my friend in sorcery hannah nutter recently described to me invisible and historic constructs of deadline1. i no longer utter the word. i also refrain from using settle, to complicate and distance myself from settler colonialism. words have power and to employ language deliberately is a Black feminist praxis, a delineation from psychosocial2 status quos.
to be Black is not only to be radical poetics in motion — it is also defiance existence manifest. to acknowledge madness is to release shame. madness can also exist as a camp house where we mad folks find each other in a world forcing us into illusionary masking safety. i am mad because maddening things have happened to me, i am born through a lineage of mentally ill folks, and i have a right to be.
is freedom gingerly stowed away — like luggage in a plane cabin — from exploitation? how does ungovernability disrupt oppression? or is unknowability a void into the very thick of it? i for one, have been a champion of clarity — almost finding opacity cringey, but in the same way urgency is a tool of white supremacy, can transparency also be used for white supremacist agendaing? to be seen, naked, unprotected? who knows, but sitting in the unknowability here, double-entendre, the power — makes for a sensuous ambivalence — a space or vortex of autistic/spiritic happening, not a body.
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