One year and six months go by...
Not back, but not gone either
I hope you made it through the closures with your health and heart in tact. I hope that you’re able to find ways to stay with your heart as the news cycle whiplashes from one outrage to another. What I find helpful is either logging off :) or paying attention to worker actions (and victories) here in Canada and in the U.S.
Two years has brought big change. I feel like a completely different person, and I’m both excited and nervous to introduce her to the world. My 13-year-old cat, Lyla, has somehow aged in reverse and is now kitten-level rambunctious (Rawiya calls it the Jane Fonda regimen). I’m back at the gym and lifting weights, inspired by Golshan, fucking powering through stability exercises with noodly limbs. Still in the same apartment though, and dreading another summer without aircon.
Part of what has changed is my writing. Like, it has, but it’s also the same? I couldn’t have figured this out without this space, and all of your generosity in those early emails. I was able to start working through my reactions, emotionally, and on the page. I could see more clearly the self-conscious impulses to ‘tell’ and ‘prove,’ and redirect toward a process that allows for more time and feeling.
The other day I saw a film called Rewind & Play by a French-Senegalese director Alain Gomis. It was an hour of unaired footage of Thelonious Monk in Paris in 1969, taping an episode of a TV jazz program. The film’s aim is to witness and embody Monk’s discomfort and easy defiance against the egoic flailing of the white interviewer, who veers manically between condescension, sycophancy, ovefamiliarity, and lapses in journalistic ethics and empathy. Meanwhile, Monk is present. He’s there being Monk.
Watching it, I felt embarrassed for music journalists — “we” — because I recognized some of those behaviours, especially the desire to will another person toward a self-serving clarity. These tics of interviewing and tendencies in the writing are assigned to, and originate in white men, but have become part of the culture of arts criticism and music journalism at large. Often under the guise of professionalism, or a role play of expert. You can read it in the writing, which is less about how art has invited one to think, and feel, and consider, and instead a series of gestures and positions indicating how one knows something, is an insider, or (worse) humorously at odds with the subject (dehumanizing both in the process). The writing is painfully aware of being perceived.
I keep thinking about Doreen St. Felix in conversation with Margo Jefferson from a few weeks ago:
DOREEN: “I guess I have a feeling, amongst writers that I know, that we are not willing to be that reckless. We are not willing to say what it is that we do believe. I think it permeates every form, and I think there’s a collapse, even within the social space of our world, where the writer is supposed to be a good person, and is supposed to even be synonymous with the activist figure, with the uplift of the race.”
MARGO: Yes, that is true. You know that shows up in every single generation, every single generation going back a couple of centuries for black writers. It just mutates, it gets a different mise en scene, a different medium, but the same demands […] A lot of the anxiety you’re describing affected me when I was a beat writer, at Newsweek and the Times. I felt very much this sense of almost a pull between how I wanted to engage the material and idealized Margo, the critic form, and the cultural politics, the gender politics, the fact that I was often the only black woman in a critical space. That is generational […] We’re talking about self-censorship. And ones notion — always absorbed by everything from one’s friends to one’s enemies to the dominating ideology — what you should be thinking and doing, and who are you betraying if you don’t.”
I think Jefferson better gets at what I was trying to say above. It is a relief to hear her say it. Writing ages over time, and the relationship to language deepens and hopefully becomes unburdened by the spectre of the reader. To me, this isn’t something that can be accomplished without the spiritual, which I define as a letting go. To let go of the personality and instead practice a kind of devotion. It’s raja yoga vibes… knowledge as devotion, not power.
Though the writing does sometimes have to leave you and enter the world, so I get it. I get why Dionne Brand wrote that, “The malicious horizon made us the essential thinkers of technology. How to fly gravity, how to balance basket and prose reaching for murder.”
I think it’s that I crave a different kind of recklessness, orienting away from that ‘malicious horizon’ toward something else, less murderous. The maliciousness is no longer simply present, it’s beckoning. Or, it’s what I said to Huda the other day: I’m interested in what’s beyond fear.
Which brings me to why I’m here in your inbox: a bunch of festering thoughts that lingered with me after Mustafa’s concert in December were recently published as an essay in Maisonneuve. I was pretty scared when I started writing. Most of this was composed in fragments over months, a lot of it written while sitting on a bench or log in the middle of High Park, where I felt supported. I asked friends to read it. I spoke to my insecurities, and didn’t allow my anxieties to be louder than my desire. And I’m proud, for the first time maybe ever! It took me a decade to feel comfortable referring to myself as a writer, and another couple of years to let go of the idealized form and find myself on the page. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it, but mostly I hope it brings up questions that make you feel a little reckless.
so lovely to read this and hear from you. xoxo thanu