Archive

There is something about rain in Trinidad, sharp and sudden and sometimes fleeting.

Of course there is the smell, the petrichor of the collision of hot pitch and concrete with raindrops. Then there are the sounds - people scrambling when caught unawares; the inevitable declaration, if it is an otherwise sunny day, that “the devil and he wife mus be fighting”; the echo of rain drops on a galvanized roof; the low distant rumbling of thunder; the crash of lightning followed, not always but not infrequently, by the explosion of a power transformer and the hiss of electricity going out.

Or perhaps you are at a beach house in Mayaro, one close enough to the ocean that you can hear the waves and taste the sea salt. When the rain comes, if the water is warm enough or you’re ocean-deprived enough, you run into the sea and dive underwater and hold your breath as long as you can, feeling the sounds of the raindrops and the waves deep in your chest. And if it is not warm, or you have already spent the whole day in the water or on the sand, then you bundle up in a blanket knowing that the rain and the waves and the growling thunder will be the soundscape to your dreams.

Attribution:

Been a long minute since I did one of these, so:

Read: Babel

Watch: Grand Crew, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Paddington

Eat: Mamak’s Corner

I spent many a Friday night, fifteen years ago, writing about banks that failed.

Another bank failed on Friday, as financial institutions sometimes do, and there I was again. Plus ça change, etc and indeed.

News repeats, because people make the same kinds of decisions over and over again.

‘People like to be told what they already know.  Remember that.  They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things.  New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect.  They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man.  That is what dogs do.  They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that.  In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.’ — Terry Pratchett, The Truth (2000)

March, the longest year. Everything since, marked. Folks talked about a before when there was a sense that there would be an after. Yet it is still, somehow, the during.

I watched - experienced, really - a play about The Jungle, about the place that was once referred to as The Jungle. (If you are in DC, it will be playing there from March 16 - April 28). It is not a hopeful play, but it is a play about hope.

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers” - Rankine, in Citizen, quoting Baldwin.

Attribution:

Empty jar: I think to grow beansprouts and look into ordering seeds. Back ordered until May 1.

Egg shells: should I start a mulch pile? Mother had a large empty milk carton by the sink where she'd add stuff to mulch. And now T reports that because they are making every meal, Our mulch pile is so alive.

Sleeping Beauty, yes, that cocoon—

Moby Dick, The Tale of Genji, Anna Karenina—I left Emily Dickinson - Selected Poems edited by Helen Vendler in my office

Notebook: March 20, 2020
A student in Elmhurst cannot sleep for the constant ambulance sirens. She keeps her blinds drawn but sees on tv what is taking place a block away—bodies in body bags loaded onto an enormous truck. The governor calls this The Apex. And late last night, R called—"helicopters are hovering over the building!" She remembers the thrumming over our brownstone in Park Slope on 9/11. And just now I learn that religious people just blocks from her were amassing by the hundreds, refusing social distance. And I am full of rage. Some communities have begun to use drones to disperse people. The president states he has "complete power." And I am filled with rage.
— from Things That Are Changed—March, 2020 by Kimiko Hahn

There is a song that I have seen performed live probably a dozen or more times, though not in the last two decades. It's called Miracle, and it's by a Trinidadian roots rock band called (The) Orange Sky. This song is not available on any streaming service. You cannot find its lyrics anywhere on the internet, whether you search via Google or ChatGPT. There are no references to it on any major social media platform. This song, as far as the 2023 prompt-based digital economy is concerned, does not exist and has never existed.

What led me down this rabbit hole was a voice memo from a relative, a cousin with whom I shared many of those music-intensive evenings and experiences back home all those years ago. Most of our messages back and forth include or are links to songs or playlists. We have years of letters that feature an extended in-joke about making as many references as possible to certain reggae lyrics. Though neither of us is a musician - whereas many of our friends are - music has been a consistent throughline of our relationship. The voice memo: them singing the refrain from the song, and asking - hey, what's the name of this again?

If he'd asked me this in 1998 or 2006, I'd have fired up iTunes and run through my painstakingly curated playlists, playlists that represented hundreds of hours of spent cataloging songs by year and genre and rating and BPM and that lived in carefully organized folders across multiple hard drives. I'd have flipped through the albums of CDs, carefully preserved with their liner notes and track listings.

But because it is 2023, and those albums of CDs are under a bed in room in Trinidad, and those hard drives are in a box that I have been meaning to get to pending buying a new desktop computer and having the luxury of several uninterrupted days off, I did the other thing I know how to do: search through digital ephemera. I am very good at finding things on the internet, but the internet is very good at decay.

There used to be a website dedicated to the local Trinidad bands I grew up listening to and following around the island. It included, for some of them, track listings and even audio files. That website is lost to time and 404s and probably takedown notices, and not even the Internet Archive could help retrieve it.

But there was another thing I could do, and that was text one of the several friends with whom I had shared these particular musical experiences, and who I knew also had carefully cultivated libraries of music and efficient systems for retrieval. "Pop quiz," I texted, to a friend who also happens to be both musician and excellent record-keeper. Four minutes later, "Think it's called miracle". Three hours later, another reply: an MP3 of the song. "Dug up some old hard drives to find that one", he said. An understatement.

How so much of what we have access to is subscription-based and prone to revocation. I think about whether anyone gets to experience art and animation and music and movies depends on whether tech and media behemoths are willing to pay royalties.

Access is not ownership. Digital ownership is precarious, because hard drives might fail or your phone gets stolen and Apple and Google decide you no longer have access to your files and there's no way to appeal, or because Amazon can change the terms that govern that Kindle book you bought from them.

This is less about the fetishization of any particularly analog medium (if you have ever tried to repair a cassette tape then you know physical storage formats have their challenges too) and more about the fragility of rights in a digital ecosystem. It is about the importance of systems of distributed memory and collective memory; of shared experiences and the shared recollection of those experiences. So many of our experiences now are designed to be uploaded, surveilled, licensed, streamed, and mediated; monetized by platforms that decide whether something is "appropriate" based on how advertisers are likely to want to spend their budgets against it.

I think about how having friends who were there too, and who want to hold on to the same things as you, make it possible to remember who were then, and why those things matter still. A miracle.

Attribution

– and suppose

we could scroll through its pages every day
to find and pronounce a Let meant only for us –
we would stumble through the streets with open books,

eyes crossed from too much reading; we would speak
in auto-rhyme, the world would echo itself – and still
we’d continue in rounds, saying let and let and let
— from Book of Genesis by Kei Miller

It seems I am always thinking about James Baldwin, at least since I first knew to be.

I bought, on a whim — because that is what good bookstores are designed to facilitate — a copy of The Devil Finds Work, a collection of his essays about movies. I also bought, more intentionally, a pair of gifts for my nephew - because that is what you do when you’re trying to be World’s Best Aunt.

And because I am always thinking about James Baldwin, I am often thinking about Toni Morrison, and about her eulogy for him: “In your hands language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be: neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive.”

Attribution

“How are you doing?” A question when, sincerely presented, demands and merits a sincere response.

“What are you willing to stop doing?” A provocation deployed insufficiently frequently.

“Be specific.” A powerful phrase, made even more so when preceded by a directive to identify and articulate what it is you need.

The task is to live well enough with you. / But how?

Dates and times: not my fave. What day is it: hold on, let me check. What time is it: hold on, let me check. Where am I supposed to be now: hold on, let me check. That thing that happened all those years ago that no one remembers but me? Seared into my brain, down to the millisecond.

Time is an illusion until you run out of it.

I have talked about the unadulterated bliss that, for me, is unstructured free time. I am, typically, scheduled up to my eyeballs. Waking up at the crack of dawn and going to sleep whenever to try to do all the tasks that have my name attached, implicitly or explicitly, to their checkboxes. (it gives a lovely light)

I run my day on alarms and timers. Who needs pomodoro when anxiety is right there.

The absence of alarms, reminders, calendar events means I get to decide how I want to spend my time.

"Doing nothing" is less interesting to me than "doing whatever I want in a given 24-hour window without the looming threat of a deadline or major breaking news or an obligation to someone who wants to ~ pick my brain ~"

I can count the number of times I have had those kinds of days in the last x number of years. Low double digits. Time to mind that gap.

Attribution

old anxieties back into the night,
insomnia and nightmares into play;
when things in need of doing go undone
and things that can't be undone come to call,
muttering recriminations at the door,
and buried ambitions rise up through the floor
and pin your wriggling shoulders to the wall;
— from February by Bill Christophersen

I am always thinking about stories. I am always trying to change the rules about who gets to set them, tell them, define them. I am always trying to complicate The Narrative.

I know more about how Tyre Nichols died than about who he was alive.

“Here’s what we know about what happened in the approximately 54 minutes when Tyre Nichols was pulled over and brutally beaten by officers” is a sentence that reflects a series of choices about The Narrative.

I know more about the ostensible motivations of the farm worker who killed seven of his colleagues than I know about why people in their 60s and 70s are still toiling on farms.

If you have had friends for a long time, if you have been friends for a long time, then being with and around them, the people who knew you then is like being a version of yourself that you are not anymore.

That was then, this is now, there are intervening years, there is intervening grief.

Then is when he was alive, and you forget, even though it is now, that he is not alive anymore because you are in the presence of another person from the time when he was. And you find yourself, back in the country where he lived (though not the country where he died), almost asking - and more than once - you find yourself wanting to ask, how is he doing?

You do not ask, because you know better, you know better, and you have been worse.

A reiteration of Dr. King’s words and works. First published in 2020.

First, Letter from a Birmingham Jail(1963), or the one in which MLK is exasperated while incarcerated and in solitary confinement:

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom…Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. 

Staring down a couple weeks of travel for work, mentally steeling myself for the planes and the trains and the hotels and the working every time zone. Making the packing lists early even though I know won’t really pack until roughly 10 minutes before I have to leave for the airport.

The lists do help, as do legit decades of practice, but there’s magic in packing cubes and the discipline of never checking a bag

Other things I’ve learned about packing for work travel over the years:

1) only take pieces that work for multiple outfits

It took about 18 months, a cannot-be-taken for granted confluence of events, and a fairy godmother, but I finally, successfully took two consecutive days off (and yeah, that includes weekends). And then I managed five more.

In a word: bliss.

I have (long had) complicated feelings about Decembers. It is a month I associate with friends who died young and who I am always grieving; with guilt about never being “home for Christmas” and bemusement over where and what home even is; with deadlines self-imposed and external; with stories unfinished; with books unread; tasks undone. It is not, in short, a month I ever particularly enjoy.

But I am always grateful to have made it through what is heralded by Old Year’s Night, and for the optimism of New Year’s Day.

Self-absorption, cruelty, pettiness. These are traits, these are behaviours, that get to me — especially when they show up in people with disproportionate amounts of power and unearned privilege.

Big, dramatic crises? Not even novel anymore. Unrelenting breaking news? A couple decades of practice behind me. But my capacity to put up with stupidity—a word I use to encompass that particular trifecta—has eroded over time.

This happened, in part, from realizing that all the stories were myths. From getting to be be in the rooms where the decisions get made. From getting to see, in real time, how history gets written. From getting to be one of the ones who decides, in those rooms. From getting to edit what becomes a draft of history. From fighting, first to get into those rooms, and then to transform them. From losing, over and over. From winning, sometimes, enough to keep going a while.

From seeing how often people choose the past of least resistance for them, even and especially when that path means so much harm for others. From hearing the stories people who chose that path tell about themselves to the people they allowed to be run over. From being run over. From telling the stories.

Chronic pain is boring. It is waking up fine on a Saturday and by Sunday afternoon not being entirely able to sit, stand, or walk. In between it is ok, I suppose. Liminal.

It is familiar, too - this particular variant having been a fact of life since I was an undergraduate, at the very least.

Or perhaps you could say it is predictable, with a tendency to strike when least convenient. Though pain is never convenient.

And it is always a reminder - of frailty, of fragility, of the ephemerality of ability. That “well” is inevitably temporary.

There was a time when I lived in London and I could get home - home being Trinidad, home still being Trinidad - relatively easily and cheaply because there were so many tourist flights to both islands. Then multiple of these airlines filed for bankruptcy or decided the route was unprofitable or unfashionable or whatever it is that stops planes from landing at airports. And I remember thinking, watching prices tick up over time, that my ability to get home was a function of other people’s desire to be entertained.

There was a time when oxtail and ghee and coconut oil weren’t things you’d find in Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, when finding the good stuff meant a bus trip or two. Have you truly lived, as a person from another place, if someone hasn’t first been repelled by the foods that most remind you of home and then later asked if you’ve ever eaten them, because they know this really good place in Manhattan that does the best

At some point “going back” becomes “going to”.

It has been a long time since I lived in London, and yet the question but where are you really from asked by a certain kind of British person and defended by a certain kind of British press with that person attends a church that Black people also attend! how dare you suggest! comes with it a visceral sense memory. A remembering, in the body, of what it was like, not being from there, having been discovered as someone who dared, nonetheless, to be there. Remembering the first time I realized what it was like for the people who were from there but were perceived, nevertheless, as interlopers. When it is was the long arm of empire that dared, first.

Two parts to the word, in historic darkness coined.

Two weeks ago I was supposed to be on holiday for a week; instead I had this weekend. Measure time off by the relative sparseness of emails sent, by the relative lag between receipt and reply; by the ability to turn all notifications off*; by bosses beaten (and bosses unbeaten) in a game designed for masochists.

Gratitude for the small moments in quiet places; a way to recharge to have the energy to make the spaces we inhabit better.

*“to switch to a slightly different focus mode with fewer exceptions” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it

On Trans Day of Remembrance, mourning more murdered queer people.

Over and over again.

Attribution:

what is that about, going out
and not having to explain
you aren't that her
or that thing?

in this, our language,
there exists no plural that doesn't deny me.
— from They by Raquel Salas Rivera

Seek to be useful in a crisis.

Care about outcomes and consequences. Understand they are never evenly distributed. Let go of the conviction of intent. Do the reading. Cite the authors who enabled your comprehension. Ask who gets left out of the footnotes of history. Consider who you’re writing out of the story.

Villains require heroes. Sometimes they look the same. And then the angles change.

It’s hard to ask different questions if your perspective hasn’t changed.

If you work in / around media and technology and/or care about electoral integrity but not in a “Stop the steal” way, you’re likely dealing with variations on grim.

It took me a long time to figure this out, but when I did I couldn’t stop thinking about it. There’s a class of people (often but not always already independently wealthy) who define their work as “mission-driven” but what they do not mean by that is “challenging to them, personally.” Sure they will work through a weekend to hit a deadline, or tolerate being yelled at by some executive or answer emails and text messages 24/7. But what they will not do is brook any conversation that suggests their work is not, in fact, changing the world for the better or that the world is changing (needs to change) in ways that they aren’t contributing to or that they, in fact, are the problem.

It is not ~fun~ to hear that whole those weekends at the office didn’t matter, or that your “public commitment to diversity” doesn’t mean anything if your primary criteria for hiring is “the CEO thinks they can have a beer with them” or that actually the most useful thing you could do in this moment is funnel money to people who’ve got domain expertise and years of relationships and an actual track record of executing under demanding circumstances.

Anyway a lot of tech and media people are losing their jobs, or will be losing their jobs, or are being confronted by the relative futility of whatever we thought our roles were in ~ making the world a better place ~ and it is very easy under those circumstances to take other people down with us, to take up a lot of time and space and energy bemoaning our own circumstances. We can work through this in the intimate spaces that are hopefully also spaces for truth and introspection and calling-in.

A list (of services that if you run a company or provide grants you should fund for your employees, especially if those employees work in media, and of best practices you should not just encourage but enforce).

No reason.

• TweetDelete.net

• BlockParty

• DeleteMe

• Tall Poppy

• Signal (because)

• 1Password (free subscription for journalists)

• Two Factor Authentication

  • Twitter

  • Google Drive and Gmail

  • Apple iCloud

  • Tumblr

  • Instagram

  • WhatsApp

  • Facebook

  • Your Mobile Phone Provider

Attribution

Many believe
whatever happens
is the other half
of a conversation.

Many whisper
white lies
to the dead.

"The boys are doing really well."

Some think
nothing is so
until it has been witnessed.
— from Djinn by Rae Armantrout

If I were asked to choose a favourite festival, and that festival could belong to a religion that is not mine, then I would immediately volunteer Divali.

A celebration of the triumph of light over the darkness, of good over evil.

Tomorrow I will light a diya or three, and I will remember all the evenings spent with friends and food and sweets, I will remember the smell of oil and smoke and the crackling sound of sparklers and fun snaps and bursting bamboo and music and laughter. I will remember Chris, I will remember long illuminated evenings in Marabella, I will remember that we can be the lamps in the dark.

Shubh Divali.

Somewhere, in the Discourse about Ye and Elon, is a forgetting.

Subject / object collision and conflict, media mediated.

We (that media we) show ourselves ill-equipped to learn and lacking in both sensitivity and sensibility when confronted with everything from how auditory processing works to turning vulnerable people’s lives into political theatre.

We (that media we) love an appeal to precedent, rarely reflect on who set those norms and who benefited from the enforcement thereof.

We can look everywhere, even if we don’t want to, and everywhere we can look there is despair.

And every where, every day, people keep going. The fight goes on. Their fight goes on. They fight on. The going gets no less tough, the terrain no less difficult. The stakes rise inexorably.

People keep going, and not because they’ve zoned out or because they’re not paying attention. People keep going because they’re tuned in, despite the overwhelming consequences.

Some folks have spent years practicing being mad about multiple things at once. Some folks have spent years honing a refusal to be chill. They keep going.

Stole away to Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge, a middle of the day matinee. One of those times when I could also recite large chunks of the source materials; one of those times when the performance of those familiar source materials moved me anew.

Folks might debate the why of going to a movie or a play alone, or dining alone (don't get people started on that one). But for me it is about the discipline and the experience of being alone with my thoughts during a creative encounter. And sometimes it is not wanting to explain the sigh of rhetorical recognition ("you realize you’re thirty and are having a terrible time managing to trust your countrymen") or the clenched fist of rhetorical recognition ("where the Negro is concerned, the danger as far as I can see at this moment is that they will seek to reach out for some sort of radical solutions on the basis of which the true problem is obscured"). Or to even have that sigh be overheard, or that fist be observed.

Baldwin and Buckley were born in New York in 1925 and 1925, respectively. Baldwin died in 1987. Buckley lived until 2008.

What a robbery.

Attribution:

No, this year I want to call
myself to task for what
I have done and not done
for peace. How much have
I dared in opposition?

How much have I put
on the line for freedom?
For mine and others?
As these freedoms are pared,
sliced and diced, where

have I spoken out? Who
have I tried to move?

— from The birthday of the world by Marge Piercy

What do you want remains a cruel question. But I suppose if I had to answer, and if I had to answer truly, I would say: time. Time that is mine. Time that enables. Time that is unstructured. Time that is free of the requirements of notifications and connectivity. Time without conditions. Time that feels abundant. Time that liberates. Time to sleep untroubled by the anxiety of knowing yet more rights might have been eroded while I dreamed.

Time might be money but money might not always buy time but it usually improves the quality of how you get to spend it. When people don’t have money we force them to pay in time instead.

What would you do if you had more time? Or indeed: what would you do if you knew you didn’t?

Attribution

I like seasons, perhaps because where I grew up there only two (rainy, dry) and other than the ongoing prospect of tropical storms or hurricanes that mostly and mysteriously seemed to ravage other islands in the region, there wasn’t much to distinguish the two in practical terms.

Then I moved to a place with much clearer delineations, one that required expertise in and the acquisition of entirely different types of clothing and shoes, one that taught me what “seasonal depression” meant but not how to deal with it. I kept moving to and living in those places, and now I have and understand the clothes and the shoes and the lamps and the coping mechanisms.

From my cousins in Germany, the ones who kept their house heated to tropical levels and had a sauna in the yard and calypso playing in the evenings, I learned about layering, and the importance of very good socks, and about not going outside in the middle of winter with wet hair. They bought me my first proper winter jacket and my first proper pair of boots. I still have the jacket, I donated the shoes.

“There is no such thing as bad weather, only inadequate clothing” - a phrase I first heard uttered by a brilliant Jamaican friend who also had to learn about the clothes and the shoes and the coping, and whose strategies for the latter involved raucous house parties that lasted into the wee hours, parties that inevitably featured home-made jerk chicken that he had marinated overnight, seemingly infinite quantities of Appleton Estate, and loud loud dancehall music. I remixed that combination (pelau, scotch and coconut water, soca) and kept the part about the wee hours.

Sometimes I think about the parallels between “someone is wrong on the internet” and “the very serious function of racism”, which is of course distraction.

One of the largest media organisations in the world gives pixels and power to that utterly tired of tropes, that the mere existence of someone who isn’t white in a space must mean that space is ~pandering to the wokes~. And it becomes A Thing, the center of The Discourse, a reminder of who you really need to just unfollow because if Twitter is good for anything, it is good for people demonstrating what they really think and who they really are.

See also: “I can’t get hired because everyone is trying to check the diversity box”. See also: “the only reason you’re in that job is because someone needed to fill a quota”. See also: “I’m not against diversity I’m just pro meritocracy”. See also: “but what about historical realism”.

It is so tired, it is so tiring, it is so distracting. Not from “the real issues”, the phrase those who believe folks can’t walk and chew gum at the same time like to trot out. No, the distraction of these tedious pseudo-arguments is from pleasure, from joy, from fun, from the ability to participate in even frivolous discussion without having to be on high alert for sea lions.

It is not like you remember it, they say. It is even darker than you recall.

So instead you get snippets and shapes and songs and scenes, things that you remind of instead of making new memories from. Once every two, three years you find a spot that could be like those other places, the places you remember or think you do, but none of the faces are ones you recognise and similar to is not the same as.

Nothing is ever the same, you remember, and no memory is the truth.

What does it mean to be from a place, anyway. What does it mean to be defined by the places you’ve left. What if you keep trying to go back.

Very very early in the pandemic, I started saying - in written memos and out-loud on Zooms - that it would be inaccurate to describe the adjustments of 2020 as “working from home”. People were, are, trying to not die. Trying to figure out how to be simultaneously responsible for elder care and childcare and ~ self care ~ and holding down jobs that became even more than full time, if those jobs didn’t disappear out from under them.

I think, I am convinced, that we keep glossing over the “trying not to die” part. And if we can zip glibly past the deep and deadly overhang of the past few years than we can skip right over all the rest, too.

“People aren’t dying of this thing at the same rate” is not the same as “people aren’t dying of this thing”. Endless time and energy and effort and money spent on trying to “rethink the office”, hundreds of thousands of words on “the challenges of hybrid”, so little attention to the experience of loss and the reality of grief.

Over 10.5 million children around the world have lost a parent or other caregiver living in the home, a staggering and heartbreaking figure. For comparison, it took 10 years years to create as many orphans as Covid-19 created in just two years - Stat News

Tried roller skating this weekend. Made it roughly (barely) halfway out of the locker room before practically (actually) falling over. So then I took the skates off and spent the rest of the evening vibing to the DJs and people watching (cringing in sympathy whenever someone else fell over).

I used to rollerblade (give or take twenty+ years) and I recall, from the mists of time, having enjoyed it. There is always something liberating about being on wheels. There’s also something liberating about being bad at things (though, ideally, not in a way that includes the potential for injury).

Routines, even when they feel claustrophobic, can also feel safe. I am trying to choose (without breaking a wrist) a path slightly less travelled.

Attribution:

On a plane leaving Las Vegas, where the temperature hit 41 degrees Celsius, or just about 106 F. Thinking about why people live there, about why I enjoyed living there.

There are ways to live in the desert, and then there is the Las Vegas Strip.

On a plane leaving Las Vegas, thinking about the lessons of the conference I just attended, thinking about all the endless media hand-wringing about _pipelines compared with the relatively under-appreciated emphasis on building benches.

Laughing about how easy it is to change the face (ahem) of a team or company when you have the support and resources to hire people who you know will challenge the status quo. Exchanging stories about how rare it is to find the boards or executives willing to invest outside the default. We trade names and experiences, we toast to the folks with the courage to be challenged, we discuss strategies for coping with everyone else.

Bill Russell

"...Boston, a city my father once described as the most racist in America. My father is Bill Russell, center for the Boston Celtics dynasty that won 11 championships in 13 years. Recently, I asked him if it was difficult to send me to school here. When he first went to Boston in 1956, the Celtics' only black player, fans and sportswriters subjected him to the worst kind of unbridled bigotry...

Every time the Celtics went out on the road, vandals would come and tip over our garbage cans. My father went to the police station to complain. The police told him that raccoons were responsible, so he asked where he could apply for a gun permit. The raccoons never came back.

The only time we were really scared was after my father wrote an article about racism in professional basketball for The Saturday Evening Post. He earned the nickname Felton X. We received threatening letters, and my parents notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation. What I find most telling about this episode is that years later, after Congress had passed the Freedom of Information Act, my father requested his F.B.I. file and found that he was repeatedly referred to therein as ''an arrogant Negro who won't sign autographs for white children.''

My father has never given autographs, because he thinks they are impersonal. He would rather shake a person's hand or look that person in the eye and say, ''Pleased to meet you.'' His attitude has provoked racist responses, and these have tended to obscure the very basic issue of the right to privacy. Any professional athlete, and certainly any black professional athlete, is supposed to feel grateful to others for the fame he or she has achieved. The thoughtless interruptions, the insistence by fans that they be recognized and personally thanked for their support, never let up..."

— from Growing Up With Privilege and Prejudice by Karen Russell in The New York Times, June 14, 1987

Nichelle Nichols

“Don’t you realize how important your presence, your character is? Don’t you realize this gift this man [Roddenberry] has given the world? Men and women of all races going forth in peaceful exploration, living as equals. You listen to me: Don’t you see? This is not a Black role, and this is not a female role. You have the first nonstereotypical role on television, male or female. You have broken ground… . Don’t you see that you’re not just a role model for little Black children. You’re more important for people who don’t look like us. For the first time, the world sees us as should be seen, as equals, as intelligent people—as we should be. There will always be role models for Black children; you are a role model for everyone. Remember, you are not important there in spite of your color. You are important there because of your color.”

And so it’s because of a serendipitous encounter with one Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that Nichelle Nichols continued her role as Uhura. In doing so, she inspired a generation of people towards their dreams including, Academy Award winning actress Whoopi Goldberg, who had a recurring role on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison, who was the first African American woman in space.

Additionally, as Yvonne D. Sims notes in her book, Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture, Nichols was one of several actresses that showed audiences for the first time that “the range of diverse beauty among African American women was not defined by mammy, the exotic other, Aunt Jemima, or Sapphire roles.”

— from Where No Woman Has Gone Before: An Actress Spotlight on Nichelle Nichols by Jennifer K. Stuller in Bitch Media, July 29, 2009

36 degrees celsius. 102 degrees fahrenheit. These don’t feel like real temperatures, until you’re outside and walking around. And I’m just walking around. I’m not working in a field or on a construction site. I’m not in a factory or kitchen or booth somewhere with minimal breaks. I have access to and can afford to run fans and air conditioning. I grew up in a place that taught me how to dress for hot weather and how not to fetishize the sun when shade is right there.

A couple of years ago, when I worked for a fancy tech company with an on-the-record commitment to environmentalism and sustainability, I emailed one of the operations team about the deeply insufficient shade situation at various of the shuttle stops. The response was a mix of “well wait in a nearby building” (not feasible if you didn’t have badge access to those buildings, as I delicately noted to them in the context of the exchange) and “eh well we don’t control construction decisions.”

I think about how different it feels to walk, run, bike, and live in places that have better tree cover and more green spaces compared with ones that (deliberately, as ever) don’t.

I think about the reality that the island where I grew up and where I learned how to handle hot weather may well sink into the sea because of climate change and a political and regulatory environment that allowed, nay encouraged, practices like sand mining.

How hot does it have to be before it's a climate emergency?

Conversations with friends about the return of low-rise jeans and visible thongs that segue into conversations about the return of both aggressive and casual homophobia and the steady, steady, steady erosion of the rights of people who don't conform to whatever standard it is for "just acceptable enough to be allowed to live" these days.

You don't quite understand the doom of repetition until the repetition comes to doom you.

These mistakes, again. These choices, again. This inertia, again.

Between the despair and the rage, possibility.

In all things, practice.

Attribution:

The world will keep trudging through time without us

When we lift from the story contest to fly home

We will be as falling stars to those watching from the edge

Of grief and heartbreak

Maybe then we will see the design of the two-minded creature

And know why half the world fights righteously for greedy masters

And the other half is nailing it all back together
— from Without by Joy Harjo

People who live with chronic pain or illness become experts in details. They will know if the muscle involved in a current episode is the erector spinnae or the sacroiliac joint; they will have more than one go-to technique for masseter massage. They will have tried all the remedies. They will have read the latest research. They will be proficient, indeed accomplished, translators of obscure terminology and references. Many of the people who live with chronic pain—like migraines—are women.

An essay I would like more people to read is called The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, by Leslie Jamison. Another is this one by Serena Williams, on how she almost died after childbirth.

We often do not trust people—especially if those people are women, and especially if those people are black women—to be reliable narrators of their own pain, their own bodies, their own experiences. This mistrust is embedded in medicine and in science, and of course in media.

We trust women so little that all around the world we contort ourselves into hateful knots the better with which to bind them.

Over the past several weeks I have been practicing making space. The thing about practice is that it is not about perfection; it is about consistency and improvement.

Which is all to say I have not always succeeded. A thing about business travel is you (I) regularly end up working two to three time zones at once (a way of saying 18-hour days) and it is hard to integrate anything else (doing yoga, going on bike rides, playing video games, reading books, getting enough sleep, spending quality time with friends or family) when your calls start at 5am and don’t end until midnight.

Before the pandemic, I travelled for work all the time. During the pandemic (did you think it was over?), I once again travel for work all the time.

And yet! There have been times I have succeeded. I have met colleagues for coffee and friends for lunch at short notice without the endless scheduling dance of duelling calendars. I have gone for long walks in beautiful parks. I have played with adorable babies I had not previously had a chance to meet. I started and finished a couple of books.

Attribution:

But we must recognize that many of our high expectations of rapid revolutionary change did not in fact occur. And many of the gains that did are even now being dismantled. This is not a reason for despair, nor for rejection of the importance of those years. But we must face with clarity and insight the lessons to be learned from the oversimplification of any struggle for self-awareness and liberation, or we will not rally the force we need to face the multidimensional threats to our survival in the 80s.

There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone. We are not perfect, but we are stronger and wiser than the sum of our errors. Black people have been here before us and survived. We can read their lives like signposts on the road and find, as Bernice Reagon says so poignantly, that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible. To learn from their mistakes is not to lessen our debt to them, nor to the hard work of becoming ourselves, and effective.

We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by the New York Times, or the Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves. When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. Which is not to say that I have to romanticize my mother in order to appreciate what she gave me – Woman, Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding.

We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves.

We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about – survival and growth.

Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust. If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack against women, is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the systems we support. Each one of us here is a link in the connection between anti-poor legislation, gay shootings, the burning of synagogues, street harassment, attacks against women, and resurgent violence against Black peo
ple. I ask myself as well as each one of you, exactly what alteration in the particular fabric of my everyday life does this connection call for? Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives: who labors to make the read we waste, or the energy it takes to make nuclear poisons which will not biodegrade for one thousand years; or who goes blind assembling the microtransistors in our inexpensive calculators?

We are women trying to knit a future in a country where an Equal Rights Amendment was defeated as subversive legislation. We are Lesbians and gay men who, as the most obvious target of the New Right, are threatened with castration, imprisonment, and death in the streets. And we know that our erasure only paves the way for erasure of other people of Color, of the old, of the poor, of all of those who do not fit that mythic dehumanizing norm.

Can we really still afford to be fighting each other?

— by Audre Lorde in February 1982, from a speech delivered at Harvard University for Malcolm X Weekend. Published as "Learning from the 60s" in Sister Outsider

Took a few days off (well, mostly: the gyrations in the markets I cover for work meant I was about as connected as not), hit up two bookstores, bought some new glasses, met up with some old friends, had several excellent dinners. A successful vacation, however brief.

How long is long enough for something to feel meaningful? How much is enough for something to be fulfilling? Can you ever really know?

I think you can know, but only in the moment. In advance, mere speculation. In retrospect, narrative creation.

There is so much to learn from being present.

There are so many ways to be absent. Sometimes loud, sometimes silent.

We all know specialists in absence. We all have our own feats of absenteeism.

May we learn how to show up, still.

Attribution

A man called Dad walks by
then another one does. Dad, you say
and he turns, forever turning, forever
being called. Dad, he turns, and looks
at you, bewildered, his face a moving
wreck of skin, a gravity-bound question
mark, a fruit ripped in two, an animal
that can't escape the field.
— In the Airport by Eleni Sikelianos

Things I miss about Trinidad:
- friends
- family
- Diwali, Eid, Old Year's
- mango season
- julie mango
- long mango
- mango chow
- Maracas
- liming until 4am at some random bar powered by a steady infusion of scotch and coconut water
- fetes

A bit ago I reached the threshold of having lived longer outside of Trinidad than having lived within its borders, though I have not lived in any one place for an equal amount of time yet.

Perhaps footloose is just another name for rootless (but wutless is a better word than either).

It is impossible not to think about borders when you are constantly (re)defined by them.

It is impossible not to think about space when you are constantly trying to recreate it.

It is impossible not to think about time, because time comes for us all.

Attribution:

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
— Don't Hesitate by Mary Oliver in Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

I am always fascinated by silent edits. Like the one that takes "wasn't as bad as some feared" and turns it into "wasn't as deadly as some feared".

Who is we remains the most useful, least-often asked question in journalism.

"A patient purchased a rifle at 2 p.m. and went on his rampage inside the hospital three hours later. In a letter found on his body, the gunman “made it clear that he came in with the intent to kill Dr. Preston Phillips and anyone who got in his way,” Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin said Thursday."

Despite the endless drumbeat of deaths and despair, there's a certain universe of people for whom all of this "could have been worse".

How bad is bad enough, exactly?

Any politics based on empathy dooms all those we deem not our kind, dear - the opposite of the all-important people like us.

Ah, that we. Ever present. Ever dismissive. Ever deadly.

Attribution:

Kids Who Die

This is for the kids who die,
Black and white,
For kids will die certainly.
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die.

Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi
Organizing sharecroppers
Kids will die in the streets of Chicago
Organizing workers
Kids will die in the orange groves of California
Telling others to get together
Whites and Filipinos,
Negroes and Mexicans,
All kinds of kids will die
Who don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment
And a lousy peace.

Of course, the wise and the learned
Who pen editorials in the papers,
And the gentlemen with Dr. in front of their names
White and black,
Who make surveys and write books
Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die,
And the sleazy courts,
And the bribe-reaching police,
And the blood-loving generals,
And the money-loving preachers
Will all raise their hands against the kids who die,
Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets
To frighten the people—
For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people—
And the old and rich don’t want the people
To taste the iron of the kids who die,
Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power,
To believe an Angelo Herndon, or even get together

There’s a lot of Discourse swirling right now about academic vs journalistic attribution because of some editorial decisions and assumptions made by reporters and editors at the New York Times.

All I will say about the NYT’s approach is that as a person from a country that produced Eric Williams, CLR James, and a song called “Haiti I’m Sorry” I am clearly not the audience for any reporting that claims to be both the first and the most definitive explanation of the relationship between Haiti’s current economic conditions and France’s demand for reparations.

“The Times reveals how Haiti became the poorest country in the Americas” is something you write if your cultural and educational context is very different from mine. As is the surprise embedded in the choice to describe the fact that “France demanded reparations from Haitians it once enslaved” as a “stunning detail”.

There are many sentences in the reporting in question that are revealing, but the one I cannot stop thinking about comes from somewhere and someone else entirely.

I have been thinking about how I answer questions, and what I choose to obscure when I answer them.

“How come you already know so much about [process, product, protocol]?”

(I get this one a lot). My default response to this is, “because I’m nosy.” Which is a fact. But the truth is that for the entirety of my career I have been drawn to projects for which there is no roadmap or precedent, and the truth is that people like me are rarely given the grace of second chances, and the truth is that the pet to threat cycle gets shorter every time, so the window to try to do good work without being perceived as a problem is narrow.

“Why is this your problem?”

There are days and there are weeks and there are days and there are weeks and they each and collectively feel like there is no reprieve.

How much worse can it get is a question some of us stopped asking because we know what the answer is, because we’ve been telling you to ask better questions.

Why is this happening is a question that really ends two words later, with a whispered, to me.

Why isn’t anyone doing anything about this is a question that should instead start with who is doing something about this, because someone always, always is and has been and will be doing, even if you hadn’t heard about them before, even if you haven’t heard about them yet, even if you’d never known you need to know.

There’s a James Baldwin quote — indeed, there’s always a James Baldwin quote — about the role of the artist that goes like this: “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.”

Perhaps one of the reasons there’s always a Baldwin quote is because of what he said in that same interview, with Life Magazine in 1963: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” And read he did, and perhaps because he read, he wrote.

I am trying to read more, again. I am trying to go to the theatre, to go see the exhibition at the museum, to see the film that’s not available anywhere on streaming when it is available for one night at the indie cinema. I am trying to spend unstructured, mostly impromptu time with friends. I am trying, because these are trying times.

I suppose you cannot be a (contemporary) emotional or spiritual historian if you are disconnected from your emotions or your spirituality. I suppose the doom feels more survivable if you can see the glory.

“Beauty stands in for unconsummated mourning” was a beautiful sentence in a review of beautiful and not so beautiful things (art!) that included a brief and violent aside on a brief life violently ended. Is there a “good” way to learn about people who were, ahem, overlooked by contemporary news and recent history?

In that obituary, a reflection: “But [Theresa Hak Kyung Cha‘s] death has sometimes overshadowed her work.” There’s a similar (glib!) aside in the first essay: “Where art is concerned, death need be no more than an inconvenience…and…being all but invisible may turn out to have been merely a speed bump.”

Well then.

In the US, folks are so allergic to grief and grieving that we are attempting to medicalize it, to pathologize it as “prolonged grief disorder”.

Something can be a privilege without being pleasurable. The (absence of) one does not negate the (reality of the) other.

Is rest a presence or an absence? Does it mean the abundance of something or the lack of something else? Is it both? Does it vary? What has to be true for you to rest, to be rested?

What is the difference between rest and restoration?

For me rest is the absence of interruptions, or of the possibility of an interruption at any moment. It is permission to turn off alarms, timers, notifications, alerts. It is permission for immersion. It is the absence of guilt about disconnecting.

What does it mean to be brave? If it is situational, what do these times demand? If it is universal, how are we called to show up?

It feels - absurd! ridiculous! tragicomic! - to ask that question while a war rages, while people are still dying in a pandemic, from a place of relative privilege and safety and comfort. But then there is always a war. (Oceania really has always been at war with Eastasia)

There is always an opportunity to demonstrate courage. Or better, to decide not to be a coward.

The ability to experience what is happening everywhere in the world not just in “CNN international correspondent time”, but in real-time, constantly, filtered and unfiltered, in black and white and colour, in TikToks and in tweets, has not at all been matched by our ability to process all of it.

You don’t have to look at the videos of the bodies in the streets to know that there are bodies in the streets, or to know why they are lying there, why it has gotten to this.

We are talking about Ukraine and Bucha and some of us are also talking about everything all at once, at the same time.

Boycott the oppression olympics and acknowledge instead the unceasing marathon of suffering.

When there’s this much pain to go around the competition for tragedy feels infinitely self-defeating. (When there’s this much pain going around, celebrating joy feels like a miracle)