The River That Swallows All Rivers
Flooding to Release, Flooding to Remember
This weekend she remembered her name meant “river that swallows all rivers”1. This site of memory is one she must return to weekly. This shore made of ashy apocalypse, this Tar beach, this over there and right here. Between soil and spirit. Between ground and ghost. Between body and Black water. Did you know: the Black River got its name from decomposing branches and leaves staining the water? Imagining there is data within the DNA of theses leaves and branches, the Black River becomes a compost tea brewing language into story with no beginning or end. An ecological gumbo steeped with ancestral memory. Oh look! There’s Honey on the horizon.
Her great grandmother invites her in, promises the water is warm. She believes her but is too busy with what the river has washed up. She spends the day collecting the ash and analyzing it. Combine it with certain levels of water and the soup would sing. Boil it and it bounced. Break it and it snaps. Melt it and it remembers. The data tells her it’s getting hotter so she learns to work quicker. The planet is boiling and all the people she loves in it, but there’s just so much sand, each granule a world. Each rock, a breadcrumb. She longs to work slowly but time is running out. She feels the bouncing, the snapping, the remembering. It’s coming, you feel it?
That unbearably hot summer day when it finally feels like it’s over. That day we truly turn to each other, not out of “virtue” but out of “there really is nowhere else to go”. Come hell or high water the fear must melt or wash away. Masked protests, student encampments, mutual aid flyers slipping through the algorithm, quitting jobs to host teach-ins full time, unionizing jobs we can’t quit, public libraries becoming cooling centers, living rooms becoming public libraries. The water is warm. Drinking dear science wayward lives beautiful experiments beloved code noir undrowned jazz. And it fed her, oh it fed her, so she was able to keep going at this speed. Metabolizing the minutiae, slurping the data, hydrating as the atmosphere boiled. As if memory were water. Wait.
No matter how “fictional” the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory. You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory — what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”
— Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” published in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (1998), edited by William Zinsser
Wading into the water, she goes down for air. The Black River, the only oxygen here. Swallowing Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman and Sylvia Wynter and Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison and June Jordan and Lucille Clifton and C. Riley Snorton and Hortense Spillers and Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand and and Jessica Gordon Nembhard and Torkwase Dyson and bell hooks and Ruha Benjamin and Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Andrea Ritchie and Cansia Lubrin and and and Jayna Brown and Walidah Imarisha and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and Alexis Pauline Gumbs and M. Jacqui Alexander and Gayl Jones and Alice Coltrane and Faith Ringgold and Mariame Kaba and Beverly Buchanan and Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston and Barbara Chase-Riboud and Lorraine Hansberry and Imani Perry and and Robin Coste Lewis and Julie Mehretu and Sharon Patricia Holland and and Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker and Joy James and Legacy Russell and Angela Davis and Kara Keeling and Julie Dash and Sonya Renee Taylor and Prentis Hemphill and Fannie Lou Hamer and Mary Lee Bendolph and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and Ama Codjoe and Uri McMillan and and and Simone Yvette Leigh and Nina Simone and Tina Campt and Fred Moten and La Marr Jurelle Bruce and Akwaeke Emezi and Simone Browne and and and and here comes the flood.
A body of water. She turned her throat into a river mouth and her full-time job into analyzing the worlds the river washed up as gifts. Drawing tributaries with her pen she remembers to savor this, because when it gets dark, it gets dark but, my god, when the light shimmers on the river. My god. She finds the energy, she finds the speed, she invents the time and subsists on the dancing light flickering on the black water. The way it shows off on lips and leaves and flesh and pages a full feast. She kept going, each word a promise, each stroke a story. Her and Honey, living off the glitter.
Zaire! She hears her name called from the kitchen but she’s already full. Pulled back to the shore of this world, smelling of Black data and swamp spit. Full belly from way too much joy and way too much pain. Full belly from being made to swallow everything; what happened to her; what happened to them; what’s happening to us. We’re all traumatized, living in a system that doesn’t let us slow down long enough to remember. Stop2 long enough to heal. How much more can we carry?
Water is heavier than fire.
She doesn't want to burn it all down.
She wants to wash it all away.
Join Us Inside the Treehouse
Still, like water, I remember where I was before I was “straightened out.”
— Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory” published in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (1998), edited by William Zinsser
In this Instagram post I invited us to remember who we are outside of white supremacy. Inside the Treehouse I’m going to invite us to remember and embody them every week. It’s far too easy to forget who we were before we were “straightened out”. So easy that remembrance must become a practice. Register for the upcoming Worldbuilding Workshop happening Tuesday, July 16th and you’ll also receive an invite to “Discover Your Weekly Dispatch” a process and workshop I’ll be talking more about in this Thursday’s podcast episode.
Enrollment into the Treehouse opens on Monday, July 15th! Until then, keep releasing, keep remembering, keep flooding.
The table has been made but not set Water is poured and we remember Words melt fluid builds and pools into Energy for Change Seeping into ground fractures A clearing appears Running toward it we Gush and build and gush and build and gush and Rock is worn smooth Mountains get dimples Horizons get nipples From every beginning Energy for Change creates slits deep enough for rivers finding home Sites of memory recalling when straightened Flooding in refusal Your mississippi mouth Your every beginning Wet worlding creating a landscape over and My god oh my god We get to live here
— Ayana Zaire Cotton, excerpt from “Mississippi Mouth: an introduction” to Dykes Day, A Holigay published by Hermetic State
The country's name, Zaïre, was derived from the name of the Congo River, sometimes called Zaire in Portuguese, which in turn was derived from the Kikongo word nzere or nzadi ('river that swallows all rivers'). The use of Congo seems to have replaced Zaire gradually in English usage during the 18th century and Congo was the preferred English name in 19th-century literature, although references to Zahir or Zaire as the name used by the local population (i.e. derived from Portuguese usage) remained common. (Source: Wikipedia)
“Mississippi is a land that I love, and it is one haunted by the burning of churches and the imprisonment and murders of children—including one especially gruesome and infamous murder of a 14-year-old, whose body was dumped into the Tallahatchie, one of the tributaries that overflowed into the Mississippi that winter of 1927. It bears the scars of apartheid all over. I cannot read about the bombing of churches and mosques and refugee camps and hospitals in Gaza and not hear the echoes of history. These are crimes that should shock us. These crimes demand a response and that response should be, bare minimum: stop.” — Mary Annaïse Heglar, “Hell and High Water: From Gaza to Mississippi” published by Scalawag Magazine on May 2, 2024
you're sick with it.❤️
thank you for you/r all. In kiswahili, river is (mto), contiguous— in my heart— with tree (mti) and human (mto). Shukran for the places this writing sent and returned me to✨