Life Updates:
So, I know I didn’t post last week *peeks from behind fingers*. I know, I know.
My business partner and I launched our new venture in Houston–a storytelling tapas catering company specializing in Afro-Latino cuisine. Our first official week we had 3 events serving hundreds of people. While I am grateful, it set the tone for the realizations and revelations that I have had since we began the month of August intentionally focusing on memory and reclaiming collective memory. Desire and horror1 has been at the nucleus of this month. I have been required to look, to stare deeply into the horrors of my desire for liberation. To stare without looking away, at both the desire for liberation and the horrors of oppression. To not water it down, to examine it in its totality.
During my morning pages I wrote about feeling stuck. I think what I was actually trying to articulate is this feeling of existing somewhere in the middle. The last two weeks have been a culmination of marvel, wonder, agony, and fading memory. The memories that have surfaced as I chose to intentionally move towards remembering instead of avoidance. To breathe my way through the discomforts of oppression. To let myself be haunted by the same pains that tattered itself against the torn flesh of my ancestors. Simultaneously watching the vision of liberation play out through the films of my imagination. The tapping rolling through my mind, side by side desire and horror, a two headed beast that cannot be slain. The beast is the mark of salvation in the underground. The beast represents the yin and yang, but necessary for harmony and cohesion. Worldbuilding is not just imagining a perfect world where we only have joy and pleasure. The world I am building, placing my hope in, is a world where we find pleasure even in the horrors. Where we let the horrors remind us that we are still striving and that this is a necessary agony. Not to excuse the horrors of oppression or to poetically erase the great suffering that has taken place at the hands of racism and colonialism, but to attempt to make sense of this reality we have found ourselves in.
This week I offer you the mutterings and musings of this process. My attempts at putting language to the process of liberation and the praxis of remembering.
The Necessary Agony
If anyone knows the necessary agony2 that has latched itself to this journey of revolutionary change, I do. I know what it’s like to wrap my fingers around the cold hand of my child. I know the way the pain of witnessing a 2ft casket warps the soul. I know how the agony of suffering has propelled me forward towards liberation. I know what it’s like to live in the duality of suffering and liberation. I understand what W.E.B Dubois painted a picture of when he described the double consciousness. This place I have found myself in I can only explain as the intense awareness of agonizing suffering that has informed my understanding of liberation, while being able to see that the freedom I desire lies at that intersection of deep suffering and freedom. As I walk down this pathway, I have had to open myself up to the deep wounds. To lay them bear, to sit with the sins sinned against me and choose forgiveness.
Choosing to remember and not anesthetize myself with the truth watered down with pleasantries and an attempt to make ourselves uncomfortable for the comfort of the White ego3. Creating this practice has caused me to understand more about this place, what this space is purposed for and who it was created for. This world, this place, Radical AF is the underground. A place to blueprint and chart a world where rebels, revolutionaries and the unhoused find refuge, seek purpose, and live boldly, spirited by the radical gospels that tell stories of liberation. A place where the pursuit of liberation and the praxis of freedom is the status quo. The living awareness of Black consciousness. Existing in duality and multiplicity. The awareness of liberation not yet made manifest and the journey of becoming while people still do not yet understand. Dancing between the worlds of horror and desire, being brave enough, or foolish enough to stare down both and still see the beauty in what lies between, not the eroticism of idyllic fallacy, but in the every, the average, the unknown, the uncharted, the unexplored truth.
Healing Marred Lands
When memory is left unprotected it dies.
We are protected by the audacity to believe, to imagine, to create from a world that you cannot see, places that only exist in our imagination. We have a responsibility to see the completion, the manifestation of what we know is truth. When we choose to make memory an everyday practice, when we engage in our history we continue to be the gatekeepers of the rituals and memories of our ancestors preventing them from being erased by fading memory.
The Tendency to Inflate The Ego as a Means for Remaining Comfortable
Placing comfort over sacrifice snuffs out love. When we choose to place precedent of our own comfort, refusing to move the line in the sand, then we uproot and unmoor the bud of love that is always growing. We pluck it when it's just yet a seed. How we handle the fragility of change determines if love can grow, if it remains rooted. But consistent patterns of uprooting created bald patches that scar the terrain where love must be buried in order to grow. It is not impossible for love to ever reside there again, but it must endure a healing process. It must be scaled away. Scraped without the use of anesthetics, because we must remember, we must be wholly present for the removal. We must not do it numbed and with one eye open, we need to lay witness to the ugly scar, the marred land and we must choose to see what is not present. We must see what only hope can. We must see what only faith can believe. We must be steadfast, firm, and unyielding. We must surrender to the truth–that even in war torn lands, even in the impossible, yet all things are still possible. I believe in the impossible. I believe in redemption and restoration. I believe a symbiotic relationship between desire and horror can be restored.
The Praxis of Memory: The Practice of Returning Home
I believe food is the vehicle for which we carry our most intimate experiences, our most vulnerable truths, the sensorial map for our history. The reason why we seed rows of corn in our hair on the journey to lose oneself. Food holds the taste and the memory of who you are and where you come from. You can lose your home, you can lose your photographic evidence, you can lose your land, but what you cannot lose is the embedded genetic seed of cultural memory held in the seed of ancient grains that continue to speak of ancient stories. Food speaks. Like a tree that bears the fruit of knowledge, the knowledge of knowing one’s self. To be firmly rooted, grounded. And even when we lose ourselves, we can sow seeds of collective memory when we break familiar bread, when we plant again in the home, the practice of knowing exactly who you are. Restoring the practice of sowing and reaping, we can find ourselves home.
Until next week revolutionist. Continue the good fight.
-Kai Moriah Winstead
An idea taken from the film Youth that was released in 2015 that examines the conversation of death and dying through the juxtaposition of youth and aging. It centers around ideas of desire and horror and explores how they coexist together.
I first encountered this phrase in a quote shared in my BIPOC Writers room facilitated by Brandi Cheyenne Harper (a group inside of Landscapes, a writing community facilitated by Cody Cook-Parrot), Brandi shared this quote that referred to “time as a necessary agony”. Though I cannot find the original quote, it was the inspiration for my morning pages as a part of our #36DaysOfSensualProse challenge.
In response to the quotes:
“By courageously looking we defiantly declare not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality” bell hooks from Black Looks: Race and Representation (2014) pg. 115-131 via Brandi Cheyenne Harper
“If I am to be a spectacle, this is what I want the spectator to see-a wayward woman. Ungovernable. Wild. Sensual. Free. Narkita Wiley from The Oppositional Gaze of the Wayward Woman (2024) via Brandi Cheyenne Harper.