i wrote we are our own magic hands for my Substack in the couple days leading up to Juneteenth, a holiday that’s felt increasingly hollow with every passing year.
There’s just so much that’s fucked up here. Every last little thing about enslavement is its own horror, so much of it survives to this very moment.
And what even is This Moment, especially for those of us in close communication with our ancestors, those of us who hold our ancestors in our bodies. A BRILLIANT elder named Chelvanaya spoke something about transtemporalities a couple years back, and it’s stayed with me, shifting and percolating since then.
I’ve always resented the weaponization of time “passing”. Including the idea that heals. The contraction of linear time as our consensus reality. It doesn’t sit right in my astrological spirit, doesn’t align with my cancer placements, doesn’t make sense given my genetic diseases, and it certainly doesn’t hit when i fume, FUME over how my kin have been…GOD the english language doesn’t even have the words for it.
All this to say I don’t feel the desire to celebrate. All I see are the limits to our liberation and all I want to do is cut through them with a machete.
My friend Ngozi (check them outtttt, they’re a crip & death doula, organizer, facilitator and writer) put me on to the Anarkata in our Black & disabled movement workers strategy clinic a few months ago and i’m still so excited about it. Some folks put out a statement in 2019 (I’m not sure how many or who they were and i’m thrilled and curious about that) outlining the framework, the roots, the wishes, the praxis. HERE’S THE STATEMENT!
When I think of Juneteenth I think of how I don’t owe that thieving, murdering, earthly violation of a nationstate a moment more of my time of energy. I have no desire to fight for that world. I wish for its fall, and I wish to witness it from a safe distance. I think of how we as Black (AND disabled AND queer and MaGe) people are always set to be the very last ones liberated, and how to leverage my relative freedoms to free my own self. I think of how I refuse to wait and be left to wander the antiBlack wasteland of the world that will remain in the aftermath of it’s fall.
I hope to hold some fugitive, anarkata, and the like convos after the equinox. HMU if you’d like to be part of organizing those!
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