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the black fantastic

Hello loves!

I’m in the midst of an 11 city segment of this Octavia’s Brood book tour, so I’m sorry for writing less.

Here’s a little something I posted on the Brood blog about Celebrating the Black Fantastic – the way that in this #blackspring moment communities are using our anthology to catalyze celebrations and collaborative dreaming of black futures.

In the midst of this tour I’ve been doing a sugar cleanse and Mercury has been in retrograde (and it impacts me in rough ways even when I try to have a rosey outlook) and I’ve been thinking about how we have to turn up the challenge sometimes to see how we’re doing. So how am I? Exhausted and stretched too thin and needing an assistant, and no more crises, and a beach…

AND I’m surrounded by love, interacting with people who inspire and fuel me, feeling clearer each day I step away from sugar, like I’m facing things from my dignity…and as far as I can see there are abundant opportunities to answer my calling.

I’m quoting Rihanna’s body art all the time – ‘never a failure, always a lesson’. Because of course ‘god is change’.

I’ve been thinking how grateful I am to be alive in an age of the Black fantastic, being of a creative class of black people explicitly bending the future to be grand enough for our survival and brilliance. I look at rooms full of people of all backgrounds and I feel so grateful to see the black people realizing themselves, and all the other folks celebrating us, standing with us, reorienting to the shape of a different center. What we pay attention to grows…attending to black dignity, and growing it, creates more possibilities for all of us.

I’m case you are curious, my big thought these days is what kind of world we would need in order for there to be no enemy of blackness. Where no one feared black children.

I’m traveling with this thought, and generally wondering if we can sustain a vision of a world without enemy in the face of hateful realities…how do we stop rearranging blood, weapons, power from one deranged isolated system to another…how do we get in right relation to the planet as a species? I think realizing the fantastic, the pleasure available to each of us, is key to this exploration. This, too, is pleasure activism.

That said, last night when asked about pleasure activism, in front of my mother, I answered ‘to have more fucks’.

This is a bit of a random post but I miss y’all. In all things I am working to keep it simple.

Love!