Time Tripping

A book is a play with spacetime. The writer has spent months or years weaving narrative that you will follow over a few days or weeks, perhaps in one day if you’re particularly riveted. The time the creative process takes is compressed to produce an experience that can happen in less time. And so books dance in and out of time as they come into our lives, To keep up in my African novels, I’ve been reading two books that are African by way of Diaspora, written by writers whose people left Africa more recently than mine. OPEN WATER by Caleb Azumah Nelson was heartbreaking in its beauty, tender and intimate as it traced a young love story in London with the son of Ghanaian immigrants as its protagonist. It deliberately placed itself in conversation with Black art through the music and culture that became part of character’s lives, all drawn with such deeply raw and poetic prose. There was never a moment while I read this book that I wasn’t enraptured by it. I needed something of this beauty to sustain me. And curiously it came up in a conversation with a good friend that this book had crossed her path too, though she’d had a far different experience with it. We view art through the lens of our own minds, however they are curved or clouded.

I’ve been coursing through Dinaw Mengestu’s SOMEONE LIKE US too. I look forward to any novel he writes because I’ve loved his past ones, and this is taking me through complex and embittered relationships between the characters in the life of its Ethiopian American protagonist. This is a book I’ve been taking a while to get through, picking up to read for days then putting down when there’s other demands of my time, through no failure of the book to hold me, but just because this is the way we move through time with books sometimes. They weave in and out of our experience, we are under their spell then the veil is cast away.

I’m also reading BEYOND COP CITIES: DISMANTLING STATE AND CORPORATE-FUNDED ARMIES AND PRISONS edited by Joy James. It explores the resistance to Cop City in Atlanta and how that extends to resistance we will all need now with the advance of totalitarianism in our country, a police state perfectly funded and developed by democrats to be handed to a rogue authoritarian who tramples every boundary the establishment set for him and is increasing repression.

All empires fall, and this one founded by slaveholders on Native genocide, where a few decades of my parents lives were the small window when Black people experienced a semblance of equal citizenship is no exception. But to know that and to sit under the dark gathering storm clouds subject to the deluge when the empire falls is a different thing. And it seems more doom comes from us every day as this one falls to a dictator determined to dismantle the country’s capacity to support. We wonder if our loved ones will be deported. We wonder if we can still have our government healthcare. Thousands of federal workers in my city woke up without jobs, ones that actually were holding the infrastructure of our country together. We wonder where will the stories go of the bold Black American people when it becomes a crime to learn our history, and where will we go when we are pushed out of the public sphere, forbidden from jobs and education? Moving in and out of time as books allow me to do is one way I strengthen myself. It is not one answer I seek but to bind myself together and understand how I too am part of the woven fabric of the cosmos. And I inhale the written word and exhale the written word as part of who I am, metabolizing words that enter me, that become part of me, and giving my own output like a tree on the sidewalk seeping oxygen from its green leaves because it can’t help it, because that is its being. Our threats are very real in the time of the doom of this white supremacist country and we have never felt the danger to be more real in our lives. I encourage us to look for our solutions beyond the empire, through looking at the tools radicalism has given us, as we fight to survive it in hopes we can taste a liberation it never offered.