For Everyone Who Is Just Us
A homecoming for the stars
When God had made [the human], he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song. So they covered each one over with mud. And the lonesomeness in the sparks make them hunt for one another.
— Zora Neale Hurston, cited on page 3 of Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human by Cole Arthur Riley
Block your favorite celebrity who doesn’t know your name. Join us as we meet regularly to give thanks by tossing it around in our mouths.
Far too often I fail to acknowledge my childhood curiosity was originally sparked in the church. The decoration, the ornament, the poetry, the metallic choir gowns, the stained glass portraits of death filtering light across our faces. The food. The music. The theater. The fashion. I swear the goddamn fashion saved my life every week. The love shining through muddy eyes. I saw it, it was everywhere, glittering.
Obviously, I had to leave because I am queer and woman and blackened and neurodivergent and sometimes face a sadness so deep even a prayer couldn’t touch it and don’t know how to stay silent if something just ain't right, it just ain’t right. I was born to stay. I was born to stain.
“What is a sustainable model for life as a queer Black feminist artist thinker trouble maker whose work bridges and transforms genres and fields of study and practice? Maybe we overuse the word “sustainable.” Maybe I didn’t come into life on earth to be sustained or to sustain something. If I break the word into what I need it for, I hear stay…stain.”
— Alexis Pauline Gumbs in “The God of Every Day” published by Topical Cream on December 22nd, 2021
Now we’re out here amongst the stars, sparkling on the black river, hunting for one another. In search of each other’s gaze, love shining through muddy eyes; starting to understand why Alexis Pauline Gumbs keeps talking about ceremony. We didn’t have to search for our mothers’ gardens when we religiously committed to gathering every week for this, or that. Ceremony is what we do with the anxiety of uncertainty.
Gratitude emits light.
Love glows. Power glitters. Spirit glistens from our pores into the world when we practice being a metallic chorus. Consenting inside this rehearsal, the only place we can find a love so beautiful we’re willing to commit everything to it, for it, towards it. A light so attractive, fear becomes its opposite. Ceremony gives us permission to submit to love's power. We’re all silently longing for the same thing and ceremony gives us permission to sing about it.
What if it is not an experiment, this creative life of refusal. This rarely institutionally-funded disloyal life of practice for a world as yet unnamable. This insistence on transformation when the bank account screams “conform.” What if this life as an independent experimental artist is not itself an independent experiment? What if it’s an interdependent ceremony?
— Alexis Pauline Gumbs in “The God of Every Day” published by Topical Cream on December 22nd, 2021
I swear I turn the cloth of this quote over and over back and forth again and again in my hands every week in search of our ceremony. Swampy fugitive praxis wading in the water of the web, I smell us humming. But where’s our ceremony? What’s our rhythm? Where’s our cadence? How to locate our commitment? The drumbeat of our pulse is the only thing getting us out of bed these days so I know you feel it too. How do we work with it? How often do we work with it and for how long? The Sankofa bird lands on our shoulder and reminds us to look behind it for models of glittered belonging. Queer, dark, loudly quiet.
For everyone who is just us.