black

My father passed away when I was 8 years old. It was during Christmas vacation, winter of 1998. My father was a quiet, hard working man. He enjoyed jigsaw puzzles,…

Dear Family, I write to you from a place of knowing, aspiration and memory. This moment is so unforgiving, so demanding of our time, our essence and our uncanny ability…

“Too often, we celebrate the emergence without thinking through the breaking. To emerge from concrete presupposes a collision, a violent collision. Tender stems run raw against grating rock for the chance to move from the thick of earth, from the gait of darkness to the warmth of life, for the chance to get beyond the birthing portal of survival and into the practice of living. Too often, we do not consider what is lost to the concrete. What energy spent? What creative power emitted? What raw-rubbed branding, or tattoo, drawn onto flesh for forever times? What fears of darkness, blackness, memory are made (il)logical? How much of us is left in the rock; how much of the rock is left in us? Where do we begin to live and die, to forget and remember? To bleed, heal and/or cauterize? Perhaps, maybe, we are like spectacular comets and asteroids falling (shooting?) from one realm to another and in our wake–in the magic of our contact–is fire, destruction and birth. What parts of us, then, become extinct? Which parts of us, or the worlds we (re)create and/or enter, are completely new entities, unperverted by the blood and fire stained gaits?”

“..I wondered, for a second, what it must be like to exist in the constant moon of violence. To be colored, stained and decorated by its promise or threat or both, while also retaining a blue-black hue of power for oneself, for ones family, for ones essence. The light changed and we parted ways. I thought of her on my elliptical. Sweat dripping, brow drowning with anxiety and perspiration for the mere thought of how different life might be if I were her and she was me. A futile mental exercise because those who have tasted male privilege cannot fathom…it is much like humans opining about how the earth feels; those exercises are cute, for show, for play-play. The more correct course would be to stop polluting live sustainably and gift thanks but even those are empty gestures. I hate such comparisons as the do the ongoing work of super-humanizing or dehumanizing black women, femmes, queers and men. We do this thing, perhaps because our humanity is a common jest, where we are either Gods or Dead. Perhaps we are both. Or perhaps, we too are humans…or Gods wrapped in flesh like the rest of the wayward blood bags ravaging the earth, ravaging each other, consuming blue-black black girls in glowing the lights of libraries and upscale gyms…”

“The life that remains. The life that continues to defy certain removal and dismemberment of self from self from his/herstory from family from truth from gods from us–of old, new, now and tomorrow–we celebrate, that even still our death has not been won, paid for, laid claim to. We celebrate that at least, for us, the power to die remains the province of the flesh hold the beating heart in its crevice…”

“The revolution will cost all that we have. It will cost our lives, with the ever-elusive promise, that we might transcend the products, producers and midwives of violence we have become…”