Stairway To Heaven: Dream Logic vs. Mythological Reclamation [How to Explain A World]

image by Jalen Amir King 

“It may simply have been that I had grown tired of coming and going. It is terrible to forever remain in-between.”

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

My novel began with an image, a sound, and a separation. At the top of 2021, while watching Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, I felt immense empathetic sadness watching old Dr Dave Bowman rot with the monolith at the foot of his bed. I imagined a life where one was perpetually trapped in that moment of isolation, confusion, and loss. A room took shape in my mind, mired by the promise of being alone and being forgotten. Based on what I’ve learned about prisons, from reading and hearing first-person accounts as well as research, the primary obstacle in cases of restraint is often the self. As a Black man in the United States, restraint is a permanent state that I am well-accustomed with and I’m equally versed in the gratuitous internal mental battles. The protagonist of my novel was born from that understanding: a Black male trying to navigate his burgeoning nonexistence. 

But a character isn't a story. Narrative is a structure of desire that requires a driving force. According to Susan Stewart’s On Longing: 

I look at two devices for the objectification of desire: the souvenir and the collection. The souvenir may be seen as emblematic of the nostalgia that all narrative reveals- the longing for its place of origin. Particularly important here are the functions of the narrative of the self: that story’s lost point of identity with the mother and its perpetual desire for reunion and incorporation, for the repetition that is not a repetition. The souvenir seeks distance (the exotic in time and space), but it does so in order to transform and collapse distance into proximity to, or appropriation with, the self. The souvenir therefore contracts the world in order to expand the personal. (page xii) 

Stewart postulates that narrative assumes a return and while this is extremely relevant to contents of my novel, this reading isn't where my story grew from. I’d scribbled preliminary notes and doodled a series of rooms in the weeks after I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey but nothing else had come to mind. I found my answer while listening to “Stairway To Heaven” by The O’Jays. I knew that I had to introduce a striving component to my nonexistent character in order to give them body and life. The O’Jays’ song is about ascending through life to an idyllic, godly stopping point. I combined this with my concept of the lonely room and found a tragedy of man: one destined to fall short of becoming. This man would be ignorant of his falling and fall because he’s ignorant. It’s a cycle of many. 

W.E.B. Dubois wrote about the cycle in his essay “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” published in his 1903 collection, The Souls of Black Folk. The central idea of the essay was that of double-consciousness. He writes: 

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

These fighting souls are characterized by Dubois with a metaphor of a veil and a mirror. One half of a Black soul only sees themself through the eyes of others and the other doesn’t see themself at all. Dubois describes the spiritual striving of the Black soul as a desire to “go from two to one. To escape death and isolation.” My character has two selves occupying two different worlds in the story: an ignorant self and an absent self. I built this dichotomy based on the question: how many slices can you take from a pie until it becomes not a pie but a slice of pie? Once I recognized the separation sustained by the cycle I’d dreamt up, I had: a character, a situation, and the desire necessary to spark those elements into narrative. However, I did not have a world or better yet; the means to explain the world and render it completely. 

Fantastical stories were always the ones that held my attention. As a child it began with Anansi the Spider folktales and eventually spun out into the Harry Potter series. As an adult reader I’ve been attracted to the works of Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Zadie Smith, Yoko Ogawa, Toni Cade Bambara, and more. These authors are known for pursuing magical realism and fantasy in an “elevated” and literary fashion. While I respect their influence on my writing, that seed of Anansi is always there for me. I write with a trickster spider in my head driving me nuts, a spider who according to some Akan tales was responsible for the very moon in the sky. The distortion necessary to animate and communicate my ideas were rooted in fantasy. For me, the fantastic has been split into two distinct modes: dream logic and mythological reclamation. 

Dream logic is a well-understood and well-studied idea but what does it mean when applied to narrative and world-building? In the context of my novel for instance, the room eventually evolved into a plane of dis-reality. This is the “world” of my protagonist’s absent self. Dreamers employ the capacity to create, perceive, recognize, and destroy in an instant. This transient quality was essential to capture both in the prose and explanation of the world I was creating, a place that was essentially no-place at all. A dream renders, distorts, and betrays with bizarre certainty. It has the gumption to ask “what if?” rather than offer an alternative that fits nicely within what we consider logical. Reason is abandoned but so is time and space. In a narrative sense, this allows for an escape of linear thinking or plot and the ability to recognize the fantastic as it is rather than question how it came to be. 

This method of creation did not go over well in my MFA fiction workshop at all early on, the mature educated mind has been trained to seek rationality, even in real circumstances where there are none. Being believed is often the first hurdle of any writer who wants to write respectable magical realism and I bypassed that, completely disinterested. I wished to fail at creating a world that worked and held no belief in coherence in the early draft. I’d abandoned what bell hooks described in conversation with Alison Saar in Art On My Mind as a “longing for linear order,” both in my writing and my life. In a way, I went into the class and said, “let’s all agree the sky is red” and everyone pretty much screamed back, “fuck no, fuck you!” Even worse, the separate world of my protagonist’s ignorant self also contained irreverent departures from our reality and my workshop had come to the conclusion that those departures needed to be parsed from the narrative in order to anchor the belief of any [respectable] reader. Intellect scowls at negative capability. I was somewhat devastated, not because they didn’t like it, many confessed to being enamored by the prose alone. I was let down because I felt as though the spider in my head drove me too far from a point of strictly logical connection.  

I was uncertain of my novel at this point and considered shifting to solely writing short stories, where the weight of suspended disbelief is borne for less time. Then my thesis advisor, who’d returned with similar notes as my workshop after reading the first eighty-five pages of an earlier draft suggested I read The Famished Road by Ben Okri. I was familiar with Okri from short stories and selected excerpts of his fiction from essays written about ideas present in his work but I was completely uninitiated with the text. How thrilled was I when the text was lush with language and asynchronous and tear-jerkingly imaginative. Here is an excerpt from the novel and a strong example of dream logic imposing itself on fiction: 

I said nothing. She lifted me on the shoulder. I could still see the head of the woman. I could still hear the voices in passionate gardens, could still hear their sunflower cantatas. I saw delicious girls dancing tarantellas in fields of comets. The woman’s head turned to give me a last smile before she vanished altogether in a Milky Way of music, floating across a lake of green mirrors. Mum took me home over the mud and wreckage of the street, over the mild deluge, under the arpeggio of watery stars. She was silent. I smelt the gutters and the rude plaster of the corroded houses. Then all I was left with was a world drowning in poverty, a mother-of-pearl moon, and the long darkness before dawn. (page 308)

Upon reading, I found that the dream logic I was set on wasn’t doomed but I did need to reorient how it worked. As I mentioned earlier, a pivotal action of the dreamer is recognition, and I needed to collect souvenirs that the reader could recognize even in the world of my protagonist’s absent self. Susan Stewart wrote in On Longing, “...narrative here seeks to ‘realize’ a certain formulation of the world. Hence we can see the many narratives that dream of the inanimate-made-animate as symptomatic of all narrative’s desire to invent a realizable world, a world which ‘works.’ In this sense, every narrative is a miniature and every book is a microcosm, for such forms always seek to finalize, bring close to, a totality or model.” There needed to be impositions of time and space and memory- which are present in dreams- but instead of obeying these impositions, I had the responsibility to destroy them and their connection to the protagonist. To realize the absent self, it was pivotal that I communicated what was being lost by the ignorant. 

The world of the protagonist’s ignorant self is less ambitious and closer to the one we know but is well-acquainted with the surreal and the uncanny. Marie-Helene Bertino wrote in her craft essay “A Master Class in Disrupting Realism and Making Magic”:

I use supernatural elements in my stories and novels because they most adequately render what I notice about memory, trauma, disability, class, ongoingness, and what we mean to each other. Many of my stories are in present tense with present tense flashbacks because of what I’ve noticed about life and memory, that to remember something feels like reliving it.

At a different point in the essay, Bertino explores a method she’s employed to gauge levels of magical fiction. The scale goes from one to ten. One designates a story that could plausibly happen in real life exactly as it is told, nothing false is rendered except for the circumstances and characters. A ten would be assigned to a fantasy story where the entire world is invented and bears no immediate relation to reality. Bertino’s examples of a “one” include: the work of James Baldwin, the work of Jane Austen, and the work of Edward P. Jones. Bertino’s examples of a “ten” include: the work of Kelly Link, the work of Stephen Graham Jones, and the work of Octavia Butler; specifically Blood Child. My MFA fiction workshop and thesis advisor essentially came to the conclusion that because the dream-like nature of the protagonist’s absent self’s world was a “ten,” then the ignorant self’s world must be a “one.” The suggestion struck me as rational and logical and I almost relented until the spider in my head started bouncing around and suddenly I’d written thousands of words about an ignorant self that occupied a world at odds with nature itself. There are plagues, biblical storms, rough beasts slouching every which way, and curses aplenty. I hadn’t produced a “one” as they’d asked but maybe a “five” or “six” at the lowest. However, I did discover a way to give the surreal elements from the ignorant world a different texture than the absent one. All the surreal elements of the ignorant world employ a tool I’ve named “mythological reclamation.” 

The idea has been present for centuries, most pronounced in African and African-American folktales. Mythological reclamation is another word for “lying,” which is what the storytellers in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men call their craft. Rather than create a skewed thing from nothing, mythological reclamation substantiates and explains what already exists. It supplants, supports, fills in, takes back. Why does the snake have its venom and its rattle? They asked God for it because it ain’t like being stomped up. Why does the woodpecker have its red head? Noah struck it with a hammer for trying to poke a hole in the ark, which is where the possum lost its tail too- Noah’s son Ham used all its hairs to make a banjo! Broke the possum’s spirit. The gator and the dog stopped being friends because Brer Dog cut the gator’s mouth all ugly-like. Usually whichever lie was better or more interesting superseded what came before as the new truth. Some truth is very old. The first Anansi story I learned came from an Akan folktale and is about his six sons using their tools to save him from a bird. Each son contributed in a different but arguably equally important way. Afterwards, Anansi found a glowing white orb and wanted to give it to the son that saved him, but all six had saved him. He asked their God of All Things, Nyame, for help and Nyame put the orb in the sky and it became the moon. These are all excellent examples of mythological reclamation because they satiate unsolved curiosities but with the fantastic, not logic!

Another concept in the novel rooted in folklore concerns the protagonist. Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men describes the concept of Jack or John in the “lies” told by southern African-American storytellers: 

Jack or John (not John Henry) is the great human culture hero in Negro folklore. He is like Daniel in Jewish folklore, the wish fulfillment hero of the race. The one who, nevertheless, or in spite of laughter, usually defeats Ole Massa, God and the Devil. Even when Massa seems to have him in a hopeless dilemma he wins out by a trick. Brer Rabbit, Jack (or John) and the Devil are continuations of the same thing. (page 247)

I wanted to write about a Black wish fulfillment hero who is trapped in a vicious cycle of curses and blessings. There are no memories of his feats, neither internal nor external. I found a Moses moment deferred, a people who thought they were chosen but instead left behind. I was curious where that would leave a man, now woefully beholden to the adolescent sadness of isolation.  

The chief curiosities being reclaimed in the ignorant self’s world concern the history of families similar to my own. I grew up with one Grandpa and four Grandmothers. The disparity always seemed odd to me and as I grew older, I started seeking answers, thinking maybe it’d explain me to myself. But real life is jumbled and there is no linear order. I found more gaps than verified truth. The protagonist of my novel lives the exact same amount of days as my sole Grandfather did, the most I can expect as of writing this (following a hereditary tradition). I’ve consulted a composite of theology, theory, folklore, film, art, poetry, memory, lies, gossip, history, literature, scriptures, and traditions to explain the world I’ve been given and reclaimed everything else with my imagination. Through the surreal I am able to escalate annihilation and follow it to a natural, if not unrealistic, end point.  

The novel is currently incomplete and unsold. I have no literary agent. This essay may prove to be an exercise in futility. The narrative currently traces the history of a family curse from origin to eschaton and how a single man forgetting it all tries to restore himself to escape death and isolation. It’s about recurrence, awareness, motherhood, love, acceptance, music, sunshine, sadness, and where cathedrals form. It’s subtly inter-related. Sometimes I like to say I see the world as it was presented in [non-fiction] scriptures like the Bible or Qur’an: the Queen of Sheba, Adam, David, Solomon, Adam, Eve, Jesus, and Moses all doing incredible things through the will of God. All is possible. But I’m not sure I believe that. Like everyone else, I have things to reconcile. The novel is my attempt to explain why every change I've undergone in life has always felt like loss. Truth be told, I’m unsure if I’ve ever gotten over anything in my life. I dream and create things I don’t fully understand. This lack is where I feel most whole.  

I have a trickster spider in my head spinning stories, teaching me worlds, and turning everything to eleven. 

leap years, almost three months, some days

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream (1899)

It’s a taurus Tuesday night, I stand in the kitchen and watch water boil, oblivious to everything but the Friday afternoon I was caught shoplifting at the East Lake Publix wearing my Boy Scout uniform. It must have been 2011, because everything happened to me when I was 15 years old. Troop 706, I was decked in full paraphernalia- sash, patches, boots, neckerchief, handbook. I led a Cub Scout troop after-school, for five dollars a meeting, about once a week and we were going to Bert Adams campsite for the weekend. No money, no snacks. A simple calculus, but I was not stealing out of hunger or necessity. Gushers, chips, cookies, halal marshmallows, gatorade. The man who caught me was an older brother from the masjid and a plain-clothes employee of the grocery store disguised as a shopper. I was crouched over my bookbag, shifting loot when I heard his voice from behind: 

“What are you doing man?” 

I stopped, startled, and tried to offer an explanation or a lie but nothing came. He encouraged me to give him the stuff and he sent me on my way without alerting management. An unpronounced sin, a silent transgression. Over the coming months, I saw the man at the masjid on occasion and he was sure to ask me questions about myself. He learned I wanted to be a writer (always) and invited comparisons to great Black American scribes, exalting me as “the next James Baldwin.” I wasn’t familiar with Baldwin at the time, likely unschooled in his oeuvre because of Baldwin’s sexuality. For years the brother told me three things every time we spoke: that he’d buy my book when it came out, that we should go fishing, and that I would be the next James Baldwin. 

By that point I had written four books in composition journals cover to cover, while I was supposed to be doing my math classwork. I thought I knew all these things I simply didn’t and had only been fishing once, on a different Boy Scout trip with a bunch of other east side Black boys. I was the only one to catch a fish. My first experiences reading Baldwin were still a few years out. We never went fishing together, he and I. 

I’m no Baldwin. 

Lately, I’ve taken to watching basketball on mute. I don’t really understand why, the crowd and the calls are among my favorite aspects of the viewing experience but this deprivation helps me think. The players on screen, while familiar due to my unrelenting passion for watching the sport, don't seem to belong to me the way the players of my youth did. And the new players are getting the older players out of here, quickly. LeBron, Durant, Curry, Westbrook, Kawhi, Lillard, Harden. None advanced past the first round. I actively rooted against some of these players in years past and now, as they fail to live up to their former glory, I sink into my couch feeling sorry for the time where my allegiances lie and silly about my sorriness. The feeling isn't completely foreign, 2012 was also a significant changing of the guard. Similar emotions found me when I watched the young OKC Thunder overwhelm Kobe and the Lakers (Dirk and Timmy too) and when LeBron vanquished the Big 3 Celtics once and for all. Watching them come to age around the same time as I felt important and I found kinship in that. Now watching them go out of fashion (more gracefully than ones from before), I still feel a guttural hunger to become, wondering if my best days have already passed me by. 

I remember the summer of 2012, when my older brothers and I rode around Kansas City with a basketball goal and four fifty-pound sandbags fastened to the back of my Dad’s forest green pickup truck, hunting basketball games. Twice that summer, our family reunion and July 4th, those games ended with bullets and the threat, the loud whisper of death. I recall college nights spent in ritual at the free throw line: I needed to make ten consecutive before I could sleep. The routine was born from a desire to gather my thoughts, more meditation than practice. 

I listen to “Euphoria” by Kendrick Lamar. It feels like an important moment in the history of Hip Hop. I think of my brother’s ‘95 Thunderbird and the backseat, where I fell in love with rap music for the second time at 15, bumping bootleg copies of Watch The Throne and Tha Carter IV. Memories of music rock me back and forth through time like an aimless dinghy at sea a la Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream. “Tomorrow” by The Brothers Johnson: I’m walking under the rain in Boerum Hill. “Hold Me Down” by Daniel Caesar: I’m having dorm room sex. “Don’t Worry About A Thing” by Stevie Wonder: I’m rounding the corner on Wesley Chapel Road, leaving my love for the final time before moving to New York City. “Green Eyes” by Erykah Badu: the sun sets in Rome. “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell: downcast eyes look in the mirror and recognize the years on my face. Big smile. Age has come, rebellion wanes… it must not die.  

Pathology, the science of causes and effects (of disease). I’ve been toying with the idea of sacred lightning, memories there only for a moment but powerful as all hell. Like a last kiss unfurling back to the first one. Images of Anton Ego finding his mother in the first bite of Remy’s ratatouille comes to mind (Ratatouille, 2007). I wonder where the years have gone and what they’ve brought me aside from this sacred lightning. Where are my lessons?  I’m still trying to be gentle first and honest later, still refusing help, still needing it, just still. Lightning must beget thunder. Distant, solitary, stony, punctual, lingering thunder. 

Whenever my mother and I visit her old friends, they always describe me as “the crybaby.” Momma got hella kids so that serves as their key differentiator. They regale me with tales of my never ending infant sobs. I don’t remember those years, but I remained quick to cry as years went by and without shame. In middle school I’d weep at my desk when I got C grades, arm crossed over my face like Cabanel’s Fallen Angel. The tears were never happy; usually brought on by melancholy, movies, music, heartbreak, or infrequent madness. As of now, I have not cried since February 29th, 2024. 80 days. February 29th, a date that would not have happened any of the past three years. The leap year tears were brought on during a viewing of Rosewood (1997), summoned by an anger concerning the heavy content of the plot rather than any malfunction in my own life therefore not belonging to me. Still, it’s the only time I have cried this year. As my life falls apart (since I’ve become 28), cries swell in my spirit like a sneeze that won’t come out. I’m drowning in things unsaid. Desire, admission, disappointment. I don’t think I’ve given myself permission to win, as most writers haven’t (word to Toni Morrison), but I refuse to lose. Mostly though, there is a general anxiety cloaking everything I have akin to a stillwater marsh hiding cattail stalks. I’m like Captain Hook being chased by the ticking crocodile. Tick tick tick tick tick. 

The water boils. I’m at the mouth of my kitchen compiling notes for my first novel, feeling like unsigned hype. I crack the spine of Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and jot down a phrase shared early in the first chapter: “People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.” I finger the boldly inked underline, humming the words along its imprint. My eyes threaten tears but they don’t come. Some days I think they’ll never come again. Being a young, sometimes angry Black man is a strange panic and I need my tears now more than ever. I’ve been told to toughen up, stop crying, and be a man my whole life and now I’m all dried up. It’s making me miserable. Life’s too hard to be strong, unloved, and alone. Il faut choisir une lutte.     

I think I’ve got my hands on the steering wheel though. I’m eating my veggies, getting some sunlight, listening to music, telling my people I love them. As far as matters of control, I’ve learned that it’s a circular prism and at each end, things are either too big or too small for me to hold in these hands. 

No fear. The world ends any day now.

Alexandre Cabanel, The Fallen Angel (1847)

published May 19, 2024

HOW WE SAVE THE WORLD

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” 

This world has to end. 

And a new one must be born. Not because it’s imperfect or dying- and it is dying, but because it isn’t ours. Rebirth doesn’t always mean death. The reality is that this version of the world, this idea of the world is approaching its stopping point and we must decide how we will keep the world spinning, and imagine new and better ways of doing so.  

There are a billion things bringing this world down to earth. Everything bad, everything bad that’s ever happened to you, everything bad that will happen. It can’t be perfect, there are too many factors to account for, the biggest factor being the human component of our life here. Amongst the things ailing us (capitalism, racism, homophobia, misogyny, war, gentrification, fashion niggas, imperialism, gun violence, DJ Akademiks, etc.), we struggle to realize that it’s not incidental. The clothes you’re wearing, the bed you’re sleeping in, the music you’re listening to… it’s all by design. It began as an idea, before anything a dream. Even us, we are imperfect and incompetent by design. And that’s what’s going to save the world. We were an idea and a dream before that and that’s always more urgent than reality.

My whole life, I’ve been trying to imagine ways to make the world a better place. I wanted to find a common ground that all of us need or should have in order to be our best selves. I fancy myself a problem solver and a critical thinker. But to be honest, I don’t think I could figure anything out. Nothing sustainable or worthwhile or feasible or concrete. Nothing that felt grand enough to actually make a difference. Here are a few of the ideas I came up with, some bigger than others: 

1. More hugs (everyone gets more intimacy) 

2. Free healthcare 

3. ALL NEEDS MEET 

4. NO Racism

5. Peace 

6. Equality 

7. Yoga 

8. Art

9. Drugs

10. Therapy 

11. Journaling 

12. Stretching 

13. Therapy

14. Focus 

15. Knitting 

16. Jazz 

17. Sex

18. MUSIC 

19. DREAMS

I went away from the list for a few months and tried to think of anything else. School, work, my faith, my health, my relationships, myself. At the end of my incubation I found three answers (or ideas or realizations), three answers I think are worth engaging with: 

1. Destruction is the way. 

2. I have seen worlds end before. 

3. We must be more people. 

The first realization, destruction, brings to mind the elements. Water, as in the great deluge, the first event that reset civilization and the harbinger of the modern age. And the fire that was promised to us next time. Fire is a cleanser but it also swallows and damns all, indiscriminately. How we destroy ourselves is pivotal in choosing the path we take to salvation. What flowers will sprout from the embers we leave behind?

As for the second realization, all of the worlds I have seen come to an end were my own. I knew these worlds and they were either blown up or discarded or taken away from me or expired or not as good as I thought it was or some other thing. Each role of mine was a world and it was my responsibility to live within it. Everytime something about me would change, I felt like something was stripped from me. I used to be a child, then I grew out of it. When I moved into spaces where I was isolated and without community, I felt as though I was no longer many of the things that defined me. My life as a son, brother, friend, uncle, lover… it all felt foreign to me. I was just me, by myself, which led me to my third realization. 

We must be more people. 

As a people we should be everything to one another. Connection and community is the saving grace of collective understanding. By expanding community on a personal level, the ways in which ideation permeates our life could grow exponentially. We think we create ideas but the truth is, ideas create us. My mother and father dreamed of me for decades before I was born and my grandparents did before them. Since I became a physical body, the ideas of what I should be were imposed on my spirit and my mind. Those same ideas have gone a long way in sculpting who I am today. The vision that preempts execution is the most important part of change. We are ideas that can create more ideas and through that creation we can save ourselves and the world. These ideas should be based in unity and empathy as well as the understanding that if we extend our being outwards and onto each other, we will always be enough to overcome whatever comes around the bend. 

In Fantastic Four #570, during Jonathan Hickman’s run with the characters, Reed Richards was in turmoil. He erected a room in his lab covered with 100 ideas that he believed could change the world for the better. This all built to the seminal idea #101, which was: “SOLVE EVERYTHING.” With all his knowledge and all his power, he felt a responsibility towards what he had and what he was given. Idea #101 took shape as an interdimensional travel device that allowed him to communicate and congregate with different versions of himself and take advantage of the different perspectives/abilities they had to offer. This group was called the “Council of Reeds.” He saw himself as his brother or his wife or even his enemy. He saw what he had to offer in those roles and it helped unlock his own mind.  

Imagine a world where we can love like 100 people, listen like 100 people, give like 100 people, seek like 100 people, think like 100 people, or grow like 100 people. An intense knowing is found in multiplicity and perspective that could never be gained by simply being yourself and only yourself. 

Carl Jung described the modern man as someone who is aware of the immediate present, unafraid of the deep abyss of the future and untethered to the dregs of the past. This definition of a modern man is optimal for the development of our new world and it should be a status we all seek to find together. As a people it is crucial that we accept that we are a person and a process and with the right process, tomorrow we will be surpassed.  

The future and tomorrow is completely in our hands and it’s important that we put our best foot forward, whatever foot that may be. I began this journey looking for answers but along the way I only found more questions. I am not sure I know how to save the world but I know that everything we have was once dreamed of by someone else and that we can dream of something better. I want to build a different future than the one I see on the horizon. I dream of a future where I look out onto the world, dead at the center where the earth and the sky collide and there would be no horizon. I wish all of my (your, our) limits would die. I pray that all my limits can die. 

The truth is, it’s all happening. Everything we love and everything we hate, it’s happening and it’s all us. We save the world by being it. 

-

O mankind, We have created you male and female, and appointed you races and tribes, that you may know one another. 

Surah 49, Ayah 13

DEAR NIGGAS (letter for the black man)

“Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can’t stay away from another a whole day. So. It look to me like you the envy of the world.” 

-Toni Morrison, Sula 

A few months ago, I was invited to an after-class outing with my NYU MFA classmates to a bar in Greenwich Village. Our class ends at 9 PM, so it was pretty late and I pretty much hadn’t eaten the whole day. The only thing on my mind was rushing back uptown to my Harlem apartment and making dinner. I’m usually quick to retreat back to my small isolated world but today, I was wrapped up in a conversation with my classmates and I found it a little harder to just decline the invitation and go home. I’ll just walk with them to the bar and go home. It’s on the way to the train station anyway. 

We walk in a large group to the bar, I linger towards the back, having three conversations at once. I am the only black man present, but this is a common occurrence at NYU. We are separated at a crosslight and most of the group arrives at the bar before the other stragglers and I. The stragglers included myself, two black women, and a brown woman. Upon arrival, my other classmates are sitting in the outdoor dining area of the bar. Their table was full, no space for us. My decision to go home had been made a little bit easier. The bouncer from inside the bar yelled across the sidewalk to tell the late arriving that photo ID was required to sit down. 
One of the black women asked what he said, he mocked her, then he repeated his demand. She and the others rummaged through their belongings to find ID while I perused the menu to make my final decision on whether or not to go home. I continued at least two of my three conversations while doing so. Ultimately, I decided to go home. But before I could say my final goodbyes, the bouncer came out and asked to see ID for all of the stragglers. The bouncer was a middle-aged, average height fat guy, not white but certainly not black either. The other three produced their proof but I stood there with my hands in my pockets. I carry my fat ass Vivian Westwood wallet in my backpack whenever I go to class and I hadn’t taken it off my shoulders yet.

“I haven’t taken it out yet,” I said when he asked to see my ID. 

“Oh well, you get the fuck out of here if you don’t want to show ID,” the bouncer said.

“I have ID, I just haven’t taken it out yet,” I said slowly and slightly confused. 

The bouncer barely waited a second again before responding again, at a larger volume. 

“I said, if you don’t want to show me ID, you can get the fuck out of here!” 

I was about to leave anyway, but the aggression in his voice triggered my fight or FIGHT response so I had more to say. I took a few moments to gather myself and looked the bouncer up and down. All eyes were on me, the bouncer took a few steps to advance in my direction. 

“My nigga, relax,” I said. I said it in a low tone and without much inflection. I thought this might make the bouncer a bit less aggressive but it did the opposite. It set him off. He went on a tirade about how he wasn’t my nigger (hard R) and how he could kick my ass and how I’m a taller Sisqo and the such. I said my fair share back and I stood on the sidewalk eager for him to hit me, so I could hit him. But he didn’t. 

He stuck his finger in my face for a split second and we exchanged profane language. No one said anything, no one had my back. They quietly filed out of their seats and began to walk away from the bar. I paused for a moment before deciding to leave with them. As the space between the bouncer and I grew, I grew more embarrassed and as a result, I grew angrier. One of my black woman classmates began to look for the bar’s name to report them for racial discrimination. I apologized to the group for my actions even though they maintained it wasn’t my fault. Most of them were avoidant and wouldn’t even look at me. Only one of my white classmates said anything directly to me. She asked if I was okay, because I was the victim and I had been called nigger. 

I said yes, of course I’m okay. And I am. But more than anything, the only thing on my mind was going back to the bar and killing him. I felt like a pussy (a bitch, a sissy, a coon, soft) for choosing peace and freedom and for considering the consequences of my actions and for being a rational thinker. I didn’t want to go back and fight him. I wanted to put him in the dirt. And it wasn’t because he called me nigger. I call myself a nigga so many times in a day, the word almost didn’t register when he said it. Instead, I was angry because he felt he had the license to try me and to disrespect me. And this, my mind had concluded, was worthy of his death. In the face of my anger, I was disappointed that I didn’t let it engulf me. 

We ended up going to a Thai restaurant in Greenwich Village that I frequented. Most of the conversation shifted to other things and I pretended to have let the emotions from the encounter go somewhere else, but it was with me, more than anything else. Me, the black man of the group, was the angry one.

I told my mother about my “racist” run-in and she concluded that I did the right thing but even today while writing this, I am not so sure. Being a black man is a weight, most of it is from within. I felt like the expectation of how I would act in that moment was so built-in to my psyche and the fact that I acted otherwise filled me with regret. I took this challenge to my masculinity as an affront to my whole being. And I know I’m no bitch. I’ve reacted violently (or accordingly) to many instances of disrespect over the years, many times when I had much less to lose. 

I’ve had guns in my face. I’ve been outnumbered. My temperament usually allowed me to get out of those situations with my pride intact. And while I don’t think I did anything cowardly in this situation, the lack of a violent eruption left me disappointed rather than relieved. 

It took me a few days of contemplation to realize that my disappointment, anger, and discontentment lied with where I was in life rather than with the bouncer, regardless of how much he disrespected me. For the first time in my life, him calling me a nigger felt like an apt description. And that’s because I had spent the past year beating myself up because I wasn’t happy with where I was and what I had accomplished. 

Money struggles made me feel like a broke nigga. Creative struggles made me feel like a dumb nigga. Romantic struggles made me feel like an expendable nigga or even worse, the nigga in the wrong all the damn time. There always seemed to be a disconnect between how I viewed myself and how the world viewed me. It’s hard to not feel like shit when it feels like most of the world treats you like shit all the time. Before long, I began to believe them rather than myself. I’ve been angry. And that’s a difficult emotion for me. I don’t carry it well. 

And that’s where my thirst for violence came from. I needed an outlet. And I denied myself that outlet. Since then, I’ve been ashamed of both my thirst and my decision to not quench it. 

I don’t consider myself a very masculine person. Of course I lean heavier that way, but I was one of those cringe black boys who were putting flowers on their ears and smiling big as hell between each of them. #blackboyjoy. I get manicures and I bleach my hair and I like “feminine” music just as much as the misogynistic music and I cry a lot in the movies (sometimes in general) and I wear flamboyant clothes sometimes and I generally carry myself in a way that invites questions of my sexuality. I feel comfortable embracing the parts of myself that desire to be more feminine and I feel like there is a lot of power in that. There are energies inside all of us but they aren’t at war. They’re dancing with each other. I am not afraid to be soft. But I’m hard. 

Most of the time, I keep my emotions to myself and it’s hard for me to express myself to others. I think a lot of black men can relate to this. Depression, mental health, and constant pressure from all sides to be on top of everything creates a strange desire to handle it all or your own. And I am definitely a victim of this phenomenon. I hate going to anyone for help in any capacity, no matter how much I need it. No matter how much I am implored to open up, I simply cannot. 

The patriarchy, a false sense of what masculinity should be, a lack of resources, and a failure of education (both mentally and emotionally) create a whirlwind that leads to black death far too often. The suicide rate of black men is through the roof compared to other demographics and the homicide rates not looking much better. Black men do carry an anger and it’s the same anger I have. It’s the same anger that Bigger Thomas has in Richard Wright’s Native Son (shoutout James Baldwin). The same anger I even see in our superheroes, like Black Panther. And it’s real. We recognize it in each other and no one else can see it. No one else even necessarily understands it. Everything that happens, and I mean everything, is done in an effort to reconcile that anger. 

We’re all Jody (from Baby Boy). We’re all Malcolm X. We’re all OJ Simpson. We’re all Omar (from The Wire). We’re all Virgil Abloh. We’re all Doctor Umar. We’re all LeBron James. We’re all Trayvon Martin. We’re all Jussie Smollet. We’re all Okonkwo (from Things Fall Apart). We’re all Takeoff. We’re all Barack Obama. We’re all Tyler Perry. We’re all Kanye West. We’re all even that black guy we hate more than anything else in the world. We’re all each other. For better or worse. The anger is a universal, communal anger that we feed together and it has the power to destroy us all. It’s time we find more creative, less destructive ways of communicating our anger. 

I don’t mean that in a corny, “you don’t have to play basketball or rap kinda way.” Black men are caught at an intersection of race and gender that allows us to be the oppressed and the oppressor. We are men and we get a good amount of the benefits that come with that, but at the same time we are seen at a lower state as a result of being black. And this causes confusion in many black men about where our rivers should flow, “up” to being a man with white men or “down” to being black with black women. And no river flows up. 

As Malcolm X famously hypothesized, the black woman is the most unprotected person in the world. They lie unprotected as a result of our anger and our yearning. Even worse, they have been a victim of that anger far too many times. Toni Morrison once asked of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, “invisible to whom?” 

Black women see us and they’ve been with us for so long. They’ve been our mules, carrying the weight of our anger, so much so that they barely have enough room for their own. Black men pay them back with misogyny and patriarchal thinking. Black men wish to ascend and we use the same thought processes as our oppressors to do so. A lot black men don’t hate oppressive thinking but they hate that the oppressive thinking is being used against them. We are what we’re in conversation with. And recently, black men have been in conversation with a lot of piss poor shit in attempts to get away from our anger. 

Whether that be antisemitism, misogyny, colorism, homophobia, transphobia, or white supremacy; we’ve lost the plot. Because we have the capacity to be the victim, we resist any idea of us being the abuser as well. Black men are not solely responsible of course, but a lot of black men cannot sit and take a talking to. 

The problem, or at least the root of it is that hypermasculinity does not encourage empathy or sympathy. Hypermasculinity is an expectation of black men and until we unpack that, we cannot empathize with the plight of black women. Because many black men do not look at black women and see themselves, they don’t desire to understand black women. But I am black women just as much as a I am any of those niggas I named earlier. In fact, because I know black women are unprotected, I make an extra effort to put them ahead of where I put myself. The constant bouncing between nonexistence and hypervisibility makes it hard. But we are hard. And we can do better. 

As far as dealing with our anger, black men need to hear a few things. The first thing, on a serious level, we cannot let go of our anger until we confront patriarchal masculinity and the ways it has been imposed on us. bell hooks writes in We Real Cool, “Wounded black men can heal. The healing process requires that they break through denial, feel what they feel, and tell the truth.” But on a more personal level, we need someone to tell us that it’s okay. Our anger. It’s okay. It’s earned. It’s valid. But we can release it. We don’t need it to be together. We are a community without it. 

A lot of black male youth are looking for answers on how to deal with their anger they’re turning to the wrong places. I looked in some of those same places when I was angry about growing up in poverty and having a part-time father and having arthritis and feeling ugly and undesirable and so much other shit. But none of them stuck. I found some of the answers I was looking for in writing, reading, free expression, creative thinking, and music. But mostly, I found a home in black women. I was raised by two black women, my mother and my older sister, so they always had my utmost respect. But by looking to black women and shutting the fuck up and listening and loving them, I have become a better black man. 

However, finding answers without learning and unlearning is useless. Here’s a good and short reading list for challenging our anger: Heavy by Kiese Laymon, We Real Cool by bell hooks, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Sula by Toni Morrison, Coming of Age In Mississippi by Anne Moody, To Float In The Space Between by Terrance Hayes, We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Tradition by Jericho Brown, Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Notes From A Young Black Chef by Kwame Onwuachi, and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. 

Black men, I love you because you are me. I will love myself better and in new and innovative ways. We are whole. We are niggas. You aren’t heavy, you’re my brother.

I WAS NOT MEANT TO BE ALONE AND WITHOUT YOU WHO UNDERSTAND 

DEAR CRONUS

Dear Cronus,

If I should die atop this mountain, 

release my soul into the sea-

If I am seen as worthy. Father time,

I’m stuck in an endless loop.

Forgive me, but I believe my bearer will bury 

me in advance of the season of my ripest fruit

I live in a watch,

marble in a dial watching

Numbers touch my hands

Grasping for new hours

Dreading the future with you

[I knew ours]

Deep below the heart of the Earth

I roam the sands of my hourglass,

Grains graze my head.

Won’t be long before my hour passes

We don’t belong to our past,

A frozen,shackled heart embraced in your warm arms

You burn my chest

And brand the rest

I trace the pattern of my warm scars

My eyes drag 

Like the ship that rows 

Over the stream of my tears

Stopping as the bells toll

And midnight rolls.

A new day begins- 

and my fears accompany it.

Will you take the life I love to forsake?

This is a letter of sincerity,

King.

-

Depression won August.

Our ongoing battle takes up the time I do not have. The score appears irredeemable, yet I persist with the hope of something greater to come. In July, the leaves started wilting. Now in September, I’ve started falling with them. The fall is coming. 

A letter to time:

I am in the midst of life. At least, that’s what it feels like. I’ve had my own personal grey cloud for years. Wherever I go, it follows. Sometimes, it sprinkles, and sometimes it storms. I see clear skies from time to time, but recently it’s felt like a race against the weather. I think to myself, “I hope I get inside before it rains.” It always rains for the rest of the day. I come inside drenched in dread. Yet, if you were in arms reach of me, you would believe that I was as dry as a bone. No one else can see the catastrophic storm that looms over my head from day to day. And sometimes it feels like I might drown in a flood that I’ve caused with no one to save me. Then I remind myself of when I was in the eye of the hurricane. When it was only me that could save me. I survived what had felt like Katrina. 

Summer is fleeting.

There were no carnival visits in June. There were no day trips to the beach. There were no nights I can’t remember. Only a couple of day visits with my life-long friends. Solitude haunts my daily schedule. There are 4 walls in my room, and I memorized each scratch. I put up new paintings to cover up the bleakness of my space. I wish I could do the same with my mind. However, the romanticization of my implacable melancholia is a comfortable place to land when my mind decides to stop racing. 

It feels like something’s coming. Yet, I feel like I’m running in place, absorbed by suspense; I attempt not to grow anxious about it, but the thought feels concrete, “Will it all come to an end soon?” I’m trying to grow in love with myself before it’s too late. I recently typed in my notes that life has looked like a double-sided mirror. The difference is that I’m watching myself from the outside and experiencing it inside. 

Where did the time go? 

Youth is starting to feel like a faint pleasure. Joy feels fainter. My age shows as I drive past my high school, where the memories inside that building start to feel like third removed relatives. Father Time’s hand no longer holds mine and the future is uncertain. But what if that’s a good thing? My isolation felt against my will, but there’s a chance it was for my will. It’s hard to think you’re doing enough when there are 17-year-olds with apartments and LLCs. My isolation reminded me that you don’t have to “do” to grow. So, this summer, I grew. 

This poem is probably the most personal I’ve written in a while, and I was hesitant to share it, but I know it feels like a storm follows some lovers as well. So, whether it feels like it’s hurricane season, slight showers, or sunny skies, keep loving. 

published September 10, 2022

THE WINTER PRODUCTION

“If you give yourself up, nobody can blackmail you with anything.” - Ms. Lauryn Hill 

THE FINAL ACT 

I choose to share my perspective knowing that even though the human experience is unique, ultimately, we share similar experiences and lessons. With that understanding, I accept that I am a vessel for my  message and my story, a slight variation of a common tale.

All I seek is freedom. Freedom from self-imprisonment, illusions, addiction, attachment, and everything else that does not represent my truth. I encourage you to free yourself as well. Be who you are and become who you’re supposed to be.

PROLOGUE

It’s reported that Jimi Hendrix’s last words were “I need help bad, man.” We were left with that and a poem that concluded with the words,  “the story of love is hello and goodbye until we meet again.” Jimi is the intro because it encapsulates a hopeless day where you wake and everywhere that you once knew life to encompass is suddenly b l e a k. You realize you haven’t had a real meal in days. Or a good night's rest in weeks. Or even put on real clothes and you’ve slowly regressed into old patterns you thought you’d overcome.

On Tuesday, December 21, while hypnopompic my ears were met with a auspicious tapping on my window. It was then I realized my final death was approaching and my soul would soon be cleansed. Just what I needed and in timing so divine. An angelic voice sang “Hello, Kareem” and delivered a few warning messages before I’d experience another season. 

I. When the love is true there will be no on and off, no uncertainty. So you know what you must do if it occurs again Kareem. 

II. Begin preparing & stay patient, a pivotal change is coming. What is it you ask? You’ll soon find out. 

You must wonder, how can one prepare for what they don’t know is coming? I say simple, live as you would while knowing something will soon occur that will be change the course of your life.

ACT I: BLEEK SPEAKS 

*tap tap* “Is this mic on.” 

Fall ’21 contained a chapter of isolation for me where I removed myself from the general public’s field of vision. Solitude was required to deal with my struggles, recalibrate, and to find a passageway towards understanding my authentic self rather than continuing to push any image of this “golden child” that I wanted the world to accept. 

When you look at me, what do you see? Do you see someone who loves themself unconditionally and exudes natural confidence? Or do you see me? At times, I feel on top of the world and then the pendulum swings and I’m reminded of how I felt in the basement in 2015, insignificant and insufferable. If I don’t validate myself, the world’s brutality will make me feel…inadequate. I learned no matter who supports me or what compliments are given, none of that will matter if the feeling doesn’t initially come from within. I believe everyone lacks confidence in their youth because it must be built from nothingness.

WHAT’S HAPPENING BROTHER

Both Fall and Winter consisted of many necessary trials that would lead me into being exactly who I needed to be to thrive today. Days before dropping Fall ’21, I was given notice that by the end of the week I would need to pack my bags and live elsewhere. So I began packing with no idea of where I'd go, but I knew I would figure it out. I couldn’t find a job and my housing situation grew more and more tenuous. Every week for three weeks, there was a new motel to call home. Come Sunday, my creator hit the reset button. I didn’t even have a dollar to my name when I got a call from my mom pleading for me to return home. The inevitable had come, I’d be descending into the pits of my personal hell. When I return somewhere I’ve been tormented, memories and reality slowly become intertwined and I regress into feeling like the version of myself that experienced said torment. To flee the pain, I went off the grid with no warning, no goodbyes, and once again no idea where I’d go. By the end of Winter, I relocated four more times and every time I thought I’d found stability, the illusion fell before my eyes. This led to me making an instrumental decision for my growth and peace of mind: taking an indefinite break from school due to burnout. I was excessively exhausted emotionally, physically, and mentally stressed.I was not tending to my garden, however, I put on a great act to keep those around me from worrying. I found myself smiling on days when it felt impossible. I grew up in an environment where I was forced to compartmentalize myself  for survival. I managed. In hiding, I learned that it’s an act of self-love to be transparent with those you love about what you’re going through. To anyone reading this who struggles to do so, I understand and as cliché as it sounds, as you let it out it gets better. 

ACT II: BLEEK TWEAKS

This segment is phenomenal, more specifically, that track 37 to track 40 run…INSANITY. That’s all need to say on that. *pats self on back and nods*

ACT III: BLEEK WEEPS

(When Lauryn say put that nigga in the back…you put that nigga inna back.)

Originally, I pushed all thoughts of him out and as a result, all creativity halted. I then heard the voice of Lauryn tell me that confronting your emotions is necessary and that the only way out of the negative emotions is through feeling them. You can try and numb the pain, but avoidance doesn’t heal wounds and that pain is still present, just dormant. Emotions are a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others and mine were a rollercoaster. Once I acknowledged this, I fastened my seatbelt and allowed “A.P.I.D.T.A” to catalyze the process. HOV speaks “I got numbers in my phone that'll never ring again” and continues “I got texts in my phone that'll never ping again, I screenshot 'em so I got 'em, I don't want this thing to end” encompassing where our relationship stood as the season began. If one were on the brink of tears, Jay Electronica’s verse comes in to deliver the final blow. Reflecting on those times, we were both looking to be saved by the other, a job that neither could complete because we needed to direct that energy inwards. Our separation allowed me the space to think about our relationship, how it panned out and how things affected me as an individual. I became aware that I was contributing to my pain by trying to make someone love me and felt ashamed but shame doesn’t heal pain either. I began feeling better with time and by processing emotions with a shrink and in turn, the opportunity to expand out of this cycle presented itself. He returned. Despite having reservations about granting him access into my life again, I did so because our love felt otherworldly and I trust my heart to lead me to its lessons. The difference this time was the chance was granted with intention; I’d commit myself to learning forgiveness and made it clear that under all circumstances this would be the final chance and so we reunited. The lesson was we should always love boundlessly, but never without boundaries.

WEIGHT OFF

Before ushering in the season finale, I took the time to review my year’s highlights and praise myself for the ways I’ve grown and changed for the better as well as speak life into my manifestations and goals for 2022. I briefly covered a few lessons learned, expressed gratitude for my blessings, and acknowledged that even what was not perfect at the time could be flipped in a matter of time. Though I was burdened with the weight of communicating many heavy emotions, I make it my duty to end these seasons with positivity, faith, and optimism for the future. I don’t have much else to say as the rest of this was for my enjoyment and those who listened and had lyrics resonate. 

published August 11, 2022

HOWTOAPOLOGIZETOYOURSELF

The date is June 22, 2022. It is 9:12 PM. I’m fresh out of the shower, in bed, typing in my notes because I’m too lazy to get my journal out of the car. Cities Aviv’s “Accompanied by a Blazing Solo” hums in the background from my speaker. His raspy voice raps over a sample repeating, “...Heaven is the place for me.”

In two days, I’ll be nineteen. My birthday is supposed to be the main thing on my mind right now, but I can’t stop thinking about my sixteen-year-old self. One day,I woke up and abandoned her, leaving without saying goodbye. I am guilty of many things, but mostly for  the pain I put her through. I owe more than an apology, but these words are all I have. If I could apologize to her, I would say:

                Dear Camille,

For sixteen years I broke you down mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically. I called you ugly. I compared you to others. I lied to you. I hated you. I left you in toxic situations. I introduced you to this thing, and I called it love. And I let you down. I am sorry.

I will not explain my actions because no explanation can make the pain feel better. We stood on the battlefield together and fought off the world  for so long. You stood by me through it all. It is my fault for going home and creating a war between us. I took what the world  taught me and used it on you. The world gave me grief and I gave you pain. You once told me that the very same words they used on us, always hurt more when coming from me. Because we were a team, and teams stuck together no matter what. I am sorry for blaming you. I am sorry for turning my back on you and joining the other team.

No one taught me how to talk to myself. They taught me not to talk to myself. They taught me that words did not hurt. I look at you, an embodiment of everything they taught me, and weep at how wrong they were. The only thing I had against you were my words, and I used them in every way possible. I destroyed you. Or at least I tried to. I am sorry.

Sometimes I wonder, why did I hate you so much? I remember thinking you were ugly. But looking back at you, we look so much alike. Nothing changed. Maybe I hated you because everyone told me I should. They told me you were not acceptable. They told me you were lame. They taught me to hate you for things out of your control, and I did like the faithful follower I was. I am sorry.

I had to learn to fall in love with everything they told me to hate about you to accept you. I fell in love with who you were. I was told I was weird because I was shy and loved books and music. And I believed them. I didn't fit in with a lot of my peers. Those were the first things I decided to love.I fell in love with your shyness. I fell in love with the fact that you were poor. I fell in love with your lips which gave way to your voice, respect your thoughts and value your opinions. I fell in love with you, all of you.

In two days, I’ll be 19. Every day I continue to find myself. I accept myself. I apologize to myself. I forgive myself. Every day I fall in love with something new about myself. I love you, and I thank you for being the sacrifice for my new love, even if you didn’t want to. I pulled self-love out of you, kicking and screaming. All that you endured is the reason that I am standing here, loved and full and growing, today. I had to hate you to learn to love myself. I can write to you today through growth and growth alone. I can finally admit that I would not be here without you. I love you. I am sorry.

With Love, Camille

published August 8, 2022

WHO WILL CRY FOR THE LITTLE GIRL?

(April 2021) Thoughts and Feelings:

Who will cry for the little girl who cries herself to sleep? Who will cry for the little girl who only knows hurt and pain ? Who will cry for the little girl who cries inside of me?

I can’t sleep. It's hard to breathe. 

I feel like dying. But all I can do is cry.

I’m Frustrated. Angry. Sick. 

Literally vomiting. I’m so disgusted.

My dreams are over. My life is over.  Why not just give up? 

I have no power. I am weak. I was strong before this. 

But tonight, I am weak.

In my head, I relive the same truth over and over again: I was sexually assaulted by somebody I know and trust. The same somebody  who stood behind the camera to capture my beauty. The same somebody who stood behind me at my weakest moment months later pushed me down to sexually assault me. I feel disappointed with myself. I began to feel this strong connection with younger me and she is broken, she is crying. She is hurting and confused. She has been here before. No one cared. No one cried. She revisits  again. Will it be the same ?

(May 2021) Thoughts and Questions:

Who will cry for the little girl who dreams big dreams that now feel just out of her reach? Who will cry for the little girl broken and abused? Who will cry for the little girl, the girl inside the woman ? Who cries inside of me? 

I feel like I am losing my mind. I am sick. I’m so sick. Omg, am I pregnant? Can depression make you feel this way? God please don’t let me get pregnant by a man who fucking assaulted me. *buys a test* *checks it*. Okay, I'm ok. I’m still not mentally okay. He has to pay. I’m so scared. He’s powerful and connected. Here I am… just getting started.  What will happen if I expose him on my own? Who will believe me? What will happen to my dreams? God, I just wanted to model. It’s still so hard to sleep!! When I  can sleep I wake up screaming sometimes. I just want to sleep. He preyed on me, what the fuck. He saw my weakness. He saw I was quiet and an outcast in that room and he used my silence to prey on me. 

(June 2021) Thoughts and Occurrences:

I am healing slowly from this. Well, at least I’m trying to.  Someone sends a post to me “…. is being exposed for assaulting multiple women” a tweet on twitter. My friend said “This is him, the guy you were talking about, he’s crazy and fucking disgusting, you were never wrong.” I am shocked. I feel for the other women. I am glad to be able to tell my story, along with the other women. Now I’m angry all over again. Who was there for these women when they suffered? Who will be here for me now that I have to relive this all over again? I feel my anxiety rise  to the roof. All my life I lived a private lifestyle and now I know what I must do and I hate it for my anxiety. I have to put this out. I go to my instagram. In less than 20 mins, I undergo a transformation from the most private person to the center of a public spectacle . I can’t even recognise myself. But it has to be done right? So I can heal, so other women can heal,and for my younger self to be proud of my strength. So many views from people I never knew. Omg. I’m having a panic attack. Kiya, breathe. Just breathe.

(August 2021) Realization: 

Wow, I really had to say fuck my anxiety and put all of my business out there. I never really cared about what others think about me. But now that’s all I could think of. All I want to do is be taken seriously as a model. I don’t want my assault to define me or to attach itself to my legacy. Is this the end of the legacy I was trying to build? What’s next for me? 

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(Jan 2022 NYFW) Wins: 

I will cry for the little girls. That girl who once was me. 

I won. What the fuck, I won. Okay, so this is what happy tears feel like. I love it. I want to feel more of this consistently. I’m literally looking at myself in Vogue, Paper, NY Times etc. The place I was at mentally a few months ago was full of defeat and fear; powerless and depressed  For a moment I gave up. What is for you will never leave your side. It will never allow you to stray away either. I hold my own power to win. I won. No more fighting myself I won… I won. This win will not be my last and neither will these tears. 

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published July 22, 2022

MY LIFE IN MUSIC: [ENTRY #00110100 00001010]

In the entertainment world, having an alter ego is seemingly more important than showing who you are. Beyoncé thrived on stage as Sasha Fierce, Superman lives a normal life as Clark Kent, Eminem created Slim Shady as a way of channeling emotions that are deemed negative, and Nicki Minaj…Nicki has had plenty of alter egos for many reasons throughout her career. In correspondence with these greats, I've decided to electrically and mechanically engineer another alter-ego as a way to liberate my repressed traits. 

Few people knew of my first alter ego, Atlanta Bleek. Even if they heard Bleek speak, they've likely never spoken to or met them. Bleek was a highly sensitive person, so I asked them to stay inside and do some introspective writing. This allowed Bleek the space to explore their emotional spectrum but being emotionally overwhelmed led to burn-out. This was when Bleek asked to be benched and I saw an opportunity in that. 

Author Janet Finch once said, “The artist is the phoenix who burns to emerge.” Bleek burned and a new supreme would rise. I immediately went into my laboratory and began conceptualizing my new trusted partner. I pressed play on “Phoenix Rise” by Maxwell, grabbed my soldering iron; collected some scrap metal, plastic, and silicone, and let the montage commence. I stayed up many nights having my ears invaded by electronic sounds for hours, watching documentaries on other robots, and studying how to assemble the perfect AI. After standing in front of my new self, I realized I was close to completion, and upon noticing how realistic it looked and felt, an idea to humanize this android came about. I would need to code its ROM data, burn digital data for the robot to read onto a CD, and activate its operating system first and then I could figure out how to humanize a machine. I finished encoding this creation with the information on its presentation, how to function in daily life, how to “learn” from past decision-making, etc. It was then that I thought to humanize the machine by inserting Atlanta Bleek’s core experiences into it with no heart to feel the emotions. I powered on the droid in safe mode as a test run and as planned the robot began reading the content on the compact disc and spoke lyrics from Robot Rock / Oh Yeah by Daft Punk “Robot…Human…Human Robot.” The sound was distorted on startup but as the internal fans started, the sound cleared up and I was proud knowing I’d created the next supreme. I watched the robot slowly start rocking its hips and I looked down at my notes and smiled, noticing I wrote algorhythm instead of algorithm. Instead of going in to recode, I realized this adds character to the robot. I restarted the computer in its default mode and sent it out on its first night out.

The disc played the next song narrating my alter ego’s first experiences: “Supercomputer status: walkin’ along the streets, everyone is an addict…everybody wanna get chose like Moses.” On my first night out, I simply observed people and began to understand Childish Gambino’s code in “Algorhythm” and other human algorithms. Each one was programmed with vice and to seek connection within their networks just like I was. The uncontrollable movement to these songs seems to have been programmed to be my vice. I translated the ones and zeros and followed the rules of the song “Step, step, slide, slide, move your body from side to side” I recognized a pattern and stored the data for later use. I glitched and Childish Gambino’s words repeated “Nothing can live forever, you know we gon’ try” and I began to process my inevitable ending even as a machine causing me to overheat and then automatically send a crash report to my developer. As I reboot, the disc skips to the next track assuming that the crash was caused by the previous song, and reroutes me to the laboratory and I continued to dance until my return.

When I received the notification of the crash I immediately had an idea that would solve the issue. Instead of giving the humanoid Atlanta Bleek’s memories with no heart, I could give it a heart with a toggle switch making it almost human, and make a few internal adjustments. After doing so upon start-up I noticed the robot’s movements became less mechanical than before. I took note of this and watched the robot begin dancing and reciting lyrics from Toro y Moi’s “Who I Am” repeating, “Now I don’t know who I am” as if I was comforted by the freedom of being able to get to know its new algorithm. To make sure the robot could still read its coding I asked the robot for its name and it responded “I am K Electronicä!” I continued “Correct and what were you programmed to do?” while blissfully dancing Electronicä responded “Touch, kiss, dance, and be free. Let’s do it!” I was shocked at first but I then laughed as I realized those were lyrics from “Emotional Healer” by Space Ghost. I adjusted the code and programmed the alter ego to heal the heart it’s been giving through dancing freely. “Yes, indeed you are the emotional healer. Now go out into the world and do what you do best, dance for me. 

POSTSCRIPT: 

“K Electronicä!, how’d you come up with that name?” 

I’ve been contemplating the next alter ego’s name for a while. I felt it brewing within me for a while and then it struck. Recently, I’ve been listening to mostly electronic and dance music and knew it would be instrumental to this next period of my life. I was listening to “A.P.I.D.T.A” by Jay Electronica and like lightning, it struck me. K ELECTRONICÄ! Everybody needs an alter ego and Electronicä is the one that grabs you saying “I wanna dance” similar to Channel Tres on the track “Alter Ego”. They’re the alter ego that casually flirts with everyone and always makes sure they have the time of their life. They’re what I’d call a “Barbie Girl” living in their own world because they understand that with your imagination, life is your creation. Instead of being a “blonde bimbo” like Aqua said on LILO’s remix, they have cinnamon hair now. K Electronicä is like a personal doll that I can dress up in XS clothes. When dancing to Kaytranada’s “Look Easy,” they changed the lyrics to “I’m hotter than Atlanta (Bleek)” and kept singing “I make it look easy.” I prefer going out with Electronicä over Bleek because Bleek would get drunk and I’d have to take their phone before they start texting everyone from their past. The worst Electronicä might do is lose their phone, but that's just because they heard the tourist remix by Finesse by Pheelz come on and they have AppleCare+ so it's okay. They live with a no strings attached mindset like they’ll have the most passionate connection with a stranger and never speak of them again. I once witnessed them kiss a girl they met at that party and said “I thought you liked niggas” and they giggled and replied, "I'm human" and that was that.

solo(ng)

(collage poem of thoughts & questions curated from the notes and mind of Jade Scott)

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waterfall, baptism, emotional masochism

what if you allowed yourself to feel how you want to before you anticipate how other people will react to these feelings?

do you think that expectations are people’s innocence intertwined?

• is what you're offering not enough? how so?

????

????

I wonder how many things we leave unsaid because we are afraid that they are true. Will the absence of silence make it real or just make it seen? Does it need room to breathe?

you’re the loveliest ———> maybe that was the same thing as having a crash… deading?

WHAT IF YOU ALLOWED YOURSELF TO FEEL BEFORE HYPOTHESIZING THE MESS YOU MIGHT MAKE?

you don’t have to do anything to recieve love.

love is you. love is you.

while you want for an unplanned future

<3

while you want for an unplanned future <3

where would I be without your loooooveee? I love you, endlessly. 

Where is it that you don’t want to be? Is it here? What are you doing to escape your reality?

innocence vs. experience 

so now that ur FREE, what will you use to convince yourself that you’re trapped?

whileyouwaitforanunplannedfuturewhileyouwaitforanunplannedfuturewhileyouwaitforanunplannedfuture

WHILE YOU WAIT FOR AN UNPLANNED FUTURE

WHILE YOU WAIT FOR AN UNPLANNED FUTURE

AFROFUTUR(IS)T SURVIVAL GUIDE 🧚🏽‍♂️

i was born. i was born 46 minutes to midnight, during a full moon, on a Friday, to a Leo and a Pisces. i could tell many stories and ink an autobiography filled with truth and dishonesty. But mostly, you should know that i was born. i am her(e), carrying and bearing every day. i was named. Middle name from my mother, and last name from my father. i’ve been consumed by who I’m supposed to be. Obsessed with how i can emulate her. Or how i can be perceived as her. i’ve had to be so many people and things to be seen and liked and loved. i’ve offered my love and food and legs and emotion for men who refuse to do it themselves. And in return i’ve gotten a glance, a smirk, 2 seconds of attention. i have been the glue and am tired of being sticky. I’m tired of being stuck. The younger me who longs for love and the words to express it reaches up from the inside. i think that i am not alone in this. i feel that others are with me.

i was born in Southfield to parents from Pine Bluff and Brooklyn. i don’t remember much of my childhood in Michigan. Maybe that’s a good thing. i remember being perceived as an exuberant, lively, curious child: my talkative and humorous nature warranting changed seating arrangements and the occasional parent teacher conference lecture. i was imaginative: i used to color coordinate my outfits, a different color each day. i changed my handwriting every year. i cried when India stabbed her hand with a pencil. i ate glue and stapled my finger. i was a leader. In the 3rd grade i banded a group of students together. During class we would rub paper and eraser together, collecting the scraps that were typically given a backhanded push to the floor. We molded the small pink scraps into balls and sold the eraser dust as “Sasha”. i started JJJJewelry with Harshini in 4th grade. The business fizzled, as many others did. My venus is in gemini. i would form a new crush every year and tell them on the last day of school (to avoid rejection of course). i still remember their names. i still remember my name. i guess i remember Michigan too.

i moved to Georgia in the middle of my 6th grade year. i adapted. i was funny. i observed people, learned what they liked. i mirrored them, and assumed it meant that they liked me. That’s a hard habit to break out of, being for other people. i think they want me to be me. i’ve been told i have a pure soul. i wonder what they see. i’ve been told i’m quiet. i wonder when that happened. i often ponder who i’m going to be. Or who i was… or both. i’ve come to realize that the solution doesn’t have to be so singular, so binary. i can move forward and backwards. i used to think that to find myself i needed to choose, pick one. Go forward or inward. Or inward then forward. i didn’t allow my growth to be disorganized. i have come to challenge those strict notions of what it means to come into myself. 

Afrofuturism gives me permission to reject traditional suppressive norms and embrace difference, community, and emotion. It is a tool that reminds me to stop questioning self and start questioning system. To start relying on self and not system. Afrofuturism IS. There are a few tools you need to successfully navigate this world through an Afrofuturist lens. Glue, imagination, and question marks to name a few. So maybe it’s better to say you only need one thing that carries lots of things… like a bag or a book. Mostly, you need space: to feel, grieve, and reflect. Journals grant me the opportunity to do all three and more. To press back against confined spaces. The space i take up on the margins is growing uncomfortable. Herein lies not a solution, but a response: an amalgamation of me in different stages of life and learning. i work to honor the space that i take up and use, the many Me’s that make up this community. i think about young Jade. And what she wanted. And i’m proud of what we(she) created. So many of the questions i pose come from my inner child. She whispers, and Afrofuturism yells back.