Our Job Is To Make Revolution Irresistible
Overlapping catastrophe calls for overlapping creative action
the inconceivable decibels of all the things we’ve lived before We’ve been advised of the quotas of casualty, this time But of all the things I lost when I lost hearing Was the sound of ‘human animals’ how did you come to be ‘human animals’ they asked We were born I told them the regulators and the fascists along each perpendicular, with the least time on earth to live, signed off on the old fantasies at press conferences the editors printed their carnage again like welcome news and I was in a ship again with none of my belongings except my throat
— Dionne Brand. “prologue for now - Gaza.”1 Jewish Currents. October 27, 2023.
2020 almost took me out. Overlapping catastrophes like to flirt with your apathy, whispering into your ear with empty promises about the safety of solitude. The safety of silence. The safety of avoidance. The empty promises are dark and cavernous, without light and without ground. The darkness wouldn’t be so bad if I could at least smell soil — some possibility of change, emergence, growth. But that’s the thing about this empty promise — the option we have in the West to look away — we cut ourselves off from the generativity of letting grief and rage transform us. Inside collective grief, rage and study2 the walls are pulsing with life, the green electricity charges our movements and this dewy microclimate allows us to drink from the air; hydrating our hope for one more minute, one more hour, one more day. There is nothing but the smell of soil here. Plenty of ground to root inside of, eager for the seeds of our collective imagination and all the empty promises powered by fear — the whispering status quo — is drowned out by all the life buzzing around us.
When the overlapping catastrophes of 2020 threaten to take me out and soothe me into despondence I had to fight like hell for air I could drink from. The tools I had relied on to keep my head above water — journaling, long walks in the park, forest bathing, soaking in hot water steeped with lavender and coconut oil to the length of a container of Alice Coltrane chants — none of it provided a stabilizing force strong enough to counter the despair of the overlapping grief. Until I rooted in the overlap inside my interdisciplinary practice. I found creative community that watered my wildness, my hands found clay and created vessels for grief, my fingers found cotton and wove cloth documents carrying codes of otherwise, my pen danced across the page narrating speculative stories of elsewhere.
With deep gratitude for having made it to 2021, I tried to trace how I survived standing at the intersection of a pandemic keeping us from holding each other, black death streaming from every screen, an ongoing climate crisis and a long sweet romantic partnership coming to an abrupt bitter end. I realized the only way I was able to stand at the intersection of it all and allow myself to feel every bit of it was because I was standing at the intersection of overlapping mediums inside my art practice. It was from this place, this fertile ground where apathy isn’t an option and the smell of wet earth rides the air, that Seeda School emerged.
We’re entering Week 3 of the Seed A World Retreat inside Seeda School and I’m returning to this Toni Cade Bambara quote a lot these days, “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible”. As media black outs are taking hold in Gaza and Sudan, we’re legitimately concerned these simultaneous genocides will fall back into the background of the everyday drum beat of violence, a rhythm colonization has coined. As settler forces occupying Palestine initiated a ground invasion in Gaza last week, I feel called to remind us our overlapping cultural work is a fertile place for countering overlapping despair.
How might we keep the flame of our outrage stoked in the weeks, months, years to come? Through our overlapping creativity, organizing and collective capacity to practice liberation in the present. As we find political home and organize continued action pods, we commit to being relentless in imagining how we simultaneously hold our grief while building new worlds. Where the walls are pulsing with life, green electricity charges our movements and the dewy microclimate allows us to drink from the air, hydrating our care across time. Seeding livable futures for a world we can bear. Perhaps that is our only job.
🌱 Dispatches from the Ecosystem
An occasional series utilizing the Seeda School newsletter as a communal bulletin board to share projects, offerings, publications and events organized, produced or created by Seeda School learners.
Keren Lasme, interdisciplinary artist, writer, and literary curator is hosting a 3-week journey into the intimate foundations of community and the art of relationships via African literature. Sign up for the “Meeting Our Griots” Course on the Ijeruka platform and register for the free webinar, “African Literatures as Sites of Ancestral Knowledge” for a live conversation between Keren Lasme and Anwulika Okonjo and to learn more about the course!
Taylor Rae is hosting a 3 month Introduction to Herbalism Intensive and applications are now open! Apply here. “Connecting to Our Roots: Introduction to Herbalism Intensive” is a 3 month herbal medicine course that provides its students with a base understanding of plant medicine, body systems, botany, and Black medicine traditions.
Annika Hansteen-Izora recently hosted a book talk on exploring black queer tenderness and rage as a praxis in collaboration with Co-Conspirator Press and Printed Matter. Purchase their book, Tenderness: A Black Queer Meditation on Softness and Rage, here.
Logan Shanks recently visited the studio of Anya M. Wallace to talk about the aesthetic lexicon of Black femme sexuality in the American South for Burnaway and you can read their conversation here.
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo recently published a newsletter titled, “FREE PALESTINE: COLLECTIVE WORK IS POWER” on their Substack ROOTS WEBS NETS BRANCHES BULLETIN BOARDS. The newsletter also features beautiful artwork they’ve generously created which you can print out and post in your windows or carry during the Free Palestine! National March on Washington on November 4th.
With desire,
Ayana
Rasheed, K. (2023, October 29). “[29 October 2023]: "Primitive Hypertext" — "inconceivable decibels"; the uses and abuses of trauma; "god's list of liquids"; "the sea would be exhausted"; like it is”. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later.
“Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.” — Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, pg. 110