Next week, I return ‘back to work’, briefly to complete a cookbook project that has been in limbo since lockdown began in March. My routine has been decidedly one that is anti-work, anti-labor: I wake up with no particular schedule, no emails to answer immediately. I’ve spent my time as leisurely as I am able to, mostly oscillating between reading, jotting down research notes, writing, and playing video games.
I’ve found a rare and significant happiness in not having to labor because I don’t really have a choice but to work. I don’t know what it means to work for pleasure or for love because I have spent the last decade working to succeed, being that success is measured by whether or not you are able to keep a roof over your head, keep your phone and internet on, keep some groceries in the fridge.
Every year since I’ve started working, I always thought the coming year would be ‘my year’. Every time I have a “good year”, someone tells me I’m getting ready to “blow up”. In twelve years, it simply has not happened. And the problem with that is a moment like this, where when living hand to mouth becomes nothing short of a death sentence.
I had to get COVID tested a few days ago to go back to work. My blood pressure reading was dangerous, 180/55. My nurse at the urgent care asked me if anyone in my family had hypertension and I told her I wasn’t sure, but that the last five months of my life have been remarkably stressful, what with mass Black death, a “President” running on a violent segregationist campaign, being out of work for five months and constantly wondering if my death is closer around the corner than my elusive success.
It didn’t even register with this woman that my Black ass was stressed because of, well, everything that’s been happening in the world. She took my blood pressure one more time and it lowered slightly—150/55—but that just added to my list of worries: Could I stroke out in the next few months? Will I live to see my thirty-fifth birthday? How quickly can we find a new apartment?
Our bungalow complex was bought out by a couple as a ‘retirement investment’ in the worst economic crisis this country has ever seen, and we found out via email about a week and a half ago. Our new landlords introduced themselves to us by telling us they bought our apartments as a ‘retirement investment’ when forty million people are unemployed.
I wonder what it’s like to secure a parcel of land to monetize for your potential retirement when hundreds of thousands of people are suffering, houseless, job-less, money-less and hopeless? I never want to find out what sort of evil it takes to be that inhumane and selfish, besides I’m too busy attempting to sort through the new post-traumatic stress I’ve accumulated the last five months. The last time I was this stressed out, I was a child in elementary school being abused on a regular basis, wondering when I would get a break to breathe and just be a kid.
I’ve been waiting all my life just to take that sigh of relief.
I don’t know how we do this on a regular basis.
I don’t really know how Black people are surviving here, I just know that we do it anyway. I live out of spite because life is our birthright. We are freeborn: no one can take what is inherently mine, but they sure can make it really fucking hard to maintain a sense of autonomy, a sense that the immense effort will be worth the later reward.
I think I was supposed to be excited about Kamala but I don’t remember how to be excited about firsts, anymore. As a fellow West Indian, as a fellow third culture kid, as a person who embodies the margins, something inside me is…activated, but I’m also really tired. I’m tired of incremental change like that’s supposed to be something that gives me hope or makes me feel protected and supported by the Universe.
Incremental change is a white supremacist lie and I’m tired of perpetuating the lie. It’s part of the reason I’m not excited about a Black woman vice president — I’m tired of my people being ‘ushered’ into to spaces and places because a few white people approve that it’s now time for Black women to be taken seriously, to be ‘allowed’ to rule. Remind me, did any of you navigate Kamala’s career for her? No? This subtweet is for you progressives and ‘leftists', especially, who are sitting on the top of my last bad nerve with all this performative accountability.
Remember how this started out with a multitude of candidates of color and then we all helped to run them out of the race because we parroted the bird calls of the extremist right and doing the work for them? The lack of nuance in our public conversations around politics, what we owe each other as a species, and what we are going to do to take back our country makes me want to drink heavily.
The level of nuance and thoughtfulness and critical engagement I am exposed to in my regular conversations with my kin helps remove the sting of being constantly inundated with the manufactured absurdity and spectacle this administration deals in on a regular basis because I have to parse through enough absurdity in my everyday life.
In the last few weeks, I’ve had to build a case for myself for a potential project. I’ve lamented the amount of work I’ve lost, and equally, the amount of work I could have provided to my community had I been making enough as a freelancer to secure a studio to work for a regular client list.
Every year I work, it’s like it’s my first year out of the fucking gate. Imagine starting your business anew, every year for twelve years. That has been the summation of my career.
Where I see others progress and grow, I am constantly stuck in the same place, year after year. In 2019, I made the income I was projected to make right out of college, back in 2009. It took ten years. I thought surely this year I would hire on my regular crew, that we would be able to afford an apartment where I could have a home studio.
I’m moving backward now, thanks to the mismanagement of this country and the strengthening of white supremacist systems over the last four years. Two and a half years ago, leaving Los Angeles proper was supposed to be the beginning of laying down roots in Pasadena, but now we are looking to move back to Los Angeles, closer to our kin. My best friend is moving in with her in-laws, two hours away after we’ve spent the last four years of our friendship living less than 5-10 minutes away from each other.
This was supposed to be her year, too. Another dear friend was set to move to Chicago this past Spring.
At thirty-two, I wonder what I will have to show for myself by the time I turn thirty-five, three years from now? I’m not certain what my future is here, as this place oscillates between neo-segregation and neo-fascism.
I’ve photographed books. I’ve written essays. I’ve lectured and taught. I’ve been the First for publishing houses and editorial magazines. I’ve been homeless and hopeless and suicidal. I’ve pushed myself to over-perform to prove my worthiness in the spaces I navigate, including in my own family—of origin and by way of partnership. I work and work and work. I come home and cry and wonder why I’ve put my body and mind through so much overexertion. For what? To prove what exactly? I did every single thing I ever thought I would do, except live a life with dignity, where I am given access to the basic respect that would allow for me not to get lost in the cracks.
I didn’t know I would need to plan to live a dignified existence here in the richest, most powerful, most-fill-in-the-blank country in the world, but here we are.
With each passing day, I’m less and less concerned about working, and more and more concerned about what else I will be forced to sacrifice to live here. Most days, I find myself wondering where can I go to escape this place? Every day, the answer becomes louder and clearer: there is nowhere to go. This is it.
Next year will not be my year. Or the year after that, or the year after that.
Not unless we drastically change this country with our own hands, of our own volition. Nothing changes here until we change. If there is anything that excites me about Kamala, it’s that it reminds me of who and what I come from. I am American, but I am also Caribbean which means I have never forgotten that I am African.
And the Black folks who have not forgotten they are Africans are the ones you absolutely do not fuck with.
I spent a week in devotion to orisha, Oya. I made a war altar for her and petitioned for assistance. Like my ancestors before me, when my back is against the wall, I lay my petitions at the feet of the ancestors. When I am particularly angered, I petition the lwa, or the Haitian pantheon of gods in Vodou —specifically Ezili dan tor—I ask her to intervene on my behalf.
No petition I have requested has ever fallen on deaf ears when it comes to my ancestors. To me, they embody the universal cosmic intelligence from which I am created in the image of. I go to the source because I have not forgotten my source.
I was raised, primarily, by my West Indian side, by West Indian women. My grit, my resolve, my passion for truth and fairness comes from them. I am formidable because they shaped me that way. I only employ what they instilled in me in limited spaces — at home, at work, in writing — and, yet I have unraveled those places simply by standing in my power. If I’m capable of creating small ripples in the ocean, imagine what tsunamis might come into existence if we meet Kamala with our brazen power, if we show her the ways in which we wish to harness that kinetic energy alongside her.
It’s probably foolish, but in order to remain here, to keep fighting, I have to have something worth believing in.
As supremacy gasps it’s last horrid, wheezing breath, I wonder if I have the lung capacity to outlast it?
I go to my breath, inhalations echoing the sound of waves undulating ocean waters. When I exhale, when I let go of that long held-in sigh, it will my first breath; a re-birth. In order for me to live free, for Black people to live free, supremacy will have to lay down its life. I intend to train my lungs for this free-dive because when I reach the surface, I will not sigh. I will let out a cry; I will wail and my ancestors will wail alongside me, and it will be the last chorus of weeping we will hear for generations.
The weeping time has come to an end.
***
Trying to find joy wherever I can, so I made another Spotify playlist for us, there is no revolution without joy (NSFW). Kari Faux’s StickUp! is my recent anthem. I am more than halfway through Morgan Jerkins’ Wandering in Strange Lands and currently also reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. You can purchase these titles at my favorite Black woman-owned bookstore, reparations club. I’d like to schedule the first of our James Baldwin sessions with subscribers for September 7th, one month before the Vice Presidental debates. Subscribers, let me know what you think using the commenting feature, now unlocked for subscribers, below! XO - O
PS. Lamentations 20:20 is an actual Bible verse. I hadn’t read it prior to writing this but the book of Lamentations is one of my favorites (yes, this heathen read the Bible front to back, twice) and the essay echoes the verse, “See, O LORD, and look! With whom have You dealt thus? Should women eat their offspring, The little ones who were born healthy? Should priest and prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?”
I’m flexible Sept 7. Looking forward to it! Thanks
Looking forward. After 4 EST works for me, but I can always listen in if I’m at work if it’s before that. Thank you!