hi my beloveds, my name is walela Nehanda. i’m a poet, journalist, hybrid scholar, street researcher, orca enthusiast, born & based in Mid City, LA - (un)marked, an archive is a reader powered literary experiment n excavation. a cultural commentary focused on health, spirituality, Black study, media, music, & poetry.
My work, when published, will be available for free for 1-2 weeks, then it will go behind a subscription. As a paid subscriber, you will gain access to publication archives, a podcast, and access to my research on are.na
About (un)marked, an archive:
In 2020, I underwent a stem cell transplant at the height of lockdown as treatment for a long time battle against phase 3 chronic myeloid leukemia. Spending my 20s chasing the Promise Land™ of remission, I have since entered my 30s realizing there is no such thing as safety or dignity in survivorship. We live in a society ill equipped to evolve alongside us. Therefore, surviving anything, not just cancer, becomes a significant crisis of existence, which is: a crisis of faith. Which I believe many of us today are experiencing.
(un)marked, an archive is the experiment of what could our recent histories reveal to us? What if I engaged with my archive n media as its own spiritual and political text worth communing alongside? How did I face death and create a new belief system during cancer? Could I do so again? What is ideologically sound but feels like gospel?
“The old stories, the old myths just not hitting like they used to” my friend hymn said in exasperation recently.
And it’s true. It feels like we are living an era where our pantheon of gods n guides are routinely failing us. The language we used previously to identify ourselves has the state categorizing us for capture. How we previously understood the world is dissatisfying. Making it so there isn’t much hope left to spare. But there is.
Perhaps there is something to be learned from my untimely hour of death. Perhaps we are similarly being tasked to create an entirely new belief system still rooted and tethered to real philosophy, real facts, and real feelings. Our lives depend on imagining outside of the state
To survive cancer, I needed a belief system that also could afford me a delusional faith. So, I initiated a study of myself through Black study and ancestral folklore. By initiating a study of the self, I seek to mold a rememory, providing an autonomous frame of reference. (Sylvia Wynter, Felicia Denaud).
If it’s not clear, I am a Pisces and Aquarius stellium so can either be a romantic scientist or heretical investigator. So humor me as I present (cue: Open Up My Heart, The Dells):
Hypothesis: If I am a chimera, what is the possibility in my creation? What is ideologically sound but feels like gospel?
How can I look to the past, historically & ancestrally, to carve myself out?
Can I dispel the ill/logic?
Could prayer be confrontation?
How will I stop allowing the Western white imagination to dictate my possibilities?
Is celebrity or recognition all I strive for?
What do I want?
What if I had an unchecked imagination?
Could I earnestly embrace an interest in who has designed my world view?
Would my previous templates upend or expand?
I will never not be maimed or unscathed. I do not desire to diminish my wounds but, (un)marked, as in the knife ran so deep, and the scar tissue formed a continent, its tissue, melted under my skin, over time, it inevitably smoothed. So. (un)marked as in the aftermath of a wound, the genealogy of a faded scar, initiating a new study of the self to repossess hope. Surely there is something alchemical to be found. It’s happened once before, I think it can happen again.
“The only cure will be a transformation of the whole society, and an entirely new knowledge order altogether - otherwise we will remain trapped in this. It is through language that you and I are able to not sit and talk with each other, develop a mechanism to understand one another, do you see the immense potential there!? Language is entirely the point!”
- Sylvia Wynter in “What Will Be the Cure?: A Conversation with Sylvia Wynter” by Bedour Alagraa for Off Shoot Journal
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