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For a myriad of historical reasons, we have not had the conceptual ability to name whiteness for what it is—not a particular people, not a particular gender, not a particular nation, but an invitation, a becoming, a transformation, an accomplishment. It was an accomplishment sought after by immigrant group after immigrant group coming to these shores hoping to strip away their ethnic past and claim an American future. Before that it was an accomplishment born of discovery, of European men who discovered their unchecked and unrestrained power over indigenous peoples to claim and rename and alter their worlds. Before that it was an accomplishment born of Christian election and supersessionism that removed Jewish people from the privileged position of being the people of God and replaced them with people who imagined their flesh (white flesh) to be saved and saving flesh.

Willie James Jennings, To Be a Christian Intellectual

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Fireflies

by Christine Kitano

Because they have never seen anything like it, the city children weave through the barracks calling us to come see. Our stories of fireflies in Japan must echo in their young heads, how we'd picnic in summer heat to watch the lit bodies punctuate the dark. Better than Christmas, we'd told them. So when they pull us into the Utah night, how to tell them these pulsing clouds are not fireflies, but moths. Still, we chase them through the desert fields, the children cupping small fists around moon-whitened wings that collapse, not from the children's touch, but the sheer pressure of air. My mother would say the fireflies are the lights of soldiers killed in a war far away, their spirits now wandering the earth in search of home. But these are not fireflies. How to say fireflies don't come to Utah, how to say how close, or far, we are from home? How to say where we are at all? My daughter catches one, its brief body torn, and flickering in her palm. I teach her the word hotaru, firefly. Together we trace the letters in the dirt with our fingers. But the next morning, when she peeks outside, she cries to find the characters gone, the name on the earth already erased by the wind.

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Metatronia (Metatron's Cube), Solange Ferguson, 2018 - Hammer Museum - Hammer Museum

Exclusive premiere at the Hammer of Solange Ferguson's interdisciplinary performance video.

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For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, 'Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness' and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.

Audrey Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury

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Homegoing was very much an attempt to look at time. More specifically, I wanted to track how something like slavery moved and changed over a very long period of time, how these changes affected people’s lives. Time necessarily distances. This is obvious, of course, but it’s important to think about. If healing looks like being so distanced from the point of trauma that you no longer remember it, then saying “time heals” would be appropriate. Maybe this saying works if the wound that needs healing is small, like a paper cut, and if the body performs the healing function properly. But if the wound is something as large as slavery and colonialism then you need something more than time to heal it, and if the body responsible for healing doesn’t act quickly or correctly, then time only worsens it. It simultaneously distances you from the initial trauma in a way that makes it possible to forget why or how the wound even occurred. This, to me, is what institutionalised racism looks like. In America, it’s what happened when the wound of slavery was not properly addressed and was allowed to fester in myriad ways through racist policy in education, housing, criminal justice etc. for centuries. Those of us alive today may not have had anything to do with slavery, but we have certainly inherited the wound.

Yaa Gyasi, interview with Short Story Day Africa

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We are social animals. We want connection. We want . . . understanding. We want intimacy. But if the terms of that intimacy feel dishonest, or feel only possible with the acceptance of your erasure, then that’s painful. So to say, “don’t let me be lonely” is to say, 'don’t ask me to exist in a position that allows for my own annihilation.'

Claudia Rankine interview with the Spectacle

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How do we read a country? Who gets to tell or write a country’s stories? How do we come to understand a place and its people? It was these questions that provoked us. The way that knowledge is acquired is not innocent or objective. This virtual archive is devoted in trying to demystify ways of thinking about the democratic rhetoric of independent Zimbabwe. Reading is freedom. Especially at a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, reading is freedom.

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There is No Single Voice of America

Recently I got a heads-up from not one, but two separate writers of color who were kind enough to read the novel I’m publishing in April. The heads-up was about a subject that features in all of ou…

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Vietnamese is a very poetic language, it’s incredibly beautiful. It’s so tender, Vietnamese, there are certain words that I just love… and I feel like shouldn’t be in a book, even, because it’s so beautiful. I do feel, however, that there is a lot of the Vietnamese language in my writing. It’s just invisible. ... It has my…somatic system of Vietnamese-ness embedded within, between each word of the English word, or between the letters of that English word, that when people read it, [they think] ‘oh your work is really strange and poetic’. I don’t think it’s strange and poetic. I think it’s because I lived in Vietnam, I was an immigrant, we were refugees… When I read my work I’m like, this is so Vietnamese, but it doesn’t look like Vietnamese, it doesn’t even sound like Vietnamese… but there is a phantom (I think) sonic volume that is…quiet and silence… And I want to say that silence, that invisibility, is very Vietnamese.

Vi Khi Nao, c/o diaCRITICS

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Huong Ngo and Hong-An Truong

Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương’s work The Opposite of Looking is Not Invisibility. The Opposite of Yellow is Not Gold, 2016, pairs vernacular photographs of the artists’ mothers with texts from 1970s-era US congressional hearings regarding Vietnamese refugees. It is featured in “Being: New Photography 2018,” which will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from March 18 to August 19, 2018. Here, the artists discuss the political and personal impetuses behind their approach and how race, gender, and labor are often made invisible in cultural narratives.VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY speaks to

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Rinko Kawauchi, from her Ametsuchi series. Controlled burning farming method that follows cycles of cultivation/recovery spanning generations. Ametsuchi roughly translates into “song of the universe,” combining Japanese characters meaning “heaven and earth.” 

Darkness spreads over torched earth, or is it the earth that grows over the tar? 

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thoughts after watching vietgone

In Vietgone, Quang motorcycles all the way across the country to Oceanside, California, along with his sidekick friend, bent on catching the next flight to Guam and then back to Vietnam. In his stubborn confidence that he needs to return to his family, to touch and hold his children, Quang deludes himself into thinking he can return to normal life, where families are reunited, and his role as their father has held static throughout the wartime years for him to resume.  After those hundreds of miles, his friend begs him not to go because there’s nothing to go back to. And even if he were to go back to Vietnam, his position pre-Fall would warrant imprisonment for life, even death. Then what was all that fighting for? He asks. His friend replies, This is what war does; it’s for nothing. This reality brings Quang to his knees, beholding that void of having fought for his life, only to realize there is no life, nothing to return to. All there is is loss, and even what is gained—burritos, weed, and the assurance that bombs won’t detonate on one’s street—all this was not what he fought for, not what he wanted. Even as he smells the smells of home—the very ocean that connects the two borders, this is only a mirage; he is on the other side of the sea. Where he stands in relation to the sea, he sees there is no home to go back to, neither behind nor before him.

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the fear of not having a place to go back to is nothing compared to the fear of vanishing in the middle of that place, the angst of not being able to get to a tremendous immensity doesn’t touch that of being in the middle of tremendous immensity, getting to sea before dawnbreak causes much less misery than trying to resolve my relation with sea, to ease the heart, i should fabricate a bed out of sea, build a house out of tremendous immensity, even if the sea is just one tremendous immensity shredded on a map of belligerent corporations, am i in my region or your region, foreign waters familiar people, foreign people familiar waters, i have seen the line at the bottom of sky crack glimmers of clear light, i lift my gaze, your voice breaks across my ear, all at once a tremendous immensity is slit…

excerpt from “which orientation with sea” by Nhã Thuyên

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In what we call primordial cultures there was no driving roar of cacophonous city clamor, no skyscrapers that blocked the horizon’s view, nor bright lights that obliterated the starry dome of night’s awe-provoking, mathematical sky. Plainly put, our ancestors were not removed from nature and its continuous outpouring of information. When you have the opportunity to experience the vastness of nature, you become aware of the loudness of silence and its ever-speaking profundity. You gain the liberating perspective of your own smallness and become aware of rhythms and cycles. Not just the obvious change of seasons or climate, but a subtle perception of nature as a living and communicating presence. Plants, animals, stones, sky, metals, water — everything in life is whispering meaning, and with great listening, everything may be understood. That is what a true education is, when that which is being conveyed behind all things is known. This can’t happen from books alone — there’s not enough time. But knowledge can come from a developed intuition; human beings have access to intuition, but like anything, if not cultivated, it remains unknown. Art is a way of “knowing,” an intellectual virtue, and intuition and nature are the elder sisters of art. Art doesn’t seek to imitate the look of nature but represent its essence.

Alonzo King, The Memory of Nature

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