist ways of relation? How can we pour more resources, more knowledge, more creativity into cultivating the communities we are a part of? Where can we plant more community gardens, where can we exchange labor and resources, how can we repair, how can we be in relation to each other in ways that do not harm our people or the planet? Furthermore, as residents in the belly of the empire, how can we be in solidarity with our African siblings on the continent who are poisoned and displaced (at best) by these extractive economies? What are ways we can kill our own egos and seek out joy in interconnectedness?
5.Nia//Purpose
To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness
Almost a decade ago at San Diego Comic Con, Living Single actress alum Erika Alexander (Maxine Shaw, attorney at law baybeeee), now co-producer of Concrete Park, expressed that a studio executive told her that “Black people don’t like science fiction because Black people don’t see themselves in the future.” Moving past this gross oversight of Black speculative fiction works that span decades, arguably even centuries, Alexander responded: “For Black people, the past is painful, the present is precarious, but the future is free.” A video of her response has recently been recirculated around social media, and given this ongoing question of what the future brings (as it emerges in both media and politics), it feels particularly timely. What restoration, what regeneration, what new technologies must be invented for us to step into our divine and social purposes? If we are stewards of the earth, so to speak, how can we harness our duty to each other to a shared responsibility and affection for the land? As we maneuver our precarious present, can we become contractors, gardeners, inventors, medicine people, woodworkers, artists all invested in a bold, Black ecological future?
6.Kuumba//Creativity
To do always as much as we can to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it
We are taught to think of excess as sinful, from a young age. And of course, excess in the vein of accumulation and selfishness, is antithetical to an earth centric practice. But my ancestors have shown me that abundance is my birthright. Austerity, just like civility, is used as a means to deny marginalized people agency, or to dismiss our own cultural modes of worship. Columbia University professor and writer Saidiya Hartman writes in her second book, Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals, that during the turn of the 20th century, whites in the North began describing newly relocated negros as “prone to excess,” thus expressing one of many racist reasons they did not want Black folks moving into their neighborhoods (but nevertheless, found themselves encroaching on Black neighborhoods for food, fashion, culture and music). Here lies the fanaticism of Black aesthetics. We are over the top, extra, indulgent, devoted to beauty, filled with fantasies of waywardness. Our desires too big to ever be appreciated by the colonial machine. We embody all that is gaudy and sensual. We demand attention. A dressed up statement: “I am here, I am aching to be seen and accept all that is mine and return it tenfold.”
7.Imani//Faith
To believe with all our hearts in our people and the righteousness and victory of our struggle
In a 1979 interview with Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Toni Cade Bambara spoke of the Black spirit as “…inherent black nature, that we have not addressed: the tension, the power that is still latent, still colonized, still frozen and untapped, in some 27 million people. We do not know how to unleash, we do not even know how to speak of it in a courageous manner yet.” How can we attach our faith to action, to reinvigorate this latent spiritual consciousness as part of a collective body? What rage must we reclaim, what spiritual measures must we lean back into in order to cope with the unjust nature of our material world? How can we transcend these restrictive western frameworks of being by reconnecting with spirit and its living, breathing motion throughout the natural world?
Dr. Kimberly Ruffin, author of Black on Earth, theorizes as “the beauty vs burden paradox” that shapes most members of the Black diaspora’s engagements with the natural world. Black history is one put in direct opposition to the land, our bodies used as tools for pillage and environmental spoil. At the same time, Black people have been instrumental in stewarding the natural world. Dispossession became the mother of invention. Hence, our fugitivity has been instrumental to creating modes of life outside a carceral apparatus: legacies of herbal medicine, cooperative economics, reclaiming vacant lots for gardens.
Solidarity should not be built solely on narratives of sadness, removal and loss – what is greater that connects us than our fights against climate change, white supremacy, transphobia, cultural loss, etc? How are we going to relate to each other once these systems crumble? The nameless ancestors that float around in my heart and on my pages are a reminder that I will always be stuck in the loop of trying to remember where I found solidarity before the fracture. So I reach for new homes in my writing, eager to find a place where Black ecological futurity, land back, justice, in all its expansiveness, can rest. I wonder what this process of homemaking means: who is allowed to make a home, who is allowed to claim a place, who is forgotten in this venture. This is not me giving up, but attempting to find a place to channel what Aimé Césaire calls a “cosmic rage,” a persistent desire to decry banal acceptance of the “natural order of things.” My forebears wrote feverishly, fully cognizant that the scars of the past would reopen into the wounds of today. America, as it was created, was never meant to survive. We need an entire reset.
I have fallen in and out of love with this world many times. It is through storytelling, through the act of bearing witness and the process of co-creating new futures that we begin to chip away at the machine that renders us passive observers. Our eyes are powerful, our art is the way we speak bolder worlds into existence. We are often taught to approach our practices from a scarcity mindset, but I wonder what magnificence we can construct when we instead imagine a more decadent world, one that is ripe for the taking.
I have a lot of great stuff coming up in 2024, stay tuned!
If you are interested in reading more of my work, please visit my website.
Check out two of my most recent publications below:
Sierra Magazine Winter 2023 (in print, soon to be online!): Lichens Make Life Possible
Lithub: What the Marabou Stork Taught Me About Writing in an Era of Mass Extinction and Waste