Creation in the Time of Death
"They ain't tryna' to see me shine, shineBullet on my time, timeBut fuck it, I'll live forever..." -NoName, Telefone, Track: Forever
One of the hardest questions I'm asked is, "What is your creative process?" It's even more difficult to answer from where I'm sitting in history today.At this moment, I'm alive in a nation of police brutality and state-sanctioned violence. At this moment, #BlackLivesMatter is the rallying cry - the reality that we deserve to live and to thrive. This cry has consistently been met with the pithy and subversively racist #AllLivesMatter cry - diverting focus from those whose Black bodies are being ripped from our Black souls in these United States of America.At this moment, I'm alive but grieving the death of Korryn Gaines - a 23 year old mother whose home was broken into by the police - after her on some bullshit traffic violations. This encounter ended with her murder, the wounding of her son, and her story obscured and picked apart.At this moment, I'm alive but grieving the deaths of Joyce Queweay, who passed because her boyfriend and his friend thought they would teach her a lesson about "submission" to male authority. She was murdered. And at this moment, I'm grieving the death of Skye Mockabee, a transwoman, murdered and left in a parking lot.My sisters are being murdered. My brothers are being murdered, too. And everyone's fighting about the fucking details.And someone's asking me about what my creative process is. Now.I've never been more sure of the importance of writing, rapping, singing, sharing personal and cultural pain, joy, healing, lament, and strategy. I've never been more convinced that the writers of color are called to be the griots, healers, and purveyors of cultural / ancestral knowledge. There is necessity of creation in the time of death.There is something healing about the practice of wrangling cohesion from chaos - even if the healing happens only in the Self.But this shit is heavy. It gets heavy. And it BEEN heavy."What's your creative process?"These days? Cry a bit. Write. Wipe tears. Cry a lot. Stop crying. Feel numb. Writers aren't made of numbness. Stare out the window, and look at what is alive. Trees. Birds. The moth that just settled on the window. Write a bit. Stop writing. Allow my sisters to sing and speak to me...
"And I'm afraid of the darkBlue and the whiteBadges and pistols rejoice in the nightAnd we watch the newsAnd we see him die tonight" -Noname, Telefone, Track: Casket Pretty
Allow my sisters to write me through:Erica Thurman's, Black Folks Are Dying and I Just Keep Buying Lipstick. And Crying: On the Emotional and Economic Expense of Existing Through TraumaThe Churched Feminist's, Litany For Black Children Who Became Collateral DamageBrittney Cooper's, Connect The Dots: For Korryn Gaines, Skye Mockabee and Joyce QuaweayNicole JhanRhea's, Korryn Gaines I Speak Your NameTry really hard not to play the videos or recount the events. End up doing both of those things anyway. Hoping that somehow they could live forever. Knowing that they will, somewhere, even if in the Remembrances of their Stories and the Saying of their Names. Lavishing sisterly love on them, carefully listening for the lessons they want to teach me, and wishing them well from the other side - from this fucked up plane of reality.