14. Mar, 2022

Sundae Session

I don't want to say too much, but I do want to make a place holder for metabolizing outside of my research paper. A place for the valuable tape strewn across the cutting room floor as I edit (contort) to be legible as a scholar.

This is for me to be able to find how I got to where I am going. I like the idea of using this blog as my drafting space, to track how an idea changes/grows legs and maybe finds wings.

This is not a lament, I've done enough of that this week. Instead, to give thanks for the folks who left breadcrumbs that guiding me as I try figure out what is worth saying:

  • Thank you Danielle Brathwaite Shirley. The portal you created in your archive is life affirming. "I cant remember a time I didn't need you" gives me a lexicon for my grief
  • https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/i-cant-remember-a-time-i-didnt-need
  • Thank you Josh Rivers for making Busy Being Black, which has helped me find so many voices that affirm and stretch my imagination.
  • https://www.busybeingblack.com/theory-in-the-flesh
  • Thank you Audre Lorde (always), but today, I am particularly affirmed by your 1981 essay "Uses of Anger, women responding to racism"
  • https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1981-audre-lorde-uses-anger-women-responding-racism/
  • Thank you June Jordan (the more I learn about you, the more I want to know). Looking forward to reading "Civil Wars" (1981) after seeing this quote
  • "If you make and keep my life horrible then, when I tell the truth, it will be a horrible truth; it will not sound good or look good or, God willing, feel good to you, either."
  • Today I read two essays from "Some of Us Did Not Die" and felt the life come back into my body
  • 2002:42  “At the beginning of this month [2001], the United States of America walked out of the World Conference on Racism. It seems that an apology for the "barbarities" of slavery was one especially contentious issue. And so there was no apology, no acknowledgment of responsibility: The subject came up. The USA walked out.
  • Thank you for reminding me of the 2001 antiracism conference in Durban. I was in the 8th grade. Tussling with some grade A assimilationist bullshit (and getting an A+) while a few kilometers away, this was taking place.
  • https://www.npr.org/2021/09/07/1034920163/the-lost-summer
  • Thank you Malume for showing me "Amandla! A Revolution In Four-Part Harmony" (2002) back when I was a kid, where I first heard uMam' Sophie Mgcina sing ‘Madam Please’
  • https://www.instagram.com/p/CY_LTg_JEZJ/
  • Thank you for @the_black_revault for the archival work you do, because I cant find Amandla! on the Youtube (mumbles something about how hard it is to access OUR* archives).

Reading these archives of the past alongside Danielle's archive of the future is electrifying, collapses linear time, pushes coevalness without assuming equivalence and makes communication (looking and seeing, and not just gazing) possible.

My language is still..well, you see what it is...but thats okay, this is a draft.

Grateful for these guides on what has been a tricky couple of days. Something something about day light savings, springing forward in time and gaining/losing hours (I KANT!).
Now to fashion something close to coherent.