Dreaming Underground
Winter’s come down leaving the shock of its thumbprint. Pausing my daily walk for a few days meant that on resuming it I was met with suddenly barren trees, the kind of cold that brings an ache to your hands and freezes a swollen full moon solid into a supernatural spectacle. Snow came too. And like waiting for the echo on a cold winter night, I wait for word of how my new novella has reached folks. It’s largely unbeknownst to me for now how the world takes it. I have a chance to find out this Friday at my first event for the book, FES IS A MIRROR, which is at Sankofa in conversation with the lovely and brilliant Jamila Minnicks on the 12th at 6:30. I’d love the room to be filled with warmth so join if you can!
This is the time for reading novels under the covers. The natural world will sleep, so we can take advantage of our inclinations to be cozy, to build a fortress against the elements where we can be safe. We all need to create safety for ourselves. The closest thing to the experience of reading fiction is dreaming. Our eyes scan text that becomes code for the machinery of our own imaginations. Images dance behind our eyes. When we lift from the page, any amount of time may have passed as we settle back down into the every day from the liminal.
Reading has never been escapist for me though and I firmly reject that mode of looking at it. I don’t read to hide, and I don’t think you should either. I read as a hunter and gatherer hoping to incorporate new pieces of myself. And I don’t write books I intend for people to use as a vacation from reality, but ones that will allow them to confront the real world through placing themselves in characters’ situations.
In these times when the fascism America is founded in comes to a crescendo, we are living underground, holding each other tight and taking care of ourselves, availing ourselves of all nourishment and tools. I wrote my books as such tools for you. For we do not know how much longer the fight and we hope to make it to the other side. White supremacy, America’s founding principle that only shape shifts down the line, doesn’t know the community we need. Every man for himself is literally a principle that will lead us all to perish. We are who each other needs and we have to hold each other close and take care of each other, including materially through mutual aid.
Recently a writer in my community passed. DéLana R.A. Dameron was a South Carolina poet and novelist who must have been around my age that I knew through the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. I’ve sat at workshop tables with her and cheered her work over many years. She refused to relinquish a rootedness in the South and her love of its land and lived her life lifting people up. I had to sit with her death a long time because it is so personal for someone like me, not much older, another writer, who I’ve witnessed in the flesh, to suddenly not be in this world. I got the talk about death as child and have known many who passed from this life. But her death has cast a mirror on me. None of us know how many years we have walking and none of we artists know if we’ll live to complete our vision.
Still reading an African novel, though I’m taking my own advice and have more books on the stack for reading in bed. It’s a classic, THE PALM-WINE DRINKARD by Amos Tutuola. It’s a horrifying mythic adventure tale that owes itself to traditions of West African folklore. Otherworldly macabre imagery, and it owns its own logic as the speculative work does so that the inconceivable can occur in the narrative space it creates. It’s been a trip. It’s part of how I’m surviving. We will get through these dark months until spring comes, and we who know the value of each other will prevail against those who don’t know the worth of human life.