Donny Hathaway took flight, forty five years ago to yesterday. Suspended in the air, he became myth at this point falling from his window, and though we can whisper about it we can never know what part his own hand played in the end he met. We’ve mostly brushed aside Hathaway’s madness from his legend but he was diagnosed with what was then called paranoid schizophrenia. And so as I have, he at one point battled with phantoms indistinguishable from the real. And as I have, he sang anyway.
We have a lot to sing against now. They’ve told us the plague has passed us, but the numbers sickening from it increase beyond what they’re bothering to capture, so it’s everyone for themselves in situations where we so badly need to care for each other. There’s so much we can only do together. I encourage us to continue bearing witness to the suffering we are woven in as subjects of the US empire and not to turn away simply because we can, because we are all but the very few at the top under threat by the same forces despite differences in our positionality. As we’re thinking about Martin Luther King Jr. tomorrow I hope we won’t betray his legacy by thinking what conspired to kill him will save us.
Right now I’m reading a novel called SWEET MEDICINE by the Zimbabwean writer Panashe Chigumadzi at bedtime. A dramatic shift in style from the previous novel I read but I am enjoying its intimate lens on its feminine protagonist and the dash of the supernatural it opened with. My times seem meager, but I’m learning to grasp to what I do have. What I do have is what I am using to pick myself up again and again. Despair has not been avoidable for me and part of it is my constitutional make up as inclined to melancholy and part of it is having been dealt many blows, some another would’t have survived. I calculate now that I can make good on the sprints before I lay my fight down and rest again if sadness must come to me. These periods when life lets up and allows us to believe in ourselves just that much that we need to take a step forward are for taking advantage of and that’s something I offer to everybody else. Does it seem like very little in the face of this kind of world we seem consigned to? I can assure you it is much.
My novel NONE BUT THE RIGHTEOUS came out almost exactly two years ago. I can barely make sense of where I am now comparatively except to attribute it to the passage of time without being able to say much for how any factor including having published a book weighed. My opportunities to see the impact of the book I wrote have not come every day. I’ve gone periods of feeling it was in vain because the reality is that I live isolated from word of what my novel does in the world to a great degree, but I get heartened on the occasions I am increasingly hearing from people who’ve read the book and felt something in it. I have one last thing to share with you which is some of the most recent notice it received which was its honorable mention at the end of last year as one of The Black Agenda Report’s recommended books by Black radical writers. The significance of being included among writers and thinkers of the calibre of some of those was great for me as was being noted for some of the intent of my artistic project. I thank them for the gift of being seen. Enjoy this live version of Donny Hathaway’s “Someday We Will All Be Free.” He was right, you know.
Well stated, as usual. And yes, someday we all will be free. In the meantime, we can take each battle as it comes and confront despair with glimmers of hope that we will survive and thrive.
Thank youuuuu. What a poignant and powerful reminder. Indeed, we sing anyway. Write anyway. Dance anyway. Believe anyway. Much love and admiration to you, and gratitude -- for None But The Righteous is truly righteous -- a sign of the divine in our midst. So rich, so rare.