[hoursofreading]

“But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was a productive and fructifying pain. Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it—taste it—sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base—everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue, to the frosted windowpanes. It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear, sharp curves of air outlined its presence on my throat. And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die.”

—

Toni Morrison

One of my most favorite passages in all of literature.

[adesireforhealing]

“What joyful noise, what Blackpentecostal aesthetic practice is, is the reckless abandonment, an escape and secretion into the flesh, a choreosonics that decidedly pronounces the sacredness of the black flesh.”

— from Blackpentecostal Breath by Ashon Crawley

[elwenyere]

“Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Don’t pass it up. Use it.”

— Lorraine Hansberry, from To Be Young, Gifted, and Black

[hoodlumwitchh]

“What magic, to get the chance to live for whatever it is you were willing to die over. What magic to be able to see that I am worth my own words, that I deserve to enjoy the substance of my own audacity.”

— Eloghosa Osunde, from Walk Worthy

[whentherewerebicycles]

“Laughter is very useable. It heals. It gives perspective. It creates breathing space when there seems to be nothing but soul-killing cramp and close-quartered suffocation. It signals the balance of that truism the elders palaver about – that nothing is so good it might not cause someone inconvenience, and nothing is so bad it might not yield a hopeful lesson. People with no capacity for laughter worry me. Like cops. […]

Despite the risks, I have great respect for my capacity for laughter and outrage. My heart is a laughing gland. But near the chamber of the heart is a blast furnace. And poking through the slats of the rib cage is a loaded gun. The combination makes for a peculiar sort of desperado writing sometimes. Desperado in the Webster sense of outlaw. In the Roget sense of gambler. In the Unamuno sense of deep despair and high hopes. I despair at our failure to wrest power from those who have it and abuse it, our reluctance to reclaim our old power laying dormant with neglect, our hesitancy to create new power in areas where it never before existed. Our capacity for compliance, group denial, and amnesia. But I continually observe our ability to keep on keeping on, transforming the chemistry of this place. And am heartened by our spirit, our gifts, our magnificence as we battle against invisibility and fractionalization, especially in our own eyes and in each other’s. We will not be domesticated. If convinced that the truth is in the people, one can afford to laugh.”

– Toni Cade Bambara, “Working at It,” Realizing the Dream of a Black University & Other Writings

[onedandco]

For 30.

[florizels]

“Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.”

—Saidiya Hartman, from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

[mournfulroses]

Arthur Rimbaud, from The Complete Works of Arthur Rimbaud; "A Heart Under A Cassock,"

[metamorphesque]

—On Love, Marina Tsvetaeva

[text ID: I just want a humble, murderously simple thing: that a person be glad when I walk into the room.]

˗ˏˋ☕ˎˊ˗    

[itswadestore]

By Malick Sidibé.

[anarkittyy]

Wayward was so resonant with other terms – detour, errant, fugitive – and it is a word that brings to mind this practice of variance or deviation, so it seemed richly suggestive. In the chapter ‘Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible’, it’s connected to all of these other words like anarchy and queer and unruly, but there was something about the gendered character of it that was exactly right, it seemed both old-fashioned and absolutely contemporary. The wayward girl is the girl who won’t succumb to or obey the gender script. The challenge when describing black women’s lives, black women’s radical practices, is that they’re always subsumed or asterisked to a larger category. I just needed to say no, their practice is the category, you know? And this notion of being a footnote to everything else is what waywardness enabled me to challenge, it seemed an organic term for describing the radical and disobedient imaginary of young black women – so that’s why I liked it. How do we understand black radical imaginaries without understanding how central girls and women are to those projects?

[…]

Under capitalism there are so many forms of pleasure that are reproductive of the order. The forms of pleasure and joy and beauty that are also the focus here are those moments that are refusals and ruptures with the order. Again, the important question is: what does it mean to love that which can’t be loved? What does it mean to even imagine, as a poor black girl, that you might have something like a beautiful life – one that’s not about your self-annihilation, that’s not about your conformity with norms or the meagre existence to which you have been confined. That requires – is conditioned by – a certain refusal. It’s to know yourself in the world you’re a part of in radically different terms. For me that’s the miracle of everyday survival.

— Saidiya Hartman. [1]

[onedandco]

Just exceptional!

[waywardthought]

“Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe...It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.”

- Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

“In the hallway, you wonder will the world always be as narrow as this, two walls threatening to squeeze and crush you into nothingness. So you imagine other worlds, sometimes not even better, but at least different from this.”

— Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

[jrueseclipse]

[watchoutforintellect]

“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”

— James Baldwin, from “They Can’t Turn Back”

[cinemaspam]

Black Girl (1966) dir. Ousmane Sembène

[adesireforhealing]

“try to piecemeal the peace stitch together some sleep and relax for the reap for the road for the real stuff.”

— from Spill by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

[adesireforhealing]

“I think that maybe if we can guard ourselves and each other, if we can keep from losing our minds alone in quiet rooms and can at least lose them side by side, we may live through the year.”

— from Thursday Morning, Newbury Street by Eve L. Ewing