God Owes Me A Favor
Let’s Collectively Call It In
We agree about the suffering disease decrepitude and incremental death or nobody hold the child nobody bless the scar nobody change the meaning of the land the regular insensibility of trying to farm the rocks trying to beg a meal from shadow offerings of your body trying to reduce the craziness of motion without trace We disagree about desire — June Jordan, excerpt from “Argument with the Buddha”
I fuck with Zen Buddhism but to tell a black woman to renounce desire is wild…
Is how I imagine opening the memoir that is turning into a novel as it rushes from my fingers. A slippery little book that I’ve thought about titling, God Owes Me A Favor. Because god owes every black woman a favor and I dare you to say it ain’t so. This is the sort of aligned audacity that prompts you to check your tongue before allowing it to fall into its usual impulse of exclamation, assertion, correction. This is a scale of audacity that says hush baby, oh just this one time please hush, because you know the words “black”, “woman” and “entitled” can only ever produce an incoherent sentence.
Quantana. She has been running ancestral errands since a time before time, so when she asks god to show her how good it can get she rests in the inevitability of delight. When she asks the universe “what’s in it for me?”, before embarking on a new assignment she expects nothing less than a wink back. Rooted in a quantum awareness that transcends time, she remembers the women before her and before her and before her survived because they accepted nothing less than favor — watching with patient power as it fell into their lap every time.
Born into this favor, my 32nd cycle around the sun is demanding that I stop pretending to forget what I already know. Every year I ask myself first, and then my clients, “what do you want?”. Because I viscerally understand the power of that question, a worldbuilding prompt if there ever was one. This is a question the hairstylist asks, the coach asks, the lover asks, this is a question god asks. What do you want? And can you say it with your chest, with the wisdom of your belly and all ten toes? Not what your mama wants, your partner, your teacher, your friends, your co-worker or the older gentleman, bless his heart, I’m sure he means well, who told you to smile this morning. Bless his heart he couldn’t see the violent rage of a thousand piercing suns you’re holding in the back of your throat but for how long?
At what point will you let yourself finally breathe fire?
[...] So I renounce renunciation! This hand that writes and waits and writes and waits again These ears that listen for the rain or wind that catapults the tree into a standing hazard ignorant of roots I choose and cherish all that will perish The living deal The balance of my bliss with pain excites my soul — June Jordan, excerpt from “Argument with the Buddha”
With a hand that writes and ears that listen I come before you on the summer solstice attempting to maintain integrity inside my practice by honestly, unflinchingly and without judgement answering the question, “what do I want?” And watch as desire flows from my fingers, flooding the page with words that excite my soul.
I don’t want to write for a living, I want a writing life I want the forest, a sitting stone carved by thousands of years of tears waiting for a chance to cradle my hips I want a nearby creek to kiss my feet I want a copper tub charging the memory that I bathe in overlooking mountains of fur rolling with green permission to breathe I want to be kept out of the war they insist on having I want a bigger hair budget because the cryptographers could charge the world and it still wouldn’t be enough I want a house filled with more textures than the alphabet stone, wood, velvet, cashmere, linen, cotton, pubic, leather, hide
I want a safety that feels sturdy because we made it I want invitations to more living rooms, more dining rooms, more bathrooms, more bedrooms, more rooms for conspiring I want a black G Wagon because it’s the least this world can do I want more kite days and cookouts and funerals for natural causes I want him to ask me again, “how you this bad and this smart” so I can pretend to, again, not hear the anti-feminist comment I judged myself for liking I want to make up a reason to call my grand Aunt so I can hear her call me dah-lin’ I want to let it burn, let it break without reaching for my toolbelt I want my options to be Margiela, Prada or Alaïa and I want to choose all three I want maroon militancy like honoring grief with time, canceling plans to bathe an elderly loved one’s body and thwarting war from a command center of a different kind, reversing the consequences of capitalism they rebranded as “natural disasters” from the attic of the hoodoo house
I want to honor the grandmother who insisted on speaking to me softly through my every mistake and visiting even in death and the grandmother who could see without eyes while wearing silver hair she let me brush every night until she died in our arms and the great grandmother who had a flower garden that caused car accidents while she was away working the tobacco factory before coming home to fellowship with ghosts and the great grandmother who was the first entrepreneur in our oral history who turned her basement into a hair salon and divination school more than anything I want to honor them and their mothers and their mothers whose memory and power I am pulling from the page in black blood drying like ink I am saying I want to write about every inch of our love.
And after that nothing for sure.
[...] perhaps to no enlightenment but rather than transcend what makes me ache I hope to fend off enemies and bend with lovers endlessly I choose anything anyone I may lose I renounce renunciation I breathe head to head with suffering and after that nothing for sure — June Jordan, excerpt from “Argument with the Buddha”
I too, have an argument with Buddha. The guided meditation tells me this is all there is. To let this be “enough”. And this feels like another insult to an ancient injury. Centuries old wounds produce craters in bodies and leave scabs that can’t heal, because they keep getting picked at by history repeating itself. And you tell me the present is all we have. The world ending bombs and stray bullets finding children and man-made storms and sexual violence poetry can’t heal and AI weapons trained on our faith and ads directed by artists too talented for the state and the labor, labor, labor with no end in sight, sight, sight. I can’t let it be enough because there must be more than this.
We deserve more.
We are owed more.
On the morning of the solstice I FaceTime every lover that arrived just in time for summer whose faces beg for kisses through the screen, before sitting down to write this love letter to you. I am living the writing life I manifested with the favor that is my ancestral inheritance, trying to let it be enough, at least for now…in this very moment. Trying to ground in gratitude is hard when you know, at any time, you can summon more to your feet. A black woman’s desire is a revolution. Let this be our solstice ceremony. Tell me now, what do you want?
Let’s sing about it, breathe about it, be about it and burn this world anew.
Collectively, all at once, let’s call in that favor.
Thank you for this velvety read. As someone who was momentarily interested in Buddhism, this helped put words to why it never fully connected.
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