the only way of knowing a person

is to love them without hope

- walter benjamin

love didn’t ruin me

Hope did

The kind that begged

-Unknown

I do not know love without hope. Which is to say. I do not know love without snorting the crack rock of potential.

Which begs the question: Have I truly ever loved. And there are different types of love, yes, I’m aware. But what I’m saying is, the only way I’ve survived this world is by infusing hope and meaning into every crevice of my own world. Is that an honest existence? I’m now questioning it. Am I ultimately making a dream for myself that may or may not come true. Whose to say. But we are told we have to have hope lately…but as a chronically hopful nigga I’m questioning the utility of unbridled delusion. Instead, I’ve been haunted by Amina Baraka saying we go about change by goin about daily work. And that work…I’m not seduced to romanticize any longer with what could be. There is what is.

Hope has been one of the more destructive forces in my life, in my psyche, and in my survivorship.

When I was diagnosed with cancer, I was told by providers to therapists to support group members to have hope - have hope I’d survive, have hope I’d find a donor, have hope, have hope, shit I was even treated at a center named after such a concept: City of Hope. The cancer industry runs on selling hope. It’s big money to run on a wish. It can morph into anything the consumer needs it to be. Hope became something I clung so desperately onto but it was something without form, without shape, it was purely a feeling. A feeling that has fueled my mania at times even. It was also a lie.

Sometimes we need to lie to ourselves within the circumstances we are in, I understand that. Each night, throughout my transplant, I would just hope I could get through this seemingly insurmountable shit. Everything was out of my hands so the best “i could do” was “hope for the best.” But Hope became a fuzzy idea of what living after cancer should look like. Rooted in my desires, my hope promised there’d surely be a happy ending. Why would I hope for anything less? So…Of course, when I survived, the other side of hope was despair. Because shit never unfurls how we thought it would. N We all do it. We hope to change the world, we hope for revolution, we hope for a better life, we hope for our crush to like us back, we hope for a promotion at our shitty job, we hope to go viral, but what’s dangerous about hope is that its a bridge to an ideal and if not critically engaged with, it can become relying on potential then falling into an earth shattering disappointment…because there is expectation with hope, it’s in its definition.

Hope is the “a feeling of desire and expectation, a belief that something good will happen,” and idk man that actually reads a little sinister to me!

Desire plus expectation is what breeds the idea that something good is destined to happen!? There’s an entitlement to an outcome without being grounded any real action. And why does normative love immediately come to mind as this attempt to actualize desire and expectation into a bond. Into an agreement. And if hope relies on “Shoulds” and these creation stories that are attached to these shoulds, then love cannot reimagine itself, it’s already constricted to a norm which is: Fulfilling that initial desire and expectation. It’s a limiting trap. Hope becomes dishonest because it’s working off false pretenses. I don’t believe engaging with things, concepts, people, whatever the fuck else for their potential anymore - shit makes my skin crawl - I care about what the fuck is actually happening.

When it comes to hopelessness, Bayo Akomolafe comes to mind.

A couple years ago, I listened to a podcast episode where he shared a story of speaking with climate scientists about how to communicate “the end of days.” Could it be possible to deliver a message of hope for a future in the story of climate disaster? He posited the Yoruba myth that a wild god is coming to visit, coming to swallow the Earth. There is an acceptance of what is in such a story. Unlike The Great Hope by Ellen G. White which is meant to deliver a message that in the midst of the battle between God and Evil, hold out hope that Jesus Christ himself will return in a Second Coming to save us all. There’s a stark difference between the two. One is a functional story, another is an impractical fantasy. One tells the truth differently, another is an idealistic lie. One creates a mythology of what is even if it’s despairing. We may actually get swallowed the fuck up and no benevolent God or Christ is coming to carry us in a chariot to heaven. It just is man. And we here on the earth. Until we not.

But walela what about the kids? What about their futures? Should we not hope for them? First of all, the kids are feeling hopeless themselves.

And shit I would be too if I was their age. I believe in the importance of meeting our youngers within that and finding a pivot. Hope has lost its utility for We are sold hope at every turning point in the West. We are encouraged to be motivated by delusion, desire, and potential which are all distractions from being grounded in our material conditions. And Hope, especially, is a political project in the United States - prime example: Obama. Barack Obama’s initial campaign platform and merchandise ran on the motifs of Hope and Change. He was presented as this great beacon, neoliberal savior, and as if his presidency would usher in America officially becoming a post racial society. And to this day, people have been so pilled up off the idea of Black person being head of state, n this unreasonable hope that we, too, can steer the imperial core, that many of our folks refuse to deal with what is: Obama was and remains a pawn of the state and fulfilled carrying out america’s project of violent expansion.

Recently, brought up in a public conversation at Legacy Library that it feels as if everyone is just wanting to go back to that “hopeful” era, this idea that representation can save us - if we could just bring back Obama, bring back Beyonce in her Black Panthers cosplay, and if we could just see ourselves in these “powerful positions,” then we can procure hope (false pretenses) from these images, and that will be enough to assuage the daily unsettling existence of living in a settler colony. But this is an existence rooted in a cognitive dissonance. Hope relies being a bridge to an ideal. It is dishonest Lately, I’ve been questioning what is a realistic existence in these times without being primarily motivated by desire and expectation but instead being motivated by something like: discipline.

When I entered my 30s, I felt this overwhelming lack of hope and was sincerely concerned by it. Did this mean I had given up? Had I submitted myself to defeat?

It felt very different than my teenagehood and 20s where I was fueled by hope and its promise. But this confusion led me to confront how intense of a disassociative existence I was leading. This new era I was entering required me to grieve and accept. It’s true: I ain’t changing the world, I may never see freedom in this lifetime, my cancer could relapse tomorrow, I could never get that promotion, I may never get consistent income as a writer, the list goes on. But that acceptance doesn’t automatically equate to nihilism or some other bleak shit. Eventually, it became incredibly liberating in choosing to sit n accept hopelessness. Because it meant I needed something else to motivate me. Something that felt more honest.

Yesterday, my homeboy reminded me of the Dolly Parton quote that goes something like dreams are rooted in action, wishes are passive hopes without effort. Or…to translate to a saying all our grandparents love: faith without works is dead. I’ve been thinking of the word discipline a lot thanks to the work of . To me, discipline deals with what is. It’s choosing a devotion to the present. I bring etymology to the party every time but discipline got its roots in “to learn.” And I guess what is real love for myself, for others, for the world but a commitment to learn. Potential, therefore hope, gets in the way of that, it’s a blurring. There’s a commitment to inflexibility inherent in that. There is an unwillingness to be changed. But rather an attachment to what could be. Therefore there’s an inability to grieve. Which leads back to acceptance. N Acceptance doesn’t require hope, in fact acceptance requires being so firmly entrenched in what is true that you have to make a decision to change within that.

So yeah man, shit is rough outside. Everybody got different things, concepts, themes, motifs, whatever the fuck to get them through. N the best I can do, to reference Amina Baraka, is get myself together and then get my community together. I don’t need hope to do that, I been there, I done that. The shit almost killed me, hope was so deceptive I almost was incapable of accepting what is true. Instead, I need discipline, I need love, I need ritual, I need consistency, I need change, I need what is tangible, I need action, I don’t need no happy ending, I’ll make it through. Someway. Somehow. Or not. But I’m here for the ride regardless.

“My daddy was a spy”

I used to say that line all the time. Throughout elementary school, I’d bring my dad in for show and tell. Other children would have their pet rabbits and YuGiOh cards and there I was with a sandy blonde green eyed East German man sayin, “listen to him, let him tell you how he did it. And if you like that story, well guess what? When I asked my daddy if he was a spy…he said he was half of one…and I can do fractions real good so that makes me a quarter spy by proxy. Ever heard of Spy Kids? I’m that nigga”. Little did I comprehend what type of espionage my father participated in.

My dad grew up in Oberhof - a south western town in East Germany. One day, literally just some random day, the Berlin Wall started gettin built. My great uncle, her brother, hopped the wall, but my Oma was 16, pregnant, and couldn’t make the same leap. On the other side, her brother now belonged to the West and she birthed a child alone in a Soviet bloc. While Oberhof was a small town, it was an Olympic town, meaning it also had distinct Western influences. To quote my father, even still, there was

“…A distinct lack of personal freedom. No freedom of speech. No inalienable right to pursue happiness. If you said the wrong thing you could end up in jail. No freedom to travel. You were stuck in Eastern Europe. Don’t even think about summer vacation in Italy or anything like that. And lets not forget the various State sponsored activities that everyone had to take part in. Did you ever wonder where those crowds used to come from that lined the streets during various May Day, or October Revolution parades? They were there in enlightened self interest. If you don’t participate you were outcast…In East-Germany we had the concept of “enlightened self interest” which described the idea of you playing along with the State so that you can continue to live whatever existence you have lived, absent of the State paying you a visit or screwing up your life.”

That paired with the high number of informants in the general population, there was always an air of distrust in East Germany. Was your neighbor really your neighbor or an enemy?

In 1977, East Germany appeared to be 5-10 years behind the west.

As Disco was getting ready to die, everyone in Easy Germany was “enthralled with Donna Summer and Heart” but as my father was coming of age, many teenagers alongside him wanted to listen to music from the west. They wanted to “be with the times.” They wanted Levis and sideline records. So, my father, resourceful and young became a “black marketeer” smuggling goods in order to meet the demand for British and US music. At 16, my dad didn’t care about socialism or capitalism, he cared about if he could listen to Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. And because he couldn’t do that in East Germany, he felt repressed, he felt stuck, and similar to my Oma, he wanted to get out.

In 1979-80, my father and Oma took part in “the biggest espionage scandal that East Germany had ever seen.” So much so, it resulted in “…the East German government to pronounce a death sentence in-absentia…In order to bring this death sentence into reality East Germany’s government took the extraordinary step of offering a DM 1,000,000 bounty (roughly $600,000 in 1979 dollars) for the successful execution of the members of… [my father’s] group.”

Under the constant atmosphere of “big brother,” my Oma was working at the Hotel Panroma when she met Werner Stiller. “Stiller had used the Hotel Panorama as a meeting locale for his intelligence activities. Agents would come from the West and meet with him, or he would stay overnight at the Hotel in transit to an agent rendevous.” He saw my Oma as someone who not only served him frequently but a woman who was willing to talk shit about the East German government- something that was a rarity - and that made her somebody potentially worth recruiting.

Eventually, the two began dating and after sleeping together, Stiller confessed to my Oma that he was a member of the STASI - the intelligence and military security for East Germany. To assuage her concerns, Stiller revealed that his work focused on espionage in West Germany and Western Europe. He was a con man at heart and that still didn’t do much…my Oma was dickmatized and so when he suggested defecting…she agreed.

My Oma was that girl kind of. She was well connected. She believed in the “very important vitamin C” meaning C as in connections. Through her work, her consomers provided her with hard to find items like spare parts for her car or furniture. This underground system functioned and relied on bartering. For instance, my dad’s step father traded “…a rather expensive cement drill (valued at over 300.00 East-Marks) for the very first pocket calculator in [their] town. A Texas Instruments calculator…”

The question loomed:

As my father tells it, “The question “should we defect” was posed and a decision needed to be made. Do we stay together and try to defect or do we count the days that we can spend together, always knowing that it will end soon? In a way Stiller played my mother’s affection like a good control-agent plays his assets.” She was a woman in the East who could receive messages from the West and would otherwise fly under the radar. She was perfect for him to use. And he used their relationship and her love for him as a springboard of motivation for her to act on his behalf. So when my Oma agreed, Stiller asked for a meeting with her brother, my great uncle, who lived in West Germany.

“The official relation between East and West Germany had been one of Love/Hate on the part of the East-German politbureau for many years. On the one hand West Germany was the official enemy. According to the SED propaganda machine, it was a capitalist society bent on the destruction of East Germany, filled with the remnants of the Third Reich, who had fled there to escape capture by the Soviet Union. On the other hand East-Germany sorely needed the hard currency brought in by Western tourists...That economic reality translated itself into my uncle being able to visit us from time to time.”

My great uncle was rightfully skeptical of Stiller who smoothly reconfigured his argument for defection claiming it was mostly for Helga (my Oma) and that she wanted to get out so badly - he just simply had to make it happen. And while he didn’t trust Stiller, my great uncle Herbie had a great deal of respect and love for his sister. So he agreed to aid in the defection.

What ensued was a series of coded messages and confidential information passed between trains, hidden in parks, followed by elaborate decoding over short form radio waves. My Oma, my great uncle Herbie, and my father were tasked to procure and decipher these messages. Thing is from jump, the STASI and BND were suspicious of each other and so eventually wind caught that there was some kind of double agenting going on - messages for the inside were getting outside. However, through a series of hilarious miscommunications, my family was, against their knowledge, constantly just almost evading capture. An example of this would be:

“Many years later we discovered yet another one of the miraculous circumstances that made our defection a completely amazing story. The certified unbreakable cryptographic code that had been used by us in deciphering the radio messages from the West was compromised and broken by the Stasi in the early fall of 1979. Therefore, if the West had sent the defection instructions in a radio message we would have been caught immediately. The fact that the West used a dead letter drop was another one in a series of amazing circumstances.”

But the STASI, with members like Markus Wolf (aka Karla aka the man without a face) and Gunther Kratsch, were on their head regardless making it all the more urgent to escape. So on January 14, 1979, my Oma and father left their apartment 15 minutes early to go to a safehouse where they then would be assigned new identities and the opportunity to choose where they wished to be relocated to. If they had left on time, the apartment would’ve been raided with an arrest warrant. If it wasn’t for those 15 minutes, for that intuitive knowing to leave earlier, to be on the run sooner than later, I wouldn’t have been born.

Presented with an option to relocate to the US or South Africa, my father, at 16, dropped his very German name and took on one that sounded like an American movie star - he knew where he wanted to be. Throughout the rest of his teenagehood, he lived in DC, then moved to Santa Barbara where he studied photography, then he moved to Mid City Los Angeles, where walking down the street, he met my mother. The daughter of people on the run. Just from a different kind of violence, from a different kind of life.

I am the granddaughter of fugitives with long lost last names and new names to replace history.

My grandfathers grandfather chose the name Flowers and before that we don’t know who we are which is to say we re inscribe who we belong to outside of who owns us. I imagine my mother saw something familiar in my father. Who heard the sound of freedom in music and decided to reach towards that recklessly but determinedly as well. My parents collided at a fork in the road in during one of the most turbulent times in LA: 1992.

How my mother tells the story is that my dad stuck out like a sore thumb wearing a Woody from Toy Story lookin ass fit, pilled up off Western ideals. He loudly exclaimed “howdy neighbor” and she, miss girl, was a Black Barbie in a Chanel baby blue tweed suit, believed my dad was gay until he asked to take her on a date to 7-11 to eat Popsicles. N it was taboo back then, to make a life at the mid point of disaster, to Reconstruct their ideas of race and family and chose to improvise on their own. I share their story to reflect on what it means to be a fugitive and choose to raise a child within those limitations or possibilities.

My parents, like most parents, didn’t know what they were doing. They barely had the opportunity to be children themselves.

They didn’t know the type of journey they were embarking on making a family in exile. My mother’s parents fled Texas during heights of southern anti Black violence and my father, being a relocated spy, disentangled himself completely from his lineage in Germany. Los Angeles presented itself as a sanctuary for both sides of my family.

My mother felt a sense of resentment towards her Blackness and thought she could transgress the hard boundaries of race in being married to my father. She believed having a child with him would result in more opportunities for me compared to her. She distanced herself from her family and alongside my father tried to make something new and intangible. However, much of that was done alone , between the two of them. Without finding new kin to create a new reality alongside, my parents lived in isolation more than anything. I do think there was something about having a child that led them to adhere towards the state’s conception of family that made my parents a bit fucked up !

Within that alienation, they forgot about their right to refuse and instead fell into the trap of aspiring towards materialistic gain. Even on the run, the state is sneaky like that. It’ll present the American Dream like an easy off ramp n so They didn’t continue reaching towards escape, instead they settled on a fringe, and yearned for re-entry in a society committed to rejecting them. What was initially a righteous endeavor devolved into abuse and seclusion by the time I turned 18.

I’m not leading a life full fledged on the run like my dad and grandparents did but…I’ve questioned where my parents were pressured to “surrender their autonomy” (Abdurraqib). It is the daily refusals - similar to my father being a Black marketeer as a teenager or my mother wanting to be a ceramicist over a nurse that I have found any semblance of autonomy where

I refuse to get married

I refuse to have a “regular” career

I refuse to have children

I refuse to adhere to time

I refuse Western settler chauvinism

I refuse assimilation in how i look, talk, act, think

I refuse I refuse I refuse

I recognize that feeling within my father, to be so constrained and boxed in that you will do anything to emancipate yourself…which is something that is now my inheritance. It is something that comes from my grandaddy n grandma as well. Because we don’t have much else. To paraphrase Georgia Bea Jackson, I’m mobilizing around my nothingness to find…something. And that something isn't to be crowned beloved by the state but to belong so viscerally to myself…similar to my daddy…it’s like a sound I’m following that I know is guiding me to a place better than this here reality. Even if it’s not visible. I know there has to be a way to live easier than this. A place where I do not have to perform miracles with ten daggers in my back. Where I do not have to bloodlet to an impractical God.

Of course this is when Moten’s “you never get escaped,” enters the chat. Because you don’t. What does a life dedicated to constant improvisation look like? I don’t know much, I know I’ve veered away from escape many times whether the medical industrial complex or sex trafficking but I feel emboldened by my father to give it try even more intentionally.

To ask questions like: What if my parents never forgot their status as fugitives? What if they never got too comfortable with where they were living, with their status, with their material comforts, would my life have looked different? Would I have been taught more self regard? Would I have been a child of the wild and incapable of dominating?

And now, it’s my job to parent myself, to be the steady hand that guides me away from convention and into the impulses that were beaten out of me as a child. Like my disregard for authority. Like an adherence to my own code. Where the moral authority isn’t some violent settler standard but a dedication to living in the unknown, being flexible within that, surrendering myself like my father would say to Fate, Luck, God, Guardian Angels whoever n decoding the messages along the way.

read my father’s story on: my are.na

“craziest walk back of all time, i’m not non binary no more,”

I said in a reel last month. This video resulted in a number of folks agreeing and of course a number of dense debbie downers intentionally missing the point. When I say I’m not nonbinary no more, I mean I don’t relate to defining myself in negation. It menas I don’t relate to the abundance of yt tender queers being heavily associated with the word…i just have felt an urge to find a different framework to describe myself within. language loses its elasticity, we are seeing that in real time. i’m not rebuking nobody who is non binary, but for me, it doesn’t seem to describe my lived experience anymore.

My gender is Black first. We seem to forget that our gender, as Black people, is at the whim of who is interpreting us. In queer spaces, I was often regarded as someone who’d automatically be characterized as masc. In straight spaces, I was often regarded as hyper femme Jezebel or a hyposexual mother figure. But what I have found in my ten years of being non binary is that my gender and its expression has always been up for debate based on someone else’s relationship to Blackness.

I don’t like leaving myself to the whim of misinterpretation, but I don’t think Blackness is ever meant to be fundamentally understood by the world surrounding us. nor do i necessarily want it to be.

i think of ocean vuong describing queerness as going beyond the bumpers on a freeway and venturing out into an unsure unknown open space. i’ve been thinking a lot of the concept of fugitivity - what does it mean to be captured by a lexicon of identity signifiers that are used by the state for categorization. Describing myself within those limitations were just no longer satisfactory. Which led me to consider Saidiya Hartman’s emphasis on waywardness, which is something i resonate with far more deeply:

I wanna embrace abandoning my gender because it feels akin to self determination. to blow up what was and make do with what could be. I want to be relentless in my struggle towards defining myself which also means unchaining myself from language that for ME, is doing more harm than good. “When the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe” I get ancy. And this is just me and my practice, no part of what I’m saying is an imposition onto others. Regardless of whatever gender construction I make for myself, walking away from non binary is also choosing to delink myself from the current terms and conditions associated with said gender. Part of living in the mode of survival is calling upon improvisation and pivots when necessary. even if it is unpopular or impossible to understand.

My gender shifts alongside me on the run. It’s dependent on who I’m around. Who is absent. Who is present. My gender is ancestral. Undefined. Alien. Perilous. Shapeshifting. Ever present. Cannot be reduced to a term. Or. An ideology. My gender responds to “girl” n “bro.” It is auntie and uncle. My gender is resistant to identity reductionism. It is wayward in its survival. It’s an opaque unknowable thing. Tangible to only me and the feeling that I get when surrounded by kin. It’s a vibe. It’s a wave. It’s a prayer. It’s a eulogy. It’s a manifesto. And an opportunity. to abandon knowing everything and finding somethin in the nothin that remains.

*the work of Hari Ziyad, Mia Harrison, and Saidiya Hartman influenced this piece greatly

I went to see Bay Davis, Kennedy Arnette, and Shelby Swain, perform at Amber Abundance’s Toxic Femininity comedy show with Cuties LA Friday night. And well…fuck isn’t it always life changing to see Black queer femmes relentlessly hilarious antics displayed? And we, in the crowd, get to bask in such a shared glory. Kicking our heads back and letting out a cackle rippling through a white West Hollywood.

Magic be in the air in where we congregate and I was shy to such a presence for it is an invitation to let go of my burdens even for a moment. One of the performers, Kennedy Arnette, spoke about anthropology, referring to themselves as both “young hoe and historian” - or how they be at the club to also get anthropological. And yeah, same, which led me to go home and get curious about this. This deep desire to both observe and participate, which I feel like is a innately millenial/zillenial way we have been raised.

On the ride home, I was talkin with a friend about how up until commercial social media, my generation and even earlier Gen Z, always wanted that connection and we were always curious. We connected with strangers on blogs, our classmates on AOL Instant Messenger, remained anonymous on forums, Tumblr, wrote elaborate fan fiction on Wattpad, and assumed customizable avatars in Toon Town and Club Penguin. We connected earnestly over media. A love language that has since gone missing decades later.

Now, every corner of the internet is devoured by Tik Tok, Instagram, and algorithm based media. Bonding with 100,000 strangers about how much I love orcas would be preposterous to 8 year old me. For I, was on tiny 20 person killer whale forums larping as an orca. Making “characters” (my imaginary friends) requiring me to list their Name, Age, Gender, Pod, Mother, Father, Siblings, Offspring, and Distinctive Features. There, I created entire elaborate family trees, I kept extensive journals on captive orcas, sketched their dorsal fins, watched Shamu Cam like it was a livestream, tracked 18 month pregnancies, reported live findings back to forums, and I even learned how communicate with whales. Because I wanted to be a whale.

By 5th grade, I was bringing tennis balls, chimes, and stuffed animals to Seaworld California’s observational deck. I’d bounce a ball, throw keys in the air, or press a stuffed orca to the window and bam, I was the closest I could ever get to an orca separated by glass. Behaviorists would ask my parents bewildered, “how is she doing that?” I could hold the attention of almost any orca. Causing my parents to also observe them and overtime gradually have their own favorites. My mom loved Nakai because he was rambunctious and my father loved Ulysses because he was a big guy who acted like a golden retriever.

My favorite whale was the often mischaracterized grandmother and mother: Kasatka. She felt similar similar to Keiko in Free Willy, often deemed aggressive, bad, and left to her own devices, swimming in circles. Something in them felt familiar and I found myself in elementary school devoting all my time and energy to finding a shared language.

And it makes sense that I felt more of connection with these animals - with shortened life spans living in captivity, who spent a majority of their lives chronically ill, placed on drugs, in mismatched pods with unrecognizable dialects, forced to perform, expected to produce offspring…however in the midst of all that, the grandmas reigned as supreme matriarch. Of course it translated to me for there I was, this kid in Los Angeles, at a rich kid school, awfully lost, shamed for moving my body, abused at home and in school, expected to be an academically excellent doctor, and who loved hanging out with the head matriarch of my family: grandma…I couldn’t help but fuck with the whale niggas. They were me. I was them.

For further reading on speciesism and the oppression of children, read: Innocence and Corruption by Aiyana Goodfellow

My grandma often referred to me as a melancholic child for I was deeply lonely and profoundly sad.

I spent most of my days indoors, except running errands with my mother, whenever I got “too good” at a hobby my parents weren’t willing to invest their time or interest, so I shifted communities often. I couldn’t hang out with nearly any of my friends outside of school, except at bar mitzvahs, I wasn’t allowed to go to sleepovers except once or twice a year. I was not allowed to even be outside wandering my neighborhood for too long because according to my mom, outside was nothin but one big alleyway. To be raised so far away from people was already one thing, but it was another growing up in incredibly violent school systems and an abusive home. The internet, these killer whale forums, these Tumblr blogs, became a secret third place where I could exist behind a username, taking off all the things that made me a supposed delinquent, while equally observing and participating.

Consequently, I always felt pulled between two existences - one where I was coming closer to myself online and one where I was being torn apart in my waking life. I would often interact with my imagination more than people and I’m sure this is some level of disassociating or lifting from reality, but somehow I was also coming closer to myself alongside other anonymous bystanders. There was a time the internet was a genuine third space.

Once upon a time the internet was more so like a virtual tree house and we were careful about who we let inside to share our visceral internal worlds with. We were careful about who was allowed access to our imaginary cardboard kingdoms like in Disney’s Out of the Box.

True, the internet has always been a vastly out of body experience but back then, it was just a different vibe, n you had to be there. Every day, we could slink off our skins and exist viscerally in our minds silently at a computer or phone screen - it brought out a different side to the human experience. Whether it was intense special interest, a Youtube dance tutorial, a hobby, or a foraying into anthropology - who knows - but what I do know is that killer whales, for me, helped me understand the people around me, even if I was an observer, even if I grew to have frustration or empathy, whales helped me process this human experience I was having.

Until 7th grade, I only had one other place I could go where I could exist like I could on the internet: grandma’s house, a place away from home, away from school, where I could be myself, without judgement.

At grandmas house, she didn’t give a fuck about getting me on some right academic path, she wanted to know which Toni Morrison book I was reading, if I liked my classmates, she’d retell outrageously untrue headlines from tabloids that to this day I’m not sure if she believed them or if she was joking. But together, we’d sit up and eat Campos tacos, watch Maury and the Proud Family, and go walking. She always wore a skirt or track suit of some kind, a straw hat, knee high stockings, loafers, oversized prescription glasses, paired with a sandy blonde bob covering up her formerly ginger now grey hair. My grandma was the first person who ever fully understood me and kept loving me despite that. Orcas are similar. The grandmothers are the heads of pods, they carry ritual, and they transmit tradition. They have elaborate grief and mourning practices that are passed down from generation to generation.

My whole world caved on itself the day she died. It was both April Fool’s and a Palm Sunday (at least she’s got a sense of humor) when her spirit flew by my Virgin America plane window. I was barely 13 years old, returning to Los Angeles from the opposite coast, without my best friend, and her home - the last safe place I knew - was demolished. It has been an ongoing 19 year long devastation that I will forever be processing. I spent the first few months intensely listening to music to grieve alongside like Iz’s Somewhere Over the Rainbow or Angel by Sarah McLachlan (embarassing song selections, I’m aware). No matter how much I moaned, cried, shook, wailed, it felt like I wasn’t reaching her.

According to the documentary Blackfish, in 2004, Seaworld executives separated Kasatka from her daughter Takara for breeding purposes. However, in orca society, a mother and daughter are bonded for life. Takara had already birthed a daughter and Kasatka was very involved in raising her granddaughter Kohana, as well, even if it was in captivity, even if it was in a tiny concrete pool.

As Takara was airlifted to Florida, Kasatka began emoting and echolocating further, and further, resorting even to screeches, hoping to feel her daughter’s vibration. Distressed, she continued clicking and grunting in ways specialists had never heard before: Kasatka was effectively making new language trying to reach her daughter. My grandmother’s death ever since has left me like Takara, in an unfamilar place, yearning for the one mother, I’ve truly ever known. And no amount of noise I make can get me to exist beside her in that spirit realm.

As grief ruled my life, I relied more on the internet.

I found myself becoming hyperfocused on music and creating playlists for my first Tumblr: The Silence Keeps it Easy (named after a song by Scary Kids Scary Kids). I was a little computer programmer going at length to customize my blog. I was around other teenagers, in anonymity, who also took processing their emotions alongside music as essential to our well being; for certainly by 15 years old, we were all mourning something.

After my grandmother died, I was transferred from a hippie dippy private school to a brutal Catholic school on Sunset Blvd. It was a culture shock and frankly fucking insane. The school population was resistant to any person of color. Even the faculty. So of course when I won the vote to become commencement speaker. Half the faculty protested it. Cuz I was tatted. Wildly mentally ill. Allergic to confinement. And obsessed with finding some kind of resonance with the right people even if it made others uncomfortable - I was always making some kind of noise.

Despite all the protesting, i did wind up giving that speech and it’s spooky to see me back then, blonde straight hair, a zombie of myself. There is some kind of violent assimilation many of us had to simply endure. Where outwardly we appeared in a “socially acceptable” manner but then inwardly we were entirely different people. These years were why Tumblr and listening to music became so important to me, my interior world could simply get by with a song describing this distinctly heavy pain inside me.

Communing with music, quotes, or poetry on Tumblr was a shared digital grief cafe. Come as you are, we don’t ever know each other, but we all about to cry to this. Similar to being with my grandma, I was allowed to just be, and it was a shared language of surviving the self.

If I were to trace a lineage, a passing of heritage, The Whale Girls grew up and became Tumblr Girls, and are now Stand Up Comedy Girlies, The Archive Anthropology Baddies, or Spoken Word Girlies. We always moving against the grain of what grief “should” look like, what becoming “should” be. We search for a sense of belonging now amongst those who whistle and break because them playlists get to be too much if it ain’t grandma’s gospel, the killer whales are wearing salmon and stingrays as hats anyways, there are lessons from our childhoods where even through the worst things we find each other.

We know the feeling, all of us formerly regarded as viruses infecting our school systems, our families, when we’d congregate, it was treated like we were a cancerous mass, who must be destroyed to protect an ecosystem. And so what if we are that cancerous mass lumping together? We were the awakening for many, that somethin different can exist in paradise that wasn’t only by the standard of an ivory kingdom.

We made our own utopias over shared lunch in high school, at open mics in college, in our own queer utopias on Friday nights, relying on the outrageous to made into a joke, we come together and make place for a moment, even if for two hours, we made it worth staying together. We Click, guffaw, moan, screech, n wail alongside each other and it hits that perfect resonance, that bone drumming vibration, where we are both creator and recipient of noise, soundin somethin like music, somethin like a pod, somethin like a home.

Have ya’ll ever considered the type of influencer your favorite Black writers would be today?

Toni Morrison would’ve been bangin out essays on substack, Maya Angelou: a get ready with me shorty on Tik Tok, bell hooks for sure all over Twitter (X), and Audre Lorde…for sure on Instagram, yappin, bein both loud n wrong, loud n right. Feels weird to imagine…

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Praise be to my homeboys.

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All tried and true. Each willing to come apart at the seams to excavate themselves.

Praise be to my dawgs. The ones who roll tobacco n tenderness on the street corner.

Praise the ones who try new things if I ask n they trust me enough to catch them. Praise be to the trust fall we do.

Patriarchy did it’s big one, but we doin it bigger.

Praise be to the men setting aside self importance n choosin kinship over isolation.

Praise be to my autonomous niggas, my Nipseys.

Together, we really a riot.

Together, we really some silly girls.

Praise be to my homeboys who don’t let me cheat on myself, who call my shit out. They speak up n intervene, they ask questions of themselves n expect more from their hearts, they don’t practice no hierarchy.

My brothers, my day ones, hope found us and weaved a sunbeam between us.

My comrades, we conspire. My comrades, we fight with each other.

We learned to stop promising potential n just step into presence.

They each, got a gift. They each, got a message.

They walk in alignment, they some soldiers I respect.

They about that business, they about their hustles

They DJs n poets n professors n thinkers. They rappers n film makers n producers, architects n chefs. Praise be to my co conspirators.

They can be scared to do better but do so regardless.

They don’t always get it right but they willing to admit their wrong doings.

They read, they scheme, they study, they work, they try.

They go get it. They Sankofa with it.

My brothers don’t got too much of a cartography to reference bout action but they try it with lineage. They look to the men who influenced them like Malcolm, like Kwame Ture, like Kwazi n Sanyika, like George and Jonathan Jackson, like Uncle Monday. They look to Ogun n Shango n see High John in Pac n Mutulu. They crown their trinities to call onto.

Praise be to the men who see the crisis in the smoke, who go lookin for answers without bein told, they listen when we say: come find me destitute and residued where the love abundant yet not always that palpable but imma need you to believe it. N together, we believe it.

Praise be to my homeboys who hug each other n cry n say bro you aite? N say bro u got this n say bro if you need me, call me, n I’ll pull. N my homeboys pull up.

My niggas resist the stupor, n that don’t mean they don’t get got sometimes, but they know it for what it is. N ask themselves what they gotta do to let it go?

They see the cost of their grandmothers short lives, in the fault lines of our smiles. We hit the smoke circle passin breath between each other n get faded n get loose n get stupid.

N so we rejoice that under the moon, under the cratered wisdom of our forefathers. We rejoice for our, ‘kinship to the sky, [for our] devotion to the dirt that raised…[us]” (Alyesha Wise).

Praise be we found each other, that we got expectations of each other, n we risin to the occasion.

The left ain’t sexy and that’s the problem. i don’t mean sexy as in drippin and oozin in fuckin, I mean sexy as in cool, hip, where mfers say “damn he’s THAT nigga.” It’s a swag gap when it comes to bein suave and I do firmly believe this is a huge reason we’ve lost an urgent relevancy amongst the masses. Urgent relevancy as in, there isn’t a culture of…

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I love nothing more in life than being faded with my homegirl on a Monday night. Walk the block puffing on a Coastal Sun and surfin a post workout high. The Sky tangerine n the day ain’t shitty but we strugglin to find it a blessing. Swinging in the liminal space of transition, everything a portal but we rely on each other. Tryna get escaped (Moten), my…

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Every Ama project I’ve listened to requires three to four listens because shorty talkin that shit.

It’s not ever just about love, it’s almost always a layered outlook on her life and the pain of relating. Whether it’s about a friend, a lover, a parent, God, Ama goes there and allows the listener to add meaning making through their own i…

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“In a world controlled by white folks, DuBois said we always have a double consciousness. We tryna be black and meanwhile you got a white ghost hovering over your head that says if you don’t do this you’ll get killed, if you don’t do this you won’t get no money, if you don’t do this nobody will think you’re beautiful, if you don’t do this nobody will ever think you’re smart. That’s the ghost. You tryna be Black and the ghost is telling you to be a ghost”

-Amiri Baraka

That ghost hoverin over my head again

Warns me to stop cussin if I’m tryna get serious

about surviving. Points to a bra, a straight blonde

weave, a blazer, n a razor Clean up n get back in line

ghost yells offerin me a straight jacket. N I’m not fit

for capture. Ghost claims I’m disappointin my mama

and all my private school education. That it’s not cute

to be forgetting about punctuation. Do I not wanna be

taken serious? decorated by an empire? Don’t I want

to be adorned in a crown of thorns? Bleeding at the

forehead with all the things I’ve kept silent.

Ghost demands I suffer beautifully. Tempts me into lightening

myself into the shade bleached bone. Points to the mid section

of my belly n takes a knife to carve out the earthly flesh.

Wants to sink its teeth into a eurocentric beauty standard.

The ghost imposes invisibility then calls me Jezebel,

calls me Mammie, calls me fatal, a violent, lazy, sinner.

Ghost got me tongue twisted n forgetting my rage.

Tryna get me caught up in capitalist aspirations

n offers hustle culture as a refrain. Ghost got me

tortured in the mirror. got my self belief missin.

Revs the insecurity in the key of Beethoven and

Emily Post etiquette. Threatens if I go mad then I

might as well be dead. Ghost threatens its got hands,

its got a gun, n the same bounty on my head like it did

for my family Ghost raises its hands but never stings the

cheeks. Loads the rifle but never cocks the weapon back.

Looms with threats of unmaking. Looms with the scent of

grave diggin. Claims he got henchmen, whistles to send klansmen.

with they rope burns n rings of fire. Settler fantasy, ghost fastens

against my skin. Claims my image, Black skin, white masks.

Ghost in the shell, sendin me straight to motherfuckin hell.

References:

Black Skin, White Masks - Frantz Fanon

Ghost in the Shell

Everybody wanna police somebody about some shit they’ve said. N don’t get me wrong, I’m fundamentally against bigotry, but I am also against the idea of a perfectly safe space. Safety is a yt notion. It’s an aspiration enforced through violence. Sensitivity has since been weaponized as a means to ensure an impossible idea of safety. Hyper focused on the risk not to offend, we value performance and surveillance of said performance over people genuinely figuring out and enacting an authentic politic. Now, everyone is frozen out of fear of saying the wrong thing. But offense is necessary, moments of uncertainty are required, and being fundamentally wrong is paramount.

you know who else are sensitive? people who deny genocide under the guise of anti semitism. the lexicon will be used by the state and the idea of feelings will be weaponized into a liberal psyop. the state will seemingly humanize itself and prioritize “feelings” and the protection of such “feelings,” but the question is for whom and for why. The question also becomes why are we reproducing those same notions? I’m not saying people should endure violence or bigotry, but I am saying we have to get practical about who we struggle with and alongside.

most people are offensive. most people do not have a realized politic. most people are problematic. if we act as though only a select few, with the most accurate lexicon, even if radical, can determine who we do and don’t struggle alongside, that also isn’t a worthwhile transformative politic. I am not interested in abandoning niggas because they’ve offended me. i’m clear in myself, i’m clear in my identity, i’m clear in my politic, that no one can sway me from my own self realization - i will not let someone who afflicted by state propaganda be able to tell me about myself. but i will meet them where they are at. because who else is going to? a right wing pipeline? over my dead body bro. if i have endure being misgendered by a nigga to reach them, i’ll do that - not because i agree with their internalized phobias but because i know myself and know that someone ignorant to my reality cannot deny it. no one has that power over me. and the fuck i look like handing that over?

i’m disinterested in hyperpolicing people into a politic that they themselves only believe in cuz they wanna avoid being “wrong” or “bad.” the problem with sensitivity is that it is subjective and it steers into policing and surveillance extremely quickly. no one of it feels sincere and frankly most of it feels rooted in avoidance. because of the level of sensitivity the left possesses, people don’t find politics as a living breathing practice but a theory that they are failing in. it ultimately makes politics into abstract arguments about being offensive over a practical means of surviving what we are right now.

Once, I almost died n every time I went to sleep in the hospital, I was in a blackhole. A womb of white noise, completely still, without labored breath, n washed over with serenity, every time I woke up was a choice. Opening my eyes was like knocking my head through 1,000 slabs of concrete n gasping violently for air. I been tryna figure …

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Hedonistic with my Sundays, I smoke cigarettes n cook for the altar. Family recipes went missing so my homegirl fills in and passes down her family’s traditions. We both lost children of the South, so we know we gotta stick together. I’m workin on not dyin lately. but. Every time I do something good for my health, I kill myself…

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In Aspen, I’m a nigga and I know it the moment I hit the tarmac.

By God’s grace, I find a homeboy and we stand smoking by a river talkin bout niggas who are niggas but ain’t really niggas.

It’s weird out here. It’s get out out here.

A trauma surgeon says Patients are now othering The doctors. N I think it’s tragic We don’t let patients shake up a room full of LinkedIn expectations. Baraka was right bout Them ghosts Professionalism tryna invade my consciousness Asking me to be polished N it’s all nonsense

The white people go quiet when you get honest - come on Tap dance monkey mfer Their eyes sayin n I lost My rhythm crossing the Colorado border - shook it out with the turbulence Got invited, into their pristine chapel - now I’m Black as a concept so I act like a nigga -

In this liberal God’s Country they love their dogs more than their wives. Can pontificate on AI cuz the data centers ain’t being built in their neighborhood They got that good good West Coast PNW niceties laced in biases typebeat racism. They say all the right words but none of them got meaning.

N Fuck it, they paid for me to be here so I dance Comply to a pharmaceutical Company in a window walled room. I’m a hypocrite but that’s not in my nature. So I Can’t not talk without talkin bout being a noncompliant patient, can’t not talk without talkin bout how this health shit ain’t really real. N I’m just making it plain scatter brained got no exceptionalism left

In Aspen, I’m a nigga n most people skiddish around me. It’s weirder than weird out here Got the fear of the boogie man out here, Clutchin they pearls cut the clip It’s all So insincere.

Homeboy n I talk about Black ain’t enough - that we need somethin more n we both say nigga as intermediary. Cuz in aspen, we niggas n then theres Blacks. We niggas n then there’s coonin. We niggas N then there’s Black excellence. Black capitalism. The illusion of acceptance. The metric of representation. Visibility to erase history. Get enough niggas to turn negroes then they’ll forget the system gunnin after them, chompin at the bit to get at em, grindin bones to dust to feed the experimentation.

But the niggas find each other n relish in the exchange of smoke n a walk. Fight like hell to keep our dignity in tact. Even if it means making mothafuckas uncomfortable. Cuz being a nigga is uncomfortable. Being a nigga is to be stain on the window of humanity. Must be cut out, must get put down, must get snuffed into silence. We cut it up n it’s a nigga moment in the best way. The laughter singing like a disturbance of the peace. Somethin like we tryna get free.

“I got the hammer, I know it’s polarizing,”

Vince Staples mischievously raps over noise rock beats, opening his first independent release: Cry Baby. Leading with singles like Blackberry Marmalade, White Flag, and Cotton, signaling a return to his Summertime 06 & Big Fish Theory roots, Staples is clearly challenging his intention, his visuals, and his politics with Cry Baby. Without desire to hide behind metaphor, Staples is striking against empire, Cry Baby arrives as a manifesto: we not goin’ no where, so we better get busy about what we doin here. But the question becomes: is it clear in its directives or haphazard?

In Staples’ third single, Cotton, he uses the same american flag he slathered in white paint from his second single, White Flag, to screen archival videos of uprisings, rallies, American flags burning, Black Panthers, and musicians playing alongside videos of Black life, birth, love, gathering, and the mundane. His visuals become a picture book for the listener to not only aid their digestion but potentially provide the next course of action. The surrender of a white flag isn’t to the state, but a new consciousness. What type of new consciousness has yet to be determined from Staples at this point of rollout but it’s on his mind. This is further emphasized in Blackberry Marmalade which ends in a reference to Dr. King’s Letters from a Birmingham Jail, “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.” It’s almost as if Staples is provoking his listener in order to shake them out of the overwhelming sedation of nihilism and technology.

Throughout Cry Baby’s roll out, we’ve seen american flag imagery from Staples photographed with a flag draped behind him to his profile picture changed to Jesse Jackson with an American flag backdrop on Instagram. The choice of the photo is worth noting, it was taken during a 1988 Juneteenth speech at the Democratic National Convention during which Jackson called for a common ground across identities, religions, and political leanings. It’s a painfully liberal speech (with a couple decent quotes) in which Jackson calls for lions and lambs to lie beside each other and disregard the ability for the lion to annihilate the lamb. Overall, he’s asking how we will survive, which appears to be a question Staples is also concerning himself with. However, he challenges this kind of liberalism by showing visuals of klansmen being hung as an act of counterviolence.

The flag becomes a question itself: do you really wanna integrate into empire? Cry Baby serves as a refreshing alternative to projects like Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter which relied on a mix of Southern nostalgia, bourgeois propaganda making, and encouraging unbridled thoughtless patriotism - Staples’ album instead is a catalyst for us to consider: what does being Black, beyond a marker of identity or representation, actually mean?

The political arena is nothing new for Staples

From the inception of his career, he’s has consistently made statements through his music from highlighting Republic of New Afrika member Monster Kody aka Sanyika Shakur on Ramona Park Broke My Heart to mentions of Pac, Geronimo Pratt, and Bunchy Carter on earlier projects Shyne Coldchain and FML to lesser known interviews where he breaks down the corruption of the music industry, Staples is always jousting against empire’s expectations of him. He is quick witted, sharp tongued, and gets immediately to the point. It’s fitting for his independent release that he is able to articulate just how anti establishment he is. Rejecting status quo, as an artist, Staples’ lead up to Cry Baby’s release showed him provocatively challenging the limitations of being a public figure in these times. How far can he actually go?

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Performing with a full band for his album release at the El Rey in Los Angeles (and for Youtube Live)

Staples with arms crossed appears like a composed rock star stained in red light as he strolls through his Cry Baby album with sounds similar to Rage Against the Machine, Dead Prez, Wu Tang, meets the church, with some Slick Rick thrown in for good measure. He comments on not wanting to do press for this album saying, “ain’t nothin fuckin funny” - committed to focusing on the music. Staples follows with a short story of how long he’s been wanting to diversify and experiment with his sound citing label execs prevented him claiming he didn’t “belong” in electronic, rock, or genres outside of hip hop.

Suffocated by the trappings of his label, Staples is experiencing the breath of relief finally existing as an independent artist. With that freedom, he’s bucking against the narrative that compromising for the sake of visibility is worthwhile likening it to coon behavior. To Staples, Visibility is not a benchmark of progress, it’s a site of capture.

Staples attempts to rile up his audience yelling at them to sing alongside him with words like “N-I-G-G-A” and phrases like “God Bless the USA” , nearly each song having a version of call and response but the audience falls quiet. Staples, stares on with a type of look that says “fuck around and find out.”

He proceeds to move through songs like Only in America where Staples raps,

“America the beautiful, I’d like to take a look at you
It’s hard to see past the stars from behind the bars, know they love to throw the book at you We barely can read, plus speech not necessarily free
Black folks always embarrassing me, with that face down, hands up, hands on your knees”

TV Guide where he critiques Western media’s control over the masses with a chorus repeating,

T-t-t-television, you turn me on
L-l-l-lookin’ at you, I’m not alonе
M-m-m-movie magic up on the screen
I think the television’s controlling me, woah, oh, oh

Go Go Gorilla ripping into state sanctioned violence from police, mass incarceration, and genocide

Red line, gentrified, they give wrist slaps to them and sentenced mine
Went from bread lines to picket lines to main line prison time for the crimes that we commit
But genocide don’t mean nothin’ to Uncle Sam
Guess it’s dignified in America, probably just dreamed that they were sellin’ us

Big Bad Wolf critiques Barack Obama and the expansion of imperialism through bombing the Global South entirely rejecting respectability politics

Drop bombs like Barry O, you hear me coming
Up the street, my trunk jumping like a put-on
I put the hood on, it’s plenty Zimmermans among us
But that ain’t new, been gunning for us since Columbus
Drop that noose, you should be swinging in the jungle, black man
What’s your master plan?
What are you gon’ do when the shit crack off
And the big bad wolf come and blow down yours, huh?

And 7 in the Morning where he references the military industrial complex

7 in the morning, death is in the air
Decibels from warheads, deafening my ears
Desecrated holy land, the devil’s near
Devastated, questioning if Heaven’s real
7 in the morning, tryna get to noon
Staring out my window, watching the platoon go
Left, left, left, right, left

Staples’ lyrics are coming to life in real time, while he’s performin in Los Angeles at the El Rey, his hometown of Long Beach is being subjected to planned military trainings where “controlled explosions” and “simulated weapons fire” could be going off until 2am according to a City of Long Beach Advisory.

During an untitled song referencing Tulsa Oklahoma, he starts listing off revolutionaries who are dead from Assata Shakur to Bunchy Carter to Kwame Ture after he breaks out screaming “bitch ass nigga why you mad at me” - calling for a redirection towards the state of where we collectively point our rage.

Before closing his set, he gives the audience the directive to “get a gun,” Staples is not holding back on the directives assigned alongside his manifesto. This is not the first time he’s told his audience to get a gun, Staples is a jester who relies on being a “precise switchblade” (Alice Sparkly Kat) - you know when his words are especially incisive.

In the middle of performing Cotton, Staples refers to different types of Black people as Negroes, Coons, Niggas making clear it’s a venn diagram and that there’s a type of Black he politically aligns with. With his consistent hearkening to the Republic of New Afrika mentioning members like Sanyika Shakur and Assata Shakur, I can’t help but wonder if he’s pushing towards something like New Afrikan.

I first learned about the Republic of New Afrika

through James Yaki Sayles book Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth where he shares his interpretations of Fanon’s concept of new consciousness and new identity - had Black worn out its usage? Black was originally a term Kwame Ture had coined as a means for us to part from African-American - however co-opted by Nixon to derail Black people from seeing themselves as separate from the United States…Black has since become about as meaningless as African-American. New Afrikan arose as a new identity for people that evolved beyond Black where identity signaled a clear political value and leaning.

Read: New Afrikan Declaration of Independence

Founded after the Civil Rights era, The Republic of New Afrika was established in 1967 following a Detroit riot where a convening of Black Power leaders and organizations met to a create a Black nation in the South.

According to the PG-RNA’s website (Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika), “A New Afrikan (Black) Nation -exists in the United States. It began forming during colonial days, after 1660, when the Black Codes were instituted. It was fully evolved by the time of the Civil War in 1861, two hundred years later. We have common culture, common perspective and values, and group identity, and common gene pool, derived from our distinct group history. We are “New Afrikans” because We, and Afrikan people, evolved from not one but several Afrikan nations and have some Indian (Native/Indigenous) and European genes, melded during the course of 200 years, between 1660 and 1861.”

Malcolm X Grassroots Movement expands further on New Afrikan and New Afrika saying,

“The term “New Afrika” designates us not just as a group or a collective but as a Nation. We claim nationhood and sovereignty at this time and in this place!

• because we aspire to independence, self determination and self sufficiency

• because our culture and interests are not just distinct but in opposition to that of the North American empire

• to highlight the conditions of colonization in which we currently live

• as a grounds on which to demand the recompenses – such as reparations – due to all nations whose international and inalienable human rights have been unjustly compromised

• to affirm our connection to the landmass on which our ancestors toiled and bled; to affirm out connection to land from which all wealth and health flows.

• because we recognize that people do not control their own affairs, who do not control the institutions by which they participate in public life are open to disenfranchisement, marginalization, and genocide

• to be able to act as a resource, example. and sanctuary for oppressed people everywhere

The term “ New Afrika” reflects our Pan African identity, our purpose, and our direction. Although we come from distinct ethno-linguistic groups in Africa and the African Diaspora, our shared oppression and the interdependence of our liberation redefines our borders.”

Some of the most well known revolutionaries were members of the Republic of New Afrika and identified as such: including Robert F. Williams, Queen Mother Moore, Assata Shakur, Nehanda Abiodun, Betty Shabazz, Jamil Al Amin (H Rap Brown), Sundiata Acoli, and Mutulu Shakur.

In fact, one of the most famous rappers of all time was deeply entrenched in the Republic of New Afrika movement: Tupac Shakur, the step son of Mutulu Shakur. While I’m not saying that Vince Staples’ directive is that we must become New Afrikan, I am saying that I do believe he belongs in a lineage of political rappers, but especially New Afrikan rappers making it worth exploring as a potential political lineage and identity for Staples as an artist.

While I don’t want to assign these politics onto Staples, it appears as though whether its his intention or not, he has aligned himself with a New Afrikan lineage. Therefore can we say Staples is a New Afrikan adjacent rapper? Talking to my homegirl she shares, “because he has such a mythic persona, he has a substance that’s hard to pin down unless you engage with his material.” He weaves so many references that if you’re paying attention it almost feels obvious that he has been pointing towards the Republic of New Afrika.

Whether consciously or subconsciously, it remains quite profound thematically throughout his work: Staples has an impulse towards self determination that can’t go ignored

Your Honor, I have no plans for my future because I thought I would be dead by now.

Throughout my early - late 20s, I battled phase 3 chronic myleoid leukemia. Diagnosed with a white blood cell count of 660,000 and a mutation, it was clear that the battle ahead was arduous. It resulted in me constantly planning for the potential inevitability that if this cancer remains resistant to treatment, to a stem cell transplant, to anything - I may actually die….actually not maybe, I WILL die.

Living with the threat of death and constantly having escapades with almost tapping out of existing is a kind of high stakes living that no one prepares you for. It also makes you only see what is ahead of you - step by step. Throughout cancer, I couldn’t see or plan beyond a week at a time. So naturally, I spent my 20s not even thinking to prepare for living past 30 because that felt like an impossible dream. Instead. Everything I did throughout my 20s was with such an intense urgency because: what if I won’t be here? What is going to be left of me? This resulted in me overworking throughout cancer and hyper documenting my life just in case I posthumously needed the record set straight against medical racism and medical apartheid.

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In 2020, I received a life saving transplant and the following year, I signed to publish a book with Penguin about surviving cancer. In 2024, right before my 30th birthday, I released my first book: Bless the Blood: A Cancer Memoir. It was a huge dream frankly I never expected to achieve so early. I grew up as a slam poet, I call poets within the literature world “pen to paper poets,” and while I always wanted to publish a book - I never saw an avenue for it given I was a spoken word poet. But, two years ago, I achieved the only real dream I ever had for myself: publish what happened to me. And some how achieving my dream was anti climatic as hell.

Again, when you’re going head to head with death - there is no greater high than beating it. Meaning there are very little things in the waking world that get me that kind of amped, that kind of juiced, that kind of anything. Especially in survivorship this has been difficult. Because even achieving my dreams and a remission still hasn’t been enough for me. It took me until today to realize: well it’s because I never planned on living this long.

- yeah girl…same. I spent my entire 20s being known as the kid with cancer who desperately needed to survive - whether on instagram, twitter, or in real life. It became an entire persona. It became all of me. My diagnosis swallowed me alive and cancer awakened me to the realities of occupying my identities in a system set up to kill me. I became so closely associated with my diagnosis though that I never could look up and ask myself, God, whoever, what else I wanted from this life other than the pain of almost dying to be acknowledged. But pain can also be a religion, it can also be a deity that we worship. I forged so much of my identity from a place of sorrow and rage that when I no longer had cancer, I didn’t know who I was anymore.

The cancer industry is not without fault - it also sells us that we will go back to normal if we just survive this “terrible thing.” But the reality is survivorship is more difficult to navigate than the illness was itself. Survivorship is realizing you don’t belong to the kingdom of the ill (Sontag) anymore, but you aren’t welcome in the kingdom of the well, and so you are left to wander an abyss - or what I call: a wilderness. I wasn’t prepared to have to wander elsewhere and call that living. I wasn’t prepared to try to make new dreams within that wilderness. A part of me resented that in making it through the rigorous hike to the mountaintop, to the promise land of remission, that there was just another mountain when I survived cancer. And I didn’t have it in my for nearly 6 years to whip up another dream for myself.

I felt terrified to try and live again because it meant the threat of death was also there. It’s one thing to lead a close and intimate relationship with the threat of dying, and that’s it… it’s another to lead a close and intimate relationship with living again. I’ve been terrified that if I allow myself to believe I’m allowed to live that then a second cancer would happen, or a crazy accident, or lightning would strike me from the sky.

Once, I had a psychiatrist liken what cancer patients go through, especially Black cancer patients, to combat veterans. The PTSD got me bad, the PTSD got me in a freeze, in a stupor, and confused about what it is that I can want, dream, and go after. But, I have found myself exhausted from only having a relationship to dying. I’m not afraid of dying but for some reason but I am afraid of giving in to living. Which feels like two sides of the same coin though.

Something’s gotta give and something’s gotta shake. I have found myself opening myself up to the possibility of new dreams - even if they are small - like performing a live show with a band. Perhaps I do need to be this pragmatic in my wishes for living in order to see just how big I can dream for myself again. Perhaps it’s really as simple as: I’d like to get through today, with my homegirls laughing, smoking, watching TV, talkin shit, and coloring together and that is my paradise. That is my dream for the day. That is what I survived all this for. Not anything grand to most. But instead. To experience love fleetingly. To experience joy temporarily. To feel my feelings fully. And to swell so great with life that when it’s time for me to actually, really, go, I’ll be ready - for I saw the horizon, I saw the sun, I welcomed it, I welcomed it all.

“I’m cut from a sinful nature I feel afflicted”

Isaiah Rashad is a junkie or so he says, n is it a slur, is it derogatory if we claim it for ourselves? Is he givin addicts the same word with different kind of feelin, makin it somethin easier, with less weight, somethin maybe lovable? Throughout Isaiah Rashad’s most recent album, It’s Been Awful, he evid…

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When did queerness become about who you’re fucking?

No really, run it back for me.

Recently, I was writing about my trigger of the week which is gay people who aren’t queer but also…lemme take it a step further: queer people who aren’t queer.

This isn’t some gatekeeping shit, but more so, we got a mainstream image of what queerness looks like and someho…

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رسالة لكل من يقاربني

My first time public speaking was at the border erected between my grandmother and I at her funeral. Her body in a silver casket, me standing at a pulpit in Inglewood. 13 years old, wringing my hands, I didn’t know much about loss but I knew the low rumble of my grandma in her easy chair, laughing; which guided my first impulse, saying she was up in heaven dancing with James Brown therefore we should not be sad on this day. Tension collapsed out the pews in scattered whistles singing relief.

Heavy is the heart interpreting the human condition but Black folks know it better, so heavy is the crown of our burdened existence. there’s something to be said about making the mud inviting, to provide a voice accompanying us in the lonesome thrashing of grief.

Everything can be a eulogy these days which means everything can be a joke, an alternative appeal to our wary imaginations. It’s easy to undermine humor as its own language, a linguistic practice between us. But considering growing up what my grandparents and mother had choice in - either collapse from the pressure or find something in the dark to clutch onto…I see why they chose the latter. Easing the blow of living under empire with a Bernie Mac or Eddie Murphy comedy special or repeating lines from their favorite songs by Tupac and Rick Ross. When I consider where artists speak from - it is an imposed isolation while also reaching outward. We go behind a microphone or piece of paper and speak from the place we are struggling to find ourselves in while also putting it on display for interpretation. What cuts through the noise is we are perpetually ransacked, and yet there’s something to be said that only another nigga can make me equally cling onto relief and morbidity of this shared purgatory. Our cackles providing an acute knowing that we agree : the shit we are enduring is genuinely ridiculous.

I guess the joke is a trickster opening the gates of the unexpected. Like Eshu, be careful what you wish for - let this rhythmic dance out the mouth be a guide of sorts. And yeah yeah, it can be a defense mechanism, but it is also where my volatile rage, the type of rage that could send me to jail - goes off to die. It makes that which is enormous and insurmountable reduced to the size of my palms. Like that time I was overflowing with cancer cells, in a hospital bed, at 23, and I thought of my grandmother, a decade earlier, still making me smile as a blood clot bulls-eyed its way to her brain. What grace, what vulnerability, to be a knowing architect of memory and insert the echo of a laugh track. Knowing, if my body erases itself, I must consider what is left.

I once believed i was invincible, until breath almost exiled itself from my body and I had to ask: what would I want people to hear from me? A joke or two would be nice. A sign I’m fine, I made it. Safe or not. I made it

Maybe it’s epigenetic, cultural, who knows, but when someone who looks like me, speaks from that loneliness letting me in and deliver a line that sends me into a guffaw, a giggle, a wait what the fuck, nigga what did you say - I imagine it’s a wedging open of a door - here is a way we can meet and understand each other. The pun is I cannot exist without you as my audience of night remembering me as a dissolved sun. We break bread by opposing the recoil into oblivion through the feedback, the seance, the abyss where we wheeze, whoop, screech, holla if you hear me n it all translates to: do you see how hard this shit is? Well gahd damn it, I do too, and it don’t gotta be more than that, but maybe. if you bare your teeth alongside me. then we both can forsake despair as the only option. Together.

gathering as relating

-Jericho Brown, The Tradition

“For all we know

This may only be a dream”

-Donny Hathaway

I. The story goes Donny Hathaway went off his medication.

He was a paranoid schizophrenic. The voices told him he could fly. The notes hanging in the air asked why he was still tethered to the ground. Believin he could make it to where the music was, Hathaway dropped off the balcony a 15th floor hotel room suite. His body died. His spirit, steady trying, finally clawed itself out of the soul singer’s corporeal form N soared elsewhere.

II. When Nina Simone sings Stars at The Montreux Festival in 1976, she gazes into a distance, seemingly absent minded or potentially glitching between the realms of meditated and medicated. She sees a girl standing in the distance to whom she commands to “sit down.” The audience lets out surprised laughter followed by clapping, but Nina ain’t playin, for if she is to travel a distance alongisde her spirit and a piano, she requires perfect conditions. For she’s seen the end of days and lithium keeps her from losin her mind n her life. But music circumvents the laws of medication and she flies the same place Donny flies to. One all Black Crazy Folk go. The realm of the maniq.

III. I met a poet recently who re-reminded me How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind by La Marr Jurelle Bruce. In Chapter One, Mad is a Place, Bruce describes the suspension of time and space Black people experienced being live human cargo in the Middle Passage. Describing it as a type of induced madness, Bruce writes,

“What vertigo does a body undergo, caught between treacherous waters below and treacherous captors above, with “nowhere” outside?…How does one keep time, or discern direction, or remember the way home from “nowhere at all,” with no familiar beacon to behold ahead or behind? It seems to me that neither imagination nor historiography is apt to apprehend the seasick- ness of spirit, the existential dread, and the feverish homesickness that might menace a mad prisoner or black captive trapped at sea”

(Bruce, p14).

Veritgo originally means to bend, so what bending does the body undergo when caught in a liminal space of a neverendin captivity? Bruce describes there is no way that a being can discern time, space, direction, or how to get home from such a place. Given all familiarity has been destroyed, Bruce refers to this sensation as an induced illness, a “seasick-ness” of the spirit…yeah, that would drive anyone insane. But that is the is the experience of the “black captive trapped at sea” therefore: our ancestors. It breathes within us, as recent history that is also ancient. Bruce refers to this as a “mad diaspora.”

IV. When I was four, my grandmother convinced my mother to take me to a doctor, citing that she didn’t understand anything I was saying. Lips flapping zippers, making a cacophony of sound me n my accelerated speech were its own dialect. My mother, reluctantly, took me to a Kaiser in Mid City to where a doctor asked if she could understand me out of everyone, she did, so she nodded. Doc shrugged, “Her lips move faster than her brain.”

We never got the answer.

V. “Are you manic right now?” my friend asks me while slightly laughing on the phone, pointing to my accelerated speech, alas, the sting of recognition, and there was no judgement from anyone but me.

VI. I get lifted and I get low, it’s true. Lifted be like whatever the alkaline folk talk about the pineal gland being decalcified or whatever. But I get it now. Ego melting into an infinity pool, my brain becomes porous with the electrical shock of intuition constantly pulsing. It’s really that simple, one morning I wake up believing I can do anything and I’ve got a backlog of miracles to prove it. I’ve got a list of delusions, I’m steady convincing myself in to and out of…such as:

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VII. My friends were sent to kill me / They are coming for me Some of them are spies / Some of them are members of Government agencies Someone is coming to save me / It is the British monarchy I am the next Duchess of Sussex / The Daily Mail is following me/ I am going to be shot at a college campus / I am related to Asssata / I am the next princess of genovia / I am the next princess diana / I am Whitney Houston from the Body guard / My partner is working with the / secret service but in nigeria / Someone is trying to get into my home / My lover is the only person I can trust / I am calling for another man I think is my brother - I don’t believe he is safe / I still believe that to be true / The gede are looking for me / My parents still love me / I am meant to subvert the Navy / I’m under a conservatorship without my knowledge / I’m meant to save the world / My family needs to go into exile / The eyes are everywhere watching me / I am part of a covert drug dealing operation / Insanity is the unresourced healer / Hearing voices is the unresourced shaman / Someone is coming to save me / The aliens are real. I am an ancient monster forced to inhabit a human body. / The music is always speaking directly to me./ I can talk to whales / There’s always a hidden message. / An old friend asks If I’m still crazy. / I can’t help the world speaks / to me in riddles I cannot decipher.

VIII. Maniq is the realm in which the mad diaspora convenes

Meets once a month and if you tapped in, you tapped in

We all somehow get the same delusions of grandeur

share the same dreams n somehow know something is coming,

and it requires Suspending suspicion, We all know faith exists

in this Realm unlike any other. And if we all visit where our ancestors

did too, then we kin of some kind, tethered to a nu but similar bio

technology. A traveling home in the sky. Maniq is a place we be at

sometimes. Get intel from another reality. I’ve never see its four walls,

we talk shit, we hit the lotto, we see angel numbers everything is a sign.

Because it is. The delirium dismisses time, the delirium rejects the laws

of the universe, it makes one believe in the Impossible. Sometimes I am

A danger to myself. I believe I can fly. Insanity, the zenith of self belief

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Glossary:

• maniq = a term coined by walela nehanda expressing that blk* surreal mania is as a different experience for Black people, that doesn’t adhere to the typical presentations of “mania” in Western pathology. To be maniq is to be so full of sound, in another plane, it enters the mystical which is a contradictory backdrop to the current conditions we are required to endure.

*Blk = reference to Khalil Joseph’s BLK NWS and Jericho Brown’s The Tradition