creative aliveness in a world that sucks

perching lines, no. 9

Hello gentle-people,

I made a promise to myself in 2021. I promised I would not get into white folks’ business again.¹ I made a decision, informed by the fatigue that was ravishing my body, to do BIPOC centered work and write from a place that cherishes the Black interior² within me. I hold Toni Morrison’s words close to my chest:

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

―Toni Morrison

🐦‍⬛ about perching lines

A “perch” is a light rest. Much needed in a world where many of us have to learn how to catch a break while standing up. In these lighter posts, I will offer poems, questions, and connections for those brief moments of reprieve. [Explore more in this series.]

image of Rev. Dr. Barbara Holmes sourced from here.

The late Rev. Dr. Barbara Holmes³ wrote a book called Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village. I picked it up the day after the election and in return, this book picked me up and is currently stitching me back together. In a chapter focused on the importance of “the village response,” she writes that creating art together can be healing. She goes on to say:

The best response of the village to police violence⁴ is the same as it was during the civil rights movement: creative expressions, and art. We speak poetry and rap rhythms of survival. We offer graffiti images of the slain. We dance and let our bodies reveal our suffering and persistence. And, when all else fails, we sing ourselves sane. Art opens a portal to new realities.

—Rev. Dr. Barbara Holmes, Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village

Reading these quotes from Morrison and Holmes, you might get the sense that they are in conflict. But I would like to believe the artistic response to life-denying powers that is Holmes calls healing the wounded village is different than the artistic response offered in the defense of our humanity described by Morrison. I am inclined to believe remembering this difference will help me keep my promise. We’ll see.

I am writing for my life and after my life.

—me

For a long time, it felt like I was fighting for a place of relevance in their world. These last few years, I have felt like I am just beginning to explore mine. When I sit here to imagine a world that is ours, I struggle to name who all is invited.⁵ As someone who writes on the internet in a public way, I have to release some control over what happens when my posts meet eyes beyond my target audience. I use the phrase “gentle-people,” and I hope with every address, that my words find (those striving to be) gentle-people, whoever they may be. On my most optimistic of days, I consider it a powerful thing to create in a space with such an expansive invitation from my place on the margins. I am reminded from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower that we may not get to choose who we survive the apocalypse with. And from adrienne maree brown that our lives are evidence that we need each other to survive and interdependence is the only way forward.⁶

These are some of the tensions I hold as I approach Holmes’ book, Crisis Contemplation, which has a communal focus I am still learning to embrace. In this season, I am leaning into new kinds of community. There are white people in my church. I have had the opportunity to share testimony in their company and I shared about survival as many of you have encountered in my writings here. I received responses that reminded me just how far apart our realities can be.⁷

In writing for my life and after my life, I have shared with you all that I am Haitian. For some of you, this is a part of me. For me, it is me. It may seem to exist like a language I can speak that you don’t know, but are okay with because I am always speaking in your language. The accent that was violently shaken loose from my tongue lingers no where near me. There’s a vastness to my Blackness and my Haitian-ness that I want to own more and more. Especially now. In spite of now.

Photo by kevin turcios on Unsplash

These perching lines are supposed to be light. But today, I can’t seem to walk between these two quotes without acknowledging the wounds that have kept me tongue-tied: I want to honor the promises I made to myself when I started this work in 2021 and I want to engage in the kind of communal healing project that “opens portals to new realities (Holmes)” because frankly? This current reality sucks.

Toni Morrison’s quote reminds me that our ancestors have done the work of providing evidences and proofs for our humanity over and over and over and over. All that has been drudged up stands as an archive in defense of our aliveness. I do not need to live to be a proof, my life doesn’t have to be an apology. I do not need to walk around with a sign that says in bold letters “I AM A WOMAN.” I have been “sing[ing myself] sane,” though, to borrow from Holmes. Like so many ancestors did to get through the work that fractured their lives but not their aliveness. I am reminded that for the untrained eye, this singing looks like performance and/or entertainment to those who come looking for a world that revolves around them.

But I cannot deny the notes that come out of me the air they deserve just because I am afraid of what it might look like under a particular gaze. Not when I know what they feel like. Not when we know what we feel like. Especially given Audre Lorde’s belief that “[we] feel therefore [we] can be free,”⁸ I cannot help but feel my way towards freedom.

These perching lines are supposed to be light—⁹so I will end here and hope these words reach their intended audience: those of you still trying to figure out what your response looks like in a world of despair. Remember: They may fracture your life, but never your aliveness; that wild expression of life affirmed by a community that continues to choose each other.¹⁰ Are our sobs a song and our writhing a dance? I’m not sure. But I see a path of aliveness that tells me to move, to make, to be, to dream, to hope and to chase something other than the dehumanizing things we face.

Gentle-people, are you with me?

Landing Track

1. Seriously, are you with me? My intention for writing is is always with the hope that critical reflection and dialogue happens somewhere. This gentle landing space cannot be imagined without community. I feel the support from those who are paid subscribers, those who have bought feathers and those who comment. Consider some ways you can make your solidarity known if you haven’t already.

2. How are you experiencing the two quotes I shared today? Do you feel the same tension I feel? How are you working out the knots in those tense places?

3. For the global majority: Where do you find the ease to release creative expression that is not reactionary? If you’re not finding it, what kind of nurture are you seeking in this season.

4. For those used to being centered in the world; for those who carry privilege that complicates your ability to relate to stories of survival without a fictional, dystopian aid:¹¹ Can you take some time to bear witness to the stories of those for whom survival is a constant state? Can you practice releasing your desire to have all the details in your language?

1. I will tell this story in full someday, but it is simply this: I was tokenized (and mythologized) in many predominantly white communities before coming to this necessary realization. I played the Magical Negro role and it played me right back.

2. See Elizabeth Alexander’s book The Black Interior, which I have mentioned here before.

3. Rev. Dr. Holmes passed very recently. She was already on my mind before I reached for this book, which I had bought a couple years ago. Her book Joy Unspeakable, which I featured in a few of my papers in seminary, was a game changer for me. I was able to call myself a contemplative more confidently in part because of her work.

4. Some key things to know about this book: It was published in 2021. In this section, she mentions January 6th and talks about how protesters there were treated vs. what we have seen for Black Lives Matter protests, where the National Guard is called. I will admit that I struggle a bit with the part where she uses the Civil Rights Movement and its spiritual emphasis as a model for protest. But I can get behind the idea that the arts can be an avenue for changing hearts. I think here of the ever popular Toni Cade Bambara quote on the role of the artist is to “make revolution irresistible.”

5. And “Who all gon’ be there?” can be a question rooted in survival.

6. See Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown. specifically the chapter on interdependence and decentralization.

7. And I know there are white readers here who may come to these words with a struggle to relate—a struggle many of them push through because they see value here.

8. See Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Especially the essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” where this quote is from (p. 38).

9. It’s giving “I won’t hold you long.”

10. I am reminded of a quote from Alexis Pauline Gumb’s Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals—“we have each other if we choose each other.”

11. *insert a deep breath here*