and what was I for?

Written By Omnia Saed
I start this post with a poem to my loved ones titled,


sorry to my niggas! 
sorry to my niggas,
please don’t hate me/ 
please know that I love you,
 and that I’m trying
and that texts will be texted
and the calls will be called
and the facetimes gon’ face time (one day)
but on god/ 
I keep you in my heart (always)

 

*this was originally a haiku, but it is not a haiku.

 

Everyone knows that I’m not a particularly good communicator. I’m not proud of it. The reality is, sometimes I get deeply overwhelmed by the world and so I carry-on on my own until I can resurface. I typically have a pretty good hand at managing the waves when I do, but this current moment has been particularly hard. My father’s been sick for quite some time now and I’ve been searching for a light at the end of the tunnel that has yet to arrive.
Nonetheless, I’m left thinking about unanswered calls, check-ins and love. I’m always thinking about love even when I struggle to communicate it. In part, because so many of those around me do and do it beautifully. In part, because we are in a particularly unique moment in time, standing on the precipice, the edge of the cliff, toes dangling off the edge and the water stretches out for miles and miles and miles at a time. and it is in this moment that we are summoned to practice, required to insist, on our survival. 

and to survive is to live. & to live is to love? & to live is to remember to love? & to live is to say aloud what we love and to love is to jump off the cliff when we do.  

It is important to note that we define life here outside of the physical body, disavowing that survival is attached to a bodily survival. meaning, what does it mean to live, to you? to love, for you? to exist fully in your own right, with you? in this moment and beyond.

How are we imagining ourselves, or as June Jordan would say, how are we birthing our own reality, beloved?

“I resolved not to run on hatred but, instead, to use what I loved, words, for the sake of the people I loved. However, beyond my people, I did not know the content of my love: what was I for?”

& who am I in the face of the world i imagine?

In studying a series of self-portraits, Tina Campt writes:

“What shifts when we think of self-fashioning as not necessarily an inextricable expression of agential intention or autonomy? What if we understood it as a tense response that is not always intentional or liberatory, but often constituted by miniscule or even futile attempts to exploit extremely limited possibilities for self-expression and futurity in/as an effort to shift the grammar of black futurity to a temporality that both embraces and excess their present circumstances — a practice of living the future they want to see, now?”

I recently stumbled on a series of studio photos my father took when he was younger and I’ve been trying to undertake the difficult yet necessary task of listening to these images. I’m left thinking of who my father is to the world through these photos and more importantly, who he is to himself, to his heart, to his dreams, to his insistences. I listen to his aspirations, his ideas of self and his visions for the world. & we talk and talk and talk about the future we will one day get to see.

---

*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 must 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. 

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


Omnia Saed
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