As I slide into my new responsibilities and roles, I've been struggling with integrating my recent achievements. I was thinking about writing a new post about it, then I remembered this one I wrote over a year ago, pre-pandemic. What got me here, won't get me to my "Next". Here's to my new beginnings and my old dreams.
At 26, I’m learning that boundaries shouldn’t keep you barricaded behind thick walls, preventing access to and from the world around you. Boundaries should be your safety pack, assuring you that you’re in control, enveloping you in confidence and freedom as you explore your environment, your connections and your future. This year, I’m learning to integrate and flow.
Olamina, from the very start, sought to build community. It started with a vision she never even tried to own. A vision that obsessed her. She emphasized something that was as well-known as it was dangerous, going against Power by helping people empower themselves and building different structures is powerful. When you no longer seek power, when you seek Community, Power follows and sticks to you. You are either to use it or be crushed by it.
Developing a better relationship with feedback means working on killing your ego, this idea that you can just birth your ideas as they appear in your mind, that good writing can be readymade. As soon as you start doing the actual work, you realize that storytelling is a complicated endeavor that shapes you as much as you shape the lines on the page. And as long as you keep doing so, the shapes will align and meld.
Kindred is important in helping us think about our humanity and the systems we establish in our societies today, and at any point in history. It helps us think about the roles we are expected to play and how they vary across time and space, yet still remain the same in various ways. Finally, to me, Kindred is an intimate metaphor for race relations in the United States.
Being an Ayitian academic means that I get a chance to stand and fight for my freedom, to liberate my mind and illuminate others, using the measures and institutions within my reach, imperfect as they may be, to attempt to redress some of the wrongs done to my culture, some of the inaccuracies maliciously planted in my stories.
This book really made me think about the clashing relationship between the past, present, and future. The space between the Before and the After can take us by surprise, and we never know that we’ll never get to go back until it’s much, much too late.
I remember the day I told her like it was yesterday; I can still taste the anxiety. I can feel my clammy palms as I sat in my car, chainsmoking, Sa-Roc’s “Forever” on repeat, texting my then too busy ‘girlfriend’ who wanted to be there for me but didn’t want me to do it for … Continue reading Labels and Boxes: Ramblings on Self-Sovereign Identity
Growing up my nickname was Mèt Peyi. Loosely translated as “Master of the Country”, it was often meant to designate a child too big for her britches, who called out adults on their bullshit, who had no qualms about telling the impolite truth, a “towo”, a bull, lacking grace, devoid of charm. As time passed, … Continue reading How to be Unapologetically Authentic without being a Dick
We raise children and tell them to look around the world. Everything that the light touches could be theirs. What we willfully neglect to tell them is that they’ll never access these lands by being themselves. Imagine a bedtime story from Mom: “And the princess lived the rest of her life worried whether her hair … Continue reading Code Switching: Social Survival or Cultural Suicide
R.A.J. 