When War is the Weather
Beauty is the Shelter
“Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.”
—Saidiya Hartman
As I typed, recorded and sent out loving reminders for our last worldbuilding workshop before enrollment closes into the Seed A World retreat; I began scrolling my timeline in confusion, then I turned on the news and it took the wind out of me. I have an empty pale of words and an overflowing well of emotions. Full body despair witnessing so many people slinging around the word “terrorism” when “decolonization” would be more apt. How do we talk about desire and worldbuilding in a time of war? How? I do not know for sure but I do know we must try. I know we must insist on creating possibility in the space of enclosure. In moments like these my impulse is always to turn to black feminism, a politic with practitioners who understand war is the weather and beauty is the shelter. Yesterday, I was listening to the latest podcast episode of “A brush with…Torkwase Dyson” and her words wrapped around the commitment to her practice was a salve offering a framework for meantime.
“I think about Black Compositional Thought as a structure. When I found my way of making and thinking about built worlds, I needed something to really organize these histories in a way that still spoke about living and breathing and moving. So I found Black Compositional Thought by way of trying to comprehend the infrastructure of slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, different conditions of colonization, different conditions of invasion versus colonization and the ways in which dispossession happens within the system on large scales and small scales. And really Mabel Wilson points me to this directly: the institutions that have caused these catastrophes operate at different scales. Whether it's the scale of engineering, the ways in which the streets are paved and moved, the ways in which architecture was built, the ways in which plantations were laid out, that's a form of design and engineering. The way the ships happen through the trade, that's a level of water planning. Right? All of these things are happening with the white imagination. So as this is going on, I understand that liberation had to occur in the mind, in the idea of thoughts, of places that were unfamiliar. So Black Compositional Thought is a structure that enables me to regard moving in the unknown, in the indeterminable, in these spaces of built environments that are concrete with the kind of consciousness that is extra-ordinary, year after year, with the condition of complete torture. So to move, always thinking and always being under existential conditions, always being under threat of breaking up families, losing your body, all of these conditions — how do you even imagine trying to keep your mind together to move in a direction? So Black Compositional Thought says, “Hey, this is a subject for me. This is my container that I'm interested in exploring.””
— Torkwase Dyson1
This quote is edited for readability and flow, but Torkwase Dyson’s insistence, work and practice provide a structure for how we might think about desire and worldbuilding in a time of torture. Again, I have no words. I’m returning to the supporting beams of black feminist thought holding up the roof inside my own consciousness. Imagination feels impossible in these conditions, but it must be. We must insist on beauty as a method for moving through the indeterminacy.
“Beauty is a method:
reading in the windowsill
running after the police
a list on a slip of paper in a book
the arrangement of pins in cloth
the ability to make firewood out of newspaper”
— Christina Sharpe2
When the grief attempts to swallow you whole sometimes you let it then try again tomorrow. There will be no worldbuilding workshop on Tuesday, I want to give us all (myself included) space, time and permission to make firewood out of the newspaper, let grief do its work, and sit in the stillness mourning mandates. We’ll try again next Monday.
I know many of you were planning to attend tomorrow’s workshop so in the meantime, I also want to offer flexible time slots for free discovery calls to help hold your worldbuilding questions ahead of Monday’s workshop. Feel free to pick a time that works best for you.
In solidarity,
Ayana
“A brush with... Torkwase Dyson”, Hosted by Ben Luke. Produced by David Clack. Published October 4th, 2023.
“Beauty Is a Method” written by Christina Sharpe. Published in e-flux Journal Issue #105, December 2019.
Imagination is a necessary tool for liberation + solidarity. If no one dreamed of better conditions or mapped out the architecture for building better futures, our lives would look a lot different. A lot worse. While I thank my predecessors for their lives + work that made a softer world for me to exist in, I simultaneously hold the position that today’s oppression functions similarly as it did in the past, just with generational updates-in part because many people’s imaginations just couldn’t conceive of what else was possible. I say that to say, imagination is a key part of resistance. So we all must invest in nurturing our individual + collective dreams as we build nu worlds from the ashes of this one. Better is possible.
Free Palestine.