we live with death and it is ours.

Written By Omnia Saed
alternative title: the kids want to live. 

I maybe wrote this post four different times before I finally decided to send it and i maybe shouldn’t start this post with a maybe, and an ungrammatical one at that, but the definitive proof found in this statement is that we are in moments made up of many if not mostly maybes. & in the spirit of honesty and transparency, maybe makes me sad.

I battle with bad anxiety. I think most people don’t realize it because I don’t give them the opportunity to see it, but sometimes, when i’m alone, it can get so bad that I feel as if I am being consumed by an infinite wave of maybes. maybes which sometimes pound so hard on my chest that for some reason or another I forget how to breathe. 
and for these past few weeks & days i have been preoccupied by the acute and peculiar fact that our will to exist is found in our insistence to breathe. and that by lieu of nature, and by a series of happenstance and circumstance or reasons that hold no bearing or weight or moral air that fundamental fact, that mere insistence, can be taken away

and maybe I can't begin to wrap my head around that tragedy. and maybe i would like to naively believe that if not for my air were it not for my freedom.

“There is space here in The Evanesced for Nia Wilson and Jessica St. Louis, for Diamond Stephens and Sandra Bland. And when I stand in front of these women, following their lines and listening to how they take up space on their page, there is room as well for me, and for the black women who have held me in community and for the black women I don’t know who I pass when I transfer trains at MacArthur. And so too there’s space for Maya, who was reminded so acutely of black women’s vulnerability when Nia Wilson was murdered that she forgot how to breathe.” —Leigh Raiford, Nia In Two Acts

there is a picture that continues to preoccupy my mind when I think about these past few weeks. in the image, you see two young women holding hands moving across the screen. their eyes are filled with a certain uncertainty, masks falling off their faces -- masks protecting them from a global pandemic caused by a respiratory virus that in that moment had already taken  breath away from thousands of people across the world. tumbling due to what i can only assume is the sheer momentum of their stride, of their urgency, of the need to move -- to run -- from peril. these young women are running from an impending and encroaching doom, from an oncoming force that is (in this instance) the minneapolis police department, that is the state sanctioned militia deploying chemical grade weapons on young ones protesting a state, that is the apparatus that took George Floyd’s breath away. an apparatus taking their breath away too.

“We begin the story again, as always, in the wake of her disappearance and with the wild hope that our efforts can return her to the world.” — Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts

and maybe i find just as much grief as i do resolve in that their hands are gripped tightly around one another as they run. that in this moment they insist and are reminded of their right to that insistence together. and in that intimacy we demand care not only from one another but brought to us by the world, delivered to our lungs, so that we can at once and for all breathe. 

i send the utmost love, admiration and care to those committed to the fight to protect our insistence, to both a present and future existence that we will run and arrive to. that in this moment enshrouded by maybes, i hope to find anchorings in that which will have had to. If not to remind my mind and my heart to breathe, but to create a world for those i love to too.


“The grammar of black feminist futurity that I propose here is a grammar of possibility that moves beyond a simple definition of the future tense as what will be in the future. It moves beyond the future perfect tense of that which will have happened prior to a reference point in the future. It strives for the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen.” — Tina Campt, Listening to Images


*thinking about political education and its role in this movement and in movements moving forward, I hope to dedicate this space towards a communal evolvement that grapples with ideas, traditions and foundations that will shape our understandings of futurity - a future that we not only can envision but will demand. I envision this as a space where we can wade through that journey together. If you have readings you will like to see, questions we can tackle, moments to think through, let me know. if you want to write a post let me know. I nicknamed this newsletter ‘the study’ in homage to a moten quote that demands we network, we talk, we commune as a means to critical thought.. if not to find some kind of solace, a sigh when it gets hard to breathe.

anyways, here are some other readings that touched my heart this week:


Omnia Saed
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