Manifesting Beyond Survival and Toward Safety

For the Worldbuilders Ep. 050!

Martina Bacigalupo, Gulu Real Art Studio (2014) Image Description: In “GULU_kid 5” a sitter is in front of a red background wearing an oversized checkered blazer atop a navy blue dress of many crescent moons. A small child, also in blue, is resting their head on the sitters lap who has a white box where their head used to be.

“The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t happened yet but must. It is an attachment to a belief in what should be true, which impels us to realize that aspiration. It’s the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the future now.”

— Tina Campt, “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity”, Listening to Images (2017), p. 17.

Dear Worldbuilder,

It’s Thursday, shall we call this the day For the Worldbuilders?

I’m sure you’ve seen it and maybe even felt it, experienced it. Manifestation is everywhere. Folks are talking about it on TikTok, Instagram and I wouldn’t even be surprised if it’s reached LinkedIn. Point being, the gospel of the woo-woo crew is spreading. We out here y’all! And thank goodness. I think this is a good thing, that we are learning how to see without images as Toni Morrison puts in her Nobel Lecture in 1993 when invoking the power of language¹. But how might we take this practice even further…how might we listen to the images while practicing a grammar of black feminist futurity?

Inside This Week’s Podcast Episode

I ask you to reflect on a set of questions with me:

• How might we animate our spells with prayer requests worthy of ancestral intervention?

• How might we encode our manifestations with algorithms of black feminism?

• How might we embedded our politics of prefiguration with abolitionist values?

These days it seems like we’re all manifesting something. Perhaps this is good. Perhaps this is worthy of our practice. Perhaps this is something we should become skilled at.

Because what happens when we’re not only manifesting cars, wardrobes, houses, jobs…but a world without police?

This Week’s Journal Prompt

How might we leverage the current cultural consciousness of manifestation to actualize liberatory futures?

Journal with it, free write with it and if you feel comfortable, share your reflections with me by responding to this email. We’ll be covering topics like this and more inside The Treehouse, a monthly visioning (and listening) circle where we host workshops and study groups for actualizing creative lives of refusal rooted in deep desire and collective liberation. Register for the free Worldbuilding Workshop to learn more and practice alongside us!

So be it, see to it, breathe through it,

Ayana

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1. “You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures.” — Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture (December 7, 1993)