We’re driving through Delaware and a group of young, white cheerleaders are running by. From what I can see, there’s no rhyme or reason, but just as we’re about to leave them behind in view I see a girl push her friend, both-handed, to the left, and straight into a light pole. The friend doesn’t even look back as the girl hugs the pole she was lucky enough to avoid a collision with. “Oh, girl, that’s not your friend.” I dispatch telepathically.

A few weeks ago I sat on a panel about Black art as a cultural and political salve, elbow to elbow, with some of the most powerful Black women in culture. Yale was on the stage with me. Ford was on the stage with me. Big money, procured to sustain a history of Black art-making, was on the stage with me. I was the only artist on the panel, the only practitioner, an institution in and of myself. In their opening statements, the other women spoke for at least ten minutes longer than they were asked to, so there was no conversation, no chance for the assumption of interconnectedness to prove itself. What was supposed to be a panel and roundtable conversation became a pulpit for the advancement of Negro arts, sustained only by the insistence of Black excellence.

I sat silently, nodding in fake appreciation, as each woman performed her corporate sermon. Every phrase was taken from a board room pitch:

“Narrative development”

“Storytelling”

“Artist empowerment”

Each woman spoke about the power of reclamation, of “taking up space”, about building “our own institutions.” But there was no analysis, no honest mention of the contradictions. For these women, and the audience who mmm’d and ahhh’d at the language stolen from actual artists, the fact of power has no contradiction, as long as they believe they got it by taking it away from White people.

Of course I could have said something direct, offered a reframing, but every person in the audience (mostly Black) was in business wear, a reminder of where I was, and who those people expected me to be. There was no point. With legs crossed at the ankles, the women charmed the audience with the conceit of prestige. Instead of saying something, I worked hard to control my face and the frustration I felt as these three women celebrated the corporatization of culture and art in the name of collaboration with artists. But they showed themselves not to be caretakers of culture but culture salesmen.

I felt like a prop, like a figure of comparison -- look, these are the artists we support. And because I sat on that stage, facing students hungry for pathways, with almost no voice (or rather, a voice I chose to suppress due to its obvious futility in this setting) it seemed I was the result of a collaborative Black excellence that could only exist if I, the beneficiary, am willing to abide by the limitations of Black excellence, which is an intellectual limitation, a limitation of imagination and fancy. I was embarrassed to be there (I only said yes because an elder I admire asked me to) at that moment, embarrassed to be sitting with my legs crossed, twinning power. When I got home, I fell into my spouse’s arms. “Why are you crying?” They asked, rubbing my back. “This isn’t worth your tears.”

It took a few days to realize what I was crying about. It wasn’t the awkwardness of sitting in silence as the people who genuinely think that they fund and make space for my art (which requires only a pen and paper) talked about me and my artist colleagues as if we were projects taken on only because Black excellence could make space for us. It wasn’t the awkwardness of how different I was — the tattoo under my eye, the politics of my book — from these women and how my presence competes with their assumptions about what kinds of artists the elite is willing to defend. I cried because of the pessimism I left with, a pessimism that I did not expect to feel after being in a room surrounded by Black people who say they love Black artists, only to prove that Black excellence is itself extractive and inhuman. These women would not be on that stage if not for private school, if not for ivy leagues, if not for nepotism, if not for exceptionalism and essentialism. In their eyes, the preservation of culture depends on women like them, whose boardroom antics make art possible.

For most of my adult life, sometimes willingly and other times not, I’ve had the privilege of living in the corners of the rooms of Black excellence. What gets me in trouble is the paradox, the incongruity. I am always somewhere, flanked by AKA’s, who think that my lips aren’t red enough.

I was heavy crying in the car on the way home and then heavy crying in my spouse’s arms when I got home as I realized that what hurt was knowing that, despite all the evidence, Black people might never escape the trap of the “institution”, which is meant to reproduce and protect itself. Many of the students in that room who came up to me after the panel to ask me to sign books were young artists who’d suppressed and defied the power of making in service of those women’s ideas of power. “I write poetry,” one said. “But I came to law school when I really wanted to go to an MFA program.”

That was the one. That was the one that broke my heart, that made me wet my spouse’s shirt as I gripped their neck with my arms, trembling.

Behind the door of Black excellence is reality. Yale does not create the artist. The artist is not born from the institution. The artist is born from cultural surplus, which is systematically stolen from us every time the managers of culture sell the masters. Thanks, Ford. Thanks, Harvard.

The friend pushes the girl into the pole and runs away.

The New York City I know blasts Buju through every season. From the guts of cars, his sharp call is an invasion of the city’s soundscape, and whether winter or summer, someone will shout out the chorus. Someone with an accent, soft and crisp, from the bottom of their belly, will sing. Murderer/ blood deh pon yuh shoulder/kill I today you cannot kill I tomorrow/murder/your inside mussi hollow/how does it feel to take a life? I know I’m home then, among the people unafraid to sing, the people unafraid to make sound and mark, the people unafraid of matter.

New Yorkers have a particular kind of intellect. Everyone native I know knows something profound about the world and acts like it, with urgency and clarity and the appropriate amount of delusion it takes to believe that you can survive. No native New Yorker I know wants to stay. No native New Yorker I know wants to go.

I’m in The City for twelve weeks. I’m housekeeping for a friend-of-a-friend’s townhouse in Crown Heights. We left Washington D.C. at 4 in the morning and arrived in Brooklyn at 8am. By the time we crossed the Verrazano, it had begun to snow, the flakes falling like feathers around us. The Jeep Wrangler finally felt worth its dollar, we thought, lying to ourselves. The streets grew whiter as we got closer to our destination. I felt a sense of overwhelming gratitude for how beautiful it looked, gratitude for its potential, gratitude for that feeling New Yorkers feel when during the early moments of a snow, when it’s charming enough to make you wonder about whether or not it can feel like this all the time, whether or not its pearly textures can stay that even.

—

On a warm Spring evening, I was in the Lower East Side competing at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Friday night poetry slam. I was 19, I think, and new to the freedom of nighttime.

Yes. I was 19, I was competing at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe for $25, an ego massage, and the chance to be something other than the young girl I’d been written to be. Mo called me to the stage. Jive scratched the record and stopped the music. The room went quiet. I was a girl on a stage of my own lighting. The glare made it impossible to see, and so I got to pretend I was a nobody in a room of no one, just doing the ghostly work of self-realization. I was a bird learning to look for water.

The poem had consumed me for days and the stage was the place to exorcise it, to break it out of hibernation. The poem is gone from me forever but I can remember the way my body convulsed with affect, the way my voice sounded loud and buttery like wind from a flute, the way I began to sweat as I went into full embodiment and submission. God, it was everything I wanted, to fly like that, to disappear and to become new every time, to wear the poem and then to take it off, to find that underneath was a new rawness to tend to.

By the time the poem ended I felt pushed beyond the point of function. I came out of my daze to find the audience standing on their feet, some crying, other poets showed their palms to me as if to offer alchemic praise. I stepped down off the stage shaky and dry-mouthed. Jive played Buju. Take back yuself and bring back yuself inna one piece... Mo told the judges to write down their scores. After one minute she asked the judges to hold up their score cards. 10, 10, 10, 10, 10. 10’s across the board. I won my $25 and my ego boost. I won it fair and square with a poem that was not about my life, with emotion that had come from imagination and not experience. I had won it fair and square by making a departure from myself and what I knew.

The slam was over and I was 19 and I had just beaten people 10, 20 years ahead of me. I was big shit. Outside of the Cafe my friends and I cackled like teenagers do, mouths wide and fearless. Jive stepped out to hug us, Mo came out to hug us, Pepe yelled at us to quiet down “before these motherfuckers start calling the cops and shit.” A short older Latino man walked out of the Cafe. He beelined straight to me, his eyes glassy and full like lakes. As he came closer I realized he was crying. He reached up to squeeze my shoulders, tears leaving wetness on his cheeks. He dropped my shoulders and stepped back to look at me dead in my pupils while he said something to me in Spanish. Even though I’m from the Bronx and know more Puerto Ricans than southerners, I couldn’t understand him. He pulled a necklace over his head. It was a marbled rock chiseled into the shape of a heart, and it took me a minute to register its shape, because the muted blues and pinks and greens were melding together and abstracting it. He reached up to place the necklace over my head, the heart sitting on my blue chest like a medallion, like a reward. “This is the first thing I bought after we made our first dollar with the Cafe. You are why we made this, you are our legacy.” He hugged me again, kissed me on each cheek, kissed Mo on the cheek, kissed Pepe on the cheek, and walked away, his little old legs carrying him down the block and into a fantastical infinity.

I grabbed Mo’s arm. “Who was that?” I asked. Pepe rolled his eyes. Mo smiled a knowing smile.

“That’s Miguel Algarin, the founder of the NuYo.”

“The founder?” I balk.

“The founder.”

I’m nineteen and an ancestor places the heart of our legacy on my chest.

—

Either way you look at it, the city is everything everyone says it is. Everyone is skinny, everyone is indulgent. No one has money, everyone has wealth, no one has community, somebody is shopping essentials for grandma down the hall. Jamaica Kincaid asks of New York, in her essay Putting Myself Together, “What did I want? Did I know? I was twenty-five, I was twenty-six, I was twenty-seven, I was twenty-eight. At thirty, I was married.”

—

What did I know? I was ten, I was sixteen, I was nineteen, I was twenty-one, I was twenty-five.

I was twenty-six when I left the City for a Communications Director job on a mayoral campaign in Chicago.

I landed at O’hare just as a snowstorm was coming into the city, and I did not feel the winsome giddyness that I usually felt about snow. I lugged my heavy bag through O’Hare and finally caught an Uber after driver after driver kept cancelling due to airport traffic. The car hurtled through Chicago’s elevated highways, its skyline even and calm like a good day in May. The sky seemed like it was falling down a mile per mile, like it was coming to get me. I didn’t like that.

The driver let me out at a Starbucks where I was meant to meet someone from leadership who would bring me to the campaign office. I didn’t even have time to drop my bags off at the house I was staying in, so my 50 pound overweight bag came with me everywhere, like a dead man in the trunk of a cross-country trucker.

That evening, they offered to give me a ride home. We were maybe five minutes into the ride before he started to ask me about dating and relationships. Who was I dating? Was I dating for marriage? Did I have a roster? The prodding was easily recognizable; a bit meant to establish familiarity and transparency. Technically, he was my boss, so I went along, answered some of the questions, willfully and defiantly rejecting others while he laughed at my resistance.

Over the course of the three months that I spent on the campaign, that staffer became more and more familiar, less and less professional. “See, why can’t I find a girl like you?” He asked. I warned him once, “calm down, you’re doing too much.” He laughed at me. He got bolder. He got disrespectful.

At the same time, a scandal was emerging in the Chicago youth literary scene. It should be said that all the youth poets across the country know each other. I’m being hyperbolic but I’m serious. So I knew that the scandal wasn’t about stolen funds or messy programming. It was about bodies. About how mentors were treating the bodies of young women in the community. It was about how the men of the community were essentially coercing young women of younger ages into sexual relationships with men who should have aged-out of the community entirely.

Against my recommendation, the candidate and staffer set up a fundraising event with one of the artists in the circle of the accused. I warned her, “listen, these folks are not the ones we should be working with right now. Trust me. There’s a lot of weird shit happening and we don’t need to get involved.”

They went ahead with the fundraiser anyway.

Afterwards, I crawled into bed with a boy I couldn’t convince myself to love. He was very cute and from New York and was a teacher who had the kind patience of a sad animal. He had spent three years in a juvenile hall in Brooklyn, came home, played ball, almost made the NBA, got injured, and decided that he wanted to go to medical school. Teaching was a train stop. He had the kind of eyes that make you want to love someone, the kind of slowness that makes you want to hold someone’s hand, the kind of thickheadedness that makes you protective, the kind of softness that makes you want to be adored. And he was like me -- made it out the mud, as we say, found his own safety, found a way to return.

That night he made me an overdone steak, potatoes, and broccoli. It was the kindest thing that anyone in Chicago had ever done for me. He listened to me vent about the stupid campaign manager and the candidate. He wiped my tears away when I cried about the mistreatment. I was afraid to have sex with him, afraid that, because he was so nice and gentle, that it wouldn’t be good. Still, I worried that, if the sex had been good enough, I would have betrayed my instinct to run away and would end up stuck in the city I hated with a man who would end up loving me more than I did him. So I told him I wasn’t ready and then slipped out of his bed at 2am to get into mine.

It must have been the next day that I was fired. The staffer had taken it too far, far enough for me to find the bravery to tell him that he had finally crossed an uncrossable line. A few days later, after watching him flirt with a girl who must have been a teenager, I blew the whistle on my campaign manager. Not just because he was a creep, but because his creepiness bled into the campaign’s empty pockets.

I shrugged my pride on as if slipping into the certain warmth of a coat. They told me that I’d been let go because of insubordination. With my neck stiff as a stalk I stepped out of the office and back into the white cold of Chicago. I went to get tacos. I hated them. The meat was dry and unseasoned. I stopped at Urban Outfitters, and what was in stock was too generic, nothing like the exclusive NYC items. I walked the streets with my hands tucked into my pockets, my headphones blaring, my eyes dry from the wind sniping at my face. I had never wanted to go home as badly as I wanted to go home. I had never felt as impuissant, as flaccid, as vulnerable as I’d felt there. I’d never gotten the hang of the subways, and it was February, and there was no one anymore to drive me home. The beautiful organizing director who welcomed me into the city disappeared, and didn’t pick up my phone calls or respond to my texts. I had been abandoned in a city that I showed up to labor for. I asked for nothing. And I returned to New York City with a bag no longer overweight.

With my head in my hands I went back to my old building, where one of my best friends lived on the top floor. I moved in with her, then she moved out to take a new job in another city. I lived alone for the first time in my life. I had a shitty couch with peeling pleather, a bed with no frame and no work for five months. I had nothing to do but tend to my injury. I met a basketball player and almost fell in love (she was too much of a Leo), reconnected with an old crush (we stopped in the middle of having sex because I couldn’t get there), and then finally found a job on a new campaign.

In five months, I had been refortified. I walked to Z’s house every day to smoke joints and to be lectured by a friend 10 years my senior. I loved those lectures. I loved being her little sister. I smoked on the stoop to watch as new white people moved in across the street and down the block. A couple of times a week I walked to Borough Hall to pick my mom up for lunch, and we ate at the tiny Indian spot on Fulton that no one seems to go to until the lunch hour and when the line stretches out the door. We ate chana masala on a bench near her office. We fought about philosophy. She told me I was brave for leaving. I told her she was right to stay. She said she’d never thought of doing anything else.

On the internet I found an apartment three blocks from the office I would be working out of in Boston. I bought a one-way ticket. I felt sick. I packed my things. This time I packed less, even though I knew I wouldn’t be back, even though I knew there would be nowhere to go back to. The day before I left, I walked by the wine bar on my corner and did a double take when I spotted the cute teacher from Chicago. We hadn’t spoken in five months. I was happy to see his face. He seemed nonplussed, maybe even withdrawn. He stood up to hug me and the smell of him, floral but with depth, took up all the air. Why hadn’t I smelled him before?

We talked for nearly two hours. I asked him why he’d never wanted to date me, like, really date me. He looked at me, clear-eyed and dead-on, and said “I was trying to. I actually tried really hard.”

I knew this, but at the same time, I hadn’t. The brisk ache and aftertaste of Chicago came into memory.

That afternoon, I invited him up. My apartment was in shambles — I had been trying to pack and get rid of kitchen things and tchotchkes and books — but I let him in anyway, shamelessly.

To this day it was some of the best sex of my life. The sweet teacher with doctor dreams would be too far away now to be claimed. But the pleasure of the afternoon, even the painful recognition that I’d missed some cosmic gesture and ruined the rare chance of something, was worth the experience of the entire time spent between us. Chicago hurt. It was ugly and treacherous and corrupt. But the boy who fed me steak and potatoes returned to me in New York City. The city of my birth gave back to me something that Chicago had threatened to take away: the dosages of heart that only a city that really loves you can dispense.

—

We are two weeks past the first NYC snowstorm of Mamdani’s first term. I can’t leave the house because I’ve forgotten how to make my way through the NYC snow. I don’t want to take the train in negative 10 degree weather. Since when does it get this cold?

I’m reading Joan Didion’s essay Goodbye to All That, after having read Eula Biss’ collection of essays Notes From No Man’s Land. In it is an essay called Goodbye to All That, which is a response to, or perhaps even a reprise of, Didion’s original essay.

Didion says: is not that the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. It is that the heroine is not convinced she is the heroine or that the story is true. The heroine knows that New York is just a city—just a place to live. And, like any other place, it demands that you make your own story. I came to New York very young, and I left still young but not the same. The Wonder Wheel is still there, true, but everything else is gone…all I know is that I was very young in New York and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken and I am not that young any more.

Biss says: I came to New York when I was very young, and I left still young but not the same.

I left Chicago because I had never fallen in love with it. Because it wasn’t home for me, because I couldn’t find a way to be in service to it, because I was young and I knew my place.

Miguel Algarin, poet and co-founder of the Nuyorican Cafe died in 2020. Pepito, the bartender/door manager/beloved neighborhood cynic, died in 2025. I know what their absences mean. To gain an ancestor is to inherit the worlds they built for us. I know that legacy is an opulence worth honoring. My face is on the walls of the Nuyorican — there’s a portrait of my profile next to the stage, and a photo of me and a friend in a collage on the door of the bathroom. Who would I be without this history? Who else but these people, what else but these streets, could give me the kind of eyes that see color in the pitch black of night?

The people — who did not know here, who did not become here — who write about New York write about the transference of fear, about how fear in New York City is uniquely metabolized and then made into something else. I understand the impulse to make New York City the Bad Boy, the one who love bombs you and then traps you into his world of flaws. So many of the stories about New York City are about white panic: white women and their fear of the streets, their fear of the Black men on the streets, the fear of children in the corner stores, the fear of being racist, the fear of being classist, the fear of being lost to glamour, the fear of being erased from glamour, the fear of being poor, the fear of becoming too disconnected from the reality that the rest of us share, — the fear of being alone.

The transplant has the privilege of deciding what New York City is to people who’ll never know. The ethical transplant is as much in service to the community as much as she is in service to her own fear of being wrong. She realizes that New York City is a home, and not just an opulent fever dream, and realizes she doesn’t like that home, that she doesn’t like the window shades, the bathrooms, the people who use them.

The fantasies that whiteness layer onto the face of NYC become injuries once the City can no longer serve those fantasies. So the people who have always been here no longer exist once the fantasy has died. Everyone wants to come. Everyone wants to leave. No one thinks of the people whose entire beings have been constructed up against white people’s fears and anxieties. I do not think of New York City as safe or unsafe. I do not think of New York City as a playground for the wealthy, or a haven for the poor. I do not think of New York City as a land of opportunity, and I do not think of it as a place that disappears talent to be replaced with grit. Those terms feel useless.

All I know is that I came to New York in the way that only an infant can — naked and unafraid. My childhood was never a matter of magic. I have fallen and skinned my knees, I have been chased down by a pitbull twice my size, I have been arrested by power-thirsty cops and kicked out of schools by dispassionate school principals who needed me to go away to guarantee that the kids who wanted to be there had the funds to learn. I wanted to learn but I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be in the streets, in the gritty corridors that made me as soft as it made me tough, as careful as it made me reckless, as gitty and still as tortured as anyone else. I was born to this city, remade into a woman in this city. A man assaults me on a corner in SoHo. Not one white woman, most of whom you can assume to be tourists or students in that area, came to assist me. Not even the two transplants I was with, who were my friends, came to assist me. Everyone stood in shock — shocked that humanness could make typical this kind of violence. The only person unafraid was me. I chased after him, my friends at least a block behind me. I never caught up. I wiped his spit from my face. I walk to the Nuyorican, where Mo is hosting, as she does every Friday night. We tell her what happened. Mo writes me a poem. Promises to kill the next man who hurts me.

—

All my Chicago friends will call me a hypocrite. Maybe. But I know my place. I did not come to Chicago to know it, I came to work in it, a two-way mirror separating me from the color of the city, from its heart. It was right for me to leave. It was right of me to go back to the place I knew how to honor.

I was here first. My bloodline, the people who make me worthy of legacy, were here first. My mother, burned out in the 80’s by craven landlords seeking insurance money, was here first. My grandmother, an immigrant who brought all of her children to New York City from the British Virgin Islands, was here first. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe was here first, the Young Lords were here first, the Bloods were here first, the Crips were here first, the Black people dead and buried beneath the black floors of Washington Sq Park were here first, before the fancies of white whimsy.

I suppose that for many of us who have been young in New York City, a large many of us can remember the snowstorms that turned test days into snowdays. I suppose that for many of us who have been young in New York City, a large many of us can remember the bus trips to The Bronx Botanical Garden, and the small winter holiday train that tracked through it, and the gingerbread houses built in one of the greenhouses. I suppose that for many of us who have been young in New York City, only a small few of us can remember what it feels like before we were old enough to be afraid, only a small few of us can remember what it feels like to be a child at home. Like Didion and Biss, I had a yellow curtain draped over the window of the bedroom I shared with my sisters.

Whiteness has made it so that I can’t talk about New York City anymore without talking about white people, their reactions, their compulsions, their disruptive neediness that turns the Food Bazaar into a Wholesome Foods store (that doesn’t even have organic fruits!! Why!!). White people here, the pridefully shamed white people who hate whiteness, who hate having to be located within it, tell the stories about who is a victim of the city and who is a beneficiary. In the minds of the white transplants who teach kids like me in The Bronx, I would not have survived without their interventions. What would I have done without the white teacher whose guilt made her want to save me?

The heart of the city decenters whiteness, decenters the white perception of how the world has been designed around it, decenters their anxieties about service and the colonial impulse to save the savages. What is more dangerous about New York City, more heartbreaking, more gritty, than any other city? Is it its size? Is it its cost? Is it the way it attracts nefarious opportunists and liberal arts graduates alike and turns them into real people?

—

The snow has been trampled and flattened by the dirty feet of people just trying to get somewhere from nowhere. It’s flat enough for me to navigate with the snow boots my spouse bought me just for this trip, boots I did not need in D.C. I’m on my way home from class, and after a thirty four minute ride and about twenty five pages of Notes From No Man’s Land, I exit the C train at Ralph. It is cold, and dark, and the streets are emptying just as any streets do in any city after commuters settle into their homes. My headphones are on my head, but no music is playing, making them earmuffs in effect. I cross Atlantic Ave, and wonder if I should stop at the Popeyes on my way up the hill. Only the drive-thru is open. Too much of a hassle, I think. I want a Malta and a chicken sandwich, so I plan to grab the Malta from the corner store on Saint Marks and order wings from the chicken spot as soon as I get through the door.

I push the door of the bodega, made heavy by the wind, open and step into the store. I retrieve the Malta from one of the refrigerators lined up against the wall and walk it to the counter. “Papi, let me get a pack of Sour Powers. Yea, the red ones.” I shove the candy and the Malta into the bag. I don’t even notice the music playing overhead until I’m walking back out into the bare cold.

Caw! Buju yells. Caw!

We come to know grief as an event horizon, a thin lined horizon, where, after crossing, you remember nothing but the ancient silence of having a loss, which you carry as if it belongs to you, because it does, and will for a very long time, and it becomes a friend, a friend that you can’t defend, a runaway friend and then it subverts itself as it performs its own genre, as it nestles into its own air and becomes everything that everyone else has said it would be because it has to be in order to recognize order, and there must be some order if walking is the goal, but everyone dead has something to say and that thing, that wild and unspoken but needfully true thing that you don’t trust, that you can’t trust is bound to you now, bound to the promise of leaving but only if you look at it, only when you look at it, do you see the grandness of its permanence, the wit of it. I think about you every day. I know I bring the thing upon myself.

December, 2025. Just 15 minutes before the dawn of a new year. At that time of night, if you can recall, was a patient silence sitting just above time, waiting to become reason. The silence is splintered by the piercing cry of an ICE officer’s gun. Just 15 minutes before the turn of the famous hour, 43 year old Keith Porter is shot down like an ugly animal and murdered, right there in the street, like his predecessors (among them, Trayvon Martin, Andre Hill, Eric Garner, etc, etc, etc.) — this is where you can always find the mark of the beast: in the eyes of those deputized to actionalize the oppressor’s stated wants, to act out his most rational and most predictable dream, that of purity and distinction.

Surrealist painter René Magritte paints a human eye framing a pupil painted bright with the true features of any sky, and in this blue-blue sky, with heavy white clouds to complete it, we find the contradiction and constraint of humanity; does one see reality as it is, or is reality a product of what we can see? Or a product of what we can imagine?

Surrealism, the artistic and philosophical movement born in (but not born from) the early 1910’s, found itself most clearly and lucidly (funny enough) defined by André Breton, considered one of the founders of the tradition, in Manifesto of Surrealism. Its central thesis, which argues against the rational, demands, in order to be understood, an investment in the already anti-rational act of seeing. A child of Dadaism, cultivated in the space between the dramas of WWI and WWII (and of course the Spanish Civil War), surrealism was both a departure from and a response to the rational logics which cradled the happenings of war. It was also, as time suggests, a response to Marx & Engel’s manifesto. Surrealism was a rebellion against the bourgeois, against capitalism and colonialism and, in its nascence, was an embodiment of the “reality of struggle” which was a slap in the face to empire, to Western reconcilability. Surrealism was not just an aesthetic but a treatise on the colonial traps that make irrationality a crime. The rational actor believes he is the center of the world. The irrational actor understands that she lives in a dream world of her own making. Every time she exists in that world, she conjures a new reality that rejects the lived world and the material conditions which define one as human or not human.

Aimé Césaire, whose intellectual production and social philosophies belong only to himself, was in no doubt influenced by, or at least in conversation with, Breton’s surrealism. Born in Martinique in 1913, Césaire, Black poet and theorist, went to surrealism already armed with an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist liberatory politics that continues to sculpt and reshape modern liberation movements. He was a cross-genre writer, making him a writer whose practice already transcended limitation and categorization. Championed by other surrealists, especially Breton, Césaire brought a queerness to the study of freedom, making it not just an intellectual pursuit but a visceral one grounded in surrealism’s conceit: that of the imagination, of the unreal, of insanity.

Césaire says, in his magnum opus, Discourse on Colonialism, ‘“The petty bourgeois does not want to hear any more. With a twitch of his ears, he flicks the idea away. The idea, an annoying fly.”

The fly, which metaphorizes the idea of the idea, is nothing but an annoyance to the bourgeois. For the bourgeois class, the idea of the idea is threatening because it requires a looking past or a looking backward in order to understand the urgency by which the idea must weaponize to attend to itself. This is the surrealist order: the eye, looking into the eye, looking into the sky, which cannot be confirmed as real or unreal, only true to the seer, who must remain certain of the unsure in order to reproduce what he thinks he sees.

At the advent of surrealism, monsters and the grotesque were the vehicular depictions of insanity. But as it came into itself, surrealism became not only about the violent images of the dream-state, but also about the invisible heterotopic space (defined by Foucault as a counter-site that break norms and foster resistance) between dreaming and waking where the ideas and images of struggle are defended by the possibilities suggested by imagination. Imagination then is a poetic intervention. Césaire is who advanced surrealism beyond its original vehicles towards a more abolitionist logic, towards a logic that usurps the way of the ‘now’ in order to construct, from a place of nowhere, a future, a would-be, that would divorce us from the simple and feeble mind of rationality in order to defend ourselves against a rational world in which capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, naziism are normalized as inherent functions of humanness (when they are, in fact, a rational function of the state).

In Minneapolis, the weather channel boasts of a high of negative 9. The broadcast is useless because more than half of the community has abandoned warmth in order to stand in the streets and holler, and wail, and curl their frozen fists, and punt their heavy grief, at the slave patrollers, the gestapo, the products of a militarized state in the wake of another ICE execution of a nurse. It is irrational to believe that a human being will choose to withstand the most bitter and biting cold of the Winter to pursue an imagination in which institutions like ICE are abolished. This moment would be a failure if not for Césaire’s insistence on surrealism as an anti-colonial practice, as a practice and aesthetic born truly from the dream.

In this mode of imagination, we realize that the state and its fundamental function is what justifies ICE. We understand then, that in this mode of imagination, where resistance bears fruit, where struggle is a fight for the realities of the surreal, that the nation state and all of its contradictions are in fact justifications for leaving the world behind, for investing in insanity. The oppressor has an imagination too but his depends on the rational. He is not an insane actor. He is simply a sane monster whose life depends on the oppressed’s concession to his sanity, whose life depends on the oppressed’s attachment to rationality. Rationality won’t get us out of this. All the rational tools that have been offered to us are now useless. We occupy the heterotopic space between survival of this world and the conjuring of the next. For Foucault, this space is a conjuring of madness. The next world depends on how we imagine the death of the old world. Only the mad man has the bravery to imagine the death of any world at all.

I am naturally drawn, as I attempt to conclude this argument, to Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he tells us that mimesis — the inherently human act of imitation in which what exists is first imagined, and then constructed from imagination, and then reconstructed through a different medium — like a chair thought up by god, only to become material made by man, only to be reproduced in a painting made by man which does not simply mimic but represents the quintessence of the object. This is the function of poetry and the poetic. Through rationality we mimic rationality. Through mimesis we mimic irrationality in order to produce a real thing that frees us from the former rationalities that depose us.

I say all this to say:

Now is a good time to go mad.

It is Myself, Terror, It is Myself

Stranded dried up dreams flush with the muzzles of rivers create
formidable piles of mute bones
the too swift hopes crawl scrupulously
like tamed snakes
one does not leave one never leaves
as for me I have halted, faithful, on the island
standing like Prester John slightly sideways to the sea
and sculptured at snout level by waves and bird droppings
things things it is to you that I give
my crazed violent face ripped open in the whirlpool’s depths
my face tender with fragile coves where lymphs are warming
it is myself terror it is myself
the brother of this volcano which certain without saying a word
ruminates an indefinable something that is sure
and passage as well for birds of the wind
which often stop to sleep for a season
it is thyself sweetness it is thyself
run through by the eternal sword
and the entire day advancing
branded with the red-hot iron of foundered things
and of recollected sun

– Aimé Césaire

Activists are, of course, the bell-ringers of our communities. We are the ones who stand on the soapbox of the square and say what it is, say what it needs to be. But we forget sometimes that we are also just one thread in the tapestry of liberation’s possibilities. We are not the founders of liberation. It is a mistake to believe that our people are ignorant to their own subjugation, ignorant to the power structures that steal light and life from them. It may be true that we don’t all share the same lexicon, or share the same articulation of that subjugation. But to assume that our people don’t already have language for it, don’t already feel it in their everyday lives and know what they are feeling, is to infantilize a people who deserve to be spoken with, instead of to. 

It makes me anxious when I think about this dichotomy, that there are activists who believe we are teaching and activists who believe we are learning. In an ideal world, we are doing both. In a world that bifurcates these two distinct but overlapping positionalities (teachers and students), it feels critical that, if forced to choose only one, activists choose to be learners. I feel ashamed because the suggestion that our people don’t know the ledge they stand on, or that there is a ledge at all, says something about the way white supremacy and capitalist hegemonies has warped our idea of community, and how we fall into stratifications of value that correlate to (and in some cases, mirror) the hierarchy of human value that our oppressors have designed. The poor people I come from know the boot on their neck. The Black people I come from know that they are being sacrificed in order for society to meet the whims of the wealthy. 

I’m a bit off topic here, but if I have to organize my thoughts into the thematic framework of this substack, I guess I’m trying to say that activists, like writers (who are often both) must revisit the way we think about who we serve. We must get back to the draft, to the originary understanding of who we are, who our people are, and who we aim to be -- in service of our people, and in service of our spirit. If we consider ourselves stewards, then we must do away with the need to be ‘leaders’. Why must we lead a people who were already walking the road? Why must we need to lead in order to be in service? Why can’t the people we are in service to lead themselves, with us holding their tailcoats? Do we need to be celebrated and elevated and understood to be superior to do our work? Do we need to be the ones to lead our people out of Egypt in order to kill the pharaoh? 

As writers, so much of our gratitude goes to the institutions that help to fund the lives and livelihoods of writers. Because of this power dynamic, we are conditioned to focus on appealing to these institutions, on making work that will be satisfying to the gatekeepers the institutions employ to validate the value of our work. 

What would it look like to revise those relationships? To put our emphasis on devaluing and invalidating these cultural institutions, these cultural monopolies, so that we are a community less reliant on the whims, standards and politics of Big Publishing and more reliant on the standards and politics of our peers? What would it look like for writers to revise their relationships to power?

In April, I made the choice to decline an acknowledgement from PEN America, and remove myself from the Jean Stein longlist, which awards $75,000 to the winner. 

$75,000 is a weighty figure. $75,000 would change my life. $75k would change my family’s lives. But PEN’s approach to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians taints that money. PEN’s willingness to disregard the lives and right to life of Palestinians taints that money. What is $75K worth when the lives of Palestinian people are worth so little to the organization dangling a carrot stick in our faces, forcing us to turn away from harm in order to turn towards the needs of our lives. We should not have to make that compromise. And 9/10 of the Jean Stein nominees chose not to, invalidating the entire award, which could not be given away by default. At the request of the Jean Stein estate, the prize money was donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. 

And then the PEN awards ceremony was canceled. 

Below is the letter the Jean Stein longlisters drafted and signed onto, which we sent to the CEO, President and Board of PEN America. This letter sparked a watershed of press and social media commentary that helped to disrupt PEN’s business as usual and inspired many other writers to consider their own relationships to this institution. Do we need an institution that advocates for free speech, but ignores the silencing of Palestinian voices? Do we need an institution that is known for its advocacy around banned books, but elevates groups like Moms for Justice that advocate for the banning of books. 

We do not have to accept these contradictions and inconsistencies. We get to decide what institutions we validate, and who we allow to validate us. 

This letter lived in my drafts before it went wide. And now it belongs to all of us:

To the Executive Board & Trustees of PEN America,

We, the undersigned longlisters and awardees of the PEN/Jean Stein, PEN/Dau, PEN/Bingham, PEN/Hemingway, PEN/Voelcker, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, PEN Translation, PEN/Manheim, PEN/Heim Translation, and PEN Award for Literature in Translation, are writing to inform you that we reject these honors conferred by your organization in protest of your failure to confront the genocide in Gaza. Though that rejection takes a variety of forms, with some authors choosing to decline their recognitions altogether, we stand in solidarity with one another and with the people of Palestine in our refusal to lend our names and tacit approval to PEN America’s disgraceful inaction.

Since October 7th, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been murdered and over 70,000 injured by the state of Israel. As we write this, more than a million people in Gaza are facing a catastrophic lack of food, as a result of Israel’s starvation policy. This is an indubitable tactic of genocide. 

Since October 7th, thousands of writers have written and signed letters demanding that PEN America speak out and stand in solidarity with Palestinian writers. PEN America waited days to speak on this incomparable loss of Palestinian life -- and when PEN did decide to speak, the statements that followed show a lack of proportional empathy, and were often laced with ahistorical, Zionist propaganda hidden under the guise of neutrality. Neutrality is indeed a betrayal and PEN’s statements and actions demonstrate not only an immoral reliance on corporate dollars, but a lack of writerly courage. PEN America states that "the core" of its mission is to "support the right to disagree." There is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. Israel is leading a genocide of Palestinian people. PEN’s perpetuation of false equivalences, their equivocation and normalizing, is indeed a betrayal. The forcible removal of Randa Jarrar from a PEN-sponsored event represents a breach of trust between PEN America and a Palestinian writer whose speech and physical safety they should have protected, and whose voice they should have heard.

PEN America's leadership has eroded our confidence in its mission, and the important work they claim to support; instead, they cling to a disingenuous façade of neutrality, while simultaneously parroting hasbara talking points. We have been appalled to learn that management has sought to suppress the off-hours political speech and activity of its own workers, in part by suggesting language by which staffers could be punished for participating in any political activity that undermines PEN America’s mission. Yet that stated mission is to “protect free expression in the US and worldwide.” If PEN America cannot protect free expression in its own offices or at its own events, how can the organization be trusted to do so anywhere else?

As an organization that “stands at the intersection of literature and human rights,” PEN America’s dishonest coverage of the genocide of Palestinians and their consistent platforming of Zionists has invalidated its implicit contract with the writers they purport to represent: the agreement to protect their freedoms and securities. We are being lied to by an organization that has built its reputation off the labor of writers it refuses to protect.  

PEN America’s silence and implicit support of Israel stands in stark contrast to the actions of PEN International and PEN Centers around the world. Nearly fifty PEN Centers signed onto PEN International’s ceasefire call in October. English PEN, in tandem with Irish PEN and Wales PEN Cymru, have been vocally critical of the UK government’s uncritical support for Israel, have called for investigations into the sale of arms to Israel, and have demanded political pressure for Israel to comply with international law. PEN America, by contrast, has had no criticism of American complicity in the bombardment of Gaza. Likewise, a recent letter from PEN South Africa to its members outlines several concrete actions taken by that organization, many of them in support of and following the lead of PEN International. It also includes a summary of a call-out sent to PEN America, asking, among other things, why the US chapter has been so circumspect in condemning Israel’s murders, and why it had not yet joined PEN International’s call for a ceasefire. 

After increasingly loud public protests as well as internal pressure by rank and file, PEN America finally joined the call for a ceasefire on March 20th, five months after many of its sister centers, but they deserve no amount of adulation for acquiescing to the bare minimum demand that so many have been pressing for. As PEN South Africa writes, “because of the United States’ military, economic and political relationship with Israel, PEN America bears a particular responsibility [...] to call for an immediate, permanent ceasefire and an end to the occupation.” We believe that cultural and human rights organizations have a crucial role to play standing in solidarity with the Palestinian fight for freedom, especially here in the United States.  

This goes well beyond CEO Suzanne Nossel (whose longstanding commitments to Zionism, Islamophobia, and imperial wars in the Middle East are well-documented) or any one individual. PEN America has a long history of ignoring PEN International and the global network of PEN organizations, focusing on narrow US interests instead of the global solidarity meant to underpin the organizations’ work. Therefore, we demand the immediate resignation of PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel, PEN America President Jennifer Finney Boylan, and the entire PEN America Executive Committee, whose values and commitments have steered the organization in a disastrous direction for far too long. We likewise join the demands made by the authors who pulled out from the PEN World Voices Festival, asking for an audit of PEN America’s longstanding implicit support of the Israeli occupation. We stand in solidarity with PEN staff and the membership of PEN America United. We demand new, elected leadership who will agree to paying staff a living wage and to working in concert with PEN International.

It should be noted that many of the undersigned writers, many of whom are early in their careers and rely on prize money to fund their basic needs, understand the risks we are taking by rejecting an organization that holds a cultural monopoly within the literary community. 

Writers have a responsibility to be good stewards of history in order to be good stewards of our communities. Such stewardship requires, in the words of Toni Morrison, that we “look to the present to contour the past.” It requires that we have an authentic relationship to knowledge, which we apply to our analysis of how the present should function in light of the past. As an organization that benefits from, and seeks to support the labor of writers, PEN America should expect to be held to the same standard of stewardship. 

We cannot, in good faith, align with an organization that has shown such blatant disregard of our collective values. We stand in solidarity with a free Palestine. We refuse to be honored by an organization that acts as a cultural front for American exceptionalism. We refuse to gild the reputation of an organization that runs interference for an administration aiding and abetting genocide with our tax dollars. And we refuse to take part in anything that will serve to overshadow PEN’s complicity in normalizing genocide. 

Declining Signatories

Camonghne Felix, PEN/Jean Stein 

Christina Sharpe, PEN/Jean Stein 

Kelly X. Hui, PEN/Dau Prize

Eugenia Leigh, PEN/Voelcker Award 

Maggie Millner, PEN/Voelcker Award

Esther Allen, PEN/Manheim Award 

Julia Sanches, PEN Translation Prize

Frank Garrett, PEN Translation Prize

Don Mee Choi, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Kira Josefsson, PEN Translation Prize 

Maya Binyam, PEN/Jean Stein, PEN/Hemingway Award

Alejandro Varela, PEN/Jean Stein 

Robin Myers, PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Cleo Qian, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize

Natascha Bruce, PEN Translation Prize 

Nick Mandernach, PEN/Dau Prize

Joseph Earl Thomas, PEN/Jean Stein 

J.D. Pluecker, PEN Translation Prize

Adrian Minckley, PEN Translation Prize

Ada Zhang, PEN/Bingham Award 

James Frankie Thomas, PEN/Hemingway Award

Signatories of Support

PEN America’s recent donation of $100,000 to the PEN Emergency Fund pales in comparison to CEO Suzanne Nossel’s annual salary of more than $450,000 and the organization’s net assets of $43 million. This letter’s signatories of support object to the parsimony of this gesture in the midst of an ongoing genocide. Signatories of support who are able to do so pledge to redistribute their prize winnings to mutual aid funds in Gaza.

Soje, PEN/Heim Translation 

Noel Quiñones, PEN/Dau Prize

Subhashree Beeman, PEN/Heim Translation

Meg Arenberg, PEN/Heim Translation

Zkara Gaillard, PEN/Dau Prize

Sarina Ramos Rubén, PEN/Heim Translation

Verónica Dávila De Jesús, PEN/Heim Translation

Asa Yoneda, PEN Translation Prize 

Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen, PEN Translation Prize

I wrote Dyscalculia because I was going through a breakup that destabilized my entire world and I felt like there was no book out there, written by a Black woman, that would candidly and genuinely approach the conversation of bipolar disorder, the quest for accountability, and heartbreak. It was not meant to be diaristic or even cathartic. It was meant to be a craft-driven exploration of what it means to be heartbroken when you live outside of the ‘rational’ world that everyone else seems to be living in. I wanted to read that book. I wanted to be part of that story. So I had to write it. 

Dyscalculia began as a short poem in my notes app on an old iPhone, likely written through tears on my hour-long commute to work. It was first a sad & lachrymose poem (an excerpt of this poem was published in Palette Magazine) that slowly became a collection of short prose blocks about big heartbreak -- not only the romantic kind, but the existential kind.  

Even when it gets me into trouble, I am a poet. That is who my self is. My nonfiction education was informed by my poetic education and that’s what I came to the page with when I sat down to write. I was reading Renee Gladman, Maggie Nelson, Sister Souljah and looking for innovative form and structure. I had an ambition and I reached to approach it. But as its release day approached, after reading it over and over again in these different iterations, I suddenly felt that it had been overworked. I felt that I had accidentally done too much. 

When it came out, I felt unmoored and uncomfortable. I worried that I had “overshared” (a criticism I had received all my life) or that I had not validated the premise enough to sustain the arguments I was making. I knew that in some ways I had failed the project, because inevitably we always fail the project. Even through five drafts and ten revisions, it could never fully become the thing I envisioned, because ambition is a destination of which we never arrive.  

So I had to find a way to love it again. Therapy helped. I had to remember why I wrote it, what I was trying to achieve, and I had to learn that this story is a lifelong project that will take many forms. With each project, I will get closer and closer to that grand ambition, closer and closer until I die. Whether I achieve it in the end is irrelevant, simply because I got closer. 

Writing it empowered me, helped me to discover versions of myself I hadn’t realized existed, and helped me to take accountability of myself, my health, and my life -- a process that healed me. This work is my bildungsroman; it is a time capsule, a liminal object that will help shape and contour the works of my future self. I feel so grateful to have made a thing that is unapologetically mine. Remembering this helps me come back into my body when I feel the grief of my ego taking over. 

I am amazed that the thing I wrote on a subway ride became this book. Through twelve (10!) revisions, Dyscalculia went from being a sad poem to a generous mirror of myself. So I offer you excerpts of the very first draft of Dyscalculia as a thank you for reading this book, for loving on me, for being part of this online community with me. I offer it as a reminder that ambition is not material. What you have made from the threat of it is enough.

From 2017:

As writers and thinkers across all genres, it is easy to stumble into the raw feelings of inadequacy. It is easy to feel like you are not enough — not good enough, not ready enough, not grateful enough.

What I love most about the revision process is that it forces your brain to confront this lie. You see old work, work that has been transformed, and see that you have come extremely far and have gone nowhere, in the best way, at the same time. You are no longer the you you were a decade ago, when you wrote the early draft. But the you you are now can still find that person when she looks back into her notes. There it is: that same hunger, that same gratitude, that same thirst for language that made you who you are today.

We all feel shame about some part of our practice, or about some emotion that we associate with our practice. But when we look back, how can you be anything but grateful for what your mind has done for you?

This is what I’m meditating on today. Below is a poem I wrote in 2014, when I was twenty two years old. The last line became this poem, published in Apogee Magazine. I did not care about awards then, or recognition, or about being good enough. My love of language was compulsive. I couldn’t not write. This poem never saw the light of day, and besides this post, never will. But it reminds me of a place and time where I was just grateful to have the ability to map what I was seeing about myself and the world in my notes app. And I’d like to hold onto to that place and time, despite everywhere life plans to take me from here.

“I know my name and why I’m not dead.”

The original essay makes clear that Black language, Black sound and Black expression is a problem for whiteness because the jazz of it all is a direct blow to the language of whiteness itself. I had no interest in changing the core narrative, but was rather interested in that alchemical process of language becoming language and redundancy as resistance. 

After the first draft, however, I realized that redundancy was in some ways just redundancy and I had not yet defined the critical utility of redundancy (which makes sense, since the word itself is defined as uselessness), so that was gonna fall flat. 

So I started thinking about how the body might experience redundancy. We experience repetition but do not identify as useless, just doubled, or tripled, or stacked -- textured, basically. That’s what led me to thinking about physicality, materiality and how to present the body with a redundant but satisfying conflict. 

(WHEW I am talking A LOT)

Anyway: when I make any kind of visual art, it usually starts with a curiosity about what I’ve got laying around. The MFA program at Bard, where I studied, is interdisciplinary with artists working across all genres and mediums. This meant there was a lot of simple and complex material laying around. I became obsessed with tape named for its use, or after the occupation that requires it, like Plumber’s tape (which is teflon) or Electrician’s tape (which is vinyl). These tape materials were about the dialectical relationship between utility and use, and about the dialectical relationship between labor and extraction. 

So boom I pretty much decided to print out the essay on huge vinyl paper with the words at a particular font size so that the page would be both illegible and legible at the same time. I decided to do the erasure with tactical material versus digital. I used the electrician’s tape as the black out material (vinyl on vinyl = a redundancy), tacked each piece to the wall, and then set up four chairs facing the pieces. From that vantage point you really couldn’t see it. You had to choose to get up and get close to it to read it. Most of the people who came in to see it sat. Most people got up and got closer after sitting. Everyone had to get close to the material to see Black language. This meant that their typical expectations of how they should receive language (visible at a distance, comfortable up close) would be disrupted, and that my mimicry would come more like an echo than a redundancy, ultimately achieving all of the things I wanted to do with the original erasure.

So yea. This was a draft that did see a radical transformation in its revision. However, you can see that the actual text never changed, or the erasure patterns, just the medium. . See below for photos of both drafts. Share if you find this useful! 

First draft:

Final Draft:

I used to be terrified of revision. I used to be terrified of the very idea of revision because I couldn’t understand the difference between an edit and true revision. In my nonfiction workshop that I teach at The New School, I asked my students to write a 1200 word revision plan. At first, some of my students balked at the word count. What could they say about the revision of their story that could possibly use up 1200 words? Once they began writing though, most expressed surprise at just how much they had to say about where they wanted the work to go and how they planned to get it there. I realized then that I could really benefit from better understanding my own revision process. And I bet you could too. 

So that’s what this Substack is about: revision. Here, I will post unedited drafts and sometimes, their published version, to show you the stuff that happens in between a draft and a revision. Sometimes the draft is better than the revision, and on this Substack, I’ll be honest about that too. You’ll also see unedited drafts that have either become something totally different, or drafts that have been killed. Sometimes you’ll see me post mixed media work and visual art that made it into the revision process of a draft. I’ll do my best to tell you why I’ve made the revision decisions I’ve made, even if I’m not completely sure. Together, I’m hoping we’ll learn something about how we revise — the kind of thinking that guides a revision and the kind of failures that lead to a good draft. 

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